China has responded to repeated calls for Beijing to put pressure on North Korea, stating that such responsibility does not rest solely on China. President Trump has repeatedly urged for Beijing to use its influence as Pyongyang's sole economic lifeline.

"Recently, certain people, talking about the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, have been exaggerating and giving prominence to the so-called 'China responsibility theory'," Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a daily news briefing on Tuesday, as quoted by Reuters.

"I think this either shows lack of a full, correct knowledge of the issue, or there are ulterior motives for it, trying to shift responsibility.

"Asking others to do work, but doing nothing themselves is not OK," he added. "Being stabbed in the back is really not OK."

"The 'China responsibility theory' on the peninsula nuclear issue can stop," Geng said.

Daesh terrorists confirmed the group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead, Al Sumaria TV channel reports citing a source in the Iraqi province of Nineveh.

According to the source, Daesh terrorists issued a brief statement in which they reported the death of their leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as well as the name of the "new Caliph."

On June 16, the Russian Defense Ministry said al-Baghdadi was likely eliminated as a result of a Russian Aerospace Forces strike on a militant command post in the southern suburb of the city of Raqqa in late May. It noted that it was in the process of confirming the information through various channels.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov expressed Moscow's support for the efforts of unifying the ranks of the so-called "Syrian opposition" amid the war on terror, and its cooperation with the Syrian Army and the government.

During a press conference, held with his South Ossetian counterpart Dmitry Medoev, Lavrov stressed his country welcomes counter-terrorist efforts of all "Syrian opposition" platforms, the ones of Cairo and Riyadh-based groups including.

He also expressed satisfaction with the consent of Riyadh platform to participate in the forthcoming seventh round of Geneva talks on settlement of the Syrian crisis, that were previously attended only by Moscow and Cairo platforms, stressing that this is an important step further of which High Negotiations Committee is already aware.

Max Blumenthal is a well connected and known author who has done work on the Palestinian cause from a somewhat leftish perspective. He is also an arrogant and ignorant showman.

Blumenthal currently edits the Alternet Grayzone project. In their recent writings he and his co-writers profess to dislike the al-Qaeda led opposition in Syria. Yet it is exactly the same opposition they earlier vehemently supported.

Yesterday the Real News Network interviewed Blumethal on his recent piece about CNN's al-Qaeda promotion. The headline: Max Blumenthal on How the Media Covers Syria. During the interview Blumenthal laments the failure of progressive media on Syria:

In my opinion, they have abrogated their mission, which should be to challenge mainstream narratives and particularly imperial narratives on issues like Syria. I understand there are massive human rights abuses by the Syrian government, but that's not reason enough to not explore what the West's agenda, the Gulf agenda is for that country, what the consequences are, to actually get into the geopolitical issues. Instead, we've seen Democracy Now propagate generally a regime change narrative.

I don't believe they actually have a line on Syria. It's more a fear of actually taking on the official line. I haven't found a single article in the Intercept challenging the regime change line on Syria.

Blumenthal is outraged, OUTRAGED, that "progressive" media peddle the Syria conflict along "the official line".

President Trump has been contradicted by his own government, which has lined up against him in favor of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and the Russophobic presstitute media that serves the military/security complex and the neoconservatives.

I am afraid that The Saker and Finian Cunningham are correct. Nothing can come of Trump's meeting with Putin, because, as Cunningham puts it,

"Trump doesn't have freedom or real power. The real power brokers in the US will ensure that the Russophobia campaign continues, with more spurious allegations of Moscow interfering to subvert Western democracies. Trump will continue to live under a cloud of media-driven suspicions. And thus the agenda of regime change against Syria and confrontation with Russia will also continue. Trump's personal opinions on these matters and towards Vladimir Putin are negligible - indeed dispensable by the deep powers-that-be."

Cunningham points out that instead of lauding the meeting as the beginning of the process to defuse the high tensions between the two major nuclear powers, the US media denounced Trump for being civil to Putin in the meeting.

Brexit is the result of an English delusion, a crisis of identity resulting from a failure to come to terms with the loss of empire and the end of its own exceptionalism, argues Cambridge University professor Nicholas Boyle

Two days after the NYT reported that Donald Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., together with then campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner - but without Donald Trump himself being present - had met at the Trump Tower with a lawyer who was allegedly "Kremlin connected" on June 9, 2016, shortly after Trump was assured of the Republican nomination, the NY Times has followed up with a new article, one which seeks to explain the one thing that was missing from the original NYT article: the motive behind said meeting, as in retrospect it turned out that members of Trump's campaign simply meeting with a Russian lawyer was less exciting than the NYT had hoped.

Curiously, when the NYT reported of the original meeting it did not have the dramatic punchline it was hoping for - it needed its readers help for that. As it explains, "the Times reported the existence of the meeting on Saturday. But in subsequent interviews, the advisers and others revealed the motivation behind it." In other words, the new batch of anonymous sources only stepped up after reading the original report which, for lack of a better word, was disappointing.

And, as the NYT clarifies in its sequel - citing three advisers to the White House - Trump Jr. agreed to meet with the lawyer, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, only after allegedly being promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

A day after Israel's ambassador in Budapest called for local election billboards targeting George Soros to be removed - saying the campaign "sows hatred and fear" - Israel's Foreign Ministry weighed in, agreeing with the substance of Hungary's criticism.

Budapest has been plastered with election posters paid for by the ruling Fidesz party that depict the Hungarian-born billionaire grinning smugly, with the slogan "Let's not let Soros have the last laugh." Above is a caption that reads "99 percent reject illegal migration" - the main point of contention between the Hungarian government and Soros, who has criticized the country for refusing to accept a mass influx of asylum seekers.

On Saturday, Israel's ambassador to Hungary, Yossi Amrani, asked the government to discontinue the billboard campaign due to the local Jewish community's fears that the negative portrayal of Soros, who is Jewish, would stir up anti-Semitism.

"I call on those involved in the current billboard campaign and those responsible for it to reconsider the consequences. At the moment, beyond political criticism of a certain person, the campaign not only evokes sad memories, but also sows hatred and fear,"Amrani wrote in a statement, approved by the foreign ministry, Haaretz reported. "It's our moral responsibility to raise a voice and call on the relevant authorities to exert their power and put an end to this cycle," he added.

However, Israel released another statement on Sunday night that appeared to change the emphasis.

"Israel deplores any expression of anti-Semitism in any country and stands with Jewish communities everywhere in confronting this hatred. This was the sole purpose of the statement issued by Israel's ambassador to Hungary," it read.

"In no way was the statement meant to delegitimize criticism of George Soros, who continuously undermines Israel's democratically elected governments by funding organizations that defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself," it continued.

According to Haaretz, the clarification was personally ordered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

What kind of person really wants to see relations between the world's biggest nuclear armed countries deteriorate? Who wants to see the situation between the US and Russia, which has become at least as dangerous as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, get even worse? Or to put it another way, who would not welcome a genuine dialogue between the leaders of these two great countries? The answer to these questions is of course those who have completely lost their ability to reason.

North Korea is notorious for its totalitarian regime and human rights violations. Fewer people may realize the secretive country is also sitting on trillions in untapped wealth.

Embedded deep beneath the country's mountainous zones are some 200 varieties of minerals, including gold, iron, copper, zinc, magnesite, limestone, tungsten, and graphite, Quartz reports.

Some of these stockpiles are among the largest in the world, and North Korea, a tiny and cash-strapped nation, frequently uses them to bring in additional revenue — no matter the laws against doing so.

The total value of these minerals lies somewhere between $6 trillion and $10 trillion.