Israel's Justice Ministry has denied reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was under a criminal investigation for illegally receiving large sums of money, local media reported.

Earlier media reports claimed that Netanyahu was under a criminal examination for shady financial dealings, including a recent transfer of money to either himself or his family member.

The office of Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit rebuked these reports as "inaccurate, to say the least," as quoted by the Haaretz newspaper.

The investigation was announced last Sunday. The Justice Ministry did not disclose the grounds for the inquiry, but said it was not a criminal investigation.

Seagate Technology Plc, a maker of disk drives for computer storage, expanded plans to cut jobs to 14 percent of the workforce, seeking to reduce costs to weather a prolonged slump in demand.

The company will eliminate about 6,500 positions by the end of fiscal 2017, according to a statement. Cupertino, California-based Seagate had previously indicated workforce cuts of about 3 percent, or 1,600 jobs, and the stock rallied as much as 13 percent on news of the broader restructuring. The moves will result in pretax charges of about $164 million next year.

Component makers are suffering through a fifth consecutive annual decline in personal-computer shipments. The magnetic spinning-disk technology that Seagate uses in its hard drives is also facing competition from semiconductor-based storage products that the company doesn't have.

The shares rose as high as $27.20 in extended trading following the statement. They had closed little changed at $24.09 in regular New York trading.

Theresa May will replace David Cameron as Britain's prime minister on Wednesday. What do we know of the woman who's heading for 10 Downing Street?

May, 59, will be the UK's second woman prime minister after Margaret Thatcher. She is one of the longest-running home secretaries in British history and has earned a reputation as one of Whitehall's toughest operators.

RT has examined her voting record and policies, from human rights and mass surveillance, to immigration and nuclear deterrents, to get a picture of what Britain can expect from the new PM.

In the follow-up to the recently released documentary "Zero Days" by Alex Gribney on the Stuxnet worm, a "terrifying and groundbreaking virus jointly created by the US and Israel against Iranian nuclear technologies," one Iranian expert on regional security reassured Sputnik that the virus no longer poses a threat to his home country.

Alex Gribney's recent documentary "Zero Days" lays the story of the Stuxnet worm, a computer virus which was created by branches of the CIA and Mossad to cripple Iranian nuclear plants.

The story provides many fascinating details on how the virus got into the relevant networks, what it actually did when it got there, how it was discovered (and whose fault that was) and the fact that no one in the United States or Israel has ever acknowledged its existence.

The worm is described as "terrifying and groundbreaking."

However, Mani Mehrabi, an Iranian political analyst and an expert on regional security, has told Sputnik that no matter how black the virus is being painted, it poses no more threat to the Iranian networks.

In response to my request for information on US police training, readers have sent in a variety of information that seems to fit together. I am going to assemble it as best I can as a working hypothesis or provisional account. Perhaps a former or current police officer concerned about the change in the behavior of US police, or an expert on police training and practices, will come forward and verify or correct this provisional account.

First, we know that the police have been, or are being, militarized. They are armed with weapons of war that hitherto have been used only on battlefields. We don't know why police are armed in this way, as such weapons are not necessary for policing the American public and are not used in police work anywhere except in Israeli-occupied Palestine.

There is an undeclared agenda behind these weapons, and neither Congress nor the presstitute media have any apparent interest in discovering the hidden agenda.

A Reuters news report under the names of presstitutes Robin Emmott and Sabine Siebold shows how devoid the West is of honest, intelligent and responsible journalists and government officials.

First we will examine the dishonesty or incompetence of the reporters and then that of Western government officials.

Emmott and Siebold describe NATO as a "Western defense alliance." Since the Clinton regime NATO has been an alliance for waging offensive war, a war crime under the Nuremberg rules established by the United States. Under the NATO banner a number of countries have been bombed, invaded, and had their governments overthrown by Washington acting under the cover of NATO.

These destroyed countries posed no threat whatsoever to the countries of the NATO alliance and undertook no aggressive actions against NATO members. How is it possible that Reuters' reporters and editors are not aware of this? Why do they call an instrument of Washington's aggression a "defense alliance"?

Emmott and Siebold report that "Russian aggression" is the reason NATO is deploying 3,000 to 4,000 troops in the Baltic states and Poland. In other words, something that does not exist - Russian aggression toward the Baltics and Poland - is assumed to be a fact that must be countered with military deployments.

The reporters do not question whether this insignificant number of NATO troops constitutes a defense or a provocation. The number of troops would have to be 100 times greater before the force even begins to approach a defensive force. What then is the purpose of the 3,000 or 4,000 NATO troops?

Every informed person knows that there is no need of a defense force against Russia in the Baltics and Poland. Aside from this fact, only an absolute idiot could think that three or four thousand troops constitutes a defense against the Russian Army. In June 1941 Operation Barbarossa hit Russia with an invasion of four million troops, the majority German component of which were probably the most highly trained and disciplined troops in military history, excepting only the Spartans. By the time that the Americans and British got around to the Normandy invasion, the Russian Army had chewed up the Wehrmacht. There were only a few divisions at 40% strength to resist the Normandy invasion. By the time the Russian Army got to Berlin, the German resistance consisted of armed children.

The Reuters reporters raise no question about President Obama's statement that 1,000 of this insignificant force will be Americans in order "to enhance our forward presence in central and eastern Europe." Why does the United States need a "forward presence" in central and eastern Europe? What does a US "forward presence" in central and eastern Europe represent except an insane recklessness? One thousand US troops are good for nothing except a provocation.

The active stage of the Breeze 2016 international naval exercise has been launched on the Black Sea on Monday. Aimed at improving coordination in crisis response and training of NATO-led naval operations, the drills will last till July 17.

Held every year, the drills officially began on Friday in Bulgaria's territorial waters and exclusive economic zone, and on the coast off Burgas.

As many as 25 military vessels, two planes, two helicopters and some 1,700 personnel are taking part in the exercise conducted in the international waters, reports Sofia New Agency.

All NATO member states of the Black Sea region, namely Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey, are taking part in the drills, also attended by warships from Greece and Spain. The exercise also involves NATO associates Ukraine and Georgia.

A Knesset committee has approved a bill prescribing jail terms to anyone who discourages Christians - including Christian Arabs - from volunteering for military service or advocates desertion. Activists say the bill violates Arab citizens' "freedom of expression."

The bill was given the go-ahead by the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee last week, according to Haaretz. Arab members of the Israeli Knesset had criticized the initiative arguing this would violate freedom of expression. It comes amid the ongoing debate in Arab communities on whether Christians should in fact volunteer for military service.

"Everyone has the right to express their opinion, especially in view of the disagreement in the Christian community on joining the army," Osama Saadia, an Israeli Arab lawyer and politician, member of Knesset from The Joint List, told Haaretz on Sunday.


"The fact that they held the discussion despite the agreement not to do so is suspicious and inappropriate," he added.

In an article^[1] also published in German in DIE ZEIT and on EurActiv.de, Susan Stewart of the Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), an organisation which advises the German government, called for Russia to be excluded from the Council of Europe, as there is allegedly no longer any justification for it to remain.

In doing so, she pushes two arguments that fail to convince: Russia's relationship to the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the human rights situation in Crimea. The discussion behind this leads to the question of whether we should opt to harden the bloc confrontation approach, or whether efforts should be undertaken to keep channels of communication and influence open with Russia in the interests of pan-European unity.

I am going to share with you four devastating emails sent and received by Hillary Clinton on the subject of Libya. You can find these posted at Wikileaks. It is clear in reading these exchanges that, in the glow of the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, Hillary embraced the call to spike the football and clearly was planning to use Libya as evidence of her leadership and skill that qualified her to become President.

The attack on our diplomats and CIA officers in Benghazi on 11 September 2012 however, destroyed that dream. The dream became a nightmare and Hillary has scrambled to pretend that she was not the mover-and-shaker that destabilized Libya and made it a safe haven for ISIS, aka radical Islamists.