Opposition leader María Corina Machado, a key figure in the US coup plot, admitted that Venezuela "is not a dictatorship" and only international "humanitarian intervention" can topple Maduro.

A major right-wing opposition leader in Venezuela has acknowledged that her country "is not a dictatorship," calling it a "huge error" to claim otherwise. She also conceded that the only way the government in Caracas can realistically be toppled is through international "humanitarian intervention."

María Corina Machado has a close relationship to the US government, which has funded her opposition work. She has campaigned for years to overthrow Venezuela's leftist government, and was identified as one of the four main leaders of the US-led coup attempt initiated on January 23.

But Machado has criticized other opposition figures for characterizing the government of elected President Nicolás Maduro as a "dictatorship."

The decision by US authorities to break into Venezuela's Washington, DC embassy and arrest anti-coup activists on Wednesday is a clear violation of international law, Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin told RT.

A group calling itself the 'Embassy Protection Collective' has been under siege inside the building for weeks, as supporters of Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaido called for their removal.

Benjamin told RT that Code Pink, an anti-war activist group, received "an urgent call" from members of the 'Collective' on Wednesday morning saying "police had broken down the door and that they were going to be arrested."

How bloated defense budgets gut our armed forces

For a country that spends such vast sums on its national security apparatus-many times more than the enemies that supposedly threaten it do - the United States has a strangely invisible military establishment. Military bases tend to be located far from major population centers. The Air Force's vast missile fields, for instance, are hidden away in the plains of the northern Midwest. It is rare to see service uniforms on the streets of major cities, even Washington. Donald Trump did dream of holding a "beautiful" military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, complete with "a lot of planes going over and a lot of military might," but the Pentagon nixed the scheme by putting out word that the extravaganza would cost $92 million. The estimate was surely inflated - ­it was four times greater, in real dollars, than the price tag for the 1991 Gulf War victory parade - suggesting that the military prefers a lower profile. It often takes an informed eye to appreciate signs of defense dollars at work, such as the office parks abutting Route 28 south of Dulles Airport, heavily populated with innocuously titled military and intelligence firms.

Largely out of sight, our gargantuan military machine is also increasingly out of mind, especially when it comes to the ways in which it spends, and misspends, our money. Three decades ago, revelations that the military was paying $435 for a hammer and $640 for an aircraft toilet seat ignited widespread media coverage and public outrage. But when it emerged in 2018 that the Air Force was now paying $10,000 for a toilet-seat cover alone, the story generated little more than a few scattered news reports and some derisive commentary on blogs and social media. (This was despite a senior Air Force official's unblushing explanation that the ridiculous price was required to save the manufacturer from "losing revenue and profit.") The Air Force now claims to have the covers 3-D-printed for $300 apiece, still an extravagant sum.

The Obama White House kept tabs on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email accounts that the State Department improperly denied, according to newly released emails.

The emails, which were provided to Judicial Watch, show for the first time that the Obama White House was aware of the Clinton-related FOIA request, which the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) submitted to the State Department in December 2012.

The State Department denied the request in May 2013, claiming that no responsive records existed. That despite officials at the State Department, the White House and even President Obama himself knowing that Clinton used a personal email account for government business.

US President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency over technology designed or produced by 'foreign adversaries,' an act widely understood to target China's ZTE and Huawei in an effort to freeze them out of 5G market.

Arguing that "foreign adversaries are increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in information and communications technology and services" the US increasingly depends on, Trump's executive order on Wednesday declares an emergency over foreign-designed, developed, manufactured or supplied information and communications technologies.

The emergency order gives the Secretary of Commerce the authority to block any transactions that would pose "undue risk of sabotage to or subversion" of IT or communications technologies and services, or "undue risk of catastrophic effects on the security or resiliency of... critical infrastructure or the digital economy."

Russia is uneasy over the destabilization of Tehran, and on other hotspots the powers' positions are clear.

Even veiled by thick layers of diplomatic fog, the overlapping meetings in Sochi between US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov still offer tantalizing geopolitical nuggets.

Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov did his best to smooth the utterly intractable, admitting there was "no breakthrough yet" during the talks but at least the US "demonstrated a constructive approach."

Putin told Pompeo that after his 90-minute phone call with Trump, initiated by the White House, and described by Ushakov as "very good," the Russian president "got the impression that the [US] president was inclined to re-establish Russian-American relations and contacts to resolve together the issues that are of mutual interest to us."

That would imply a Russiagate closure. Putin told Pompeo, in no uncertain terms, that Moscow never interfered in the US elections, and that the Mueller report proved that there was no connection between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. This adds to the fact Russiagate has been consistently debunked by the best independent American investigators such as the VIPS group.

The US president's national security adviser has long been known for his hawkish views on Iran, North Korea, and recently - Venezuela. According to a recent media report, he was the mastermind behind the alleged plan to send 120,000 troops to the Middle East in a bid to counter Iran - something that Trump denied.

Donald Trump could be considering ousting National Security Adviser John Bolton over displeasure with him pushing for forceful regime changes in Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea, as well as attempting to draw the US into another war, The National Interest reported, citing two anonymous sources. According to the media outlet, he is currently the main driver of the Trump administration's confrontations with countries around the world.

The magazine noted, however, that some sources have indicated that the opposite could be true when it comes to relations between the two and pointed out that Trump himself defended Bolton last week. The US president insisted that he "tempers" his national security adviser and that he has more "dovish" people on board to balance Bolton's hawkish approach.

The National Interest also noted that now "there's daylight between Trump and Bolton" and that, according to the sources, "Trump wants him out". What is more, a State Department official and a former senior administration official have told the media outlet that the US secretary of state is also at odds with the national security adviser, fearing that instead of merely pressuring and isolating Iran, Bolton could start a full-fledged war against the Islamic Republic.

That the Swedish investigation into the rape allegation against Julian Assange is being re-opened is something that ought to be welcomed. The alternative would be for this accusation to hang unresolved over Julian's head forever. The Swedish prosecutors now need finally, as my father used to say, either to piss or get off the pot. They need to decide whether there is sufficient evidence to charge or not.

There is no reason for delay. The Swedish police have had seven years to investigate this case and all the evidence has been gathered and all statements taken - the last being the interview of Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy in 2017. Hopefully to review the evidence and decide whether to charge will not now be a lengthy procedure. It is worth noting, contrary to much misreporting, Julian Assange has never been charged with anything in Sweden.

In the event that Sweden does wish to try to extradite, that should take precedence over the US request. There are three good reasons for this:

Firstly, rape is by far the more serious alleged offence.
Secondly, the Swedes entered the process many years before the Americans.
Thirdly, the European Arrest Warrant is a major multilateral arrangement that is much more important than the discredited bilateral extradition treaty with the USA.

New evidence suggests that the government of Saudi Arabia not only had foreknowledge of the brutal bombings (and did nothing to stop them) but may have played a more active and direct role in the bloodshed.

A leaked Saudi diplomatic memo obtained by Lebanese outlet Alahed News claims that the government of Saudi Arabia had foreknowledge of the Easter bombings that occurred last month in three cities on the island nation of Sri Lanka, killing nearly 300 and wounding over 500 more. The contents of the memo, which additionally suggests Saudi complicity in the attacks, are supported by the connections recently uncovered by Sri Lankan authorities, that the alleged ringleader of the bombings, Zahran Hashim, had to Saudi Arabia.

The document carries the Islamic calendar (Hijri) date of 11/8/1440, which equates to April 17, 2019 in the Gregorian calendar - just a few days before the bombings - and is addressed to the Saudi ambassador to Sri Lanka, Abdul Nasser bin Hussein al-Harethi, and authored by Saudi Foreign Minister Ibrahim bin Abdul Aziz al-Assaf. It carries the labels "urgent" and "top secret."

One of the major topics highlighted in the recent Israeli elections was the increasing attempt to restrain the ostensibly extensive powers of the Israeli judiciary and its alleged interference - the High Court in particular - in the government's actions. Whereas Israelis can easily and willingly be fooled by the notion of a superpower liberal court threatening to overturn any right wing administration initiative, Palestinians residing in the occupied territories know better. Forbidden from participating in elections determining their own fate, 52 years of Israeli occupation have made Palestinians increasingly distrustful toward the Israeli judiciary.

In late April the Israeli High Court of Justice dismissed a petition, submitted by several Palestinian village councils from different areas of the West Bank together with human rights organizations, which demanded to revoke a new Israeli military order aiming to grant the Israeli Civil Administration excessive powers to demolish within 96 hours any type of new building - houses, schools, livestock structures, etc. - erected "illegally" in Area C of the West Bank.

The petitioners argued that the new order changes the existing legal arrangements, as set in Jordanian Planning Law applied to the occupied Palestinian territory, and therefore breaches international humanitarian law requiring the occupying power to respect laws already in force in the occupied territory. Whereas the existing Jordanian Law sets regulated appeal procedures, which include a hearing and opportunity to apply for a building permit, the newly introduced order qualifies the Israeli Civil Administration to conduct a swift demolition while grossly violating the right to due process.