In a major victory for U.S. President Donald Trump's national security team, the United Kingdom and France have agreed to send additional forces to Syria to pick up the slack as U.S. troops withdraw, sources familiar with the discussions told Foreign Policy.

Britain and France, the only other U.S. partners that still have ground forces in Syria, will commit to a marginal 10 to 15 percent troop increase, a U.S. administration official confirmed. Other countries may send small numbers of troops as well, but in exchange the United States would have to pay, the official said.

Neither the timeframe for the deployment nor the exact number of additional troops is clear, the official said, adding that "overall we have been disappointed" in efforts to persuade U.S. allies to commit additional resources to the ongoing fight against the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria.

As the Western Empire ramps up its full-spectrum war on the Chinese, its latest target is Hong Kong, China's premier special administrative region (SAR). Even the latest wave of media assaults confirms it.

An essential adjunct to an Imperial attack on any designated victim is a sustained campaign of demonization, conducted through mainstream media and supported by associated local media. Such a drive had been onging in Hong Kong, since the former British colony returned to its motherland in 1997. Beijing's kid-gloves handling of its relationship with its SAR was relentlessly miscast as the creeping suppression of freedoms by evil Chinese Communists. With palpitating enthusiasm, Hong Kong's legions of Beijing-haters cooperated to enforce and amplify the fraudulent narrative.

MSM's new, malevolent focus on Hong Kong is part of an all-out propaganda blitz against China by the Democracy Empire and its allies and agents. The campaign seizes on Hong Kong's current unrest to vilify China further. The reality is that Hong Kong under China is freer than it ever was during 165 years of British colonial rule, contrary to the continuous assertions of the West's Sinophobic propaganda. And during the recent turmoil — engineered by the unholy alliance between local Beijing-haters and their Western backers — Beijing has kept entirely aloof, to the dismay of Chinese patriots in the SAR.

Former UN special rapporteur Alfred de Zayas slams UN High Commissioner Bachelet's report on Venezuela as a politicized collection of baseless accusations by "advocates of regime change"
When United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet traveled to Venezuela earlier this year, she met with an array of citizens who lost family members to right-wing violence in the country.

Among them was Inés Esparragoza, whose 20-year-old son, Orlando Figuera, was doused with gasoline and lit on fire by an opposition mob during violent anti-government riots, known as guarimbas, in May 2017.

"He was stabbed, beaten and cruelly burnt alive," Esparragoza declared before Bachelet in March. "Simply because of the color of his shirt, the color of his skin, and because he said he was Chavista."

While Esparragoza poured her family's torment out before the former Chilean president, Bachelet scribbled notes and glanced down at horrific photos which captured the moment masked men attacked Figuera. As the young man knelt to the ground, a gang of anti-government thugs poured petrol over his body before lighting a match.

"I call on the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to make justice," she said. "These are not peaceful protesters, they are bloodthirsty."


Yet shockingly, when Bachelet released her long-anticipated report on the situation in Venezuela on July 5, it was as though that meeting never took place.

Apparently unmoved by the testimony of Figuera's grieving mother, or anyone else's story of injury and suffering, Bachelet made no mention of opposition violence in her report. Her failure to properly detail the plight of Venezuelans who have suffered at the hands of anti-government rioters was just one of many glaring omissions which has one of the top international legal experts to have served at the UN calling the high commissioner's objectivity into question.

Alfred de Zayas became the first UN rapporteur to visit Venezuela in 21 years, traveling to the country in 2017 to examine the social and economic impact of unilateral coercive measures applied by the US. He determined US-led sanctions were largely to blame for the country's hardship, accusing Washington of waging "economic warfare," and comparing its harsh measures to "medieval sieges of towns."

De Zayas was no less scathing towards Bachelet's report, slamming it as a politicized document that depended heavily on unfounded claims by activists dedicated to Maduro's removal. "The new Bachelet report is methodologically flawed, as were indeed the earlier reports, relying overwhelmingly on unverified allegations by opposition politicians and advocates of regime change who are only interested in weaponizing human rights," the former special rapporteur told The Grayzone.

The US Treasury Department has added two Hezbollah lawmakers and a top security official to its sanctions blacklist, the first time the militant group's elected politicians have been sanctioned.

Amin Sherri and Muhammad Hasan Ra'd are elected politicians and members of Hezbollah's parliamentary wing in Lebanon; Wafiq Safa is a security official for the group. The Treasury Department has accused Sheri and Ra'd of using their positions to further the militant group's "malign agenda" and "do Iran's bidding."

In a statement released Tuesday, treasury official Sigal Mandelker said that Hezbollah "threatens the economic stability and security of Lebanon and the wider region, all at a cost to the Lebanese people...there is no distinction between Hizballah's political and violent activities."

On Tuesday, Iran's Minister of Cultural and Social Affairs Hossein Nejat warned that Iran could obliterate US aircraft carriers in the Gulf if the US attacks Iran, further increasing tensions between the two countries.

"American bases are within the range of our missiles ... Our missiles will destroy their aircraft carriers if they make a mistake," Nejat warned. "Americans are very well aware of the consequences of a military confrontation with Iran."

According to al-Masdar News, Nejat also added that war is not on "Trump's agenda" and that the US president wants to "drag Tehran to negotiate through the maximum pressure."

We are about to open up a can of worms that could turn our entire country completely upside down by the time it is all said and done.

Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein's horrific crimes have been well known for a very long time, and I have been writing about them for many years. In fact, there were some people that really, really didn't like it when I wrote about Bill Clinton's connections to Jeffrey Epstein and "the Lolita Express" during the 2016 presidential election. Flight records show that Bill Clinton took 26 trips on board Jeffrey Epstein's infamous private plane, and Clinton also spent an enormous amount of time on Epstein's secluded private "sex island" where underage girls were routinely abused. Of course Jeffrey Epstein had lots of other very famous friends as well, and it has been documented that his "black book" was absolutely filled with marquee names from Hollywood, Wall Street and Washington.

But despite everything that we knew about what was going on, for a very long time it looked like justice would never be served. Epstein got an absolutely ridiculous sweetheart deal from prosecutors in 2008, and none of his famous friends were ever charged with anything. They all probably thought that they had escaped the grasp of law enforcement forever, but this month everything has suddenly changed.

The Deep State almost always wins. But if Attorney General Barr leans hard on Trump to unfetter investigators, all hell may break lose, says Ray McGovern.

As Congress arrives back into town and the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees prepare to question ex-Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller on July 17, partisan lines are being drawn even more sharply, as Russias-gate blossoms into Deep-State-gate. On Sunday, a top Republican legislator, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) took the gloves off in an unusually acerbic public attack on former leaders of the FBI and CIA.

King told a radio audience: "There is no doubt to me there was severe, serious abuses that were carried out in the FBI and, I believe, top levels of the CIA against the President of the United States or, at that time, presidential candidate Donald Trump," according to The Hill.

King, a senior congressman specializing in national security, twice chaired the House Homeland Security Committee and currently heads its Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. He also served for several years on the House Intelligence Committee.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam said Tuesday that a controversial bill that has spurred sometimes violent protests in the territory in recent weeks "is dead," and apologized again for causing public anger by mishandling it.

But Lam stopped short of referencing the bill's "complete withdrawal," which protesters are demanding even though she has suspended the bill indefinitely, and she reiterated her intention to stay on as the territory's leader.

Her remarks are seen as her latest bid to calm the public following weeks of protests that have drawn millions of people for mass marches and occasionally turned violent as some protesters clashed with police and stormed government buildings.

The legislation, which would allow the transfer of fugitives to the mainland China, has sparked fear that Chinese authorities might use it to crack down on pro-democracy activists and critics of the Communist Party-led Beijing government.

In a neighborhood of millionaires and billionaires, close to New York's famous Museum Mile, two initials discreetly adorn the entrance of one of the city's most opulent mansions: J.E.

The letters stand for Jeffrey Epstein, the self-described "collector'' of rich and powerful men, who has been accused of sexually assaulting girls inside the luxurious Manhattan home.

On Monday, as federal prosecutors unsealed new charges claiming Epstein ran a sex-trafficking ring that lured dozens of young women to the house, its heavy wood doors bore crowbar marks -- evidence of how authorities forced their way in over the sultry Fourth of July weekend. Prosecutors say they discovered hundreds, possibly thousands of suggestive photographs, including those of what appeared to be underage girls.

An Italian court has sentenced 24 people to life in prison for their involvement in Operation Condor, in which the dictatorships of six South American countries conspired to kidnap and assassinate political opponents in each other's territories.

The trial, the first of its kind in Europe, began in 2015 and focused on the responsibility of senior officials in the military dictatorships of Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina for the killing and disappearance of 43 people including 23 Italian citizens.

Those sentenced on Monday included Francisco Morales Bermúdez, who was president of Peru from 1975 to 1980, Juan Carlos Blanco, a former foreign minister in Uruguay, Pedro Espinoza Bravo, a former deputy intelligence chief in Chile, and Jorge Néstor Fernández Troccoli, a Uruguayan former naval intelligence officer.

Exactly how many people died as a result of the conspiracy is unknown, but prosecutors in South America and Italy provided evidence that at least 100 leftwing activists were killed in Argentina, including 45 Uruguayans, 22 Chileans, 15 Paraguayans and 13 Bolivians.