More tapes of what appear to be Joe Biden's phone calls with the former president of Ukraine have surfaced, along with documents showing how much his son Hunter was paid by Burisma, a gas company desperate to avoid prosecution.

Ledgers show payments of $3.4 million from Burisma to Rosemont Seneca Bohai, the company co-founded by Hunter Biden, for "consulting services," former prosecutor Konstantin Kulyk and Ukrainian MP Andrii Derkach revealed on Monday in Kiev.

Kulyk added that these services clearly amounted to "political protection of Burisma" and its owner Mykola Zlochevsky by US vice president at the time, Joe Biden.

Kulyk also told reporters that his office had evidence of Burisma's lawyers offering $50 million to the government to make the case against the company and its founder go away - and not $6 million as was reported earlier.

The former Israeli army Deputy Chief of Staff, Major General Yair Golan has entered politics on the furthest left of the Zionist political spectrum - Meretz. Last week, he said that he would support annexation, if the "supreme goal is to separate from the Palestinians":

"If Israel declares, 'our goal is to separate from the Palestinians,' and as part of the step of separation from the Palestinians we annex Gush Etzion or Ma'aleh Adumim, I will support it. If the Israeli government declares that its supreme goal is to separate from the Palestinians and reach a solution in which they do not live under our control, I'll support that."

On the face of it, Golan is breaking rightwards of Meretz, and ideologically joining the further right Labor, which is officially part of the new annexationist unity government.

Yemeni Armed Forces carried out a large-scale attack deep in Saudi Arabia in retaliation for the latest escalation in Riyadh regime's bloody military campaign against the impoverished nation. The Al-Masirah TV channel reported the military operation on Tuesday, adding that Brigadier General Yahya Saree, Spokesman for the Armed Forces, would make an announcement regarding the operation in the next few hours.

Earlier in the day, Saudi activists reported loud blasts north of the capital Riyadh. The Saudi-led coalition has also claimed that the alliance "successfully intercepted and destroyed" a ballistic missile launched at Riyadh by the Houthi Ansarullah movement, which leads Yemen's defense forces.

In a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency (SPA), Coalition Spokesman Colonel Turki al-Malki called the strike a "deliberate and systematic operation to target civilians and civilian objects". A few hours earlier, Malki reported another attack by the Houthis targeting the southern parts of the Wahhabi kingdom, claiming the coalition had intercepted eight bomb-laden drones and three ballistic missiles. The missiles were fired from Yemen's northwestern Sa'dah Province toward the kingdom's Najran and Jizan regions, he added.

For a brief moment in the presentation this week of the defence case against the Dutch government's indictment of Oleg Pulatov for murder in the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, the Dutch lawyer Boudewijn Van Eijck almost said there was no case to answer, and the indictment should be dismissed immediately for lack of evidence that is legal under Dutch law.

"The indictment is superficial when it comes to actual facts which the defendant is accused of," Van Eijck (lead image, 2^nd from left) said (June 22, Min 21:19). "It is not clear at this stage of this very question whether the actions would actually amount to a crime even if they could be proved."

Van Eijck also warned the presiding judge Hendrik Steenhuis (right) that he is on trial himself - that he should not continue the trial on the prosecution's evidence, ignoring the defence requests for fresh investigation and new witnesses, "in order to make sure that this case never has to be reviewed on appeal" (June 22, Min 42:35).

The next day, Sabine ten Doessschate (1^st left), the junior defence lawyer, summed up the defence case by undercutting her leader. She apologised to the Dutch press and to families of those killed on MH17 for presenting what she called "conspiracy theories". "All of the topics which we have talked about," ten Doesschate concluded on June 23, "for all of these we have asked ourselves, on the basis of what we have read, can we really say this is what really happened; and this is not the other thing which happened. And our answer is no. On the basis of the file we have at this moment it is impossible for us to say either one... this means we don't have all the answers. Investigation of topics like these can give hard facts which can give the answer to the question, how was MH17 brought down. If we were not to ask in detail for investigation, we would not be able to look at ourselves in the mirror. This is the least that can be expected of us" (June 23, Min 2:53:19).

North Korea has decided to suspend military action plans against South Korea, the official KCNA news agency reported on Wednesday, as a report suggested North Korean troops were taking down loudspeakers recently reinstalled at the fortified border.

Political tensions between the rival Koreas had been rising over Pyongyang's objections to plans by defector-led groups in the South to send propaganda leaflets into the North. Stalled negotiations regarding economic sanctions imposed because of the North's nuclear weapons programme had also fuelled tensions.

It was not immediately clear why North Korea had softened its position, which came after it blew up a liaison office last week and cut off communication hotlines with the South.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un presided over a video conference meeting of the ruling party's Central Military Commission on Tuesday, where members "took stock of the prevailing situation" before deciding to suspend the military plans, the report said, without elaborating.

The committee also discussed documents outlining measures for "further bolstering the war deterrent of the country," KCNA reported.

As Moscow marked the 75th anniversary of Soviet Russia's victory over Nazi Germany, Vladimir Putin reiterated that the country is willing to cooperate in building a common global defense architecture.

The president used Wednesday's event to emphasize that Russians will never forget the Allied forces' contribution to the defeat of Hitler and Imperial Japan. He also made special mention of the significance of the second front, opened in France during the summer of 1944, when Britain and America led the D-Day landings.

"We honor the brave fighters of the armed forces of all the states of the anti-Hitler coalition and the achievements of all fighters against Nazism, who fearlessly served in Europe," Putin said.

Mere hours after Twitter censored another post by President Donald Trump, it went after his favorite meme-maker, suspending Carpe Donktum over 'copyright violations' likely brought on by his recent mockery of CNN.

Carpe Donktum's "suspension" was quickly noticed on Tuesday evening, prompting concerns among conservative journalists that the social media platform was moving aggressively to silence the president and his supporters alike.


Earlier in the day, Twitter had hidden one of Trump's posts, saying that anyone seeking to destroy monuments outside the White House would be met with "serious force" amounted to violating their rules against abusive behavior, specifically "threat of harm against an identifiable group."

A Democrat lawmaker and an MSNBC reporter have been left wondering where the police were, after they were apparently attacked in a fledgling 'autonomous zone' near the White House.

Perhaps spurred on by activists in Seattle's 'Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone', a group of protesters in Washington, DC occupied a street near the White House this weekend, declaring it the 'Black House Autonomous Zone'. Though police cleared the street of tents and trash on Tuesday, a large crowd remained, and Democrat Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton was on the street to talk to MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell.

Several military bases in central and southern Syria have been targeted by air attacks that Damascus has blamed on Israel, Syrian state media have reported. Videos on social media show massive explosions illuminating the night.

Israel targeted several locations in Salamiyah and Saburah just before 1am on Wednesday, the Syrian army said, adding that its air defenses shot down "a large number" of hostile missiles but that some struck their targets and inflicted "limited material damage."

Judging by the volume of explosions, one of the targets appears to be an ammunition depot.

The mainstream financial press has been remarkably quiet about the Federal Reserve's appointment (March 24) of BlackRock to manage its massive corporate debt purchase program in response to the Covid-19 crisis. That silence might have a simple explanation: you don't slag your boss if you know what's good for you.

BlackRock's CEO Larry Fink may now be the most powerful man in the world, overseeing not just the Fed's new (potentially $4.5 trillion) corporate slush-fund, but also managing $27 trillion of the global economy (even before the March appointment). As the world's largest asset manager, BlackRock already was managing $7 trillion for its global corporate investor-clients, along with another $20 trillion for clients through its financial risk-monitoring software (called Aladdin).

As Andrew Gavin Marshall has explained, "Unlike a bank, asset management firms do not manage and invest their own money but do so on behalf of their many clients. In the case of BlackRock, those clients come in the form of banks, corporations, insurance companies, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, central banks, and foundations." ^[1]