Certain attempts by refugees from the Middle East to use Russian territory have been registered, but the Kremlin believes the issue of granting quotas for them the way other European countries have been doing is not on the agenda.

"This issue is hardly relevant for Russia," presidential press-secretary Dmitry Peskov said. "Of course, we had anticipated certain costs (material and other) these processes will entail. To a large extent these costs will be borne by the countries that at a certain point contributed to bringing about the catastrophic situation in some Maghreb states and in the Middle East," Peskov said. He avoided mentioning the countries he had in mind.

Khamenei: We allowed negotiation with the US only on the nuclear issue for certain reasons.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Wednesday that he would not permit negotiations with the United States beyond those that culminated in a nuclear deal with world powers in July. "We allowed negotiation with the US only on the nuclear issue for certain reasons," Khamenei said in a speech. "In other areas we did not and will not allow negotiations with the US."

Khamenei charged that Washington only sought talks on a broader range of issues in a bid to impose its own policies on Tehran. "US officials seek negotiation with Iran. Negotiation is a means of infiltration and imposition of their will," he said. "The Iranian nation expelled this Great Satan, we barred their direct access and now we must not allow their indirect access and infiltration."

The comments from Khamenei, who has the final say on all matters of state in Iran, came after the US Congress began debate on Tuesday on the nuclear agreement reached with Iran. President Barack Obama has just enough support in the US Senate to prevent the deal being blocked. But a majority of lawmakers oppose the deal, backing Israeli claims that it does not do enough to prevent any possibility of Iran developing a nuclear weapon.

Iran rejects Israel's right to exist, a stance Khamenei reiterated on Wednesday. "God willing, there will be no such thing as the Zionist regime in 25 years' time," the Iranian leader said. "In the meantime, the spirit of struggle and jihad will not leave the Zionists a moment's peace."

Iran has always denied any ambition to acquire a nuclear weapon and Khamenei has himself said repeatedly that any such policy would be a violation of Islam.

The refugee chaos that is now pushing deep into Europe - dramatized by gut-wrenching photos of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey - started with the cavalier ambitions of American neocons and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks who planned to remake the Middle East and other parts of the world through "regime change."

Instead of the promised wonders of "democracy promotion" and "human rights," what these "anti-realists" have accomplished is to spread death, destruction and destabilization across the Middle East and parts of Africa and now into Ukraine and the heart of Europe. Yet, since these neocon forces still control the Official Narrative, their explanations get top billing - such as that there hasn't been enough "regime change."

For instance, The Washington Post's neocon editorial page editor Fred Hiatt on Monday blamed "realists" for the cascading catastrophes. Hiatt castigated them and President Barack Obama for not intervening more aggressively in Syria to depose President Bashar al-Assad, a longtime neocon target for "regime change."

But the truth is that this accelerating spread of human suffering can be traced back directly to the unchecked influence of the neocons and their liberal fellow-travelers who have resisted political compromise and, in the case of Syria, blocked any realistic efforts to work out a power-sharing agreement between Assad and his political opponents, those who are not terrorists.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has opened up about his new book, 'The WikiLeaks Files,' speaking about the 'US empire' and telling RT's 'Going Underground' program that Washington had plans to overthrow Syria's government long before the 2011 uprising began.

Speaking to 'Going Underground' host Afshin Rattansi, Assange referred to the chapter on Syria, which goes back to 2006. In that chapter is a cable from US Ambassador William Roebuck, who was stationed in Damascus, which apparently discusses a plan for the overthrow of the Assad government in Syria.

The Guardian's propagandistic slant on Russia has been well covered by RI and the folks at "Off Guardian". But this Sunday it hit a new low.

The Guardian appears to run an online editorial policy that there should be a least one article daily painting Russia as a dark and unsavoury place full of chauvinist post-Soviet half-wits and controlled by sadistic mafia hordes. The type of place that is a threat to the civilized world which we might need to control via tighter sanctions, regime change, or all-out war.

If they don't have Shaun Walker poking fun at Russian cheese "Congealed Tipp-Ex to odour of gym - Russia's cheese fakers fail the taste test", then there is always a choice specimen from their bizzare New East Network section, which runs heavy on Russia attack pieces from Radio Free Europe (an unabashed US government propaganda outlet which makes RT seem balanced in comparison), Mikhail Khodorkovsky's vitriolically Russophobic Interpreter, the CIA front-show Window on Eurasia blog, George Soros' Russophobic Eurasianet, and the Russia-bashing Moscow Times and Kyiv Post. There is not a single outlet with views sympathetic to Russia in all of the 23 contributors listed. Not one.

"On Freedom's tree there rained a withering blight,
Glory to proud Palmyra sighed adieu,
And o'er her shrines Destruction's angel flew."
(Nicholas Michell, 1807-1880.)

At a meeting of the Foreign Ministers in Cairo in September 2002 the then Secretary General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa warned US President George W. Bush that the proposed invasion of Iraq would: "open the gates of Hell ... in the region." Iraq and Syria would be the first to be engulfed in the fire.

German's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said it would be a "big mistake" for the United States to launch its own war on Iraq: " ... and European foreign policy chief Javier Solana insisted that weapon inspections issues were a matter for the UN", not an invasion (1.)

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was isolated as: "the sole European leader in Bush's camp." Even: "Australian Prime Minister John Howard, long one of Bush's staunchest allies, said he favored a diplomatic solution to the crisis and would not blindly follow the United States into war."

There was of course no "crisis", just a pack of lies to justify the illegal invasion for oil and to rid a government who had committed another unpardonable sin - switching oil trading from $US to Euros - and were a staunch supporter of Palestine. We are currently witnessing a similar murderous stitch up of another supporter of Palestine, Syria.

Syria is also believed to have considerable untapped reserves of oil and gas in her territorial waters in the Levantine Basin, exploration and finance of which is being undertaken in cooperation with Russia (2.)

Given the planning the United States has invested in destabilization of the country, aptly phrased by Syrian Military Intelligence in 2006 their: "efforts to provide military training and equipment to Syria's Kurds" (3) and to "highlight Kurdish complaints" in order to implement another illegal "regime change" and resources theft there must be a fair amount of angst in Washington and Whitehall at resilience and government survival, though at huge human cost, approaching a decade later.

The "highlighting of Kurdish complaints" though, clearly had time devoted to its complexities, being needed: "to be handled carefully, since giving the wrong kind of prominence to Kurdish issue in Syria could be a liability for our efforts ... given Syrian civil society's skepticism of Kurdish objectives." Nevertheless, another plan for illegally overthrowing a sovereign government was underway, lessons from the Iraq nightmare ignored.

The human cost of US meddling has, as ever, been staggering. According the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) Syria's 2013 population was 22,85 million. By May 2015 12.2 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance, 7.6 million displaced internally due to violence and 4 million had fled the country (4.) Incidentally for those who notice the discrepancy between the population and the UNOCHA figures, in crisis people return home to those they love: "If we die, at least we will die together" is a phrase that haunts.

French President Francois Hollande has said that following recent ceasefire progress in Ukraine he hopes to see the end of sanctions against Russia.

Mr Hollande has proposed a meeting of the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in Paris later this month on the situation in Ukraine. He said there had been progress in recent weeks in implementing a troubled February peace deal. But Mr Hollande said several commitments still had to be honored.

They include holding local elections and implementing decentralisation reforms granting more autonomy to two breakaway pro-Russian areas in the east.

"The process has moved forward. There has been progress in the last few weeks. The ceasefire has almost been respected," Mr Hollande told a news conference in Paris.

The New York Times reported Monday night that a second IG review of Hillary Clinton's unusual email arrangement found that top-secret emails were indeed sent to to her personal account while she was secretary of State. This news comes on the same day Clinton told supporters on the campaign trail that she does not need to apologize for using a private email account and server, because "what I did was allowed."

A special intelligence review conducted by both the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency found that of the small sample of emails that were given to the Office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community to examine, two were classified as top secret.

Those two emails were found among a mere 40 emails that were provided to the IC IG. There are over 60,000 Clinton emails in all, half of which were deemed by to be "personal" by the candidate and deleted.

Russian military advisers are present in Syria, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said, stressing that Moscow has never concealed its longtime military-technical cooperation with Syria.

Russian military personnel is present in Syria because Moscow has a naval facility in the port of Tartus, Zakharova said in a statement on Wednesday.

"Russia has never made a secret of military-technical cooperation with Syria. Our country has long been supplying weapons and military equipment to Syria under the existing bilateral contracts," she said.

"There are also Russian military advisers in Syria who provide training in the use of the arriving equipment."

She also outlined on what conditions Russia might consider extra counter-terrorism aid to Syria.

"If additional measures in the interests of boosting anti-terrorism efforts are required on our part, this issue will be considered accordingly, but exclusively on the basis of international law and Russian legislature," she noted.

US corporate-funded policy think-tank, the Brookings Institution, published a June 2015 paper titled, "Deconstructing Syria: Towards a regionalized strategy for a confederal country." The signed and dated open-conspiracy to divide, destroy, invade, then incrementally occupy Syria using no-fly-zones and both US and British special forces is now demonstrably underway.

The paper would lay out in no uncertain terms that (emphasis added):

The idea would be to help moderate elements establish reliable safe zones within Syria once they were able. American, as well as Saudi and Turkish and British and Jordanian and other Arab forces would act in support, not only from the air but eventually on the ground via the presence of special forces as well. The approach would benefit from Syria's open desert terrain which could allow creation of buffer zones that could be monitored for possible signs of enemy attack through a combination of technologies, patrols, and other methods that outside special forces could help Syrian local fighters set up.

Were Assad foolish enough to challenge these zones, even if he somehow forced the withdrawal of the outside special forces, he would be likely to lose his air power in ensuing retaliatory strikes by outside forces, depriving his military of one of its few advantages over ISIL. Thus, he would be unlikely to do this.