The United States' "seizure" of domains belonging to some Iranian websites, including Press TV, is because Washington does not want Iran to challenge the US' "hostile propaganda," a political analyst says.

"By shutting down Press TV[.com domain], the US is attempting to deprive Iran of its capacity to challenge hostile propaganda, and put forth its own counter-narrative of controversial events, and more generally of peace, justice, and democratic governance,"

American scholar Richard Falk told the Press TV's website in an interview on Wednesday.

"In effect, being able to exercise monopoly control of media platforms is a crucial representation of power."

Syria is back in the news again. This time, it's not about hospitals allegedly being bombed, but a drought devastating Syria's wheat harvest. But there's a lot more to the story than a simple 'Act of God'.

A recent article on Reuters would have readers believe the current Syrian wheat shortage is mainly due to drought. The article makes a passing reference to the crippling Western sanctions choking Syrians, but doesn't emphasize how those sanctions contribute to the wheat shortage, as well as the fuel shortage, massive hyperinflation, and an all-round worsening of Syrian lives.

On June 16, Prensa Latina reported on wheat theft by US occupation forces noting, "a convoy of 32 trucks and containers loaded with looted wheat left for Iraq... The column was guarded by vehicles of the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (FDS)."

The prosecution of major Parisian company heads for collaborating with 'enemy' governments has captured the media's attention. But the fact this is standard practice for France stubbornly remains the elephant in the room.

On June 22, it was announced that four executives at French companies had been charged with "complicity in acts of torture" over allegations they'd helped North African authorities spy on opposition figures who were subsequently detained and tortured.

Philippe Vannier, former chief of defence firm Amesys, and Olivier Bohbot, current head of homeland security specialist Nexa Technologies, were among those indicted. The former is accused of providing "deep packet inspection"solutions to the government of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, which allowed authorities to secretly intercept private internet communications. The latter purportedly sold Cerebro software, capable of real-time message and call tracing, to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Chinese scientists have deleted crucial data from the earliest confirmed Covid patients, it emerged today amid intense scrutiny about the true origins of the disease.


Dozens of test samples from patients in epicentre Wuhan were found to have been wiped from an international database used to track the virus' evolution.

The files could have provided vital clues about how the virus originated and how long it had been spreading before the seafood market outbreak in December 2019.

The American professor who spotted their deletion and managed to recover some of the data said they suggested Covid was circulating long before China's official timeline.

Far from being a war against "white supremacy," the Biden administration's new "domestic terror" strategy clearly targets primarily those who oppose US government overreach and those who oppose capitalism and/or globalization.

In the latest sign that the US government's War on Domestic Terror is growing in scope and scale, the White House on Tuesday revealed the nation's first ever government-wide strategy for confronting domestic terrorism. While cloaked in language about stemming racially motivated violence, the strategy places those deemed "anti-government" or "anti-authority" on a par with racist extremists and charts out policies that could easily be abused to silence or even criminalize online criticism of the government.

Even more disturbing is the call to essentially fuse intelligence agencies, law enforcement, Silicon Valley, and "community" and "faith-based" organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, as well as unspecified foreign governments, as partners in this "war," which the strategy makes clear will rely heavily on a pre-crime orientation focused largely on what is said on social media and encrypted platforms. Though the strategy claims that the government will "shield free speech and civil liberties" in implementing this policy, its contents reveal that it is poised to gut both.

Indeed, while framed publicly as chiefly targeting "right-wing white supremacists," the strategy itself makes it clear that the government does not plan to focus on the Right but instead will pursue "domestic terrorists" in "an ideologically neutral, threat-driven manner," as the law "makes no distinction based on political view — left, right or center." It also states that a key goal of this strategic framework is to ensure "that there is simply no governmental tolerance . . . of violence as an acceptable mode of seeking political or social change," regardless of a perpetrator's political affiliation.

A Russian patrol ship and fighter jet have fired warning shots after the British destroyer HMS Defender violated the country's border in the Black Sea. The UK embassy's defense attaché has been summoned by officials in Moscow.

According to Russia's Ministry of Defense, the British naval ship entered the country's territorial waters at 11:52am local time and traveled 3km inside the frontier, near Cape Fiolent, in Crimea. The peninsula is not recognized by the United Kingdom as Russian land and London believes it to be illegally occupied Ukrainian territory.

"At 12:06 and 12:08, a border patrol ship fired warning shots," the Defense Ministry said. "(And) at 12:19, a Su-24m aircraft performed a warning bombing (4 OFAB-250) ahead of the course of the USS Defender."

Four minutes later, at 12:23, the destroyer left Russian territory.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, backed by French President Emmanuel Macron, reportedly wants the EU to consider "selective engagement" with Russia on issues of common interest and inviting President Vladimir Putin to a summit.

French and German diplomats "wrongfooted" other EU member states at a meeting in Brussels on Wednesday by proposing to invite Putin to a summit with the bloc's leaders, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing "people with knowledge of the discussions."

According to FT, Merkel wants to revive EU relations with Russia along the template provided by last week's Geneva summit between Putin and US President Joe Biden. Though she meets and speaks with Putin on a regular basis herself, the German chancellor reportedly wants a format that allows the EU to address Russia "with one voice."

Warren Buffett announced Wednesday that he's resigning from his position as trustee at the Gates Foundation, as the divorce of its founders, Bill and Melinda, casts uncertainty on the leadership of one of the world's largest charitable organizations.

Buffett, who's the eighth richest person in the world with a net worth of about $105 billion, pledged most of his fortune in 2006 to the Gates Foundation and to four other charitable trusts created by his family.

In a statement, Buffett downplayed the significance of his departure, which represents an about-face for the Gates Foundation. A spokesperson for the foundation told reporters last month after the Gateses announced their divorce that "no changes to their roles or the organization are planned." Buffett said:

"For years I have been a trustee - an inactive trustee at that - of only one recipient of my funds, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMG). I am now resigning from that post, just as I have done at all corporate boards other than Berkshire's."

"The greatest threat to religious liberty in America today," said former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr in a recent speech, is "the increasingly militant and extreme secular-progressive climate of our state-run education system."

Barr, whose high-profile career has demonstrated a deep commitment to the U.S. Constitution as written and intended, spoke to the religious liberty legal defense organization Alliance Defending Freedom. The legal lion put together a strong argument that a half-century of Supreme Court decisions combined with the left's long march through American institutions have pushed U.S. public schools so far from religious neutrality that many now comprise a government-established preference for the atheist religion. Government preferences for some religious views over others are unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Barr said:

"The heavy-handed enforcement of secular-progressive orthodoxy through government-run schools is totally incompatible with traditional Christianity and other major religious traditions in our country. In light of this development, we must confront the reality that it may no longer be fair, practical, or even constitutional to provide publicly-funded education solely through the vehicle of state-operated schools."

We now know the name of the Chinese defector RedState first wrote about on June 4, who has been working with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for a few months, and what his position within the Chinese military and government was, among other details.

Matthew Brazil and Jeff Stein at Spy Talk reported on the "rumor," and gave the name and background of the rumored defector:
Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are abuzz this week with rumors that a vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei (董经纬) defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang.

Dong is, or was, a longtime official in China's Ministry of State Security (MSS), also known as the Guoanbu. His publicly available background indicates that he was responsible for the Ministry's counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018. If the stories are true, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the People's Republic of China.