The US and its allies should cooperate with Syrian President Bashar Assad in fighting Islamic State, "a common enemy" of the international community, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview on Sunday.

"Our American partners and some countries in the region persistently refuse to recognize Assad as a partner, which is rather strange," Lavrov said in an interview with Russian state Television channel Rossiya 1, aired on Sunday. "Assad was a fully legitimate partner in destroying chemical arms but somehow he is not when it comes to fighting terrorism."

A coalition against Islamic State (IS, formerly known as ISIS/ISIL), as planned by Russian President Vladimir Putin, would "bring together all those already fighting on the ground," that is, the Syrian and Iraqi armies, the Kurds and "the part of the armed opposition that represents Syrians."

A report says Israeli businessmen are buying properties belonging to the displaced minorities in the ISIL-held regions in northern Iraq to prepare the ground for accommodation of more than 2,000 people there.

Citing a local source, Fars News Agency reported that estate agencies in Mosul and other cities of the Nineveh province in northern Iraq have began purchasing the houses and lands of Iraqi minorities including Christians and Izadis and Turkmens.

The estate agents offer "attractive prices" in exchange for the properties and later sell them to Israeli businessmen, the unnamed source said.

The source added that more than 2,000 Jews have recently returned to Iraq's Kurdistan region to resettle in Iraq's northern areas.

Thousands of Iraqi Christians and other communities have been forced out of their homes in Mosul since June following an ultimatum by ISIL terrorists. Most Christians in the northwestern Nineveh province escaped after the Takfiris overran the region.

The ISIL terrorists control some parts of Syria and Iraq. They are engaged in crimes against humanity in the areas under their control.

Accusations by a US think-tank regarding the Iranian Parchin military site are "lies" spread "to damage" the major nuclear agreement of the world powers with Tehran, according to Iran's foreign minister.

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif commented on a claim put forward by the US-based Institute for Science and International Security. On Friday, the think-tank cited satellite imagery to question the recent movement of vehicles at Tehran's Parchin military site, saying that it was nothing to do with roadwork.

"We said that the activities in Parchin are related to road construction," Zarif said on Saturday, as cited by the IRNA news agency. "They [opponents of the deal] have spread these lies before. Their goal is to damage the agreement."

Within the framework of the July 14 nuclear agreement, reached in Vienna by Iran and six major world powers, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is supposed to get access to Iran's nuclear sites, including Parchin.

Parchin, located about 30 kilometers southeast of Tehran, is a huge military complex. In 2004, it was reported to have been used for tests of explosives for a nuclear warhead. Over a period of 10 years, Iran has allowed IAEA inspectors to access the site five times.

Last Friday's nonfarm payrolls report of 215,000 new jobs in July with its attendant announcement of an unemployment rate of 5.3 percent drew mostly yawns from the media. That wasn't the case on February 3 of this year when Jim Clifton, CEO of the polling company, Gallup, wrote a stunning opinion piece on the company's web site calling the U.S. unemployment rate "The Big Lie." Clifton raised more media frenzy the next day when he appeared on CNBC and suggested he might "disappear" for questioning the government's unemployment rate.

Back then, the official unemployment rate was 5.6 percent. Today it's 5.3 percent - a very healthy looking rate for an economy that is supposedly on the rebound.

One of the bogus aspects raised by Clifton in his opinion piece about how the U.S. government calculates the unemployment rate was this:

"Say you're an out-of-work engineer or healthcare worker or construction worker or retail manager: If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 — maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn — you're not officially counted as unemployed in the much-reported 5.6%."

Even for a government hell bent on putting the best possible spin on overcoming the Wall Street train wreck of 2008, which brought on the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, characterizing someone working one hour a week in a lawn job as "employed" seems like the height of duplicity. We decided to check it out.

We went directly to the source: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Federal agency that calculates who is employed and who is not. According to the BLS, the bogus nature of who is counted as "employed," is even worse than Clifton suggests. Not only is a person counted as employed if they are working one hour a week in a lawn job paying $20, but a worker who makes no money at all donating his or her services to a family business for 15 hours or more per week is also considered employed.

Throughout the rest of America, one's donation of services typically defines one as a volunteer not an employed worker; but the BLS doesn't see it that way.

Venezuela's government is opening an investigation against CNN en Espanol (CNNE) over the news network's allegedly false report on looting in the country, the CONATEL telecommunications regulator said in a statement.

CONATEL said on Friday that "given the seriousness of these facts [false looting report]" and the impact of media on public opinion, Venezuela's National Telecommunications Commission "has initiated a punitive administrative proceeding" against CNNE over the "dissemination" of false information on the territory of Venezuela.

Earlier on Friday, CNNE issued a statement recognizing its mistake and apologizing for what it said was an error in the text that appeared on screen while a report on food scarcity in the Venezuelan cities of Maracay and Valencia was running on the channel on Thursday.

Due to its failure to repay a $58 million to creditors on Monday, Puerto Rico has defaulted for the first time in its history.

Sending the Puerto Rican government into a "death spiral," according to Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla, the island has defaulted after paying only $628,000 of a $58 million debt repayment which was due on Monday.

"This was a decision that reflects the serious concerns about the Commonwealth's liquidity in combination with the balance of obligations to our creditors and the equally important obligations to the people of Puerto Rico," Puerto Rico's Government Development Bank president Mela Acosta Febo said in a statement.

Do you remember when real reporters existed? Those were the days before the Clinton regime concentrated the media into a few hands and turned the media into a Ministry of Propaganda, a tool of Big Brother. The false reality in which Americans live extends into economic life. Last Friday's employment report was a continuation of a long string of bad news spun into good news. The media repeats two numbers as if they mean something—the monthly payroll jobs gains and the unemployment rate—and ignores the numbers that show the continuing multi-year decline in employment opportunities while the economy is allegedly recovering.

The so-called recovery is based on the U.3 measure of the unemployment rate. This measure does not include any unemployed person who has become discouraged from the inability to find a job and has not looked for a job in four weeks. The U.3 measure of unemployment only includes the still hopeful who think they will find a job.

The government has a second official measure of unemployment, U.6. This measure, seldom reported, includes among the unemployed those who have been discouraged for less than one year. This official measure is double the 5.3% U.3 measure. What does it mean that the unemployment rate is over 10% after six years of alleged economic recovery?

In 1994 the Clinton regime stopped counting long-term discouraged workers as unemployed. Clinton wanted his economy to look better than Reagan's, so he ceased counting the long-term discouraged workers that were part of Reagan's unemployment rate. John Williams (shadowstats.com) continues to measure the long-term discouraged with the official methodology of that time, and when these unemployed are included, the US rate of unemployment as of July 2015 is 23%, several times higher than during the recession with which Fed chairman Paul Volcker greeted the Reagan presidency.

It has occurred almost without notice. While the U.S. continues to claim its foremost world status as a democracy, since 9/11 it has shifted its model of government to something far more concerning. This shift is instanced perfectly in a story that appeared in very few of the news media outlets during the last week of July: two animal rights activists were charged with "domestic terrorism" and jailed for freeing caged animals on a fur farm and for vandalizing the property of the corporation that ran it. Federal law now makes it a crime of terrorism to engage in acts that threaten the ability of a business or a corporation to make a profit.

This speaks directly to a shift that has occurred in the model of government on the federal level, from what the lawyer and philosopher David Luban calls "the war model" to an even more force-oriented model: what we will call "the terrorist model." We will show the structures of such a model by first defining "terrorism." Then we can apply that definition to U.S. actions and policies. This will allow us to see the shift in the governing model the U.S. now uses, both abroad and domestically.

President Barack Obama's push to get congressional approval for the Iran nuclear deal has run into opposition, even after envoys from the UK, Germany and Russia told US lawmakers that rejecting the agreement would be a "nightmare."

In a statement posted to his website Thursday evening, New York Senator Chuck Schumer said he would endorse a Republican-drafted disapproval resolution "not because I believe war is a viable or desirable option, nor to challenge the path of diplomacy," but because he believed "Iran will not change." Schumer is supposed to take over the leadership of the Senate Democrats later this year.

The Obama administration seemed less put off by Schumer's announcement, calling it "disappointing but not surprising." White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday that 12 members of US Congress - seven Representatives and five Senators - publicly expressed support of the agreement in recent days, showing that Obama had made a persuasive case in his speech at American University on Wednesday.

Even with Schumer's defection, the Democrats should have the 34 votes required to uphold a presidential veto, even if they no longer have the 41 votes required to outright defeat the disapproval resolution in the Senate.