The ex-adviser, who also worked with Hillary Clinton, has been accused of possessing indecent images and arranging commission of a sexual offense in the UK.

A former White House aide who advised then-President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on counterterrorism initiatives has reportedly been accused of committing child sex crimes in the UK.

Rahamim 'Rami' Shy, 46, was arraigned on Friday in Luton Crown Court, near London. He faces charges of possessing indecent images of children and arranging the commission of a child sexual offense, according to local media reports. The New Jersey resident was arrested in late February and jailed at HMP Bedford pending court proceedings.

Shy, who has not yet entered a plea to the charges, is scheduled for another court hearing in June, the Daily Mail reported. His case is slated to go to trial in August.

The defendant held multiple roles in the Obama administration, reportedly including coordination of the US government's efforts to combat Taliban and Al-Qaeda terrorists. He was a senior adviser in the US Treasury Department from 2008 to 2014, working to disrupt terrorist financing and helping overseas allies impose sanctions on adversarial governments. He also advised the chiefs of staff at the Pentagon.

Shy's LinkedIn page, which has been deleted, said he advised the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. He studied at New York's Columbia University and reportedly worked most recently at US banking giant Citigroup. A company spokesman told the Daily Mail that Shy was no longer a Citigroup employee.

The Russian armed forces have the initiative along the entire contact line and are pushing the enemy away from the occupied borders, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said at a meeting of the Defense Ministry's board.

Ukraine has lost almost half a million soldiers since the beginning of the special military operation in 2022, Russian Defense Ministry Sergei Shoigu said on Tuesday.

"In total, the losses of the Ukrainian armed forces amounted to almost half a million military personnel since the beginning of the special military operation," Shoigu told a Defense Ministry meeting.

More than 3,000 German military personnel are taking part in the Grand Quadriga 2024 drills that kicked off in Lithuania on Tuesday. The maneuvers are part of the larger, months-long Steadfast Defender 24 series of NATO exercises that began in late January.

Lithuania shares a border with Russia's Kaliningrad exclave, as well as Moscow's closest ally, Belarus. In a separate development earlier this month, Berlin deployed an advanced military team to the Baltic country as part of plans for a full-strength armor brigade permanently stationed there. Moscow has described the plans as a threat requiring "special measures" in response.

The Grand Quadriga 2024 exercise is scheduled to wrap up in late May, and will involve 200 pieces of German military hardware, including Leopard tanks as well as Puma and Boxer infantry fighting vehicles.

WASHINGTON, April 20 (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives on Saturday with broad bipartisan support passed a $95 billion legislative package providing security assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, over bitter objections from Republican hardliners.

The legislation now proceeds to the Democratic-majority Senate, which passed a similar measure more than two months ago. U.S. leaders from Democratic President Joe Biden to top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell had been urging embattled Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson to bring it up for a vote.

The Senate is set to begin considering the House-passed bill on Tuesday, with some preliminary votes that afternoon. Final passage was expected sometime next week, which would clear the way for Biden to sign it into law.

The bills provide $60.84 billion to address the conflict in Ukraine, including $23 billion to replenish U.S. weapons, stocks and facilities; $26 billion for Israel, including $9.1 billion for humanitarian needs, and $8.12 billion for the Indo-Pacific, including Taiwan.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy expressed his thanks, saying U.S. lawmakers moved to keep "history on the right track."

"The vital U.S. aid bill passed today by the House will keep the war from expanding, save thousands and thousands of lives, and help both of our nations to become stronger," Zelenskiy said on X.

Poland is ready to host nuclear weapons on its territory, President Andrzej Duda announced on Monday (22 April), confirming he had been in talks on the matter with the US administration during a recent visit.

​​In an interview with the Polish daily Fakt, Duda admitted that he is discussing the possibility of deploying nuclear weapons in Poland as part of NATO's Nuclear Sharing Programme.

US nuclear-sharing arrangements foresee the deployment and storage of a nuclear arsenal in Europe, allowing non-nuclear-weapon states to place nuclear weapons on their territory and participate in planning and exercises.

Though no official confirmation exists, it is widely known that US nuclear weapons are currently stationed on American and European bases across Europe: Kleine Brogel in Belgium, Büchel in Germany, Aviano and Ghedi-Torre in Italy, Volkel in the Netherlands, and Inçirlik in Turkey.

© 1984

"Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference ... The Thought Police would get him just the same ... the arrests invariably happened at night ... In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word." — George Orwell, 1984

The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder.

The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.

What's playing out now with the highly politicized tug-of-war over whether Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gets reauthorized by Congress doesn't just sell us out, it makes us slaves of the Deep State.

Talk about victory for Kiev has disappeared as Washington becomes a 'back seat driver'...

The Istanbul agreements - a tentative peace plan agreed between Russia and Ukraine in the spring of 2022 - are being discussed again. However, as they were written at the time they are no longer relevant and are unlikely to be of any use in the future. The realities on the ground and in the hearts and minds of many key people, have changed completely.

Nevertheless, it's no coincidence that talk of negotiations began in Switzerland just as it became clear, to Westerners, that the Ukrainians are unable to make any progress. I am not talking about victory, but about any meaningful success on the battlefield. And thus it has become necessary to somehow limit Russia's potential for success, to prevent it from winning.

This is not coming from Ukraine itself, but rather the enemy with whom we are now really at war. The desire to prevent a Russian victory is behind all these diplomatic machinations.

Like all living creatures, people need to eat to live. Some people, eaten from within by a demonic force, try to deny others this basic sustenance. All across the world people are starving because the powerful and wealthy create economic and political conditions that allow their wealth to be built on the backs of the world's poor. It is an old story, constantly updated. It is one form of official terrorism.

From the Irish famine with its terrible aftermath created by the imperialist British government in the nineteenth century that caused the death of between one and two million Irish and the forced emigration of more than a million more between 1846 and 1851 alone, to today's savage Israeli genocide and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, the stories of politically motivated famine are legion.

In their wake, as the historian Woodham-Smith wrote in 1962 of the Irish famine, it "left hatred behind. Between Ireland and England the memory of what was done and endured has lain like a sword." This Irish bitterness toward the English was strong even in my own Irish-American childhood in the northern Bronx more than a century later. Ethnic cleansing has a way of leaving a livid legacy of rage toward the perpetrators, especially in the Irish case when talk of of one's ancestors' perilous forced emigration on the Coffin Ships was ever broached.

Today's Israeli government leaders must be historically ignorant or suicidal, for the Irish rage at the British led to the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the eventual establishment of the Republic of Ireland, where today in Dublin, its capital, huge throngs march in support of the Palestinian people and their fight against Israel. Do the Israeli leaders think that they can evade the lessons of history, lessons that oppressed people everywhere learned from the irrepressible Irish rebels? Like their arrogant British imperialist counterparts, they have self-anointed themselves a chosen people so they can inflict death and suffering on the unchosen ones, the animal people, those disgusting creatures not deserving of life, land, or liberty.

But starve, torture, and slaughter people enough and the flaming sword of revenge will exact a heavy price. Dark furies will descend.

Dehumanize people enough, take their land, and the day always comes when the wretched of the earth rise up against their racist colonialist settlers.

Deny the bread of life to people long enough so that they watch their emaciated children die in their arms or search for their body parts beneath the bombed rubble and you will find that the terrified have become terrifying.

Chad has asked US troops to halt activities at an airbase near the capital of N'Djamena, the sole place American military presence in the country, several media outlets reported this week, citing letters sent by the country's armed forces minister, Air Force Chief of Staff Idriss Amine Ahmed.

The letters were reportedly addressed to the US defense attaché. Reports, however, vary as to the contents of the missives. According to Bloomberg, which claimed to have seen one of the letters and verified it with a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Chad has merely alerted the US "to stop their activity at the base." However, earlier in the week CNN, citing intelligence sources, reported that in a separate letter the US military was ordered to clear out of the Adji Kossei Air undefined entirely. Chad also reportedly threatened to cancel the Status of Forces Agreement, the document that governs how the US military can operate in the country.

Tehran's retaliatory attack may not have caused much destruction, but it was far from a failure

On the night of April 14, Iran and its proxy forces launched a series of cruise missile and kamikaze drone strikes on Israeli territory. The attacks did not come as a surprise. Tehran had warned that it would respond to the Israeli airstrike on Iran's consulate in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, which killed several high-ranking officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including two generals. The retaliatory strike was called Operation True Promise.

There is still much debate on whether Iran's retaliatory strike was successful. Most military experts agree that there was nothing unusual about Tehran's actions, except that this was Iran's first direct attack on Israel. From a technical point of view, the strategy was simple and correct: Iran first suppressed the enemy's air defense systems with drones and then launched hypersonic missiles which the Israelis and Americans were not able to intercept. Incidentally, in light of this, Ukraine's statements about shooting down Russian Kinzhal hypersonic missiles sound ridiculous.