A critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly had his U.S. visa revoked, according to multiple reports.

Bill Browder tweeted about the situation this weekend, saying: "Not only did Putin add me to the Interpol list, but the US simultaneously revoked my visa."


Browder, a British citizen, was put on the Interpol wanted list this past weekend, according to the Guardian.

Following announcements that Israel had advanced plans for nearly 3,000 illegal settlement units in the occupied West Bank, Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee Member Dr. Hanan Ashrawi strongly denounced the move as a "blatant disregard for the two-state solution.

"The Israeli Civil Administration's High Planning Committee convened on Tuesday and Wednesday, and advanced plans for 2,615 housing units in illegal Israeli settlements.

"In blatant disregard of the requirements for the two-state solution and the chances for peace and stability, Netanyahu and his extremist, racist coalition continue to persist with their egregious policies of colonial-settler expansionism," Ashrawi said.

"Israel is deliberately working to enhance its extremist Jewish settler population and to superimpose 'Greater Israel' on all of historic Palestine. Undoubtedly, it is bent on annexing the entire city of Jerusalem, systematically wiping out the Palestinian presence and continuity on Palestinian soil, and destroying the territorial and demographic contiguity of the future Palestinian state."

The Israeli Civil Administration's High Planning Committee convened on Tuesday and Wednesday, and advanced plans for 2,615 housing units in illegal Israeli settlements across the occupied West Bank, according to settlement watchdog Peace Now.

Peace Now released a statement on Wednesday detailing the committee's decisions, saying that over the course of two days of meetings, the civil administration promoted 2,615 housing units, bringing the total number of units promoted through plans this week to 2,646, after 31 construction permits were approved for settlers in Hebron on October 16th.

Of the 2,615 housing units promoted, 1,508 were approved for depositing, while 1,323 were approved for validation.

Meanwhile, the civil administration issued on Tuesday a tender for 296 units in the Beit El settlement, located in the Ramallah district of the central West Bank.

Since the beginning of the year, Peace Now reported that 6,742 settlement housing units have been promoted by Israeli authorities.

The so-called Islamic State organization was primarily a bogeyman encouraged by the western powers. I've been saying this for the last four years.

I asserted, as a former soldier and war correspondent, that IS would collapse like a wet paper bag if proper western ground forces attacked their strongholds in Syria and Iraq. This week, the western powers and their local satraps finally took action and stormed the last IS stronghold at Raqqa. To no surprise, IS put up almost no resistance and ran for its miserable life.

The much-dreaded IS was never more than a bunch of young hooligans and religious fanatics who were as militarily effective as the medieval Children's Crusade.

In the west, IS was blown up by media and governments into a giant monster that was coming to cut the throats of honest folk in the suburbs.

IS did stage some very bloody and grisly attacks - that's what put it on the map. But none of them posed any mortal threat or really endangered our national security. In fact, the primary target of IS attacks has been Shia Muslims in the Mideast.

Three weeks on and there's still no proper account of what happened on the Las Vegas Strip on the night of October 1st 2017. The official investigation and mainstream media coverage has focused on the massacre at the Route 91 Harvest Festival venue, apparently conducted exclusively by 64-year-old gambler Stephen Paddock from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel-casino resort, providing the public with a nonsensical timeline and a highly suspicious explanation of events as detailed by Joe Quinn in this article.

Since then, survivors from among the 22,000 people in attendance at the venue, along with other guests, residents and employees present on the Strip that night, have begun speaking out about what they saw and heard and to say their statements diverge from the official narrative would be a massive understatement.

Comparing police reports on published audio recordings of the Las Vegas Metro Police Department (LVMPD) scanner with videos taken by multiple eyewitnesses, along with eyewitness statements made to the media on the night, and in published testimonies they have been making since then, a picture emerges of terror and chaos deliberately spread over a much larger area than just the venue, a picture that casts further doubt on the official story of a lone gunman.

On Monday October 9th, Las Vegas Police revised the date on which they believe Stephen Paddock checked in to the Mandalay Bay - saying it was likely Sept. 25th, and not the 28th as previously thought. Nicole Rapp, whose mother was trampled during the massacre, spoke to the Associated Press on Tuesday 10th saying: "It's very confusing to me that they are just discovering this a week later. How did we not know this before? It's traumatic for the victims and their families not to be sure of what happened".

Contrary to repeated claims by government that questioning the official narrative of mass casualty incidents "hurts the families of the victims", it is implausible half stories pandered as truth that really hurt the victims. The real truth - a narrative that makes sense and maps to reality - on the other hand, is the one thing that can bring lasting peace to victims of such attacks.

The apparent cluelessness of the police and FBI about when Paddock checked in to the hotel room is just one of many far more serious problems with the entire narrative of what happened on the night of October 1st in Las Vegas. Furthermore, all of these problems are easily discernible by anyone with a functioning BS meter. The following describes the most clear-cut examples.

The Podesta brothers - John and Tony - are creepy.

Most recently, John was the Clinton campaign's chairman, but he has worked with Bill and Obama too. Tony is considered one of Washington's most powerful lobbyists. (For more on their political background, see Abby Martin's recent Empire Files on teleSUR.)

Not knowing much about them - aside from the fact that Podesta is interested in UFOs - the first ping on my radar was the "spirit cooking" revelation from the leaked Podesta emails.The relevant email suggests that not only are Tony and John close enough to Crowleyite "magickian" and "artist" Marina Abramovic to be on a first-name basis with her, but also that they are familiar enough with her "spirit cooking" to know what that involves and presumably be fine with attending a session. The casual tone sounds as if the planned "dinner" was probably not their first. (See: Sickos: Wikileaks reveals Podesta bros participate in disturbing, occult-themed "spirit cooking" involving copious bodily fluids?)

Since the release of Podesta's emails, users on sites like 4chan, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube, among other blogs and forums, have been uncovering a ton of strange connections, creepy implications, and perhaps outlandish speculations about the brothers and their circle of friends. For example, see this compilation of info by "ausbitbank" on steemit. There's a ton of other stuff out there, so knock yourself out searching and combing through it all. There's a ton of speculations and unsourced assertions on the topic, but there are also some genuinely creepy people and connections involved. Here I'll present just the facts. Let's start with Tony.

On July 16, 2015, Politico published a photo essay "inside Hillary's campaign headquarters" that featured an image of John's office. On the wall is a painting, on loan from his brother Tony, that features a suited man lying on a table, with two men standing over him. The visual suggestion - given the plates and cutlery held by the two - are that they are preparing to eat him.

Italy is on the brink of becoming "ungovernable" due to the rise of Eurosceptic parties, ex-Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said.

The Democratic Party (PD) secretary yesterday blasted the growth of right-wing populism in Italy, branding it "very dangerous".

Mr Renzi, who quit as PM last year after losing a referendum on constitutional reform, admitted: "Ungovernability in Italy is a great risk.

"That is why I am so disgusted to have lost the referendum. We would have ended this situation."

Rather than expand U.S. exports to Iran - and create more American jobs - President Trump fell in line behind Israel's P.M. Netanyahu, decertifying the Iran-nuclear deal and risking more war, as Gareth Porter explains at The American Conservative.

President Donald Trump's new Iran policy clearly represents a dangerous rejection of diplomacy in favor of confrontation. But it's more than that: It's a major shift toward a much closer alignment of U.S. policy with that of the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Whether explicitly or not, Trump's vow to work with Congress to renegotiate the Iran nuclear agreement, and his explicit threat to withdraw from the deal if no renegotiation takes place, appear to be satisfying the hardline demands Netanyahu has made of Washington's policy toward Tehran.

Federal agents failed to hack into 6,900 mobile devices protected by encryption, the FBI director told a police chiefs' conference, amid heated debate over privacy and government control over cyberspace.

The FBI was unable to retrieve content from more than 6,900 mobile devices, agency director Christopher Wray said on Monday at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Philadelphia. This is more than half of the mobile devices the FBI tried to access in less than a year.

"To put it mildly, this is a huge, huge problem," Wray said. "It impacts investigations across the board - narcotics, human trafficking, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, gangs, organized crime, child exploitation."