Air defense systems have been activated around Tel al-Harah in southern Syria, close to the border with Israel, border to repel an incoming missile attack allegedly launched by the IDF, state news agency SANA reports.

Amid the strike on the strategic mountaintop area in the Daraa Governorate, the IDF allegedly waged "electronic warfare" against the Syrian army's radar installations, a SANA source noted. The high ground was captured by the government forces from al-Nusra terrorists in July 2018, and currently serves as a crucial air defense position, according to reports.

No casualties from the strikes have been reported. The attack did cause some material damage, the agency reports, citing military sources that blamed Israel for the aggression.

The IDF has not commented on the alleged attack. Israel rarely acknowledges its cross-border raids against Syria, and has repeatedly stated that it reserves the right to defend its 'national security' by any means necessary. In recent weeks, Tel Aviv has confirmed striking multiple Syrian Army installation targets, in retaliation to cross-border tensions surrounding the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Damascus views Israeli intrusions as a blatant violation of its sovereignty and says they boost the morale of the remaining terrorists in the country. Syria has repeatedly urged the UN to put an end to Israeli strikes and intervene to stop these violations.

US President Donald Trump claimed that Iran has completely changed its behavior as a result of his sanctions and ditching the nuclear deal. Tehran now respects the US and suffers from bread shortages, Trump said.

Answering questions from reporters on his way out of the White House on Tuesday, Trump spoke about the trade war with China and the spat over Mexico about immigration, before touching on the tensions between the US and Iran.

"Iran is a country that now, because of the all of sanctions and other things, is a much different country than it was when I came here," Trump said. "When I came here they were all over the place, causing terror, causing problems."

According to Trump, this is because "they respect the United States right now much more than they ever have."

Many Russians believed that investigative journalist and anti-corruption activist Ivan Golunov was framed by the police at the behest of some of the powerful oligarchic forces that he exposed through his work and that the dismissal of the case against him due to a lack of evidence validates their claims, which is why people of all classes from the regular man all the way up to RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan and even the country's third most powerful person Chairwoman of the Federation Council Valentina Matviyenko publicly expressed their support for him and ended up on the right side of history.

Golunov's Cause Galvanized The Masses

Last week's arrest of investigative journalist and anti-corruption activist Ivan Golunov in drug charges was shady from the get-go after the authorities originally released several photos of supposed "evidence" that they later admitted weren't even involved in his case. Not only that, but many Russians immediately suspected that he was framed by the police at the behest of some of the powerful oligarchic forces that he exposed through his work, which is why his plight quickly became a cause célèbre within the country and abroad. People of all classes from the regular man all the way up to RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan and even the country's third most powerful person Chairwoman of the Federation Council Valentina Matviyenko publicly expressed their support for him, ending up on the right side of history after his case was dismissed for lack of evidence.

The Kremlin's Concerns

The Kremlin was also forced to pay attention after several protests were organized in his support and following the unprecedented coordination of three of its largest newspapers when they ran identical front pages declaring that "I/We Are Ivan Golunov". Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov revealed that Putin was being regularly briefed on the case's latest updates and acknowledged that "errors are possible", though he cautioned that everyone should wait until the forensic report is released before drawing any conclusions. This was an important statement because the Interior Ministry earlier reported that the DNA of several people was found on the bags of drugs that were seized from Golunov, supporting the theory that he was framed and possibly being the reason why the charges against him were ultimately dropped.

The prime minister of the German state of Thuringia joined the chorus of resounding voices against sanctions on Russia, arguing that the "inefficient" penalties don't deliver peace in Ukraine but increase suffering.

"The political ineffectiveness of the sanctions has long been proven; their declared goal, much-needed peace in Ukraine, is as far away as ever," Thuringia Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow, a long-time member of Germany's Left Party, told a local paper, adding that "the suffering of the civilian population [is] great."

He isn't the only head of a German state to lash out at the sweeping sanctions the US and EU imposed on Moscow in 2014. The sanctions followed the armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine that broke out after local residents denounced the Western-backed coup in Kiev.

The UK has published its annual human rights report, but with some notable omissions in its section on Yemen's war - namely the identity of the country bombing its civilians, and the UK's own involvement in the conflict.

The 2018 "Human Rights & Democracy" report from the UK's Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) includes an almost 800-word section on the humanitarian situation in Yemen - but, to a reader unfamiliar with the specifics, the document offers few clues as to who bears most responsibility for the crisis, since the British report seems to have forgotten to mention some key details.

The FCO report laments that the "human rights situation worsened in Yemen in 2018" and "the conflict in the country has had a devastating effect." It then details the estimated numbers of lives lost and displaced citizens according to UN statistics, but doesn't seem eager to pin blame on anyone in particular, laying responsibility at the feet of "multiple parties."

Yet, a UN investigative report last year found that airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition had caused "most of the documented civilian casualties" in the country - and said the indiscriminate strikes had hit "residential areas, markets, funerals, weddings, detention facilities, civilian boats and even medical facilities."

The West's war against Chinese tech giant Huawei was stepped up to absurd levels on Monday as British MPs compared the telecoms manufacturer to the German company which sold lethal gas to the Nazis for use in concentration camps.

Huawei is bidding for contracts to build part of the UK's superfast 5G network - a revelation which caused a stir in April and invited increased scrutiny of the company from MPs. Unsurprisingly, much of British officialdom so far seems eager to follow the lead of the US, which has painted the company as a threat to national security, despite lacking any evidence to justify those concerns.

Huawei's global cybersecurity and privacy officer, John Suffolk, was probed on Monday by a group of sanctimonious-sounding MPs, demanding to know if the company had moral objections to working with the Chinese government. It quickly became clear that the MPs were using the committee hearing to fire off more shots in the anti-Huawei propaganda war.

Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee, MP Norman Lamb, blasted Suffolk for what he said was Huawei's "willingness to work with the Chinese government in a province where there are allegedly gross human rights abuses" - a reference to the fact that Huawei technology is used in detention centers where the US claims China is holding up to two million Uyghur Muslims.

Twenty years ago today, ash settled over Serbia, then a republic of Yugoslavia, in the wake of more than two months of continued bombings by NATO. The campaign had been initiated by President Bill Clinton. NATO acted without the authorization of the United Nations. Its states justified what they called "Operation Noble Anvil" as a humanitarian operation to respond to the Kosovo War.

Of all the atrocities levied by the Clintons, perhaps none is more unjustified, brutal, and lasting as his Serbian legacy.

The Kosovo War featured two sparring, violent sides with legitimate claims on the land in question. Kosovo had been a historical homeland of the Serbs, one from which Ottoman colonists had sought to purge them. Neighboring Albanians, aligned with the Ottomans, soon migrated to Kosovo, where a Serbian population ebbed but persisted nonetheless. Once Serbia had liberated itself from Ottoman conquest and then Habsburg rule, the newly independent principality of Serbia pushed many Albanians out of Kosovo toward the end of the 19th century. Kosovo remained a part of the Kingdom of Serbia, then communist Yugoslavia, all the way up until the Kosovo War.

Normally bitterly opposed Democrats and Republicans have joined forces to support bills cracking down on shell companies and internal tax havens such as Delaware, dubbed the "Switzerland of the US."

Two Republicans and two Democrats on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs joined forces on Tuesday to introduce ILLICIT CASH Act, a clever acronym for "Improving Laundering Laws and Increasing Comprehensive Information Tracking of Criminal Activity in Shell Holdings".

It aims to end the incorporation of shell companies in the US and aid in the fight against money laundering. The co-sponsors are Senators Mark Warner (D-Virginia), Doug Jones (D-Alabama), Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), and Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota).

Shell companies and their facilitation of secrecy and money laundering is often most closely associated with offshore tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and the UK's Crown Dependencies. But the problem is hardly confined to overseas jurisdictions. Within the US itself, the state of Delaware has come under criticism for its lax rules on "shell companies," which led to the US being dubbed "the easiest place in the world" to set one up.

Israel's main foreign intelligence body, the Mossad, may be involved in efforts to stymie the boycott movement against the Jewish state, according to information gleaned from a freedom of information request.

A consumer advocacy group, Hatzlacha, the Consumers' Movement for the Promotion of a Fair Society and Economy, appealed under Israel's freedom-of-information laws to publicize the workday calendars of Israeli ministers in 2018, in a bid to uncover links between top politicians and local and international business interests.

Among the revelations, according to a report Wednesday in the Haaretz daily: Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan held a meeting in 2018 with Mossad chief Yossi Cohen whose subject was listed as "the fight against the boycott movement."

John Dean, the former White House counsel to Richard Nixon, testified Monday that he sees "remarkable parallels" between Watergate and the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report - at a dramatic Capitol Hill hearing that Republicans panned as a political "show" as they repeatedly challenged the credibility of the witness.

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Dean, an outspoken critic of President Trump, said several points in the Mueller report "echo Watergate," especially relating to the obstruction of justice probe.

"In many ways the Mueller report is to President Trump what the so-called Watergate road map...was to President Richard Nixon," Dean said, adding Mueller "has provided this committee a road map."