Presidential candidates in 2020 won't be able to rely on 'embedded' Facebook staff, the Menlo Park company declared. Hillary Clinton's campaign declined this help in 2016, letting her rival Donald Trump leverage it to victory.

Facebook will still offer technical support to candidate headquarters, as well as basic training on how to use the platform, but will not have any staffers "embedded" in campaigns as it did in 2016, Bloomberg reported.

This kind of support helped then-candidate Trump spread his message in 2016, his digital director Brad Parscale said in an interview, referring to Facebook staff as "embeds." Facebook has quibbled with his choice of words and eventually decided to scrap the program, under tremendous pressure from Congress to "do something" about its influence over US elections.

Clinton's surprise defeat led to accusations of "Russian collusion" and "meddling" in social media, with numerous news outfits leading the witch hunt for "Russian bots and trolls" on Facebook and Twitter. After CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled by Congress in April, Facebook said in its follow-up response that it offered the same support to the Clinton camp as it did to Trump, but that the Democrats declined.

Russia's military presence in Syria has effectively turned the tide of war back in 2015, the year Islamic State was about to "roll over Damascus," the head of Israeli Air Force intelligence said in an interview.

The aerial campaign Russia started against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) in 2015 had "categorically" decided the fate of war in President Bashar Assad's favor, Brig. Gen. Uri Oron, head of the Israeli Air Force Intelligence, told Haaretz newspaper. He acknowledged the Russians came at the time when Syrian defenses were on the brink of collapse.

"In the summer of 2015 everyone was sure that ISIS was about to roll over Damascus too," Oron opined. The Russian deployment in Syria "was one of the strongest things to shape reality in the area in recent years," along with the milestone nuclear deal the six major world powers signed with Iran the same year.

The president of Ukraine is suing British broadcaster BBC over a report that he paid $400,000 for a chance to meet Donald Trump. The news comes months before presidential election, which is set to be tough for Petro Poroshenko.

The BBC report, which Poroshenko's lawyers claim was defamatory, came in May and said that the meeting between the leader of Ukraine and the US president in June 2017 was organized in a pretty roundabout way. The Ukrainian side paid Michael Cohen, then-the personal lawyer of Trump, at least $400,000 for an embarrassingly short two minutes and a handshake. The best the Ukrainian diplomats and registered lobbyist could have arranged at the time was reportedly a brief photo-op with the US president.

The lawsuit filed with London High Court, which was first reported by the Daily Telegraph, claims that the story of the pay-off was not true and stressed that BBC's failure to retract it was particularly damaging to Poroshenko's anti-corruption effort in Ukraine. Poroshenko's lawyer confirmed the report to RT.

There is a lot to chew over in the blockbuster New York Times story about Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's erratic behavior in his first few weeks on the job, just after President Trump fired FBI Director Jim Comey on May 9, 2017.

The Times reports that Rosenstein suggested that "he secretly record President Trump in the White House to expose the chaos consuming the administration" and that he "discussed recruiting cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office for being unfit." Rosenstein also reportedly told Acting FBI Director Andrew G. McCabe "that he might be able to persuade Attorney General Jeff Sessions and John F. Kelly, then the secretary of homeland security and now the White House chief of staff, to mount an effort to invoke the 25th Amendment." As Drudge summarizes it, with only a tad of unfairness: "Rosenstein Wanted to Wear Wire; Plot To Remove Trump." As the Times makes clear, "None of Mr. Rosenstein's proposals apparently came to fruition."

Rosenstein responded to the story in a statement:

"The New York Times's story is inaccurate and factually incorrect. I will not further comment on a story based on anonymous sources who are obviously biased against the department and are advancing their own personal agenda. But let me be clear about this: Based on my personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment." But he did not deny the story's claims that he discussed invoking the 25th Amendment and secretly recording the president. And indeed, the Justice Department issued a statement from an anonymous official who said that Rosenstein made his proposal to record the president "sarcastically." Other anonymous officials, however, insisted that Rosenstein "was serious about the idea" and "followed up by suggesting that other F.B.I. officials who were interviewing to be the bureau's director could also secretly record Mr. Trump."

The tragic murder of Alexandr Zakharchenko solidified Ukraine's intent to retake the Donbass region by force. We know the attack on the Donetsk Republic leadership was meant to throw the fledgling nation into an emotional and political turmoil and cause a crisis in succession for the Republic.

Ukraine gravely miscalculated the response Poroshenko received which was both deliberate and dignified by the Donetsk Republic leadership and LNR's interim president Leonid Pasechnik.

The murder was possibly to set up the conditions for a September 14th assault.

It's about that time again. WTI hits $70 per barrel and the tweet-rage is back.


OPEC does have a meeting in the coming days in Algiers to assess the state of the oil market, and decide on next steps. But one of the largest near-term challenges for OPEC is balancing the oil market in the wake of lost barrels from Iran - a key factor driving up prices and also a fact that seems to be lost on the American President.

There are no clear solutions for OPEC+ that leave the oil market satisfied while also maintaining group cohesion.

The Judiciary Committee will hold a vote on US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Monday, unless a deal is reached soon with his accuser Christine Blasey Ford, who accuses him of sexual assault, to testify before the panel.

"I'm providing a notice of a vote to occur Monday in the event that Dr. Ford's attorneys don't respond or Dr. Ford decides not to testify," the panel's chairman, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement. "In the event that we can come to a reasonable resolution as I've been seeking all week, then I will postpone the committee vote to accommodate her testimony. We cannot continue to delay."

The university professor, who is accusing Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct sometime back in 1982, has placed Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court in jeopardy. For the entire week, US lawmakers have been approaching Christine Blasey Ford to testify against the 53-year-old before the judge's confirmation process can proceed. On Friday, the Committee announced that the Monday hearing for Kavanaugh and his accuser to both appear before the US lawmakers has been called off.

The committee has now set a 10pm Friday deadline for Ford to accept the invitation to testify on Wednesday. If she declines and no other deal is reached, the vote on Kavanaugh will take place Monday.

A new take on the 'Russia hacked the US election' story by the Gray Lady herself may make some in the journalistic community cringe. It's usually not considered correct to report allegations as facts, you see.

On Thursday the New York Times published a 10,000-word special report titled 'A Plot to Subvert an Election: Unravelling the Russia Story So Far'. Written in a way that would make the late Tom Clancy proud, it summarizes the many aspects about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The report has all the hallmarks of standard Russia scoop. Intellectuals will be pleased to see the name of Aleksandr Dugin in the section explaining why Russian President Vladimir Putin hates America and its freedom. The less-read are told about how he called the fall of the USSR the greatest geopolitical disaster of the previous century.

Following a meeting of EU leaders in Salzburg, Austria, where they agreed to cooperate closer with Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and Libya to curb illegal migration, the German chancellor has spoken out for modelling an agreement with them after a similar deal with Turkey.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has advocated for taking the European deal with Ankara, according to which Turkey agreed to help with more than 3 million refugees in exchange for several billion dollars, as an example for an accord with the Northern African states.

"Ultimately, we'll need agreements and accords that are structured like the agreement between the European Union and Turkey," Merkel said, recognizing that the situation of every country would require a different solution.

Last month, a U.S. Africa Command spokesperson confirmed in a Task & Purpose report that Marine Corps Raiders were involved in a fierce battle in 2017 in an unnamed North African country, where they fought beside partner forces against militants of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). AFRICOM acknowledged that two Marines received citations for valor but withheld certain details, such as the location - undisclosed due to "classification considerations, force protection, and diplomatic sensitivities." The command also said the Marine Special Operations unit was engaged while on a three-day train, advise and assist operation. However, subsequent research and analysis strongly suggest U.S. involvement runs much deeper. In fact, the dramatic events described in the award citations obtained by Task & Purpose align with those that took place in Tunisia, which has been combating a low-level insurgency in its western borderlands for the past seven years. Evidence indicates the battle occurred at Mount Semmama, a mountain range in the Kasserine governorate, near the Algerian border. There, the United States sustained its first casualty in action in Tunisia since World War II.

While not of the same magnitude, the events that AFRICOM confirmed took place on Feb. 28, 2017, echo a disastrous ambush less than seven months later in the village of Tongo Tongo , Niger. In that battle, members of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara killed four Army Special Forces soldiers and four Nigerien partners. U.S. partner forces engaged militants of AQIM's Tunisian branch, the Uqba ibn Nafaa Battalion (KUBN) in a firefight, which resulted in the killing of one militant. The engagement also necessitated a request for air support to rout the militants. The jihadis then attempted to flank the joint U.S.-Tunisian force from the rear, forcing the Marines to return fire. While engaged on the ground, U.S. forces were also part of the air-support component. When a Tunisian soldier manning an M60 machine gun aboard a helicopter sustained wounds after being shot twice by militants returning accurate fire, a U.S. Marine Raider took control of the machine gun to maintain suppressive fire against the militants and simultaneously treated the wounded Tunisian soldier. The Marine Raider unit and their Tunisian partner force each sustained one casualty in the battle, both of whom recovered from their wounds. At the time, local media reported the incident without alluding to any U.S. participation.