The United States will soon be cooperating with Ecuador in dealing with security issues through a new office. The previous government in Ecuador scaled down military cooperation with the Americans.

The establishment of the new Security Cooperation Office, which was reported by Ecuadorean Defense Minister Oswaldo Jarrin on Thursday, is the latest move by President Lenin Moreno's government to depart form the policies from his leftist predecessor Rafael Correa. Jarrin was careful to stress that the new entity would not violate the country's constitution, which was amended under Correa to ban permanent presence of foreign troops in Ecuador.

"There will be a plane that will allow us to share intelligence. It will stay here for three or four days and then return. So in no way it means that a new military base is being established," the minister said. He added that due to this arrangement the Ecuadorean Air Force would be handling the cooperation program.

All victims of extrajudicial killings will get a free pass to heaven, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte announced after purportedly consulting with "God" on the issue.

Speaking at the opening of a drug rehabilitation center on Friday, the eccentric Philippines leader disclosed that he had "asked God" for "all the victims of extrajudicial killings" to go to heaven - and God consented.

Duterte said that when he asked for the favor, God replied: "I can, I can."

Yemeni civilians are "starting" to be at risk after Saudi-led airstrikes hit a hospital, Nikki Haley said in puzzling statement about the US and UK-backed campaign that has lead to thousands dying from bombs and starvation.

Speaking before the Security Council, the US envoy to the United Nations began her remarks by condemning the Houthi rebels - and Iran - before venturing into uncharted territory: tepid criticism of the Saudi-led invasion of Yemen. Haley expressed concern about reports that the Saudi-led coalition - backed by US weapons and logistical support - bombed a "fish market and a hospital" in Yemen's port city of Hodeida, and may have caused "dozens of casualties."

"We've hit a new day now in Yemen. And we've hit a new sense of urgency in Yemen," Haley said during a UNSC briefing on Yemen on Thursday.

"If this is what's starting to happen, civilians are at risk, infrastructure is at risk, and we as the international community have to demand that the two parties come together and understand the seriousness of this."

Q: What do the following wildly diverse people and institutions have in common: MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and Fox News' Shepard Smith, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, The New York Times and The Weekly Standard, The National Review and the Daily Kos?

A: All agree that Donald Trump's July 16 meeting and press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki were, in Senator John McCain's words, "a tragic mistake," if not "treasonous" (the term used by former CIA director John Brennan). McCain declared that "the damage inflicted by President Trump's naivety, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate." The chorus singing this same tune now ranges from liberal columnists like Charles M. Blow and Tom Friedman to unrepentant neo-cons like Max Boot, Republican Hawks like Newt Gingrich, and pretty much every former head of the CIA, DIA, and NSA still alive. A remarkable amalgam of left- and right-leaningpols and pundits, whose unity, however temporary, demands explanation.

Although China has provided political support to Damascus and is widely expected to play an important role in Syria's post-war reconstruction, Beijing has so far shied away from offering direct military support to the Syrian Army.

Chinese Ambassador to Syria Qi Qianjin has suggested Beijing could soon deploy forces to assist the Syrian Army in its upcoming Idlib offensive, in addition to anti-terrorist operations in other parts of the country.

Speaking to Syria's Al-Watan newspaper on Thursday, the Chinese diplomat said they are monitoring the conflict, adding that the Chinese military "is willing to participate in some way alongside the Syrian Army that is fighting the terrorists in Idlib and in any other part of Syria."

It is commonly accepted that, after 70 years of Communist dictatorship, Russia's 1990s transition was inevitably going to be a massive train wreck. This is yet another convenient misconception that western intellectuals like to embrace. The foregoing article seeks to dispel this notion and set the historical record straight. It is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of my book, Grand Deception: the Truth About Bill Browder, the Magnitsky Act, and Anti-Russia Sanctions. The book's previous incarnation was banned last summer.

This is the last in a six-part series on Russia's 1990s transition from communism to capitalism. Links to previous posts: introduction, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5.

"Americans, who thought their money was helping a stricken land, have been dishonored; and the Russian people who trusted us are now in debt twice what they were in 1991 and rightly feel themselves betrayed."

¬ Reporter Anne Williamson before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the U.S. House of Representatives, 21 September 1999

Was there a better way for Russia to move from communism to capitalism? Was her traumatic experience under the Yeltsin regime inevitable, or was the pain intentionally inflicted? To this day many intellectuals in the West maintain that the transition could not have gone otherwise, arguing that Russia had emerged from 70 years of communist rule with a state-controlled economy, with private property outlawed and a nonexistent culture of entrepreneurship. The shift between two drastically different economic systems together with the most complex privatization project ever undertaken could never have gone smoothly. The Russians themselves are usually assumed to have been ignorant about the workings of free markets and unprepared for the transition's challenges. However, this is simply not true.

Well before the Soviet Union began to unravel, it was clear to most of its thinking citizens that their system would capsize unless it drastically changed.

When told that her driver of 20 years was a spy for China, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) was reportedly 'mortified.' The staffer was fired and the whole thing quietly swept under the rug - until now.

Buried deep in a recent Politico story about alleged Russian spying in Silicon Valley was the revelation that a long-time staffer at Feinstein's California office had been passing information to Chinese intelligence.

Citing "four former intelligence officials," Politico identified the spy only as a staffer who was "a liaison to the local Chinese community" and reported to the Chinese Ministry of State Security in the 2000s. No charges were ever filed against him. One former intelligence official speculated that this was because he passed along political intelligence and not classified information, which the California staff didn't have access to anyway, per Feinstein's office.

The San Francisco Chronicle filled in a few more blanks on Wednesday, saying that in addition to driving Feinstein around when she was in California, the staffer also "served as gofer in her San Francisco office and as a liaison to the Asian American community, even attending Chinese Consulate functions for the senator."

An influential bipartisan group of U.S. senators has introduced a package of measures designed to protect "American security from Kremlin aggression," including new financial sanctions and a "strong statement of support" for NATO.

The bill introduced on August 2 represents at least the fourth piece of legislation circulating in Congress to punish Russia for its alleged interference in U.S. elections, its aggression in Ukraine and Syria, and other "malign" activities.

"The current sanctions regime has failed to deter Russia from meddling in the upcoming 2018 midterm elections," Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said in a statement introducing the bill.

"Our goal is to change the status quo and impose crushing sanctions and other measures against [President Vladimir] Putin's Russia until he ceases and desists meddling in the U.S. electoral process, halts cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, removes Russia from Ukraine, and ceases efforts to create chaos in Syria," Graham said.

According to a statement issued by the senators, new sanctions would target "political figures, oligarchs, and family members and other persons that facilitate illicit and corrupt activities, directly or indirectly, on behalf of Vladimir Putin."

The bill would also require a report to be assembled on the personal net worth and assets of Putin, who many say has amassed great amounts of wealth as the Russia leader.

US President Donald Trump has claimed that Moscow regrets he had won the presidential elections, citing the expulsion of diplomats and his scorn of a Russian gas pipeline to Germany as proof of his tough stance on Russia.

Trump was speaking at a 'Make America Great Again' rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to support Rep. Lou Barletta in his race for Senate, when he dived into one of his most recurrent topics - the contentious Helsinki meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and how unfairly it was treated by the media. In the wake of the summit, labeled "disastrous" by the mainstream media, Trump was accused of cozying up to Putin while defying his own intelligence community.

"In Helsinki, I had a great meeting with Putin, we discussed everything," Trump said at the rally, to a round of applause from the cheering crowd. "We got along really well. By the way, that's a good thing, not a bad thing, that's really good," he added, before blaming the lingering Russiagate probe for standing in the way of further progress. "Now, we are being hindered by the Russian hoax, it's a hoax," he said.

Jim Acosta walked out of a stormy White House briefing after press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders would not contradict Donald Trump by saying that that the "press are not the enemy of the people."

CNN's Acosta began his line of questioning by saying that the journalists "deserved" a reassurance that their work was valued by the President, and it would be a "good thing" if she would refute a label Trump first gave the press in January 2017, and never backed down from.

But Sanders would not swallow the bait, stating that Trump has "made his position clear," but before she could get any further, Acosta began to ask another follow-up.