On the night of May 9th, Ynetnews, which is the online English-language website of Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's most-widely read newspaper, headlined an "Analysis" article, "A Preemptive Strike in Syria" and opened:

Even if Iran had no intention of launching missiles at Israel on Tuesday, the alleged Israeli strike came along and conveyed the following message to the Iranians: You raised the likelihood of an attack on Israel, so we're raising the threat level, despite the tensions.

Their reporter said that the issue now would be, "We're waiting to see what the Iranians will do: Will they continue the preparations for an attack" or stand down?

Also late on May 9th, Russian Television bannered, "Israel Launches Massive Missile Strikes in Syria" and opened:

Syrian air defenses have been deployed to thwart an attack by the Israeli rockets, Syria's state SANA news agency reported. The bombing is reportedly being carried out by Israeli warplanes from Lebanese airspace. ...

SANA has released footage of Syrian air defense systems responding to incoming missiles.

The Israeli strikes are seen as a continued retaliation to what Israel claims were some 20 rockets launched by Iran's Quds Force from Syrian territory into the Israeli-occupied part of the Golan Heights earlier in the night. The Israel Defense Forces said its Iron Dome systems intercepted some of the projectiles and the reported attack resulted in no injuries.

Also late on May 9th, the New York Times reported that,

A missile strike, apparently by Israel, south of the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Tuesday [May 8th], an hour after Mr. Trump's announcement about the nuclear deal, killed 15 people, at least eight of them Iranians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday.

That strike, on the area of Al Kiswa, targeted facilities for the Syrian military and their Iranian allies. Israeli news media said that one of the targets was a convoy of missiles taken out of storage and heading to a launching site, and that the strike was pre-emptive.

That alleged Israeli "missile strike" against Damascus on Tuesday - which Israel did not deny - could have been the provocation for the alleged retaliation against Israel by Iranians in Syria late on Wednesday May 9th, which could have provoked Israel's claimed "massive" missiles-retaliation soon thereafter.

Leave it to Donald Trump, besieged by denunciations of his torturous behavior toward women, to have nominated a female torturer to head the Central Intelligence Agency. It was a move clearly designed to prove that a woman can be as crudely barbaric as this deeply misogynistic president. When it comes to bullying, Gina Haspel, whose confirmation hearing begins Wednesday, is the real deal, and The Donald is a pussycat by comparison. Whom has he ever waterboarded? Haspel has done that and a lot worse. Haspel is Trump's ideal feminist, a point tweeted by White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders:

The United States aims at toppling the country's clerical establishment, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said during Friday prayers, broadcast by Iranian state TV.

Speaking further, Khatami said that Israel's Tel Aviv and Haifa will be destroyed, if the country acts foolishly.

"We will expand our missile capabilities despite western pressure (to curb it).... to let Israel know that if it acts foolishly, Tel Aviv and Haifa will be totally destroyed," Ahmad Khatami said during Friday prayers at Tehran University.

While speaking about the recent decision of US President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Nuclear deal, the cleric noted that Iran shouldn't trust the European Union in terms of the deal.

"America cannot do a damn thing. They have always been after toppling of Iran's regime and this exit is in line with that aim... these European signatories also cannot be trusted... Iran's enemies cannot be trusted," Khatami noted.

The Donald's action to ash-can the Iranian nuclear deal marks the War Party's complete and baleful triumph. There is now nothing much left of America First.

Trump's reckless, unwarranted and utterly irrational action will pull Washington ever deeper into an incendiary middle eastern vortex of political and religious conflict that has absolutely nothing to do with the safety and security of the America people.

To the contrary, picking a fight with Tehran is an exercise in unprovoked Imperial aggression. The Iranian regime has no means to attack America militarily and has never threatened to do so. Nor has it invaded any other country in the region where it was not invited by a sovereign government host.

Even Iran's minor skirmishes with American forces in recent years have been owing to the happenstance of Washington's far-flung imperial ventures.

The UK has made it clear it won't let Moscow meet Russian citizens ex-double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, as the dragging secretive probe into their poisoning speaks volumes to the observers, the Russian ambassador says.

"It has become clear that we will not get access to the Skripals. They [the British authorities] just will not provide it," Russian envoy to the UK Alexander Yakovenko told journalists on Thursday, following his meeting with Philip Barton, the Director General, Consular and Security at the British Foreign Office.

By blocking access to the Russians, London flagrantly violates its duties under a bilateral treaty on consular relations with Moscow, Yakovenko said. The true fate of the Skripals, meanwhile, remains unknown, he pointed out.

London maintains that the Skripals do not want to meet with Russian officials. However, neither the Russian ex-spy nor his daughter, Yulia, have publicly appeared to confirm it since the March poisoning. The Russian authorities never received any photos or voice recordings of the man and his daughter from the British side, Yakovenko said.

"We cannot conclusively establish what condition they are in as well as whether they are acting voluntary," Yakovenko said, adding that the answers that Moscow continues to get from London are "empty and formalistic."

Yesterday, Putin observed the necessity of increasing Russia's economic sovereignty and independence from the petrodollar system, stressing that the West is boosting this process through its economic bullying in the form of sanctions. TASS reports:

MOSCOW, May 8. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin considers necessary to strengthen the national economic sovereignty and anti-Russian sanctions are helpful in this aspect.

"We need to increase the level of our economic sovereignty but this is not a straightforward decision," the head of state said. "Oil is traded in dollars on the exchange," Putin said. "Certainly, we are thinking about what we need to do in order to get free of this burden. Furthermore, our partners are helping us by introducing all these unlawful restrictions and violating principles of the global trade, because the whole world sees the dollar monopoly is unreliable; it is dangerous for many, not only for us," he added.

"This is not merely a separation from the dollar; this refers to the need of strengthening our economic sovereignty," Putin said.

"Our gold and foreign currency reserves undergo diversification and we will continue to do it," he added.

Generally speaking, any country that wants to buy oil needs to buy dollars first, with which to accomplish the commodity purchase, which is a major aspect of the dollar's global hegemony in international trade.

The US, in attempting to maintain this, has been resorting to international bullying in its sanctions and financial practices, which, continuing down this path, is only ensuring America's eventual irrelevance on the global economical stage.

The Department of Justice lost its latest battle with Congress Thursday when it allowed House Intelligence Committee members to view classified documents about a top-secret intelligence source that was part of the FBI's investigation of the Trump campaign. Even without official confirmation of that source's name, the news so far holds some stunning implications.

Among them is that the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation outright hid critical information from a congressional investigation. In a Thursday press conference, Speaker Paul Ryan bluntly noted that Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes's request for details on this secret source was "wholly appropriate," "completely within the scope" of the committee's long-running FBI investigation, and "something that probably should have been answered a while ago." Translation: The department knew full well it should have turned this material over to congressional investigators last year, but instead deliberately concealed it.

It almost goes without saying that yesterday was one of the most depressing days in memory. Here was a massive fragile edifice of recent history, the Iran deal, that had seemed to almost all of us such a great step forward, a labor of statesmanship by so many diverse figures around the globe working together to advance cross-cultural respect and comity, and Trump took a dufus's sledge hammer to it. You could hear fear in anchors' voices: suddenly the world was less safe.

If there was one bright spot in the day, it was the almost universal anger and anguish that followed Trump's speech, and the determination to try and undo his action by any means the rest of us can. Even the neoconservatives who have pushed this action seemed afraid of what it meant. Even Chuck Schumer, who had opposed his own president on the Iran deal three years ago because of the "threat to Israel", was against Trump.

Germany is set to help its businesses minimize the impact of the US decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal, while France has sought exemptions for companies operating in Iran, according to the countries' economy ministers

"We are ready to talk to all the companies concerned about what we can do to minimize the negative consequences,"Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said in an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio. "That means it is concretely about damage limitation."

Berlin doesn't reportedly have any immediate reason to make changes in its export credit guarantee scheme for Iran. Altmaier has called to discuss the ways to avoid negative impact on German labor market after US withdrawal.

Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman warned on Thursday that Lebanon is now under Hezbollah's "complete control," The Times of Israel reported.

His remark came after Hezbollah's success in the Lebanese parliamentary elections earlier this week.

According to Lieberman, the outcome of the vote had led to a dangerous situation on the country's northern border, where Lebanese servicemen "take direct orders from Hezbollah and [its leader, Hassan] Nasrallah."

"Hezbollah has in practice completed its takeover of Lebanon," Lieberman was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

"And that means it is in complete control not just of the Lebanese [government], but also its army. From now on a Lebanese sniper is a Hezbollah stand-in and takes direct orders from Hezbollah and Nasrallah. And that is a new reality," he said.