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The story of the coronavirus ahead but first.... The Pentagon says that two aircraft carrier battle groups will be in the Persian Gulf region to counter the threat to US forces in Iraq...... Iran rejecting the United States assertion of Iranian involvement in the attack on a US base in Iraq this week that killed two Americans and a Briton... The US announced air strikes yesterday on targets related to an Iraqi militia group with ties to Iran.... The US airstrikes condemned by the Iraqi military..... Russia's Reconciliation Center in Syria says that in the 24 hours ending Friday there...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States waged a series of precision air strikes on Thursday against an Iran-backed militia in Iraq that it blamed for a major rocket attack a day earlier that killed two American troops and a 26-year-old British soldier. The U.S. strikes appeared limited in scope and narrowly tailored, targeting five weapons storage facilities used by Kataib Hezbollah militants, including stores of weaponry for past attacks on U.S.-led coalition troops, the Pentagon said. In a statement, Iraq’s military said the U.S. air strikes hit four locations in Iraq that housed formal Iraqi police and military units, in...

The strikes come one day after the US assessed an Iranian-backed group was responsible for a rocket attack on a base where coalition forces are located, killing two American service members and one British service member. The Defense Department on Friday identified the two US service members killed in the attack as Army Specialist Juan Miguel Mendez Covarrubias, 27, of Hanford, California and Air Force Staff Sgt. Marshal D. Roberts, 28, of Owasso, Oklahoma. The UK Ministry of Defense had earlier identified the slain UK service member as Lance Corporal Brodie Gillon. The UK government expressed support for the US...

An American soldier, a British soldier and one US contractor were killed on Wednesday in a rocket attack on an Iraqi military base hosting foreign troops, a US official told AFP. Hours later, air strikes believed to have been carried out by the US-led coalition targeted Iran-aligned Iraqi fighters in neighboring Syria. On Wednesday evening, a volley of rockets hit the Taji air base north of Baghdad, which hosts troops from the US-led coalition helping local forces battle jihadists. A coalition official first told AFP the force had sustained "several" injuries on Wednesday ranging from "light to critical," but a...

Gunnery Sgt. Diego D. Pongo died Sunday along with Capt. Moises A. Navas from Maryland, also 34, died in a joint Iraqi-U.S. helicopter assault on a suspected ISIS-occupied cave complex in the Makhmur Mountains of northern Iraq. They were assigned to the Second Marine Raider Battalion. The mission began with several dozen Iraqi counterterrorism forces, along with approximately a dozen special forces Marines, traveling by helicopter to the area where intelligence showed 15 to 20 ISIS fighters had hidden. As they got close to the target, they encountered stiff resistance from ISIS fighters largely equipped with small arms. The firefight...

Gunnery Sergeant Diego Pongo and Captain Moises Navas are the first US service members killed in Iraq since August The U.S. Defense Department on Tuesday, March 10 identified two Marines killed near Makhmour, Iraq during an mission against Islamic State. Gunnery Sergeant Diego D. Pongo, 34, and Captain Moises A. Navas, 34, both of 2nd Marine Raiders Battalion, Marine Special Operations Command, were killed on Sunday. The two Marines were accompanying Iraqi security forces “during a mission to eliminate an ISIS terrorist stronghold in a mountainous area of north central Iraq,” a Defense Department statement read. It took six hours...

The head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards has today claimed that the coronavirus outbreak could be a biological attack by the United States against China and Iran. Hossein Salami told a crowd in Kerman today that the virus outbreak which has brought misery to Iran 'may be the product of the American biological invasion'. 'We will win in the fight against the virus, which may be the product of the American biological invasion, which it first spread to China and then to Iran and the rest of the world,' he declared. There is no evidence to support his theory of the...

Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden is taking heat on Twitter after a video of a confrontation between him and members of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War during a campaign stopover in Oakland, Calif., went viral. Biden had just spoken to a crowd at the Buttercup Diner when Air Force veteran Michael Thurman confronted the former vice president

A contractor for the Pentagon has been charged with providing classified U.S. intelligence to a Lebanese national connected with terrorist group Hezbollah, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday. The department alleges Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, began transmitting the classified intelligence around December 30, when Iraqi militiamen stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Thompson is a linguist who at the time was working at a U.S. special forces base in Erbil in northern Iraq. The classified “files contained classified national defense information including true names, personal identification data, background information, and photographs of the human sources, as well as operations cables...

In early January the United States killed General Qassim Soleimani, a top commander of Iran’s al-Quds Force, in an airstrike at Baghdad’s International Airport. The strike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iran-backed militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces. Seven people were reportedly killed in the airstrike. Following the death of Commander Soleimani Democrat Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) lashed out at President Trump for assassinating the Iranian al-Quds terrorist leader who was responsible for the deaths and maiming of HUNDREDS of US soldiers. It soon became apparent why Murphy was sooo upset with Soleimani’s death. Senator...

Late News From Syria Tonight Turkish backed jihadist forces reported advancing in southern Idlib tonight in the face of fierce resistance from the Syrian army. And early Monday morning local time a Turkish position coming under Syrian artillery fire in southern Idlib with injuries reported.... Two Syrian aircraft shot down by Turkish forces..... Syria saying that it shot down six Turkish drones today... Late today the Russian military warning that it cannot guaranteee the safety of any Turkish aircraft over Syria... Greece is facing what one official has described as an "onslaught" of migrants unleashed by Turkey towards Europe in...

Julian Assange tried to contact Hillary Clinton and the White House when he realized that unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables given to WikiLeaks were about to be dumped on the internet, his lawyer told his London extradition hearing on Tuesday. Assange is being sought by the United States on 18 counts of hacking U.S. government computers and an espionage offense, having allegedly conspired with Chelsea Manning, then a U.S. soldier known as Bradley Manning, to leak hundreds of thousands of secret documents by WikiLeaks almost a decade ago. On Monday, the lawyer representing the United States told the hearing that Assange,...

I first met Qassem four years ago, at the height of the European refugee crisis. The BBC had sent me to capture the stories of Mideast migrants, thousands of whom would daily wash ashore on the Greek isles. He was around 15, malnourished and clearly traumatized. As we sat together in a cabin at a ­migrant camp on the island of Lesbos, his hunched body rocked backward and forward. His marginal life amounted to a speck of dust amid the geopolitical earthquakes that were remaking the region at the time. Yet the story he told opened a window onto the...

Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke by phone Friday with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan about the situation in Syria. The Kremlin issued a news release noting that Putin expressed concern about "ongoing aggressive actions of extremist groups"..... Russia's defense ministry says that large numbers of Turkish armored vehicles and huge caches of ammunition entering northwestern Syria point to apparent preparation for a large scale military operation that Turkey has been threatening...... The Pentagon revising upwards for the fifth time the number of traumatic brain injuries resulting from the January 8th missile attack by Iran on the Al-Asad Air Base..... US...

Donald Trump attacked the Bush family during the Republican presidential debate Saturday night, accusing the George W. Bush administration of lying to the public before going to war in Iraq. "Obviously the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake," Trump said, launching into a fierce critique of rival Jeb Bush's brother. "George Bush made a mistake," the billionaire continued. "Obviously we can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty." "We should have never been in Iraq," Trump added. "They lied, they said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none and they knew that there were none."...

The Democratic senator who mocked President Trump after Trump ordered the killing of Iranian general and terror leader Qassem Soleimani, saying Trump had ‘made us a literal laughingstock” around the world, held a secret meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during the Munich Security Conference last week, according to a source briefed by the French delegation to the conference. The Federalist reports that Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who had mocked Trump in early January, joined other Democratic senators for that secret meeting. What makes Murphy’s action particularly hypocritical is that in the past, he has bitterly slammed...

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and other Democratic senators had a secret meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during the Munich Security Conference last week, according to a source briefed by the French delegation to the conference. Murphy’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment by press time. Such a meeting would mean Murphy had done the type of secret coordination with foreign leaders to potentially undermine the U.S. government that he accused Trump officials of doing as they prepared for Trump’s administration. In February 2017, Murphy demanded investigations of National Security Advisor Mike Flynn because...

Several blasts hit a U.S.-led coalition military base in Baghdad early on Sunday from an apparent rocket attack, a U.S. military official said. The official did not immediately say if the attack caused any casualties or significant damage.

The U.S. Justice Department has accused Huawei Technologies of helping Iran track protesters in its latest indictment against the Chinese tech giant as Washington steps up pressure on the world's largest telecommunications equipment maker. In a new indictment unsealed on February 13, Huawei was also charged with conspiring to steal trade secrets from six U.S. technology companies and to violate a racketeering law typically used in the fight against organized crime. The indictment supersedes one unsealed last year in federal court in Brooklyn, New York. According to prosecutors, Huawei provided surveillance equipment to Iran that enabled the monitoring of protesters...

"Hello Goodbye" by the Beatles, a number one song from early 1968 here in the USA. That's around the time my father left the factory to higher paying and longer lasting government employment as inflation kicked in here in the USA. Lyndon Johnson was ramping up government with Medicare and Medicaid and the cost of medical care was beginning to skyrocket, debt was beginning to accumulate and wow here we are 23 trillion dollars plus later. The 2021 federal budget proposed by President Trump adds another 966 billion to that. Well the currency is devalued and its easy to tell...