US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said he doesn’t think Benjamin Netanyahu’s election vow to annex the West Bank will have a negative impact on a two-state peace plan, despite the removal of a large part of one state.

Asked whether he thought Netanyahu’s promise to officially annex the West Bank – already riddled with settlements constructed by Israel on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law – would hurt the peace process, Pompeo said, “I don’t.”

“I think that the vision we’ll lay out is going to represent a significant change from the model that’s been used,” he told CNN.

President Donald Trump’s “vision” for the Middle East has already diverged significantly from the model that’s been used.

This has included a unilateral declaration recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which the United Nations has repeatedly declared illegitimate since Israel officially annexed the Syrian territory in 1981.

It has also seen the relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, defying international law that holds the eastern part of the city to be occupied Palestinian territory. It’s hard to see how this vision could do anything other than hurt the peace process.

Pompeo has been noticeably cagey since Netanyahu’s re-election regarding the two-state solution that until very recently represented the official goal of US policy toward Israel and Palestine.

During a Senate hearing on Wednesday, he refused to answer when Democrats asked him to affirm his support for a Palestinian state, instead responding: “Ultimately the Israelis and Palestinians will decide how to resolve this,” and promising that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his aide Jason Greenblatt would soon unveil a proposal “to resolve a problem that’s been going on for decades and decades that previous administrations couldn’t solve.”

“We’re hopeful that we have some ideas that are different, unique, which will allow the Israelis and the Palestinian people to come to a resolution of the conflict,” Pompeo added.

Trump has been touting Kushner’s “peace plan” for years, though he has yet to reveal its contents and even threatened to withhold it entirely if Netanyahu didn’t win a fifth term. Now that the PM’s future is secure, Trump has said he will unveil the plan in June. It’s unclear how much more of the surrounding area Netanyahu plans to annex before then.

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“The Masons were here” and “Big Brother is watching” are just two of the many secret messages that were accidentally included in thousands of Oculus virtual reality devices, the Facebook-owned company has revealed.

In a series of tweets Nate Mitchell, head of VR for Facebook, said the firm had mistakenly included the secret ‘easter egg’ messages on the soon-to-be-released Oculus Rift S and Oculus Quest controllers. The messages were only supposed to be included in prototypes of the machines.

“While I appreciate Easter eggs, these were inappropriate and should have been removed,” Mitchell said. “The integrity and functionality of the hardware were not compromised, and we’ve fixed our process so this won’t happen again,” he added.

The messages are emblazoned on the ‘flex’ portion of the Touch controllers, Business Insider reported.

“To be clear, no devices have been sold with these messages yet, since Quest and Rift S have not yet shipped,” Johanna Peace, an Oculus representative, said.

“That said, as mentioned in Nate’s tweet, the messages will be inside tens of thousands of controller pairs that will ship to consumers when Quest and Rift S ship. We think it’s important to be transparent with our community and take responsibility when there’s an error,” she added.

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Venezuela will strongly retaliate against Brazil, the nation’s leader Nicolas Maduro has said, calling on the Brazilian Army to resist President Jair Bolsonaro’s attempts to intervene in its neighbor’s affairs.

The people of Venezuela stand united against the “threats of war and military intervention” voiced by the Brazilian right-wing leader, Nicolas Maduro said on Saturday. He blasted Bolsonaro as “a fascist rookie” and “a Hitler imitator,” and warned that Caracas will find ways to retaliate against any attacks coming from its neighbors.

Maduro also called on the Brazilian Army to “stop the madness” and thwart the attempts to create a conflict in the region.

A former army captain, Bolsonaro has never hidden his deep animosity towards the socialist government of Venezuela. Under his tenure, Brazil was among the first nations to openly back the opposition leader Juan Guaido as the ‘interim president’ during his standoff with Maduro.

In a radio interview earlier this week, the Brazilian leader said that he was working with US President Donald Trump to sow dissent within Venezuela’s armed forces in the hopes of ousting Maduro. He also said that he will consider helping Washington should the US launch a military invasion into Caracas.

His remarks were a departure from the ones previously made by Brazil’s vice president, who explicitly ruled out military intervention in Venezuela.

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A US sailor stationed in Okinawa was found dead next to a local woman after an apparent murder-suicide, Japanese officials reported. The small southern island hosts roughly half of all American troops in Japan.

The US man, who was not immediately identified, was attached to III Marine Division, Stars and Stripes reported citing a military spokesman. The body of the 31-year-old was discovered on Saturday next to that of a woman in her 40s. The two were reportedly in a relationship, which ended with the sailor stabbing the woman to death before taking his own life.

The Japanese police reportedly found the dead pair in a six-story apartment building in the Kuwae district of Chatan, a town on the western coast of Okinawa. The police said the woman’s child witnessed the incident when it happened in the early morning and called a relative, who in turn notified law enforcement.

“We are aware of an incident resulting in the death of an apparent US Navy sailor with III Marine Division and a resident of Okinawa,” the spokesman, First Lt. David Mancilla said. “This is an absolute tragedy and we are fully committed to supporting the investigation into the incident.”

The incident was discussed by Japan’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Takeo Akiba and US Ambassador William Hagerty during a phone call, the Japanese foreign ministry said as cited by Associated Press.

Okinawa, the southernmost of Japan’s bigger islands, hosts about half of the 54,000 US troops stationed in Japan while amounting to only 1 percent of the country’s territory. For decades the military presence has been a major point of contention for local residents, who complain about things like environmental pollution, noise from aircraft operated by American bases and the danger posed by their flyovers.

US service members have also been involved in a number of high-profile crimes against locals, fueling anti-American sentiment. Tokyo shuns local authorities when they attempt to oppose the presence of American troops in Okinawa, saying it is necessary for national security.

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Sporadic clashes with police marred Yellow Vests protests in Toulouse, the city chosen as the ‘capital’ of this week’s anti-government marches in France. Act 22 is the first since a controversial anti-rioting law took effect.

This Saturday marked the 22nd consecutive week of the “Gilets Jaunes” movement as France once again saw anti-government protests, which were held in cities such as Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseilles, and Strasbourg. In the French capital of Paris alone, some 5,000 demonstrators took to the streets, according to the French Interior Ministry.

Unlike some earlier protest gatherings, no major rioting has occurred so far this weekend. However, Toulouse, which was declared a “capital” of this Saturday’s protests, still saw street violence as the protest march there spiraled into clashes with police less than an hour after its beginning.

The protesters were seen throwing stones, bottles, and firecrackers at the officers, who responded with tear gas. Police also blocked several streets and used water cannons to disperse the crowd. At least 23 people were detained in Toulouse following the clashes that left at least two people injured, according to Le Figaro.

Marches in Paris and elsewhere were largely peaceful. Still, police arrested 15 people in the French capital, RFI reported. According to French authorities, some 31,000 protesters took part in the ‘Yellow Vests’ rallies across France, including around 2,000 in Toulouse.

Many protests seemed peaceful…

…and more jovial than full of rage

Some participants used the occasion to show support to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was arrested on Thursday in London.

This week a new controversial anti-rioting law came into force in France after the country’s Constitutional Council partially censured it. Some of its provisions, including one that bans covering one’s face during a mass gathering, was criticized by human rights organizations. Some of the protesters on Saturday apparently ignored it by wearing gas masks and other gear.

The protest movement is meant to keep pressure on the French government despite it officially declaring on Monday an end to a three-month period of public debate on its economic policies. French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said the government needs to digest some two million online contributions and 10,000 hours of town hall meetings before formulating a path forward.

The continued protests were ignited by a hike in fuel taxes last November, which prompted the protesters to adopt the now-iconic motorist visibility vest as their symbol. It soon escalated into a massive movement against President Emmanuel Macron’s business-friendly austerity policies.

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The failed face-to-face talks with President Donald Trump raise doubt whether the US is really committed to improving relations with North Korea, its leader Kim Jong-un said, while promising to beef up the nation’s defense.

Pyongyang will give the US till the end of the year to drop “its current calculation method” with regards to bilateral talks and come up with “a correct posture” instead, Kim said, the state-run KCNA news agency reported on Saturday. In that case, North Korea will consider holding a third summit with President Trump sometime in the future, he explained.

Addressing the nation’s parliament, Kim said that his talks with US President Donald Trump in February raised “a strong question” whether the country was right in making concessions. The meeting, which was cut short by the White House and ended without an agreement, also cast doubt on the “true willingness” of Washington to improve relations with North Korea.

According to Kim, the problem lied in the “American-style way of dialogue” which amounted to making “unilateral” demands without being ready to “sit face-to-face with us and settle the problem.”

As Pyongyang waits for the US to change its stance, it will “keep increasing the defense capabilities,” the North Korean leader stressed. He didn’t specify what branches of the military will be strengthened and how.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, wrote on Twitter that another meeting with Kim “would be good in that we fully understand where we each stand.” The relationship between the leaders “remains very good, perhaps the term excellent would be even more accurate,” he added.

The president’s tone was in contrast with the stricter stance of US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who earlier said that he wanted to “leave a little space” for easing the sanctions on Pyongyang but affirmed that the restrictions will largely remain in place as long as the US deems North Korea a nuclear threat.

Trump and Kim met for the first time in Singapore last year. They agreed to pursue peace, and North Korea pledged to work toward “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula. In the months leading up to the talks, Pyongyang froze its nuclear and ballistic missile tests and demolished the only known nuclear test site.

The next round of talks, held in Hanoi, Vietnam, quickly fell apart. The US flatly rejected the proposal to partially lift the sanctions on North Korea in exchange to additional assurances that Pyongyang will not restart nuclear and ballistic missile tests. Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, later clarified that the White House found Kim Jong-un’s idea of a ‘step-by-step denuclearization’ unacceptable as well.

North Korean officials have since expressed a readiness to resume the nuclear and ballistic missile program if the US continues its aggressive policy toward the nation.

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The US attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a spiteful assault on civil freedoms conducted by an ailing superpower that is struggling to preserve its dominance, UK-based journalist John Pilger told RT.

One should not mistake what is happening to Assange for anything but the persecution of a man, who embarrassed the US by exposing to the public Washington’s brutality in the Middle East, award-winning British journalist John Pilger told RT’s Going Underground program.

“The United States has aroused the ire because what we are in the midst of is the world’s greatest superpower struggling to maintain its dominance. Its information dominance, its technological dominance, its cultural dominance. And WikiLeaks has presented an extreme hurdle to this,” he argued.

Assange was arrested by the British authorities on Thursday after Ecuador revoked his political asylum and allowed the police to drag him out of the embassy in London. The US accuses the publisher of conspiring with WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning in her leaking of classified materials related to US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

WikiLeaks publications based on the Manning leak, especially the so-called “collateral murder” video, dealt a massive blow to US attempts to cover up the “homicidal nature of its colonial wars,” Pilger said.

“Anybody watching that video really has to read very little else of the WikiLeaks revelations about the nature of the American wars, because there it is. There is some kind of consensual belief – I’m trying to figure for a polite term for ‘brainwashing,’ frankly – that we don’t do these kinds of things, we perpetually benign,” he explained.

Pilger says the attack on WikiLeaks is emblematic for the current state or journalism in the West, which has betrayed its mandate to be the public’s watchdog for the actions of their governments.

“We’ve handed a whole world of abandonment of basic democracy, which is based on dissent, on challenging, on holding power to account, on revelation, on the embarrassment of power. Not trivial embarrassment, the embarrassment of odd celebrity, but real embarrassment. And WikiLeaks provided that public service of journalism,” he said.

The journalist said Assange was arrested “on a political whim” and his likely prosecution and imprisonment in the US “opens up a whole chapter of diminishing the very principles that came out of the Second World War, upon which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is base. It shows how fragile they are.”

Watch the entire interview.

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The Israeli team behind the Beresheet spacecraft’s failed moon landing has explained that a “technical glitch” shut down one of the craft’s engines, which sent it flying to its doom at 500kph.

The craft, launched by Israeli nonprofit space venture SpaceIL and defense contractor Israel Aerospace Industries, crashed into the surface of the moon on Thursday, after failing to adequately slow its descent.

The SpaceIL team explained on Friday that the first technical issue occurred 14km above the moon’s surface. By the time the team lost contact with the craft at 150 meters, it was moving at 500kph, “making a collision inevitable.”

“Our engineers think that a technical glitch in one of the components caused the main engine to shut down – making it impossible to slow the spacecraft’s descent,” SpaceIL explained. “By the time the engine was restarted, its velocity was too high to land properly.”

Beresheet, Hebrew for the biblical phrase “in the beginning,” would have been the first Israeli and first private spacecraft to land on the moon. To date, only Russia, the US, and China have managed to perform controlled ‘soft’ landings on the lunar surface.

The SpaceIL team were unperturbed by the loss of the mission, and counted the failed landing as an achievement in itself. The team will also receive a $1 million ‘Moonshot Award’ from California-based XPRIZE foundation, “in honor of their achievements and their milestone as the first privately funded entity to orbit the moon.”

“SpaceIL’s mission not only touched the Moon, it touched the lives and hearts of an entire world that was watching,” said XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu watched the landing attempt from the control center, and has already promised that an Israeli craft will return to the moon in the next two or three years.

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It might be hard to believe, but NATO’s bombing campaign to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya eight years ago has not led to a new era of peace and prosperity. In fact, it looks like a new revolution is on the way.

Blowing in from the east is warlord General Khalifa Haftar who used to be a Gaddafi ally, then he wasn’t, then he went to live in the US near CIA HQ, and is now back trying to take power, with the backing of a whole range of allies. His opponent in Tripoli is the UN backed Government of National Accord which isn’t really a government, or national or in accord with anything.

Normally it would just be a case choosing a side, and bombing the other one, but as ICYMI discovers, it’s not that easy in Libya anymore.

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For years, three NATO states have had no trouble using Russian air defense systems, but Turkey’s S-400 deal is a special case as it’s a risk to the US grip on Ankara and inflicts losses on its military industry, analysts told RT.

Not a single month passes without the United States unloading on Turkey, which seems to stay on course buying the top-notch S-400 anti-aircraft systems. Washington has already put on hold F-35 deliveries to the Turkish Air Force and warned that carrying on with the deal could jeopardize Ankara’s ties with the US and NATO.

Following suit, some mainstream media rushed to explain how Turkey’s industry will suffer if the S-400s reach Turkish soil. Others warned that having the F-35 and the S-400 within one military would compromise critical advantages of the fifth-generation fighter jet.

Military analysts who talked to RT said much of the fuss is about Ankara not bowing to Washington and NATO and pursuing its own interests.

The US “is losing the lead and Russia is taking it,” Igor Korotchenko, editor-in-chief of the National Defense magazine and member of the Defense Ministry’s public board, said. The prospect of a NATO member buying from Russia “damages US reputation … and inflicts losses on the American military industry.”

READ MORE: Turkey must choose between remaining NATO partner or buying Russian S-400 – Pence

The S-400 is a danger to NATO aircraft because “it can spot and engage F-35 and F-22,” he explained.

But it is not uncommon for NATO member states to use high-tech Russian-made weaponry, including the S-400’s predecessor. Bulgaria, Greece, and Slovakia – all US’ NATO allies – have the S-300 in their arsenals.

Greece has installed them on the island of Cyprus, which became a turning point in its national defense strategy. Bulgaria and Slovakia are frequently using the system – designed at the height of the Cold War – during NATO live-fire exercises.

So, why is Turkey – which joined NATO in 1952 on par with Greece – under intense pressure while the other three are not?

“Greece and other members have procured Russian anti-aircraft weapons long before 2014, i.e. before tensions between the US and Russia began to mount,” explained Russian military expert Mikhail Khodarenok.

Khodarenok, a retired Russia’s Air Defense Troops officer, said enhanced firepower, resistance to jamming and extended reach all make the S-400 stand out among other surface-to-air missiles.

But what if the US is so fearful of the S-400 because it is less familiar to the Pentagon than the older-generation S-300? The American military had acquired a pair of S-300P and S-300V variants through Belarus and Ukraine after the USSR’s collapse to study the system’s capabilities – but this knowledge isn’t up-to-date now, Khodarenok said.

“The US has nothing of its [newer variants],” he noted. Even knowing the enemy weapons in detail doesn’t help much in the battlefield as “suppressing anti-aircraft systems is about robust electronic jamming,” not studying any specific type of hardware.

Ankara says the S-400 will help the country to defend itself, as Turkey faces threats coming from the Middle East. But at the same time, it is in talks with the US over the Patriot missiles – a near-peer analog to the S-300 family.

Avoiding “putting all eggs in one basket,” Turkey shows that it doesn’t want to necessarily buy anti-aircraft systems from one vendor, Khodarenok suggested. He believes that the Russian deal will be limited to Turkey buying only a number of S-400 squadrons “to cover only one important facility.”

“There will be no wholesale purchase of anti-aircraft systems to cover all of Turkey,” while the S-400 debacle is far from over. The deal is done only after Turkish crews are trained in Russia, the launchers are tested and sent to Turkey, and, finally, all payments are made, he explained.

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