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The US government has threatened the European Commission (EC) with retaliation if the body decides to proceed with its plan to demand millions of dollars in unpaid taxes from technology giant Apple. The US Treasury Department issued a rare warning on Wednesday, accusing the Brussels-based body of becoming a “supranational tax authority” that poses a threat to international agreements concerning tax reform. “The US Treasury Department continues to consider potential responses should the Commission continue its present course,” the Treasury said in its strongest language to date. “A strongly preferred and mutually beneficial outcome would be a return to the system and practice of international tax cooperation that has long fostered cross-border investment between the United States and EU member states,” the warning added. The European Union (EU) has been investigating a series of tax deals between Apple and Ireland which allow the iPhone maker to pay little or no tax on inco...

Britain’s departure from the European Union (EU) is impossible considering the complex process it requires, warns a top British professor, blasting Brexiteers for not realizing the “sheer enormity” of their decision. Nearly 52 percent of British voters opted to leave the EU in a referendum on June 23, in hopes of taking back control over their borders and having more economic freedom. Professor Thom Brooks, who is head of Law at the University of Durham, doubted that the UK government would ever be able to end the over 4-decades-old membership in the union,  The Independent  reported Tuesday. “There is a 42 year evolving legal relationship that is not so easy to unpick. It is an absolutely massive task,” he told the British daily. In order to leave the EU, Britain needs to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to trigger the process. Brooks, however, said the article was unlikely to ever be invoked, and if it was it could “let down the next generation.” “The ...

A senior Iranian official says the US is terrorizing the Europeans into shunning business with Iran despite the lifting of sanctions under a landmark nuclear deal.  Deputy Petroleum Minister for trade and international affairs Amir Hossein Zamaninia has said US officials are deliberately keeping the terms of engagement with Iran opaque.   As a result, European banks and investors are not clear about how they can operate in Iran without falling foul of US law, he was quoted as saying in remarks published on Monday. US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) oversees the implementation of American sanctions which have mostly remained in place despite the July nuclear accord.   European banks are not certain as to what OFAC’s decision will be if they get engaged, Zamaninia said. “It’s more of a psychological problem than a legal one,” he told the online news portal Middle East Eye in Tehran.   Many Iranians are disappointed at the results of th...

The United Nations (UN) says the death toll from the 18-month Saudi war against Yemen has increased to nearly 10,000. The UN Humanitarian Coordinator said in a press conference in the Yemeni capital on Tuesday that the toll was based on official records provided by medical facilities in Yemen. Jamie McGoldrick added that the figure might be even higher as some areas in Yemen lack medical premises, and families there often bury loved ones by themselves. Internal Yemeni sources had previously provided the same number for the casualties in the Saudi war. The news comes as Saudi Arabia continues to pound Yemen in its war of aggression. On Tuesday, Saudi aerial attacks hit a civilian vehicle in the Razih district in the northwestern province of Sa’ada, leaving three people dead and one injured. The Saudi warplanes also bombed a gas station in the districts of Sahar and Baqim as well as the Kahlan military base in Sa’ada Province. The districts of Nihm and Sanhan in the Ye...

American intelligence officials say hackers based in Russia are to blame for two recent attempts to breach voter registration databases in a US state. In the two attempts, data from as many as 200,000 voter records in the US state of Illinois was stolen, the officials told NBC News. They said that the incidents fueled concerns that the Russian government might be seeking to interfere in the US presidential election. One of the officials claimed that "there is serious concern" that Moscow was trying to create uncertainty in the US presidential election process. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the attacks were attributed to Russian intelligence services. "This is the closest we've come to tying a recent hack to the Russian government," the official said. The attacks caused the FBI to issue a "flash alert" to election officials nationwide earlier this month. The agency urged them to remain vigilant in the face...

US Secretary of State John Kerry is in India for strategic and commercial talks as the two countries try to improve security and economic ties, in part to counter China’s growing influence. Kerry, along with US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, is leading the American delegation to India for the second strategic dialogue between the two nations. The US and India have set an ambitious goal of increasing annual trade to around $500 billion. "I'm very, very confident that we will continue to strengthen what President Obama has called the defining partnership of the 21st century," Kerry said in New Delhi on Tuesday. Kerry will meet Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday during the two-day visit. The top US diplomat also expressed hope that a deal to provide nuclear energy assistance to India would move ahead. "We also hope to see our civil nuclear cooperation take shape in the form of new reactors that will deliver reliable electricity to tens of millions ...

More than a million Indian workers are set to go on strike across India to protest against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's controversial labor reforms and a plan to close some loss-making firms. Major Indian trade unions announced on Tuesday that workers from banking, telecoms and other sectors, who are seeking higher wages, will go on strike on Friday. All India Trade Unions Congress and Center of Indian Trade Unions have also rebuffed a government appeal to call off the strike, saying the Modi administration has failed to address their demands. Tapan Sen, the general secretary of the Center of Trade Unions, said the strike would go on despite a recent promise by the government to release state employees' bonuses for the last two years, and increase minimum wages for unskilled laborers. Sen added that there had not been any "tangible proactive steps" by the government to address union demands. Some workers at Coal India Ltd (COAL.NS) are also due ...

An American major league football star has refused to stand for the US national anthem before games due to oppression of African Americans and other minorities in the country. "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," said San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernickbe on Saturday as quoted in an AP report. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder." Kaepernick sat on the team's bench Friday night during the anthem before his team played host to the Green Bay Packers in an exhibition game. He later explained his reasoning in an interview with NFL Media . According to the report, Kaepernick is biracial and was adopted and raised by white parents. He has been outspoken on his Twitter account on civil rights issues and in support of th...

Disturbing video has been released showing a police officer pepper spraying an 84-year-old black woman inside her home in the US state of Oklahoma. The footage, taken on August 7, shows Muskogee police officers kicking in Geneva Smith’s front door apparently in pursuit of her son, Arthur Paul Blackmon, Fox 23 News reported. Blackmon, 56, had allegedly run a stop sign and refused to pull over when ordered by police. Officers followed Blackmon to his mother’s home and demanded he come outside. They applied a Taser on him when he refused to comply even though he had his hands up in the air. A female officer then turned towards the elderly woman, yelling at her to turn around or she would spray. The footage then goes on to show Smith being sprayed in the face. She falls to the floor and her hands are secured behind her back. "I just came out and asked what was going on and they just pepper sprayed me," she later told the media. Smith, who suffered a panic a...

Iranian Army’s Air Defense Base has reportedly warned off a US radar-evading unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) which had sought to intrude on Iranian airspace. The US spy drone had sought to cross into Iran through the eastern border from neighboring Afghanistan, Tasnim News Agency reported on Monday. However, it was immediately detected and forced to leave the area after a “timely and stern” warning by the Air Defense Base. The drone had taken off from a base in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar and had come to within 20 miles of the Iranian border. After the identification of the drone, the monitoring and missile systems of the air defense base were put on alert. In December 2012, Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) captured a US ScanEagle drone over the Persian Gulf waters upon its intrusion into the Iranian airspace. In the same month the previous year, Iran downed a US RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft with minimal damage. The drone was flying o...

A shocking new video released by the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group reportedly shows a British boy executing a prisoner with a handgun in Syria. The blue-eyed white boy, identified in the video as Abu Abdullah al-Britani, is one of five children carrying out executions of Kurds in the city of Raqqah. The boys, believed to be from Britain, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia and Uzbekistan, make statements in Arabic before raising their handguns and executing the kneeling men in front of them. The child executioners, believed to be about 10 to 13 years old, are clad in camouflage gear and black gloves and their faces are clearly on display. One of the boys reportedly shouts in Arabic, “No one can save the Kurds even with the support of America, France, Britain, Germany, the devils in hell.” They then place handguns to the backs of the prisoners’ heads and pull the trigger. Children have regularly featured in Daesh propaganda in which the terrorist organization boasts about preparing t...

Britain’s anti-terror police have arrested five men on suspicion of plotting acts of terrorism in the country. Two of the suspects, aged 32 and 37, were arrested Friday and were taken into custody in the Stoke area of Staffordshire, a landlocked county in the West Midlands. Following the first arrest, counter-terror forces raided a number of homes in Birmingham and arrested three other men, aged 18, 24 and 28. Officials said all five men were being held in the West Midlands on suspicion of commissioning, preparing or instigating acts of terror. After the raid in Birmingham, a part of the city was cordoned off while police and an army bomb squad performed security inspections. Some properties in Stoke were also searched as part of the investigation. Police officials said the arrests were “intelligence-led and part of an ongoing investigation.” The army bomb disposal squad was called to the scene as a “precautionary measure” following the arrests, police added. Des...

Dozens of Palestinian football players and soccer fans have suffered tear gas inhalation after Israeli forces raided a stadium northeast of Jerusalem al-Quds on Friday. Palestinian sources said some 1,200 people were watching a match between two clubs on Friday afternoon, when Israeli troops stormed the Faisal al-Husseini stadium in the town of al-Ram. The Israeli forces fired tear gas canisters to disperse the crowd, leaving dozen of people in need of medical attention. The motive behind the Israeli attack was not immediately clear. Separately, five young Palestinian men were shot and injured in the town of Silwad northeast of Ramallah after clashes erupted at the funeral of the 38-year-old Iyad Zakariya Hamed. The Israeli military said they shot dead the man at the entrance to Silwad after they suspected him of running towards an army post.  Israeli media outlets initially said the slain Palestin...

Hezbollah fighters have ambushed a group of militants belonging to the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham Takfiri terrorist group in northeastern Lebanon,  killing and wounding a number of them. They outflanked the terrorists on the outskirts of the town of Arsal on Friday, the Lebanese resistance movement’s War Media Center said.  The attack killed at least one militant and injured several others, according to Hezbollah's Al-Manar television channel. The center released a brief video showing fighters firing mortar bombs and a rocket at targets in the barren area. Lebanon has been affected by the spillover from the foreign-backed militancy, which has been plighting Syria since 2011. The militants briefly overran Arsal in August 2014, taking several Lebanese army and police forces hostage, some of whom were executed. In December last year, most of the captives were released as part of a prisoner swap deal. Ever since, Lebanese border areas have come under intermitt...

The number of Canadian citizens who have traveled overseas to join extremist organizations such as the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group has grown over the past months, a new government report says. The 2016 Public Report on the Terrorist Threat to Canada, released by Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale on Thursday, gave an assessment of the terror threat landscape in 2015 and early 2016 across Canada. As of the end of 2015, about 180 “individuals with a nexus to Canada” were suspected of participating in terrorism-related activities overseas, up from 130 the previous year, it said.  The report noted that more than half were thought to be in Turkey, Iraq or Syria. Nearly 20 percent of Canada’s extremist travelers were women, the report also said.  Lorne  Dawson, co-director of the University of Waterloo’s Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, said the participation of women in terrorist organizations in itself is n...

US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has taken a 12-percentage-point lead over her Republican rival, Donald Trump, in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential race, according to a new poll. The  Reuters /Ipsos poll, released on Tuesday, shows the former secretary of state has 45 percent of the votes as compared to the New York billionaire having only a 33-percent support. Another 22 percent wouldn't pick either candidate. Clinton has led Trump throughout most of the 2016 presidential campaign. But her latest lead represents a stronger level of support than polls showed in recent editions of the poll. In the previous polls, the former First Lady’s lead over the real estate tycoon ranged between 3 and 9. One poll -- McClatchy/Marist survey – conducted early August, however, found Clinton 15 points ahead of Trump. Clinton's lead over Trump slimmed slightly in the Reuters/Ipsos poll in a four-way match-up that included Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and G...

The founder of whistleblowing website Wikileaks says his organization plans to release more information linked to the campaign of US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. When asked if the data could be a game-changer in the November 8 presidential election, Julian Assange told  Fox News  on Wednesday: “I think it’s significant. You know, it depends on how it catches fire in the public and in the media.” He was speaking from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been residing for several years. In July, Wikileaks released hacked files, showing that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) favored Clinton over her primary challenger and anti-establishment candidate, Bernie Sanders. The release, during the Democratic National Convention where Clinton was officially named the party's presidential nominee, prompted the committee's Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to step down. “I don’t want to give the game away, but it’s a variety of documents...

A new opinion poll in the United States shows over one-fifth of Americans do not support neither Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton nor her Republican rival Donald Trump. The  Reuters /Ipsos poll, released on Tuesday, shows 22 percent of likely voters wouldn't pick either candidate. That lack of support is high compared with how voters responded to the poll during the 2012 US presidential election between Democratic President Barack Obama and his Republican rival Mitt Romney. "Those who are wavering right now are just as likely to be thinking about supporting a third-party candidate instead, and not between Clinton and Trump," said Tom Smith, who directs the Center for the Study of Politics and Society at the University of Chicago. Previous polls have shown that Clinton and Trump are ranked among the most unpopular presidential candidates in America’s history. Critics say both candidates represent special interest groups rather than the people’...

US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is a “bigot” who does not consider African-Americans proper human beings “worthy of a better future,” according to Donald Trump. "Hillary Clinton is a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future," the Republican presidential nominee told his supporters in Jackson, Mississippi. "She's going to do nothing for African-Americans; she's going to do nothing for the Hispanics. She's only going to take care of herself, her husband, her consultants, her donors," Trump said. "These are the people she cares about." Trump has recently attacked Clinton in a series of speeches aimed at Hispanic and African-American voters, who polls show are largely rallying behind the Democratic candidate. The New York billionaire has vowed to deport 11 million undocumented workers from the United States and would establish a “deportation force” for this purpose, ...