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Kurds in Syria have reacted furiously to videos showing Turkish-backed rebels abusing the body of a female Kurdish fighter killed in battle.

Barin Kobani was part of all-female unit challenging a Turkish-led offensive in north-west Syria.

Kurdish officials accused fighters allied with Turkey of "playing with her corpse" and mutilating it.

Last month, Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels launched a campaign to capture the Kurdish-held Afrin region.

Barin Kobani was killed during fighting earlier this week in the northern part of the region, reports say. She was in her mid-20s, and joined the Kurdish all-female unit known as the YPJ in 2015.

The group is part of the YPG (People's Protection Units), seen by Turkey as a terrorist group and an extension of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has fought for Kurdish autonomy in south-eastern Turkey for three decades.

The YPG denies any direct organisational links to the PKK - an assertion backed by the US, which has provided the militia and allied Arab fighters with weapons and air support to help them battle the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) in Syria.

The memo House Republicans and the Trump administration have been plugging for weeks now – which would supposedly show how the FBI and the Department of Justice joined in a dreaded "deep state" tag-team to push the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton – was finally released on Friday.

It's underwhelming, to say the least. Those hyping the memo's revelations as "worse than Watergate" need to go read a history book.

If the outrage that House Republicans and their lackeys in the conservative media were exhibiting was to be believed, the memo authored by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., was going to reveal some conspiracy, or at the very least serious abuses, regarding surveillance by the nation's law enforcement agencies, all in an effort to help Democrats. It shows no such thing, at least without getting a look at some of the underlying materials.

You can read the full memo here. If this is the pretext President Donald Trump uses to undermine the investigation into Russian meddling in the election that's being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, it's weak tea indeed, and everyone who isn't in the deepest throes of partisan madness should be able to see it.

The Republican allegation pre-release was that surveillance on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was improperly launched because the warrant allowing for it was based on the infamous "Steele dossier," that unverified packet of information written by former British spy Christopher Steele (which includes the allegation that Trump was compromised by Russia due to his, errrr, cavorting with prostitutes, let's say). This was always a bit of a strange complaint, since Page was on the radar of American law enforcement as a potential Russian asset for years before the Trump campaign even existed, but be that as it may.

What does the memo say? It claims that the dossier was an "essential" part of the application to surveil Page. Without seeing the application, of course, it's impossible to know what "essential" means. The memo then claims that the dossier is necessarily suspect because it was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

But what's more important is what the memo leaves out. For starters, Nunes conveniently omitted that the initial funders of the dossier were conservatives. And the memo doesn't address whether or not any of the claims Steele made were true or false, simply that they were politically motivated and Steele spoke to the media on a few occasions. It doesn't say to what extent the FBI did or did not vet Steele's allegations, some of which have been corroborated.

Without seeing any of the underlying materials, including the surveillance application itself, it's simply impossible to judge what role the dossier played in it. But the memo doesn't even attempt to make the case that the information in the dossier was bad. It simply says that because the dossier was political in nature, it is ipso facto not to be trusted, and therefore something, somewhere is corrupt.

Democrats allege that reading the underlying materials would lead one to the conclusion that even Nunes' minimally impactful allegations aren't to be believed, and that the dossier was not as important to the surveillance application as Republicans say. The memo also confirms that the entire Russia investigation was launched in July 2016, thanks to information from an entirely different Trump associate, months before Page was ever surveilled as part of the case. So what Republicans hoped to gain from putting this timeline before the public is entirely unclear.

Even the most explosive claim in the memo – "Deputy [FBI] Director Andrew McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] without the Steele dossier information" – is much less than meets the eye. Maybe the information was corroborated by other sources? The memo does not explicitly make the case that Steele's information was not verified elsewhere, which Nunes likely would have made if he could.

To sum up, calling the memo a nothingburger is an insult to burgers.

Before the memo's release, I said that the best course of action would be to release it along with the Democratic response and the underlying intelligence materials, the latter two of which Republicans have been blocking. That's still the best way to go about things. The freakout many folks on both sides of the aisle had regarding the national security implications of releasing Nunes' scribbles seem entirely unjustified, too. The more transparency in this case, the better.

I know that there are those in the conservative media who are going to hype this thing to the hilt; in fact, they may have played the decisive role in pushing the memo to be made public, dooming Republicans into releasing information that doesn't help them thanks to a vicious feedback loop. And Trump himself is going to use the memo to continue claiming that the law enforcement officials whom he himself put in place are all somehow scheming with Democrats to oust him. (Which is weird, since he only hires "the best people.")

But it seems to me like Republicans would have been better off continuing to hint at the allegations in the memo without releasing it publicly, as bad as that would have been for, you know, the democratic process. Putting it out just revealed their outrage for the faux nonsense that it is.

Spy Warrant Relied On Dossier And News Stories Planted By Fusion GPS

Isikoff’s article, which was touted in a Clinton campaign press release after publication, cited claims from a memo Steele wrote on July 19, 2016. It alleges that during a well-publicized trip to Moscow earlier that month, Page met secretly with two Kremlin insiders, Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin. The dossier also alleges that Page worked with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort as part of a “well-developed conspiracy” with Russians to influence the election.

Page has denied ever meeting Sechin, Diveykin or Manafort and refers to Steele’s report as the “dodgy dossier.”

No evidence has emerged validating the claims made about Page in the dossier.

Page, who is suing Yahoo! over the article, said that he “look(s) forward to updating my pending legal action” in the case to include the allegations from the memo.

After weeks of buildup, the three-and-a-half-page document about alleged F.B.I. abuses during the 2016 presidential campaign made public on Friday was broadly greeted with criticism, including by some Republicans. They said it cherry-picked information, made false assertions and was overly focused on an obscure, low-level Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.

It didn’t live up to the hype.

But the campaign, captured in the hashtag #releasethememo, which was trending on Twitter for days, may have a far more significant impact than the memo’s contents. It was a choreographed effort by House Republicans and top White House officials to push a highly contentious theme — that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department abused their powers to spy on the Trump campaign, and relied on dodgy information from a former British spy paid by Democratic operatives.

What began as an ember more than two weeks ago was fanned into a blaze by conservative media titans, presidential tweets and Republican lawmakers urging people to use social media to pressure Congress to make the memo’s contents public. “I invite everybody to use the hashtag #releasethememo,” Representative Raúl Labrador, the Idaho Republican, said on Fox News during the campaign’s infancy, adding that Americans would be “shocked” when the memo was released.

By Friday, it was obvious that the memo had become part of a proxy fight for the larger battle that the White House is now waging to discredit the Russia investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel. By promoting the idea that the Mueller inquiry was born from a corrupt and partisan process, his entire investigation can be tarred as a biased inquisition.

Two hours after the memo’s release, the White House issued a statement saying the document “raises serious concerns about the integrity of decisions made at the highest levels of the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. to use the government’s most intrusive surveillance tools against American citizens.”

Today, the #FISAMemo was released, and now all Americans have the same access to the memo as Members of Congress had. My statement: https://t.co/e5H2kG7Mju#AZ05pic.twitter.com/pr7HIouuph
— Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) February 2, 2018

In a Fox News interview on Friday, Representative Devin Nunes of California, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said his panel was still proceeding with a separate investigation. He hinted that it focused on the State Department’s role in the Russia investigation during the Obama administration.

The barrage that the president and his allies have launched at the F.B.I. is focused on one small part of the mission — surveillance warrants — in an agency of 35,000 people that investigates everything from bank robberies to human trafficking to Wall Street malfeasance. But Mr. Trump could have more ammunition in the coming weeks as the Justice Department’s inspector general finishes a report widely expected to be critical of the F.B.I.’s handling of the final months of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

As part of that inquiry, Michael E. Horowitz, the inspector general, has uncovered text messages between two F.B.I. officials working on that case and also the Russia investigation in which they express intense dislike for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Horowitz is expected to reserve particularly harsh criticism for the two officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Conservative media outlets have already delivered their verdicts on the officials, who are regularly skewered on the popular Fox News program hosted by Sean Hannity.

Mr. Hannity recently described the Mueller investigation and decisions in 2016 by James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director at the time, as “one giant incestuous circle of corruption.”

WASHINGTON – Hours after a Republican-led House committee released a document alleging surveillance abuses by the Justice Department and FBI, the bureau's director Christopher Wray sought to rally agents and analysts with a memo of his own.

"Talk is cheap; the work you do is what will endure," FBI chief Wray wrote in an internal message Friday. "We speak through our work. One case at a time. One decision at a time." 

President Trump on Friday approved the release of a memo prepared at the direction of House Intelligence Committee Chairman David Nunes, R-Calif., over the objections of Wray and Justice Department leadership. In an unusual statement this week, the FBI issued a public statement expressing "grave concerns'' about the accuracy of the memo. 

Late Friday, Wray urged the bureau to move on. "We're going to keep doing that work because we know who and what we are and because we know our mission comes first," the director said. "The American people come first.
"Remember: keep calm and tackle hard," he continued.

The document, which focused on a 2016 surveillance warrant approved to monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, assailed the bureau and Justice for relying on a dossier prepared by a British intelligence agent whose work was funded in part by Democrats.

"The FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it," the FBI said earlier this week. "As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy."

Details Emerge About Trump Dossier Firm’s Media Outreach Campaign 07/13/2017

Court papers recently filed in London provide new details about the media outreach campaign carried out by opposition research firm Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele.

Fusion GPS and Steele, who runs the London-based firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, collaborated to produce a 35-page dossier of research about President Trump’s financial and political ties to Russia. Steele and Orbis are currently being sued in the U.S. and U.K. by Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian tech executive who says he was falsely accused in the dossier of hacking the Democratic National Committee’s email systems. BuzzFeed is also being sued by Gubarev in a U.S. court.

In one [document filed by Steele in the case], dated May 18, Steele says that he was instructed by Fusion GPS to meet with reporters at various outlets in order to publicize some of the allegations made in the dossier.

It has been widely known that Fusion GPS and Steele were in contact with reporters to discuss the dossier. It has been reported that rumors of the dossier were floating around in Washington, D.C. political and journalist circles for months prior to BuzzFeed’s decision to publish it on Jan. 10.

The outlets were The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo! News, The New Yorker and CNN.

Steele met once more — and again at Fusion GPS’s instruction — with The Times, The Post, and Yahoo! News. Fusion GPS took part in all of those meetings, Steele’s lawyers say.

Kurds in Syria have reacted furiously to videos showing Turkish-backed rebels abusing the body of a female Kurdish fighter killed in battle.

The evidence points directly at Obama.

But it seems to me like Republicans would have been better off continuing to hint at the allegations in the memo without releasing it publicly, as bad as that would have been for, you know, the democratic process. Putting it out just revealed their outrage for the faux nonsense that it is.

It's Turkey. This is the sort of thing that they do when they perpetrate their genocides against regional minorities.

But the campaign, captured in the hashtag #releasethememo, which was trending on Twitter for days

#ReleaseTheMemo is the top-trending hashtag among Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations, according to Hamilton 68, a website launched last year that says it tracks Russian propaganda in near-real time.

Archaeologists have spent more than a century traipsing through the Guatemalan jungle, Indiana Jones-style, searching through dense vegetation to learn what they could about the Mayan civilization that was one of the dominant societies in Mesoamerica for centuries.

But the latest discovery — one that archaeologists are calling a “game changer” — didn't even require a can bug spray.

Scientists using high-tech, airplane-based lidar mapping tools have discovered tens of thousands of structures constructed by the Mayans: defense works, houses, buildings, industrial-sized agricultural fields, even new pyramids. The findings, announced Thursday, are already reshaping long-held views about the size and scope of Mayan civilization.

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But the campaign, captured in the hashtag #releasethememo, which was trending on Twitter for days

But thank goodness a friendly foreign power, who has nothing but the best wishes for America's success, is helping out

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#ReleaseTheMemo is the top-trending hashtag among Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations, according to Hamilton 68, a website launched last year that says it tracks Russian propaganda in near-real time.

businessinsider

"The latest attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests — no party's, no president's, only Putin's," McCain said.

A Russian Sukhoi-25 fighter jet has been shot down in a rebel-held area near Idlib in north Syria, reports say.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said the pilot ejected and was killed, but this has not yet been confirmed.

Video posted on social media appeared to show the plane being hit, while other video showed burning wreckage on the ground, with a red star on a wing.

Russia has acted alongside its Syrian allies targeting rebels in the area.

Syrian government troops launched a major offensive around Idlib in late December, backed by Russian jets. The UN says some 100,000 civilians have been displaced.

The Syrian Observatory told Agence France-Presse there had been dozens of Russian air strikes in the area over the past 24 hours.

There are several reports that Russia has now fired cruise missiles into Idlib province from navy vessels in the Mediterranean.

It is not yet known which group shot the plane down. Reports say the pilot ejected and landed via parachute.

One social media video posting showed a body said to be that of the pilot but there is no independent confirmation of the airman's fate.

Hardline rebel groups including the jihadist, al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham are active in the north-western province.