The Borat video is a complete fabrication. I was tucking in my shirt after taking off the recording equipment.

At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate. If Sacha Baron Cohen implies otherwise he is a stone-cold liar.

In fact, the NY Post today reports "it looks to me like an exaggeration through editing."

As soon as I realized it was a set up I called the police, which has been noted in THR article on July 8th.

This is an effort to blunt my relentless exposure of the criminality and depravity of Joe Biden and his entire family.

Deadline Hollywood reports CAA had a distribution screening in September where there was no mention of the scene holding any importance.

We are preparing much bigger dumps off of the hard drive from hell, of which Joe Biden will be unable to defend or hide from. I have the receipts.

A satellite image captured earlier this year revealed the presence of several Russian-made MiG-29 jets at an airbase in Armenia.

According to the Russian publication Avia.Pro, a satellite image confirmed that recently up to 13 MiG-29 fighter jets believed to be part of the Russian Aerospace Forces were stationed at a military airport in Yerevan that in the past was known to host Russian military aerial exercises.

“The Russian Aerospace Forces transferred at least 13 MiG-29 fighters to the territory of Armenia, as seen by satellite images of the Erebuni military airbase,” Avia.Pro reported.

“We are talking specifically about Russian combat aircraft, since officially the MiG-29 fighters are not in service with the Armenian Air Force,” they continued.

As shown in the satellite image provided by Avia.Pro, there are not only 13 MiG-29 jets, but also several helicopters, which the publication says likely belong to the Russian Air Force.

Governments around the world are using the ongoing pandemic to crack down on online dissent according to a human rights watchdog.

Washington-based Freedom House said dozens of countries have cited CV as a means “to justify expanded surveillance powers and the deployment of new technologies that were once seen as too intrusive.” They added that it marks the 10th consecutive annual decline in internet freedom, Barron’s reported.

The expansion of technological systems is enabling governments’ social control, according to the report.

Secret Service logs obtained earlier this year by Senate investigators include dates and locations matching those discussed in the emails allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

The alignment of the dates in the emails and the Secret Service protective detail logs is significant because the authenticity of the emails, first published by the New York Post last week, is the subject of heated debate. The FBI, which purportedly obtained Hunter Biden’s laptop in December last year, has not yet officially confirmed that it is in possession of the device and whether the emails are genuine.

In one alleged email, written after midnight on April 13, 2014, Hunter Biden wrote to Devon Archer, his business partner, that he will be traveling to Houston the next day. Secret Service logs obtained by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs show a trip by Biden on April 13-14, 2014.

Below is my column in The Hill newspaper on the censorship of the Hunter Biden controversy by Facebook and Twitter. The response of the Biden campaign and figures like Rep. Adam Schiff has been to dismiss the story as the likely product of Russian intelligence. Notably however they do not address the underlying emails.

As many of us have written, there is ample reason to suspect foreign intelligence and the FBI is reportedly investigating that possibility. However, that does not mean that the emails are not authentic. Hillary Clinton was hacked by Russia but the emails were still real. It is possible to investigate both those responsible for the laptop’s disclosure and what has been disclosed on the laptop. The censorship by these companies however has magnified concerns in the controversy, particularly with the disclosure of close connections between some company officials and the Biden campaign.

It didn't take long for the historic US-brokered peace and 'normalization' of ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates to shift focus to a potential major oil pipeline project in the works.

Israel's Haaretz newspaper reports, "In what could become one of the most significant deals to emerge since Israel and the United Arab Emirates normalized relations, the Israeli state-owned pipeline company Europe Asia Pipeline Company, or EAPC, said on Tuesday that it had signed a memorandum of understanding to store and transport oil and distillates from the UAE to Europe."

Below is the EAPC route through southern Israel from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean port of Ashkelon. This is unprecedented considering that up until just months ago the Arab Gulf states and Israel were official enemies, as they had been for decades especially over the fate of Palestinians.

Andrew Cockburn has a stunning report in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine on secret Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) that “implement extraordinary presidential authority in response to extraordinary situations.”

Cockburn notes that these sweeping powers have been “Compiled without any authorization from Congress” and were not on the public’s radar “until Donald Trump started to brag about them.” In March, Trump made this statement:

“Well, we have things that I can do. We have very strong emergency powers under the Stafford Act. And we are — we have it — I mean, I have it memorized, practically, as to the powers in that act. And if I need to do something, I’ll do it. I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about.”

IN NOVEMBER 2019, Bolivia’s three-term President Evo Morales was forced under threat of police and military violence to flee to Mexico, just weeks after he was declared the winner of the October presidential election that would have sent him to his fourth term. Installed in his place was an unelected right-wing coup regime, led by self-declared “interim President” Jeanine Áñez, who promptly presided over a military massacre that killed dozens of Morales’s Indigenous supporters and then granted immunity to all the soldiers involved. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the time cheered the coup by citing subsequently debunked claims of election fraud by the Organization of American States, or OAS, and urging “a truly democratic process representative of the people’s will.”

On May 2, 1985 the highest law enforcement officer in the United States, the head of the U.S. Department of Justice, Attorney General Edwin Meese, held a news conference to announce that the sixth largest brokerage firm on Wall Street, E.F. Hutton, was pleading guilty to 2,000 felony counts of wire and mail fraud. It had also agreed to pay criminal fines of $2 million and up to $8 million in restitution to the 400 banks it had defrauded. The fraud had lasted less than two years, from July 1, 1980 and February 28, 1982, and consisted of the following according to the Justice Department:

“The essence of the charges was that Hutton obtained the interest-free use of millions of dollars by intentionally writing checks in excess of the funds it had on deposit in various banks.”

On the following day, Friday, May 3, the New York Times put that story on the front page of its newspaper.

Now, carefully consider what happened three weeks ago.

The People’s Republic of China isn’t exactly a favorite of the American public. Since the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak of early 2020, Americans are questioning whether or not all of that cheap plastic junk from Wal-Mart doesn’t come with a hidden cost.

It’s not just about the virus: There is also the spectre of deindustrialization, which has been a social disaster for the United States, particularly the rust belt. What’s more, Tucker Carlson and others reported during the early days of the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak that the United States was dependent on China for basic medical supplies, such as penicillin.

Carlson’s comments are incredibly important, especially when we begin drilling down further into just how reliant the United States is on China: 97 percent of all antibiotics and 80 percent of all active ingredients in American pharmaceuticals come from China. In 2017 alone, the United States imported a whopping $4.6 billion in foodstuffs from the People’s Republic of China.

A group of prominent progressive senators is urging the Homeland Security Department to withdraw its proposal to expand the biometric information collection practices of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Sens. Ed Markey, D-Mass., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., sent a letter to DHS acting Secretary Chad Wolf Friday urging the agency to abandon its biometrics proposal due to privacy concerns, calling biometric data collection “invasive.”

“Expanding biometric-data collection in this manner would chill legal immigration, be inconsistent with our privacy values, and pose disproportionate risks to individuals of color,” the letter reads. “The scope, sensitivity, and invasiveness of the proposed DHS biometric data collection program would amount to an unacceptable escalation of government surveillance.”

The US is urging countries that have ratified a UN treaty that bans nuclear weapons to withdraw their support for the pact. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) is approaching ratifications from 50 countries, which is needed to bring the treaty into force.

The TPNW requires all ratifying countries “never under any circumstances … develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” The TPNW also bans the transfer or use of nuclear weapons and requires its participants to promote the treaty to other countries.

The Associated Press obtained the US letter to the signatories of the treaty. The letter says Washington’s NATO allies and the five original nuclear powers, the US, Russia, China, France, and the UK, all “stand unified in our opposition to the potential repercussions” of the TPNW.

At a press conference on Wednesday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg was asked about President Trump’s recent Tweet that said all US troops would be home from Afghanistan by Christmas. Stoltenberg dismissed the idea of an imminent US withdrawal and said all NATO allies would withdraw from Afghanistan together when “the time is right,” reiterating comments he made earlier this month.

“In Afghanistan, NATO has around 12,000 troops in the Alliance’s biggest mission,” Stoltenberg said. “As part of the peace process, we have adjusted our presence. Any further adjustments remain conditions-based.”

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper announced a new initiative on Tuesday to counter China and Russia, another sign of the Pentagon’s shift away from counter-terrorism towards so-called “great power competition.”

The initiative, called the Guidance for Development for Alliances and Partnerships, aims to strengthen and expand US alliances with “like-minded democracies.”

While unveiling the initiative in a speech at the Atlantic Council, Esper stressed the importance of alliances to counter Russia and China. “America’s network of allies and partners provides us an asymmetric advantage our adversaries cannot match,” he said. “China and Russia probably have fewer than 10 allies combined.”

Esper said the US needs to build stronger ties with “like-minded democracies such as India and Indonesia.”

On Wednesday, Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay said Ankara would not hesitate to send troops to support Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh if requested. Oktay added that at the moment, no such request had been made.

Since clashes between Azerbaijan and Armenian forces broke out in Nagorno-Karabakh on September 27th, Turkey has been outspoken in its support for Baku. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly called for Armenia to end its “occupation” of Azeri territory.

Turkey has been supporting Baku militarily through weapons sales. Turkish arms exports surged just before the fighting began. Sales rose from $278,880 in July to $36 million in August and jumped to $77 million in September.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Wednesday that he sees no diplomatic solution to the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh in the near future as clashes in the disputed enclave continue.

“We have to realize that the Karabakh question, at least at this stage and for a very long time, cannot have a diplomatic solution,” Pashinyan said. “Everything that is diplomatically acceptable to the Armenian side … is not acceptable to Azerbaijan anymore.”

Pashinyan’s comments come after a ceasefire agreed to on Saturday quickly fell apart. It was the second attempt, following a Russian-brokered truce agreed to on October 10th that only lasted a few hours.

At the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called for a collective security effort in the Persian Gulf to prevent a full-scale war from breaking out in the region. According to AP News, the proposal got strong support from all Security Council members except the US, who unsurprisingly blamed the region’s instability on Iran.

Washington brought the region to the brink of a major war in January when the US killed Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani in Iraq. Lavrov mentioned the assassination and said the worst-case scenario was avoided, but “the situation remains fragile and could become dangerous and unpredictable again.”

Israeli DM Benny Gantz appeared to confirm Israel’s responsibility for the overnight attack on the Syrian village of al-Hurriya, where they struck a school that was being used as a command center by a Shi’ite militia.

Gantz said he wouldn’t “go into who fired what,” but insisted that Israel would do whatever is necessary to drive Iran and Hezbollah out of the border region. It’s not clear who was in the Shi’ite militias at the border, but Israeli press almost always label them “Iranian.” Three suspects were slain in that attack.

Pointing to further attacks, Israel is dropping leaflets in SW Syria now warning government forces not to deal with the militias. That suggests Israel isn’t intending to attack Syrian military targets in the future, just militias.

The story is very apocryphal now, but it holds that in 146 BC, Rome capped off the Third Punic War by sacking Carthage and salting the earth so that nothing would ever grow there again. It probably never happened, which is sort of a shame, because it’s an excellent metaphor for European activity on Africa’s Mediterranean Coast.

Wherever Europe’s attention turns in northern Africa, that region is the worse for it. In recent years, this has meant Libya, where the destruction of the Libyan government during the 2011 NATO intervention there is now set to give way to direct European Union intervention.

NATO was quite pleased with its 2011 handiwork, which saw Moammar Gaddafi removed from power and quickly killed. The assumption was that this would lead to an orderly transition of power. Instead it led to a civil war that’s continued to tear the country apart ever since.

Canadian law makes it illegal to recruit soldiers for a foreign state. But, the line between enticing impressionable young people to oppress Palestinians and formal recruitment is unclear.

In an open letter signed by Noam Chomsky, Roger Waters, filmmaker Ken Loach, author Yann Martel, former MP Jim Manly, poet El Jones and more than 150 others call on the Canadian Justice Minister David Lametti to investigate the Israeli consulate for advertisements to recruitment Canadians into the Israel’s military, and possible military recruitment inside of Toronto schools. The letter and adjoining formal complaint asks the federal government on Monday to apply charges under the Foreign Enlistment Act against those recruiting Canadians, if such violations are found during an inquiry.

The Pentagon’s secret intelligence fund received $23.1 billion in appropriated funds for the recently concluded fiscal 2020 — the highest total for the account in nine years.

The increased funding for the Military Intelligence Program, or MIP, comes after FY19 saw a rare decrease in year-over-year spending power for the classified account. The funding, which includes both base dollars and overseas contingency operations money, “is aligned to support the National Defense Strategy,” per a four-sentence statement from the Pentagon.

The department annually waits until after the fiscal year ends to announce how much money it was given for the fund. The Pentagon requested less than $23 billion for the MIP in its FY20 budget request, meaning Congress gave the fund a slight increase over requested amounts.

Over the past two years, the United States has dramatically increased the number of U.S. Navy aircraft carriers and destroyers sent into the South China Sea as freedom-of-navigation show-of- force missions to remind the Chinese government that the U.S. considers the Western Pacific and the South China Sea as a part of the oceans of America and its allies.

Additionally, in 2020, the Trump administration ratcheted up tensions with China by sending to Taiwan the highest-ranking U.S. officials in over 40 years. The Chinese government has responded with the largest naval exercises in its history and sending flights of 18 aircraft to the edge of Taiwan’s air defense zone.

Forty-five American lawmakers have urged the US government to boycott next month's G20 summit in Riyadh unless Saudi authorities address key human rights concerns, according to correspondence released Wednesday.

The letter from US Congress members to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo comes after European lawmakers passed a resolution this month calling for the European Union to downgrade its attendance at the summit, also over human rights.

The developments are a source of embarrassment for the kingdom, the current G20 president, as it gears up to host world leaders next month at what is widely seen as a crucial event for Saudi international diplomacy.

The Knesset plenum on Wednesday voted to form a parliamentary inquiry into a major corruption scandal that has previously ensnared several close associates of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but the rare opposition victory was quickly nullified, quashing the probe.

Knesset Speaker Yariv Levin, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, drew swift condemnation after he canceled the original vote on a technicality, enraging opposition members who accused him of politicizing his job.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz will fly to the United States on Wednesday night for a “security meeting” with US Defense Secretary Mark Esper, as well as discussions with other officials in the Pentagon, Gantz’s office said.

The meetings will likely focus on the proposed sale of F-35 fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates and the potential impact on Israel’s so-called qualitative military edge, or QME, its military superiority in the region, which the US is legally mandated to maintain.

Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, has claimed that textbooks used by schools run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugess in the Near East (UNRWA) contained inciteful content.

In discussion with UNRWA's chief, Philippe Lazzarini, Erdan said that the agency was allowing an infrastructure of incitement in its facilities, including in its school curricula.

The ambassador demanded that the UN agency “end the incitement and antisemitism in UNRWA schools and publicly pledge to eliminate any terrorist infrastructure in its buildings”.

Nagorno-Karabakh is at the heart of a decades-old conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, both former Soviet republics.

It is internationally recognised as Azerbaijani territory, but is run by ethnic Armenians who either want to secede or join Armenia.

Turkey said on Wednesday it extended the stay of its Oruc Reis survey vessel and two other ships in a disputed area of the eastern Mediterranean until Oct. 27, in a move likely to further escalate tensions in the region.

Two other vessels, the Ataman and Cengiz Han along with Oruc Reis will continue work in an area southeast of the Greek island of Rhodes until Oct. 27, Turkey's Navy said in a maritime notice. The vessels had previously been scheduled to work until Oct. 22.

NATO members Turkey and Greece are at odds over conflicting claims to hydrocarbon resources in the eastern Mediterranean and overlapping views on the extent of their continental shelves. Tensions flared in August when Ankara sent Oruc Reis to waters also claimed by Greece and Cyprus.

Family says senior PLO diplomat remains in critical condition, intubated and connected to ECMO machine; treatment especially complicated given history of health issues, including lung transplant in 2017

Over 7,500 illegal boat migrants have reached the United Kingdom by crossing the English Channel from France since the start of the year, reaching the number that Migration Watch UK predicted would arrive in the country by the end of the year.

Following the arrival of 100 more illegal aliens on Monday, the total number of illegal migrants recorded to have reached British shores rose to a record 7,532, more than four times the number of migrants in 2019.

Since the beginning of the month, some 403 boat migrants have successfully crossed the Channel, according to the Daily Mail. In September, a monthly record of 1,954 landed in Britain.

In July, the mass migration sceptic think-tank Migration Watch UK predicted that — based on arrival trends at the time — between 7,500 and 7,600 migrants would reach the country by Christmas.

The far-left Associated Press (AP) is deliberately encouraging more left-wing domestic terrorism by downplaying the unprecedented wave of terrorism that has hit countless Democrat-run cities over the past few months.

The domestic terrorists in Antifa and Black Lives Matter are responsible for murders, assaults, arson, looting, and the destruction of large areas of numerous downtowns. And the maniacs at the AP, who want more, are trying to convince us these terrorists are just like us.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) announced on Tuesday that it has reached agreement with hospitals in Virginia and Maryland to change policies to allow clergy to visit hospitalized patients during the coronavirus pandemic.

The complaints that were settled include virus protocol at the University of Maryland medical system – Medstar Health — a network of 10 hospitals in that state.

A married couple who were severely injured in a car accident in August and were hospitalized in that system in grave condition were denied clergy visitation to receive religious sacraments during end-of-life circumstances.

At Mary Washington Health Care in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in July a mother who tested positive for the virus was separated from her newborn and the hospital denied her request for an in-hospital baptism for the infant consistent with her Catholic faith.

A federal judge ruled late last week in favor of two Colorado churches that challenged Gov. Jared Polis’s (D) pandemic orders requiring indoor occupancy limitations and masks during worship.

U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Domenico, a Trump appointee, granted Denver Bible Church and its pastor, Robert Enyart, as well as Community Baptist Church and its pastor, Joey Rhoads, a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction.

The judge said Polis’s Public Health Order 20-35 violated the churches’ First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.

“To see and not to speak would be the great betrayal,” said Enoch Powell. Worse is to see, to know, to speak, and then act destructively anyway. Angela Merkel, White Renegade of the Year 2015, did this when she welcomed a massive migrant flow into Europe years after declaring multiculturalism was a failure. Yet this year’s renegade has less excuse. He clearly warned of the consequences of mass immigration, but still pushes catastrophic policies on his people—even in the face of failure and furious opposition. This year’s White Renegade of the Year is the president of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron.

Alexei Navalny has opened his US media campaign on Sunday with interviews on CBS Television and the New Yorker magazine. Wearing a new white shirt, he has also opened a new version of the attempted assassination.

In Navalny’s fresh plot, he now says he was poisoned when he was putting on clothes in his hotel room in Tomsk, and then touched a water bottle. “We know that I was poisoned in the hotel because I — well, again, it’s just a pure speculation because no one knows what happened exactly — but I think that when I was, er, maybe put some clothes with this poison on me, I touched it with the hand [left hand], and then I sipped from the bottle [right hand]. So this nerve agent was not inside of the bottle but on the bottle.”

China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for ­Facebook to recruit social media censors?

There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’ ”

The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it.

The leaders of the Haredi community have rewritten the rules of the game, pretending to be the persecuted when they are the persecutors, a radical minority that will continue to ravage Israel's majority until the state is no more

AstraZeneca shares turned negative Wednesday after a Brazilian health authority, Anvisa, said a volunteer in its coronavirus vaccine study died.

The Federal University of Sao Paulo, which is helping coordinate late-stage trials in Brazil, separately said that the volunteer was Brazilian, according to Reuters.

Shares of AstraZeneca, a front-runner in the Covid-19 vaccine race, gave up a slight gain after the news broke. Shares were down by about 1% in early afternoon trading.

“Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this… That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow — but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”—Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School

Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?”

The answer, then and now, remains the same: None.

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin will propose the dissolution of several major Islamist associations after the murder of teacher Samuel Paty.

Interior Minister Darmanin said he would defer to the courts, but argued that he would propose the disbanding of several controversial Islamist groups such as the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF).

Darmanin went as far as stating that he believed several factors regarding the groups made them an “enemy of the Republic” and helped contribute to the environment that led to the beheading of Mr Paty last week, Le Figaro reports.

The CCIF was involved in overturning bans on the Islamic swimwear known as the burkini, which the group branded “political Islamophobia”, after several local governments along the French Rivera had forbidden it in 2016.

Arts Council England have made some very questionable choices about who receives their “recovery fund” grants. The council boasts on its website that “to date, we have announced £334 million of investment, with much more to come.” But where has all that money gone?

Scouring through the Round 2 grants, Guido noticed that the Arts Council gave £215,305 to “Le Gateau Chocolat” – a solo drag act from Brighton. Le Gateau Chocolat Ltd is private limited company claiming to have 2 employees, owned by a man called George Ikediashi, who is the company’s sole performer. His Round 2 grant was the 86th highest in the country, out of 589 grants handed out…

The US Navy will be equipping its attack submarines and all of its destroyers with hypersonic missiles in a bid to stave off the mounting threat posed by China in the Pacific, Trump’s top national security adviser, Robert O'Brien, said Wednesday.

The service will first be installing the weapons on its Virginia-class attack submarines, then on its new Zumwalt-class destroyers, before finally mounting the missiles on all three tiers of its Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, according to Defense News.

Joe Biden was facing intense backlash Wednesday night for referring to America as an "idea" that "we've never lived up to."

The Democratic nominee shared a clip from his interview on the podcast "Unlocking Us with Brené Brown," which was released earlier in the day.

"America was an idea, an idea," Biden said. "'We hold these truths to be self evident.' We've never lived up to it, but we've never walked away from it before. And I just think we have to be more honest. Let our kids know, as we raise them, what actually did happen. Acknowledge our mistakes so we don't repeat them."

Remember those great early-pandemic days last spring when bags of flour and yeast suddenly became precious items? Wasn’t that fun? Well, great news, everybody: we’re going to get to experience them all over again. As we’ve noted before, grocers are a little more prepared this time around and have been stocking “pandemic pallets” of food they can reorder quickly, but some things will still be hard to find. Mashed has thoughtfully prepared a list:

U.S. officials accused Iran on Wednesday of being behind a flurry of emails sent to Democratic voters in multiple battleground states that appeared to be aimed at intimidating them into voting for President Donald Trump.

The officials did not lay out specific evidence for how they came to pinpoint Iran, but the activities attributed to Tehran would mark a significant escalation for a country some cybersecurity experts regard as a second-rate player in online espionage. The announcement was made at a hastily called news conference 13 days before the election.

On Wednesday the US State Department designated six more Chinese media outlets as "agents of China's government," forcing them to have to register officially as foreign missions if they want to keep operating on US soil under the Foreign Missions Act. This brings the total number of Chinese media outlets considered "foreign missions" or essentially agents of a foreign power to 15.

“We simply want to ensure that American people, consumers of information, can differentiate between news written by a free press and propaganda distributed by the Chinese Communist Party itself,” Pompeo said. “Not the same thing,” he bluntly concluded.

Predictably, an angry reaction was swift out of well-known Chinese state media pundits, foremost among them Global Times editor Hu Xijin, who denounced that "The US has gone too far."

In response to the latest round of US arms sales to Taiwan, the Chinese Foreign Ministry called on the United States to cancel the proposed deal on Thursday.

"We call on the US side to recognize the serious harm caused by the arms sale to Taiwan and adhere to the ‘One China’ policy and the China-US three joint communique, halt military communications with Taiwan and cancel related plans on arms sale to Taiwan," Zhao Lijian, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman, said during a regular press briefing.

Zhao’s comments came in response to the US State Department's decision to approve the proposed sale of three weapons systems to Taiwan, valued at $1.8 billion, on Wednesday.

The Korean Medical Association has called on the country’s government to halt its plan to inoculate millions of citizens after more than a dozen people died after receiving flu shots.

The vaccine initiative, billed as a strategy to potentially offset complications from Covid-19, aims to provide free flu jabs to 19 million people. But the ambitious undertaking has come under fire after 13 people died, including a 17-year-old boy and a man in his 70s, after participating in the program.

The vaccination drive was suspended for three weeks after it was revealed that around five million doses, which require refrigeration, had been stored at room temperature while being transpired to a medical facility. The program resumed on October 13. None of the people who died received the recalled doses.

The tiny state of Palau has invited the US to build a military base on its territory. It’s a sign of how the Pacific is becoming strategically vital as countries choose to align with either Washington or Beijing.

Few people in the west are likely to have heard of a nation called Palau, an archipelago in the western Pacific Ocean. Located close to Papua New Guinea and the Philippines, it boasts a population of only 17,000 people, less than the average small town.

Do not let its size obscure its significance, though. For all these islands may seem irrelevant in the world of contemporary politics, they are in fact situated right at the heart of one of the world’s emerging geopolitical struggles, the cold war between the United States and China.