Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

The Cass Freight Index once again warns again of economic contraction.

Donald Broughton, founder of Broughton Capital and author the Cass Freight Index says the index signals contraction, possibly by the end of the year.

That's just one one month away.

Six Key Points
With the –5.9% decline in October, following the string of declines in May through September (ranging from -3.0% to -6.0%), we repeat our message from the previous five months: the shipments index has gone from “warning of a potential slowdown” to “signaling an economic contraction.”

We acknowledge that: all of these negative percentages were against tough comparisons (some extremely tough), and the Cass Shipments Index has gone negative before without being followed by a negative GDP. However, demand is weaker across almost all modes of transportation, both domestically and internationally.

A new report in Axios suggests that Russia has significantly increased its presence in war-torn Libya, perhaps seeking to clean up the mess left in the wake of the US-NATO led regime change war which toppled Muammar Gaddafi.

This after a recent NY Times investigation found that at least 200 Russian mercenaries from Wagner Group have been in Libya supporting renegade General Khalifa Haftar's offensive against the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli.

Eight years after Gaddafi's overthrow and brutal field execution at the hands of NATO-backed rebel Islamists, the oil and gas abundant country is still in the throes of grinding factional civil war.

Interior Minister for Tripoli's GNA Fathi Bashagha told Axios the unfolding “proxy war” will doom the country to become “a haven for terrorists and extremists” unless the US steps in again.

The fake “whistleblower’s name— Eric Ciamerella—has been known for a long time, but not officially. Now it is official. Senator Rand Paul has officially released his name. Funny, isn’t it, that only the Republicans want Ciamerella to testify. The Democrats won’t hear of it. See this.

If the American people are paying attention, the Democrats are in trouble. When Russiagate fizzled out on them, Adam Schiff (D,CA) orchestrated a fake “whistleblower” whom the Democrats cannot risk putting on the stand to testify. The Democrats’ focus shifted to sleazy State Department types who could offer nothing but second or third hand hearsay followed by a hearsay second telephone call that cannot be confirmed.

When Morales was declared the winner in the October 20th elections, violent right-wing protests soon followed. The leaders of the opposition led by mostly fascist elements of Bolivian society including Luis Fernando Camacho who Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton of The Grayzone described him as “a powerful multi-millionaire named in the Panama Papers, and an ultra-conservative Christian fundamentalist groomed by a fascist paramilitary notorious for its racist violence, with a base in Bolivia’s wealthy separatist region of Santa Cruz.”

A ceasefire has been reached between Israel and groups in Gaza, after two days of violence that left 34 Palestinians dead. Many of the Democratic candidates have tweeted about the events, defending Israel’s actions while condemning rocket fire from Palestine. Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders expressed concern for Israelis and Palestinians, while Warren was the only candidate to acknowledge that multiple Palestinians have been killed.

2020 presidential candidates Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Thursday condemned recent violence between Israelis and Palestinians following the announcement of a cease-fire earlier in the day.

The two candidates took to Twitter to condemn acts of violence from Palestinian militant groups accused of firing rockets at Israel, while also calling for an end to the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.

"Israelis should not have to live in fear of rocket fire. Palestinians should not have to live under occupation and blockade," Sanders tweeted.

The husband of Lady Emma Arbuthnot, the Westminster chief magistrate overseeing WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange’s extradition to the US, has financial links to the British military establishment, including institutions and individuals exposed by WikiLeaks.

It can also be revealed that Lady Arbuthnot has received gifts and hospitality in relation to her husband, including from a military and cybersecurity company exposed by WikiLeaks. These activities indicate that the chief magistrate’s activities cannot be considered as entirely separate from her husband’s.

Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom, a former defence minister, is a paid chair of the advisory board of military corporation Thales Group, and was until earlier this year an adviser to arms company Babcock International. Both companies have major contracts with the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD).

On hearing the State Department’s George Kent and William Taylor describe President Donald Trump’s withholding of military aid to Ukraine, The New York Times summarized and solemnly endorsed their testimony:

"What clearly concerned both witnesses wasn’t simply the abuse of power by the President, but the harm it inflicted on Ukraine, a critical ally, under constant assault by Russian forces."

"’Even as we sit here today, the Russians are attacking Ukrainian soldiers in their own country, and have been for four years,’ Taylor said. ‘I saw this on the front line last week; the day I was there a Ukrainian soldier was killed and four more wounded.’"

Kent compared Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s intervention on the side of the Donbass secessionists to "our own Minutemen in 1776."

A late night vote in Bolivia’s Senate, which finally had a quorum after the police stopped blocking the ruling Movement for Socialism (MAS) party from the chamber, has agreed that all parties will work together toward having new elections as soon as possible.

New elections were promised by former President Evo Morales, and are still the goal despite his ouster and exile to Mexico. A lot of details are disputed between Morales’ MAS and self-proclaimed interim president Jeanine Anez, who was endorsed by the US and Bolivia’s military.

Early, free elections are likely to be a matter of dispute, as Anez insisted that, while she will allow the MAS to run a candidate in the vote, they’d better come up with one soon, and that she would absolutely forbid Morales from running again.

South Korea has historically paid an unusually large percentage of the cost of keeping US forces there, and under pressure from President Trump, agreed earlier this year to a substantial increase, with South Korea agreeing to pay $924 million annually.

Since then, Trump had suggested a few times that he wanted more, and that South Korea could easily afford it. His new demand, however, shocked everyone on both sides as he is demanding over five times what South Korea is paying, $4.7 billion annually.

This is raising a lot of questions in South Korea about the viability of keeping the US around, but the bigger task is for US officials, who are trying to somehow justify a $4.7 billion price tag that seemingly came out of nowhere.

Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad and Israel declared a halt to hostilities across the Gaza Strip border on Thursday but a lasting ceasefire appeared tenuous as they differed on terms.

Islamic Jihad said an Egyptian-mediated truce went into effect at 0330 GMT, about 48 hours after Israel triggered the exchange of fire by killing the Iranian-backed faction’s top Gaza commander in an air strike, deeming him an imminent threat.

Occasional rocket fire from Gaza and a retaliatory Israeli air strike broke the calm, but the ceasefire largely held.

President Trump’s position on the Syrian War aims to further simplify matters. Turkey’s President Erdogan says he is worried about Turkey’s border with Syria, and President Trump sees an opportunity to contrast his own war, saying “we left troops behind only for the oil.”

In the context of US-Turkey relations, this seems very straightforward and avoids conflicts of interest. Admitting that the whole US war is for oil isn’t the panacea Trump thinks it is, however, and he’s running up against other US officials on this issue.

Lawmakers are couching the Syrian War as being about protecting the Kurds, while the Pentagon’s leadership sees it heavily built around fighting ISIS and continuing to work toward regime change in Syria. Some even suggest it’s about countering Russia.

Trump’s all-oil agenda directly contradicts everyone else, and gives the impression that the US is being deliberately evasive about its military agenda and where US foreign policy is going.

Authored by Jenna Ellis Rives, op-ed via The Hill,

The House began public hearings this week, furthering the partisan move by the Democrats to impeach President Trump in a blatant abuse of constitutional authority. Representative Adam Schiff said in a press conference, “These open hearings will be an opportunity for the American people to evaluate the witnesses for themselves and also to learn firsthand about the facts of the president’s misconduct.”

There are several problems with this statement.

Struggling to keep its economy growing, the city of Ruzhou spent big, but is now asking its health care workers for cash to stay afloat.

Ruzhou, a city of one million people in central China, urgently needed a new hospital, their bosses said. To pay for it, the administrators were asking health care workers for loans. If employees didn’t have the money, they were pointed to banks where they could borrow it and then turn it over to the hospital.

Ruzhou is a city with a borrowing problem — and an emblem of the trillions of dollars in debt threatening the Chinese economy.

Authored by Craig Murray,

Perhaps the only fact on James Le Mesurier about which I would agree with the MSM war cheerleaders is that he was a very busy man. It is remarkable therefore that he found the time and inclination to follow “Philip Cross” on twitter. Given that “Philip Cross” has virtually never posted an original tweet, and his timeline consists almost entirely of retweets of Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and openly pro-Israel propaganda accounts, why would Le Mesurier bother to follow him?

“Philip Cross” has never posted any news other than to retweet columnists. He has never given an insight into a story. In addition to James Le Mesurier, why then were all these MSM journailsts following “Philip Cross” from before “he” gained notoriety for his Wikipedia exploits?

Oliver Kamm, Leader Writer The Times

Nick Cohen, Columnist The Guardian/Observer

Joan Smith, Columnist The Independent

Leslie Felperin, Film Columnist The Guardian

Authored by B.N.Frank via AcivistPost.com,

You won’t see cell phones or personal computers much in movies or TV shows until the late 1990s because most people didn’t own them. Of course most people didn’t need them either. If you couldn’t afford a “home phone” – pay phones usually weren’t hard to find. Anyone who needed to be “on call” – like doctors – wore pagers.

People who grew up without new technology know firsthand that it has made the world better in some ways.

We also know that it has made it worse in others. People who never knew the world without new technology have been conditioned to believe that all of it is necessary as well as beneficial. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. 5G is very dangerous (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). Artificial Intelligence (AI) is associated with many risks as well.

Authored by B.N.Frank via AcivistPost.com,

You won’t see cell phones or personal computers much in movies or TV shows until the late 1990s because most people didn’t own them. Of course most people didn’t need them either. If you couldn’t afford a “home phone” – pay phones usually weren’t hard to find. Anyone who needed to be “on call” – like doctors – wore pagers.

People who grew up without new technology know firsthand that it has made the world better in some ways.

We also know that it has made it worse in others. People who never knew the world without new technology have been conditioned to believe that all of it is necessary as well as beneficial. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. 5G is very dangerous (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). Artificial Intelligence (AI) is associated with many risks as well.

As noted moments ago, futures ramped to new record highs rising above 3,100 following a quote from top Trump advisor Larry Kudlow, who has figured out that he gets most bang for the buck in juicing futures when liquidity is virtually nil, around 8pm or so, when he told reporters that Phase One of the China deal is "down to the short strokes", adding that "we are in communication with them every single day right now", and repeating that "a deal is close", even if "it’s not done yet."

War sustains our way of life while killing us at the same time. As Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent and author Chris Hedges observes:

War is like a poison. And just as a cancer patient must at times ingest a poison to fight off a disease, so there are times in a society when we must ingest the poison of war to survive. But what we must understand is that just as the disease can kill us, so can the poison. If we don't understand what war is, how it perverts us, how it corrupts us, how it dehumanizes us, how it ultimately invites us to our own self-annihilation, then we can become the victim of war itself.

War also entertains us with its carnage, its killing fields, its thrills and chills and bloodied battles set to music and memorialized in books, on television, in video games, and in superhero films and blockbuster Hollywood movies financed in part by the military.

After a month of constant verbal gymnastics (and diarrhea from financial pundit sycophants who can't think creatively or originally and merely parrot their echo chamber in hopes of likes/retweets) by the Fed that the recent launch of $60 billion in T-Bill purchases is anything but QE (whatever you do, don't call it "QE 4", just call it "NOT QE" please), one bank finally had the guts to say what was so obvious to anyone who isn't challenged by simple logic: the Fed's "NOT QE" is really "QE."

In a note warning that the Fed's latest purchase program - whether one calls it QE or NOT QE - will have big, potentially catastrophic costs, Bank of America's Ralph Axel writes that in the aftermath of the Fed's new program of T-bill purchases to increase the amount of reserves in the banking system, the Fed made an effort to repeatedly inform markets that this is not a new round of quantitative easing, and yet as the BofA strategist notes, "in important ways it is similar."

Last night we heard some knucklehead on the War Channel (CNN) braying about Ukraine as a vitally important "ally and strategic partner". The implication, of course, was that the Donald’s attempted squeeze play on its new President was dangerously undermining national security.

What unadulterated tommyrot!

The safety and security of the American homeland has absolutely nothing to do with it. That’s because Ukraine is a no count, strategically irrelevant patch of earth that was long ago ruined by the old Soviet Union, and thereafter turned into an economic trainwreck by its own corrupt oligarchs – along with plenty of help from Washington interventionists.

As it’s a Friday I am contractually entitled to have a rant and whine about whatever I want to write about. Which, today, isn’t really the cut and thrust of markets.

To be brutally frank - we all know what the problems are: Too much money in the markets pushing up the prices of market assets. The fact is too much of that too much money is owned by too few people who use their too much money to buy all these financial assets. These too few people who own all the financial assets get richer everyday as their too much money makes their too many financial assets even more valuable. And these too few people get even richer by getting even more too much money to put into the already too expensive financial markets by “persuading” central banks to keep rates low, to buy financial assets through QE, and get their in-the-pocket politicians to enact tax cuts so their too much money is even more too much money…

With me so far??

pdate 2: Pretty soon, all of the students working to transform their campuses into fortresses against the Hong Kong police might be facing an even more formidable foe: The People's Liberation Army.

Foreshadowing the possibility that the Hong Kong protest movement could end with a Tiananmen Square-like mass-casualty incident - at least that's what we gleaned from remarks made by President Xi at the BRIC leaders summit in Brasilia.

According to a post on Weibo (China's answer to Twitter), Xi told his fellow BRIC leaders that stabilizing Hong Kong had become a serious challenge, and warned that "stopping the storm and restoring order" is a "most urgent task".

Here's a translation of the Weibo post, describing Xi's remarks.

Fidelity Investments in its third-quarter retirement report has a new warning for its greedy baby boomer clients: portfolio risk has never been higher as retirees are overly exposed to equities, running a serious risk that the next market meltdown could wipe out their retirement accounts, reported Bloomberg.

The report notes more than 33% of baby boomer clients have exceeded Fidelity's recommended allocation to equities.

But it’s even worse than it looks. And this time, there is no jobs crisis. This time, it’s the result of greed by subprime lenders.

Serious auto-loan delinquencies – auto loans that are 90 days or more past due – in the third quarter of 2019, after an amazing trajectory, reached a historic high of $62 billion, according to data from the New York Fed today:

This $62 billion of seriously delinquent loan balances are what auto lenders, particularly those that specialize in subprime auto loans, such as Santander Consumer USA, Credit Acceptance Corporation, and many smaller specialized lenders are now trying to deal with. If they cannot cure the delinquency, they’re hiring specialized companies that repossess the vehicles to be sold at auction. The difference between the loan balance and the proceeds from the auction, plus the costs involved, are what a lender loses on the deal.

The repo business, however, is booming.

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

I just keep tripping on how dumb this latest US-backed military coup is. It’s in Bolivia in case you’ve lost track, which would be perfectly understandable since US-backed coups have become kind of like US mass shootings — there’s so many of them they’re starting to blend into each other.

I mean, for starters the justifications for this one are so cartoonishly reachy and desperate it boggles the mind a bit. The main argument you’ll see in favor of the coup is that Evo Morales was elected after Bolivia’s high court ruled that he could run for a fourth term, but the (democratically elected) court ruled against a 2016 referendum on presidential term limits.

That’s it. That weird, pedantic appeal to a particular interpretation of bureaucratic technicalities is the whole entire argument in support of a literal military coup backed by the United States.

It was clear in yesterday's press briefing during President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's visit to the White House, where he didn't actually receive much push back from either President Trump or the press (at one point Trump requested that only a "friendly" reporter from Turkey ask questions of Erdogan), that the touchy subject of Turkey's acquirement of Russia's S-400 anti-air system was front and center in closed door conversations.

But Erdogan appeared unmoved by whatever pressure he may have faced in the Oval, given he later told reporters while standing next to the US president that Turkey cannot possibly discard the S-400 due to its strategic ties wit Russia, but he also added, “I’ve told Mr. Trump that we’re ready to buy Patriots.”

As the media are all out to get Trump, there is no way to get any valid information about the so-called impeachment. But you don’t have to pay too much attention to notice that the Democrats and the presstitutes are constantly changing the focus. The alleged whistleblower, who only had hearsay information, if that, has dropped out of the picture, being too compromised by his affiliations and prior meetings with Adam Schiff during which the “whistleblowing” was planned as an attack on Trump.

Documents allegedly leaked by the Ukrainian General Prosecutor's office to CD Media have shed light on payments from Burisma Holdings to Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC, a corporation controlled by Hunter Biden partner (and fellow former Burisma board member) Devon Archer.

Archer was Yale roommates with John Kerry's stepson Chris Heinz - the two of whom opened investment firm Rosemont Capital with Joe Biden's son, Hunter. Rosemont Capital is the parent company of Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC - the entity which receive the Burisma payments and in turn aid Biden.

The newly leaked records show 45 payments between November 2014 and November 2015 totaling $3.5 million, mostly in increments of $83,333.33. The payments correspond to Morgan Stanley bank records the New York Times reported on earlier this year. The records were submitted as evidence in a case against Archer who was convicted in a scheme to defraud pension funds and an Indian tribe of tens of millions of dollars.

Now that “Russiagate” has failed and “Ukrainegate” neatly takes its place, many questions arise. Will the Democratic Party, this time in open collusion with the intelligence apparatus, succeed in its second attempt to depose President Donald Trump in what might fairly be called a bloodless coup? Whatever the outcome of the thus-far-farcical impeachment probe, which is to be conducted publicly as of Wednesday, did the president use his office to pressure Ukraine in behalf of his own personal and political interests? Did Trump, in his fateful telephone conversation last July 25 with Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, put U.S. national security at risk, as is alleged?

All good questions. Here is another: Will Joe Biden, at present the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, get away with what is almost certain to prove his gross corruption and gross abuse of office when he carried the Ukraine portfolio while serving as vice president under Barack Obama?

As the media are all out to get Trump, there is no way to get any valid information about the so-called impeachment. But you don’t have to pay too much attention to notice that the Democrats and the presstitutes are constantly changing the focus. The alleged whistleblower, who only had hearsay information, if that, has dropped out of the picture, being too compromised by his affiliations and prior meetings with Adam Schiff during which the “whistleblowing” was planned as an attack on Trump.

SOURCE: RT
The Indian Army will soon reinforce its strength in Kashmir with hundreds of combat robots capable of lobbing grenades, overcoming obstacles, and carrying out search-and-rescue raids, local media report.
The Defense Ministry is looking for around 550 “robotic surveillance units,” each with a 25-year lifespan, according to Indian media, citing military sources. “These robots should be capable enough for water fording with minimum 20 cm depth,” an unnamed officer told Livemint.

Once acquired, the robots will be sent to the Rashtriya Rifles, the Indian Army’s counter-insurgency force. The unit will use them in built-up areas to gather intelligence on terrorists’ movements.

Aside from collecting imagery intelligence, the unmanned vehicles will be armed and capable of firing “suitable munitions at the intended target, for example, throwing grenade at places where the terrorists are holed up,” the source explained.

The so-called War on Terror launched by the United States government in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks has cost at least 801,000 lives and $6.4 trillion according to a pair of reports published Wednesday by the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

"The numbers continue to accelerate, not only because many wars continue to be waged, but also because wars don't end when soldiers come home," said Costs of War co-director and Brown professor Catherine Lutz, who co-authored the project's report on deaths.

"These reports provide a reminder that even if fewer soldiers are dying and the U.S. is spending a little less on the immediate costs of war today, the financial impact is still as bad as, or worse than, it was 10 years ago," Lutz added. "We will still be paying the bill for these wars on terror into the 22nd century."

A US military program dubbed ‘Insect Allies’ could be used as a biological weapon, a group of European scientists warns. The Pentagon’s research arm claims they are intended to defend crops, but doesn’t deny ‘dual-use’ potential.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology and the University of Freiburg in Germany, as well as the University of Montpellier, France, have published a critique of the program, dubbed “Insect Allies,” in the October 5 edition of Science.

They argue that “the knowledge to be gained from this program appears very limited in its capacity to enhance US agriculture or respond to national emergencies” and therefore the program “may be widely perceived as an effort to develop biological agents for hostile purposes and their means of delivery,” which would mean a breach of the Biological Weapons Convention.

SOURCE: MICHAEL SNYDER @ THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE
This week, the U.S. national debt reached the 23 trillion dollar mark for the first time ever. There was no fanfare, there were no politicians giving speeches about fiscal responsibility, and there has been very little national outrage. We have simply come to accept that it is “normal” for our national debt to grow at an exponential rate, but the truth is that we are literally committing national suicide. Given enough time, there is no doubt that this colossal mountain of debt will kill our Republic, and yet fiscal responsibility is not even a major national issue any longer. Everyone seems to be okay with the fact that we are stealing more than 100 million dollars every single hour of every single day from future generations of Americans and destroying the bright future that they were supposed to have. What we are doing to our children and our grandchildren is beyond criminal, and yet very few of us seem to care.

A week ago, Senator Rand Paul said that he might release the whistleblower's name.

Over the weekend, Senator Paul said the whistleblower's name should be released.

And today, Senator Paul has named the whistleblower publicly...Eric Ciamerella.

During a Wednesday interview on Washington, D.C.-based WMAL, Paul named Ciaramella himself and said he should be brought in testify to clarify whether he is indeed the whistleblower.

“I think Eric Ciaramella needs to be pulled in for testimony, and then I think it will be ultimately determined at that point,” said Paul.

“But I think he is a person of interest in the sense that he was at the Ukraine desk when Joe Biden was there when Hunter Biden was working for the Ukrainian oligarch. So simply for that alone, I think he’s a material witness who needs to be brought in.”

More than 50,000 Polish nationalists paraded on the streets of Warsaw for this year's Independence March on Monday.

Tens of thousands of people, waving Polish flags, were young and old, of all walks of life, with whole families took to the streets.

Poland shifted towards nationalism when Law and Justice (PiS) party came to power in 2015.

PiS has asked citizens to abandon Western liberalism for patriotism and Roman Catholic values.

Attendees lit flares and marched through the streets chanting more slogans: "Not Islamic or secular, but Catholic Poland," "No to abortion," and "Great Poland is our goal."

A thirty-eight million nation in the heart of Europe (i.e., with a population approximately the size of Spain's) has been revolting against the EU establishment and its view of European unity based on cultural and religious indifference and anti-nationalism.

Entirely to be expected, a new report in The Wall Street Journal has found that Turkish-backed Syrian forces currently fighting US-backed Kurdish groups as part of 'Operation Peace Spring' are guilty of war crimes, including summary executions of Kurdish civilians.

"U.S. military officials watched live drone feeds last month that appeared to show Turkish-backed Arab gunmen targeting civilians during their assault on Kurdish fighters in northeastern Syria, attacks the Americans reported to their commanders as possible war crimes, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the incidents," reports the WSJ.

What the report fails to mention, however, is the blatantly obvious and relevant recent history that the Islamist militants carrying out such atrocities are the very same militants which were a few short years ago funded, armed and trained by the CIA and Pentagon.

Big Tech can't seem to go one month without becoming involved in some new data privacy scandal, but this time, Google parent Alphabet has outdone itself.

Yesterday, WSJ broke a story about a deal between Alphabet and Ascension Health System, a Catholic non-profit that operates hospitals and nursing homes in 21 states and Washington DC. Ascension has more than 2,600 facilities, but its data - including critical patient data - is presently spread across 40 data centers in more than a dozen states.

But thanks to a deal between the two organizations that spawned Google's "Project Nightingale", all of that data are being moved into Google's cloud, and Google engineers are working on a system that they say could revolutionize how doctors use patient health data to make diagnoses.

Violent protests continued in Hong Kong for a third day on Wednesday, crippling transport links and clogging roads, and prompting many major companies in the city, including HSBC and BNP Paribas, to instruct employees to stay home from work to avoid the risk of physical harm.

And in anticipation of more violence tomorrow,the Hong Kong Education Bureau has said that all kindergartens, primary schools, secondary schools and special education needs schools will cancel class on Thursday for safety reasons, according to an official statement. Most universities in Hong Kong have suspended classes until next week or converted them to online-only for the rest of the semester. And after the clashes from earlier this week, more than 80 mainland Chinese students have been evacuated for their own safety.

A crisis is emerging across three continents as extreme weather conditions and disease are beginning to bite the farming industry leaving world banks warning the 2020s are set to be a decade of dramatic economic and social upheaval as another billion mouths will need to be fed. Meanwhile, Europe is losing 1000 small farms a day, due to a crop decline leading to price rises. Officials are using the word 'disaster' to describe the widespread crop failures happening all over America. In Asia pork prices this year have almost doubled after a quarter of the pig population has been slaughtered due to swine fever.

To anyone who ever doubted that Politifact was a left-wing blog acting under the guise of being an independent fact checker, look no further on their latest attempt at gas-lighting American voters.

In the past I’ve argued that Politifact is at least clever with their bias, often choosing to simply fact check more Republican or conservative statements than liberal ones to give the impression that those on the right are making falsehoods more often. Of course, there have been times when they’ve slipped up, fact-checking nearly identical claims from Republicans and Democrats and rating the former false, and latter true.

Christopher Steele became famous in the United States as the author of a “dossier” that claimed Russians had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Donald Trump “for at least 5 years.”

Now Steele is back, claiming that the Russians have been cultivating the Tories and Boris Johnson for . . . five years.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki condemned Netflix for inaccuracies in a documentary it debuted about World War II, Poland’s national press agency reported on Monday.

Mateusz sent a letter to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings accusing the film The Devil Next Door of “obfuscating historical facts,” including showcasing maps that “falsely places several German Nazi concentration camps within modern-day Poland’s borders,” according to the Polish Press Agency:

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

Experts are warning us that this will be a “freezing, frigid, and frosty” winter, and even though the official beginning of winter is still over a month away, it already feels like that in much of the country right now.

Authored by Michael Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Two days before Bolivian president Evo Morales was pushed out by the country’s military, Mark Weisbot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research penned a warning about what was happening, and what might unfold, in a Nation article titled, The Trump Administration Is Undercutting Democracy in Bolivia.

He noted:

Multilateral organizations like the Organization of American States (OAS) have a certain perceived impartiality because they are, in theory, controlled by a diverse group of nations. But sometimes a great power can wield a disproportionate influence. It could theoretically be a coincidence that both the Trump administration and the OAS have tried—without offering any evidence—to discredit Bolivia’s national election in the past couple of weeks. But it’s more likely that this dangerous, ugly, and destabilizing operation is being pushed by Washington.

A pair of Israeli airstrikes targeted senior Islamic Jihad commanders in Gaza and Syria early Tuesday, escalating Israel’s confrontation with Iran across the region and threatening to unleash another devastating round of cross-border violence with Palestinian militants.

In eastern Gaza, the Israeli strike killed Bahaa Abu el-Atta and his wife, setting off a furious barrage of Gaza-fired rockets that reached as far as the Tel Aviv heartland as Islamic Jihad vowed further revenge. The military said Abu el-Atta was the mastermind of recent attacks against Israel and the militant group’s top commander in Gaza.

Meanwhile, Syrian officials said an Israeli airstrike in the capital, Damascus, targeted another Islamic Jihad commander, Akram al-Ajouri, who was not harmed.

Saudi citizens found guilty of engaging in homosexuality and feminism could see themselves lashed or imprisoned in the ultraconservative kingdom, lawyers suggested.

The punitive measures could range from fines, to public lashing or even imprisonment, lawyer Nawaf al-Nabati said, according to al-Watan.

The remarks came just hours after Saudi Arabia listed feminism and homosexuality as extremist elements, on Friday, despite the kingdom’s ongoing drive to reform and relax its ultraconservative laws.
Saudi Arabia’s counter-extremism department announced the move on Twitter, where it warned its citizens and nationals to remain cautious against such groups.

"Extremism in all its forms is a societal scourge. It is important to remain cautious,” the statement said, before warning against hardliners who break away from religion to affirm their views.

Israeli forces shot and killed a young Palestinian man outside his home today in the al-Arroub refugee camp in the southern occupied West Bank district of Hebron.

Omar al-Badawi, reported to be 22-years-old, was shot in the abdomen near the front steps of his home in the camp during protests commemorating the death of revered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Eyewitness reports said that al-Badawi was exiting his home in an attempt to put out a small fire that had started nearby as a result of clashes between Israeli forces and local protesters.

A video, published by Quds News Network, shows al-Badawi slowly exiting an alleyway next to his home and waving a white towel — seemingly to indicate to soldiers that he meant no harm.