US Marines are landing in Iceland and warplanes are flying overhead in Scandinavia, just days ahead of the kickoff of Trident Juncture. The annual exercise, focused on the Arctic Circle and Scandinavia, is set to be the largest operation since the Cold War.

31 countries are involved, 29 NATO members and Finland and Sweden. They will overall be sending 50,000 troops, 10,000 vehicles, 150 warplanes and 65 ships. Starting Thursday, the exercise will last a month.

And while officials insist it’s not strictly along the Russian border, Russian military officials say it is close enough, and clearly targeted at growing Russian interests in the Arctic Circle, as warmer temperatures open up new route.

Some terrible foreign policy ideas seem to have eternal life. One example is the proposal to expand NATO yet again by offering membership to Georgia and Ukraine. That campaign has gone on for more than a decade and is a significant factor in the West’s deteriorating relations with Russia.

Despite the intra-Alliance resistance to the Bush administration’s campaign to offer MAPs to Kiev and Tbilisi, though, the outcome of the Bucharest summit was not a total defeat for U.S. ambitions. The summit’s final declaration stated that “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” There was no timetable but the ultimate outcome seemed clear.

The U.N. humanitarian chief says the conflict in Yemen has left 8.4 million people dependent on emergency food assistance and 75 percent of its 22 million people requiring some form of aid.

Mark Lowcock warns in an analysis obtained Monday night by The Associated Press that humanitarian officials "estimate that 3.5 million to 4 million more people could become severely food insecure in the months ahead."

The analysis, which is to be the subject of a briefing to the Security Council on Tuesday, says 3 million Yemenis are malnourished, including 1.1 million pregnant women "and more than 400,000 severely acutely malnourished children."

In a worst case scenario, Lowcock warns that if current trends continue, food needs could increase "by as much as 62 percent."

Google is not covered by the draft law intending to limit foreign participation in news aggregators, Deputy Head of the Russian telecom regulator Roskomnadzor Vadim Subbotin told TASS on Monday.

"Traffic at the time of considering the issue regarding its inclusion into the register of news aggregators was insufficient," Subbotin said. "It is not included into the register of news aggregators now," he noted.

Google "is not covered" at present by the submitted draft law in case it is approved, Subbotin added.

Authors of the draft law say in the explanatory note that "restrictions are offered for the purpose of preventing the threat to public order in Russia and creating thereby comfortable conditions for development of the civil society." Provisions of the bill stipulate a six-month term to bring constituent documents of companies in compliance with new rules.

The TSA has released its roadmap to use biometrics technology in the coming years. The Verge reports:

Customs and Border Protection has been using facial recognition to screen non-U.S. residents on international flights since 2015, a project that was expedited by the Trump administration. Last year, the U.S. government laid out its plans to start expanding the screening tools to U.S. citizens, which would require them to undergo facial scans when they leave the country through a system called the Biometric Pathway. Today's news lays out how the TSA will adopt the same technology, partnering with CBP on biometrics for international travelers, expanding security operations to TSA Precheck members, and eventually, using facial recognition to verify domestic travelers.

Unbelievably – Rothkopf has the audacity to criticize Trump for having “repeatedly shown great fondness for foreign leaders—even despots and known murderers, human rights abusers and criminals”, while Rothkopf himself is literally a paid agent working to disseminating propaganda for one of the most repressive regimes on the planet, one that does much of the Saudis’ dirty work for it in Washington. And the fact that the Daily Beast makes no disclosure of any of this is what makes this practice – having paid lobbyists and consultants for foreign regimes and corporations masquerade as objective and neutral analysts of the news – such a massive journalistic scandal and fraud.

– From today’s Intercept article: MSNBC and Daily Beast Feature UAE Lobbyist David Rothkopf With No Disclosure: a Scandalous Media-Wide Practice

Humanity has created more than 9 billion tons of plastic since the 1950s, when large-scale production of the material first took off. Of that total, a staggering 76 percent has gone to waste. These days, plastics are found in most table salt, marine life and the deepest parts of the ocean. So it any surprise that they have made it into our bodies, too?

A small study has detected microplastics in human excrement for the first time, raising larger questions about how the tiny particles can affect our health.

Plastic particles were found in all the stool samples of eight participants from Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the UK and Austria, researchers from the Medical University of Vienna and the Environment Agency Austria found. On average, 20 microplastic particles per 10g of stool were detected.

An explosive device was found at the Westchester County, New York, home of billionaire philanthropist George Soros on Monday afternoon.

In a statement to NPR, the Bedford Police Department said an employee of the house found a suspicious package in the mailbox. They opened it, revealing what "appeared to be an explosive device." The employee placed the package in a nearby wooded area and alerted authorities.

State and federal authorities responded to the scene in Katonah, a hamlet in the town of Bedford. A bomb squad was able to safely detonate the device, The New York Times reports.

After authorities were contacted, an "extensive investigation" involving the Bedford Police Department, the Westchester County Police Department, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the FBI, commenced.

The case has been handed over to the Joint Terrorism Task Force Division of the FBI, the Bedford Police Department says.

Body parts belonging to murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi have been found, according to Sky News sources, who added that he had been “cut up” and his face “disfigured.”
The sources’ claim echoes a statement by Do?u Perinçek, leader of the left-wing Vatan party on Monday night. Perinçek told Turkish television that Khashoggi’s “body parts” had been recovered from a well in the Saudi consul’s garden, and added that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would explain the findings later on Tuesday.

The news comes after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded Saudi officials reveal the whereabouts of Khashoggi’s remains, after the Saudi government admitted Khashoggi had been murdered, albeit in a “fist fight” with officials inside the consulate in Istanbul.

"Jamal Khashoggi's body parts have been discovered" - Sources have told @AlexCrawfordSky "grisly details" about how Jamal Khashoggi's body parts were discovered.

A judge in California on Monday upheld a landmark verdict in a case brought by a terminal cancer patient who successfully argued his illness resulted from his exposure to Monsanto's weedkiller RoundUp, but slashed the damages the agrochemical giant was originally required to pay from $289 million down to just $78 million and said she would order a retrial if former groundskeeper Dewayne "Lee" Johnson rejects the payout.

"The evidence presented to this jury was, quite frankly, overwhelming... We are happy the jury's voice was acknowledged by the Court, even if slightly muted."
—Johnson's team

Jurors had come forward to demand that San Francisco Superior Court Judge Suzanne Bolanos respect their historic verdict, issued in August. The judge had been considering a request for a retrial from Monsanto, but decided (pdf) instead to cut the punitive damages from $250 to $39 million.

"Paid protesters are real," writes the Los Angeles Times, after a lawsuit filed by a Czech investor against a business rival spotlighted the seedy, and very real business of people hired to express fake outrage, support, and everything in between.

According to a lawsuit filed by investor Zdenek Bakala, Prague-based investment manager Pavol Krupa hired Beverly hills company Crowds on Demand (COD) to stage a protest near Bakala's home in Hilton Head, SC.

In the Bakala case, Crowds on Demand is accused of spreading misinformation through a website, putting on protests and organizing a phone and email campaign targeting several U.S. institutions with ties to Bakala, who got an MBA from Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and had an estimated net worth topping $1 billion earlier this decade, according to Forbes. -LA Times

Crowds on Demand provides pop-up "protests, rallies, flash mobs, paparazzi events and other inventive PR stunts," according to its website.

"A photo emerged on Monday night that showed Stacey Abrams, Georgia's Democratic candidate for governor, burning the state's flag during a protest at Georgia's Capitol in 1992 while she was a freshman at Spelman College in Atlanta.

"Ms. Abrams’s role in the protest, which took place around the end of her freshman year at Spelman College in Atlanta, has begun to emerge on social media on the eve of her first debate Tuesday with her Republican opponent, Secretary of State Brian Kemp," The New York Times reported. "Mr. Kemp and his allies have sought to portray her as 'too extreme for Georgia.'"

The photo of Abrams burning Georgia's state flag "appeared in an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in June 1992" and showed Abrams "standing with students burning the Georgia state flag at the state Capitol."

Abrams' campaign released a statement on Monday addressing her flag burning, noting that Georgia's flag at the time partially incorporated the Confederate battle flag.

The creators of the ACT test announced on Wednesday that scores for the class of 2018 are the worst reported in decades. Math scores, in fact, are in freefall among ACT-tested U.S. high school graduates, falling to their lowest mark in 14 years, according to The Condition of College and Career Readiness 2018, the ACT’s annual report.

The report includes ACT test results from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

"The percentage of ACT-tested graduates who met or surpassed the ACT College Readiness Benchmark in math—suggesting they are ready to succeed in a first-year college algebra class—fell to its lowest level since 2004," the report declared, with only 40 percent of 2018 graduates meeting the benchmark, "down from a high of 46% in 2012."

The level of political violence in the U.S. is rising. The main reason for this, of course: the license given by our Establishment to the Antifa movement of Communist thugs. But will violence spread from the streets to the soldiers? I know, it sounds crazily apocalyptic. But it’s being discussed in Britain.

Twice recently—in Charlottesville last year, and in Portland, Oregon two weeks ago—we have seen municipal police forces deliberately stood down by their political superiors so that Antifa could control the streets. The Establishment’s media shills either find a way to frame the subsequent violence as someone else’s fault, as at Charlottesville, or else they just ignore it, as in Portland.

That is the context in which to evaluate the clashes in New York City on October 12 between Antifa activists and Gavin McInnes’s Proud Boys.

An explosive device was found on Monday at the New York home of billionaire George Soros.

Bedform police said the department received a phone call from the Soros residence in Westchester County about a suspicious package.

An employee that works at the home found the package and opened it, revealing what appeared to be an explosive device, according to a press release from the Bedford Police Department. The employee then placed the package in a wooded area until authorities arrived.

The department told Fox News that a suspicious package was found in a mailbox. The package contained bomb components, police said. Police referred Fox News to the F.B.I's New York office, which did not confirm the report.