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At least 200 people still stranded after unseasonally heavy snowfall during China’s Golden Week holidayTrekkers have described facing “extreme” conditions after an unseasonable snowstorm during one of China’s busiest holiday weekends stranded hundreds of people on Mount Everest, prompting a massive rescue effort.Chinese authorities said about 350 people had made their way down but at least 200 remained stranded at the Everest Scenic Area, to the east of the mountain, on the Tibetan side of the border. Continue reading...

Donald Trump on Sunday was warned about yet another criminal prosecution that's coming his way.Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at George Mason University Scalia Law School and a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, over the weekend published a piece called "The Next Prosecution of Donald Trump" in which he claims "plans are under way to try him in the International Criminal Court.""This time he can strike first," Kontorovich argues.According to Kontorovich's analysis, the international court will try to "find a jurisdictional hook" in the president's actions."Before his second term began, President Trump was prosecuted repeatedly in state court, federal court and the Senate. After it ends, he could face trial in another venue, the International Criminal Court in The Hague," Kontorovich said. "The U.S. didn’t sign the Rome Statute and therefore doesn’t belong to the ICC, but the court can find a jurisdictional hook in actions the administration has taken abroad in ICC member states."Specifically, Kontorovich says Trump may have opened the door to his future prosecution with the recent attacks on purported smuggling boat operations."The strikes on Venezuelan narcoterror smuggling boats provide one possible avenue. Shortly after the U.S. Navy destroyed the first such vessel, Ken Roth, a former head of Human Rights Watch, endorsed ICC intervention. 'Trump just did what the International Criminal Court has charged former Philippines Pres. Duterte with doing—ordering the summary execution of alleged drug traffickers,' Mr. Roth tweeted," the professor wrote. "Venezuela is a Rome Statute party, which in the court’s thinking gives it jurisdiction over U.S. officials and servicemen involved in the attacks. The ICC has already launched an investigation against a nonmember state (Israel) based on a single boarding of a vessel flagged by a member state, so it has all the precedents it needs."He goes on to offer advice for how Trump can attack the ICC and circumvent the future prosecution.Read the piece here.

President Donald Trump used profane language to scold Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for trying to downplay progress on ending the war in Gaza.According to Axios, Trump expected Netanyahu to declare victory after Hamas agreed to return the remaining hostages, but wanted to negotiate other parts of the peace deal. Netanyahu, however, discounted the importance of the progress."Bibi told Trump this is nothing to celebrate, and that it doesn't mean anything," one source told Axios."I don't know why you're always so f------ negative. This is a win. Take it," Trump reportedly fired back.Netanyahu eventually accepted the conditions and ordered an end to air strikes in exchange for the hostages.In an interview with Axios on Saturday, Trump said that the deal gave Israel a "chance for victory." And he said Netanyahu had eventually agreed to get on board."He was fine with it. He's got to be fine with it. He has no choice. With me, you got to be fine," the U.S. president insisted.

Hamas has responded to the demands outlined by President Donald Trump in an effort to establish peace. According to Reuters, Hamas said on Friday it will release all Israeli hostages, alive or dead, under the terms outlined in the Gaza proposal. They have not signed onto the plan, but it's a significant first step in the direction of ending the war.

The world has often seen great wars ignited not by inevitability, but by weakness, hesitation, and betrayal. Cowards playing with matches.History shows that one of the biggest risk factors for war is an autocratic leader who fears for his own future. Which is why the kind of pathetic incoherence we saw at the United Nations this week should concern us all.This week’s news brings some alarming data points:After four different Danish airports were buzzed by what many assume to be Russian drones (Danes are uncertain), a French airport was hit yesterday and a Norwegian airport was shut down by drones earlier in the week.The US Navy fired Trident II D5 ballistic missiles from the coast of Florida, lighting up the sky as they were testing devices that could carry thermonuclear bombs deep into Russia.A massive US Navy presence in the Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela was just this week joined by F35s and Reaper drones as Trump has blown three Venezuela boats out of the water without congressional authorization.In an absolutely unprecedented move, Pete “Kegger” Hegseth has ordered all the US military’s flag officers and their staffs to come to Virginia for a meeting with an unknown agenda. This is not normal military procedure; it has the stench of authoritarian consolidation, the kind of maneuver history has shown us precedes purges, coups, and crackdowns.Russia is experiencing a nationwide fuel shortage (also in Russian-occupied Crimea) as the result of Ukrainian drones taking out refineries and depots across the nation. It’s so bad, the Kremlin has banned fuel exports until the end of the year. The nation’s economy is teetering and Putin is apparently in political trouble.Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister Wu Chihchung warns, “China is preparing to invade Taiwan.”Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, just said, “NATO and the European Union want to declare, in fact, have already declared a real war on my country and are directly participating in it.”NATO notified Russia that they may shoot down planes that invade NATO airspace, and Russia replied that “would be war.”As Russian jets cross NATO skies and intelligence warns of an impending strike, while Trump — desperate for a diversion from the Epstein/Trump sex scandal and a collapsing economy —appears to be trying to provoke a war with Venezuela, the question grows louder: are we watching the sparks of a new global conflict?And is the dangerous bond between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump the match that could light the fuse of World War III?Remember back in July when Trump told NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte (during a visit to the Oval Office) that if Europe would pay for the anti-missile defense systems Ukraine desperately needs he’d see to it that they were shipped over there promptly?President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted:“I’m grateful to our team and to the United States, Germany, and Norway for preparing a new decision on Patriots for Ukraine.”Rutte coordinated with Germany and Norway (and later other NATO countries) to raise the billions necessary to pay for the systems to replenish stocks held by European nations, particularly France, Germany, and Denmark, that those countries are supplying to Ukraine.The replacements should have arrived in Europe by now, a continent that’s increasingly on edge as Putin keeps flying MiGs over former Soviet client states in the Baltics.As they supply Ukraine — which is suffering under unprecedented attacks with hundreds of missiles and drones every night — Europe’s own stockpiles that could be used to deter Russian aggression are vanishing.Between that Oval Office meeting and now, however, Trump had his infamous red-carpet meeting with Putin in Alaska and apparently got different orders from his self-described friend and probable mentor.As Vivian Salama reports for The Atlantic, there’s been a sudden change in the Trump administration’s position with regard to providing NATO or EU countries with defensive weaponry to replace what they’ve given to Ukraine:“Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby said that he didn’t believe in the value of certain foreign military sales, according to two administration officials with knowledge of the discussion.”Adding to European concerns, news broke last week that a Russian Major General who defected claims Putin is planning a full-on invasion of both Ukraine and parts of the Baltic states — all NATO members — “before Christmas.”The British newspaper the Daily Express reported, in an article headlined “Russia's 'greyzone' invasion plan to start WW3 before Christmas revealed by defector”:“Moscow is preparing a ‘greyzone’ attack on Poland before Christmas, a senior Russian military official has revealed.“The warning, sent through an Eastern European ally during London’s DSEI arms fair last week, has triggered urgent discussions in the UK and US about the risk of a deniable strike aimed at fracturing NATO.”Poland, Romania, and Estonia have all seen Russian MiGs violate their airspace in the past two weeks, scrambling NATO jets as Poland and Estonia have invoked NATO’s Article 4 process to stand up to potential aggression.It appears to me (just my opinion) that when Putin met with Trump in Alaska either he ordered Trump to back away from Ukraine and NATO, or simply took the measure of the man and concluded he could launch an invasion of the Baltics with a low probability that the United States under the convicted felon would respond militarily. Trump’s recent blocking of Patriot systems to Europe suggests the former rather than the latter.Europe is taking this threat seriously. Great Britain this past week dispatched Royal Air Force jets to Poland with backup from Voyager tankers; they join German, French, Swedish, and Danish jets that began patrolling the eastern flank of the Baltic nations after the first Polish incursions.Donald Tusk, Poland’s Prime Minister, warned that his nation — and, implicitly, the region — is now closer to military conflict “than at any time since the Second World War.” The UK’s OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) Ambassador, Neil Holland, was explicit that these were not accidental incursions into NATO airspace:“Either Russia has deployed systems it cannot control, or it is provoking us deliberately.”According to the Express reporting, British intelligence isn’t expecting a full-on invasion of Eastern Europe but, instead — at least initially — the same sort of “deniable” pinpoint attacks Putin has used to precede his later, larger assaults on other nations including Georgia and Ukraine. One UK intelligence official said:“There’s no suggestion of a full-scale invasion. But a calibrated strike – something deniable, something confusing – is exactly how Russia has operated in the past.”He added:“They’re probing NATO. If they can strike Poland and NATO flinches — even slightly — it undermines the whole alliance.”At the same time, Russia has reportedly launched a full-scale “coordinated information warfare” assault on Finland via the internet and social media. Finland shares a 833-mile border with Russia, which, as the USSR, has invaded that nation twice in modern times, once in 1939 and again in 1941.Marco Giannangeli, Defence and Diplomatic Editor for Express, pointed out:“Western officials fear the disinformation campaign is intended to soften the ground for further provocations along the Gulf of Finland.”Putin’s apparently taking Trump’s TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) label to heart. Tragically, the entire world may soon see the consequence of a blustering, incompetent, race/deportation-obsessed, apparently terrified-of-Putin president who’s surrounded himself with people whose singular quality is not competence but loyalty and a willingness to break tradition and the law on the boss’ behalf.History will not forgive miscalculation at this scale. With Europe bracing for attack, NATO stockpiles running dry, Trump near provoking war with Venezuela, and Putin — in deep trouble at home — probing for weakness, the world stands at a perilous crossroads.The only question now is whether this moment will be remembered as the turning point that stopped another world war, or the disaster when Trump and Putin together opened the gates to it.

United States Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is revising a long-standing report aimed at gathering estimates of future threats to the United States. The reason, she said, is that those responsible for it failed to do their job and were too partisan. The New York Times reported Friday that Gabbard won't have the report gathered every four years to predict the challenges the U.S. will face in the coming decades. Typically, the intelligence community focuses on immediate concerns rather than a long-term examination of what to keep an eye on in the next several years.Gabbard's office claimed the National Intelligence Council’s Strategic Futures Group, which prepares the report, had “neglected to fulfill the purpose it was created for." Gabbard's statement said they were pursuing a partisan agenda in examining foreign threats. “A draft of the 2025 Global Trends report was carefully reviewed by D.N.I. Gabbard’s team and found to violate professional analytic tradecraft standards in an effort to propagate a political agenda that ran counter to all of the current president’s national security priorities,” the office said.Gabbard never worked in the intelligence field until she was confirmed in Feb. 2025. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was established after the Sept. 11 attacks, when an independent congressional commission found that there were intelligence failures and that what intelligence was gathered wasn't integrated with the military and domestic agencies, the website explains.

President Donald Trump has corrupted the Department of Justice to target his political enemies as part of a "cynical ploy" borrowed from Vladimir Putin, according to a former federal prosecutor.A federal grand jury indicted former FBI Director James Comey for making alleged false statements to Congress and obstruction of justice, both based on his denial that he had authorized leaks to the media about the 2016 investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails, and former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade published a column for Bloomberg examining the case on its merits."The indictment came a week after Trump posted a demand to Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge Comey and other perceived enemies, calling them 'guilty as hell,'" McQuade wrote. "Perhaps cognizant that the five-year statute of limitations would be expiring within days, Trump added, 'We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.'"That social media post made plain the DOJ was acting on Trump's orders, but he made that even more obvious by replacing the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who questioned the case's strength with a former personal attorney of his who has never prosecuted a single case before presenting the Comey evidence to a grand jury."By directing his DOJ to charge Comey, Trump appears to be borrowing a tactic from the playbook of Vladimir Putin," McQuade wrote. "According to Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser, Putin doesn’t try to convince the Russian people that he is honest. Instead, he works to persuade them that everyone else is corrupt.""It’s a cynical ploy meant to condition people to tolerate corruption," she added. "If voters believe that all public officials are crooks, then they will overlook the crooked leader who professes to share their values."Trump, of course, is the only president who has ever been convicted of a felony – all 34 counts against him in the only criminal case out of four in which he faced trial – and McQuade suspects his vindictive prosecution of Comey, and the others he's threatened, shows he's playing the same game as the Russian president he admires."If Trump can make people believe that indictments like the one targeting Comey are meaningless, then the indictments against him can be dismissed just as easily," McQuade wrote. "Indeed, following the Comey indictment, New York Democratic Representative Dan Goldman said, 'The problem is how are you ever going to know whether an investigation by the FBI, an investigation by the Department of Justice, is legitimate or is corrupt.'""Exactly," she added. "When everyone is corrupt, then no one is."

A promise made by Donald Trump to desperate American farmers during a press availability may blow up on him if the Supreme Court disagrees with his administration on tariffs.Appearing with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump was asked about farmers facing ruin, in large part because of the trade war he is waging on the world.Mistaking billions for millions, he initially replied by bragging about the money he claimed his trade tariffs were bringing in. “The other day, it was very interesting, they found $31 billion. They said, ‘Sir, we’ve found 31.’ I said, ‘You mean positively, right?’ They said, ‘Yeah, $31 million more than we knew.’ And they said, ‘We don’t know where it came from.’”He continued, “So what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be taking some money from all of the tariff money we’ve taken and we’re going to distribute it to our farmers, until the tariffs kick in to their benefit.” He added that they would “be making a fortune” due to his policies.This followed Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins stating on Wednesday that there is “potential” to distribute tariff money to beleaguered growers of crops like soybean, corn, wheat, sorghum, and cotton, who have complained that tariffs have decimated their businesses.However, as the New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling pointed out moments after Trump concluded his press conference, the Supreme Court might have something to say about that.“That plan could be completely upended, however, if the Supreme Court decides that Trump’s tariffs are illegal,” Houghtailing predicted.According to USA Today, an adverse ruling on tariffs, with a hearing expected after a hearing in November, would make that money unavailable because the U.S. government would then be obligated to refund between $750 billion and $1 trillion to those directly impacted by the tariffs already.The New Republic report added, “Of course, farmers may have avoided these difficult times altogether if Trump had never instituted his aggressive tariff plan to begin with. Tensions between the Trump administration and Beijing have practically halted trade with China, nixing a crucial market for American farmers. "The end result, according to insiders, is a mandatory bailout — which will weigh heavily on the American taxpayer’s dime.”