Donald Trump has compared Rep. Adam Schiff's claim that Hunter Biden's alleged leaked emails are part of a Russian disinformation plot to Hillary Clinton calling Democrat Tulsi Gabbard a "Russian asset" similarly without evidence.
During a Tuesday Fox News interview, Trump addressed Schiff's evidence-free claim that the Hunter Biden email leaks, which detail his alleged dealings in Ukraine and China, were coming "from the Kremlin." The leaks were published by the New York Post last week.
"It's just crazy," Trump said of the theory, referring to the Democratic congressman as "Shifty Schiff" and a "sick" man, who was purposefully obfuscating the issue.
President Trump derided Anthony Fauci as a "disaster" and claimed that Americans have tired of the novel coronavirus during a call with campaign staff on Monday.
"People are tired of COVID. Yup, there's going to be spikes, there's going to be no spikes, there's going to be vaccines. With or without vaccines, people are tired of COVID," Trump said on the private call, according to audio obtained by The Hill. "I have the biggest rallies I have ever had and we have COVID. People are saying whatever, just leave us alone. They're tired of it."
Trump then accused Fauci, the top U.S. infectious diseases expert, of providing inconsistent advice about the coronavirus pandemic and claimed baselessly that if he had followed all of Fauci's advice the United States would have "700,000 to 800,000 deaths right now."
Comment: Trump just gave the Dems their latest laser pointer dot to chase:
Trump's tweets are just a small part of his Monday criticisms against Fauci. He also blasted the doctor in a campaign call reporters were invited to listen to, and then again while speaking to reporters in Phoenix, Arizona.
While Fauci has been frequently criticized by conservatives for his support of lockdowns to battle Covid-19, his popularity with Democrats has been growing. Presidential candidate Joe Biden has said he would give Fauci the opportunity to continue working with the White House on the pandemic if he won the election.
Thus, Democrats have not taken Trump's latest criticisms of the doctor all that well with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and others targeting the president on social media.
Biden also released a statement condemning Trump's Fauci comments and claiming he is waving the "white flag" on the pandemic.
Many conservatives, however, have celebrated Trump so openly targeting and trolling Fauci.
Fauci was not the only one coming in for Trump's scorn on Covid, singling out CNN:
President Donald Trump has called CNN "dumb bastards" for focusing news coverage on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump made the remarks during a campaign rally in Prescott, Arizona on Monday. The president's supporters cheered when he said that the public was tiring of the pandemic, while insulting the news network and claiming it is attempting to dissuade voters from participating in the election.
The president has long targeted CNN at his rallies and elsewhere, calling it "fake news" for including unfavorable coverage of him. In a particularly colorful July 2017 tweet sharing a doctored video of his 2007 WWE professional wrestling appearance, Trump appeared to be physically tackling and attacking a man with the CNN logo superimposed onto his head.
The former head of the OPCW has defended the whistleblowers who alleged that it engaged in a cover-up of exonerating evidence in Douma, arguing efforts to silence him prove the dissenters right.
Jose Bustani, the OPCW's founding director general, has fiercely defended the inspectors who braved political pressure from their own organization along with the US and its allies to expose the apparent cover-up of evidence countering Washington's hole-filled narrative that Syrian President Bashar Assad's government used chemical weapons in Douma in April 2018.
In an interview with the Grayzone, Bustani lamented the political co-option of the body he helped establish by the US, which - together with its allies, including Britain and France - barred him from testifying before the UN Security Council earlier this month, using the bizarre excuse that he lacked the expertise to speak about the operations of the organization he once led.
Not only are the Douma whistleblowers "extremely competent...extremely professional and extremely reliable" - trusted colleagues from his early days at the OPCW - but the group's very reluctance to hear them out signaled it lacked confidence in its own revised conclusions of Syrian guilt in the Douma attack, Bustani told the outlet. The body's insistence Assad had used chemical weapons was held up after the fact to justify US airstrikes on Damascus.
Bahrain and Israel have signed a joint communique to formalise ties during a visit by an Israeli and US delegation to Manama to broaden cooperation that Washington has promoted as an anti-Iran bulwark and potential economic boom.
Bahrain followed the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in agreeing last month to normalise ties with Israel in US-brokered deals, stunning Palestinians who had demanded statehood before any such regional rapprochement.
The UAE and Bahrain became the third and fourth Arab states to agree to normalise ties with Israel, following Egypt's peace deal with Israel in 1979 and a 1994 pact with Jordan.
For the US allies, it is a chance to close ranks on Iran more overtly.
The Israeli delegation, which flew on an El Al Israel Airlines charter flight from Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, was accompanied by US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin.
A teacher beheaded on a street near Paris on Friday afternoon has been named as Samuel Paty by French Education MinisterJean-Michel Blanquer.
The suspected killer, who was armed with a knife and a plastic pellet gun, was later shot dead by officers in a nearby town, police said.
French authorities have launched an anti-terror investigation.
President Emmanuel Macron called it an "assassination" and an "Islamist terrorist attack".
Here's what we know about the attack so far:
Who was the victim?
Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher, was decapitated near the school in the commune of Conflans Saint-Honorine, northwest of the French capital, at around 5 pm local time.
Police told the AFP news agency that he had hosted a class discussion with secondary school students about cartoons of Islam's Prophet Muhammad.
French police have detained four people, including a minor, in connection with the brutal slaying of a schoolteacher in Conflans-Saint-Honorine near Paris, which was described by President Emmanuel Macron as Islamist terrorism.
Five more people were taken into custody after the raid, according to unconfirmed French media reports. Among them is the suspect's father and several people who were involved in a row with the victim, a school teacher, which allegedly triggered the crime.
The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which was targeted by Islamists for publishing cartoons of Islam's Prophet Mohammed, has called for a public rally in the wake of what is seen as a copycat killing of a schoolteacher.
The publication, known for its no-holds-barred approach to satirical cartoons, has called on the French people to show up on Sunday in the iconic Paris Place de la Republique square. The protest is being organized in league with the French teachers' union and freedom groups, Charlie Hebdo said.
UPDATE (10/19): Abdoulakh Anzorov reportedly tweeted an image of Mr. Paty's head after the murder. Some of Paty's students may have seen the image, which included this message: "From Abdullah, the servant of Allah, to Macron, the leader of the infidels, I executed one of your hell dogs who dared to belittle Muhammad." Paty had been doxxed online after he showed the image of a naked Mohammed cartoon. Any angry father whose daughter was in the class called on Muslims to take action against the teacher. After that, Paty's personal information showed up online.
Russian authorities say they have no powers to open up their own investigation into Anzorov, but will keep in touch with French officials. They added that he had been radicalized in France (he lived there since he was six), so there's not much they can do.
Meanwhile France intends to strengthen their control over Islamist group funding. And French police have made a number of arrests in operations against Islamist radicals:
The authorities have launched more than 80 probes into the spread of hate online, [the interior minister] said.
Never has the government mobilized so many resources to fight Islamism on social media.
Darmanin said that around 50 Muslim groups will be inspected by the authorities this week. "Several of them, as per my proposal according to the president's request, will be dissolved by the Council of Ministers."
One of the groups in the crosshairs is the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), a human rights NGO chronicling attacks on Muslims, according to its website. Darmanin linked the group to the parent who had "launched a 'fatwa' against the teacher."
A certain number of elements allow us to believe that [this group] is an enemy of the Republic.
The minister said he will also ask for another Muslim NGO, BarakaCity, to be dissolved. Its founder, Idriss Sihamedi, was detained last week following an online harassment complaint by a media columnist.
...
Journalist Zineb El Rhazoui accused the CCIF of participating in a "harassment campaign" against the slain teacher, and similar allegations were made by lawmaker Aurore Berge. The CCIF rejected these allegations as "false," denying any ties to the case.
BarakaCity head Sihamedi, meanwhile, said that the dissolution of the group cannot happen "in the snap of a finger," and would be "illegal," because Darmanin is "not a king in an absolute monarchy."
UPDATE (10/20): The French mosque responsible for sharing a video online thought to have provoked the murder (though it didn't include Paty's name or any calls for violence) expressed regret for doing so. But the French interior ministry has now demanded the mosque be closed down for six months.
The father who initially called for action to be taken against the teacher online allegedly issued a fatwa against the teacher, according to Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin. Before the murder, he was in contact with Anzorov, the young Chechen who ended up beheading Paty:
The news contradicted earlier reports claiming the killer had no contact with, or knowledge of, Paty or the school where he taught - despite allegedly having asked specifically for the 47-year-old history and geography teacher's whereabouts upon arriving at the school on Friday. ...
The father and several of his relatives have since been arrested in a crackdown on "Islamic terrorism" following Paty's killing, as the French government acknowledged it had not done enough to police extremist organizations. Five students have also reportedly been arrested for allegedly helping Anzorov identify Paty in exchange for money.
France's L'Express magazine reprinted Mohammed cartoons, some of which were reportedly those shown by Paty in class.
Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach has claimed a second laptop belonging to Hunter Biden's business contacts in the country has been seized by law enforcement there
A Ukrainian lawmaker has claimed a second laptop belonging to Hunter Biden's business contacts in the country has been seized by law enforcement there.
Andrii Derkach posted to Facebook on Friday to say there is a 'second laptop' involving evidence of corruption and connected to the Bidens, The Daily Beast reports.
Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, has said foreign sources did not provide the Hunter Biden emails first reported last week. He says a laptop containing the correspondence and intimate photos was simply abandoned in a Delaware repair shop and the shop owner reached out to Giuliani's lawyer.
Derkach is one of Giuliani's principal contacts and was mentioned in an August intelligence assessment that described a concerted Russian effort to disparage Biden. A Treasury Department sanction announcement from last month characterized Derkach as an 'active Russian agent for over a decade.'
Trump wrote to Assad in March proposing 'direct dialogue' over the release of one of the US citizens, reports WSJ
In a dramatic turn of events, it was revealed that the United States sent Kash Patel, deputy assistant to President Trump and the top White House counterterrorism official, to talk to the Syrian government regarding the release of two Americans being held by the Syrians. It is not known currently with whom Patel met. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the story.
The two prisoners are Austin Tice and Syrian-American Majd Kamalmaz. There are also four other Americans believed to be held by Syria.
Tice is a former Marine officer and freelance journalist who was kidnapped in 2012 while covering the Syrian Civil War. Majd Kamalmaz is a psychotherapist who was treating refugees in the region. In February 2017, he had traveled to visit an elderly family member in Damascus. A day after arriving, Kamalmaz was stopped at a Syrian Government checkpoint in Mezzeh, a suburb of Damascus, and has not been seen or heard from since that day.
As countries are furiously stocking food in anticipation of global food shortages, 'experts' are now calling COVID-19 a Syndemic "COVID-20," requiring a 'social vaccine' comprising Universal Basic Income & nutrition, free education, huge dietary changes. The technocrats will stop at nothing, including engineered food shortages, to push their Great Reset into global communism and transhumanism. Christian breaks it down.
Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien sent a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates Monday urging the group to release a new set of topics ahead of Thursday's third and final debate and to refrain from adding any additional rule changes.
NBC News' Kristin Welker, the third debate's moderator, released her selected topics for the third debate on Friday, which included national security, fighting COVID-19, race in America, leadership, American families, climate change and leadership.
The Trump campaign's letter reads, that Welker's selected topics "are serious and worthy of discussion, but only a few of them even touch on foreign policy," as is typical of the third presidential debate.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo is the latest Democrat to cast doubt on a potential Covid-19 vaccine, saying he is "not that confident" in the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
In a Monday morning interview with ABC's 'Good Morning America', Cuomo claimed the CDC and FDA "don't have any credibility" while President Donald Trump is in office and the public should be "very skeptical" of any vaccine pushed out.
"I'm not that confident, but my opinion doesn't matter. I don't believe the American people are that confident," the governor said. "I think it's going to be a very skeptical American public about taking the vaccine, and they should be."
When a vaccine does become available, Cuomo says states will need independent doctors to test it on their own to ensure it's "safe," which is what he plans to do in New York.
Comment: Trump just gave the Dems their latest laser pointer dot to chase: Fauci was not the only one coming in for Trump's scorn on Covid, singling out CNN: