China has stepped up its criticism of the United States over an intelligence services report into the origins of Covid-19, insisting it will be used as a political weapon.

In a phone call with Dutch counterpart Sigrid Kaag on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said the report was "bound to serve its own political purposes and seriously interfere with international anti-pandemic cooperation".

He said the US was "anti-science" because it "has ignored and abandoned the research report worked out by WHO experts, and asked its intelligence agencies to come up with a so-called conclusion on origins tracing within a limited time", according to a readout from the Chinese foreign ministry.

Former CIA and NSA head Michael Hayden has applauded treating fans of ex-president Donald Trump as subhuman - or at least second-class citizens, cheering a suggestion they be thrown out of the country and compared to the Taliban.

On Sunday, Hayden retweeted a post suggesting sending "MAGA-wearing unvaxxed" Americans to Afghanistan rather than sending the evacuation planes "back empty" after they deposited those fleeing the Taliban elsewhere, calling it a "good idea."

An elite Taliban fighting unit known as the Badri 313 Battalion has been spreading propaganda while wearing captured American military gear and posted one photo appearing to mock the iconic World War II photo, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.

It is believed that they came across the gear which used to belong to American soldiers and US allies while going on patrols in the captured city of Kabul. The unit has also been seen driving around in armored Humvees.

The Taliban are also reportedly searching "door to door" for US-involved collaborators and groups at this time. They are also reportedly negotiating with UNICEF on subjects such as women's rights to education.

The first impacts of Henri dropped record-breaking rainfall, giving New York City its wettest day in seven years

Henri had already delivered record-breaking rain totals and widespread flooding hours before its projected landfall Sunday afternoon. Heavy rain overwhelmed storm drains and drivers plowed through foot-deep water in a few spots Saturday night in New York City and New Jersey.

Now a tropical storm, Henri is still projected to bring another three to six inches of rainfall Sunday as the system moves over Long Island and into New England.

Flash flood warnings were issued beginning Saturday night and into Sunday morning throughout the five boroughs and northern New Jersey.

Ten people are dead and approximately 40 people are missing in Humphreys County after severe flooding rocked the community Saturday.

Crews were going house to house in search of the missing people late Saturday, Humphreys County Sheriff Chris Davis told The Tennessean. Davis said the flooding event is the worst he has seen in his 28 years with the department.

Power outages and a lack cell phone service has compounded the problems. Portable units will be brought in to help establish communication lines, Davis said.

Rural roads and highways throughout Humphreys County were washed away Saturday.

The Tennessee National Guard was deployed to the county to assist residents there after up to 12 inches of rain fell in parts of Middle Tennessee on Saturday and caused catastrophic flooding.

More than 15 inches fell in Humphreys County, prompting water rescues, flooding roadways and briefly closing a large section of Interstate 40. The Piney River also shattered record water levels, the National Weather Service Nashville reported.

On the menu today: The transcript of President Joe Biden's interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos dropped, and the president's incoherence, insistence that he was incorrectly briefed, denial that he was warned by his military advisers, and oddly low profile in the past week raise troubling questions about his ability to perform his duties.

What's Going On with President Biden?

After making no public appearances for four days — during a major foreign crisis — President Biden read a 20-minute speech off a teleprompter on Monday afternoon and took no questions. He immediately returned to Camp David. He had no events on his schedule Tuesday. On Wednesday, he gave another 20-minute speech about vaccine boosters off a teleprompter from Camp David, and again took no questions. Also on Wednesday, the president sat for an on-camera interview with George Stephanopoulos that did not go well. According to the White House public records, Biden has had two phone conversations with foreign leaders in the past ten days — one with Boris Johnson and one with Angela Merkel.

A lot of nonsense about Afghanistan is being written in Britain and the United States. Most of this nonsense hides a number of important truths.

First, the Taliban have defeated the United States.

Second, the Taliban have won because they have more popular support.

Third, this is not because most Afghans love the Taliban. It is because the American occupation has been unbearably cruel and corrupt.

Fourth, the War on Terror has also been politically defeated in the United States. The majority of Americans are now in favor of withdrawal from Afghanistan and against any more foreign wars.

Fifth, this is a turning point in world history. The greatest military power in the world has been defeated by the people of a small, desperately poor country. This will weaken the power of the American empire all over the world.

Sixth, the rhetoric of saving Afghan women has been widely used to justify the occupation, and many feminists in Afghanistan have chosen the side of the occupation. The result is a tragedy for feminism.

This article explains these points. Because this a short piece, we assert more than we prove. But we have written a great deal about gender, politics and war in Afghanistan since we did fieldwork there as anthropologists almost fifty years ago. We give links to much of this work at the end of this article, so you can explore our arguments in more detail.^[1]

A Victorian man will spend at least three months in jail after he helped organise an anti-lockdown protest for Sydney this weekend.

Anthony Khallouf was arrested at Hornsby Railway Station, in Sydney's north, yesterday afternoon and told officers he was lost.

But authorities were aware the 29-year-old had travelled from Queensland to NSW without a reasonable excuse, in breach of COVID-19 public health orders.

Khallouf had reportedly been staying at a hotel in North Sydney.

Today, in Hornsby Local Court, he pleaded guilty to four counts of not complying with a direction and one count each of encouraging the commission of a crime and making false representations resulting in a police investigation.

Magistrate Robyn Denes sentenced him to eight months in prison with a non-parole period of three months.

He will be released on parole on November 18.

Lloyds is planning to become one of the UK's biggest landlords as it aims to buy 50,000 homes in the next decade.


The banking giant is to charge tenants rent as a private landlord under its recently launched Citra Living brand.

The Financial Times, which first reported the story, said the bank was aiming to buy 10,000 homes by the end of 2025.

Lloyds is currently the largest mortgage lender in the UK, providing nearly one in four home loans.

A specter is haunting the world: the increasing prospect of a new totalitarianism under the extended covid response. Unlike the specter of communism, or the specter of "dissent" to communist dictatorship that Václav Havel ironically identified in his groundbreaking essay "The Power of the Powerless,"¹ this specter originates from those in power and not from the revolutionary or the powerless.² And rather than haunting only Europe or Eastern Europe, this specter casts its long shadow across the future of all humanity, such that one wonders how one might plan, if at all, for this future.

Mixed into this spectral fear are grave doubts promoted by some about the intentions of world leaders and a medical and technocratic elite apparently bent on new lockdowns, masking, and mandatory mass vaccinations.

Heterodoxies burgeon in the shadows. The mere mention of these heterodoxies will rank one among the heterodox. Nevertheless, I venture to name them. They include the belief that a mass eugenics program is underway and that the vaccination regime amounts to the greatest crime against humanity in world history. They include the belief that the entirety of the covid response has been nothing if not a means for increasing the power and control of the elite over the world population. And they include the more modest claim that "the science" being peddled by "the experts" has been hastily and erroneously construed and represents a grave series of errors, yet merely errors after all. Another claim is that the covid crisis, while real, has been opportunistically used by the ruling elite to further a preexisting agenda for resetting the world economic system and forever changing the shape of the social order (the Great Reset). These claims are not necessarily mutually exclusive and two or three may either be held simultaneously or all four juggled. That these and other heterodoxies are being rigorously suppressed, and that their messengers are either cancelled or vilified, or both, only lends them subterraneous force and adds to the overall anxiety, whether spoken or not. While I will not adjudicate all these claims, it is enough to say that their existence is part of the terror campaign that is the covid regime itself. It is as if the mendacity of the regime spontaneously generated them.