The following special report comes to us from our Russian correspondent, Anoniy Mouseevich Stenographov. Anoniy risked his life smuggling this information out of Russia, but he fears for the safety of his family due to the explosive nature of the Russian national secrets revealed here.

Four years ago, the UK's Daily Express revealed to the world one of the Kremlin's best-kept secrets: Russian President Vladimir Putin is insecure about his height. One year ago, the New Yorker's Robin Wright confirmed this, using her astute knowledge of Putin's inner psyche to conclude: "Putin is still a little man strutting to be one of the big boys."

This information continues to be relevant, and several sources within the U.S. and UK intelligence communities have confirmed to us that it is perhaps the key piece of intelligence that will help the free and democratic world win the New Cold War. While they couldn't share all their plans with us for reasons of national security, they did tell us one thing: part of the plan involves interfering in the elections of as many foreign nations as possible in order to 'elect' tall leaders (like Trump at 6'3", Imran Khan at 6'2", and Aleksandar Vucic at 6'6"). The hope is that the intimidating height of such competitors will slowly wear on the Russian president's self-image until he does something to catastrophically weaken his stranglehold on Russian politics, thus paving the way for the election of someone more willing to sell Russia to the highest bidder, like Alexey Navalny.

Here's what the Express said at the time, quoting their source in the Kremlin:

The Russian president was hosting a group women at the presidential palace in Moscow to celebrate International Woman's Day. However, Putin's aides forgot to tell the invited group not to wear high-heels, leaving several of the guests towering over the Russian leader - who is famously self-conscious about his height. A Kremlin insider said strict rules dictate no one can be taller than the president - who is believed to be between 5ft 2" and 5ft 5" - in official photos.

"That's why his bodyguards are always shorter then [sic] he is, to give the impression Putin is a tall person," the source revealed. However that diktat appears to have been ignored in the most recent images of Putin, which show a handful of the 14 invited women dressed smartly but with accompanying high heels. According to the insider, the women were told to bend down during the photo call to make Putin appear slightly taller.

"They were told to try and squat down a little bit during the official photo session," the source said. They added: "Fourteen women were selected and invited to the Kremlin to take part in the official meeting with [the] president. In line with Kremlin rules, no one can be taller than he is to avoid causing embarrassment in pictures and video."

SOTT.net can confirm that this insider was subsequently ferreted out by the FSB and is currently serving time in Putin's personal secret gulag, where he is forced daily to repeat the phrase, "President Putin is the greatest and tallest leader the world has ever known." Our own Russian sources tell us that the women photographed with the Russian president have not been seen since the unfortunate event. Their whereabouts remain unknown - even to our highly-placed sources within the Kremlin. Only Putin knows their fate.

Selfies are a matter of skill. Finding the right angle, getting the light right, working the pose correctly: all of these come together to capture the perfect selfie. Over the years we've seen several famous persons work the selfie like no one else ever could. Checking all the right boxes, they have always been considered as setting the bar in clicking selfies.

But get over them Kardashians! We now have the very handsome gorillas of Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo, who are pushing all barriers in the department of taking selfies!

The Virunga National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site situated in the lush forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The past few years of military turmoil in the region has left the site in danger of being open to damage from the war as wells as poaching activities. However, over 600 rangers have come together to save this Heritage Site and protect the gorillas inhabiting it. Virunga's website presents more such information.

It also boasts of the bravery of these rangers who equip themselves with special fighting skills in order to be prepared for any sort of emergency situation. They fight off threatening elements and help save several members of the gorilla family, including the world's critically endangered Mountain Gorillas.

After tirelessly poring over the Special Counsel's recently released findings, The Onion can confidently report that our award-winning team of legal analysts have concluded their official count of how many pages are in the Mueller Report. The Onion has employed a rigorous, exhaustively thorough multi-stage process to unequivocally confirm the exact page count of the document, and we're proud to share our verified results with the world today: The Mueller Report is 448 pages long.

It was not easy to arrive at such a specific conclusion. We established that the report was really long when we unsuccessfully tried to staple the thick stack of papers together, so our best-in-the-field legal experts deployed several methodologies and then cross-referenced each individual result to bolster the veracity of our findings. Our first approach was to comb through the report sheet by sheet and keep a running tally of each page. The legal scholars then determined beyond a reasonable doubt that there weren't two pages stuck together.

Both CNN and MSNBC saw a ratings dive this week after the Mueller report determined there was no collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia in the 2016 election, while Fox News appears to have done very well in the wake of the news.

CNN has waved away the drop in ratings, claiming it is just because there's not that much news this week that they would like to report on.

Glendale, California - A man was rushed to the hospital yesterday after encountering a slightly different viewpoint than his own Wednesday.

Shortly before 12:30 p.m., Glendale PD officers responded to a 911 call at the Java Lounge Coffee House in the 900 block of North Emerson Road. They found a person who had collapsed in shock and went to the station for help. Witnesses say the man was having a casual conversation about politics with another patron when the minutely opposing viewpoint was expressed.

"They were both Democrats, Bernie supporters," said Janice Hughson, a barista at the Java Lounge. "Then the guy he was talking to said he had some issues with abortion and thinks there should at least be a few limitations put on the practice. That's when the man seized up and began foaming at the mouth. It was terrible."

Titania McGrath, 24, is a radical intersectionalist vegan activist, feminist slam poet and the author of Woke: a Guide to Social Justice. She won't meet me in person for security reasons - she fears doxxing - or send me a photograph of her face. Rather, she consents to an interview by email from her gîte in the Buis-les-Baronnies district of France, where she is 'working on a new anthology of slam poetry which will end the patriarchy' in the nude. This is from her poem Cultural Appropriation:

Plunderbeast of history.

My ancestors scream in your hollow wigwam,

Ghostrolling in the ectoplasm of your hate.

I staunch the flow of simpering tribal sauce,

A digital sombrero clings deafblind

To a face falsely smeared in a coalish hue.

She wrote Woke because, 'I was permanently banned from Twitter for a whole day. This gave me time to reflect on my subjugation as a woman in a patriarchal world and write a book about my oppression. The entire document is a masterpiece unparalleled in the history of the written word'.

I am not sure a book dedicated to the destruction of the Capitalist patriarchy should be available on Amazon but there is no contradiction for Titania: 'I'm attempting to destroy the capitalist system from within, and the only way I can do that is to make a shit-load of cash'.

A 47-year-old Austrian man, Joachim Assenheim, has been arrested by Venezuelan police in the Turkish Embassy in Caracas, where he has been living for nearly a decade. Mr Assenheim originally entered the Embassy back in November 2009, claiming that the Venezuelan Government was about to arrest him and extradite him to Russia, where he is wanted for publishing footage on his site - Web-Hinweisgeber (Web-Whistleblower) - showing Russian servicemen committing atrocities and war crimes against unarmed civilians during the 2nd Chechen War.

Mr Assenheim was dragged from the Embassy early in the morning by the Policía Nacional Bolivariana - Nicholas Maduro's loyal police force -, after the Turkish Government, under huge pressure from Moscow, finally revoked his Turkish citizenship, which Ankara had granted back in late 2015, at a time when relations between Turkey and Russia had soured. Although speculation had been rife that Mr Assanheim was about to be evicted and arrested, the indictment itself took some by surprise, since it does not focus on his publishing of the footage, but rather on his alleged involvement in procuring it. However, according to a US State Department official, this is merely a fig leaf, intended to cover what will happen to Mr Assanheim if and when he is extradited to Moscow:

"The only reason they've chosen not to indict Mr Assenheim for publishing the material, is because a number of other media outlets around the world also published it, for which we can all be very thankful for their role in exposing the war crimes committed by Russian forces. If the Russian Government were to go after him on these grounds, they'd face internal pressure to go after the other journalists that published the same material. However, nobody should be fooled by the limited nature of this indictment. We all know that if Mr Assanheim is extradited to Russia, his trial will be held in secret, with no access to legal representation, and you can be sure that they will add to the charges and make sure that he never sees the light of day again."

The extradition treaty between Moscow and Caracas means that the Putin regime doesn't need to present any evidence against Mr Assanheim - it only needs to make allegations. This means that Moscow can ask for, and expect to receive, anyone it dislikes from Venezuelan territory, regardless of whether there is any actual evidence against them, and also irrespective of whether their alleged crime was committed in Russia. According to experts on International Law, this creates a highly dangerous situation. It also goes to show the lengths that the Russian Government is prepared to go to cover up its crimes and ensure that nobody who dares to reveal them can feel safe.

Pleasant View, TN-Local pastor Mike K. Bell scheduled a special prayer meeting for Sunday night at the exact time of the Game of Thrones premiere so as to see which members of his congregation were real Christians and which ones were filthy heathens that need to repent.

The special meeting will include a time of prayer for the nation, the church, and the hopelessly lost sinners who stayed home to watch Game of Thrones.

"We will be meeting here Sunday night at 9/8 central," he told his congregation last Sunday. "And we will be taking attendance."

U.S.-A coalition of groups and organizations has come together to officially redefine hate speech as "speech we don't like."

The coalition included several dictionaries, the SPLC, the majority of colleges and universities in the nation, several Big Tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter, and the Democratic Party. Representatives from each of these groups came together at Harvard University to vote on and ratify the proposal officially changing the definition of "hate speech" to "speech we don't like."

"A lot of people are getting the wrong idea about hate speech," a representative from Instagram said. "They believe hate speech actually has to be hateful to qualify. So I think we need to clarify terms here. For instance, we just deleted a post that a lot of progressives did not like. It wasn't hateful or anything, but they did not like it."

While many cat owners will passionately argue that their pets can understand what they're saying, it's understandable that the rest of us would brush off the suggestion with skepticism. However, as it turns out, cats are quite capable of understanding when their name is called out - even if, in typical feline fashion, they choose to shrug off the call and go about their business.

According to new research from Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan, that was published in Scientific Advances, while cats may not understand human language or the human conception of their name, many are able to pick out their name from a string of words. The research team called their findings "the first experimental evidence showing cats' ability to understand human verbal utterances."

Lead author of the study Atsuko Saito, led a previous study in 2013 that found cats are also capable of recognizing their owners' voice and had long suspected that cats were capable of gleaning at least some understanding from human vocalization - like other animals including dolphins, dogs, and parrots do.