Speaking at a bookstore in Manchester, N.H., Dr. Jill Biden urged voters on Monday to consider the "electability" of her husband, former Vice President Joe Biden, ahead of the 2020 Democratic primaries, and how they may have to "swallow a little bit" with the Democratic front-runner in order to defeat President Trump.

"I know that not all of you are committed to my husband, and I respect that, but I want you to think about your candidate, his or her electability, and who's going to win this race," Dr. Biden said.

"And so if you're looking at that you've got to look at the polls," Biden said. "If they're consistent and they're consistently saying the same thing, I think you can't dismiss that."

Is it too soon to ask: What have we gained from our longest war? Was all the blood and treasure invested worth it? And what does the future hold?

Friday, President Donald Trump met in New Jersey with his national security advisers and envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who is negotiating with the Taliban to bring about peace, and a U.S. withdrawal from America's longest war.

U.S. troops have been fighting in Afghanistan since 2001, in a war that has cost 2,400 American lives.

Following the meeting, Trump tweeted, "Many on the opposite sides of this 19 year war, and us, are looking to make a deal — if possible!"

Some, however, want no deal; they are fighting for absolute power.

Saturday, a wedding in Kabul with a thousand guests was hit by a suicide bomber who, igniting his vest, massacred 63 people and wounded 200 in one of the greatest atrocities of the war. ISIS claimed responsibility.

Monday, 10 bombs exploded in restaurants and public squares in the eastern city of Jalalabad, wounding 66.

Trump is pressing Khalilzad to negotiate drawdowns of U.S. troop levels from the present 14,000, and to bring about a near-term end to U.S. involvement in a war that began after we overthrew the old Taliban regime for giving sanctuary to Osama bin Laden.

Behind the scenes, some major events were set in motion last autumn that could soon change the tenor in Washington, at least as it relates to the debunked Russia collusion narrative that distracted America for nearly three years.

It was in September 2018 that President Trump told my Hill.TV colleague Buck Sexton and me that he would order the release of all classified documents showing what the FBI, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and other U.S. intelligence agencies may have done wrong in the Russia probe.

About the same time, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, under then-Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), voted unanimously to send 53 nonpublic transcripts of witnesses in its Russia review to the director of national intelligence (DNI) for declassification. The transcripts were officially delivered in November.

Now, nearly a year later, neither release has happened.

To put that into perspective, it took just a couple of months in 2004 to declassify the final report on the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks after a presidential commission finished its work, which contained some of the nation's most secretive intelligence revelations.

But the long wait for transparency may soon end.

Yang Qiuyun's home in eastern China heaves under a mountain of paper files. They are scattered on top of cabinets, piled on the water dispenser and stacked up on her bed.

The files are filled with forms completed in her neat handwriting, records of the laborious work she carries out as one of 10 "information gatherers" in a village at the forefront of an experiment in social management: China's social credit system.

Every day, Yang, 52, roams Jiakuang Majia village with a pen and paper in hand, writing down every instance of free labour or other donations her fellow villagers make to the community - two points for Ma Shaojun for taking eight hours to install a new basketball hoop in the village playground; 30 points for Ma Hongyun for donating a 3,000-yuan (US$445) TV screen for the village meeting room; and 10 points each for Ma Shuting and Ma Qiuling who have a son serving in the army in Tibet.

Joe Biden, 76, has been getting heaps of attention for his verbal gaffes. Alas, voters should worry about a far bigger problem: It's impossible to know what he stands for.

Yes, some of his slip-ups can be head-scratching. Democrats choose "truth over facts," he said. Huh? The kids from the Parkland high school shooting — which happened after he left office — "came to see me when I was vice president."

He lamented "the tragic events in Houston" and "Michigan" rather than El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. He warned against giving President Trump "eight more years" and told backers to "go to Joe 30330," instead of texting him. And that's just recently.

Sometimes his flubs raise serious questions about what he thinks, as when he asserted that "poor kids" were as bright as "white kids," though he quickly corrected himself (as, to his credit, he usually does).

His advisers insist it's not his age but just "Joe being Joe." That's hardly consolation. Still, misspeaking isn't the worst of sins.

The bigger trouble is that, even when he's not mangling words, it can be hard to tell his true position — not just because he's inarticulate but because some of what he says is just plain bizarre. And because he's flip-flopped so furiously under pressure from his Democratic foes.

Vice President Mike Pence paid a visit to the Hudson Institute — a conservative Washington, DC, think tank — to give a wide-ranging speech about the United States' relationship with China. Standing stiffly in a shiny blue tie, he began by accusing the Chinese Communist Party of interfering in US politics and directing Chinese businesses to steal American intellectual property by "any means necessary." Pence then turned his attention to the country's human rights abuses, starting not with the persecution of religious minorities, but with a peculiar governmental initiative: the social credit project. Pence said:

"By 2020, China's rulers aim to implement an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life — the so-called 'social credit score. In the words of that program's official blueprint, it will 'allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.'"

The vice president's remarks echoed a steady stream of Western media reports, published in dozens of outlets over the past few years, that paint China's Social Credit System as a dystopian nightmare straight out of Black Mirror. The articles and broadcast segments often said China's central government is using a futuristic algorithm to compile people's social media connections, buying histories, location data, and more into a single score dictating their rights and freedoms. The government can supposedly analyze footage from hundreds of millions of facial-recognition-equipped surveillance cameras in real time, and then dock you points for misbehavior like jaywalking or playing too many video games.

The international reaction -- and especially the US' -- to the West Papua riot might influence Pacific geopolitics by potentially pushing Indonesia to choose a side in the New Cold War.

The eastern Indonesian region of West Papua was rocked by a riot in its capital city of Manokwari on Monday that resulted in the torching of the local parliament and was sparked by reports that the authorities used disproportionate force over the weekend when responding to claims that students from that part of the country who are studying in East Java supposedly disrespected the national flag on Independence Day. The police are accused of using tear gas to clear out a dormitory full of students and then temporarily detaining 43 of them after humiliatingly forcing them to "squat and waddle across the ground" first, according to Indonesian human rights lawyer Veronica Koman as quoted by The Guardian. She also said that racist chants and death threats were shouted against the students at that time too, which naturally inflamed the restive residents of West Papua who have long complained of continuous human rights abuses against them ever since their controversial incorporation into Indonesia following a UN-backed vote by a little more than 1,000 locals hand-picked by Jakarta to participate (they unanimously agreed to it).

The mineral- and LNG-rich but sparsely populated jungled territory remains woefully underdeveloped to this day despite having the world's largest and second-largest gold and copper mines, respectively, thus feeding into a simmering separatist movement that carried out two high-profile attacks last summer in the run-up to local elections there. The author analyzed the significance of this event at that time in his piece about how "The Papua Attacks Prove That Insurgency Is Still Alive In Indonesia", which builds upon earlier analyses about Indonesia's Hybrid War vulnerabilities and its future role in the emerging Multipolar World Order. Judging by what just took place on Monday, anti-government sentiment is extremely high in the region and capable of spilling over into violence if the indigenous society there feels like their people are being collectively humiliated in front of the eyes of the entire country after the nationwide scandal that erupted over the weekend following the flag incident. About that, the Indonesia Expat online information outlet quoted police spokesperson Brig. Gen. Dedi Prasetyo as saying that the entire thing was based on a hoax and that the authorities are searching for the person who spread the initial reports on social media that ultimately led to the riot.

Billionaire investor George Soros on Thursday said Chinese President Xi Jinping was "the most dangerous enemy" of free societies for presiding over a hi-tech surveillance regime.

"China is not the only authoritarian regime in the world but it is the wealthiest, strongest and technologically most advanced.

"This makes Xi Jinping the most dangerous opponent of open societies," Soros told a dinner audience on the margins of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Communist China under Xi has been building a cutting-edge system including facial recognition to keep tabs on its citizens, and Soros said it would be used to calculate how dangerous a threat individuals might pose to the regime.

Five years is a long time in politics. In 2014, relations between Russia and the West went into a nosedive over Ukraine and Syria.

The "annexation" of Crimea, the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner, and the conflict in eastern Ukraine destroyed the partial re-establishment of normal relations which had started in 2008 with President Obama's "re-set" and Nicolas Sarkozy's rapprochement with Vladimir Putin. This included the Georgian crisis of that year, of which the French president's decision in 2010 to sell two Mistral aircraft carriers to Russia was a potent symbol. The collapse in relations as a result of the Ukraine crisis led to EU and US sanctions against Russia, and to her expulsion from the G8 group of nations, as it then was, as well as to a war of words between East and West.

Vladimir Putin's visit on Monday to the fort at Bregancon, the official summer residence of the French president, demonstrates that that period is now officially closed. On every level, the West has now abandoned its earlier hostility to Putin and Russia. First, the symbolism: President Putin spends a lot of time governing from his own summer residence in Sochi, and the invitation to the Mediterranean coast, where the atmosphere is more intimate and relaxed than in Paris, was undoubtedly a gesture to Putin's predilection for warmer climes. The fact that the meeting took place just a few days before the Biarritz summit of what is now the G7 also shows that Paris intends to include Moscow in discussing world affairs at the highest level, even if it is unlikely that Russia will be formally readmitted to that structure. Even the substance of the meeting showed how much things have changed. When Emmanuel Macron said that Russia was essential to solving various crises in the world - Iran, Ukraine, Syria, the INF Treaty - he was announcing a 180-degree change in French and Western policy.

Attorney General William Barr removed the acting director of the Bureau of Prisons from his position Monday, more than a week after millionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein took his own life while in federal custody.

Hugh Hurwitz's reassignment comes amid mounting evidence that guards at the chronically understaffed Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York abdicated their responsibility to keep the 66-year-old Epstein from killing himself while he awaited trial on charges of sexually abusing teenage girls. The FBI and the Justice Department's inspector general are investigating his death.

Barr named Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, the prison agency's director from 1992 until 2003, to replace Hurwitz.

Hurwitz is moving to a role as an assistant director in charge of the bureau's reentry programs, where he will work with Barr on putting in place the First Step Act, a criminal justice overhaul.