The U.S.-employed terrorists, Maghawir al-Thawra (MaT), have turned against their partners, the U.S. Army, stationed at al-Tanf base in the eastern Syrian desert. On October 4, the terrorists, who are employed as mercenaries by the U.S. military, attempted to break out of the illegal U.S. base using a large-caliber machine gun on the pickup truck they were driving. However, their break out was thwarted by the Syrian Arab Army who hold positions nearby and returned fire causing the MaT to retreat into the U.S. base.

Russian Major General Oleg Yegorov, deputy chief of the Russian Center for Reconciliation of the Opposing Parties in Syria, reported the incident on Wednesday.

The U.S. military had cordoned off al-Tanf base in the 55-kilometer deconfliction zone, shut down the internet, and ordered all mercenaries to lay down their arms and leave the base at once on foot. On September 27, to reinforce the message, U.S. coalition aircraft flew over the area and broke the sound barrier to drive home their insistence that mercenaries who refuse U.S. military orders must leave.

The military council of the MaT has rejected the U.S. military's decision to remove the former commander of the MaT and replace him with a man who is not a member of the MaT. The U.S.-employed terrorists stated, "... that it rejects any foreign intervention in the appointment of its revolutionary leadership." The MaT must not have understood that when you are on the payroll of the U.S. military you are obliged to follow their orders. Equally, the U.S. Army must not have understood that when you partner with Radical Islamic terrorists you cannot expect them to follow orders. As the saying goes, "When you feed a monster, it can turn to bite you."

Al-Tanf is an illegal U.S. military base in Homs province on the M2 Baghdad-Damascus Highway in the Syria-Jordan-Iraq border triangle. The outpost began in early 2016 under the command of the Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR). The MaT consists of at least 300 terrorists partnered with at least 200 U.S. troops. The Syrian government has demanded the U.S. leave its occupation of several bases in Syria.

According to Israeli defense sources, al-Tanf hosts around 350 military personnel and civilians, "including some British and French forces that were described as 'intelligence experts." CNN reported in August 2022, that there are approximately 900 U.S. troops in Syria, with most of them split between the al-Tanf base and Syria's eastern oil fields.

On September 29, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights sources reported that dozens of residents gathered near al-Tanf base to protest the coalition's decision and called on its command to appoint any other officer from the faction instead of an outsider.

Canada like many other countries may be on the cusp of a political revolution. To the chagrin of the mainstream media in Canada, Pierre Poilievre has been elected the leader of Canada's Conservative opposition party. As a result of his win, attacks on Poilievre have dramatically increased. He has been declared as "dangerous" and even reckless. In short, Canadian media is busy painting him as a mini Donald Trump.

In what is seen as a move to appease many of his critics Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently declared an end to Canada's vaccine mandate. This includes the policy of requiring travelers entering Canada to provide their vaccine passports and a slew of other restrictions and requirements. This took effect on September 30th and was considered partly in response to the growing threat of the populist sentiment popping up in Canada. Many Canadians had come to view Trudeau's vaccine dictate as overtly authoritarian, it reeked of government overreach and Gestapo-style tactics.

The United States has announced that it is preparing to impose new sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran because of so-called "human rights violations".

Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly also announced that she would impose new sanctions against 25 individuals and nine entities in Iran due to what she termed "repressive measures and violation of human rights and international law".

Is it really about human rights or the fact that Iran is resisting capitulation to Western hegemony?

On October 4, notorious US neoconservative John Bolton wrote a highly revealing op-ed for the military blog 19fortyfive.com. Its bold title concisely encapsulated the rabid warmonger's message - Putin Must Go: Now Is the Time For Regime Change in Russia.

Bolton outlined just what Washington's response to the Ukraine conflict - and, indeed, its policies towards Russia since the Cold War's ended - has always been about. Namely, the US Empire ensuring a pliable, servile leader - who doesn't stand in its way - is safely installed in the Kremlin, and that Europe, as a whole, remains subjugated to its economic, political, and military will.

That this state of affairs has been a top Anglo-American objective for some time is very clear. While Bolton's comments elicited enormous amounts of mainstream attention, a report published in June this year, which spelled out in even greater detail how the conflict could facilitate fulfilment of that long-standing goal, passed by unacknowledged.

Ever since Ukraine launched a successful counteroffensive against Russian forces in late August, American officials have tried to claim credit, insisting that U.S. intelligence has been key to Ukraine's battlefield victories.

Yet U.S. officials have simultaneously downplayed their intelligence failures in Ukraine — especially their glaring mistakes at the outset of the war. When Putin invaded in February, U.S. intelligence officials told the White House that Russia would win in a matter of days by quickly overwhelming the Ukrainian army, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, who asked not to be named to discuss sensitive information.

The Central Intelligence Agency was so pessimistic about Ukraine's chances that officials told President Joe Biden and other policymakers that the best they could expect was that the remnants of Ukraine's defeated forces would mount an insurgency, a guerrilla war against the Russian occupiers. By the time of the February invasion, the CIA was already planning how to provide covert support for a Ukrainian insurgency following a Russian military victory, the officials said.

U.S. intelligence reports at the time predicted that Kyiv would fall quickly, perhaps in a week or two at the most. The predictions spurred the Biden administration to secretly withdraw some key U.S. intelligence assets from Ukraine, including covert former special operations personnel on contract with the CIA, the current and former officials said. Their account was backed up by a Naval officer and a former Navy SEAL, who were aware of the movements and who also asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The CIA "got it completely wrong," said one former senior U.S. intelligence official, who is knowledgeable about what the CIA was reporting when the Russian invasion began. "They thought Russia would win right away."

The sabotage of the two Nord Stream pipelines leaves Europeans certain to be much poorer and colder this winter, and was an act of international vandalism on an almost unimaginable scale. The attacks severed Russian gas supplies to Europe and caused the release of enormous quantities of methane gas, the prime offender in global warming.

This is why no one is going to take responsibility for the crime - and most likely no one will ever be found definitively culpable.

Nonetheless, the level of difficulty and sophistication in setting off blasts at three separate locations on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines overwhelmingly suggests a state actor, or actors, was behind it.

Western coverage of the attacks has been decidedly muted, given that this hostile assault on the globe's energy infrastructure is unprecedented - overshadowing even the 9/11 attacks.

The reason why there appears to be so little enthusiasm to explore this catastrophic event in detail - beyond pointing a finger in Russia's direction - is not difficult to deduce.

It is hard to think of a single reason why Moscow would wish to destroy its own energy pipelines, valued at $20 billion, or allow in seawater, possibly corroding them irreversibly. The attacks deprive Russia of its main gas supply lines to Europe - and with it, vital future revenues - while leaving the field open to competitors.

Moscow loses its only significant leverage over Germany, its main buyer in Europe and at the heart of the European project, when it needs such leverage most, as it faces down concerted efforts by the United States and Europe to drive Russian soldiers out of Ukraine. Even any possible temporary advantage Moscow might have gained by demonstrating its ruthlessness and might to Europe could have been achieved just as effectively by simply turning off the spigot to stop supplies.

After last month's expansion of Twitter's crowdsourced fact-checking program known as Birdwatch, Twitter announced this morning the notes fact-checkers leave on tweets will now be visible to all U.S. users. That doesn't mean everyone in the U.S. will be able to participate in Birdwatch, however. The service had around 15,000 contributors during its pilot testing phase, and was planning to add around 1,000 more per week, Twitter said in September. If Twitter stayed on track with that goal, it would have grown to around 19,000 contributors as of this week.

The idea with Birdwatch is to add a layer of fact-checking and context to tweets that don't necessarily violate Twitter's rules. Instead, it can wade into gray areas to address misinformation across a range of topics beyond politics and science to also clarify, correct or add more information to tweets in areas like health, sports, entertainment and other random curiosities that pop up on the internet — like whether or not someone just tweeted a photo of a bat the size of a human, Twitter had recently explained.

"The issue of creating an international reserve currency based on a basket of currencies of our countries is being worked out," Vladimir Putin said at the BRICS business forum.

So there you have it.

You may recall that Russia has been cut off from the SWIFT system. Now if you're a consumer of Western legacy media, you'd likely not have heard a word on it, but the fact is that Russia was largely prepared for this and has already developed and is now using the SPFS the Russian equivalent of SWIFT, developed by the Central Bank of Russia since 2014.

If you weren't paying attention at the time, we were, and I can tell you that after the The West threatened to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT system was when they urgently began building SPFS. This is an alternative for international payments which, in their own words, will... "cut reliance on the Western financial system."

Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump appointee, must decide whether to charge the son of the current president.

Federal agents investigating President Biden's son Hunter have gathered what they believe is sufficient evidence to charge him with tax crimes and a false statement related to a gun purchase, according to people familiar with the case. The next step is for the U.S. Attorney in Delaware, a Trump administration holdover, to decide on whether to file such charges, these people said.

The investigation into Hunter Biden began in 2018, and became a central focus for then-president Donald Trump during his unsuccessful 2020 reelection effort. Initially, the investigation centered around Hunter Biden's finances related to overseas business ties and consulting work. Over time, investigators with multiple agencies focused closely on whether he did not report all of his income, and whether he lied on gun purchase paperwork in 2018, according to the people familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing case.

Agents determined months ago they had assembled a viable criminal case against the younger Biden. But it is ultimately up to prosecutors at the Justice Department, not agents, to decide whether to file charges in cases where prosecutors believe the evidence is strong enough to lead to a likely conviction at trial.

A train communications system in Germany was targeted by sabotage Saturday, forcing both passenger and cargo trains to halt for nearly three hours across the northwest of the country, authorities said.

Operator Deutsche Bahn said early Saturday that no long-distance or regional trains were running in the states of Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony and Bremen. That also affected trains between Berlin and Cologne, neither of which was directly affected by the system failure, and between Berlin and Amsterdam, while trains from Denmark weren't crossing the border into Germany.

The sabotage hit a primary mode of regional and intercity transport in Germany as well as disrupting supply lines for industries using cargo trains.

After the nearly three-hour suspension, Deutsche Bahn said the problem — a "failure of the digital train radio system" — had been resolved but that some disruptions could still be expected.

It later said the outage was caused by sabotage.