The office of South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff has confirmed that a Hyunmoo-2 short-range ballistic missile launch failed at a base in the east coast city of Gangneung late on Oct. 4, according to a report from NK News. The South Korean military said there were no casualties from the incident, which caused a large fire.

"The failed launch came during combined US-ROK surface-to-surface missile drills conducted in response to North Korea's intermediate-range ballistic missile test over Japan earlier Tuesday," a statement from what is officially called the Republic of Korea's (ROK) Joint Chiefs of Staff said, according to NK News. "The US and ROK each successfully fired 2 ATACMS [Army Tactical Missile System short-range ballistic missiles] at targets in the sea."

The defense minister noted that not only is Europe increasingly militarizing on the borders, but it is also preparing for war.

Minsk cannot turn a blind eye to the increasing militarization of its Western neighbors, as there is concrete evidence that NATO countries are preparing their infrastructure and their troops for war, according to Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin.

"The situation is really complicated today. A number of hostile leaders of the neighboring countries, unfortunately, have openly outlined the goals that they want to achieve by working against our country. We cannot leave this without attention," Khrenin said as quoted in Beita.

The minister specifically said that the country has both the forces and the means to respond to any threat that may rise.

US health officials have given a hugely controversial research organization another $650,000 (£580k) grant to experiment on Covid-like viruses - despite fears similar risky work may have actually sparked the pandemic.

EcoHealth Alliance, run by British zoologist Peter Daszak, funded studies in Wuhan - the Chinese city where the pandemic began - on manipulated coronaviruses.

Such research, known as 'gain of function', can see viruses deliberately engineered to become more dangerous to humans.

The Biden Justice Department released Peter Strzok's 2018 termination letter from then-FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich on Thursday in its legal battle against the fired FBI special agent.

"As I considered all the known facts associated with the adjudication of your case it was difficult to imagine another incident like yours which brought so much discredit to the organization. In my 23 years in the FBI, I have not seen a more impactful series of missteps which called into question the entire organization and more thoroughly damaged the reputation of the entire organization," Bowdich said in the August 2018 letter to Strzok. "In our role as FBI employees we must sometimes make unpopular decisions, but the public should be able to examine our work and not have to question our motives."

Turkish officials have asked Russia to delay a portion of Ankara's payments due for natural gas as Turkiye seeks to mitigate economic damage from higher energy prices, Bloomberg reports.

According to the report, Turkiye's state-run energy importer, Botas, is seeking to postpone some of the payments to 2024, due to the currency crisis in the country.

Last month, Botas was permitted to pay 25 per cent of its obligations in rubles rather than dollars.

Recently, I argued that Russia was provoked into beginning the 'special military operation' (SMO) by a series of events stretching from initial NATO claims of its goal to expand to Ukraine, NATO-Ukrainian cooperation, the Western-cultivated and ex post facto fully supported Maidan revolt (despite the neofascist Ukrainian element's false flag snipers terrorist attack) to which Putin responded by annexing Crimea, Western support for Kiev's attack on Donbass (including civilians), deeper Western and NATO involvement in Ukraine, Kiev's failure to implement its obligations under the Minsk Donbass peace accords, and much else [see Gordon M. Hahn, Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West and the 'New Cold War' (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Books, 2018); here; here; here; and here]. As far as I am concerned, the 'West/NATO expansion provoked the Ukrainian crisis and war' is an incontrovertible fact.

More recently, I also argued, Putin decided to call off coercive diplomacy begun in spring 2021 and escalated in autumn through January 2022 by massing troops at the Ukrainian border, when the West rejected Moscow's appeals to end NATO expansion and sign a draft treaty on security agreements for Kiev and a European security architecture. The West's rejection was accompanied by a major escalation in the Ukrainian military attacks along the Donbass line of contact and a threat by Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy to abandon the Budapest Memorandum, implying an attempt to acquire nuclear weapons. Zelensky said at the annual meeting of the Munich Security Conference on February 19, 2022: "I, as president, will do it for the first time. But Ukraine and I are doing it for the last time. I am launching consultations within the framework of the Budapest Memorandum. The Minister of Foreign Affairs has been asked to convene them. If they do not happen again or if their results do not guarantee the security of our country, Ukraine will have the right to think that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and that all the comprehensive decisions of 1994 are being questioned". The Munich conference is attended by all the leaders of the NATO alliance and other parties interested in European security issues, and yet not one Western leader questioned the appropriateness of what would be a violation not just of the Budapest Memorandum but of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. That these immediate provocations were a direct cause of Putin's decision to begin the SMO is not possible to prove, but the thesis is highly plausible if not likely a fact. Putin responded to Zelenskiy's nuclear demarche, saying that the only thing Ukraine needs is a uranium enrichment system, but this technical issue "is not an insoluble problem" for Ukraine, especially given the support Kiev enjoys from some nuclear powers. Incidentally, this is not only pertinent to Putin's February decision but also provides some context for the struggle surrounding the Zaporozhe Nuclear Power Plant.

NATO should not welcome Ukraine into its ranks until the armed conflict between Kiev and Moscow has been resolved, Bulgaria's president has argued. Rumen Radev's comments run counter to a joint communique adopted earlier by the leaders of several eastern and central European countries.

In a statement published by the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency on Monday, Radev's office said the president felt compelled to clarify why he had not signed off on the pro-Ukraine declaration.

According to the Bulgarian head of state, the "security environment" has changed dramatically since 2008, when Bulgaria joined a declaration on Ukraine's future accession at the summit in Bucharest. The reality on the ground now dictates that Ukraine's "membership in the Alliance be discussed within the full composition of the North Atlantic Council," the president said.

Message found in fortune cookie from Panda Take-out reminds us: "The dildo of consequence is seldom lubricated." Please apply this ancient wisdom to "Joe Biden's" sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natgas pipelines. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spun the deed as a "tremendous opportunity" to reduce fuel use in Euroland, and shift its prior dependence on affordable Russian energy to ruinously-priced American liquid natural gas (LNG) — a supposed boon to US producers. Lucky us and them!

Let's get a few technical matters straight about natgas. Gas pipelines allow for cheap gas, without costly intervening shipping procedures. Flows are continuous from producer to customer. LNG requires compression of the gas at super-cold temperatures and costly-to-build LNG tanker ships to keep that gas cold and compressed in transit. Each tanker can carry only so-much gas and the flow is not continuous. At each end of the energy-losing journey there is a costly LNG terminal to load and unload the gas. Bottom line: Euroland customers can't afford US LNG, though for now they'll be getting it good and hard to struggle through the first winter of a permanent depression that will feel more like the forecourt of a new dark age. Also bear in mind that American shale gas is a finite resource; that we need plenty of it ourselves; and that the earliest-developed US shale gas fields are crapping out one-by-one.

Secretary Blinken pretends that Europe's deadly predicament will segue crisply into a new "green renewable" disposition of things as well as a stable-and-balanced new cold war between US-led NATO and Russia, like the 1950s. Secretary Blinken is, of course, completely insane. Germany's industry will now collapse, the Euro currency will collapse with it, and the exchange rate with the dollars Euroland needs to buy in order to purchase US LNG will bankrupt them further. It will also probably blow up the European Union, which is chiefly a trade scaffold. With industrial production sinking, trade sinks too, and the flimsy cooperative arrangements between nations turn into a desperate competition as each nation of Euroland struggles to stay alive.

North Korea has fired a ballistic missile over Japan for the first time since 2017, officials in Tokyo have claimed. The reported incident follows a flurry of similar launches in recent months.

Japanese and South Korean officials confirmed the launch on Tuesday morning, saying the projectile was fired from North Korea's Chagang Province and flew over a portion of Aomori Prefecture in Japan's north.

Prime Minister Fumio Kashida's office said in a statement:

"A short while ago, North Korea launched a ballistic missile that flew over Japan and is believed to have landed in the Pacific Ocean. This is an outrageous act following the recent repeated ballistic missile launches, and I strongly condemn it."

The PM's office later confirmed that the missile landed in the sea outside Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone, and went on to accuse North Korea of violating United Nations resolutions with its 20 missile tests so far in 2022 - the largest number since leader Kim Jong-un took power in 2011.

Twenty-seven members of Congress sent a letter addressed to US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on 30 September calling for sanctions to be imposed against Algeria over its arms deals with Russia.

In the letter, the 27 US lawmakers, led by Republican Congresswoman Lisa McClain, showed concern over what they referred to as a growing relationship between Moscow and Algiers.

The arms agreements in question, which were signed last year, were reportedly worth around $7 billion and included the sale of Russia's Su-57 warplanes to Algeria, which Moscow has not provided to any other state. According to the concerns highlighted in the letter, the deal makes Algeria the third largest recipient of Russian weapons in the world.

The lawmakers have called for the sanctions to be imposed under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), passed by Congress in 2017.