A man carrying a knife has been detained outside the White House in Washington, DC. He told the US Secret Service that he'd brought the weapon to "assassinate" Donald Trump.

The suspect himself approached a security officer who was patrolling outside the presidential residence Saturday afternoon, and told him of his plan. "I have a knife to do it with," he said, according to a police report seen by AP.

Police identified the man as 25-year-old Roger Hedgpeth, who was arrested on charges of making threats to cause bodily harm. The man had a 3.5-inch (around 9-cm) knife on him as well as an empty pistol holster.

After the arrest, Hedgpeth was taken to a hospital for a mental health evaluation. It turned out that he was a "critically missing/endangered person as well as a mental health consumer" from Brandon, Florida. It's currently unclear how long he was missing and how was he able to cover the 1,500 km separating Brandon and Washington, DC.

One of Democratic presidential nomination frontrunners, Sen. Bernie Sanders, laughed at Donald Trump calling him a 'communist' and explained how the US President, who doesn't seem to know the difference, profited from 'socialism.'

Chris Wallace, the host of Fox News Sunday, asked the Vermont Senator, who identifies as a social democrat, an ubiquitous question about him being slammed by his opponents as a communist. The program played a clip of Trump saying that he thinks "he is a communist."

Sudan is reconsidering its participation in the armed conflict in Yemen and gradually reducing its forces there, Information Minister Faisal Mohamed Salih has said.

"Currently, there is a revision of the whole war in Yemen, even among the coalition's principal countries, and there is an opinion that military activities will not solve the problem, and will likely to compound it", Salih said on Sunday at the ongoing summit of the African Union in Addis Ababa.

According to the Minister, it was not easy for Khartoum to suddenly decide to withdraw its troops, so it is gradually reducing the number of its forces per an agreement with the coalition. "We think that the current efforts will soon lead to a decrease in combat activities, which will be replaced by negotiations", he said.

In December, Sudan's Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok announced that his country had cut the number of its troops participating in the conflict from 15,000 to 5,000.

In a fiasco for the ages, the blue party face-plants in Iowa

Monday, February 3rd, just before 9 p.m., the airport Holiday Inn, Des Moines, Iowa. A crowd of supporters and volunteers for Sen. Bernie Sanders is buzzing. After four years of being shat upon by party officials and media allies alike (CNN and MSNBC are seen in Sanders crowds as Goebbels-ian arms of the Democratic National Committee), Vermont's anti-corporate crusader has defied odds and soared in polls. All that remains is the schadenfreude orgasm of a victory speech.

A young animal-rights lawyer named Colin Grace is explaining how he got turned on to Bernie. "Honestly, it started by looking into some of the causes of 2008," he laughs. "Well, then I found weed and became a libertarian."

A nearby supporter with long hair under a standard issue Spin Doctors wool weed-smoking hat perks up. "Dude, should we all smoke right now?" smiles a fortysomething named David, patting his chest pockets. "I've got the most enormous J."

Max Blumenthal breaks down the shadowy network of billionaires, Democratic elites, and Russiagate profiteers behind the Shadow app that ruined the Iowa caucuses, and a wider effort to stop Bernie Sanders' progressive momentum.

Iowa's voting debacle has renewed fears that the DNC is again working against Bernie Sanders and his grassroots campaign. Iowa Democrats slowly released the tallies from areas that favored Pete Buttigeg - allowing him to falsely claim an early victory. DNC chair Tom Perez called for a recanvassing of the vote amid widespread uncertainty about its accuracy. And the firm behind the Iowa Democrats' faulty voting tabulation app, Shadow, is tied to veteran Clinton and Obama operatives, and a dark money operation funded by anti-Bernie Sanders billionaires.

Guest: Max Blumenthal, Editor of The Grayzone and author of The Management of Savagery.

I have written several times about the continuing NATO preparations for an attack on Russia, a second Operation Barbarossa, the code name for the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941. Circumstances prompt me to write about it again, for as of the last week in January the Americans and their gang of lieutenant nations in NATO have commenced the biggest military exercises in 25 years to take place in Europe. The code name for this operation is Defender-Europe 20 but we can interpret that as Attack-Russia 20; in effect a preparation for an attack on Russia comparable to the Nazi invasion in 1941 that killed 27 million Soviet citizens, wounded countless more and destroyed everything west of the Urals and led ultimately to the crushing of the Nazis that launched the attack.

For the past several years the US has been building up bases in Eastern Europe, building up their logistics systems, prepositioning vast amounts of munitions and weapons of every type and calibre, securing convoy routes from the USA across the Atlantic and across Europe right up to Russia's borders for the rapid movement of military equipment and formations, installing nuclear capable missile systems in key locations from Poland to Romania, increasing intelligence flights in the Baltic, particularly with regard to the Russian base at Kaliningrad and the approaches to St. Petersburg, and the Black Sea, Crimea and Ukraine as well around the Russian bases at Vladivostok, all the while, in their propaganda talking about false flag operations they could use to blame Russia and provide the pretext for their attack. Kaliningrad has been mentioned several times by US generals and officials as one possible scene for staging a false flag operation for this purpose. But the number of scenarios they could use is limited only by their imagination and capabilities.

A US has envoy warned Israel not to declare sovereignty over West Bank land without Washington's consent, pushing back against calls for immediate action by ultra-nationalists within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition.

US President Donald Trump's Middle East peace plan, unveiled on January 28, envisages Israel keeping key swathes of the occupied territory where Palestinians seek statehood. But the question of timing has opened up a rare rift between the allies.

Netanyahu initially pledged a speedy "application of Israeli law" - de facto annexation - to Jewish settlement blocs and the Jordan Valley, delighting his religious-rightist base ahead of Israel's March 2 election, where he hopes to win a fifth term.

Moscow is ready to prolong the crucial New Start arms control treaty without any preconditions - and even negotiate on its new, state-of-art weaponry - yet the US is dodging the talks, Russia's FM Sergey Lavrov has said.

One of the last obstacles on the path of the unhinged nuclear arms race, the US-Russia Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) is set to expire in a year. Still Moscow and Washington have been unable to engage into any meaningful discussion on it yet, since the US has been ignoring the repeated calls for dialogue, Lavrov said during an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper.

Moscow's position is clear - it's ready to extend the existing treaty right away - and it has been repeatedly voiced by the top Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin. Instead of discussing the existing pact, however, the US has been insisting on dragging China into it.

NATO fans fears of the "resurgent" Russia and drags neutral countries into its orbit, but the fact is that Moscow's military potential is only half the size of the bloc's forces in Europe, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

Although the European continent has already been "oversaturated with military facilities and weapons," NATO is "continuing to merge with the European Union," and has its sights on those EU nations that declared themselves neutral, Lavrov told Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper.

"NATO states are trying to conduct joint exercises, attracting neutral states, such as Finland and Sweden, under the pretext of [their] EU membership," Russia's chief diplomat explained.

The unexpected alliance between Turkey and Libya is a geopolitical earthquake that changes the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean and across the Middle East. Turkey's audacious move has enraged its rivals in the region and cleared the way for a dramatic escalation in the 9 year-long Libyan civil war. It has also forced leaders in Europe and Washington to decide how they will counter Turkey's plan to defend the U.N-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA), and to extend its maritime borders from Europe to Africa basically creating "a water corridor through the eastern Mediterranean linking the coasts of Turkey and Libya." Leaders in Ankara believe that the agreement "is a major coup in energy geopolitics" that helps defend Turkey's "sovereign rights against the gatekeepers of the regional status quo." But Turkey's rivals strongly disagree. They see the deal as a naked power grab that undermines their ability to transport natural gas from the East Mediterranean to Europe without crossing Turkish waters. In any event, the Turkey-Libya agreement has set the stage for a broader conflict that will unavoidably involve Egypt, Israel, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Europe, Russia and the United States. All parties appear to have abandoned diplomatic channels altogether and are, instead, preparing for war.