Widespread predictions of a "blue wave" of Democratic victories in next month's midterm elections should be taken with a hefty grain of salt, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway warned Wednesday morning, because they emanate from the "same geniuses" who all but guaranteed a landslide win for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

"Let's not forget the same geniuses that predicted a huge romp by that woman who lost in 2016 are the same people predicting a huge win by the Democrats this time," Conway told Fox News' Fox & Friends. "So we have to be a little bit cautious."

The British government is preventing Russia from appointing new diplomats to replace the 23 expelled by London over the Novichok poisoning allegations, the Russian ambassador to the UK said.

"We cannot fill those vacancies because Britain refuses to issue visas to our diplomats," Alexander Yakovenko said during a press conference on Friday.

The UK expelled 23 diplomats working for the Russian embassy in retaliation for the poisoning attack on former double agent Sergei Skripal in March and convinced its Western allies that they should do the same. London says the poisoning was carried out by Russian military intelligence officers using a Novichok toxin. Moscow denies the allegations.

The Jerusalem Post got a tad ahead of itself with a 'breaking news' alert about Russia's ambassador to the UK denying that Moscow had any role in the Skripal case, reporting instead that the envoy... had died? Sure.

"Russian UK envoy dies; Kremlin hacked computers and murdered ex-spy," the Post announced in a "BREAKING NEWS" update.

It appears that the outlet botched the headline of a Reuters wire report about Russian Ambassador Alexander Yakovenko's news conference in London held on Friday.

English Conservative voters are so completely committed to Brexit - no matter what - that they are even willing to sacrifice the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom to make it happen. What kind of 'union' is this, exactly?

It's not just a few of them who are thinking that way, either. Large majorities of English Tory voters would be willing to support Scottish independence (79 percent) or even the undoing of the Northern Ireland peace process (75 percent) as "worth it" to "take back control" from the European Union, new research from the Universities of Edinburgh and Cardiff has suggested.

Even more shockingly, a huge majority (87 percent) of 'Leave' voters in Northern Ireland itself see the potential unravelling of the peace process as an acceptable price to pay to ensure Brexit goes ahead. In contrast, just one of the NI respondents who voted Remain (which was the overall majority in NI) said Brexit was more important than peace.

One of the main themes used to demonize Putin in the West are the incessant insinuations that he is corrupt and that his corruption enabled him to build up massive personal wealth. But while these allegations are invariably presented with zero evidence, we do have some evidence that Putin is in fact not corrupt (at least not in the way it is being implied in Western media - but this will be a topic for another discussion). I found the testimony from Sharon Tennison very interesting in this regard as well. Tennison is the founder and president of Center for Citizen Initiatives (CCI) and had worked in Russia (and the USSR) for 30 years. In the course of her activities, she has had at least one personal encounter with Putin and had over the years came to know many other American officials and businessmen who had worked with him. According to Tennison, none of those officials "would describe [Putin] as 'brutal,' or 'thuggish,' or other slanderous adjectives and nouns that are repeatedly used in Western media."

Tennison first met Vladimir Putin in 1992 and described the experience in one of her blog articles:

"I met Putin years before he ever dreamed of being president of Russia, as did many of us working in St. Petersburg during the 1990s. ... For years I had been creating programs to open up relations between the two countries ... A new program possibility emerged in my head. Since I expected it might require a signature from the Marienskii City Hall, an appointment was made. My friend Volodya Shestakov and I showed up at a side door entrance to the Marienskii building. We found ourselves in a small, dull brown office, facing a rather trim nondescript man in a brown suit. He inquired about my reason for coming in. After scanning the proposal I provided he began asking intelligent questions. After each of my answers, he asked the next relevant question. I became aware that this interviewer was different from other Soviet bureaucrats who always seemed to fall into chummy conversations with foreigners with hopes of obtaining bribes in exchange for the Americans' requests... This bureaucrat was open, inquiring, and impersonal in demeanor.

After more than an hour of careful questions and answers, he quietly explained that he had tried hard to determine if the proposal was legal, then said that unfortunately at the time it was not. A few good words about the proposal were uttered. That was all. He simply and kindly showed us to the door. Out on the sidewalk, I said to my colleague, 'Volodya, this is the first time we have ever dealt with a Soviet bureaucrat who didn't ask us for a trip to the US or something valuable!' I remember looking at his business card in the sunlight - it read Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin."¹

At least in this 1992 encounter with Tennison Vladimir Putin seemed to fulfil his duties in a professional manner without seeking kickbacks or favors from Tennison, who was obviously well-accustomed to that exact behavior from other government bureaucrats.

Ankara will not ask for financial aid from the International Monetary Fund, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said recently. It means the country seeks to be independent despite economic turbulence, according to analysts.

"This would not have brought the country no good but even greater problems, since appealing to the IMF for help is not only related to economic issues but also entails the fulfillment of a number of political demands," Dr. Ercan Enc, deputy chairman of the Turkish non-parliamentary left-wing nationalist party Vatan, told Sputnik Turkey.

"This would be tantamount to Turkey rejecting its independence," Enc said, adding that Ankara will have to find a way to curb economic troubles without help from the United States or the European Union.

Russia has proposed mutual guarantees to the US on non-involvement in each other's sovereign affairs, but Washington continues to reject the offer, a senior Russian diplomat has told reporters.

Moscow has repeatedly offered such a deal to the US State Department in recent years, and noted that the scheme worked in 1933 for the restoration of healthy relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, the head of the Foreign Ministry's Department for North America, Georgy Borisenko, said.

In 1933, Soviet Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt exchanged personal notes with obligations not to interfere with the other nation's sovereign affairs, Borisenko noted. He said that these mutual guarantees were given on America's insistence because, after the Great Depression, Washington was extremely concerned about the spread of the communist ideas.

The Daily Beast continues its mission to become a regular contributor to the Digest this week with some clairvoyant journalism, while a number of Senators are playing the Russophobia card ahead of the midterms.

Here's a look at the last seven days or so of Russophobia.

Sites dealing with government transparency, pages dedicated to police brutality and alternative media - take a closer look at the top ten accounts with millions of followers that were recently suspended by Twitter and Facebook.

PAGE: The Free Thought Project

• NUMBER OF FOLLOWERS: 3.1mn
• ABOUT: The widely known website which calls itself "a hub for free thinking conversations" focuses on government transparency. Founded in 2013 by Jason Bassler and Matt Agorist, the site claims to "shed light" on "corrupt entities" across our planet. Its reports have covered the Monsanto row, police brutality and shootings in the US, as well as an insight into how the American government gets personal information about any citizen.
• BANNED ON FACEBOOK: YES
• BANNED ON TWITTER: YES

PAGE: The Anti-Media

• NUMBER OF FOLLOWERS: 2.1mn
• ABOUT: Initially launched on Facebook by blogger and entrepreneur Nick Bernabe, the Anti-Media is now an independent news aggregator with a hefty amount of followers. The group, which poses as "non-partisan" and "anti-establishment," publishes loads of "mainstream" stories, including ones dealing with the UN report about a number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan, the Tesla crisis, and Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
• BANNED ON FACEBOOK: YES
• BANNED ON TWITTER: YES

Ukraine's festering dispute with Hungary escalated after 'death lists' of Ukrainians, allegedly holding Hungarian citizenship, were published on a notorious Ukrainian witch-hunting website.

Ukraine technically forbids dual citizenship, but in practice tens of thousands of Ukrainians hold citizenships of other nations. Hungary's practice of offering its citizenship to ethnic Hungarians living in Ukraine is the source of a bitter row between Budapest and Kiev, which already resulted in expulsion of diplomats last week.

On Tuesday, the quarrel further escalated after a Ukrainian website, called Mirotvorets, published personal data of 313 Ukrainians, living in the Zakarpattia Region bordering Hungary, which the site claims are secretly and illegally Hungarian citizens.