In his address to South Korea's national assembly, President Donald Trump said that he hoped to "speak for all civilized nations," in telling North Korea, "do not underestimate us and do not try us."

North Korea "interpreted America's past restraint as weakness," Trump said, calling that a "fatal miscalculation."

"This is a very different administration than the United States has had in the past," he added.


The president's speech in Seoul early Wednesday came during his second stop on a 12-day, five-country tour of Asia.

The Tverskoy District Court in Moscow has rejected a lawsuit in which opposition activist Alexey Navalny sought to prove that President Vladimir Putin had encouraged regional authorities to ban public rallies arbitrarily.

The press secretary of the court, Anastasiya Dzyurko, told RBC on Wednesday that the refusal was based on the section of the Russian civil code that does not allow courts to accept lawsuits without sufficient explanations on how in particular the claimant's rights, freedoms or lawful interests are infringed. The lawyer of Navalny's NGO Foundation for Fighting Corruption, Ivan Zhdanov, confirmed that the lawsuit had been rejected and said that he planned to appeal the decision.

Donna Brazile appeared on The View Tuesday morning and admitted the Clinton campaign indeed knew about the Russia dossier BEFORE the presidential election.

Brazile says she specifically asked about the dossier on November 4th and was told she didn't need to know about it.

Meghan McCain asked Brazile point blank, "I have a question for you and I hope you answer this honestly because there are a lot of questions about this Russian dossier and there is evidence that came out that the DNC helped fund it. Did you know that was happening, and were you surprised to hear about it if you didn't," McCain asked.

"I asked one question on November 4th and I was told that I did not need to know and so no, I did not know," Brazile said.

Brazile went on to say that she did not control the money in the DNC and line items for oppo research were vague.

This is odd, Hillary says she didn't know the dossier existed until Buzzfeed published the 35-page document on January 10th.

Who knew the republic was so vulnerable that our elections could be monkeywrenched by Russian dirty-tricksters spending their office coffee budget on a motley collection of social media ads that would make the authors of Nigerian prince scam emails wince at their clumsiness?

Or, more likely, cynical politicians are making much ado about Putin and company's low-rent effort to make themselves look relevant in order to justify government interference in political speech. Just consider Sen. Dianne Feinstein's (D-Calif.) threat to Facebook, Google, and Twitter during Senate hearings over the clumsy Russky meddling: "You created these platforms, and now they're being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it-or we will."

Feinstein thinks government should exercise more control over speech? Such a shocker-unless you saw her try to smother encryption in 2016, or heard her insist in 2015 that edgy material like The Anarchist Cookbook "should be removed from the internet" or her similar effort to ban bomb-making instructions in 1997. And then there was her scheme to narrowly define "journalists" to limit legal protections for people reporting news events, and her vote for the COICA bill that would seize domain names from websites accused of piracy...

Units of the Syrian Army and its allies have launched a wide-scale military operation against Hay'at Tahrir Al Sham (Al Nusra Front) terrorists in the northeastern countryside of Hama province.

The goal is to restore security and stability to the villages in Al Rahajan area, as well as securing the Hama-Aleppo motorway.

The operation is focused on destroying Al Nusra fortifications in an area that is extending 30 km alongside the Hama-Aleppo highway from the north of Ethriya to the village of Sheikh Hilal.

Former interim Democratic National Committee (DNC) head Donna Brazile worried Seth Rich was either killed for being white or by Russians.

From her book "Hacks":

I felt some responsibility for Seth Rich's death. I didn't bring him into the DNC, but I helped keep him there working on voting rights. With all I knew now about the Russians' hacking, I could not help but wonder if they had played some part in his unsolved murder. Besides that, racial tensions were high that summer and I worried that he was murdered for being white on the wrong side of town. [My friend] Elaine expressed her doubts about that, and I heard her. The FBI said that they did not see any Russian fingerprints there.

Brazile repeatedly returns to the subject of being haunted by Rich's murder, even though other Democrats have pounced on anyone who suggested that the murder was anything other than a robbery gone wrong. The DNC data staffer was killed days before Wikileaks began publishing its emails, and his valuables were not taken.

But Brazile says she had a "spook," with connections to the intelligence community, who told her after the killing that she needed protection for herself, including cameras, alarms and backup power at her house, and that she heeded his advice.

The hyperbolic world of 'Russiagate'

The other day, Ari Melber, beady eyes flaming, re-enacted Congress's grilling of Facebook's Mark Zuckerman over 'Russian interference in the 2016 election', pairing his own questions with Zuckerberg's videoed responses, condemning him like a religious inquisitor.

The next day I received an e-mail from the self-proclaimed 'revolutionary theorist' Micah White, whose book on protests I had reviewed favorably. I could hardly believe that he now accuses himself and the entire American left of inadvertently selling out to the Russians!

While Melber's tone is aggressive, White's claim that Russia used an internet repairman to gain access to his computer is paranoid, as is his belief that the pro-Black website an interviewer worked for is - according to an anti-Putin Russian source one of many Russian sites set up to swing the US election. Here is some of White's 'evidence':

"The interview with Yan Big was immediately uncomfortable. The phone quality was terrible: it sounded like he was calling internationally through a distant internet connection. He had a strange accent and an unusual way of phrasing questions. He was obviously not a typical American. I rationalized that he must be an African immigrant living in America and that was why he was interested in protesting against racism and police brutality. His attempts at flattery set off more alarm bells. I finished up the interview as quickly as possible and got off the phone."

Beware of bad phone quality, and let flattery get you nowhere!

The Russian foreign minister has commented on the ongoing probe into Moscow's alleged meddling in the US presidential election.

"The facts, that are already known and established, suggest that no Russian link has been found in this affair. There are internal connections there, including within the Democratic party," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit in the Vietnamese city of Da Nang on Wednesday.

The Russian foreign minister's statement comes after the Washington Post reported that the Clinton presidential campaign and the DNC were donors for a dossier aimed at discrediting Trump by revealing negative information about his past business dealings. The dossier compiled by Fusion GPS originated due to unknown republican donorship. However, they stepped aside when it became clear that Trump would win the race. After that, the DNC took their place.

It's been a more-than-usual eventful week in the Middle East. Russian-backed forces made yet more significant military gains in defeating US-sponsored proxies in Syria, with a fearsome display of long-range Russian air and naval firepower against militant hold-outs near Deir ez-Zor. That was while Russian President Vladimir Putin was greeted in the Iranian capital Tehran by Ayatollah Khamenei - a meeting that spoke volumes of the new reality of geopolitical authority in the region.

Then days later, the Saudi-backed Lebanese premier Saad Hariri makes a "surprise" resignation, which wasn't really a surprise for those who are watching events closely. Hariri made his blustering speech while in the Saudi capital Riyadh, accusing Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah of "destabilizing" his country, and even plotting to assassinate him.

Iran denounced Hariri's antics as "grandstanding" and kowtowing to a political agenda set by Washington and its regional allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel, aimed at smearing Iran and Hezbollah.

Maybe you have been following the 1 October Shooting on social media, particularly Twitter, and have came across the handles; Naval_Intel, DeepStvte, DeepStateTerror and realDavidSins. These in fact are fake Twitter handles, with Naval_Intel being the "mother-account." The only account that appears to not be a bot, and is ran by an actual human, is DeepStvte. After a revealing Twitter Audit, the Naval_Intel account topped out at 29% a.k.a. FAKE. The DeepStvte account touts his followers to follow his backup account "in case this one gets suspended," and that account he lists as Naval_Intel (pictured above). It is worth noting, to show the depth of the skills we are talking about, that the handle DeepStvte has Sean Hannity following the account - that's how good they are - and also a well-respected journalist, True Pundit.

On October 23, the DeepStvte Twitter account posted a video of Police scanner audio from the night of the shooting. It was an attempt to frame the narrative that SWAT actually killed Stephen Paddock. What they did was they changed the audio transcription from "shot" to "SWAT." You can listen to the full audio here; relevant times in question are (80:25-80:36). The accurate audio transcription reads as such: (80:25-80:36) "This room is clear, it has been cleared by (inaudible) breaches. We also have one shot officer, who did fire, negative injuries on anybody else." The part the DeepStvte added into their Tweet, to augment additional deception, was something that doesn't come on the scanner until nearly 15s later (80:46) and that was "We just have one suspect down at this point in time." By adding this in their post, included with the disclaimer "UNREDACTED AUDIO," they attempted to show that the SWAT officer fired and killed Paddock. When in fact, the only shot officer on the 32nd Floor that evening was Mr. Jesus Campos. Once I mentioned this stubborn fact to the DeepStvte, in a reply to that very post, the DeepStvte blocked me, and that is what tipped me off. The well-respected journalist, True Pundit, went on to break this "story" on October 24 that he got from DeepStvte's disinformation campaign.

Now, here is where it gets really weird.