US President Joe Biden has commissioned a survey to get a clearer picture of Vice President Kamala Harris' popularity, ABC News has reported, citing an anonymous senior administration official. The source reportedly told the outlet that despite putting on a brave face publicly, the 81-year-old Democrat has recently become more receptive to calls urging him to exit the presidential race ahead of the November 5 election.


Questions as to whether Biden is fit for a second term have been overshadowing his campaign since he bungled a performance at last month's CNN-hosted debate against Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. During the event, the incumbent repeatedly lost his train of thought, mixed up words and numbers, and struggled to finish his sentences.

On Friday, ABC News quoted an unnamed White House staffer as saying that the "president is wiped and exhausted." They added that his recent COVID-19 diagnosis "gives him a chance to bring people together, have conversations and think while he recovers in Delaware."

Backdrop:

Great communication yields far greater truths than the sum of its parts.

Post the Trump Assassination attempt, the Legacy mainstream media has been slow to explore obvious contradictions and holes in timelines surrounding the roles and responsibilities of various parties involved in the event, including but not limited to Government agencies.

Fortunately in what may be a watershed moment for the New Media to help shed light — and at least move investigative processes forward in a more timely manner giving events such as Presidential candidate assassination attempts the urgency needed — others are on the case.

The New Media is comprised of people with expertise and experience in pressure cooker environments able to interact, then develop and stress-test ideas quickly. Further, these quicker turnaround processes are facilitated by open culture free-speech media platforms, like X.Com.

In effect the X platform is a new community plaza where people meet and ideas are exchanged in full view of the whole community to be tested and rejected or accepted more efficiently than the legacy news media currently does.

Most of the security personnel working at the Donald Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, during which the Republican presidential candidate was shot, weren't even Secret Service, US Senator Josh Hawley has claimed, citing whistleblowers.

Shots fired from the roof of a nearby factory nicked Trump's ear, killed one audience member, and injured two more before the sniper was taken out by law enforcement.

"Whistleblowers tell me that MOST of Trump's security detail working the event last Saturday were not even Secret Service," Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, said on Friday, accusing the Department of Homeland Security of assigning "unprepared and inexperienced personnel" to the campaign rally.

In a public letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Hawley said whistleblowers with "direct knowledge of the event" told him that the majority of the security detail "were not in fact USSS agents but instead drawn from the department's Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)."

President Joe Biden feels personally hurt and betrayed by the way so many Democrats, including some of the party's top leaders, have left him hung out to dry as he faces the biggest crisis of his political career, according to two sources familiar with his thinking.

And privately, many of those leaders have expressed doubts about his path forward.

Former President Barack Obama's only public comment came the day after Biden's disastrous debate last month, when he tweeted "Bad debate nights happen" and talked about his former vice president's virtues. Privately, however, Obama has concerns.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have done nothing publicly other than each putting out a tweet shortly after the June 27 debate.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, both of New York, as well as Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the former House speaker, have spent weeks listening to their members' concerns and relaying them to Biden and his campaign. Publicly, all three have said they support whatever decision Biden makes, but even behind closed doors, they haven't told congressional Democrats to get behind Biden or given them any guidance about what they should do.

Decades of making weapons to sell rather than fight and fighting low-intensity "wars" have turned the American military-industrial complex into a network of useless startups.

Every day videos circulate on the internet showing Russian soldiers shooting down Western drones used by the Ukrainian armed forces. There are records of the use of hunting rifles, stones, pieces of wood and even simple water bottles against American drones in Ukraine. Apparently, anything can be used to shoot down a Western UAV, this being a fragile and vulnerable military artifact.

In the same sense, Western tanks and artillery systems once feared around the world have proven to be true paper tigers on the battlefield. Having absolute control over the airspace in the conflict zone, Russian forces freely use aviation, artillery and drones against armored vehicles and missile launch systems in Ukrainian positions. Moscow constantly eliminates NATO military software, destroying not only enemy machinery but also the entire myth of American military "superiority."

Plots to kill the Russian president were earlier reported by the head of Kiev's military intelligence.

Kiev has been planning to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin with the direct participation and financial support of the West, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said.

She was commenting on assassination threats against the Russian president mentioned recently by the head of Ukraine's Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR), Kirill Budanov.

Zakharova, during a briefing with reporters on Thursday, said:

"There is no doubt that such crimes were planned and financed with the participation of the Anglo-Saxon masters of the Kiev regime. Such incidents serve as evidence of Western powers being complicit in the criminal activity of the Kiev regime. And not a single atrocity, not a single terrorist act against civilians, against government officials, has ever been condemned by Western countries."

Budanov, who had been placed on Russia's terrorist and extremist list, revealed efforts by Kiev to kill Putin in an interview with Ukrainian news outlet NV published last week.

Tucker Carlson, speaking yesterday at the Heritage Foundation's "Policy Fest" at the Republican National Committee in Milwaukee, made the case for U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who was announced yesterday as former President Donald Trump's running mate:

So now J. D. Vance is the VP pick, and I think every person who pays close attention has got to be thrilled by that.

And if you don't know much about J. D. Vance, I'm not even going to make a case for J. D. Vance. I'm going to tell you what I just saw, which is that every bad person I've ever met in a lifetime in Washington was aligned against J.D. Vance.

And I do think the negative case is often more powerful, because I know of myself, I do not think I'm a particularly good person. I have strong reasons for feeling that way. I don't always think that my side is right. I know for a fact I have been wrong many, many times. And I hope to correct and be honest about my error.

So it's not like I think that, you know, always, you know, God's always on my side. Sometimes I'm not on God's side. But I definitely know who's representing the other side. It's a lot easier to tell who the people who are only in it because they like, I don't know, killing other people in pointless wars.

Yemen's Houthi group has claimed responsibility for the drone that struck overnight in Tel Aviv, Israel, killing one person and injuring eight.

Israeli media identified the dead man as 50-year-old Yevgeny Ferder, who had moved to Israel from Belarus at the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Last night's strike is unique — it's the first time the group is known to have hit Tel Aviv, though the Houthi have waged a continued campaign against targets they claim are linked to Israel since the ongoing devastating war on Gaza broke out in October.


What happened?

The drone struck in central Tel Aviv in the early hours of Friday morning. The site itself is thought to be close to a number of hotels, many hosting those displaced from Israel's northern border with Lebanon. A US embassy office is also close to the site of the attack.

The presidential nomination of Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance as his running mate raises the prospect of a peaceful settlement to the conflict in Ukraine. Both have been vociferous critics of the NATO proxy war and the arming of the Kiev regime. Vance has even proposed a peace settlement that is close to Moscow's demands.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is recently pushing peace diplomacy, has voiced optimism that the omens are good for a settlement later this year to the worst war in Europe since the Second World War - if Trump and Vance are elected.

Only days after Donald Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt, he was officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate amid ecstatic scenes at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

After the tumult and drama over the last week - a long time in politics, as the saying goes - the Trump election campaign is in the driving seat. His vice presidential running mate is 39 years of age and gives the Republican Party a youthful zest. Both men are very much singing from the same hymn sheet regarding their "Make America Great Again" vision.

Trump has united the GOP under his leadership. All former party rivals lined up this week in Milwaukee to endorse the former real estate magnate in his bid to seek re-election to the White House in November. That helps to solidify his manifesto, which bodes well for diplomacy in Ukraine.

By contrast, the election campaign of Democrat incumbent President Joe Biden has run into a ditch. This week he was self-isolating in Delaware having reportedly incurred a third-time Covid infection. Biden increasingly looks toast. His apparent mental decline - the latest gaffe this week was not remembering the name of his Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, referring to him haltingly as "a black man" - has provoked a crisis in the Democratic Party and the largely favorable U.S. corporate news media. Senior figures including former President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are reportedly urging Biden to stand down and pass the torch to a younger candidate. Panic is in the air.

There are reports that Biden may throw in the towel within the next few days as the Democrats head into their National Convention to officially nominate their presidential candidate. The trouble for the Democrats is they do not have a viable alternative candidate at this late stage in the campaign - with less than four months to election day on November 7.

That means there is now a serious chance that Trump could return to the White House after he lost the election in 2020, which MAGA loyalists hotly disputed as "stolen".

The Old World is extremely vulnerable to an American leader who could depart from the liberal Atlantic consensus

If I wanted to ape the mood of erstwhile Soviet political essays, I'd write something like this: "The loud echo of gunshots in Pennsylvania resounded across the Atlantic..." You can argue about the appropriateness of using a stylebook long consigned to history, but it's the truth of the matter.

Across the European Union, they're in shock at what is happening in the United States. In the past two weeks alone, first the uproar over President Joe Biden's embarrassment in the debate, and now the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which has disrupted the entire election campaign and given the Republican a head start.

To be fair, it should be noted that Trump has not yet won the race - the most acute phase of the struggle has yet to come, and it is impossible to predict what might happen. It's worth remembering the lessons of 2020. In the spring, almost no one doubted the extravagant president would win a second term, but the pandemic messed up everything and cost him the White House. We must assume that Trump and his strategists have not forgotten this experience, and won't relax. But objectively, the conditions are now favorable.