The ongoing operation in Mosul, Iraq, is taking its toll on US troops, with 16 killed and 27 wounded, according to a military source in Moscow cited by TASS. The US Department of Defense has told RT America it is only aware of one casualty.

"During the first two weeks of the ground operation to capture Mosul, 16 American servicemen lost their lives, 27 more sustained various wounds," the source told TASS. The majority of the losses were due to "land mine explosions, artillery and mortar shelling."

In certain cases, however, poor coordination between ground troops and air support was reportedly to blame for those killed or injured. "Two special operations soldiers died following airstrikes by US B-52H jets on Mosul suburbs," the source said.

Among the House of Cards-infested cliffhangers that defined the "circus is in town" US election (to quote Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan's Desolation Row), the key question in the lead up towards Election Day was why the FBI finally folded.

FBI Director James Comey, at the 11^th hour, ended up delivering another letter to Congress, marveling how his team "has been working around the clock" studying no less than 650,000 emails on the laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, the sex pervert estranged husband of Hillary Clinton's top aid Huma Abedin.

Comey finally concluded the FBI had not found anything to change its previous verdict regarding Hillary's Subterranean Email Server. "Extreme carelessness", yes; but no criminal wrongdoing.

All this while among the twitter.com/wikileaks.

In Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks, an explicit admission can be found in a November 10, 2008 internal review that the Clinton Foundation was breaking the law.

Moreover, The Big Picture had been quite clear all along; the Clinton Foundation as well as the Clinton Global Initiative were both operated as "political organizations" totally focused on boosting "pay to play".

We had expected a Syrian Army "Election Campaign", a large size attack on Al Bab or east-Aleppo. That did not happen despite the right "assets" being in place and I have heard no reason yet why it was delayed. The Russian aircraft carrier group, which was expected last Friday along the Syrian coast, will only arrive this evening. It must have intentionally slowed its travel. There has been no single Syrian or Russian airstrike on east-Aleppo in last 21 days. "Rebel" shelling of west-Aleppo has not stopped for a day and caused many casualties. That will now change. One Russia source claims the Russian fleet will engage immediately. NOTAMs, NOtices To Air Men, about imminent operations on Syria's west-coast have been released. The declared areas and times of operation correspond to a campaign, not a single strike.
After some 12 days of fighting, the second large al-Qaeda campaign to break the siege on east-Aleppo by attacking the south western side of west-Aleppo completely failed. While the first round nearly achieved a break through but was then contained the second attack was only a alibi attempt which never made any progress towards its claimed aim. The Syrian army has recaptured the housing project 1070 and will soon have cleaned all other areas that were shortly in the hands of the Jihadis. The loss in material and men for the Jihadis were immense. The Syrian army has finally learned how to defend against suicide vehicle bombs: have adequate weapons ready in the front line to kill them on their approaches. Of nearly 20 such bomb runs only 3 or 4 reached their targets and losses from those were less severe than from earlier bombs. The Jihadis and their "western" media and "expert" proxies seem to have given up on east-Aleppo. There is no sign that another break through attempt will be launched.

Leaked funding documents reveal an effort by George Soros and his foundations to manipulate election laws and process rules ahead of the federal election far more expansively than has been previously reported.

The billionaire and convicted felon moved hundreds of millions of dollars into often-secret efforts to change election laws, fuel litigation to attack election integrity measures, push public narratives about voter fraud, and to integrate the political ground game of the left with efforts to scare racial minority groups about voting rights threats.

These Soros-funded efforts moved through dozens of 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) charities and involved the active compliance with civil rights groups, government officials, and purportedly non-partisan groups like the League of Women Voters.

The leaked documents also reveal deliberate and successful efforts to manipulate media coverage of election issues in mainstream media outlets like the The New York Times.

Conservatives and Republicans have no opposing effort or source of funds that represents even a small fraction in opposition to level of the Soros-led manipulation contained in the leaked documents.

The documents reveal that the Soros campaign fueled litigation attacking election integrity measures, such as citizenship verification and voter ID. It funded long-term efforts to fundamentally transform election administration -- including the creation of databases that were marketed to state governments for use in voter verification. It propped up left-leaning media to attack reports of voter fraud, and conducted racially and ideologically targeted voter registration drives.

Moscow seeks to abolish mutual restrictions with the EU, but Brussels doesn't show commitment to the matter, Economic Development Minister Aleksey Ulyukaev told Italian business leaders in Rome on Tuesday. Italy has been opposing anti-Russian sanctions, calling them counterproductive.

"As for cars, clothing and furniture, there are no imports restrictions. The restrictions apply to agricultural products. They're probably quite significant," Ulyukaev said.

"But this is not our choice. The best solution is to mutually waive these limitations, we would welcome it, but unfortunately our partners - including the European partners - are not showing goodwill here," he added.

Italian businesses have been seeking ways to continue delivering their products to the Russian market despite the restrictions. For example, investors from Italy plan to build a buffalo farm and a mozzarella production plant in Crimea, aiming to put €300 million (US$337 million) into the enterprises.

Five suspected Islamic State recruiters have been arrested in Germany, German media report. The so-called "preacher without face," a suspected mastermind of the entire recruiting scheme, is one of those detained.

The arrests were made in the German regions of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia, according to a team of journalists at the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and broadcasters NDR and WDR.

Among the suspects is the so-called "preacher without face," Ahmad Abdelazziz A (who sometimes calls himself Abu Walaa, and has an app with this name), a 32-year-old Iraqi citizen who has been under investigation since last year over recruiting young Muslims in Germany, and later arranging to send them to Iraq and Syria.

During a very important meeting of the Security Council - not even mentioned in the Western Press - on 28 October, the United States voted against UNO cooperation with regional organisations which include Russia, and therefore also China. By refusing to work with others, and thus to admit that other powers are their equals, Washington has taken the path towards a division of the world into two distinct spheres and the end of economic globalisation.

Moscow called for a special meeting of the Security Council on 28 October 2016, to debate the cooperation between the UNO and the certain regional organisations. Ambassador Vladimir Churkin, who was then presiding the Council, invited the representative of the Commonwealth of Independent States (the Russian Sergey Ivanov, CIS), the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (Russian General Nikolai Bordyuzha, CSTO) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (Tajik Rashid Alimov, SCO).

The three General Secretaries presented the work of their organisations - cooperation between the states of the ex-Soviet Union for the CIS, a military alliance for the CSTO, and a regional cooperation to stabilise central Asia for the SCO. They stressed their contribution to the UNO concerning the fight against drug trafficking and terrorism - two subjects which are unanimously approved by the international community, although everyone knows that these plagues are created and controlled by the United States.

In Douglas Adams' So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, there is a scene where a spaceship lands on earth and a robot emerges from the craft, proclaiming that "I come in peace" and exhorting the earthlings to "take me to your Lizard." The story's protagonist, Arthur Dent, has this strange request explained to him by his friend, Ford Prefect, an experienced galactic hitchhiker:

"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

"What?"

"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"

"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."

Ford shrugged again.

"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."

If only this was a joke. But here we are, on the verge of a contest between the two least respected, most distrusted candidates to run for office in modern political history. And some people say these lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them.

In a backhand way, The New York Times admits that the U.S.-backed "moderate" rebels in east Aleppo are fighting alongside Al Qaeda jihadists, an almost casual admission of this long-obscured reality, writes Robert Parry.

As much as The New York Times and the mainstream U.S. media have become propaganda outlets on most foreign policy issues, like the one-sided coverage of the bloody Syrian war, sometimes the truth seeps through in on-the-ground reporting by correspondents, even ones who usually are pushing the "propo."

Such was the case with Anne Barnard's new reporting from inside west Aleppo, the major portion of the city which is in government hands and copes with regular terror rocket and mortar attacks from rebel-held east Aleppo where Al Qaeda militants and U.S.-armed-and-funded "moderate" rebels fight side-by-side.

Almost in passing, Barnard's article on Sunday acknowledged the rarely admitted reality of the Al Qaeda/"moderate" rebel collaboration, which puts the United States into a de facto alliance with Al Qaeda terrorists and their jihadist allies, fighting under banners such as Nusra Front (recently renamed Syria Conquest Front) and Ahrar al-Sham.

The fortuitous discovery of perhaps thousands of emails exchanged with Hillary Clinton's private email server, recovered from the computer belonging to sexual cluster bomb Anthony Weiner and his estranged missus - Clinton Chief of Staff and vice-chair of her election campaign Huma Abedin - has once again interrupted the manufactured momentum of Clinton inevitability. First and foremost, it reemphasizes the transient nature of Clinton's understanding of 'truth'; she clearly did not turn over to the FBI all emails on the server which were not of a personal nature. Or perhaps it is the concept of 'personal' with which she has an imperfect understanding, so that it includes 'things which might get me in trouble'.

Several sites have attempted to make sense of this election campaign, which is noteworthy as it pits perhaps the two most despised people in America against one another for the increasingly tawdry prize of President of the United States. Let me say that again - the only thing unusual in these times of negative campaigning and character assassination is that a popular candidate has not emerged - it remains to be determined only who is less hated. Anyway, of those sites, the best I have seen can be found at the Archdruid Report (thanks, Cortes); poignantly entitled, "The Last Gasp of the American Dream", it is at pains to explain - among other things - that the claim this is the most important election in American history is simply a flailing attempt to lend some dignity and appearance of deliberation to a process that has become nine parts entertainment mixed with one part immature graduation kegger.

There's an old military parable which is a cruder analogy of "You can't put lipstick on a pig", and it's, "You can't buff a turd". It is, frankly, impossible to invest the ongoing election process in America with anything like dignity, and it is instead increasingly apparent to uncomfortable Americans and gobsmacked internationals that it is a desperate contest by a serial liar to prevent an interloper from outside the insular American political class from occupying the highest office. The Clinton campaign's subtext that repudiating Clinton is spitting in the face of women everywhere is a cheap trick - no further demonstrations are necessary to prove women can do anything men can do which does not require superior upper-body strength, and there are a few women who can do even that. Speaking in the broadest and most general terms, there are some fields in which women are a little better than men, and some in which they generally do not perform as well. But there are virtually none women just can't do, and it should be clear that gender has nothing to do with a natural ability to assume the office of president.