On October 7th, the U.S. government formally accused the Russian government of interfering with the U.S. election process.

The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow — the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.

On October 14th, NBC News reported that the CIA is planning a cyber attack against Russia, and that the target is Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders.

On October 15th, Russian Presidential Aide Yury Ushakov said in response to that news — "We will react, of course, especially given specific figures from the Russian government were mentioned."

From the U.S. government's perspective, it is the victim of Russian aggression; that the evidence pointing to the Russian government is sufficient to meet the attribution standard of "reasonable certainty"[1], and so it is entitled to respond in self defense as long as its response is proportionate to the attack[2].

Contrary to UN and Western claims Al-Qaeda shows it firmly controls eastern Aleppo as it stops Jihadi fighters and civilians from accepting a Russian offer to flee the city.

The inability of the UN to provide aid during the current ceasefire in Aleppo, and of the people of eastern Aleppo to leave via the 'humanitarian corridors' provided for them, demonstrates the truth of what The Duran - notably our contributor Afra'a Dagher, who is Syrian and who writes from Syria - has been repeatedly saying: there are no "moderate rebels" in Syria.

The story of the Aleppo ceasefire and of the 'humanitarian corridors' can be told quickly enough.

The UN supported the ceasefire and sought to use the 'humanitarian corridors' to send aid convoys into eastern Aleppo. The Jihadis in eastern Aleppo fired at the convoys, and the movement of the convoys has stopped. The result is that no aid has got through.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Jordan have been involved in purchasing thousands of Toyota pickup trucks that have been supplied to the ISIL terrorists in Syria and Iraq, Toyota customers' list in the Middle East shows.

After photos of hundreds of ISIL's Toyota pickups seized or targeted by the Syrian Army were sent by the Russian army to the Toyota Company in Japan, the company revealed a list of its main customers that have bought the vehicles.

The customers' list shows that a Saudi firm has purchased a sum of 22,500 trucks, Qatar 32,000, the UAE 11,650 and the Jordanian Army 4,500 vehicles from Toyota company. The Jordanian Army had received loans from several Saudi banks for payments.

A large number of the purchased-vehicles by the four Arab countries have already been delivered to the ISIL terrorists in Syrian and Iraq.

Informed sources have confirmed that ISIL has now over 6,000 Toyota vehicles.

"A large number of terrorists have joined their comrades in Quneitra province in Southern Syria via Jordan," a battlefield source said.

"Meantime, hundreds of militants have moved from Idlib to Jordan via Israel to join other rebels to restructure a new battalion that will be armed to the teeth and will operate under the command of a joint operation room with Israel."

The source said that the terrorists have also taken a large volume of arms and military equipment with themselves to Southern Syria.

"The terrorists are preparing for a massive attack on al-Saria al-Rabe'a region to enter al-Amal farms and are transferring military warfare to the Jabata al-Khashab region that hosts the terrorists' main base and their joint military operation room with Israel," he added.

The first mission of the new battalion will be striking at the Southernmost parts of Quneitra and Damascus province.

As polls show Hillary Clinton closing in on victory, Official Washington's neoconservative (and liberal-hawk) foreign policy establishment is rubbing its hands in anticipation of more war and more strife, including a U.S. military escalation in Syria, a take-down of Iran, and a showdown with nuclear-armed Russia.

What is perhaps most alarming about this new "group think" is that there doesn't appear to be any significant resistance to the expectation that President Hillary Clinton will unleash these neocon/liberal-hawk forces of intervention that President Barack Obama has somewhat restrained.

Assuming Donald Trump's defeat - increasingly seen as a foregone conclusion - the Republican leadership would mostly be in sync with Clinton if she adopts a hawkish foreign policy similar to what was pursued by President George W. Bush. Meanwhile, most Democrats would be hesitant to challenge their party's new president.

The three days of unilateral ceasefire Syrian and Russia had announced and kept for the besieged east-Aleppo expired today. No evacuations took place, no civilians or fighters left and no aid was delivered as "rebels" inside the besieged area shelled all possible crossings.

The U.S.-supported al-Qaeda-aligned Jihadis have used the pause to prepare for another attack on the government-held parts of Aleppo city with the aim of opening a passage into the besieged eastern areas. They received enormous amounts of new weapons and munitions from the U.S. and their other supporters. The child beheaders of the U.S.-supported radical Zinki group warned civilians in west-Aleppo city to stay away from military positions. That is impossible as the refugee-filled, densely populated areas are in the immediate neighborhood of the front lines.

The renewed attack is expected in the south-west of government-held west-Aleppo near the Ramoush-area and the Artillery Academy where the first attempted breach battle also took place. A second attack is expected in the north-west near the Castello road. It is possible that Turkish-supported forces, who battle Kurdish troops to the north-east of Aleppo-city, will also try an attack on the city. The fight against the Kurds is a Turkish attempt to keep its logistic lines of communications to the Islamic State open. Turkey has supported, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the Islamic State for years. An attack on Aleppo by directly Turkish-supported forces would be a serious breach of the Turkish-Russian agreements and lead to a further serious escalation and internationalization of the war. Turkey will not dare such a move without full U.S. support.

When immediately after the elections, I said that we are witnessing a new era of Russian parliamentarism, my optimism might have seemed premature. Today I am ready to repeat these words with even more confidence, as the new Duma convocation is showing in practice just how much the Russian parliament has changed. Over a very short period of time, new deputies and the new speaker of the Duma have made it clear that everything is going to be different than what we're used to.

Depriving deputies of the possibility to vote by proxy is a symbolic gesture showing society that from now on every deputy is personally responsible for his vote and the decisions he supports. Not a faction, not a party, and not the leaders of a party, but every individual deputy is responsible for what button he pushes when voting and for the consequences of his decisions.

Yet another important symbol is the struggle against absenteeism and the clear efforts by the new speaker to make deputies treat their work seriously, and not as an unpleasant addition to a very nice salary. Such an approach is drawing protest from those politicians who under the red flag brought some of their business sponsors in the Duma. These sponsors did not invest money into a campaign to work on laws in the Duma from 9:00 to 5:00. This means that these deputy sponsors will have to start working on legislation and forget about their own businesses, or they'll have to leave parliament.

Venezuela's opposition-led National Assembly has declared at an emergency session that "President Maduro's regime" staged a coup by blocking a referendum on Maduro's recall. The parliamentary meeting was briefly interrupted by pro-government supporters.

The lawmakers passed a resolution announcing a "break of the constitutional order and the existence of a coup d'etat committed by the Nicolas Maduro regime," AFP reported.

On October 20, the Venezuelan National Election Assembly announced the blocking of the preparations of a recall referendum for the current president.

The emergency meeting on Sunday was briefly interrupted after alleged pro-government activists rushed into the session, shouting "The Assembly will fall."

Reuters reports that several people were injured in the standoff, before the intruders were forced out.

Slaughter is all too human. Killing fieldsor mass burial grounds are in the archeological record from the Neolithic period (6,000 to 7,000 years ago) on. Nonetheless, with the advent of modern weaponry and industrial processes, the killing fields of the world have grown to levels that can stagger the imagination. During World War II, when significant parts of the planet, including many of the globe's great cities, were effectively reduced to ash, an estimated 60 million people, combatants and civilians alike, died (including six million Jews in the killing fields and ovens of Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor, and elsewhere).

America's wars in our own time have been devastating: perhaps three to four million Koreans, half of them civilians (and 37,000 Americans), as well as possibly a million Chinese troops, died between 1950 and 1953 on a peninsula largely left in rubble. In the Indochina wars of the 1960s and 1970s, the toll was similarly mind-bending. In Vietnam, 3.8 million civilians and combatants are estimated to have perished (along with 58,000 Americans); in Laos, perhaps one million people died; and in Cambodia, the U.S.-led part of that war resulted in an estimated 600,000-800,000 dead, while the rebel Khmer Rouge murdered another two to three million of their fellow countrymen in the autogenocide that followed. In all, we're talking about perhaps, by the roughest of estimates, 12 million dead in Indochina in those years.

And that's just to begin to explore some of the numbers from World War II to the present. Nick Turse, who spent years retracing the slaughter that was the Vietnam War for his monumental, award-winning book on war crimes there, Kill Anything That Moves, has more recently turned to a set of killing fields that are anything but history. In the last three years, he's paid three visits to South Sudan, the newest "country" on the planet, the one the U.S. midwifed into existence, producing a dramatic account of the ongoing internecine struggles there in his recent book Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. It's a land that has experienced Syrian-level death counts with almost no attention whatsoever from the rest of the world. Recently, he returned to its killing fields and offers a chilling account of a largely forgotten land in which slaughter is the essence of everyday life. Tom

Flying kites, safe and friendly neighborhoods, women in freely chosen attire attending college, watching movies at the cinema, attending festivities... these are some of the details of happy memories several of my Afghan friends and relatives recall during the 70s. If 15 years ago, the criminal and illegal US invasion of Afghanistan had not taken place, and if it weren't for the invasion of US-trained Mujahideen and if societal, infrastructural, and economic development had continued, the youngest generation of Afghans would today be making similar memories, and perhaps even better ones.

While the consensus in the mainstream media these days is that the Russians cause suffering wherever they set foot, the USSR actually helped build infrastructure (such as universities and dams) in the country before the Mujahideen started to emerge. The Soviets were forced to leave, and the country was left with a growing cancer that was intentionally induced by the West. As current US presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, said during an On The Record interview that took place on July 19, 2010:

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan we had this brilliant idea that we were going to come to Pakistan and create a force of Mujahideen and equip them with Stinger missiles and everything else to go after the Soviets inside Afghanistan.

And we were successful. The Soviets left Afghanistan, and then we said; "great, good-bye!", leaving these trained people, who were fanatical, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, leaving them well-armed, creating a mess, frankly, that at the time we didn't really recognize, we were just so happy to see the Soviet Union fall and we thought "fine, we are OK now everything is going to be so much better".

Now you look back. The people we are fighting today, [al-qaeda] we were supporting in the fight against the Soviets.

Those words alone make it clear that the fate of the Afghan population was never a concern, their mission was to get the Russians out of an area that is of geopolitical interest to Clinton and her Western warmongering colleagues.

The mess that they 'mistakenly' created is one that serves their agenda well, because the US never truly left Afghanistan. To this day, the US has rooted itself all over the country and is in charge of most, if not all, military operations under the pretext that Afghanistan would be lost without them and that the situation would worsen if all troops were to be withdrawn. (That's right, Obama's "you can take that to the bank" promise to bring the troops home from Afghanistan was a lie.) A mere glimpse at the results from their 15 year occupation and the conclusion is that the Afghan population would be far better off without US 'assistance'.