On August 9, the State Department approved the latest major US weapons sale to Saudi Arabia, mainly to replace tanks that the kingdom has lost in its war in Yemen against Houthi rebels and allies of the former president. The $1.15 billion deal highlights the Obama administration's deepening involvement in the Saudi-led war, which has escalated after four months of peace talks broke down on August 6. Since then, warplanes from the Saudi-led coalition have bombed a Yemeni school, a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, and a potato-chip factory, killing more than 40 civilians, including at least 10 children.

The deal for the Saudi army to buy 153 Abrams tanks, hundreds of machine guns, 20 heavy-tank recovery vehicles, ammunition, and assorted other weapons is the latest in a series of arms sales by the United States—and, to a lesser extent, Britain and France—to the kingdom since it launched its war against Yemen in March 2015. In addition to providing intelligence assistance, Washington has rushed billions in smart bombs and other war matériel to help the Saudi air force continue its bombing campaign. Indeed, some of the Saudi weapons systems are so complex and dependent on US spare parts that they would be grounded without American assistance.

The Clinton's dead pool list is growing. Three people who had direct connections to Bill and Hillary Clinton died of unusual circumstances over the last few weeks adding to an already long, suspicious list of accidents and supposed suicides.

Since the Democratic National Committee emails were released by Wikileaks a few weeks ago, three people associated with the DNC have all been found dead under questionable circumstances.

According to WND, when DNC staffer Seth Rich was gunned down near his affluent neighborhood in Washington, D.C., on July 10, theories exploded in the news media about Rich's possible involvement in the WikiLeaks dump of nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails - some of the messages suggesting that the Democratic Party favored nominee Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders from the start.

Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to surround herself with more scandals than you can shake a stick at, as we said when I was growing up in Texas. We had the Mena, Arkansas scandals when her husband, Bubba, otherwise known as William Jefferson Clinton, was Attorney General and then Governor. Ambrose Evans Pritchard, the British Telegraph investigative journalist did a masterful documentation of that in his The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, when Bill was President facing impeachment in the 1990's. Then there are the Clinton Foundation scandals documented in the 2015 Peter Schweitzer book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, detailing how Hillary abused her office as Secretary of State to steer huge Saudi and other "donations" to the Clinton Foundation on whose board she sat as soon as leaving office as Secretary of State.

There are of course the national security e-mail server scandals which a corrupted Attorney General and a corrupt FBI director swept under the rug. This latest scandal puts all others in the background. It's her refusal to release all medical records detailing her medications and true state of health following a brain concussion in 2012. The Democratic candidate is likely medically suffering from irreversible dementia.

On August 8, a New Jersey radio host and blogger released what he claimed were leaked copies of Hillary Clinton's 2014 medical records from her doctor, Lisa Bardack M.D. of the Mt. Kisco Medical Group in upstate New York. According to the documents, Dr. Bardack wrote that Clinton had "early-onset Subcortical Vascular Dementia" following a serious brain concussion she suffered from a fall when she was Secretary of State, on December 7, 2012. After that fall, she spent six months in constant hospital care according to Bill Clinton, who told ABC News in 2014 that her injury "required six months of very serious work to get over." On February 1, 2013 Secretary of State and future Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, abruptly resigned as Secretary of State with no link to her health mentioned.

ABCNews in May, 2014 cited the following quote from her doctors, one of whom was Dr. Lisa Bardack: "In the course of a routine follow-up MRI on Sunday, the scan revealed...a clot in the vein that is situated in the space between the brain and the skull behind the right ear. It did not result in a stroke, or neurological damage. To help dissolve this clot, her medical team began treating the Secretary with blood thinners..." - Dr. Lisa Bardack, Mt. Kisco Medical Group, and Dr. Gigi El-Bayoumi, George Washington University.

Slower revenue growth and large spending will expand the US budget deficit to $590 billion in the fiscal year ending September 30, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

The deficit is expected to be $152 billion more than last year and $56 billion larger than CBO's forecast in March and will equal 3.2 percent of the country's economic output.

Such a budget deficit is more than the GDP of Sweden, Poland or Iran. In July, the US posted a $113 billion budget gap, bigger than the economies of Ukraine or Slovakia.

The largest deficit America has seen is $1.4 trillion in 2009, which dropped to $485 billion in 2014. US public debt will continue to grow and is projected at 77 percent of the country's GDP by year-end.

The US has pitted the Syrian Kurds against Damascus-led forces in the northeastern city of Hasakah in a bid not to lose regional influence should Turkey, Russia and Iran create an alliance to resolve the Syrian conflict, analyst and journalist Hüsnü Mahalli told Sputnik, adding that recent clashes are part of the West's "geopolitical games."

"Up until now Russia and Iran have helped to maintain cordial relations between the Syrian Kurds from the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and Damascus. The PYD made a mistake when it opted to cooperate with the US," he said.

Kurdish militias, assisted by the US, have been trying to push radical groups, including Daesh and al-Nusra Front from northern Syria and secure the porous border with Turkey. At the same time, the Kurds have established a de-facto autonomy in the areas under their control.

Mahalli emphasized that any efforts on the part of the PYD and the People's Protection Units (YPG) to create an independent state will be a mistake that could not be undone.

"The Americans have repeatedly said that they have a Plan B for Syria. Perhaps, this is what they meant. I'm afraid that the US has decided to drag the Kurds into a large-scale bloodbath," he added.

A Guantanamo detainee, who the CIA tortured as a suspected top leader of Al-Qaeda but never officially charged, has made his case for release. Abu Zubaydah appeared in public for the first time in 14 years of his detention. His first-ever hearing was made via video feed from Washington's Cuba-based prison and on his behalf. Addressing a Periodic Review Board through a uniformed soldier who read his message, Zubaydah said that he "has no desire or intent to harm the United States or any other country."

"He has been respectful to us in all of our meetings and dealings with him, and he has come to believe that he might have a chance to leave Guantanamo through this process," his opening statement reads. He said he would want "to be reunited with his family" while also "begin the process of recovering from injuries he sustained during his capture" in Pakistan in 2002.

"He has some seed money that could be used to start a business after he is reintegrated into society and is living a peaceful life," his representative read. A Saudi-born Palestinian, Zubaydah is one of three men that the CIA has admitted to have waterboarded at an unknown prison in Thailand. According to the so-called "torture report" released in 2014, Zubaydah was the first prisoner to endure the harsh CIA interrogation program.

Privacy advocates have been alarmed by calls of French and German interior ministers, who proposed a law that would make it compulsory for digital messenger services to offer unencrypted records of users' conversations to security services. France's Bernard Cazeneuve and Germany's Thomas de Maiziere shared a platform, as they spoke to the press following a Paris meeting on combating terrorism.

Cazeneuve said the countries were "not questioning the idea of encryption" - the ability to send messages digitally that cannot be easily intercepted and deciphered by outsiders - but nonetheless pushed for a new law to be discussed by EU leaders during next month's meeting in the Slovakian capital, Bratislava.

"If such legislation was adopted, this would allow us to impose obligations at the European level on non-cooperative operators," said the French minister. Additionally, Cazeneuve and de Maiziere called for a bolstering of external EU borders, better information sharing between member states, and implementation of facial recognition software that could identify suspects in public places.

Cazeneuve specifically drew attention to Telegram, a fast-rising messenger service, founded three years ago by Russian tech entrepreneur Pavel Durov. Legally domiciled in several countries around the world, Telegram prides itself on extra security measures, functions such as self-destructing messages, and not kowtowing to governments.

The top U.S. commander for the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) said Monday that he is skeptical of any additional military cooperation with Russia in Syria, and that he believes he can get the mission done without it.

Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend said that any decision to cooperate with Moscow is one for the Obama administration to make.

But, "as a soldier, I'm fairly skeptical of the Russians," Townsend told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Baghdad. "I'm not sure how much I'm inclined to believe that we can cooperate with them."

Townsend's comments on Russia reflect a broader U.S. military reluctance to work more closely with Moscow on operations in Syria, despite requests from Russia to the U.S. to join forces against ISIS in Syria. The U.S. is reluctant to cooperate with Moscow because of its alliance with President Bashar Assad; the U.S. is backing rebels who are fighting ISIS but who are also in Assad's sights.

Last week, U.S. aircraft scrambled twice to protect American commandos because Syrian government warplanes were bombing nearby.

Reading through a recent interview with former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen, it becomes clear that his world is one in which US foreign policy has only ever made us all safer and the biggest risk we now face is diminished US power.

The entire premise of his argument throughout the interview is that if the US steps back from playing global policeman, the "bad guys" will win. Simple as that.

According to the Lebanese As Safir newspaper, the proposal was made via official channels during a meeting of representatives of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia has repeatedly proposed to support Kurdish combat actions against the Syrian army and the main condition for getting the aid is a continuation of fight all across Syria, where the Kurdish fighters are present, the newspaper reported, citing PKK sources.