Tensions between the United States and China are rising as the U.S. election nears, with tit-for-tat consulate closures, new U.S. sanctions and no less than three U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups prowling the seas around China. But it is the United States that has initiated each new escalation in U.S.-China relations. China's responses have been careful and proportionate, with Chinese officials such as Foreign Minister Wang Yi publicly asking the U.S. to step back from its brinkmanship to find common ground for diplomacy.

Most of the U.S. complaints about China are long-standing, from the treatment of the Uighur minority and disputes over islands and maritime borders in the South China Sea to accusations of unfair trade practices and support for protests in Hong Kong. But the answer to the "Why now?" question seems obvious: the approaching U.S. election.

Danny Russel, who was Obama's top East Asia expert in the National Security Council and then at the State Department, told the BBC that the new tensions with China are partly an effort to divert attention from Trump's bungled response to the Covid-19 pandemic and his tanking poll numbers, and that this "has a wag the dog feel to it."

Meanwhile, Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden has been going toe-to-toe with Trump and Secretary Pompeo in a potentially dangerous "tough on China" contest, which could prove difficult for the winner to walk back after the election.

When International Court of Justice (ICC) Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, confirmed last December that the Court has ample evidence to pursue a war crimes investigation in occupied Palestine, the Israeli government responded with the usual rhetoric, accusing the international community of bias and insisting on Israel's 'right to defend itself.'

Beneath the platitudes and typical Israeli discourse, the Israeli government knew too well that an ICC investigation into war crimes in Palestine could be quite costly. An investigation, in itself, represents an indictment of sorts. If Israeli individuals were to be indicted for war crimes, that is a different story, as it becomes a legal obligation of ICC members to apprehend the criminals and hand them over to the Court.

Israel remained publicly composed, even after Bensouda, last April, elaborated on her December decision with a 60-page legal report, titled: "Situation in the State of Palestine: Prosecution Response to the Observations of Amici Curiae, Legal Representatives of Victims, and States."

In the report, the ICC addressed many of the questions, doubts and reports submitted or raised in the four months that followed her earlier decision. Countries such as Germany and Austria, among others, had used their position as amici curiae — 'friends of the court' — to question the ICC jurisdiction and the status of Palestine as a country.

Bensouda insisted that "the Prosecutor is satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to initiate an investigation into the situation in Palestine under article 53(1) of the Rome Statute, and that the scope of the Court's territorial jurisdiction comprises the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza ("Occupied Palestinian Territory")."

Iran's actual coronavirus death toll is three times the official government numbers, an investigation concluded over the weekend.

The Middle Eastern nation has been accused of deliberately suppressing the extent of its Covid-19 outbreak after an anonymous source leaked data which showed vastly more people had both caught and died from the virus.

Iran's health ministry figures claim 279,000 people have been infected, of which 14,000 have died.

But the BBC's Persian service has been given details of daily admissions to hospitals, including ages, gender and symptoms, which found at least 451,000 people have caught coronavirus in Iran and almost 42,000 have died.

Iranian health officials on Sunday rejected the BBC's report, which was broadcast on Saturday.

"Despite all the pressures that the pandemic has put on the country's medical staff, the outbreak is not large enough to cause such deaths figures," Ali Akbar Haqdoust, deputy health minister, told state radio on Sunday.


Health ministry spokeswoman Sima Sadat-Lari said on Saturday that Iran follows WHO guidelines, while hard-line news media in Iran accused BBC of fabricating evidence.

Venezuela's main opposition parties on Sunday pledged to boycott legislative elections scheduled for Dec. 6, saying they will be rigged by the ruling socialist party and that taking part would amount to "collaborating with the dictatorship's strategy."

The move was widely expected after a series of recent interventions by President Nicolas Maduro's government in the National Electoral Council (CNE) and opposition political parties. The parties boycotted Maduro's 2018 re-election on similar grounds, and now label him a usurper.

But it nonetheless paves the way toward a loss of opposition control of the National Assembly, which could complicate the standing of Juan Guaido, recognized by dozens of countries as Venezuela's rightful president due to his position as the congress's speaker.

"Venezuela, a nation undergoing a humanitarian crisis that is also subjected to a criminal, oppressive dictatorship, deserves free, democratic and transparent elections," the 27 parties wrote in a statement published on the National Assembly's website.

The parties included Guaido's Popular Will party, as well as the Justice First, Democratic Action, and A New Era parties, which are collectively known as the "G4" and make up the bulk of opposition representation in the legislature.

Venezuela's information ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Maduro calls Guaido a U.S.-backed puppet seeking to oust him in a violent coup, and has argued the opposition boycotts elections it knows it would lose.

British special forces must "uphold the same standards" as other soldiers in wartime, a senior defence figure said after accusations that a rogue unit killed Afghan civilians.

The Special Air Service Regiment has come under the spotlight after emails were released suggesting its troops were involved in the deaths of 33 Afghan people in 11 night raids on homes in 2011.

The Ministry of Defence said it had thoroughly investigated the claims and found no evidence to prosecute any soldiers.

But the level of detail in the emails has raised concerns over the conduct of the troops in Helmand province during the conflict.

Tobias Ellwood, chairman of the Defence Select Committee, told The National that any new evidence should be pursued by investigators.

"The British Armed Forces have one of the most highly respected reputations in the world because of their standards and values on the battlefield," Mr Ellwood said.


"If evidence comes to light that we have fallen beneath those standards, then it's imperative that the military police reopen the investigation."

"The true terrorists of our world do not meet at the docks at midnight, or scream "Allahu Akbar" before some violent action. The true terrorists of our world wear 5000 dollar suits and work in the highest positions of finance, government and business."

~ Peter Joseph, "Zeitgeist: Addendum". Documentary, History, War, www.imdb.com. 2008.

So who are the real terrorists today? They are those that seek to gain total power and control over all of us, and they are called the State. Politically speaking, the use of terrorism is a mighty weapon because it instills much fear into the hearts of man, and fear can drive the masses into panic and hiding, leaving the door open to tyranny. The ruling class fully understands this concept, and uses it as a psychological tool to control the people, and by doing so the terroristic state claims to be our protector and savior instead of our aggressor. Only a system controlled by psychopaths would use such a strategy.

Do not mistake anything about what is going on today, and do not underestimate the sinister aspect of this long planned and purposely-manufactured false pandemic. This is an act of terror that has been created for the purpose of spreading fear in order to gain more power and complete control over the world population. This is not only state sponsored terrorism, but is an active terroristic plot being accomplished by the state itself. The difference this time is that it is not cloaked in mystery or secrecy, there is no threat of bombs, and no group is claiming responsibility for this attack on humanity. It is terror by stealth alone, as this new claimed killer of the innocent is said to be a virus that has never even been properly or scientifically isolated or identified. No shot had to be fired in order to panic the masses, and all that was needed was a lie that could be easily sold to a population of pathetic brainwashed sheep awaiting their own slaughter.

Politicians who attended the funeral of Congressman John Lewis in Georgia won't have to worry about Washington's new quarantine rules as they return to the city because they're deemed too essential to lock down.

A 'Who's Who' of Democrat politicians attended Thursday's funeral in Atlanta, despite a state ban on gatherings of more than 50 people. Some 50 members of Congress attended, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Kamala Harris, a leading candidate to be Joe Biden's vice presidential running mate.

Georgia is among 27 states that Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser deemed to be coronavirus hotspots and therefore subject to her July 24 order requiring anyone traveling from high-risk areas to self-quarantine for 14 days when they arrive in the nation's capital. Georgia has seen a rise in new Covid-19 infections, including 32,000 confirmed cases on July 28 alone, and some hospitals reportedly have run out of intensive care unit beds.

Forty five years ago, Cold Warriors in the Pentagon and CIA shook their fists angrily at the stars- and for good reason.

On July 17, 1975 the first international handshake was occurring in space between Russian Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov and American astronaut Thomas Stafford as the first official act kicking off the historic Apollo-Soyuz cooperative mission. Taking place during age of nuclear terror on Earth, the Apollo-Soyuz represented a great hope for humankind and was the first ever international space mission leading the way to the MIR-USA cooperation and later International Space Station. Starting on July 15 as both Russian and American capsules launched simultaneously and continuing until July 24^th, the Apollo-Soyuz cooperation saw astronauts and cosmonauts conducting joint experiments, exchanged gifts, and tree seeds later planted in each others' nations.

As hope for a bright future of cooperation and co-discovery continued for the coming decades with mankind's slow emergence as a space faring species, affairs on earth devolved in disturbing ways. A new era of regime change operations, Islamic terrorism and oil geopolitics took on new life in the 1980s and as globalization stripped formerly productive nations of their industrial/scientific potential, the Soviet Union collapsed by 1991. During this dark time, the consolidation of a corporatocracy under NAFTA and the European Maastricht Treaty occurred and transatlantic globalists gloated over the collapse of Russia and the rise of a utopian end-of-history, unipolar order.

In some ways, today's world of 2020 is different from that of 1975 and in other ways it is disturbingly similar.

London — On May 18, Qatar became the latest country to make downloading a coronavirus contact tracing app mandatory for citizens and residents, raising privacy concerns because the app can access photos, videos, and location data on the user's phone.

The government launched the app, called Ehteraz — which means "precaution" — in late April, but authorities said this week the app had to be installed when "leaving the house for any reason," starting on May 22.

Qatari health officials have maintained that there is no cause for concern over privacy, saying personal data would be kept for no more than two months before being "deleted forever."

Polish allegations that Russia planted TNT aboard the ill-fated plane of former President Lech Kaczynski are a figment of their imagination, Moscow has said, advising Warsaw to listen to the pilots' communications again.

"Reality has firmly intertwined with fiction, turning it into an endless fantasy-making process," Maria Zakharova, Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, wrote on Facebook about the freshly released preliminary results of Poland's second probe into the 2010 tragedy.

This investigation "has become the Yoknapatawpha County of modern Poland," she said, referring to a fictional territory in Mississippi where the events of most novels by American writer, William Faulkner, took place.