The overall price tag of the fiscal stimulus package in the US could be around one trillion dollars. With record budget deficits and its national debt at $23 trillion, is the US hastening toward a fiscal reckoning?

The Trump administration wants to send direct cash payments to Americans in the coming weeks to help them cope with the economic ravages of coronavirus, part of a massive relief package developed between the White House and Capitol Hill. The overall price tag of the package is more than $1 trillion, making it one of the largest federal emergency fiscal packages ever assembled.

Whether this is a temporary downturn or a full-blown recession, two things will happen. Tax revenues will fall as people's income drops, and Federal spending will rise. The result will be higher deficits.

Millions of Americans across the country are, day-by-day, adjusting their lives to better cope with the economic, social, and political impacts caused by the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, as a dark money network simultaneously works overtime to further politicize the festering crisis.

A Democrat-aligned Super PAC announced on Tuesday that it will spend $5 million on negative ads targeting President Trump's response to the coronavirus. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday:

"The campaign from Pacronym — a political action committee affiliated with the nonprofit group Acronym — represents the first major pivot to coronavirus-related advertising fewer than 250 days from the election."

Acronym owns the technology firm Shadow, Inc., which was responsible for developing the infamous app used in the chaotic Iowa caucuses. As RealClearPolitics noted, the firm's founder and CEO, Tara McGowan:

"worked for Barack Obama's 2012 campaign and previously served as the digital director for NextGen America, a progressive organization founded by presidential candidate Tom Steyer."

Acronym is funded by the "liberal dark money group" New Venture Fund, which is "part of a larger group called Arabella Advisors, which provides philanthropic guidance and manages four nonprofits," according to the nonpartisan ethics watchdog group Americans for Public Trust. Those also include the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Windward Fund, and Hopewell Fund.

The financial web, however, goes far beyond those connections.

On June 16, 2019, we presented arguments against the Mueller gang's assertion that the DNC was hacked by Russians. Cyber expert Yaacov Apelbaum posted an incredible report with information basically proving that the DNC was not hacked by the Russians. Today we have additional information supporting the case that Russians never hacked the DNC.

The political gridlock in Israel shows no sign of abating even after holding its third parliamentary elections in a year in early March, amid attempts by Prime Minister Netanyahu's Likud and the Blue and White alliance to form a coalition government.

In an interview with Israel's Channel 12 on Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that his Likud and the Blue and White alliance led by Benny Gantz had wrapped up talks on a possible line-up of a national unity government.

This stipulates that he would first serve as prime minister to later be replaced by Gantz.

"I will leave office on the agreed date. There will be no shticks and tricks. Millions of Israelis are waiting for us", he pointed out.

Here's a question for you: How do you know when you're at war?

When there are troops on the streets? When mass panic hits? When there's martial law and the public is told to batten down the hatches for a months or years-long siege? When world "leaders" tell their populations that the enemy is to blame for all the carnage?

If these are the criteria, then that means we're at war right now.

Troops on the streets? Check.

Mass panic? Check.

Martial law and the public being told to batten down the hatches? Check and check.

World leaders telling their populations that the enemy is to blame for all the carnage? Check and check.

Yes, by all of those metrics, we're at war. But no one is calling it war. Why not? Because, in the minds of the public, there really is only one metric for judging our war status: Whether troops are in the battlefield shooting at each other or not. Surely that's war, right?

But then, why is Merkel invoking World War II in her attempt to explain the current crisis to the German people? Why are we being told that the times we are living through are worse than war? Why is misleader after misleader, from Trump to Trudeau to seemingly everyone else, invoking old war time emergency measures and preparing for full-scale martial law?

Still not enough to convince you that the world is now at war? Well then why did Donald Trump declare war on coronavirus and anoint himself a "war-time president"? Why did Macron look steely-eyed into the cameras and pronounce "nous somme en guerre"? Why are Boris Johnson, Moon Jae-in, and seemingly every other so-called "leader" in the world piling on in their declarations of war?

The truth is that the world is at war now. And that war is World War III. The difference is that no one (as yet) understands the nature of this war, who its combatants are, and what the objective of those waging it really is.

I know you're incredulous, so allow me to explain.

Even as President Trump says he tested negative for coronavirus, the COVID-19 pandemic raises the fear that huge swaths of the executive branch or even Congress and the Supreme Court could also be disabled, forcing the implementation of "continuity of government" plans that include evacuating Washington and "devolving" leadership to second-tier officials in remote and quarantined locations.

But Coronavirus is also new territory, where the military itself is vulnerable and the disaster scenarios being contemplated -- including the possibility of widespread domestic violence as a result of food shortages -- are forcing planners to look at what are called "extraordinary circumstances".

Above-Top Secret contingency plans already exist for what the military is supposed to do if all the Constitutional successors are incapacitated. Standby orders were issued more than three weeks ago to ready these plans, not just to protect Washington but also to prepare for the possibility of some form of martial law.

In 2017, RAND Corporation published in its associated media Small Wars Journal an article by the researchers Marta Kepe and Jan Osburg, outlining a strategic defense plan for the Baltic countries in the event of a Russian invasion. The authors claim that Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia will manage their weaknesses to face the Russians, overcoming their population and military deficit through the participation of civilians in the conflicts, working with the armed forces to create a "total defense" plan that would make the invasion too costly and laborious for Russia.

Subsequently, the RAND Corporation article was mentioned in a paper by the National Interest magazine, authored by Michael Peck, in which the author studies the Baltic defense strategy, speculating about "total defense" and its efficiency in a possible case of Russian invasion. The researcher, finally, takes a pessimistic conclusion, stating that, despite all efforts, nothing will change the fact that Russia is a large country and the Baltic States are small and weak.

In March last year, the renowned American magazine Foreign Policy published an article by Mikheil Saakashvili, former president of Georgia, claiming that Russia's next "targets" would be European nations. In the text, Saakashvili considers the possibility of a Russian attack on the Baltic countries, saying that President Vladimir Putin sees them as real threats because they are "functional democracies on the Russian border". After developing his reasoning, the author comes to the conclusion that this invasion will not occur, pointing other countries as future "targets" of Russia. However, even though Saakashvili does not believe in the possibility of a Russian invasion, rumors about a Russian plan to invade and annex the Baltic nations have generated unfounded tensions in the region.

Though it narrowly averted war with Iran this January, the Trump administration is still pushing for all-out military conflict. The architects of the drive to war, Mike Pompeo and Benjamin Netanyahu, have relied on a series of cynical provocations to force Trump's hand.

The administration of President Donald Trump may escape the most recent conflict with Iran without war, however, a dangerous escalation is just over the horizon. And as before, the key factors driving the belligerence are not outraged Iraqi militia leaders or their allies in Iran, but Trump's secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long sought to draw the US into a military confrontation with Iran.

Throughout the fall of 2019, Netanyahu ordered a series of Israeli strikes against Iranian allies in Iraq and against Lebanese Hezbollah units. He and Pompeo hoped the attacks would provoke a reaction from their targets that could provide a tripwire outright war with Iran. As could have been expected, corporate US media missed the story, perhaps because it failed to reinforce the universally accepted narrative of a hyper-aggressive Iran emboldened by Trump's failure to "deter" it following Iran's shoot-down of a U.S. drone in June, and an alleged Iranian attack on Saudi oil facility in September.

Pompeo and John Bolton set the stage for the tripwire strategy in May 2019 with a statement by national security adviser John Bolton citing "troubling and escalatory indications and warnings," implying an Iranian threat without providing concrete details. That vague language echoed a previous vow by Bolton that "any attack" by Iran or "proxy" forces "on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force."

President Donald Trump told his top national security advisers last week that because of the coronavirus pandemic he didn't think an aggressive response to new attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq by Iranian-backed militias was the right move, according to one former and four current senior U.S. officials.

Trump expressed concern that hitting back hard at Iran at this time would make the U.S. look bad given the extent to which Iran and the rest of the world are struggling to contain the spread of COVID-19, the officials said. They said the president made the comments during a meeting at which his advisers briefed him on possible military responses to the attacks.

It was a notable shift for a president who has made a bellicose approach to Iran a cornerstone of his foreign policy agenda and one that showcases how consumed Trump now is with the coronavirus pandemic.

Russia is set to send teams of doctors, protective gear and medical equipment to Italy to help fight the Covid-19 pandemic in the country. It follows an appeal by Italian PM Giuseppe Conte during a phone call with Vladimir Putin.

The coronavirus is spreading like wildfire in the southern European country, where nearly 800 people succumbed to the disease on Saturday alone - the largest daily loss since the start of the pandemic.

The overall number of deaths in Italy now stands at 4,825, with 53,578 infected, having long surpassed China, where the virus originated.