Starting next year, Singapore will allow travelers to travel using biometrics alone. That means no passport or boarding pass just give them your eyeball! You still have to have those documents with you but the airport security won’t need it to authenticate you in 2024.
โฝ๏ธ The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) will re-admit Russian junior teams to international events.
๐ฆ๐ฒ Armenian authorities say that they have received at least 42,500 refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh following Azerbaijan's offensive last week.
๐ช๐ธ Spanish conservative leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo failed to win enough votes to challenge acting Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez meaning the Prime Minister has a chance to stay in office.
๐ฎ๐ฑ Israel says that the U.S. will waive Visa requirements for Israelis but the U.S. says that this is not a sure thing yet.
๐ฏ๐ต The Supreme Court in Japan is debating whether a person must undergo surgery in order to change their legal gender. Reminder: surgery does not change gender.
โ๏ธ The House Oversight Committee has shown proof that Delaware Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf explicitly directed that a probe into the Biden Family FARA violations exclude Joe Biden, named as "Political Figure 1."
๐ผ Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman says that China is "taking back our pandas." Pandas are not native to North America.
๐ Twitter, now X, CEO Linda Yacarino admitted that Twitter supresses speech that is "lawful but awful."
Ukraine is offering to attack Iran and Syria along with its plea to attack Russia with long-range missiles, according to The Guardian. In their continued plea for long-range missiles, Ukraine says that if they get them, they’ll attack other countries that the West doesn’t like. It’s like a two-fer!
Ukraine says that drones from Russia were provided by Iran but have European components. They say that they can take those factories out if they have more weapons.
The Ukrainian government document is called “Barrage deaths: report on Shahed-136/131 UAVs.” Moscow has denied using Iranian drones and the U.S. recently admitted that Russia is not having a problem making its own weapons. So would they rely on this new intelligence from Ukraine as a tactic to authorize them to strike Iran when the U.S. is so desperate to re-negotiate the nuclear treaty? Let’s hope not given that NATO specialist Jaques Baud reported that Ukrainians are using Google Translate to figure out how to use the weapons that the West is currently sending.
The European Union says that Russian disinformation is the most active on Twitter. They said that after Elon Musk pushed back on the Digital Services Act (DSA) because it regulates the conduct of the large tech platforms.
How do they know that Russian disinformation is the most active on Twitter? We saw from the Twitter files that when U.S. politicians asked them to find Russian disinformation, they could not. So where did the E.U. find it? They found it through a “a disinformation monitoring start-up” called TrustLab, which compiled this report. Incidentally, TrustLab has partnered with the CIA.
TrustLab’s report does not say that disinformation came from Russia. They do not seem able to prove that. They say that incidents of keywords related to disinformation are high on various platforms in various countries.
All they did was search use the “sampling approach for specific keywords related to current mis/disinformation topics on each platform’s native search engine, and collect the posts and accounts from the search results.”
That literally has nothing to do with Russia yet European commissioner Vฤra Jourová said this about the report: “The Russian state has engaged in the war of ideas to pollute our information space with half truth.”
Did she read it?
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Epic Games refused to pay two Fortnite Champions because they were Russian.
The two champions were told that their $200,000 cash prize money would be withheld because they are from a “Prize Restricted Region.” But they don’t live in Russia. They live in Belarus, which is not a “Prize Restricted Region” and one of them holds a bank account in Kazakhstan, which is not one either.
The rationale is that Russian people must be punished because their country “invaded” Ukraine. Russia did not invade Ukraine, they responded to the request by Eastern Ukrainian regions to protect them from escalating terror by the Ukrainian army. They did so invoking the United Nations Treaty article 51 which allows “self-defense as an exception to the prohibition against the use of force.”
But let’s pretend that Russia did invade Ukraine. Does that mean all Russian people should be punished? By that logic, all Americans should be punished for their country’s current illegal occupation of Syria. Or past invasion of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia… You pick.
That would mean seizing Jeff Bezos’ yachts like they do Russian oligarchs. That would mean that U.S. athletes would be banned from international competition. Is this what we sign off to when we watch Russian property owners and athletes banned from international events?
Former NATO specialist Jaques Baud says this about sanctioning people for the action of their country in his book Operation Z:
“The invasions – illegal and illegitimate – of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria by Western countries have given rise to neither sanctions nor condemnations. Disabled American or Polish athletes were not deprived of the Paralympic Games; British cats were not excluded from cat shows; Polish, German, American, British, French or Lithuanian weightlifters were not convicted for crimes they did not personally commit; British , American or Swiss tennis players were not forced to condemn their governments to participate in a tournament, Chopin's "Polonaises" did not become "Iraqis", and the atrocities of the Polish military were not condemned , etc.
With the Russian operation, it seems that, suddenly, the West has created a consciousness, but which functions – as we will see – in a very selective and variable geometry way…”
Republican Debate is trending because that happened last night without President Trump.
Obamacare is trending because the GOP candidates were asked multiple times if they would end it and couldn't provide an answer. Mike Pence dodged the question it twice and instead changed the subject to mass shootings.
Storm Agnes is trending because that is the name of a storm currently pummeling for the U.K
News By The Numbers
Two months. That is how long a Korean veteran was given to find a new place to live after the nursing home he lived in was sold to be used for undocumented immigrants.
96%. That is how many people in Alabama admitted to being petty in a recent poll. That is the top score in the country but can you trust a self-reported score of pettiness?
40. That is how many bottles of whisky, casked in 1933, were found in the cellar of a castle in Scotland. At 190 years old, that makes it the oldest whisky in the world. At least 24 bottles will be sold at auction and are expected to sell for £10,000 each.
The Senate may have reached a deal to keep the U.S. government going but it will have a hard time clearing the House.
Senate leaders announced that they reached a deal on what they are calling a “stopgap” funding bill, which would extend government spending through November 17. The bill includes $6.2 billion for Ukraine and $6 billion for natural disasters and nothing for the U.S. southern border crisis.
House Republicans are demanding that the bill include money for border security and many are saying that they will not approve the aid to Ukraine.
Even if Congress does reach a deal, they will have to do this again in mid-November based on these negotiations. That’s not a very good deal, is it?
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This newsletter is written and researched by Natali Morris. Please feel free to reach Natali at [email protected] for any editorial feedback.
