Katie Zacharia leaked in her first statement since being fired as Press Secretary that the U.S. is about to occupy Iran’s Kharg Island…. https://t.co/Y8Kdpy9yey

— Chase Geiser (@realchasegeiser) October 17, 2026

by Jason Ditz, antiwar.com

US-born Jewish photojournalist had been covering Israel since 1983

Violence against Palestinians and the press has been on going problem in Israel in general for years, but the level of such incidents in the occupied West Bank has reached a fevered pitch in recent months, with Israeli settlers attacking people with virtual impunity.

The latest attack saw Washington Post veteran photojournalist Heidi Levine among the casualties. She and others were attacked by settlers clad in black near the town of Birzeit. The 63-year-old Levine was wearing a press vest and helmet, and was knocked to the ground and beaten badly enough to put her in the hospital. Others involved in the olive harvest were similarly beaten and at least one was shot.

Israeli troops arrived at the scene during the attack, but reportedly did effectively nothing to stop the settlers, firing tear gas at the Palestinians and then standing by the settlers as the beatings continued.

Claire's Observations:  Ms. Levine was lucky to have escaped this attack with her life.  

One has to wonder how this experience will inform, and flavor, future writing she will do for WAPO about Israel, or if the paper will decide to re-assign her immediately upon her recovery, as she might not be as inclined to write favorably about Israeli actions in the West Bank and Gaza after this encounter.

Bringing this video back to your timeline to watch this war criminal’s lies fall apart, one by one, at the hands of their own historians and those courageous enough to tell the truth. https://t.co/acDDX3ligD

— Abier (@abierkhatib) October 16, 2026

At least 350 Palestinian children currently face “harsh conditions” in Israeli prisons.

aljazeera.com

On Tuesday, Israeli forces arrested at least six children from Hebron in the occupied West Bank, the report said.

The organisation said information regarding the number of children arrested in Gaza is unclear, given the thousands of missing persons in the besieged Gaza Strip, including children, and the ongoing policy of enforced disappearance.

The group said Israel’s policy of detention without charges or a release date constitutes “an additional violation and crime that leaves children facing the unknown and deprives them of family and educational stability”.

Cases of Palestinian children in prison

The report described Israeli practices that begin with “intimidation and arrest” and extend to “torture, starvation and denial of healthcare”.

The group highlighted the case of 15-year-old Mohammed Hamid, who contracted scabies, a contagious skin infestation, while he was detained in Ofer Prison, where rights groups have long documented abuses. He suffered severe infections, underwent heart surgery and was admitted to intensive care in critical condition. He subsequently had one of his legs amputated.

The organisation also highlighted the case of 17-year-old Walid Ahmed, who died in March 2025 after six months in Megiddo Prison. In December, an Israeli judge halted the investigation into his death, stating that although there was evidence of starvation, no definitive cause of death had been established.

Claire;s Observations:  Certain European officials about 80 or so years ago,  would have blushed in envy, at how easily Palestinian kids can be imprisoned, tortured, and allowed to die in Israeli prisons.

In this 21st century, it's an ugly commentary on the human condition, that the murders of alleged "undesirables" continues apace.

It's just  that who is in charge of this definition of "alleged undesirables", and how they use it in today's world, has.  

And the rest of the world simply closes its eyes and ears to what is happening, as though its people have collectively taken some massive moral soporific.

Sgt. Jamie Milliman drove to Elser's Fort Logan home on September 27th, 2025, with the criminal summons already in hand.

The accusation: she had stolen a $25 package from a neighbor's porch five days earlier.

The evidence: a Flock Safety automated license plate reader showing her vehicle had driven through the area 20 times over the prior month.

Milliman never checked her dashcam footage, her GPS records, or her phone location data – all three of which would have placed her more than a quarter-mile away, getting fitted for a gown.

Instead, he boasted about his cameras. "You can't get a breath of fresh air in or out without us knowing," Milliman told Elser, caught on doorbell and body camera.

He told her the case was "one hundred percent. No doubt."

A wave of Houthi missile strikes hit Saudi Arabia’s King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh this week, killing Saudi citizens and forcing airlines to cancel flights into the kingdom’s capital.

Texas Democrat James Talarico is pitching citizenship for long‑time undocumented immigrants if they pay taxes, learn English, and clear a background check — and he says violent offenders would be deported.

In archived White House remarks, Trump said “these really phony polls” were “designed to keep our voters at home, create the illusion of momentum for Mr. Biden, and diminish Republicans’ ability to raise funds.” He called them “suppression polls”. The claim has resurfaced again this election cycle, as Trump and allies argue that unfavorable surveys discourage conservative turnout before voters even reach the polls.

Nine former Federal Bureau of Investigation employees filed a 70-page complaint in federal court in Washington, D.C., on October 15, 2026. The suit names the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Attorney General Todd Blanche. The plaintiffs say they worked on the Trump classified documents investigation as part of their jobs. They allege they were removed for that assignment, not for cause, and that the firings broke federal rules.

The lawsuit says each person received a termination letter signed by Director Patel. The letters, according to the complaint, cited poor judgment and lack of impartiality tied to political weaponization. The plaintiffs argue those phrases were not backed by any proof of individual wrongdoing. They also say they did not seek out the Trump case. They say leaders assigned them to specialized counterintelligence and counterespionage teams as part of normal duty.

Donald Trump has suspended sanctions against Russia, just a week after making a deal with Vladimir Putin to stock the US with over 300,000 tons of diesel fuel ahead of the midterm elections.

The President wrote to Congress that the move was in the national interest, undoing legislation he signed just last month and named in honor of the late Senator Lindsey Graham.  

The Executive Order, issued late on Friday night, came just two days before a deadline that was set in the law for its own implementation. 

In October 2020, more than a year after Jeffrey Epstein died in a New York jail cell, the FBI recorded an allegation that, if true, would completely change how we understand one of the most notorious sex-trafficking scandals in American history. According to a confidential human source, Epstein hadn't simply been a wealthy financier who happened to know some extremely powerful people. He had allegedly been “trained as a spy” by Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, and the source had become convinced that Epstein was a “co-opted Mossad Agent.” This was an allegation recorded by the FBI, not a conclusion reached by the FBI. But the document is real, and it raises a question that has followed Epstein's story for decades: was Jeffrey Epstein really working for Israeli intelligence? Once you start looking into Epstein’s connections to Israel, things get weird. 

Andrew Day , theamericanconservative.com

Trump is now joined in that ill-advised effort of mixed messaging by America’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who recently gave an intellectual twist to Trump’s hostility to Iranian civilization. Predictably, the Islamic Republic pointed to Rubio’s remarks as further evidence that the U.S. is at war with Iran’s people and indeed its entire history and culture, not just its government.

Rubio made his unwise rhetorical intervention during a soaring speech last week on Western civilization, delivered in Athens against the dramatic backdrop of the Acropolis. The aesthetics were kino, as the kids say, but the substance of the speech was confused and counterproductive.

The secretary thematized the profound influence of ancient Greece on America’s Founders, and to be sure, this influence cannot be denied. But Rubio went further, insinuating, with minimal subtlety, that Iran’s own historic civilization is hostile to the West.

Early in the speech, Rubio narrated the second Persian invasion of Greece, when “the armies of Xerxes arrived in this city and they put its sanctuaries to the torch.” Most of the Athenians fled, he explained, but a brave few stayed behind in defense of their city, barricading themselves in the Acropolis and “heaving massive stones down the cliffs onto the Persian invaders.”

Later in the speech, Rubio cited “the legendary stand of 300 Spartans—surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by the vast armies of Persia—who refused the chance to save themselves, choosing to fight to the last man rather than abandon their post or abandon their duty.”

You don’t have to love the “mullahs of Iran” to see a problem here. In fact, even a radical Iran hawk who despises Tehran’s clerical leadership should easily see the problem.

Rubio’s villainization of Persia bolstered the impression that 1) the U.S. aims to “annihilate” Iran, as Trump repeatedly says, and 2) that it harbors this eliminationist intent for deep cultural reasons divorced from the foreign and domestic policies of the Islamic Republic. The speech, in other words, was a PR coup for Tehran.

Claire's Observations:  I'm having an industrial-strength double face-palm at warp-speed, upon reading this. 

Did this man manage to fail every world history course he ever encountered, and how in the name of Heaven can he possibly described as a "diplomat" after having pulled a stunt like this?!?

Update(1240ET): Iran state IRIB reports a new thermal anomaly detected near an oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia's Yanbu region, suggesting Saudi East-West oil pipeline has been targeted once again.

However, any further information or confirmation has not been forthcoming. Regarding the Ukraine war, Russia's Ryazan oil refinery, about 200 km southeast of Moscow, was hit again overnight and is reportedly on fire.

Oil prices extend gains.

MAGA activists are urging President Trump to consider martial law as they brace for what they believe could be another ‘rigged’ midterm election.

The extraordinary proposals include seizing ballots and voting equipment, pausing the election and using emergency powers to force states to change how they run their elections.

No evidence suggests the upcoming election will be rigged, and some proposed measures go beyond the president's legal authority, Axios reported Friday.

Peter Ticktin, Trump's childhood friend and an attorney, raised the prospect of martial law during a September 30 video call with election activists.

'There would have to be martial law' if there were another rigged election, Ticktin said. 

US President Donald Trump could have Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky arrested on corruption charges, former British MP George Galloway has predicted.

Tensions between the two men escalated after Zelensky challenged Trump’s deal with Moscow to ease restrictions on Russian diesel exports. Washington has repeatedly demanded that Kiev stop striking Russian oil refineries, warning that continued attacks could jeopardize US intelligence sharing and Starlink support. Kiev has pressed ahead with the strikes, while Zelensky has accused Trump of “betrayal” and “weakness.”

middleasteye.net

As Israel's elections draw closer, the establishment of a Palestinian state has taken centre stage in the campaigns of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his leading opponent, former army chief Gadi Eisenkot.

The two politicians have traded barbs, accusing each other of supporting a Palestinian state.

On Tuesday, Eisenkot posted a video on X showing Netanyahu shaking hands with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. In the footage, Netanyahu can be heard expressing support for a Palestinian state.

Eisenkot, who hopes to replace Netanyahu, has repeatedly rejected the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

“Benjamin is Palestine” read the caption on Eisenkot ’s X account. His post said that in the 27 October elections, Israelis would have to choose between “the man who spoke in favour of two states dozens of times and will form a draft-evasion government, or a Zionist conscription government of Yashar with Eisenkot”

Eisenkot’s Yashar party has pledged to conscript ultra-Orthodox young men into the army. It has accused the governing coalition of failing to recruit enough soldiers to meet the demands of Israel’s multi-front wars.

Tuesday’s video was not the first time Eisenkot had rejected the prospect of a Palestinian state.

“There is no Palestinian state, and in the government that we will form, a Palestinian state will not be established,” he wrote on X in August, responding to comments by Mansour Abbas in support of Palestinian statehood.

Abbas, leader of the Arab-led Ra’am party, is seen by many opposition voters as a potential partner for Eisenkot ’s bloc. His support could prove crucial in securing the seats needed to form a government.

Secret Service Deputy Director Matt Quinn announced his resignation from the agency Friday, an abrupt announcement that comes after a series of high-profile security blunders, as well as an increase in threats against the commander-in-chief.

The news comes some two years after the Butler Pennsylvania, assassination attempt against then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, which then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle said was the agency's 'most significant operational failure in decades,' as well as a shooting incident at White House Correspondents' Dinner earlier this year. 

'Today I informed the men and women of the Secret Service that I will be transitioning out of my role as Deputy Director,' Quinn said in a social media post Friday. 

Zionists are trying hard to silence critics as Israel's genocide in the Middle East rages on. Ana Kasparian discusses on The Young Turks.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous joins the show to reflect on the third anniversary of Hamas' October 7th attack against Israel. Ana Kasparian discusses on The Young Turks.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled that Florida’s HB 3, which takes aim at addictive social-media design, is likely constitutional as applied to members of the suing trade groups. The three-judge panel vacated a lower court’s injunction and allowed the law to take effect while the case continues. The judges said the statute implicates speech but regulates features and functions, not viewpoints, which makes it content-neutral under the First Amendment.

The panel stressed that the law limits account creation for minors instead of banning them from reading content on the internet. Children younger than 14 cannot create accounts on covered platforms, while 14- and 15-year-olds need parental consent. The court described this as a conditional, age-based measure rather than a sweeping shutdown of online speech for young people. That focus on design and access terms, not messages, helped the law survive initial scrutiny.

Webmaster Addition: Gotta get those kids away from the internet and back to watching state-controlled TV!

Astronomers analyzing white dwarf stars have for the first time found a star that would appear green to human eyes, according to a new study.

While for most stars, color is temperature-dependent and limited to a few hues, white dwarfs, which are the dense remnants of sun-like stars that have died, can glow in an incredible range of colors, said lead study author Mark Hollands, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick, England, on Thursday.

“The colors that normal stars can have are pretty much only orange, white or blue,” Hollands told CNN.

“What we found is, for most white dwarfs, that’s the same as well. But there are some special cases where the physics in the outer layers of these stars are sufficiently strange that it causes actually quite big deviations in terms of their spectrum,” he said.

The US still hasn't admitted to bombing the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School, an attack that killed at least 120 children

by Dave De Camp, antiwar.com

Bloomberg reported on Thursday that top Pentagon officials have expressed that they will withhold the release of an internal report on the US bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, southern Iran, which massacred at least 120 children, through the midterm elections.

According to an earlier Bloomberg investigation into the attack, within hours of the strikes, Pentagon personnel were aware that the US was responsible, but the Trump administration has still not admitted to carrying out the attack.

The new Bloomberg report said that advisors to US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have conveyed to other Pentagon personnel that the report on the massacre, which found flawed intelligence, outdated imagery, and an overreliance on AI contributed to the attack, will not be shared with the public before the November 3 elections. Officials said the investigation has been all but complete for several months.

Claire's Observations: It is fascinating that Secretary of War Hegseth appears to be blissfully unaware that so publicly delaying the publication of this report, is tantamount to an admission of US  executive and military culpability in this incident.

Posted by Tyler Durden, Authored by Milan Adams via Preppgroup,

It ended, apparently, in the spring. Gold ran to a record in the last days of January 2026 - $5,608 an ounce on one spot reading, roughly $5,405 on the LBMA benchmark, and $5,318.40 on COMEX futures, three figures describing the same metal and differing by nearly $300, which is a reminder that the price depends on which price you mean - and then it simply stopped. By the middle of October the metal was changing hands near $4,112, some 27 per cent below the January spot peak, while silver, having briefly touched $121.62 on 29 January, had lost more than half its value and was trading around $56. Two metals, two collapses, and for anyone who had spent three years waiting for the precious metals complex to deflate and stop interrupting the serious business of equity markets, a comfortable conclusion was available: the thing had been a trade, the trade had unwound, and the world could return to its previous arrangements.

The underlying market, though, had already changed, and the sell-off made the shift harder to ignore.

Between April and June of 2026, as the price fell and commentary turned skeptical, central banks bought 288.9 tonnes of gold, the highest second-quarter total on record and 62 per cent above the same period a year earlier. The quarterly figure does not by itself prove that the buying was concentrated in the weakest weeks, but the World Gold Council's own reporting indicates that institutions kept adding through a quarter in which gold lost 14 per cent, which is the opposite of the pattern one would expect from buyers chasing a rally. And they did so in size and without much explanation.

Silver spent the same year doing something the price chart could not show. The market recorded a sixth consecutive annual supply deficit, estimated by the Silver Institute's World Silver Survey 2026 at 46.3 million ounces against 40.3 million the year before, with mine production flat. Despite the 53 per cent decline in the price, the projected shortfall widened.

That pairing - a violent correction alongside a deteriorating physical balance - is the substance of what follows. The word shock has been devalued by overuse, and precision is worth the trouble here. A shock, as the term is used in this article, is not a spike on a screen or the sort of one-week convulsion that produces memorable charts and forgettable analysis. It is closer to a condition: the moment when the price of a metal and the physical availability of that metal stop agreeing with one another, and the gap becomes large enough that ordinary arbitrage can no longer close it. Price spikes are events. What gold and silver have been signalling is a change in the settlement mechanics of the world economy, and events of that kind are considerably harder to reverse than the enthusiasm or the panic surrounding them.

Posted by Tyler Durden:  By Julianne Geiger of OilPrice.com,

The United States is putting another 17 million barrels of crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on offer, one day after the IEA accelerated emergency stock releases as governments scramble to get more oil and fuel into a tight market.

The Department of Energy issued a request for proposals Friday for an exchange of up to 17 million barrels, part of the 172 million barrels Washington committed to make available under the IEA’s 400-million-barrel emergency action announced in March.

The SPR currently holds about 283 million barrels. If companies take the full 17 million barrels before any repayments arrive, inventories would fall to roughly 266 million barrels—squarely inside the 250-million-to-300-million-barrel range generally considered the reserve’s operational minimum zone.

There is one rather large catch: somebody has to want the oil.

DOE offered the final portion of its March commitment in June, requiring companies to return the borrowed crude later with premiums of as much as 24%. Companies agreed to take only about 500,000 barrels.

The government is trying again. The API estimated that U.S. crude stocks fell 11.12 million barrels last week, following a 2.09-million-barrel decline the previous week. Commercial inventories have lost more than 51 million barrels over the last 26 weeks.

Friday’s solicitation follows another escalation in the emergency-stock campaign. The IEA said Thursday that members would accelerate the roughly 100 million barrels still outstanding from March, including more than 20 million barrels of diesel as soon as possible.

Washington is now putting 17 million more barrels on the table, with the SPR sitting at 283 million barrels in a market that already showed once this summer that borrowing government crude on expensive repayment terms is not necessarily a deal refiners want.

Posted by Tyler Durden: Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

The number of new annual dementia cases worldwide is estimated to increase more than twofold by 2050 from 2023 levels, according to a recently published peer-reviewed study.

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

The number of new annual dementia cases worldwide is estimated to increase more than twofold by 2050 from 2023 levels, according to a recently published peer-reviewed study.

Published in the JAMA Neurology journal on Oct. 12, the study analyzed data from more than 38,000 individuals across 18 nations and territories.

Based on the calculated incidence rate of dementia, the researchers estimated that in 2050, there would be 24.7 million new cases worldwide, up by more than 116 percent from 11.4 million new cases in 2023.

Gender-wise, incidence rates were found to be higher among women than men.

Middle-income and lower-income nations had higher rates than richer countries.

In an Oct. 13 statement, the University of New South Wales Sydney, whose researchers led the study, said that dementia already affects more than 57 million people globally.

Prof. Henry Brodaty, co-author of the study, said in a statement that the findings reinforce the urgent need to invest in dementia prevention measures.

"Twenty-four million new cases of dementia every year would place enormous pressure on individuals, families, health systems and economies around the world," Brodaty said.

"Population ageing means we cannot simply wait for people to develop dementia and then respond," Brodaty said.

"We need to act across the spectrum - from reducing modifiable risk factors and identifying people at risk earlier, through to improving diagnosis, treatment and care."

Understanding incidence rate was critical as it helps estimate future demand for diagnoses and clinical care, while contributing to preparing the requisite preventive measures, the statement said