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Special counsel Robert Mueller has subpoenaed Kristin Davis — the notorious hooker booker for ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer who also has close ties to President Trump’s crony Roger Stone — as part of his investigation into Russian election interference, a new report said Friday. Sources familiar with the matter told the celebrity gossip website TMZ that Davis’ lawyer was negotiating the scope of the subpoena with Mueller’s team... An individual believed to be Stone was mentioned in Mueller’s indictments last week of 12 Russian spooks who allegedly meddled in the 2016 presidential election... Mueller is scrutinizing Stone over his contacts with...

(From Netease) Chinese folks have always had the self-entertaining mindset to compare little things to big renowned things even just for the slightest resemblance. We had a post last year talking about a homemade knockoff Lamborghini by a 25 years old guy. Recently a chef from Zigong City, Sichuan Province became famous on the Internet for spending only about 4000 yuan in designing and handcrafting what netizens called a knockoff "Hummer". The 2 meter long, 1.5 meter high homemade auto took Qu Zhibo 3 years to build since he was busy running his own restaurant. Small as it is, it...

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. (AP) - Facing condemnation from allies and foes alike on Capitol Hill, President Donald Trump was outnumbered even in the Oval Office. Top aides gathered to convince the president to issue a rare walk-back of the comments he’d made raising doubts about U.S. intelligence conclusions of Russian election interference as he stood alongside Vladimir Putin. Vice President Mike Pence, National Security Adviser John Bolton and chief of staff John Kelly stood united in the West Wing on Tuesday in their contention that the commander in chief had some cleanup to do. They brought with them words of alarm...

On 12 June 2018, US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un signed a memorandum of understanding on the future of the Korean peninsula. The document was short and expressed in ambiguous diplomatic language. It conveyed a framework for working over a period of time to denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula in exchange for normalisation of North Korea’s standing within the international community. It was palpable that the memorandum the leaders signed had been prepared in advance of their meeting in Singapore, that in most part was a photo opportunity. It is also almost certain that more detailed...

France and Russia have agreed to send 50 metric tons of medical aid to government-controlled eastern Ghouta in Syria, French officials said on Friday. A Russian cargo plane arrived late Friday in Chateauroux in central France to take the aid, which includes medical supplies and other essential goods, to a Russian military base in northwestern Syria. It will then be transported to eastern Ghouta, which the Syrian government retook from rebel forces in April. Once in Syria, the cargo will be distributed by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) with the help of the Syrian...

American politics have borrowed a lot of ideas from sports. Nowadays, everyone has become familiar with certain phrases that we use in everyday life, often without even thinking about their origins. For example, the phrase "pull no punches" originated in boxing, and the proverbial "drop the ball” came from football. The well-known rule of "three strikes and you're out" came from baseball. The latter is the best way to characterize President Trump's attitude toward Vladimir Putin. It seems that leftists in America still cannot forgive Putin for the destruction of the ideals that were nurtured in the West by the...

President Trump blundered in his appearance with Putin, but his intuitions are nevertheless correct: a new Cold War with Russia would not end as happily as the real Cold War did. Donald Trump has the magic touch. After eighteen months in office, and eighteen more before that as the pre-eminent figure in American politics, Trump’s shock value might have worn off. The political establishment might have become inured to his heresies about cherished policies and sacred institutions, even to the point of learning to control its own response to his provocations. But hell no!—Trump can still do it. He...

At that moment in Helsinki, for Mr. Trump, the question of choosing between Vladimir Putin (ex-KGB despot) and Mr. Trump’s own experience of being set up, framed and relentlessly persecuted by the American “intelligence community” to this day, must have felt like the choice between Scylla and Charybdis. Either would destroy him, and no matter what he said, the Left would shriek the sky is falling yet again

In fact, Trump’s response to Lemire, and his overall conduct at the press conference, did not convey weakness at all. Certainly he was far more assertive of US interests than Obama was in his dealings with Russia. In Obama’s first summit with Putin in July 2009, Obama sat meekly as Putin delivered an hour-long lecture about how US-Russian relations had gone down the drain. As Daniel Greenfield noted at Frontpage magazine Tuesday, in succeeding years, Obama capitulated to Putin on anti-missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, on Ukraine, Georgia and Crimea. Obama gave Putin free rein in...

Russia wielded an overwhelmingly negative influence on the United States during the 20th century. Given the nuclear arsenal the Russians continue to maintain, forging a better relationship with them seems wise. But for this to succeed the Russians need to drop old habits. That an agent of the same KGB that engaged in dirty deeds during the Cold War now leads the Russian nation and employed over-the-top tactics to intrude on the 2016 U.S. presidential election flows from the history that preceded. While hints at collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians without any substantiation discredits the Mueller investigation,...

Tony Podesta, founder of the now-shuttered Podesta Group and brother to former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, has been offered immunity by special counsel Robert Mueller to testify against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, according to a report. Fox News' Tucker Carlson announced on his show Thursday evening that two separate sources confirmed the offer. "In other words, for a near identical crime, Bill and Hillary's friend could escape and emerge completely unscathed while Paul Manafort may rot in jail. Only one of them made the mistake of chairing Donald Trump's presidential campaign," Carlson said. The special counsel's...

European stocks fell Friday, with auto and bank shares among those losing ground as U.S. President Donald Trump threatened a significant expansion in tariffs on Chinese imports, underscoring concerns that a global trade war will crimp global economic growth and corporate profits. ---snip--- European stocks extended losses after Trump, in an interview with CNBC, said he’s “ready” to put tariffs on all Chinese goods imported to the U.S., which would amount to more than $500 billion. Trump had previously said he’s looking at targeting $200 billion in Chinese imports, and that would be on top of tariffs already in effect...

To get a whiff of how bad things are in San Francisco – not in its aromatic streets, but in its sanctuary city status – consider two cases both going on around the issue of reasonable modifications toward the city's extremist succor for illegal aliens. First, Gavin Newsom, the former mayor of the city who's now the frontrunner for the California governor's job. The Sacramento Bee has the goods: As mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom in 2008 spearheaded a citywide policy requiring law enforcement officers to report juvenile undocumented immigrants [sic] to Immigration and Customs Enforcement when charged with...

North Korea’s economy contracted at the sharpest rate in two decades in 2017, South Korea’s central bank estimated Friday. Gross domestic product (GDP) in North Korea last year shrank 3.5 percent from the previous year, marking the biggest decline since a 6.5 percent drop in 1997 when the isolated nation was hit by a devastating famine. North Korea does not publish economic data, and comprehensive public figures on social conditions are nonexistent. However, analysts believe wider sanctions last year are likely to make the economic deterioration in 2018 worse than 2017, which could add to humanitarian need in the politically...

Did US President Donald Trump commit treason in Helsinki when he met Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin? Should he be impeached? That is what his opponents claim. Former president Barack Obama’s CIA director John Brennan accused Trump of treason outright. AP reporter John Lemire placed Trump in an impossible position. Noting that Putin denied meddling in the 2016 elections and the intelligence community insists that Russia meddled, he asked Trump, “Who do you believe?” If Trump had said that he believed his intelligence community and gave no credence to Putin’s denial, he would have humiliated Putin and destroyed any...

After decades teaching social studies at a California high school, Noel Correa moved to Nicaragua, buying a home on the outskirts of this colonial city. Then, the country he chose as his retirement paradise began to unravel. “We were just getting settled when the fighting broke out,” said Mr. Correa, 67, who arrived here with his wife in December. “Now we are in limbo.” So are many other expats caught up in a three-month-old uprising against Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, whose crackdown in response has killed more than 300 people.

Maybe it was the F.B.I.’s fault for unnerving him. Or maybe the White House staff had left President Trump ill-prepared before his stunning remarks in Helsinki Monday, when he sided with Russia over his own intelligence agencies. At a bar in central Pennsylvania, voters wondered if election meddling was really so terrible. At a mall in Arizona, they insisted that Mr. Trump had actually been quite tough on Russia until, well, whatever that was in Finland. In interviews with conservatives and Trump supporters across a half-dozen states, there were many theories about the president’s performance — he was tougher in...

(snip) --- The CIA director couldn’t himself go public with his Clinton spin—he lacked the support of the intelligence community and had to be careful not to be seen interfering in U.S. politics. So what to do? He called Harry Reid. In a late August briefing, he told the Senate minority leader that Russia was trying to help Mr. Trump win the election, and that Trump advisers might be colluding with Russia. (Two years later, no public evidence has emerged to support such a claim.) But the truth was irrelevant. On cue, within a few days of the briefing, Mr....

LONDON (Reuters) - Sam Brownback, the U.S. Ambassador for International Religious Freedom, complained to the British ambassador in Washington D.C. about the treatment of an English right-wing activist who is in jail for disrupting a trial, according to three sources familiar with the discussion. Brownback raised the jailing of Robinson during a meeting with Darroch that covered a range of “religious freedom issues”, the British official confirmed earlier this week.

President Donald Trump has indicated that he’s willing to hit every product imported from China with tariffs, sending U.S. markets sliding before the opening bell Friday. In a taped interview with the business channel CNBC, Trump said “I’m willing to go to 500,” referring roughly to the $505.5 billion in goods imported last year from China. The administration to date has slapped tariffs on $34 billion of Chinese goods in a trade dispute over what it calls the nation’s predatory practices. Dow futures which had already been pointing modestly lower slid sharply after the comments were aired by CNBC early...