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Zogby Analytics conducted a hybrid (live interviewer telephone and online) survey of 1,514 likely voters in the US. The survey was conducted 10/19/2017 - 10/25/2017. Based on a confidence interval of 95%, the margin of error for 1,514 is +/- 2.5 percentage points. In our latest poll, we analyzed voters' attitudes concerning potential 2020 presidential election match-ups. We found Donald Trump is in close races against Senator Elizabeth Warren and former first lady Michelle Obama. We also see the president in difficult match-ups with Senator Bernie Sanders and former vice president Joe Biden. In the match-up between President Trump and Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont receives a narrow majority of voters, while Trump receives 40% of voters. Sanders does better than Trump with women (56%-35%), younger voters age 18-24 (69%-27%), 18-29 (64%-30%), Walmart shoppers (47%-42%), voters age 50-64 (46%-44%), Amazon shoppers (51%-41%) and all minorities. As per usual Trump beats Sanders among voters age 65+ (53%-40%) NASCAR fans (47%-46%), Catholic voters (49%-43%), and rural voters (53%-36%). Sanders does the most damage to Trump among men (both tied at46%), and beats him significantly with Independents (51%-36%). Bernie Sanders also cuts into Trump's lead with older voters and NASCAR fans. When we examine Trump vs. former vice president Joe Biden, Biden beats the president 50% to 40%. Joe Biden, like Bernie Sanders, is favored among younger voters age 18-24 (74%-18%), voters age 18-29 (60%-31%), women (57%-34%), Independents (50%-37%), and all minority groups. President Trump struggles against Biden because Biden is able to tap into the president's base of voters who frequently shop at Walmart (tied at 46%), voters age 50-64 (Biden leads 47% to 43%) and voters with no college education (Biden leads 47% to 42%).

The House of Representatives on Monday voted 366-30 to declare what has long been known — that it has not authorized U.S. action in support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, but other than urging the parties to come to a negotiated solution, the resolution did not actually do anything to end American participation in the conflict. Since the Saudi bombing of Yemen started in the spring of 2015 — when Saudi forces intervened on the side of ousted President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi — the U.S. has played a close support role. It has aided Saudi bombers with targeting and assisted with refueling. It has also sold tens of billions of dollars in munitions to the Saudis since the war began, while the kingdom has used U.S.-produced aircraft, laser-guided bombs, and internationally banned cluster bombs to target and destroy schools, markets, power plants, and a hospital, resulting in thousands of civilian deaths. Following a deadly strike on a Yemeni funeral in 2016, the U.S. actually doubled fuel support for Saudi airplanes. The war has led to an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions.

Russia has finalized an agreement with Turkey on the sale of the S-400 air defense missile system. Vladimir Kozhin, a presidential aide who oversees Russia’s matters of military cooperation, said Thursday that the deal was now finalized and Moscow would begin delivery of the system to Ankara in late 2019. “The first deliveries are likely to begin at the end of 2019, beginning of 2020,” Kozhin said. He said no more issues remained about the deal, which was discussed between Russia's President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan during the former’s visit to Ankara on December 11. “All aspects have been resolved over the past few days ... All parameters, all technologies, the entire deal has been agreed ... Practically speaking, the contract is entering the phase of realization,” he said.

The deal comes as Turkey has been establishing closer relations with Russia after it experienced glitches in its relations with Western governments following a crackdown in the country over the July 2016 coup attempt. The alliance originally reacted skeptically to the decision, saying the system was not compatible with its equipment. However, the Pentagon said recently that Turkey’s purchase of the S-400 system, the most significant deal Ankara has signed with a non-NATO military supplier, was generally “a good idea” as it was inter-operable with the military alliance's other systems. The S-400 is Russia’s latest surface-to-air missile defense batteries. Moscow aims to sell the system to Saudi Arabia, with Kozhin saying Thursday that the deal with Riyadh could also be finalized before the end of the year.

Yemen’s cholera epidemic has reached one million suspected cases, the International Committee of the Red Cross said on Thursday, with war leaving more than 80 percent of the population short of food, fuel, clean water and access to healthcare.

Yemen, one of the Arab world’s poorest countries, is embroiled in a proxy war between the Houthi armed movement, allied with Iran, and a U.S.-backed military coalition headed by Saudi Arabia. SponsoredThe United Nations says Yemen is suffering the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and eight million people are on the brink of famine.

A new wave of cholera is expected in March or April. “It’s probably unavoidable. We need to be ready to face another big epidemic,” said Poncin, adding that cholera may become a long-term burden as it has in Haiti. “The places where the war is active are the ones most at risk for increase of disease.” The latest emergency is diphtheria, a disease not seen in Yemen for 25 years, which has affected 312 people and killed 35. It has not spread explosively, as cholera did, but diphtheria outbreaks can affect many thousands, and there is a global shortage of diphtheria anti-toxin. Yemen has enough for 200-500 patients, Poncin said.

While the mainstream media has largely ignored it, the scandal surrounding Russian efforts to acquire 20% of America's uranium reserves, a deal which was ultimately approved by the Obama administration, and more specifically the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) which included Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder, is becoming more problematic for Democrats by the hour.  As The Hill pointed out earlier this morning, the latest development in this sordid tale revolves around a man that the FBI used as an informant back in 2009 and beyond to build a case against a Russian perpetrator who ultimately admitted to bribery, extortion and money laundering.  The informant, who is so far only known as "Confidential Source 1," says that when he attempted to come forward last year with information that linked the Clinton Foundation directly to the scandal he was promptly silenced by the FBI and the Obama administration.

Working as a confidential witness, the businessman made kickback payments to the Russians with the approval of his FBI handlers and gathered other evidence, the records show.   Sources told The Hill the informant's work was crucial to the government's ability to crack a multimillion dollar racketeering scheme by Russian nuclear officials on U.S. soil that involved bribery, kickbacks, money laundering and extortion. In the end, the main Russian executive sent to the U.S. to expand Russian President Vladimir Putin's nuclear business, an executive of an American trucking firm and a Russian financier from New Jersey pled guilty to various crimes in a case that started in 2009 and ended in late 2015.   Toensing added her client has had contact from multiple congressional committees seeking information about what he witnessed inside the Russian nuclear industry and has been unable to provide that information because of the NDA.   “He can’t disclose anything that he came upon in the course of his work,” she said.   The information the client possesses includes specific allegations that Russian executives made to him about how they facilitated the Obama administration's 2010 approval of the Uranium One deal and sent millions of dollars in Russian nuclear funds to the U.S. to an entity assisting Bill Clinton's foundation. At the time, Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary of State on the government panel that approved the deal, the lawyer said.

In the midst of the new discoveries revealed yesterday about the Uranium One case (see: FBI Uncovered Russian Bribery Plot Before Obama Approved Uranium One Deal, Netting Clintons Millions), "Confidential Source 1" has once again hired an attorney, Victoria Toensing, a former Reagan Justice Department official and former chief counsel of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to get his story out. Sitting down with The Hill earlier, Toensing said that the last time her client tried to speak out "both his reputation and liberty" were "threatened" by the Obama administration in a effort to force his silence.  “All of the information about this corruption has not come out,” she said in an interview Tuesday. “And so my client, the same part of my client that made him go into the FBI in the first place, says, 'This is wrong. What should I do about it?'”   Toensing said she also possesses memos that recount how the Justice Department last year threatened her client when he attempted to file a lawsuit that could have drawn attention to the Russian corruption during the 2016 presidential race as well as helped him recover some of the money Russians stole from him through kickbacks during the FBI probe.   The undercover client witnessed “a lot of bribery going on around the U.S.” but was asked by the FBI to sign a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) that prevents him from revealing what he knows to Congress, Toensing explained.   When he tried to bring some of the allegations to light in the lawsuit last year, “the Obama Justice Department threatened him with loss of freedom. They said they would bring a criminal case against him for violating an NDA,” she added.

In its latest budget request, the Trump administration is asking for a near-record $750 billion for the Pentagon and related defense activities, an astonishing figure by any measure. If passed by Congress, it will, in fact, be one of the largest military budgets in American history, topping peak levels reached during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. And keep one thing in mind: that $750 billion represents only part of the actual annual cost of our national security state. There are at least 10 separate pots of money dedicated to fighting wars, preparing for yet more wars, and dealing with the consequences of wars already fought. So the next time a president, a general, a secretary of defense, or a hawkish member of Congress insists that the U.S. military is woefully underfunded, think twice. A careful look at U.S. defense expenditures offers a healthy corrective to such wildly inaccurate claims. Now, let’s take a brief dollar-by-dollar tour of the U.S. national security state of 2019, tallying the sums up as we go, and see just where we finally land (or perhaps the word should be “soar”), financially speaking.

Final tally: $1.2542 trillion So, our final annual tally for war, preparations for war, and the impact of war comes to more than $1.25 trillion — more than double the Pentagon’s base budget. If the average taxpayer were aware that this amount was being spent in the name of national defense — with much of it wasted, misguided, or simply counterproductive — it might be far harder for the national security state to consume ever-growing sums with minimal public pushback. For now, however, the gravy train is running full speed ahead and its main beneficiaries — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and their cohorts — are laughing all the way to the bank.

One month ago, the bond market and political pundits did a double take when according to the latest Treasury International Capital report, Russia had liquidated virtually all of its US Treasury holdings, selling off the bulk of its US government bonds in just two months, March and April.

And with the US threatening to impose a new set of "crushing" sanctions on Russia, including in retaliation for the alleged Novichok nerve gas attack in the UK, Russia not only intends to continue liquidating its US holdings, but to significantly reduce its reliance on the US Dollar. Speaking in an interview for the Rossiya 1 TV channel, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that Russia "aims to keep reducing its investments in American securities" following new U.S. sanctions and said that the "US dollar is becoming an unreliable tool for payments in international trade." The minister also hinted at the possibility of using national currencies instead of the dollar in oil trade. "I do not rule it out. We have significantly reduced our investment in US assets. In fact, the dollar, which is considered to be the international currency, becomes a risky tool for payments," Siluanov noted.