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Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny was nearly killed with a rare nerve agent before he recovered from a coma and went on to trick one of his apparent assassins into confessing to the details of the plot on tape.

Russia, under strongman Vladimir Putin's watch, has become a rogue regime apparently responsible, despite its loud denials, for a growing list of egregious crimes.

assassinations of political targets at home and abroad -- some with banned chemical weapons -- to Russia's ongoing invasion of neighboring Ukraine and a hacking campaign of unprecedented scope against the United States, and it's clear that Putin has become bolder and more dangerous than ever.

Republican U.S. Rep. Roger Marshall held off state Sen. Barbara Bollier to win an open U.S. Senate seat in Kansas, The Associated Press projected Tuesday night, spoiling Democratic hopes of an upset in the deep-red state where they haven’t won a Senate contest since 1932.

Marshall will fill the seat Sen. Pat Roberts (R) held for more than two decades. Roberts’ decision to retire at the end of this term set off a heated GOP primary race to replace him, especially after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decided against a run. Marshall defeated former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an anti-immigration hard-liner whose campaign Democrats tried to boost in hopes it would help them turn the seat blue.

Democratic upset hopes were driven in part by President Donald Trump’s declining support in a state he won by more than 20 points four years ago. Polling averages ahead of Election Day showed Trump barely above 50% among Kansas voters, at times holding a single-digit lead over Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Bollier, meanwhile, crafted a moderate campaign platform that went heavy on some Democratic priorities ― she advocated for adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act and boosting public education funding ― while avoiding issues like abortion and gun control. Marshall, who opposes abortion rights, focused on the GOP’s confirmation of conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the repeal of Obamacare and Trump’s efforts to build a wall on the southern border.

How do people like Bolton, Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson or (when he eventually departs) Pompeo justify their witting, willing service to this witless, wicked president?

In a superb essay in The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum draws on the inspiration of Czeslaw Milosz’s “The Captive Mind” to address the question. There is the relief, and pleasure, of political conformity. There is the allure of power, or proximity to it. There is a profit motive. There is a kind of savior complex, in which officials like the “Anonymous” New York Times Op-Ed writer from 2018 claim to form part of a secret resistance within the upper reaches of government.

there’s an additional factor at work, described by Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” How do demagogues get away with their nonstop lying — even with those who at some level understand they are being lied to? Arendt observed “a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member, depending upon his rank and standing in the movement, is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders and the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement.”

cretary of Defense Mark Esper is on shaky ground with the White House after saying Wednesday that he does not support using active duty troops to quell the large-scale protests across the United States triggered by the death of George Floyd and those forces should only be used in a law enforcement role as a last resort.

"we are not in one of those situations now," distancing himself from President Donald Trump's recent threat to deploy the military to enforce order.

"The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act," he told reporters. Esper also distanced himself from a maligned photo-op outside St. John's Church.

North Korea on Thursday said the United States is in no position to criticise China over Hong Kong or human rights when Washington threatens to “unleash dogs” to suppress anti-racism protests at home.

Speaking to Fox News on Sunday, Pompeo said recent actions by the Chinese Communist Party suggest it is “intent upon the destruction of Western ideas, Western democracies, Western values” and “puts Americans at risk.”

Such statements by American leaders are a sign of their concerns about a declining United States, he said, citing the ongoing protests against police brutality.

The situation in Washington grows dire. For Trump’s most recent ravings make Queeg look like a model of sanity and restraint.

He attacked his own cabinet members for not prosecuting or persecuting his political adversaries. Attorney General William Barr, Trump proclaimed, will go down in history as “a very, sad, sad situation” if he did not indict Joe Biden and Barack Obama:

Of Kamala Harris, Trump said, “she’s a communist,” calling her “this monster that was on stage with Mike Pence.” He claimed that Biden “wouldn’t be president for two months” because “he’s not mentally capable.”

As President Donald Trump makes a hurried final push for reelection, he is relying not only on his campaign staff but on government officials to transmit his message to voters

his White House press secretary has appeared on television from campaign headquarters, identified as a campaign adviser. His top White House immigration adviser convened a campaign-organized briefing to assail Joe Biden

Seldom does a day go by in a battleground state where a Cabinet member from the Trump administration is not paying a visit -- often with a government announcement in tow.

When it comes to health policy, President Donald Trump made it his mission to undo many measures his predecessor put in place.

In their four years in office, the Trump administration made sweeping changes that affected the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, abortion and transgender rights, in many cases reversing the efforts of the Obama administration.

Biden's health officials will likely be active, as well, but it will take time for all their actions to take effect.

President Donald Trump continues to howl on Twitter -- between rounds of golf -- spreading the lie that he won the election he lost, and promising he will be in the White House come January.

the first family has canceled plans for Thanksgiving in Florida to instead stay in the White House he'll leave in just more than two months.

But across the government Trump oversees -- with actions at the Pentagon, inaction on the economy and denialism about the pandemic -- the President and his allies are undercutting President-elect Joe Biden and harming the American people, even as none of them acknowledge that they're about to be replaced.

Since then a number of right-wing websites have refused to accept Mr. Biden’s victory, backing baseless accusations by President Trump and his allies of a stolen election, despite statements to the contrary from international observers and state officials across the country.

The Gateway Pundit article went on to describe “massive Democrat fraud in Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania,” including claims that Republicans were barred from counting rooms.

The right-wing pundit Dan Bongino, who has a wide readership on social media, used his platform to claim that the election was not over: “There’s nothing to concede,” he said in Tuesday’s episode of his podcast. “I can’t say this enough. This race has not been called yet.”

The warning, from the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity arm, indicated that hackers had found another line of attack to enter systems used by the government and Fortune 500 companies.

Federal officials issued an urgent warning Thursday that the hackers who had penetrated deep into government systems also used other malware — and different attack techniques — that posed “a grave risk to the federal government.”

Russian intelligence agency’s hackers had, since this spring, gotten into critical network monitoring software used by the government and hundreds of Fortune 500 companies.

Thursday that hackers who American intelligence agencies believed were working for the Kremlin used a far wider variety of tools than previously known to penetrate government systems, and said that the cyberoffensive was “a grave risk to the federal government.”

complicates the challenge for federal investigators as they try to assess the damage and understand what had been stolen.

Echoing the government’s warning, Microsoft said Thursday that it had identified 40 companies, government agencies and think tanks that the suspected Russian hackers, at a minimum, stole data from. Nearly half are private technology firms, Microsoft said, many of them cybersecurity firms, like FireEye, that are charged with securing vast sections of the public and private sector.

Iran and the United States have recently engaged in a spiraling escalation of threats and warnings

On Saturday, Iran’s Parliament placed largely symbolic sanctions on 51 Americans, many of them prominent political and military officials, for “terrorism” and “human rights violations,” in retaliation for the U.S. assassination of Iran’s top commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, two years ago.

Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, then warned that Iran would “face severe consequences” if it attacked any Americans, including any of the 51 people hit with the sanctions.

Meanwhile on another Russian TV station, this time in Russia, Donald Trump’s former secretary of state and putative Republican candidate Mike Pompeo was shown saying of Putin that he is “very shrewd, very capable. I have enormous respect for him.”

Kaboom! On Monday at 10pm Moscow time Putin himself, following up a bizarre nod-along ceremony, torpedoed their arguments. The problem wasn’t Nato and it wasn’t the EU. It wasn’t Russia’s “security concerns”. It was, as he told it, the terrible errors of Lenin and Stalin in creating an autonomous Ukrainian entity when historically it was all really Russian

For over a decade now left and right populists alike have opposed western policy towards Russia.

The diplomatic efforts were part of a coordinated effort by the governments of Netanyahu and Donald Trump in the US to place public and private pressure on the prosecutor and her staff.Between 2019 and 2020, in an unprecedented decision, the Trump administration imposed visa restrictions and sanctions on the chief prosecutor. The move was in retaliation to Bensouda’s pursuit of a separate investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, allegedly committed by the Taliban and both Afghan and US military personnel.However, Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, linked the sanctions package to the Palestine case. “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” he said.