America

Preliminary prints for October Services and Manufacturing in America beat expectations and rose to 2017 highs pushing the composite index to its highest since January.

Commenting on the flash PMI data, Tim Moore, Associate Director at IHS Markit said:

“The US economy seems to have made a strong start to the final quarter of 2017. Resilient service sector growth and an encouraging rebound in manufacturing production combined to generate one of the sharpest rises in private sector output for twoand-a-half years during October.

Update (10:30 am ET): With just hours to go before Trump's lunchtime meeting with Congressional Republicans, the president is heaping still more twitter scorn on one of his biggest perceived foes, Tennessee Senator and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker.

This time, he's focusing on Corker's foreign-policy work. The president previously criticized Corker for helping create the Iran deal.

Authored by John Pilger via Counterpunch.org,

On 16 October, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation aired an interview with Hillary Clinton: one of many to promote her score-settling book about why she was not elected President of the United States.

A simmering nuclear crisis, series of devastating natural disasters and a resurgence of drug-fueled crime are inspiring more Americans than ever before to buy up “doomsday prepper” gear – everything from gas masks to fallout shelters – a trend that we’ve observed time and time again.

The Baghdad government and its paramilitary forces increasingly see American troop presence as the actual foreign menace.