Politics

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,

Australia is implementing its own “foreign agents” legislation modelled off of the US’.

The government recently announced that foreign lobbyists must register with the authorities and that political parties will be banned from accepting foreign donations.

The move to stop foreign funding is clear-cut and understandable, though there’s a lot of vagueness and prevailing uncertainty over what criteria will be used to designate someone as a “foreign agent”.

US intelligence believes North Korea is still between 12 and 18 months away from gaining the ability to load a nuclear warhead onto one of its ICBMs, but South Korean intelligence reportedly has credible evidence that Kim Jong Un and his regime have begun testing loading anthrax onto the country’s ICBMs, according to Japan's Asahi newspaper.

As Asahi reports (via Google Translate)

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

In the run-up to Christmas, President Donald Trump has been the beneficiary of some surprisingly good news and glad tidings.

Sunday, Vladimir Putin called to thank him and the CIA for providing Russia critical information that helped abort an ISIS plot to massacre visitors to Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg.

 

Monday found polls showing Trump at his highest in months.

 

In an embarassing reversal of what House Republicans had celebrated as a done deal, the House will need to vote again on the final version of the tax reform plan passed earlier this afternoon. The second vote is the result of a technicality in one of the bill's provisions.

After more than six weeks of frenzied negotiations, the House of Representatives has passed the reconciled version of President Donald Trump's tax plan, leaving only one major hurdle between Republicans and their biggest legislative accomplishment of the Trump era.