The world leader who once said he’d ride a jet ski out to the Spratly Islands to put a stop to Chinese land-reclamation efforts, added to his legendary list of outrageous claims Thursday when he bragged about stabbing a person to death when he was 16 years old - and raised even more eyebrows when he reportedly later called former President Barack Obama "so black and arrogant."
In observance of Veterans Day, Reuters published a story reminding the public how remarkably little has been done to address to rapidly worsening opioid crisis, which has now been blamed for a range of societal ills, including rising male unemployment, cash-strapped foster systems, overtaxed local first responder services - the list goes on.
And one group that has been particularly hard-hit by the crisis is Veterans, who are prescribed opioid painkillers at higher rates compared with the broader population.
No, not The Onion...
In what is perhaps the least surprising tactic from the Spanish establishment, a government-backed research institute in Madrid has stated that Spain’s struggle to quash separatism in its Catalonia region was disrupted by Russian hackers agitating for a break-up, in a hallmark propaganda effort to fracture Europe.
While President Donald Trump was effectively forced to cancel a formal meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin due to the glare of the Mueller indictments - despite the fact that the charges had seemingly little to do with his campaign - the two leaders still took a minute to chat on the sidelines of an Asia Pacific conference in VIetnam on Saturday. Photos captured Putin ominously whispering a message into his surrogate’s ear, before posing for a few photos alongside other world leaders, with one photo featuring a much discussed handshake between Putin and Trump.
There was something odd about Friday's night's explosion of an oil pipeline belonging to Bahrain's state-run oil company BAPCO, which local authorities initially said was the result of an accident: as we said, the giant fireball had all the hallmarks of either sabotage or a terrorist event, the only question is whether it was real or staged, and who would ultimately be blamed for it.