Republican candidate Donald Trump has scored a series of shocking wins in battleground states including Florida and Ohio, opening a path to the White House for the political outsider and rattling world markets counting on a win by Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Mr Trump surged to wins in Ohio, Florida, Iowa and North Carolina.
Mrs Clinton has won Colorado and its nine electoral votes, and Virginia.
However, Mr Trump is leading Mrs Clinton by 19 Electoral College votes, according to media reports that put him on 244 votes and Mrs Clinton on 209.
Mrs Clinton still has ways to reach 270 electoral votes but she will have to sweep the remaining battleground states including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada.
Forty-one states have been called so far. Mrs Clinton has won 17 states to Mr Trump’s 24.
There are 538 Electoral College votes allotted to the 50 states and the District of Columbia. It takes 270 votes to win.

International media ahs reported that NATO is preparing a military force of up to 300,000 personnel, capable of being deployed within just two months to attack Russia.

It is reported as the world remains fixated on the outcome of Tuesday’s US elections, NATO continues its aggressive troop buildup around Russia.
With each passing day, the constant NATO activity is looking more and more like a preparation for full scale conflict with Russia state reports.
Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg has announced that NATO member nations are at this very moment putting hundreds of thousands of troops in a state of high alert, in an effort to deter the fantasy threat from Russia.
The US-led military alliance is planning to speed up the mobilization of forces numbering in the tens of thousands and, ultimately, hundreds of thousands and millions that are to be mobilized against Russia. Beyond its existing 5,000-strong emergency response force, NATO is tripling its “incumbent response force” to 40,000 and putting hundreds of thousands of troops on higher alert levels say reports.

Nicaraguan electoral authorities have declared incumbent Daniel Ortega the winner of Sunday’s presidential election.

Officials say a preliminary count of the ballots shows Ortega has won a third consecutive term by getting just over 71 percent of the vote against five other lesser-known candidates.
Ortega’s wife Rosario Murillo ran as his vice presidential candidate.
Rosario Murillo is a Nicaraguan poet and revolutionary who fought in the Sandinista revolution in 1979.

Daniel Ortega has been President of Nicaragua since 2007. He is a leader in the socialist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). His policies in government have seen the implementation of leftist reforms across Nicaragua.

Tens of thousands of South Koreans marched along the streets of Seoul yesterday (5th) , using words including “treason” and “criminal” to demand that President Park Geun-hye step down amid an explosive political scandal.

The protest, the largest anti-government demonstration in the capital in nearly a year, came a day after Park apologized on live television amid rising suspicion that she allowed a mysterious confidante to manipulate power from the shadows.

Holding banners, candles and colorful signs that read “Park Geun-hye out” and “Treason by a secret government,” a sea of demonstrators filled a large square in front of an old palace gate and the nearby streets, singing and thunderously applauding speeches calling for the ouster of the increasingly unpopular president.
They then shifted into a slow march in streets around City Hall, shouting “Arrest Park Geun-hye,” ‘’Step down, criminal” and “We can’t take this any longer,” before moving back to the square and cheering on more speeches that continued into the night.

“Park should squarely face the prosecution’s investigation and step down herself. If she doesn’t, politicians should move to impeach her,” say many demonstrators.

Earlier Choi Soon-sil, the daughter of a late cult leader and a longtime friend of Park and two former presidential aides were arrested and detained over allegations that they pressured businesses into giving $70 million to two foundations Choi controlled.

There are also allegations that Choi, despite having no government job, regularly received classified information and meddled in various state affairs, including the appointment of ministers and policy decisions.

Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said on Monday that its founder Julian Assange’s internet was shut down by the government of Ecuador

“We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange’s internet access Saturday, 5 pm GMT, shortly after publication of (Hillary) Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speechs (sic),” the statement from WikiLeaks said.
Assange has lived and worked in Ecuador’s London embassy since June 2012, having been granted asylum there after a British court ordered him extradited to Sweden to face questioning in a sexual molestation case involving two female WikiLeaks supporters.
Meanwhile, Hacktivist group Anonymous said it had shut down the Ecuadorian government mail in retaliation for its decision to cut off WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s internet connection for the period of the US presidential elections.
Shut Down The Internet; We’ll Shut Down Your Communications!” read the tweet posted by Anonymous on Sunday night.
Ecuador’s foreign ministry has stated that the restriction was related to the release of documents by WikiLeaks that could impact the presidential election in the United States.

An accompanying satellite was launched from space lab Tiangong-2 at 7:31 a.m. on Sunday, said Chinese scientists.

The satellite, which weighs 47 kilograms and is the size of a printer, was launched into space aboard Tiangong-2 on Sept. 15, said the Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The micro satellite is able to conduct efficient orbit control, process tasks autonomously and transmit data at high speeds, with stronger capabilities compared with the accompanying satellite of the Shenzhou-7 spacecraft, it said.

At the end of October, the satellite will orbit close to Tiangong-2 and Shenzhou-11 and take photos with the high-resolution camera installed on it.

The accompanying satellite will also carry out space experiments with Tiangong-2 to expand the use of space.

The Shenzhou-11 spacecraft carried two astronauts into space on Oct. 17 from northwest China’s Gobi Desert. It docked with Tiangong-2 two days later.

China.org.cn

The Long March was “a great feat in human history,”and  “epic” and a “human miracle” says Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Xi, also the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), made the remarks at a gathering on Friday to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Long March.

Xi said the Red Army’s Long March, full of the spirit of idealism and dedication, was a “human epic composed of will and courage” and “an epic of mankind’s unremitting efforts to pursue truth and brightness.”

Xi said that during the Long March, Red Army officers and soldiers fought more than 600 battles against the enemies, crossed about a hundred rivers, climbed over 40 steep mountains and trekked over the grassland.

With their strong will, they overcame human physical limits, represented a dramatic episode in world military history and achieved a glorious human miracle, Xi said.

In October 1934, during a civil war, embattled Chinese Communists broke through Nationalist enemy lines and began an epic flight from their encircled headquarters in southwest China. Known as the Long March, the trek lasted a year and covered more than 4,000 miles. The Long March marked the emergence of Mao Zedong (1893-1976) as the undisputed leader of the Chinese Communists.

After enduring starvation, aerial bombardment and almost daily skirmishes with Nationalist forces, Mao halted his columns in northern Shaanxi on October 20, 1935, where they met other Red army troops. The Long March was over. By some estimates, 8,000 or fewer marchers completed the journey, which covered more than 4,000 miles and crossed 24 rivers and 18 mountain ranges.

An exclusive interview an American arms dealer had with ‘Fox News’ indicates the US had armed Libyan rebels to oust Libyan Leader Muammar Qaddafi during the 2011 Arab Spring. Later Qaddafi was assassinated and dragged on the streets like a dog.

American arms dealer Marc Turi in his interview with the media says he was made a scapegoat for the covert weapons programme to arm Libyan rebels.

In 2011, the Obama administration, with support from some Republican and Democratic lawmakers, attempted to arm Libyan rebels. However, this plan could not be realized due to sanctions from the UNO prohibited direct sales. Hence, they planned to use Turi to have the U.S. government supply conventional weapons to the Gulf nations Qatar and UAE, which would then in turn supply them to Libyan rebels.

Turi says however, he never sold any weapons but he was cut out of the plan as Clinton’s State Department used its own people to supply weapons to Libya and Syria. He said the programme went out of control and weapons may have reached all sorts of movements including Al Qaeda, Ansar al-Sharia, or ISIS.

Turi, a contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency, has been at the epicentre of a failed federal investigation led by the Justice Department spanning five years and costing the government an estimated $10 million or more. The case against him was dismissed last week “with prejudice,” meaning the government cannot come after him again on the matter.

The second debate between White House contenders Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, considered as one of the nastiest U.S. presidential debates in recent memory, reflects the decay of U.S. politics and a deeply divided society states ‘Xinhua’.

It states in an event that looks more like two hungry sharks trying to devour each other, the candidates relentlessly went on the attack in the 90-minute debate on Sunday night at the Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Full text:-

Unlike the first debate on Sept. 26 in which both candidates carried out serious discussions on policy issues, “scandal,” “interruption” and “no handshake” seemed to become keywords of the second debate.

The face-off described by USA Today as “ugly” just shows that the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign has reached a new low.

Less than 48 hours before the second debate, tapes of Trump’s making sexist remarks about women more than a decade ago were released.

The tapes have caused shockwaves in U.S. society and outrage among Trump’s critics, as they included Trump’s remark that being famous allowed him to “kiss any woman,” and lewd words about women. Some Republicans even asked Trump to withdraw from the race.

Under widespread criticism and pressure, Trump apologized for his lewd remarks, while denying he had sexually assaulted any woman.

To shift focus on the tape scandal, Trump’s camp launched a pre-emptive strike — hosting a press conference with women who have accused former President Bill Clinton, Hillary’s husband, of sexual assault or rape before the second debate was due to begin. The move set the tone of the debate to accuse each other.

Trump again criticized Clinton’s email scandal, in which Clinton used a personal email instead of a secure, government-issued one while conducting business as secretary of state. He even threatened to jail Clinton, which was deemed inappropriate in the United States.

Such debate that deviated from discussing serious policy matters aroused public disappointment.

Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson said on twitter: “23 minutes in, and we still have had no serious discussion about jobs, debt, or our security.”

DECAY OF U.S. POLITICS

In this year’s presidential campaign, both Clinton and Trump have invested more energy in the use of media, which on the one hand helped them contact voters, know public opinion and create their media images, but on the other hand helped increase political entertainment and vulgarization.

During the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, although social media became a battlefield, what the candidates said online still kept grace and rationality, with their tweets focusing on policy matters.

But this year, to gain support from online voters, Clinton and Trump have attacked each others’ temperament, characters and health conditions. Even until the televised debates at the sprinting stage, the presidential race still has not returned to the track of presenting campaign claims and policy ideas.

The energy of the U.S. politics is being consumed by some drama and entertainment and cannot be used to deal with core issues such as political reform, which has brought about great public dissatisfaction.

Nielsen data for 11 broadcast, cable and public television channels on Monday showed that some 66.5 million Americans watched the second debate on Sunday, well below the record 84 million that watched the first face-off two weeks ago.

Polls conducted by Pew Research Center in July showed that although 77 percent of the voters, a higher proportion than any election in the past two decades, call the 2016 race “interesting,” many voters consider it “too negative.”

About two-thirds say the tone of the campaign is too negative, while just 27 percent think it is not too negative, the polls said.

Many Clinton and Trump supporters describe their choice as a vote against the opposing candidate. For the first time since the 2000 election, fewer than half of both candidates’ supporters say they back their candidates strongly.

A Reuters/Ipsos 50-state survey gave Clinton a 95 percent chance of winning the election. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll on Monday showed Clinton with an 11-point lead nationally over Trump.

But even if Clinton wins the election, she will face the challenge of governing a deeply divided nation, which features a great gap between the rich and the poor, racial conflict, impacts of immigrants and frictions among multiple values.

It is time for the U.S. politics to have self-reflection to get back to the normal track and deal with those phenomena of inequality.