© David Oliveira/Observador
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
President Donald Trump's new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia is defending her self-description as a lawyer, while acknowledging that she took the bar exam and considered the results "inconsequential."
Zacharia's legal qualifications have faced growing scrutiny since her debut White House media briefing earlier this week, when shortly afterward she was asked which state she passed the bar exam in and replied: "When I moved to China."
In an interview Thursday with right-wing provocateur Jack Posobiec on Real America's Voice, she did not deny reports that she'd failed to pass the bar.
Zacharia, who moved to China after earning her law degree in 2011, told Posobiec she had already preregistered for the bar exam before moving to Beijing, where her husband was working at an American private equity firm.
"I didn't want to withdraw from that," Zacharia said of the bar exam. "And we knew we would be moving out to China, and I was obviously incredibly distracted and overwhelmed and excited for finally being married to someone who I had been long-distance from for at least a year."
Zacharia said she thought she'd take the bar and "see what happens."
"The results are somewhat inconsequential because I knew I wouldn't need the bar in China, and we left shortly thereafter," said Zacharia.
The Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday that Zacharia failed California's bar exam after graduating from Pepperdine University in 2011.
A Business Insider review of records for all 50 states and the District of Columbia found no evidence that Zacharia had been admitted to practice law in the US.
In China, Zacharia said she took a job in the international practice division of the Zhong Lun law firm, where she said she worked on multimillion-dollar shareholder agreements and cross-border transactions. She said she was one of four associates under a senior partner.
"After moving to China, I didn't really think much of the bar results or consider that something that I needed to focus on," Zacharia told Posobiec, adding, "There's no Chinese bar. I had enough credentials, which was my law degree, to be able to do this practice."
"I had all the necessary requirements to do that, and I was able to do it effectively and well," she said.
She also said that she never retook the bar exam after returning to the US and having the first of four children with her husband within six years.
Zacharia said she consulted with people within the legal field "for a very long time" and was told it would be acceptable to call herself a lawyer "and provide legal analysis, not legal advice."
"They said absolutely, absolutely across the board — you can call yourself a lawyer, you have a JD, and to buffer that, you have international legal experience in transactional law," Zacharia said.
"It's unfortunate that people dub this as some kind of conspiracy," she said. "The truth is, I was very careful how I executed this, and I never came across as someone who was an attorney at law."
Zacharia's LinkedIn page says she served as general counsel for Fix California, a political advocacy group, between January 2024 and March 2025. In California, it is a misdemeanor to practice law or to advertise yourself as an attorney without a license.
At least two watchdog groups have filed a complaint about Zacharia with the State Bar of California this week.
© HENRIQUE CASINHAS/OBSERVADOR
© INÊS LACERDA/OBSERVADOR
During a meeting on Thursday, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte tacitly asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to implement the “energy ceasefire” announced by U.S. President Donald Trump.
RELATED:
Ukraine Resumes Strikes on Russian Refineries: Zelensky
“Good to see President Zelensky in Brussels. We talked about the importance of implementing an energy ceasefire,” Rutte said in a social media message accompanied by a photograph with the Ukrainian leader, who is in the Belgian capital to attend a European Union summit on Friday as a guest.
Rutte also said they discussed “NATO allies’ continued support for Ukraine,” among other things through the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) mechanism, launched by the alliance so that allies can buy U.S. military materiel to send to Kyiv.
Through social media, Zelensky said the meeting with Rutte served to continue coordinating with NATO “greater protection and security for Ukraine.” He took the opportunity to blame Russia for having broken the energy ceasefire through attacks on energy infrastructure.
⚡️ On October 15 in Baku, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov directly rejected any potential ceasefire in Ukraine, explicitly countering US President Donald Trump’s October 11 announcement of an energy truce. pic.twitter.com/CB4Md9VTkN
— UNITED24 Media (@United24media) October 15, 2026
He also complained about restrictions on Starlink satellite operations in Ukraine, asked that arms supplies to Ukraine continue, and insisted on the need to receive ballistic missile interceptors and ammunition for F16 aircraft.
The Brussels meeting comes a day after Russia launched an attack against three thermal power plants operating in the Kiev region and an attack against energy facilities in Kharkiv.
In statements to the Financial Times, Zelensky reaffirmed his willingness to continue the conflict and announced that “the ban (on attacking Russian refineries) has been lifted. That is enough.”
On Thursday, Russia confirmed that Ukraine attacked a refinery in Ryazan, a region 200 kilometers from Moscow. Yesterday, Russian authorities also denounced Ukrainian attacks on two other refineries in the Saratov and Ryazan regions.
The Kremlin assured that Russia has not violated any agreement given that the energy truce between Russia and Ukraine was never finalized.
teleSUR/ JF
Source: EFE
Two people critically hurt when vehicle carrying HGV drivers hit stationary train in Calais, say French authorities
Nineteen people have been injured after a minibus collided with a stationary freight train at the loading platform of the Eurotunnel near Calais, French authorities have said.
Pas-de-Calais underprefect Agathe Cury said 18 passengers and the bus driver were injured in the incident.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: MAXPPP/Alamy
© Photograph: MAXPPP/Alamy
© Photograph: MAXPPP/Alamy
This story originally appeared in Panamerican Dispatch on Oct. 14, 2026, and is shared here with permission.
On August 18, Fernando Cerimedo was arrested in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, for hiring hitmen to assassinate his ex-partner, Nadia Beller, who was pregnant at the time, after she threatened to go public about his large-scale illegal bot farm operations to throw elections for far-right candidates across Latin America. Still recovering from the multiple gunshot wounds she miraculously survived, she gave an interview this week on the Ventana al Mundo program on Mexico’s public television network, Channel 14. During the interview, she explained how Cerimedo and a member of the Bolsonaro family, who is assumed to be Flavio’s brother Eduardo, met with Meta officials to plot interference in Brazil’s presidential elections. She also said Cerimedo’s largest bot farms are still operating, and that his group is planning to interfere in the Claudia Sheinbaum administration in Mexico. You can watch her interview below. Beneath that, is a transcribed and translated excerpt from her interview.
“In early August, Fernando sent me a photo with one of the Bolsonaros in the United States. I can’t pin down the exact date right now, because, as I told you, my phone is with the public prosecutor’s office. But between the first and the fifth of that month, while he was in the United States, he sent me a photo and told me they were discussing the campaign, that he was going to seek financing and that he was going to take part in that campaign, in that election, one way or another. And what they did with Meta is straight out of a playbook. They have very good contacts at Meta. In fact, there was a journalist whose page they had taken down themselves, and Fernando stepped in to get it restored, and he told me at least three times that he had very good relationships at Meta and could get any page taken down or put back up. I have no doubt that his team, his group, intervened for this. I understand there are complaints about electoral violations by Meta, that some dirty war campaigns were allowed through, along with the suspension of Lula’s accounts. I have not the slightest doubt that this was part of a strategy by this team to strip away Lula’s visibility.
The bot farm they took down here is tiny, it’s minuscule. From the very first day I gave interviews, I said there was a much bigger one. I told them where it was. They never touched it. I imagine it’s still active. I don’t think it’s in the same location anymore. It was in the business district. They never touched it, and the same goes for Argentina. I know they have their own bot farms there too. I imagine Fernando’s arrest caused some disruption, and for a moment they went inactive, but they’re fully active now. I’m a victim of it myself, because it spreads lies. His lawyer goes out and says some outrageous thing, and it immediately gets amplified by their bots. So I myself am a victim of their farms, and they use them everywhere, in every single country, with exactly the same modus operandi.
He also told me he was going to get involved in the Mexican election and would have his own candidate, because they were extremely interested in removing her, the president, from office. How do they get involved in elections? As you mentioned before: by distorting public debate, through cognitive fraud, dirty war tactics, buying influencers, their coordinated bot farms that organize attacks, that manufacture trending topics. All of that, what does it do? It distorts public debate.”
President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have desperately lobbed accusations of “socialism” and “communism” at liberals in their attempts to scare voters in this year’s midterm elections.
Conservative political leaders have instituted “anti-communist” propaganda to indoctrinate schoolchildren with anti-democratic talking points, and Trump’s regime has made a habit of railing against socialism in public — with some rather embarrassing results.
But fresh polling data suggests that a fairly large contingent of the Republican Party actually seems to like socialism. And it’s arguably all Trump’s fault.
The survey by the Economic Innovation Group and Echelon Insights shows that Republicans, at 29%, are more in favor of the government owning a stake in independent companies than independent voters and even Democrats.
Two years ago, what share of GOP voters would agree with government ownership of companies?
— Daniel Di Martino (@DanielDiMartino) October 13, 2026
Now 29% of GOP voters do. More than Democrats.
This must be reversed. Those who pushed for this may come to regret it if America becomes a socialist country. pic.twitter.com/zgrZ1bjulb
The polling suggests majorities of each group oppose the idea. But the not-insignificant number of Republicans who are in favor suggests that Trump’s trend of having the government buy stakes in independent companies — communistic behavior that has led some critics to say he’s practicing “MAGA Maoism” — has led some conservatives to welcome the practice.
So much for all that past talk among Republicans about how the government shouldn’t be in the business of “picking winners and losers.” It has taken less than 10 years of Trump-style authoritarianism to get about a third of the GOP on the record endorsing an undeniably socialist policy, if not a communist one.
So as Republicans rattle on about the supposed scourge of socialism, it sure seems like a chunk of their own party isn’t on the same page.
The socialist threat is coming from inside the house https://t.co/vZJjrG2QlD
— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) October 13, 2026
Or, as Scott Lincicome, a vice president at the libertarian CATO Institute, put it: “The socialist threat is coming from inside the house.”
The post Trump’s desperate war on ‘socialism’ is failing within his own party appeared first on MS NOW.
Filming a drone strike and posting it online may be quietly teaching Russia’s drones to aim better. Russia is collecting footage of its Geran attack drones striking Ukraine, probably to check how its optical target-recognition and guidance algorithms perform in combat, presidential defense-technology adviser Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov says.
Russia has fitted its jet-powered Geran drones with machine vision that lets them recognize and track targets on their own in the final seconds of flight, a capability Ukraine’s electronic warfare cannot easily defeat. Now, Moscow is paying people inside Ukraine to film where those drones land, which Flash says is no coincidence after four years of not asking.
“Across many Telegram channels, the enemy is asking traitors to film videos of ‘Geran’ impacts and transmit information for a reward. For four years they didn’t ask, and suddenly it has become so crucial,” Beskrestnov notes.
The reason, he believes, lies in those optical guidance systems. Russian forces need impact footage to see how its algorithms are performing in real combat conditions, according to the expert.
His takeaway for them is blunt: stop posting the videos of Russian assaults. He stresses the serious danger of publishing footage of impact sites and urges people not to film or share it.
“This serves as a signal to everyone: do not film and do not publish videos of ‘Shahed’ hits. You see how vital and necessary this is to Russia,” Beskrestnov adds.
Earlier, Ukrenergo board chairman Vitaly Zaichenko said that a Russian drone severed a unique power transmission tower at the Dnipro River crossing in Kyiv, and it cannot be restored. He added that the company was developing new technical solutions "on the fly, and very fast."
It would start the procedures for those solutions from 15 October. Russia’s use of drones able to sever metal towers is a new and serious challenge for Ukraine’s power engineers.
When Rudolph Diesel disappeared in 1913, many suspected foul play. The prime suspects were Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II and US oil man John D. Rockefeller. Both would have had reason to want the inventor of the diesel engine dead. The militaristic kaiser was building a diesel-powered submarine fleet. He had no interest in other countries […]
The post Rudolph Diesel was thinking of farmers when he invented his engine appeared first on Asia Times.
© ALEXANDROS BELTES/EPA
Login