Update: Belgium's crisis center has raised the nation's terror alert status to its highest level.

“Horrified by the terrorist attack which left two victims in the heart of Brussels,” Belgian Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib said in a post on the X social media network.

“All necessary means must be mobilized to combat radicalism.”

“We are monitoring the situation and ask the people of Brussels to be vigilant,” Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said in a post on X, but appeared to confirm the link to terrorism:

"I have just offered my sincere condolences to the Swedish prime minister following tonight's harrowing attack on Swedish citizens in Brussels.

"Our thoughts are with the families and friends who lost their loved ones. As close partners, the fight against terrorism is a joint one."

Additionally, the Euro 2024 soccer qualifier between Belgium and Sweden (taking place in Belgium's national stadium in Brussels) has been abandoned at half-time after the attack, with fans locked in the stadium.

No suspect has yet been arrested.

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As Remix News' Thomas Brooke reported, two people have been shot dead and others injured in central Brussels on Monday evening and the perpetrator remains at large, Belgian police have said.

Authorities have confirmed a shooting took place in Ieperlaan at around 7:15 p.m. local time and two people of Swedish nationality were killed.

The victims are understood to have been supporters of the Swedish national football team and were visiting the Belgian capital to attend the European Championship qualifying fixture between the two nations at the Heysel Stadium on Monday evening.

Amateur footage circulating outline showed the perpetrator, dressed in a fluorescent orange jacket and wearing a white helmet, equipped with an assault rifle on the rampage in the city. The suspect arrived at the scene on a scooter before opening fire in the street causing pedestrians to flee into a nearby apartment building.

Ce n’est pas une blague, s’il vous plaît faites attention à vous pic.twitter.com/9tP4Us1iUG

— Votre Nom Ici (@momoblf) October 16, 2023

The man followed those fleeing the scene into the lobby of the residential building before firing several more shots, before returning to his scooter and taking off at speed.

Belgian media reported eyewitness testimony which stated the shooter shouted “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire.

Additional footage circulating online purports to be a video message recorded in Arabic by the shooter who is wearing the same identifiable clothing following the attack. According to the Sudinfo news outlet, the attacker said his motivation for the mass shooting was to avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world and boasted about killing “infidels.”

“In his very violent speech, he said he had shot two people to ‘avenge the Muslims and that we live and die for our religion,'” the news site stated.

The tweet is viewable here but not embeddable...

Crisis meetings have taken place between the Belgian federal police, the Brussels local police, the security services, and Belgian Interior Minister Annelies Verlinden and Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne.

Authorities have not yet made an arrest and the suspect remains at large.

This is a developing story...

Authored by Dorothy Li via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Chinese regime urged the Israeli government to stop its military actions in Gaza, saying Israel has "gone beyond self-defense" in response to the surprise attack by the Hamas terrorist group last week.

China's foreign minister Wang Yi delivered the message during a Saturday phone call with Saudi Arabian counterpart, Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud.

"Israel's actions have gone beyond self-defense," Mr. Wang claimed, urging the Israeli government to stop what he called “collective punishment of civilians in Gaza,” according to the readout from China's foreign ministry.

The conversation came after the Israeli foreign ministry sharply criticized Beijing's lack of condemnation for Hamas's unprecedented attack on southern Israel a week ago, killing over 1,000 civilians and capturing up to 150 more as hostages.

"There was no clear and unequivocal condemnation of the terrible massacre committed by the terrorist organization Hamas against innocent civilians and the abduction of dozens of them to Gaza,” the Israeli foreign ministry said in a readout of a phone call between Israeli ambassador Rafi Harpaz and China's special envoy to the Middle East, Zhai Jun.

Mr. Harpaz has expressed "Israel's deep disappointment" to Mr. Zhai, the ministry said.

The Chinese regime has refrained from denouncing the Palestinian terror group. In the wake of the Oct. 7 strike by Hamas on Israel, the communist regime's first response was to call on "relevant parties" to "stay calm" and "exercise restraint." Without naming Hamas, the statement said Beijing was "deeply concerned" about the escalation of tensions and violence and made calls for a two-state resolution, drawing criticism from United States and Israeli officials who said it lacked sympathy for the Israeli victims.

“When people are being murdered, slaughtered in the streets, this is not the time to call for a two-state solution,” Yuval Waks, a senior official at the Israeli embassy in Beijing, said during a briefing on Oct. 8.

Facing pressure, China's foreign ministry issued a new statement, saying that the regime condemned such acts against civilians. The updated statement, however, still avoids mentioning Hamas by name.

“China is a friend to both Israel and Palestine,” Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for China's foreign ministry, told reporters at a regular briefing on Oct.9.

While China sought to portray itself as neutral, outside observers say the communist regime has chosen to side with Palestine.

"We have to look at China's relationship with Iran because Iran has often been a proxy for Beijing. And, of course, Hamas is a proxy of Iran. So really, what we've got here is China fueling these brutal attacks and this invasion of Israel," said Gordan Chang, author of "The Coming Collapse of China" and "China Is Going to War."

"I'm sure Chinese weapons [will] show up on the battlefield. And, of course, it's Chinese money that has permitted this," he said.

Separately, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also spoke with Mr. Wang on Saturday.

Mr. Blinken "reiterated U.S. support for Israel’s right to defend itself and called for an immediate cessation of Hamas’ attacks and the release of all hostages," the State Department said in a statement. Mr. Blinken "discussed the importance of maintaining stability in the region and discouraging other parties from entering the conflict," according to the statement.

For his part, Mr. Wang reiterated the regime's stance that it "opposed all actions that harm civilians and condemning practices that violate international law."

The Chinese Communist Party's top diplomat said the United States should "play a constructive and responsible role," pushing the conflict "back on track for a political settlement as soon as possible," according to Beijing's statement.

Their conversation also touched on U.S.–China ties, the ministry said, which Mr. Wang said have shown signs of stabilizing.

As part of the efforts to reopen communication lines, President Joe Biden hopes to meet Chinese Mr. Xi on the sidelines of next month's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco. But such a meeting hasn’t been confirmed by Beijing.

Mr. Xi will sit down with Russian President Vladimir Putin next week. Moscow has confirmed that Mr. Putin will visit Beijing from Oct. 17 to Oct. 18.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“After 2016, the national security state, the foreign policy establishment, & the gov’t-funded NGO-plex orgs redefined the word “democracy”: it no longer meant a consensus of individuals, it meant a consensus of institutions.”

- Mike Benz

The din of war drums beating hasn’t completely drowned out the barrage of lying bullshit issued by US Deep State blobsters in their effort to keep reality at bay from a citizenry gone restive and aggrieved over the seemingly deliberate ruination of our country by the people who run it.

On Thursday, FBI Director Chris Wray and Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas warned Americans that terrorist threats are rising in the US since Hamas attacked Israel, October 7th. Mr. Wray explained:

“Here in the U.S., we cannot and do not discount the possibility that Hamas or other foreign terrorist organizations could exploit the conflict to call on their supporters to conduct attacks on our own soil.”

We must be especially alert to the “lone wolf” lurking  amongst us, he added.

Neither of these officials noted that the rising terror threat here had any relation to the thousands of aliens streaming daily across the US border unvetted, or that the agencies under Homeland Security were helping to distribute them into every corner of America by plane and bus, giving them free cell phones, loaded debit cards, and other rewards for breaking the law.

And that “lone wolf” bit — is it possible that any number of them actually arrived as trained and pre-organized cadres or squads? How would we know? Most of them are military-age young men.

Are these unreasonable questions to ask? And If Hamas was so supernaturally successful in secretly planning the mass murder and kidnapping operation of 10/7 from Gaza that the world’s supposedly top intel agencies were blindsided as it rolled out, why should Americans have any confidence that the FBI has a clue what any of those unvetted border-jumping mutts are up to here? Especially since those free phones enable them to find each other and hook-up right from the get-go, without delay. It’s even possible that those phones were preloaded with their comrades’ numbers on speed-dial. Not to mention that illegal migrants have been coming here in huge waves for years, and surely some have been busy ever since setting up networks aimed at making trouble that new arrivals can easily slot into.

Since the FBI has been so preoccupied the duration of the “Joe Biden” regime tracking down every native-born living soul who attended the 1/6/21 riot at the US Capitol, instead of using the agency’s assets to monitor alien networking, you have to wonder why Mr. Wray even bothers to comment on the current situation. He can only embarrass (or incriminate) himself more deeply. One thing for sure is not happening: any effort by Mr. Mayorkas and his 260,000 employees to make the US/Mexico border any less porous. If it hadn’t occurred them yet, they might consider closing down the US-funded United Nations operation in Central America (with help from several international NGOs) that is running way-stations to transport aliens north to our border in hundred-plus bus fleets at a time, taking every possible advantage to accelerate the flow. I guess we’ll just have to stand by and see what happens.

Speaking of mind-blowing bullshit, emanating from a different pseudopod of the DC blob, former CIA Director Leon Panetta chimed in with Fox News’s Bret Baier last week to declare he still thinks that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian dis-info operation. Mr. Panetta was a co-signer of the notorious letter from 50 other former US Intel bigwigs in October, 2020, a few weeks before the election, organized by former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell to gaslight voters after The New York Post published the existence of the Laptop from Hell and some of its sordid contents tending to incriminate the Biden family for foreign influence-peddling.

As with so many blobsters infesting government and its nether regions, Leon Panetta likes to demonstrate that his contempt for the people of this land is boundless. He can’t possibly believe what he is saying. Everyone from the FBI to The New York Times has declared Hunter’s laptop authentic. Therefore, Leon Panetta is either a fool, a lying scoundrel, or insane. This kind of self-satisfied dishonor is a new thing in the USA, at least at the colossal scale it has achieved the past decade. In 2023 it is the order-of-the-day. In this particular case, it led to putting “Joe Biden,” with his handlers and movers, in a position to destroy the country, and they are getting it done.

Yet, events are still in motion, and decades are happening in days now.

We’ll learn this week whether escalation of the war involving Israel and its enemies can be averted without giving Hamas a pass on consequences for its recent murder spree.

We’ll learn whether a meaningful opposition against the Party of Chaos can organize around a new House speaker.

We’ll learn whether that same assembly can begin the process of laying out a president’s crimes for all in the nation to see, including the sizeable cohort of citizens who relish official lying and being lied to.

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