"Obamacare premiums will soar in 2017, the administration acknowledged Monday, with the price of the most popular benchmark plans jumping an average of 22 percent as the law continues to rely on older, sicker customers than its backers had envisioned.

"The number of insurers offering plans on the federally run exchange will also plummet as companies tap out, saying they can't figure out a way to make the economics work -- and raising the risk of lower competition and worse premium increases.

"Roughly one in five customers will have only a single insurer as an option next year after major players such as UnitedHealth Group and Aetna withdrew from most states and nearly all of Obamacare's co-op plans failed.

"That's particularly rough news for President Obama, who is trying to boost his legacy in his final months in office, and for Hillary Clinton, his would-be Democratic successor, who has defended the law."

"Donald Trump often describes President Obama's response to foreign threats as a 'disaster' and has vowed to restore America's military deterrence. So does Hillary Clinton. 'We need to respond to evolving threats from states like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea,' she said in August at the American Legion in Cincinnati. 'We need a military that is ready and agile so it can meet the full range of threats and operate on short notice across every domain,' she added.

"After eight years of retreat, that may prove a tall order. ...

"The next president must demonstrate that there's a new sheriff in town, starting by significantly upping military budgets. Climbing out from the hole we put ourselves in may exact a high cost, but without it, America -- and the rest of the world -- may find things sharply change for the worse."

Read entire article here.

"Iran's leaders, according to the nation's state-run press, now expect 'billions of dollars' in exchange for US hostages they're holding in Tehran's notorious Evin prison.

"Proving, yet again, the problem with ransoming hostages. ...

"Iran's hostage-taking habit is just one more mess the next president will have to clean up."

"So Debate No. 3 had one clearcut winner: Fox News' Chris Wallace. ...

"On Wednesday night, Wallace put on a clinic on how to run a debate, He focused heavily on questions of substance. He largely stayed away from the distractions. And he moved quickly and forcibly to keep the debate on track, cutting off interruptions and off-subject interjections. Not perfectly, but pretty darn well."

"Try as our Democratic friends might, there is no denying that fraudulent voting happens. Illegal immigrants and other non-citizens cast votes: Research from politics professors Jesse Richman and David Earnest finds that one in six non-citizens are registered to vote, and many of them report voting illegally. Legal U.S. voters have been found illegally voting in multiple states. Efforts to purge voter rolls of ineligible voters, e.g. dead people, have been resisted strongly by Democrats, as have efforts to see to the enforcement of laws against voting by felons. It is easily within the realm of statistical possibility that these votes have been decisive in at least two elections: Al Franken's 2008 Senate election and Barack Obama's 2008 victory in North Carolina. ...

"The fact is that we should be opposed to illegal voting even if it is only desultory and rare, even if it amounts to something less than a decisive factor in electoral outcomes. For one thing, it is wrong, malum in se, and for another, it actually does what the Democrats accuse Trump of doing: It undermines confidence in the legitimacy of U.S. elections."

"Operatives working for the Democratic National Committees sent agitators to Donald Trump rallies in an attempt to cause violence -- an effort that was supported by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

"The revelation comes from a hidden camera video released Monday by activist James O'Keefe and an email released by Wikileaks. In the video, liberal activists who say they are in contact with the Clinton campaign claim responsibility for violent events which have occurred so far this election."

"Take a deep dive into the more than 10,000 Clinton campaign emails published by WikiLeaks, and here's what you'll learn: Hillary Clinton is a careful, methodical, tightly-controlled politician. Her jokes, her tweets and even her purported ad libs are often scripted by aides. She hates to apologize, even when she admits she's done something wrong, like keeping emails on a home server. She's a progressive, but not an ideologue; she yearns for 'rational, moderate voices' on both sides. Above all, she's a pragmatist who's willing to compromise -- and to have 'both a public and a private position' if that's what it takes to make a deal.

"Fainted yet?

"'Politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way,' she told a housing group in 2014. 'But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the backroom discussions and the deals...then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So you need both a public and a private position.'

"In other words, she's a Clinton -- a Democrat who believes in progressive goals, but who's willing to trim them, postpone them, even throw them under a bus (temporarily, anyway) when practical politics requires."

"UNESCO -- the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization -- is supposed to promote peace, but keeps doing just the opposite: This week, it moved to write Jewish (and Christian) history out of areas sacred to several religions.

"On Thursday, the agency recognized Jerusalem's Temple Mount and Western Wall as Muslim -- effectively denying any Jewish or Christian ties there.

"Yet Jews have revered the site for 2,000 years as where the holy Temple stood and where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son Isaac. It's also significant to Christians as the site of several key events in Jesus' life. ...

"Such revisionist propaganda wins cheers in benighted bastions of anti-Israel and anti-Western hostility -- and can only embolden jihadists, incite violence and worsen prospects for Arab-Israeli peace."

"The decision to let Hillary Clinton off the hook for mishandling classified information has roiled the FBI and Department of Justice, with one person closely involved in the year-long probe telling FoxNews.com that career agents and attorneys on the case unanimously believed the Democratic presidential nominee should have been charged.

"The source, who spoke to FoxNews.com on the condition of anonymity, said FBI Director James Comey'€™s dramatic July 5 announcement that he would not recommend to the Attorney General's office that the former secretary of state be charged left members of the investigative team dismayed and disgusted. More than 100 FBI agents and analysts worked around the clock with six attorneys from the DOJ's National Security Division, Counter Espionage Section, to investigate the case.

"'No trial level attorney agreed, no agent working the case agreed, with the decision not to prosecute -- it was a top-down decision,' said the source, whose identity and role in the case has been verified by FoxNews.com.

"A high-ranking FBI official told Fox News that while it might not have been a unanimous decision, 'It was unanimous that we all wanted her [Clinton's] security clearance yanked.'"

Read entire article here.

"American arms dealer Marc Turi, in his first television interview since criminal charges against him were dropped, told Fox News that the Obama administration -- with the cooperation of Hillary Clinton's State Department -- tried and failed to make him the scapegoat for a 2011 covert weapons program to arm Libyan rebels that spun out of control. ...

"The 48-year-old Arizona resident has been at the epicenter of a failed federal investigation led by the Justice Department spanning five years and costing the government an estimated $10 million or more, Turi says.

"Turi says the Justice Department abruptly dropped the case to avoid public disclosure of the weapons program, that was designed to force the ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi during the 2011 Arab Spring.

"'Those transcripts from current as well as former CIA officers were classified,' Turi said of the evidence. 'If any of these relationships [had] been revealed it would have opened up a can of worms. There wouldn't have been any good answer for the U.S. government especially in this election year.' The Justice Department faced a deadline last week to produce records to the defense."