Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo weighs in on the Biden administration's handling of the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and the botched Kabul drone strike. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slammed the "failed" drone strike in Kabul that was aimed at ISIS-K terrorists, after the Pentagon admitted on Friday that the attack instead killed an aid worker and members of his family including seven children. Speaking with Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures," Pompeo noted that "it's obviously a tragedy that civilians were killed" and argued that the botched strike "is just another piece of an evacuation that was driven by politics" and not driven by "putting America first." SANDERS CHARGES U.S. DRONE STRIKE THAT KILLED AFGHAN CHILDREN WAS'UNACCEPTABLE' Head of the U.S. Central Command Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. announced Friday that it is unlikely any ISIS-K members were killed in the Kabul drone strike on August 29, which led to multiple civilian casualties. According to U.S. officials, the strike on the vehicle, formerly believed to have been a threat that included bombs and that was operated by ISIS-K militants, took place after a suicide bombing at Kabul airport in Afghanistan killed 13 U.S. service members and civilians.

Here's what you need to know as you start your day State Department was steered away from coronavirus origins probe, ex-officials say State Department leaders were warned not to pursue an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus, former department officials told Fox News on Thursday. The concern was that a probe would bring attention to U.S. funding of research at the Wuhan institute from which the virus may have escaped. Vanity Fair reported that officials calling for transparency from the Chinese government were told not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology's "gain of function" research, because it would bring what the outlet described as "unwelcome" attention of U.S. government funding into that research. The outlet reported that Thomas DiNanno, a former acting assistant secretary of the State Department's Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote in a January memo that staff from two bureaus "warned" leaders within his office not to probe the origins of the virus because it risked opening "a can of worms." Multiple former State Department officials told Fox News that the reported memo accurately describes what was happening at State at the time and that there was an effort among some officials at the department to oppose an extensive investigation into a possible lab leak.

Washington – The United States and close ally Australia held high-level talks on China on Tuesday and agreed on the need to uphold a rules-based global order, but the Australian foreign minister stressed that Canberra's relationship with China was important and it had no intention of injuring it. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper held two days of talks in Washington with their Australian counterparts, Foreign Minister Marise Payne and Defense Minister Linda Reynolds, who had flown around the world for the meetings despite the COVID-19 pandemic and face two weeks of quarantine on their return. At a joint news conference, Pompeo praised Australia for standing up to pressure from China and said Washington and Canberra would continue to work together to reassert the rule of law in the South China Sea, where China has been pressing its claims. Payne said the United States and Australia shared a commitment to the rule of law and had reiterated their commitment to hold countries to account for breaches, such as China's erosion of freedoms in Hong Kong. She said the two sides had also agreed to form a working group to monitor and respond to harmful disinformation and would look at ways to expand cooperation on infectious diseases, including access to vaccines.

Washington – U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took fresh aim at China on Thursday and said Washington and its allies must use "more creative and assertive ways" to press the Chinese Communist Party to change its ways, calling it the "mission of our time." Speaking at the Nixon Library in former President Richard Nixon's birthplace in Yorba Linda, California, Pompeo said the late U.S. leader's worry about what he had done by opening the world to China's Communist Party in the 1970s had been prophetic. "President Nixon once said he feared he had created a'Frankenstein' by opening the world to the CCP," Pompeo said. Nixon, who died in 1994 and was president from 1969 to 1974 opened the way for the establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with Communist China in 1979 through a series of contacts, including a visit to Beijing in 1972. In a major speech delivered after Washington's surprise order this week for China to close its Houston consulate, Pompeo repeated frequently leveled U.S. charges about Beijing's unfair trade practices, human rights abuses and efforts to infiltrate American society.

When it comes to AI ethics around the use of facial recognition, China does not have a good record. As India has banned Chinese apps including TikTok, one that went viral in 2019 and 2020 that uses AI to recommend micro videos, Australia and the U.S. are likely to be next. Kevin Mayer left Disney recently to join ByteDance, as CEO of TikTok, but you cannot separate TikTok, from its parent company with an HQ located in Beijing. If this company isn't helping export China's police surveillance capitalism play, I don't know what is. It's the greatest PR stunt by ByteDance I've seen yet.

On June 30, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's address to the UN Security Council calling for an arms embargo on Iran to be extended was expected to dominate the international news agenda. However, Iran's judiciary stole the morning's headlines by issuing an arrest warrant for Donald Trump the day before. Tehran prosecutor Ali Alqasimehr said on Monday that Trump, along with more than 30 others accused of involvement in the January 3 drone attack that killed Iran's top general, Qassem Soleimani, face "murder and terrorism charges". The prosecutor added that Tehran asked Interpol for help in detaining the US president. The same day, the US special envoy for Iran, Brian Hook, denounced the warrant as a "propaganda stunt" at a press conference in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.

Washington – U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday condemned China's effort to take over national security legislation in Hong Kong, calling it "a death knell for the high degree of autonomy" that Beijing had promised the territory. Pompeo called for Beiing to reconsider the move and warned of an unspecified U.S. response if it proceeds. Meanwhile, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said China risked a major flight of capital from Hong Kong that would end the territory's status as the financial hub of Asia. Shortly afterward, the Commerce Department announced new restrictions on sensitive exports to China. The contentious measure, submitted Friday on the opening day of China's national legislative session, is strongly opposed by pro-democracy lawmakers in semi-autonomous Hong Kong.

MUNICH ― U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Saturday called out China as America's main adversary and warned allies that letting the Chinese firm Huawei build its next-generation, or 5G, network risks their security cooperation and information sharing arrangements with the U.S. "Reliance on Chinese 5G vendors, for example, could render our partners' critical systems vulnerable to disruption, manipulation and espionage," Esper said in a speech at the high-level Munich Security Conference. "It could also jeopardize our communication and intelligence sharing capabilities, and by extension, our alliances." Adopting Huawei's equipment on allies' 5G networks, Esper said, "could inject serious risk into our defense cooperation." It was a tough statement partially at odds with other U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who offered assurances last week that U.S.-U.K. intelligence sharing remained strong despite Britain's decision to include Huawei in some parts of its nascent 5G network. A day earlier, the White House's point person for international telecommunications policy, Robert Blair, told reporters: "There will be no erosion in our overall intelligence sharing."

WASHINGTON – The United States on Wednesday resumed joint military operations with Iraq that had been put on pause after the U.S. drone strike that killed a top Iranian general in Baghdad, The New York Times reported. Two U.S. military officials quoted by the paper said the Pentagon wanted to resume these operations in order to pick up the fight against the Islamic State group. Washington began the pause on January 5 two days after the strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani at the Baghdad airport. The same day of the suspension furious Iraqi lawmakers voted to expel the more than 5,000 U.S. troops that are in Iraq. It was not immediately clear if anyone in the Iraqi government had approved the resumption of the joint military operations, the Times reported. The Pentagon said it had no information to provide concerning a resumption when contacted by AFP.

WASHINGTON – Confronted by persistent questions about his military action in the Middle East, President Donald Trump and his top officials offered a string of fresh explanations Friday, with Trump now contending Iranian militants had planned major attacks on four U.S. embassies. Just hours earlier, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had said the U.S. didn't know when or where attacks might occur. Trump and other officials insisted anew that Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani had posed an imminent threat to the U.S., but they rebuffed repeated attempts to explain what they meant by "imminent." Trump, meanwhile, announced additional sanctions against Iran, which he had promised after a barrage of missiles fired by the Islamic State against American bases in Iraq earlier this week. Those Iranian missiles, which caused no casualties, were prompted by the U.S. drone strike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani last week in Baghdad.