Beware the Stalinist Biker Gangs | So Who Really Invented the Parachute?

Slovakia is emerging as the next political battleground between the West and Russia.

Atop their multicolored motorcycles, the nationalist Night Wolves biker gang revved their engines outside the Russian embassy and launched their newest European base – in Dolna Krupa, a village in Slovakia, the former Eastern Bloc nation that in the years since the Berlin Wall fell had mostly escaped Russia’s interference.

Their muffler-marked arrival in July set off alarms in the capital of Bratislava just 44 miles away, with the Slovak foreign minister saying the gang – which has called Stalin a hero and NATO a criminal organization – would be closely watched. More than two hundred public figures penned an open letter asking for the Slovak government to take action.

But the biker gang remains, with officials saying they don’t have evidence to convict them for any crimes. Their stay in Slovakia is just one very visible sign of growing pulls and pressures between the country’s Western allies and an increasingly aggressive Russia trying to reclaim its old sphere of influence.

The bullpen in the MLB postseason keeps growing in importance.

In Game 5 of the 2015 World Series, with the Kansas City Royals leading the series 3-1 against the New York Mets, reliever Wade Davis came out of the bullpen, pitched a shutout inning and helped end the Royals’ 30-year World Series drought. In so doing, he started the current era of MLB postseason bullpen fever.

The Royals were patient zero for this fever — building a power pen and winning it all in 2015 — and then the fever spread. Bullpenning a game — using four, five, six relievers to win — has become a thing in baseball and especially a thing in October. The percentage of work given bullpens in the 2013 postseason was 34.8. In the 2017 postseason, that number rose to 46.5 percent.

Only four teams in the past 40 years have won a World Series when their bullpen has averaged four walks per nine innings.

President Trump struck a deal with Canada that may prove more politically consequential than Kavanaugh.

So much of Donald Trump’s being is wrapped up in what happens at America’s southern border, where he has cracked down on immigrants and pledged a big, beautiful wall that his supporters are still waiting on. But the road to success in the midterm elections may well run along the world’s longest border between two countries — the U.S.-Canada divide.

A handful of competitive House races and two pivotal Senate contests touch the border. Monday’s announcement of a new don’t-call-it-NAFTA trade deal with Canada and Mexico may yet prove to be the week’s most politically consequential moment.