The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution is quite clear: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

While we have witnessed much discussion over the years about the meaning of “cruel and unusual punishments,” relatively little has been said about “excessive fines.” Yet governments at all levels appear to give little regard to the relationship between some of the outlandish fines imposed and the significance of the crimes.

A case in Indiana is expected to land in the lap of the U.S. Supreme Court soon: the issue of civil or criminal asset forfeiture (CAF) and “excessive fines.”

If these people are radicalized and don’t support the United States, and they’re disloyal to the United States, as a matter of principal that’s fine, that’s their right. It’s our right and our obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.

– General Wesley Clark in a MSNBC interview

The European Parliament's Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs committee will ask MEPs to vote for Hungary to be sanctioned over alleged violations of the rule of law, just days after Viktor Orban's decisive re-election.

"Time and time again, Viktor Orbán's government has undermined the independence of the judiciary, freedom of the press and the fundamental rights of its citizens," said the motion, authored by Dutch Green Party MEP Judith Sargentini, who has led an investigation on whether Budapest is in breach of "EU values."

With Orban set for a third consecutive term, after the Eurosceptic, anti-immigrant Fidesz party took the vast majority of parliament seats on April 8, the EU committee proposed invoking Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union. The statute would force Hungarian officials to defend their country before the European Council, and could eventually see Budapest's voting rights in the EU suspended.

Anyone who believes that governments create reality is living in a fantasy world, and is surely no conservative, neo- or otherwise, either politically or temperamentally. As the conservative philosopher Claes Ryn has pointed out,

“Only great conceit could inspire a dream of armed world hegemony. The ideology of benevolent American empire and global democracy dresses up a voracious appetite for power. It signifies the ascent to power of a new kind of American, one profoundly at odds with that older type who aspired to modesty and self-restraint.”

In 2017, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) downgraded the US democratic system. The EIU has an annual Democracy index that provides a snapshot of global democracy by rating countries on five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. They are then classified into four types of governments: full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime, and authoritarian regime.

The US is rated as a flawed democracy – one having free elections but weighed down by weak governance, an underdeveloped political culture and low levels of political participation. According to Pew, Gallup and other polling agencies, there is a trust deficit between the American people and the government, which has a corrosive effect on the functioning of democracy.

Apparently we have been doing our job too well recently, and somebody REALLY doesn’t appreciate it!

Traffic on the site has exploded over the past few days, and is about 3X its usual level - until about an hour ago.

Our site was down for about 2.5 hours yesterday evening EST, and has been intermittent this afternoon, due to a sustained and relatively sophisticated DDoS (denial of service) attack.

It took me about an hour of trying to publish this article, and I still can't load an image with it. I've sent out this same message via our email newsletter list. If you haven't signed up for that yet, please do, it may be the only reliable way to stay in touch with you if they keep disrupting the site.
I've heard that other sites, Fort Russ, and Southfront have also been under attack.

After they launched a lethal strike (from Lebanese airspace, no less) against the T-4 airforce base in Syria in retaliation for the a chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held Syrian village - killing several Iranians in the process - senior Israeli officials have finally confirmed what many have long assumed since the country started escalating its military operations within the borders of its crumbling Levantine neighbor.

That is, if Israel even so much as suspects that Iranian agents are planning an attack against Israel from Syrian territory, it will be Syrian President Bashar al-Assad who ends up on the receiving end of a preemptive strike from the IDF, per the Jerusalem Post.

In light of this morning's jawboning by Trump, who vowed that an attack with US missiles "nice and new and “smart!" is imminent, and following overnight unconfirmed reports that US warplanes are massing over the Syria-Iraq border, it will hardly come as a surprise that Syrian soldiers and pro-government forces are getting the hell out of dodge.

According to Reuters, which cites the (highly conflicted) Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Syrian pro-government forces are evacuating main airports and military air bases ahead of possible U.S. strikes.

While the report has yet to be confirmed, amusingly Reuters clarified that "the Syrian army could not be immediately reached for comment." It's also not immediately clear what they would say: "yes, we are retreating, have a good day."

The former UK Ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, told BBC Radio Scotland regarding the alleged Douma chemical weapons attack:

The Syrian government is probably not guilty

The sources claiming there was a chemical weapons attack are pro-Islamist jihadi propaganda outlets

The incident was probably staged, and it is likely that no one actually died

Update: The Russian warships leaving port has been reported as a drill, as InterFax reports:

Russian Navy ships, starting from April 11, will conduct exercises near the coast of Syria, follow from the international notification for aviation personnel (NOTAM) and navigational warning for seafarers.

The reports contain the coordinates of the closed area, as well as the conduct of training shooting there.

The training area, located in the international waters of the Mediterranean, is adjacent to the sea border of Syria. It will be closed on 11-12, 17-19 and 25-26 April from 10 to 18 Moscow time.

Currently, as part of the permanent operational connection of the Russian Navy in the Mediterranean Sea, there are about 15 warships and vessels providing the Black Sea Fleet, including the carriers of the Caliber cruise missiles Frigates Admiral Grigorovich and Admiral Essen, as well as submarines that repeatedly struck at the targets of terrorists in Syria.

Mark Zuckerberg notably failed to mention the recent revelations about the Obama 2012 campaign’s exploitation of the platform’s weak pre-2014 data protections toharvest masses of data from non-consenting users. But when looking deeper at the number of former Obama staffers and former Hillary staffers in senior positions at the social media giant, it becomes a lot easier to see the “why” behind the obvious and glaring question.

It isn’t a secret that Facebook has been censoring anyone with a non-left political ideology. Even Diamond and Silk have had a run-in with censorship.

Star and Stripes reports an additional Navy battlegroup are departing the US this morning (11th April) to join the other US destroyers:

“The aircraft carrier will be accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Normandy and the guided-missile destroyers USS Arleigh Burke, USS Bulkeley, USS Forrest Sherman and USS Farragut. The destroyers USS Jason Dunham and USS The Sullivans will join the strike group later, a Navy statement said. The strike group, carrying 6,500 sailors and Carrier Air Wing One, will cruise alongside the German frigate FGS Hessen. It remains unclear what the upcoming strike group deployment might entail.”

The Russian naval facility in Tartus is a leased military installation of the Russian Navy located on the northern edge of the seaport of the Syrian city of Tartus. According to CNN Turk, US destroyers were at a distance of 100 km from the port of Tartus, as of Monday.

As Pentagon planners ready a possible military response to a suspected poison gas attack in Syria, one danger has sparked special concern — whether U.S. airstrikes may inadvertently kill Russian soldiers in Syria and escalate the regional war into a confrontation between Washington and Moscow.

The chances of a potential clash would increase if President Trump opts for a heavy bombardment, employing not only Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from Navy ships offshore — as he did last year after a previous chemical attack — but also manned bombers and other warplanes to strike multiple targets in Syria, current and former officials say.

With all the attention paid to Facebook in recent weeks over ‘data breaches’ and privacy violations, even though what happened with Cambridge Analytica is part of their standard business model, it’s easy to forget that there are four other Big Tech corporations collecting just as much - if not more - of our personal info.

Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are all central players in “surveillance capitalism” and prey on our data. New reports actually suggest that Google may actually harvest ten times as much as Facebook.

Deputy Secretary General of NATO Rose Gottemoeller says that the Alliance does not wish to face military conflict with Russia, but still blames it for a "troubling pattern of behavior," from Ukraine to Salisbury.

"We would categorically want to avoid a situation where confrontation with Russia is inevitable. And that's exactly what our decision-making is governed by," Gottemoeller told Russian daily Kommersant in an interview published in Russian on Tuesday. However, her message was far from reconciliatory as she went on: "But we can't leave without reply Russia's illegal acts: from the annexation of Crimea, to destabilization in Donbass, to election meddling, or the latest events in the UK."

President Trump is in the process of building a new coalition of allies to participate in a multi-nation “strike force” attack on the Syrian government. This talk of coalition action reflects the rapid escalation of plans since US officials embraced Saturday’s allegations of a chemical weapons strike.

French President Emmanuel Macron, Donald Trump, and British PM Theresa May
Officials said as early as Sunday that the claimed Saturday attack would lead to a US military strike, and President Trump indicated this would happen “very soon.” Instead of a one-off strike, as with last April’s tomahawk missile bombardment of Syria, the US seems to be envisioning starting a whole new war over it.

This new US-led war in Syria doubtless suits much of the administration just fine. After all, this time last week US officials were trying to talk President Trump out of ending US military involvement in Syria. Now, they seem to have a pretext for an open-ended conflict.

According to the latest report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), released on Monday, the U.S. economy is going great guns. But that growth, no matter how robust, will never catch up with government spending. Hence, despite that growth, annual deficits of a trillion dollars will arrive two years sooner than originally projected.

That previous projection, made by the CBO last June, showed a deficit of $563 billion for 2018, rising to $689 billion next year. Now, with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act behind them, the CBO projects this year’s deficit to be $804 billion and next year’s to be just a touch below a trillion dollars, at $981 billion.

The CBO is considered by many to be less partisan than most government entities and as likely to create more accurate projections than those coming from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It covered itself with this disclaimer:

As the United States continues to experience sensational mass shootings and many Americans call for gun control, the London is dealing with its own rash of violent crime, mostly in the form of knife attacks.

Countless memes circulating on the internet have pointed out that despite the British government’s harsh gun laws, criminals have still found ways to commit violence and murder. Despite this, the government is clamping down further, attempting to restrict knife possession even more than it already has in its fruitless attempts to stop the wave of crime (in 2014, for example, a teenager was restricted from buying spoons, a measure that has apparently failed to reduce crime).

But there is more to the story, and what’s missing from the mainstream conversation further discredits the actions of the British government.

Facebook’s first reactions to the Cambridge Analytical headlines looked very different from the now contrite promises Mark Zuckerberg made to the U.S. Congress this week. Look closer, though, and you'll see a theme running through it all. The message coming from Facebook’s leadership is not about how it has failed its users. Instead it's about how users —and especially developers —have failed Facebook, and how Facebook needs to step in to take exclusive control over your data.

The environmental impact of the world's plastic consumption is profound. Plastic trash and the tiny pieces that chip off it can be found everywhere—oceans, marine life, land and our bodies, too.

To help solve this planetary crisis, Nestlé pledged Tuesday to make all its plastic packaging 100 percent recyclable or reusable by 2025. The Swiss food giant envisions a world where "none of its packaging, including plastics, ends up in landfill or as litter," it said.

"Plastic waste is one of the biggest sustainability issues the world is facing today. Tackling it requires a collective approach," Nestlé CEO Mark Schneider said in a statement.

Nestlé joins a number of major international corporations, such as rival Unilever, making similar commitments.

Iran has limited the amount of foreign currency citizens can hold outside of banks to €10,000 ($12,350) in an effort to control the falling rial and control the country’s severe dollar shortage.

In a statement, the central bank said Iranians have until the end of April to sell excess foreign currency or deposit it in banks.

The decision comes as part of the Iranian government’s measures to overcome losses to the local currency. The rial has lost almost half of its value since September. Iranians have been purchasing foreign currency and gold coins in anticipation of the US pulling out of a 2015 nuclear deal which promised an end to sanctions on the oil rich state.

It’s a hard job being a global hegemon and the world’s sole superpower.

You have to keep the entire planet in line. Every country needs to be taught its place, and kept there, by force if need be. Now and again a country or two has to be conquered or destroyed, just to teach others a lesson. Plus you have to relentlessly meddle in other countries’ politics, rigging elections so that only US-friendly candidates can win, run regime change operations and organize colored revolutions. Stop doing this, and some countries will start ignoring you. And then the rest will quickly realize that you are losing control and go their separate ways while ignoring you.

Watching Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg answer questions yesterday by a congressional inquiry and saying he is open to regulations on his company is like watching my long-time suspicions play out in real-time, on live T.V.

Facebook may just become the de facto Real I.D. of a Satanic Beast System. No Joke. How you may ask, well let’s look at that.

Google, Youtube, Facebook, Amazon, etc. have not only become the online gateways to accessing the internet, they have actually become the internet itself.

The Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group (HSTCSG) is being deployed to the Mediterranean Wednesday, where it will join the USS Donald Cook off Syrian territorial waters.

The aircraft carrier will be accompanied by guided-missile destroyers USS Arleigh Burke (DDG 51), USS Bulkeley (DDG 84), USS Forrest Sherman (DDG 98) and USS Farragut (DDG 99), as well as the guided-missile cruiser USS Normandy (CG 60). The Destroyers USS The Sullivans (DDG 68) and USS Jason Dunham (DDG 109) will join the HSTCSG later, according to a statement by the US Navy.

The Sachssen-class German frigate FGS Hessen (F 221) will also operate as part of the strike group during the first half of the deployment.

In addition to USS Donald Cook, the U.S has now dispatched USN Carrier Strike Group 8 to the Mediterranean/#Syria:

Update: After the listing saw public news coverage, DHS spokesman Tyler Q. Houlton quickly tweeted to calm fears of government over-reach and the creation of a real 'Ministry of Truth'...

Despite what some reporters may suggest, this is nothing more than the standard practice of monitoring current events in the media. Any suggestion otherwise is fit for tin foil hat wearing, black helicopter conspiracy theorists.

Phew - thanks for clarifying. And don't forget America, it's for your own good.

As Americans we must face the possibility that we have a criminally insane government in Washington that is leading the world to destruction.

A Russian Government Press Release:

False information is being planted about the alleged use of chlorine and other toxic agents by the Syrian government forces. The latest fake news about a chemical attack on Douma was reported yesterday. These reports are again referenced to the notorious White Helmets, which have been proved more than once to be working hand in glove with the terrorists, as well as to other pseudo-humanitarian organisations headquartered in the UK and the US.

We recently warned of the possibility of such dangerous provocations. The goal of these absolutely unsubstantiated lies is to protect the terrorists and the irreconcilable radical opposition that has rejected a political settlement, as well as to justify the possible use of force by external actors.

Washington and its allies use the Security Council as a sound stage platform for their imperial agenda – rule of law principles ignored, the UN Charter, other international law and America’s Constitution discarded.

Time and again the same or similar scenarios unfolded on the world stage, as well as in Washington and other key NATO capitals.

Facts don’t matter, only a pre-planned imperial agenda, naked aggression its defining feature. The die appears cast in Syria. Regime change is Washington’s long-sought objective.

Things appear heading toward something similar to US-led aggression on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, smashing these countries, eliminating their leadership, installing illegitimate pro-Western puppet regimes.

Russia wastes time and energy demanding an independent probe into the fake April 7 Douma incident.

The US will act against the Syrian government with or without a UN blessing, US envoy Nikki Haley told the Security Council, blaming Russian “obstructionism” for allowing the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria and beyond.
“We are beyond showing pictures of dead babies. We are beyond appeals to conscience. We have reached the moment when the world must see justice done,” Haley declared to the Security Council on Monday, accusing Russia of backing the “monster” [Bashar] Assad, who was murdering children with chemical weapons.

“The Russian regime, whose hands are all covered with the blood of Syrian children, cannot be ashamed by pictures of its victims. We’ve tried that before,” Haley said, adding that “no civilized government would have anything to do with Assad’s murderous regime.”

RUSSIA has issued the US with a dire warning after Donald Trump imposed a raft of harsh new sanctions. The Kremlin told Washington this afternoon the US is in violation of “anything and everything”.

Russia issued the fiery statement after the US issued its harshest raft of new sanctions against Vladimir Putin as Russia battles controversy in Europe and the Middle East.

After Moscow's stocks plummeted following the sanctions announcement, the Kremlin lashed out at Washington with an accusation of breaching “everything”.

Russia said: “This is outrageous from the standpoint of legality and violates anything and everything.”

The Kremlin said they were considering “a large variety of options” - a thinly veiled threat to Donald Trump and his White House administration.

In the years since the declaration of a ‘war on terror’ and the invasions of first Afghanistan and then Iraq, the world has witnessed an enormous proliferation of private military and security companies (PMSCs) seeking to profit from instability and conflict. Hundreds of companies have been established in the past few years alone, and there now exists a vast private industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Sadly, rather than introducing binding regulation of the industry, the British government has decided to allow the mercenaries to regulate themselves.

The UK is an important hub for the PMSC industry. At the height of the occupation, around 60 British companies operated in Iraq. Now there are hundreds of British PMSCs operating in areas of conflict around the globe, working to secure government and corporate presence against a range of ‘threats’.

Watchdog groups sounded alarms on Monday after the Wall Street Journal reported that the proposed mega-merger of Bayer and Monsanto has cleared its final regulatory hurdle in the U.S.

The reported approval from the Justice Department came "after the companies pledged to sell off additional assets," the Journal reported, and despite concerns raised by hundreds of food and farm groups. It also comes weeks after the European Commission gave its thumbs up.

"The approval of the third supersized seed merger, after ChemChina-Syngenta and Dow-DuPont," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, "leaves farmers vulnerable to price gouging for seeds and other supplies and strengthens the hold a few dominant corporations have over the entire food system."

A VIDEO SHOWING the interrogation of Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi was released by her family on Monday, with footage of Israeli interrogators threatening and intimidating the 17-year old. At a press conference the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Ahed’s father Bassem Tamimi announced the release of the video, taken from an interrogation that she underwent on December 26 of last year, after she was detained for slapping an Israeli soldier during a raid on her house.

In the footage released to the public, Ahed Tamimi is shown sitting at a desk in an interrogator’s office, a week after she was detained in a raid on her home by Israeli forces. Two Israeli interrogators are seen questioning her about her involvement in recent protests. The men also make comments about her white skin and threaten to detain her family members if she fails to cooperate with them.

Tamimi repeatedly refuses to respond to interrogators questions or their comments about her physical appearance.

At the start of the month we reported that according to White House sources, Trump was pushing for a Nafta deal "over the next two weeks", which was expected to be unveiled "in principle" at the Summit of the Americas in Peru on April 13-14.

Alas, a Nafta deal announcement will not happen - or anything else for that matter - because moments ago the White House announced that Trump has canceled his South America trip to oversee the US Syria military response, which is expected to be announced - or launched - momentarily.

TRUMP WON'T ATTEND SUMMIT OF THE AMERICAS IN PERU: SANDERS
In lieu of Trump's, VP Mike Pence is now scheduled to go to Peru:

TRUMP CANCELS PLANNED TRIP TO PERU, COLOMBIA, PENCE TO GO
Sarah Huckabee Sanders' full statement below:

President Trump will not attend the 8th Summit of the Americas in Lima, Peru or travel to Bogota, Colombia as originally scheduled.

Yesterday, it was announced that Uber acquired Social Bicycles Inc., or Jump Bikes an electric bike share company from New York.

What's wrong with Uber acquiring an electric bike share company you ask?

Jump Bikes is much more than an electric bicycle company.

Jump Bikes tracks customers calories burned and the miles they traveled and lets people share or view other bicyclists personal information, encouraging them to post their results on Twitter and Facebook.

"You may also share your own trip maps and statistics via certain third-party sites such as Facebook or Twitter or by email."

Uber plans to put their electric bikes in smart cities everywhere.

US Navy Destroyer, USS Donald Cook (DDG-75), equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles, as well as the Aegis missile defence system, is fast approaching the port of Tartus in Syria.

The port of Tartus is the location for the Syrian logistics base of the Russian Navy.

On Monday CNN Turk reported that the US destroyer was at at a distance of 100 km from the Russian Navy port in Syria.

The destroyer left the Cyprus port of Larnaka for the Syrian shoreline, and was reportedly buzzed by Russian warplanes which circled above the US warship four times.

Most troubling part of this advancement into Syrian waters (and within striking range of the Russian base) is the fact that the U.S. Navy destroyer approached Syria WITHOUT notifying Russia.

Trump and his war hawk White House is pushing the world to complete nuclear destruction, all in support of Al Qaeda and White Helmet-ISIS propaganda.

Zerohedge reports…

In the latest stunning assault on the freedom to think, California state senator Richard Pan — known as the “Mercury Joker” super villain for pushing mandatory vaccines into law via SB 277 — now wants to criminalize all bloggers and independent journalists who dare question the official narratives on vaccines, medicine, politics and government.

The quest for absolute authoritarian control never seems to end with these left-wing zealots. And California looks more and more like North Korea with each new law. (Is Richard Pan the long-lost cousin of Kim Jong-Un?)

Ever seeking to limit public debate, crush independent journalism and control all speech, Richard Pan has a new thought control bill entitled, “SB1424 Internet: social media: false information: strategic plan.” While the title seems to target social media websites, the language of the bill clearly applies the law to all blogs, news websites, video sites and podcasts. From the proposed law itself:

On Monday, the FBI notified Judicial Watch that the bureau will need at least three years to hand over “releasable,” communications between anti-Trump FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

Harvard University will soon investigate professors accused of “microaggressions” after students reported being subjected to in-class “verbal or nonverbal slights/insults.”

Seven classes at the Harvard University School of Public Health have been “flagged for special attention and review” after each class drew three or more student reports of microaggressions, The Harvard Crimson reported Thursday.

"We have workshops for our faculty that help them think about how to manage sometimes difficult, but important, conversations in classrooms around diversity and inclusion." Tweet This

85 students responded “yes” to a question on whether they had experienced in-class microaggressions, according to data that school dean Nancy Turnbull provided exclusively to Crimson reporter Luke Vrotsos.

While the US didn't directly order the airstrike against Syria's T-4 airbase late Sunday night (Russia and the Syrian government had initially blamed the attack on the US), American officials reportedly confirmed to NBC News that the US had been informed of the impending strike by its ally, Israel.

Israel carried out the strikes against Syrian base, two U.S. officials tell @NBCNews, and the US was informed of the forthcoming strikes in advance. https://t.co/FKrc4V1ZM1

— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 9, 2018
The pre-dawn attack was intended as retaliation for a poison gas attack on the last rebel stronghold near Damascus. That attack has been blamed (with no supporting evidence) on the Syrian regime.

For years now, the US Department of Agriculture has been flirting with the latest and greatest DNA manipulation technologies. Since 2016, it has given free passes to at least a dozen gene-edited crops, ruling that they fall outside its regulatory purview. But on Wednesday, March 28, the agency made its relationship status official; effective immediately, certain gene-edited plants can be designed, cultivated, and sold free from regulation. “With this approach, USDA seeks to allow innovation when there is no risk present,” US Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said in a statement.

Pueblo Sin Fronteras, the main group sponsoring the caravan of Central American border crashers, is staging communist-inspired “People’s Tribunals” in U.S. cities to put the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) on trial and call for an end to illegal alien detention.

Last year, authorities told residents of a Muslim-populated part of China to install JingWang, an app that scans for certain files. Now, researchers have found it transfers the collected data with no encryption.

In Xinjiang, a part of western China that a Muslim minority population calls home, the government forces residents to install an Android app that scans devices for particular files. Now, cybersecurity researchers have found that the so-called JingWang app has horrendous security practices for transferring data, and uncovered more details on what exactly the app does to phones.

China experts say the app is a continuation of China’s surveillance and oppression of the some 11 million-strong Uighur ethnic group, in an area fraught with some of the most broad human rights violations in the world.

In a ruling that will be used to a reinforce a disturbing pattern practiced by police officers across the United States, the Supreme Court has determined that officers who shoot non-threatening citizens are completely justified and cannot face consequences for their actions—as long as they express to the court that they feared for their safety.

The case of Kisela v. Hughes originated from a police shooting in Tucson, Arizona, in 2010. Police Corporal Andrew Kisela heard a report over police radio about a woman using a kitchen knife to hack a tree and acting erratically in public. He responded to the scene with two other officers.

The US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, says the United States will probably get out of the Iran nuclear deal and reimpose sanctions on the Islamic republic.

Haley made the remarks on Thursday during her lecture titled, “Confronting Today’s Global Governance Challenges,” at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina.

She accused Iran of supporting terrorism and violating the terms of the 2015 historic nuclear agreement and went on to say that the Europeans are closing their eyes on this but added that the United States would not do that.

Discussing the background of the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and six world powers, Haley said, “Iran was being a destabilizing country that was causing threats and the international community decided that we needed to come together to find a solution.”

One look at recent trends in the payrolls data, especially the important numbers beneath the headlines, and one will be left with the impression that there is an unprecedented amount of (political) data goalseeking, if not outright manipulation, taking place at the Bureau of Labor Services.

Case in point, last month we reported that in addition to the strong Establishment Survey payrolls number, which was revised even higher to 326K this month, there was an even more impressive number: a record 1 million full and part-time jobs were added according to the Household Survey.

The war of words between President Trump and 'everyone else' continues to heat up, with market conniptions managed for now by Kudlow's "good cop" headlines to Trump's "bad cop" histrionics.

China, which is a great economic power, is considered a Developing Nation within the World Trade Organization. They therefore get tremendous perks and advantages, especially over the U.S. Does anybody think this is fair. We were badly represented. The WTO is unfair to U.S.

But it appears China's Xinhua news - unofficial mouthpiece of the Party - has sparked some more concerns as an op-ed calls for open rebellion against President Trump...

The most infamous of those psychiatric drug-induced criminal behaviors happens to be the uniquely American epidemic of mass school shootings, of which the Parkland, Florida shooting is just one of the most recent ones. Not usually so well-publicized are the many acts of asocial behaviors, poor judgments (or actual crimes) which includes such actions as impulsive thefts, inappropriate sexual conduct, physical assaults, homicidal thinking, suicidality, drug-induced psychotic episodes, drug-induced mania, drug-induced OCD symptoms, drug-induced anxiety or depression, drug-induced, crazy-making sleep-deprivation, etc.

The European Commission presented the Action Plan on Military Mobility on 28 March. “By facilitating military mobility within the EU, – explains the foreign representative of the Union, Federica Mogherini – we can be more effective in reacting when challenges arise”. Even if she does not say so, the reference to “Russian aggression” is evident.

The Action Plan was actually decided not by the EU, but by the Pentagon and NATO. In 2015, General Ben Hodges, commander of US gound forces in Europe (US Army Europe), called for the establishment of a “military Schengen Area” so that, to face “Russian aggression”, US forces could move quickly from one European country to another, without being slowed down by national regulations and customs procedures. (Manlio Denucci)

The United States has deployed more than 200 military facilities in the Asia-Pacific region, where over 400,000 servicemen are stationed, First Deputy Chief of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) Igor Kostyukov said Thursday.

“To implement its guidelines, including creating conditions for the projection of force through the rapid deployment of troops anywhere in the Asia-Pacific region, the United States has created a contingent of more than 400,000 troops. At the moment, more than 50 large military bases are operating in the region, there are more than 200 US military facilities,” Kostyukov said at the Moscow Conference on International Security (MCIS).

READ MORE: US Expands Military Capabilities in Northeast Asia — Russian Envoy to Seoul

The United Kingdom opened a permanent military base in Bahrain on Thursday, Bahrain’s state news agency BNA reported.

The ceremony formally opening the UK Naval Support Facility was attended by Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa and Britain’s Prince Andrew.

Britain announced in 2014 it had sealed a deal to expand and reinforce its naval presence in Bahrain, allowing it to operate more and bigger ships in the Gulf.

The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet is also based in Bahrain.