A judge may send Roger Stone to jail after Stone posted a photo of the judge on Instagram Monday afternoon with crosshairs in the background next to her head.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is presiding over Stone's prosecution in D.C. federal court, scheduled a new hearing Thursday to discuss "why the media contact order entered in this case and/or his conditions of release should not be modified or revoked in light of the posts on his Instagram account." The judge's options include revoking his bail.

Jackson ordered a gag order last week to prevent Stone from speaking to the press about the case. Stone has been out on bail since he was arrested by the FBI in January. He faces seven charges in the Mueller probe, including five counts of lying and one count each of obstruction and witness tampering.

As the Free Thought Project reported last year, 2018 was the year of the snitches as neighbors turned in fellow neighbors to authorities for selling water, lemonade, or for simply being black at your own apartment complex pool. This see something say something society is the wet dream of the authoritarian and as a recent case of a boy selling hot chocolate in Pennsylvania illustrates, it is showing no signs of slowing.

A full court press is taking place in Florida today (Presidents Day) with Republicans, Democrats, expatriates from Cuba and Venezuela and the warmonger ministry of propaganda that constitutes the US media all denouncing Maduro and blaming him for the hardships imposed on Venezuelans by Washington’s sanctions and attacks on Venezuela’s currency.

Even “liberal” NPR is reading off the same fascist warmonger script. NPR managed to report on Venezuela without mentioning the sanctions, without mentioning the theft of Venezuela’s gold foolishly entrusted to the US and British central banks, or the orchestrated protests funded by US-financed NGOs that are small in comparison with the crowds that support Maduro that are never mentioned in the US media. In other words, NPR is just another part of the whorehouse brigade.

Singapore, aiming high for the status of Asia’s unofficial capital, seems like the ideal venue for a conference to discuss how the Middle East could learn a few lessons from ASEAN’s multi-layered relations with China, especially involving partnership in the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

But first, let’s get things straight. The “Middle East” is, of course, a Eurocentric, Orientalist denomination. From Asia’s – and China’s – cultural and geographical point of view, the “Middle East” is correctly seen as Southwest Asia.

It’s enlightening to evaluate two Chinese informed perspectives on how China is deploying its geopolitical soft power across Southwest Asia in contrast to the Trump administration’s immensely muddled strategy.

Singapore, aiming high for the status of Asia’s unofficial capital, seems like the ideal venue for a conference to discuss how the Middle East could learn a few lessons from ASEAN’s multi-layered relations with China, especially involving partnership in the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

But first, let’s get things straight. The “Middle East” is, of course, a Eurocentric, Orientalist denomination. From Asia’s – and China’s – cultural and geographical point of view, the “Middle East” is correctly seen as Southwest Asia.

It’s enlightening to evaluate two Chinese informed perspectives on how China is deploying its geopolitical soft power across Southwest Asia in contrast to the Trump administration’s immensely muddled strategy.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s interview with Scott Pelley of CBS’s “60 Minutes” aired on Feb. 15.

McCabe played a pivotal role in what has become known as Spygate. He directed the activities of FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, provided an early approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) application on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, and was involved in all aspects of the Russia investigation. He was also mentioned in the now-infamous “insurance policy” text message sent by Strzok to Lisa Page.

Notably missing from the “60 Minutes” interview was any mention of these and other critical components regarding McCabe’s involvement in the investigation into alleged Trump–Russia collusion.

The United States is lobbying Gulf states to hold off restoring ties with Syria, including the UAE which has moved closer to Damascus to counter the influence of its rival Iran, five sources told Reuters.

The opposing approaches are an early test of whether Syrian President Bashar al-Assad can gain political and diplomatic credibility after a nearly eight-year civil war turned him into an international pariah.

Many countries cut links with Syria at the start of the war.

Several Gulf states shut or downgraded their embassies, Syria was suspended from the Arab League, flights stopped and border crossings were closed. The United States and other countries imposed economic sanctions.

Washington, backed by Gulf countries Saudi Arabia and Qatar, does not want Syria welcomed back into the international community until a political process to end the war is agreed.

As Brian Stelter and CNN work overtime to pretend that the MSM didn't uncritically promote Jussie Smollett's absurd "hate crime" claim in a giddy rush to frame Trump supporters as violent, journalist Andy Ngo has pushed back.

In a running thread of hate-crime hoaxes that the MSM either uncritically reported - or gave little attention to once the truth came out, Ngo lists hoax after hoax designed to smear conservatives.

One thing that should be said about Representative Ilhan Omar’s tweet about the power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (more commonly known as AIPAC, or the “Israel lobby”) is that the hysterical reaction to it proved her main point: The power of AIPAC over members of Congress is literally awesome, although not in a good way. Has anyone ever seen so many members of Congress, of both parties, running to the microphones and sending out press releases to denounce one first-termer for criticizing the power of… a lobby?

Somehow, I don’t think the reaction would have been the same if she had tweeted that Congress still supports the ethanol subsidy because the American Farm Bureau and other components of the corn/ethanol lobby spend millions to keep this agribusiness bonanza going (which they do). Or that if she had opposed the ethanol subsidy, she would have been accused of hating farmers.

Our sudden hostility to China reflects a consensus – at least within the Washington Beltway – that we need to wrestle China to the ground and pin it there. But what are the chances we can do that? What are the consequences of attempting it? Where are we now headed with China?

Realism is out of fashion in Washington even if it’s alive and well elsewhere in America. It should give us pause that our new enemy of choice is a very different, larger, and more dynamic country than any we have unbefriended before. China had a couple of bad centuries. But forty years ago, the Chinese Communist Party and government began to evolve what turned out to be a successful model of economic development that blended state capitalism with free enterprise. This unleashed the entrepreneurial talents of the Chinese people. The results have been staggering.

Researchers studying the brain have stumbled upon a mysterious, previously unknown form of neural communication that has stunned the scientific community.

Despite major scientific breakthroughs, the brain largely remains a mystery, and the team from Case Western Reserve University have added to it with their latest paper on a self-propagating ‘wireless’ communication they encountered that can jump across different sections of the brain.

On Monday, CNN’s Brian Stelter said, “There was a rush to judgment” in the case of Jussie Smollett’s alleged hate crime, but it did not come from media outlets.

“I think it was mostly in the celebrity press and among activists and among Twitter people. I think it was a really careful reporting by news organizations. But it all gets lumped in together at the end of the day,” he said.

With Stelter’s claim thoroughly debunked by our own Caleb Howe, and many others, the CNN media correspondent’s remarks were heavily criticized.

This week, now that the Chicago Police Department has “shifted the trajectory of the investigation” and now believes Jussie Smollett may have faked his own bias attack, we’ll be hearing apologies from a lot of progressive activists, celebrities and politicians.

With three simple words, they’ll disarm their detractors, pour oil on troubled waters. They’ll help to reunify a culture by admitting that sometimes their ideological opponents are correct.

Just kidding. Don’t hold your breath waiting for mea culpas from Cory Booker, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris, or (throwback time!) Al Sharpton, who opined that if Donald Trump simply remained silent on the Smollett matter, it would be sinister. The formerly successful actress Ellen Page blamed the nonexistent assault on … Mike Pence.

ABC’s Good Morning America team went into full damage control mode Monday, after news broke over the weekend that actor Jussie Smollett had allegedly paid two men to stage his assault. Just last Thursday, anchor Robin Roberts had given the actor a softball interview, even refusing to call his story of a Trump supporter assaulting him, “alleged.”

Leading into the report, Roberts finally did call the quickly unraveling story “alleged:”

"A new twist in the Jussie Smollett case. The actor firing back this morning as the story of his alleged attack faces questions. Police in Chicago say they're working to corroborate allegations that Smollett paid two men to stage the assault," she stated.

A major storm will bring snow, rain, ice or a wintry mix to more than 200 million Americans beginning Tuesday, impacting roughly 60 percent of the U.S. population.

Parts of 39 of the 48 contiguous United States will be touched by the massive storm, including every state east of the Mississippi River. The storm will have such an impact on so many because it will reach parts of 26 of the 30 most populous states.

As the large storm rolls up the Eastern Seaboard at midweek, it will bring snow, ice and difficult travel to the Midwest and Northeast.

This latest round of snow gave us a little more than we expected as southeastern Wisconsin is waking up Monday to almost 10 inches of snow in some areas.

Sunday's all-day light snow turned to overnight lake-effect snow along Lake Michigan.

Early snow totals from the National Weather Service office in Sullivan included 9.5 inches in West Allis, 6.5 at Mitchell International, 8 in Pleasant Prairie, 4.6 in Oconomowoc, 7.5 in Racine and 6 in Jackson.

You'll want to get that cleared off the driveway because more is in the forecast overnight Tuesday into Wednesday, perhaps around 2 to 3 inches, plus some freezing rain or freezing drizzle.

Delivering another speech in support of Venezuela regime change during his visit to Miami on Monday, President Trump warned Venezuelan military members will “lose everything,” and find “no safe harbor” anywhere in the world if they continue to defy US expectations.

For weeks, Trump has endorsed opposition leader Juan Guaido as the rightful ruler of Venezuela. In practice, President Maduro remains in power, and still has overwhelming loyalty among the military leadership. Officials have conceded that without a shift in the military, an actual regime change is unlikely.

Which is where Trump’s threats come in. Though some in the administration are arguing Trump was referring to secret Venezuelan military official money stashes worldwide, the reality is that most have little but their future and their lives, and that’s what Trump is saying they’ll lose, reiterating that all options are on the table.

A winter storm moved through Las Vegas Sunday covering the ground with snow and prompted road closures.

Up to two inches of snow accumulated on the western areas of Las Vegas overnight, FOX 5 Vegas reported Monday. The snowy conditions caused traffic issues throughout the area.

Nevada Department of Transportation closed both directions of Interstate 15 between Stateline and St. Rose Parkway Monday morning. Las Vegas Boulevard near I-15 was also closed to traffic.

Over the weekend, Facebook prevented people from sharing two conservative articles on the unraveling case of Empire star Jussie Smollett, which seems to be a hate hoax. Both Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, and Daily Caller reporter Jen Kerns saw their articles censored on Facebook.

"You are not allowed to say on Facebook that Jussie Smollett carried out a hate hoax," Dreher tweeted on Sunday with a screenshot of Facebook blocking his article at The American Conservative.

When he swept into office back in 2015, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised supporters of a Liberal Party reinvigorated by a decade of conservative rule that he would bring about "real change" - both in Ottawa, and for a Liberal Party marred by allegations of corruption.

So far, he has largely failed at both, cozying up to the country's energy industry while masking his maintenance of the pro-business status quo with legalized marijuana and a "progressive" agenda that has included banning misgendering and hiring the first cabinet in Canada's history with an equal number of men and women.

Yet as Canada's leader braces for what promises to be a bruising reelection campaign ahead of a vote in October, his office has been marred by a blossoming scandal surrounding reports that it pressured the former attorney general into dropping years-old corruption charges against Montreal-based SNC-Lavalin, a Canadian construction company with close ties to Trudeau's party.

After a relative lull that was punctuated by a handful of small terror attacks and military exercises along the line of control in divided Kashmir in 2018, tensions between South Asia's two nuclear armed neighbors - India and Pakistan - are escalating once again in the wake of a suicide car bombing that killed 44 Indian paramilitary police officers in the restive border region, the deadliest attack in the three decades of insurgency in Kashmir.

US President's day

Another fascinating weekend… It’s a holiday in the US, and much of UK is off for mid-term. I’m still trying to digest the importance of last week’s news about Amazon pulling out of its New York HQ2 deal in light of protests by liberal lefties. I’m thinking it’s a very interesting moment, and rather changes the game.

How much do current events, like Amazon, change the game of Macro Strategy decisions? In the past the role of strategist was to carefully scrutinise, analyse and conceptualise Central Bank interest decisions, input the available economic data into our calculations, spice it up with some expectations about global trade prospects, and make rosy assumptions about growth and consumption to determine (ie; guess) if stock and bond prices will rise or fall, and therefore what to buy.

Car sales in China continued their relentless descent in January, falling 17.7%, as we recently expected would happen when discussing Europe's tumbling January auto sales. This follows the country's first full year slump (2018) in more than two decades and it puts further pressure on the state of the global automotive market.

The drop marked the eighth monthly retail sales decline in a row and was the biggest one-month drop in seven years.

The Indian government is wary of people – militants and refugees alike - crossing over the border and taking shelter inside the country.

New Delhi (Sputnik) — India has deployed additional Indian Army units in the past few days along its Myanmar border after the threat of militants entering into the Indian side increased.

"A large number of troops have already been deployed in the sensitive area," a source told Sputnik.

A school running a community arts center in Ohio was forced to stop advertising a party game where kids are instructed to ‘eliminate’ the president with toy guns, after it sparked national outrage.

The game entitled ‘President’ had been advertised as a part of Nerf gun-themed party organized by the Olmsted Performing Arts community center in Berea, a suburb of Cleveland.

“There is one president with body guards. Everyone else tries to eliminate or shoot the president,” read the description of the game on the center’s website, since deleted.

For some time, it was assumed that Yulia Tymoshenko would challenge Petro Poroshenko for the Ukrainian presidency in next month’s election. However, out of nowhere, Vladimir Zelensky has now emerged as the frontrunner.

For Ukrainians able to vote in next month’s presidential election, the choice is now pretty clear. There are three options: the incumbent oligarch anti-Russia hardliner, the femme fatale of Kiev’s political scene, or a comedian best known for playing a fictional president in a popular TV drama.

While his candidacy originally inspired much bemusement, nobody’s laughing now at Zelensky. Because the entertainer has surged into a nine-point polling lead with just six weeks left before the big day.

According to Asheley Landrum, assistant professor of science communication at Texas Tech University, all but one of 30 Flat Earthers interviewed said they hadn't considered the Earth to be flat until watching videos promoting the theory on YouTube. Presenting her results at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC, Landrum said that most were recommended videos after watching clips about other conspiracies, such as alternative 9/11 theories and fake moon landing theories.

The White House has narrowed down its search for the next United Nations ambassador to four names, according to Bloomberg.

Potential nominees include Dina Powell, a partner at Goldman Sachs; Kelly Craft and Richard Grenell, the current ambassadors to Canada and Germany, respectively; and John James, a former GOP Senate candidate from Michigan, sources told the news service.

The new list of candidates come after State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert withdrew her nomination for the post over the weekend. Nauert, who was reportedly favored by President Trump, was to replace former Ambassador Nikki Haley in the job. Her decision to withdraw followed reports that she once employed a nanny who wasn’t authorized to work in the U.S.

Sometimes, things just all seem to come together. In his 60 Minutes interview, fired former FBI acting director Andrew McCabe threw a ton of shade on Justice Department operative Rod Rosenstein, effectively saying that yes, there was a Deep State coup attempt against President Trump, but Rosenstein Did It. It was all his fault.

In the absence of any smoking gun against President Trump from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, that suggests President Trump's deep state opponents are now turning on each other.

I’ve been going over and over in my head what "missing money" means. Let’s review.

Dr. Mark Skidmore did an analysis of the DoD and HUD budgets from 1998-2015. He and his students found that there were $21 trillion dollars in undocumentable adjustments, for a budget that started out at $271 billion in 1998 and ended at $637 billion in 2015.

French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to crack down on hate crimes after neo-Nazis scrawled swastikas on nearly 100 graves at a Jewish Cemetery.

Macron went immediately to the cemetery in Quatzenheim in the Alsace region near Germany, a few hours ahead of nationwide rallies to denounce a surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes.

'We shall act, we shall pass laws, we shall punish,' Macron told Jewish leaders while inspecting the 96 tombstones spray-painted with blue and yellow swastikas.

Late last month, Jussie Smollett’s claim about being attacked by two White Trump supporters in MAGA hats in Chicago led Senator and Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris to unleash a stunning tweet calling the attack a “modern day lynching:”

But with Smollett’s story collapsing into a sick, race-baiting hoax, Harris was asked about the tweet on Monday while on her first campaign visit to New Hampshire.

To say she was at a loss for words is an understatement. Kamala short-circuited…

“Empire” actor Jussie Smollett, upset after a racist letter sent to the show’s studio didn’t get a “bigger reaction,” is suspected of paying two men to attack him a week later, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the investigation.

“When the letter didn’t get enough attention, he concocted the staged attack,” a source told CBS 2 Investigator Brad Edwards. Other sources corroborated that information…

De Mar spoke on the phone exclusively with the Osundairo brothers Monday afternoon. In a joint statement, they said: “We are not racist. We are not homophobic, and we are not anti-Trump. We were born and raised in Chicago and are American citizens.”

Supporters of a measure to cut off U.S. support to Saudi Arabia in Yemen are projecting victory in the coming weeks when the Senate takes up a House-passed resolution.

The Trump administration is expected to ramp up its lobbying against the Yemen war powers resolution as the vote nears in hopes of flipping some of the Republicans who back the measure.

But opponents have few tools at their disposal to stop the resolution, which only needs a simple majority for a procedural vote and subsequent final passage.

Backers say they now have added momentum as the administration’s missteps in handling the Jamal Khashoggi killing have only increased ire at Saudi Arabia.

“I think we’re going to win,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said.

He declined to say whether he expects any Republicans who supported the measure in December to switch their vote.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is expected to leave his role at the Justice Department by mid-March, a senior DOJ official told Fox News on Monday.

An official announcement of who has been selected to replace Rosenstein could come as early as this week. A Trump administration official added that Attorney General William Barr has picked Jeffrey Rosen, who currently serves as Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, to take over for Rosenstein.

Russia’s position on Venezuela is to prevent American-backed regime change, the country’s Foreign Ministry has announced, amid a jostle for power among rival political factions in the crisis-struck Latin American country.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has accused the United States of backing a coup in his country after Washington recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as president. Moscow and Beijing have continued to express support for Maduro, who retains control over key state institutions including the military.

The attorneys general of California, New York, and 14 other states on Monday filed a lawsuit in the Ninth Circuit against the White House's recent national emergency declaration over border security, claiming President Trump has "veered the country toward a constitutional crisis of his own making."

President Trump sarcastically had predicted the lawsuit last week. He's slammed the Ninth Circuit multiple times as "disgraceful" and politically biased.

In a recent interview, CBS News Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan critiqued the international “liberal” media while holding up outlets like Breitbart and Fox News as the opposite side of the coin.

Logan spoke to retired Navy SEAL Mike Ritland about a variety of topics on Friday for his Mike Drop podcast (h/t Breitbart), and the conversation eventually turned toward her agreement with Ritland that “the media everywhere is mostly liberal, not just the U.S.” As Logan lamented that voter registration among journalists shows that the media is out of balance, she came with a metaphor to explain how she believes the press is tinged by the sameness of opinion.

Combined ticket sales were down sharply even before the worst Presidents Day weekend in 15 years.

Accepting the Filmmaker Award at the Cinema Audio Society (CAS) awards in Los Angeles, California, the influential director praised the theatrical experience, saying “there’s nothing going to a big dark” cinema.

“I hope all of us really continue to believe that the greatest contributions we can make as filmmakers is to give audiences the motion picture theatrical experience,” he said, according to Variety. “I’m a firm believer that theatres need to be around forever.”

This week, the United States national debt ticked above US$22 trillion for the first time, an amount equivalent to $67,000 per U.S. citizen.

The U.S. federal government owes more money than any other institution in the history of human civilization. And it’s just getting worse. According to the Congressional Budget Office, in only 10 years the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio will be higher than any point since the Second World War.

Below, a few factoids about just how eye-wateringly, bone-chillingly large the U.S. debt has become.

The Trump administration and key GOP lawmakers are playing defense after early data showed Americans are getting smaller tax refunds in the first filing season under the GOP tax law.

The average refund size through Feb. 8 was 8.7 percent smaller than the same period last year, according to IRS figures. Democrats have seized on the numbers, arguing they prove that the 2017 tax-code overhaul by Republicans was a “scam” designed to help the wealthy at the expense of the middle class.

Patterson gave this warning in a string of interviews with various UK publications:

“Hackers can hack into a robot or a robotic device and have full control of the connections, arms, legs, and other attached tools like in some cases knives or welding devices. Often these robots can be upwards of 200 pounds and very strong. Once a robot is hacked, the hacker has full control and can issue instructions to the robot. The last thing you want is for a hacker to have control over one of these robots. Once hacked they could absolutely be used to perform physical actions for an advantageous scenario or to cause damage.”

The scandal regarding the fake hospital video published by the White Helmets as a proof of the Douma chemical attack has reached its peak in the media and has caused reaction on the diplomatic level.

On February 13, BBC Syria’s producer Riam Dalati came out with a statement that “After almost 6 months of investigations” he “can prove without a doubt that the Douma Hospital scene was staged” and “no fatalities had occurred in the hospital.” Dalati added that he believes that “the attack did happen” but no Sarin was used and “everything else around the attack was manufactured for maximum effect.”

For more than a decade Venezuela has aided the governments of Haiti and the Dominican Republic through a preferential system known as Petrocaribe, and the people of those nations are not taking their governments’ support for the US coup in Venezuela lightly.

As Judas betrayed the Son of Man with a kiss for 20 pieces of silver, the institutionally corrupt governments in Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo have written another sad chapter in their nation’s history.

Ironically, it was Venezuela that helped to develop the island’s energy infrastructure in recent years. A key part of this is the REFIDOMSA oil refinery in the Dominican Republic which the Venezuelan government helped to develop and partially owns, and which has also been used to help alleviate increased fuel demands and shortages in Haiti.

The Green New Deal blueprint introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was crafted by three far-left organizations and is being pushed by a coalition of well-funded professional progressive groups and known leftist agitators.

Some of the organizations helping to promote the Green New Deal have ties to financing from billionaire George Soros and trace their roots to such radical groups as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.

Earlier this month, Ocasio-Cortez posted an 11-page Google document in the form of a nonbinding legislative resolution that has become the most authoritative version of the Green New Deal, a broad outline for the current conception of the socialist-style plan.

The Palestinian Authority on Monday warned that Israel was “playing with fire” after clashes erupted at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem over the closure of the Golden Gate site – also known as the Gate of Mercy – to Muslim worshipers. The PA also accused Israel of “waging war on Islam” and called on the intervention of the international community.

The Jerusalem Police detained five east Jerusalem Arabs who tried to enter the premises of the Golden Gate, which has been closed by a court order.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe appeared Monday on NPR’s “Morning Edition” to discuss his firing from the Bureau and the investigation into leaking information to The Wall Street Journal.

NPR host Steve Inskeep asked McCabe multiple times about the investigation and lying under oath, which McCabe dodged each time by blaming the “ongoing legal issues” that he is “handling.”

During an interview with NBC News’ “Today,” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe defended former colleagues Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, saying the two are “good people who served this country well.”

Although text messages revealed the two alleged lovers bashed now-President Donald Trump, McCabe said he never saw “clear bias against the president” from them or anybody else within the FBI in the Hillary Clinton email investigation or the Russia investigation.

“Not once, not from Lisa Page, not from Pete Strzok, and not from anybody else on that team,” McCabe told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie.

One pillar of dogma among leftist activists is that voter ID laws, under which citizens are required to present a valid form of identification in order to cast ballots in elections, amount to insidious and racist forms of "voter suppression." That term deserves to be placed in scare quotes because it's often employed as a catch-all phrase to describe any policy or idea that liberals believe would reduce their chances of winning. Voter ID laws have been upheld by the Supreme Court as constitutional, and enjoy overwhelming public support -- including approval from large majorities of racial minorities, who evidently don't share the professional Left's racialized hysteria. We've written previously about how, if reducing turnout among certain populations truly were the goal of such laws, they've failed miserably.

American taxpayers are continuing to fund border security measures and border walls in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Lebanon with President Trump’s signing of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending bill.

While the United States-Mexico border received only $1.3 billion for construction of a border wall at the overwhelmed southern border with soaring illegal immigration, foreign countries are getting help from American taxpayers to secure their borders.

The Republican-Democrat spending bill signed by Trump last week provides Pakistan with at least $15 million in U.S. taxpayer money for “border security programs” as well as funding for “cross border stabilization” between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

People driving through downtown Sarasota were greeted with a shocking sight by a familiar statue - graffiti.

Overnight, someone spray painted “#MeToo” on the Unconditional Surrender statue alone U.S. 41 near Marina Jacks. Police say they were called to the scene at North Gulfstream Avenue and Bayfront Drive shortly before 1am and discovered the graffiti, which they estimate caused $1,000 in damage. Police say they was no available surveillance video of the area and no known witnesses.

Genevieve Judge, spokesman for Sarasota Police, said, “We’re not sure what they had in mind. It’s just heartbreaking they’d take matters to this iconic statue that’s a piece of art we have here in the city, and so, it’s under investigation, we’re trying to figure out exactly who did this.”

France gathered for the 14th week of Gilets Jaunes protests, with the injury toll of the worst civil unrest in decades now resembling that of a small war. Yet despite pleas from victims, Emmanuel Macron is tightening the screws.
“This is not normal. We are in France, one of the oldest and best democracies in the world,” says Fiorina Jacob Lignier, who lost her eye at a demonstration in Paris on December 8. "We usually condemn from afar other countries where this occurs, that this is happening here is unbelievable."

Lignier, a 20-year-old philosophy student, traveled from the northern city of Amiens to march on the Champs-Elysees to protest against fuel taxes with her boyfriend, Jacob Maxime.

He told RT that they were marching with a column of peaceful demonstrators, when a group of masked radicals began to vandalize a shopfront more than 50 yards away.

Russia will deliver 300 tonnes of humanitarian aid to the Venezuelan capital of Caracas on Wednesday, Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro said.

"We receive humanitarian support every day. On Wednesday, 300 tonnes of Russian humanitarian aid will be legally delivered to the international airport of Caracas," Maduro said on Monday at a meeting with scientists.

The Venezuelan Ambassador to Russia commented on the situation in South America. He said that Juan Guaido, who earlier proclaimed himself the president, is a puppet of the US and recruited by Washington 10 years ago. The diplomat also said that he thinks that military intervention could follow the US's aid. The ambassador added that the Venezuelan government expects provocations from the opposition.

Tourists, employees and children on tours were exposed to radiation from uranium sitting in the Grand Canyon's museum collection building for nearly two decades, according to the park's safety manager.

Elston 'Swede' Stephenson, the park's safety, health and wellness manager, warned of possible health consequences to staff and the public from three five-gallon buckets of uranium ore which he claims were stored next to a taxidermy exhibit from 2000 until June 18, 2018, according to AZ Central.

Stephenson revealed the information in a rogue email to staff after bosses failed to issue any information on the exposure for eight months, he claims.

He believes top management are now involved in a cover-up operation, saying he has been cut off from all information about the exposure.

In his email, Stephenson wrote: 'If you were in the Museum Collections Building (2C) between the year 2000 and June 18, 2018, you were 'exposed' to uranium by OSHA's definition.'

The Palestinian Authority on Monday warned that Israel was “playing with fire” after clashes erupted at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem over the closure of the Golden Gate site – also known as the Gate of Mercy – to Muslim worshipers. The PA also accused Israel of “waging war on Islam” and called on the intervention of the international community.

The Jerusalem Police detained five east Jerusalem Arabs who tried to enter the premises of the Golden Gate, which has been closed by a court order.