Please read Introduction, Part IA and I B before this chapter.  The Horn of Africa has the second most globally geostrategic location on the continent behind North Africa, straddling the commercially vital Red Sea and providing international access to the world's fastest-growing economy of Ethiopia. In this sense, the coastal states acquire a dual maritime and mainland importance through which their territories can be simultaneously used to exert influence along the waterway and the regional interior. Furthermore, as it relates to the Red Sea, this body of water occupies a crucial role in China's grand strategy because it serves as the most geographically convenient route for facilitating the transit of goods between the East Asian state and the EU, which is particularly expected to climb with the completion of the Balkan Silk Road in a few years' time. Due to the importance that China places on the One Belt One Road grand strategy and the need that it has for maintaining and strengthening its overseas markets (especially the large and ever-promising EU one) in order to sustain domestic stability and long-term growth, it logically has an inherent interest in preserving stability in the Horn of Africa so as to safeguard its Sea Line of Communication (SLOC) to Europe. For similar reasons, it also wants to tap into the allied Ethiopian economy and assist in the maximization of its potential so as to acquire a strategic presence there that allows it to deepen its presence further inland into the continent's resource-rich interior.  It should be no surprise then that the Horn of Africa is the focal point of international military attention, as evidenced by the previous part of the research which described the vast array of foreign non-African military bases in Djibouti, the recent GCC presence in Eritrea, and the Turkish and Emirati plans for building a base in Somalia. Quite naturally and in accordance with its obvious interests, China is opening its first overseas military base in Djibouti in order take advantage of the country's dual role in exercising maritime and mainland influence. It's clear how and why the tiny coastal state can be used by Beijing for flexing its maritime muscles, but it's less obvious how it plans to do this in the opposite mainland direction. It's therefore relevant to recall the Ethiopia-Djibouti Railway that China is building between the coastal city and the inland capital, since this large-scale infrastructure project will serve as the umbilical cord between the Chinese and Ethiopian economies and also allow the later to finally and reliably access the global market in general. Moreover, the connective vision that China is pursuing is complemented by the Kenyan-originating LAPSSET project that it's also helping to finance , which eventually plans to connect Addis Ababa with the Indian Ocean port of Lamu by rail . Suffice to say, the completion of both transnational railways and the Djibouti-based military facility will catapult China into being the most influential country in the Horn of Africa region, although this seemingly inevitable reality will expectedly be opposed by the US using the methods of Hybrid War.  This part of the research therefore endeavors to explain all of the ways in which the US could apply Hybrid War strategy in order to conceivably offset China's grand designs in the Horn of Africa region. It begins by offering a general overview of regional relations that sets the appropriate context for deeper analysis. After having established the state of affairs and provided a solid understanding of each examined countries' interactions with the other, the second portion of the work then delves into a summary of these states' strategic situations, focusing primarily on their most influential determinants. Finally, the last part of the regional study looks at the most realistic Hybrid War scenarios that the US could possibly provoke against China's Horn of Africa interests. Thorny Relations In The Horn  The four states that occupy the Horn of Africa region – Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia – don't all have pristine relations with one another, with the most obvious problems being between Eritrea & Somalia on one side and Ethiopia on the other.  Ethiopia-Eritrea  To explain the reason behind the abysmal relations between these two states, it's necessary to begin by talking about Eritrea's bloody three-decade-long secessionist war against Ethiopia which only ended in 1993. The roots of the conflict are many, but they can be summarized as starting during the imperial period when the Kingdom of Italy annexed Eritrea from the larger civilization-state of Abyssinia in 1890, thenceforth giving it a sense of identity separateness from Ethiopia and planting the seeds for future conflict after the two entities were reunified following the end of World War II. Addis Ababa's unilateral 1962 abolishment of the ten-year-old Federation of Ethiopia and Eritrea sparked the separatist war that raged throughout the proceeding decades, and even after independence, the two countries remained at tense odds with one another over the expectation that there would eventually be a continuation war sometime in the future.  This came to pass from 1998-2000, and despite ending in what has been described as a lingering stalemate , it killed over one hundred thousand people and undermined the economic development potential of these two dramatically impoverished states. In the years since, Ethiopia and Eritrea have still remained each other's primary nemesis, with the two sides regularly accusing the other of attempting to subvert its stability and supporting various anti-government forces. Just like in the immediate years after independence, there still exists the very real possibility today that the two countries will go to war with one another at a moment's notice, and this atmosphere of heightened militant tension is the most destabilizing interstate factor in the Horn of Africa. In fact, it will later be argued that this situation is being exploited by the out-of-regional powers inside the GCC as a means of acquiring leverage over Ethiopia and potentially pushing Eritrea into instigating a renewed round of debilitating violence.  Ethiopia-Somalia  Although not as bad as its ties with Eritrea, Ethiopia's relations with Somalia are objectively pretty poor. Granted, on the surface of things there is positive and pragmatic interaction between both states at the government-to-government level, but the primary issue between them has always been the enticing idea of "Greater Somalia" that has captivated some Somalians on both sides of the border and even led to the Ogaden War between 1977-1978. This conflict is notable as being the last conventional attempt to create "Greater Somalia" and also as being the only time when the Soviets and Americans switched sides during a proxy war. The issue was over the status of Somalians in Ethiopia's sparsely populated eastern region which has now been revealed to be rich i n oil and natural gas deposits, with Addis Ababa claiming that this is an integral part of Ethiopia's territory and a native people to the multiethnic country while Mogadishu and Somalian nationalists assert that it's an occupied region whose people must be united with their namesake nation-state. While Somalia has no realistic means of ever reattempting another Ogaden land grab anytime again in the foreseeable future, the appeal of Somalian nationalism is dangerous for Ethiopia and can easily be used by the US and others in order to engineer destabilization inside of Africa's second-most populous country.  Complicating matters even further is Ethiopia's 2006 anti-terrorist intervention in Somalia which aimed to overthrow the extremist Islamic Courts Union (ICU) that had seized control of most of the country. Covertly supported and egged on by the US, Ethiopia invaded its neighbor and succeeded in expelling the militia from the capital, however its subsequent three-year occupation of the country generated a lot of hostility against it and led to a surge in Somalian nationalism. This in turn was taken advantage of by Al Shabaab, an Al Qaeda- and Daesh-linked terrorist group that grew out of the ICU's youth wing, which blended anti-Ethiopian sentiment, Somalian nationalism, and Islamic extremism in creating a lethal cocktail of hate that has made the group one of the most feared in all of Africa. The Somalian government's inability to appropriately combat Al Shabaab and the sympathy that misguided Somalians (especially the youth) have to the organization's twisted message has made it a major regional threat which has the very real potential of actively causing chaos inside of Ethiopia's Somali Region (formerly called Ogaden). In response, the authorities have been compelled to implement harsh security measures as an anti-terrorist precaution to any Daesh-like attempts to create a transnational territorially administered "Islamic State" within the region, though this has had the inadvertent effect of drawing the ire of some Somali locals and cyclically leading to the same type of anti-government attitudes that Addis Ababa has sought to avoid.  Ethiopia-Djibouti  Perhaps the most fruitful and positive relationship in the region is between Ethiopia and its northern Djiboutian neighbor. Demographically and geographically mismatched, the two are inherently tied to one another due to regional circumstances. Ethiopia lost all of its coastal territory with Eritrea's independence and thereafter became a landlocked state, and the sky-high tensions between it and its former province have precluded any possibility of pragmatic economic cooperation. Similarly, because of the anarchic instability and terrorist threat in Somalia, Ethiopia has been unable to use its territory in acquiring reliable access to the sea (although it has made some positive steps in this direction with the autonomous self-proclaimed and de-facto independent state of Somaliland via the port of Berbera). For the most part, Ethiopia's economic potential was bottled up inside the Horn of Africa interior and unable to reach the global markets, but China's visionary and proactive initiative in building the Ethiopia-Djibouti railroad changed all of that. The project essentially turned Djibouti into the 'cork' which controls the flow of economic riches into the Ethiopian 'bottle', making it a literal bottleneck state in pivotally opening up the massive economic possibilities of its southern neighbor.  Along the same lines, however, this breakthrough infrastructure development means the tiny country is disproportionately important to Ethiopia and can be used indirectly as a means of destabilizing the much larger and expanding economy of former Abyssinia. Domestic disturbances such as Color Revolution unrest or possible Afar separatism in Djibouti could disrupt access to the railroad and indefinitely cut Ethiopia and its partners off from one another, thus making it totally dependent on the LAPSSET corridor to its south which runs through Oromo-populated territory and could quickly become a tantalizing target for ethnic-affiliated rebel and terrorist groups. With this in mind, it becomes even more apparent why China chose Djibouti as the location of its first overseas military base, since it's substantially easier to exert positive influence on small Djibouti in safeguarding the viability of its prized railroad investment than in doing so inside of Kenya or anywhere else, and plus, there's of course the added maritime advantage in being located on the Red Sea. As for how China could predictably protect its railroad, it might either employ the direct use of its military as hinted at in its first-ever 2015 white paper on military strategy in order to protect its foreign interests, or it could end up utilizing private military corporations (PMCs) to indirectly do this instead.  The bottom line is that Djiboutian stability is absolutely integral for Ethiopia's strategic security, and it's for this reason that bilateral relations are extraordinarily close and will foreseeably remain so for the future. Djibouti benefits from this relationship by profiting off of its transit state status in facilitating access to and from the Ethiopian economy, so it has a vested self-interest in protecting the railroad as well. Therefore, it's expected that it would use its military forces to safeguard the line in the event of any domestic troubles, likely applying the training that they acquired from their Chinese counterparts inside the country and probably even doing so under the supervision of Chinese advisors as well. By functioning as Ethiopia's critical link to the outside world, Djibouti could also end up being targeted by Eritrea or by Somalian-based terrorist groups as a means of indirectly offsetting the regional hegemon, so this is of course a factor that must be considered.  Eritrea-Djibouti  In reference to the previous, Eritrea does not have positive relations with Djibouti and actually fought a brief border war with its neighbor in 2008. As per UN agreement, Qatar has deployed its troops to both countries in order to mediate the conflict and has remained in the region since 2010, presenting another factor of instability vis-à-vis Ethiopia which will be discussed later on. To continue with the state of bilateral relations between the two coastal countries, it's worthwhile to also mention that Eritrea has actually had problems with all of its neighbors, and this includes Sudan and Yemen (the latter via the Hanish Islands conflict ), which together demonstrates a distinct pattern of Eritrean behavior. Therefore, the 2008 conflict with Djibouti mustn't be seen in isolation, but rather as a continuation of long-standing Eritrean policy which regularly resorts to militant means to achieve its goals. It can't be discounted that Qatar and Eritrea might conspire together in supporting Al Shabaab attacks inside of Djibouti in order to inflict strategic harm on Ethiopia, since not only has the Gulf state been convincingly linked to the terrorist organization, but Eritrea is actually under UNSC sanctions for allegedly aiding it in the past (although the latest findings indicate that this relationship may no longer be in effect). Therefore, Eritrea's relations with Djibouti absolutely must be seen in the prism of its regional proxy war with Ethiopia which conceptualizes the neighboring state between them as a potential asymmetrical battleground.  Djibouti-Somalia  On the other side of things, Djibouti's relations with Somalia are warm and friendly, despite Mogadishu having no de-facto control over the bordering region with the autonomous and self-proclaimed independent state of Somaliland. While there isn't anything substantial to speak of in this regard, it's worthwhile mentioning the latent threat that non-state-actor-promoted militant Somali nationalism might pose to Djibouti (including the perverted version espoused by Al Shabaab). The country is mostly populated by the Issa clan, which itself is regarded as a subsect of the Somalis and thus places them within the within the purview of "Greater Somalia". While this ideal may have had some sway in the Cold War-era past and in the years before and immediately after the former French Somaliland's independence, it no longer has much of an appeal in Djibouti after Somalia descended into failed state status in 1991, although that isn't to say that there might not be some people who are still attracted to the romanticized version of this ideology. What's most threatening, however, isn't the possibility of passively sympathetic Djiboutians supporting "Greater Somalia" slogans, but Al Shabaab and other terrorist groups violently targeting the country's nationals and infrastructure projects in order to ostensibly support this vision.  The varied deployment of so many international non-African military forces in Djibouti makes it unlikely that the terrorists would succeed in inflicting long-term harm to the country or the Ethiopia-Djibouti railroad, but their extremist ideology and willingness to die for their cause makes them very dangerous and leads to the impossibility of discounting this scenario. Still, the relatively better policed and more closely administrated Somaliland region serves as a stop gap in inhibiting Al Shabaab's direct movement to Djibouti, although it's of course possible that the organization could infiltrate its coastal target through more conventional means such as covertly entering it by means of the world-famous port and under an assumed cover instead of illegally sneaking across the international border. In any case, the only relevant factor of Djiboutian-Somalian affairs that's applicable to the Hybrid War research is Al Shabaab and the ideology of "Greater Somalia", neither of which are promoted at the state level but both of which could lead to serious problems for the targeted country. For this reason, the Djibouti-Somalia axis is the least relevant factor in the Horn of Africa's regional political arrangement, at least on the official level, although it does have the potential to unconventionally become a major destabilizing issue in the future among certain non-state actors.  Eritrea-Somalia  Just like Eritrea views Djibouti, it also holds the same proxy battleground mentality for Somalia as well. If the UNSC's suspicions about Eritrea's support of Al Shabaab are to be believed, then it's clear to see that Asmara is simply employing whatever tool it can get its hands on in order to destabilize Addis Ababa. Whether reckless or justified depending on one's political disposition, it's unmistakable that Eritrea's burning hate for Ethiopia has spread the proxy conflict between them from the joint border all the way to the Somalian frontier, thereby engulfing the region in this turmoil and turning their rivalry into the single most important driver of the Horn of Africa's geopolitical destabilizations. It's likely that the Eritrean leadership is no longer as close to Al Shabaab as it was suspected of being before, partly due to increased international stigma and awareness of this relationship, but that doesn't remove the fact that Asmara may have played a key role in the group's early development and consequently makes the country responsible to an extent for the organization's present existence and violent rise.  Accordingly, the only logical way to view Eritrean-Somalian relations is through the prism of the greater Eritrean-Ethiopian proxy war in the region and the relative benefit that each respective actor gets from Somalia's stability or insecurity. With that being considered, it can be argued that Eritrea benefits more from Somalia's instability and the prevalence of militant non-state actors there (including Islamic-affiliated terrorists and "Greater Somalia" nationalists) than it does if normalcy were to return to the country. The arrival of stability would preclude Somalian territory from ever again being used by Eritrea as an asymmetrical springboard against Ethiopia, and it would correspondingly limit Asmara's strategic flexibility in dealing with its larger and better equipped rival. Since Somalia is gradually becoming more stabilized over the past couple of years, Eritrea's strategy might shift from allegedly working with terrorist groups to harnessing its new yet unofficial GCC military partnership in order to make inroads with the autonomous and self-proclaimed de-facto independent state of Somaliland. The strategic fusion of Eritrean and GCC capabilities on Ethiopia's northeastern border might portend a more concerted destabilization sometime in the future, whether of an Islamic terrorist, "Greater Somalian", or blended nature thereof.  To be continued…  Andrew Korybko is the American political commentator currently working for the Sputnik agency. He is the author of the monograph " Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change " (2015). This text will be included into his forthcoming book on the theory of Hybrid Warfare.  PREVIOUS CHAPTERS:


Donald J. Trump explicitly acknowledged for the first time during Sunday's debate that he used a $916 million loss that he reported on his 1995 income tax returns to avoid paying personal federal income taxes for years. Mr. Trump's response — "Of course I do. Of course I do" — was the fullest the wealthy developer had provided since The New York Times reported that he had declared the loss, and that the tax deduction could have been large enough to allow him to avoid federal income taxes for up to 18 years. Previously he had declined to comment on the documents, issuing a statement that neither challenged nor confirmed the $916 million loss. Asked directly during the debate if he would say how many years he had avoided paying federal income taxes, Mr. Trump responded, "No. " But at the same time, he asserted that he paid "hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes," calling it a "simple" thing. "I pay tax, and I pay federal tax, too," he said. Unless Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, releases his tax records, it is impossible to determine exactly how he has handled his taxes and what he has paid over the years. If he does not make his taxes public, he will be the first presidential candidate in four decades not to do so. Though the issue has been overshadowed in recent days by a recording of Mr. Trump's lewd comments about women, his refusal to release his tax returns — and the possibility that he had not paid federal income taxes for years — has emerged as a central issue in the campaign. During the debate, Mr. Trump appeared to shed some light on his approach to taxes, saying that he knew more about the tax code than any other presidential candidate in history. "I have a . A lot of it is depreciation, which is a wonderful charge," he said. "I love depreciation. " But as Mr. Trump explained his own tax situation, he tried to make the case that his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, was among those responsible for the tax code that enabled him to get benefits. "She has given it to us," he said. Mr. Trump also went on to invoke Mrs. Clinton's wealthy allies. "Many of her friends took bigger deductions," he said. "Warren Buffett took a massive deduction. " Mrs. Clinton, though, contended that Mr. Trump provided an example of what needed to change in the tax code — saying he was among the people who "paid zero in taxes, zero for our vets, zero for our military, zero for health and education. That is wrong. " She proposed a tax on people who make more than $5 million, calling it the "Buffett rule. " In Mr. Trump's case, what is clear is that he derived remarkable tax benefits from the financial ruin he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his foray into the airline business and his purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. "Simply put, the organization is in dire financial straits," New Jersey casino regulators concluded after reviewing his business balance sheet woes in 1990. The 1995 tax documents, which were anonymously mailed to a New York Times reporter, were the first page of a New York State resident income tax return, the first page of a New Jersey nonresident tax return and the first page of a Connecticut nonresident tax return. They did not include any pages from Mr. Trump's 1995 federal return. Mr. Trump was correct when he said he benefited from a provision that had been used by other wealthy families. Known as net operating loss, it allows an array of deductions, business expenses, real estate depreciation, losses from the sale of business assets and even operating losses to flow from the balance sheets of those partnerships, limited liability companies and S corporations onto the personal tax returns of people like Mr. Trump. In turn, those losses can be used to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income. With a $916 million net operating loss in 1995, Mr. Trump could have avoided paying more than $50 million a year in taxable income over 18 years. Mr. Trump appears to have embraced other elements of the tax code. In 1991, he lobbied federal lawmakers to relax tax rules that he claimed had strangled the real estate industry. And in less than two years, as part of a budget deal, Congress passed a set of provisions sought by developers that could have helped Mr. Trump avoid large tax bills linked to his enormous debt racked up by the early 1990s, while also allowing him to spin other real estate losses into valuable offsets on his future earnings in licensing, television and other ventures. One provision allowed real estate investors with highly leveraged properties to accept forgiveness of their bank loans without paying taxes on the money, in exchange for giving up other tax benefits. Another allowed them to apply some real estate losses against other kinds of income. While details of Mr. Trump's income taxes and any deductions are scarce, limited details are contained in government filings that have been unearthed during his campaign. For example, Mr. Trump paid more than $71, 000 in federal income taxes on about $218, 000 of taxable income earned from 1975 to 1977, according to a 1981 report assessing his fitness for a casino license. During the next two years, 1978 and 1979, he paid no taxes, the report said. Mr. Trump also avoided paying any federal income taxes in 1984, tax court records show. With his Atlantic City casinos in financial trouble in 1991 and 1993, casino commission reports show that he claimed losses that would have allowed him to avoid paying income taxes in those years. Voters in recent polls have shown interest in Mr. Trump's taxes. A CBS York Times poll last month showed that 59 percent of respondents said it was necessary for him to release his tax returns. Mr. Trump has said he will not release his taxes while he is facing an audit from the Internal Revenue Service. "I pay hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes, but, but as soon as my routine audit is finished I'll release my returns," he said. "I'll be very proud to. "


A technician hired by Hillary Clinton to run the private email system she used while U.S. secretary of state told investigators he tried to pass on colleagues' concerns that the system might not comply with records laws, FBI interview summaries show. Bryan Pagliano, the technician Clinton hired when she joined the State Department in 2009, told federal investigators he relayed the concerns to Cheryl Mills, then Clinton's chief of staff. Mills, whose lawyer did not respond to requests for comment, has previously testified under oath she could not recall anyone alerting her to potential problems with Clinton's email arrangement. The episode had not been disclosed until the Federal Bureau of Investigation released on Friday night nearly 200 pages of additional records from its year-long investigation into the handling of classified government documents by Clinton and her staff via an unauthorized email server in the basement of her New York home. Clinton has said the decision to use a private email system was a mistake, but the controversy has dogged her campaign as the Democratic candidate for the presidency and raised public doubts about her trustworthiness, public opinion polls show. Republicans have criticized her for putting national security at risk. The FBI closed the year-long investigation in July, recommending no charges, although FBI Director James Comey said Clinton and her staff had been "extremely careless" in handling classified government secrets. Pagliano has declined to answer questions by Republican lawmakers about his work on Clinton's server, but spoke to federal investigators after securing a form of immunity from prosecution. He told investigators two colleagues from the technology office approached him with concerns during Clinton's first year after learning about the email system. One said it could lead to a "federal records retention issue," Pagliano told investigators, and urged him to raise the concern with Clinton's "inner circle." A colleague also warned Pagliano "he wouldn't be surprised" if classified information was being sent through Clinton's unsecure system, Pagliano told the FBI. The newly released interview summaries from the FBI investigation show government employees undercutting other aspects of the public accounts given by Clinton and senior State officials. A State Department employee, whose name was redacted, told investigators they believed senior department officials interfered with the screening of Clinton's emails for public release last year in a way that helped Clinton. The employee, who worked on the screening process, said there was pressure to obscure the fact they were finding classified information in the messages. John Kirby, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement the department "strongly disputes" the claim of interference. Clinton repeatedly said last year she never sent or received classified information, but now says she did not do so knowingly since the release of the FBI findings. The employee also said the Defense Department told the State Department last year it had found about 1,000 emails between Clinton and David Petraeus in its records from his time as the director of the United States Central Command. The State Department has said that Clinton did not include any of her emails with Petraeus when her lawyers screened and returned what they said were all her work emails in 2014. A single conversation of about 10 emails later emerged last year after the Defense Department provided it. Spokesmen for Clinton have declined to discuss the omission, and did not respond to questions about the new interview summaries. Kirby, the department spokesman, said he could not "speculate" whether the Defense Department had found more than just a single conversation between Clinton and Petraeus. "We can only speak to the records in our possession," he said.


A Mexican columnist just repeatedly stabbed a President Trump pi ata She got it on film thinking it would be funny but Trump supporter Marco Gutierrez shared the video with the Secret Service in hopes that they would visit this nut job to let her know how serious this is.Please make sure you visit @gloaeza & let her know how #USA feels of this acts of hers @FBI @ALT_DOJ @SecretService @infowars @seanhannity pic.twitter.com/zRKuXfutAl Marco Gutierrez (@MarcoGutierrez) August 17, 2017Others in the video laughed as Loaeza furiously stabbed and stabbed.She stabbed the Trump pi ata at least 56 times before stopping to catch her breath and the video ended.Marco Gutierrez notified the Secret Service of Loaeza s stunt let s hope she gets lots of blowback from Trump supporters! This is ridiculous and disrespectful!TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME!


Share on Facebook NASA Space Sounds: what happens when spacecraft are used to record radio emissions from planetary environments, which are then converted to sound waves. Some spacecraft have instruments capable of capturing radio emissions. What you're hearing is the result of scientists' conversion of these radio emissions to sound waves. Instruments on NASA's Voyager, INJUN 1, ISEE 1 and HAWKEYE space probes were used to record the vibrations of different objects in our solar system. The recorded sounds are the complex interactions of charged electromagnetic particles from the solar wind, ionisphere, and planetary magnetosphere. The space sounds are really amazing! Nothing was added or tweaked either, these are the beautiful sounds which emanate from that mysterious world above and beyond. Enjoy! Saturn's Rings


Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump took office, his presidency started generating controversy. Photographs showing that the crowd at Trump's swearing-in was smaller than at Barack Obama's first presidential inauguration in 2009 caused the first ruckus in his administration - but not the last. Trump's first year in office was colored by an investigation into whether his campaign colluded with the Russian government to affect the election outcome, insults and threats of war with North Korea, and an effort to pass business-friendly legislation. From the start, the White House took a combative approach, accusing the media of framing photographs of the inauguration in a way that appeared to understate the crowd size. Press Secretary Sean Spicer argued that the images were not what they seemed and that crowds of historic size watched Trump take the oath of office. Protests would become a hallmark of Trump's first year. On Jan. 21, the day after the inauguration, hundreds of thousands of women jammed the streets of Washington to demonstrate opposition to Trump. A week after taking office, the Republican president signed an executive order to prevent citizens of seven predominately-Muslim countries from traveling to the United States. Known by critics as the "Muslim ban," protesters quickly demonstrated at airports in opposition. Trump would ignite protests again in August, when he was asked to respond to white nationalists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, including one who drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a woman. The president argued there were bad people "on both sides." Following his remarks, business leaders resigned from Trump's business councils and the panels were disbanded. A defining feature of Trump's first year in office was the investigation into whether his campaign colluded with Russia during the election. Trump ignited a political firestorm in May when he fired Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey, who had been leading an investigation into possible collusion by the Trump 2016 presidential campaign with Russia to influence the election outcome. Russia has denied meddling in the election and Trump has denied any collusion. Soon afterward, the Justice Department named former FBI chief Robert Mueller as special counsel to lead the investigation. Paul Manafort, who had briefly served as Trump's campaign manager, and his business associate Rick Gates were indicted by Mueller's team in October, accused of illegally lobbying on behalf of foreign governments. A month later, Michael Flynn, who briefly served under Trump as U.S. national security adviser, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations last December with Russia's then-ambassador in Washington just weeks before Trump took office. Trump has also found himself embroiled in a war of words with North Korea over its missile program, exchanging insults and threats with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. At home, Trump has struggled to enact sweeping changes he promised on the campaign trail. He threatened to withdraw the United States from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but business lobbyists persuaded him to renegotiate it. Trump signed an executive order setting up talks on the trilateral trade deal, which has hit roadblocks with Mexico and Canada. Trump's team also failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare despite Republican control of the White House and Congress. It was not until December that Trump made headway on major legislative change as both chambers of Congress passed a sweeping tax overhaul. The bill must be reconciled with a different version approved by the House of Representatives, but the Senate bill is expected to remain largely intact. (Click on reut.rs/2Asabau to see a related photo essay)


Just suppose the play was cancelled because the school was using black actors. Would this be the only place you would see this story?A small, state college in northern Pennsylvania has canceled a musical about a week before it was scheduled to open after the playwright objected to the use of white actors for South Asian characters.Clarion University had spent much of the year preparing to stage the punk rock version of Jesus in India, by dramatist Lloyd Suh, which ran off-Broadway in 2013 and received favorable reviews.Suh, who owns the rights to the musical, sent an e-mail on Monday to the school s play director Marilouise Michel ordering her to either replace the non-Asian actors with ethnically appropriate actors or cancel the production, which was due to open Nov. 18. I have severe objections to your use of Caucasian actors in roles clearly written for South Asian actors, and consider this an absolutely unacceptable distortion of the play, Suh wrote in the e-mail provided to Reuters by Michel.Michel told Reuters on Thursday that one of the Indian roles was to be played by a biracial girl, and the rest by whites. They were not doing the roles in brownface or using dialects, she said, but Suh rejected any solution other than removing them.Suh, who has another play, Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, running off-Broadway this month, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did his agent, Beth Blickers.Michel said Clarion University, with about 4,900 students, has a student body that is 0.6 percent Asian and that no Asians auditioned for the play.She tried several times to reach Suh by phone to discuss aspects of his play, but he did not take her calls before it was canceled on Tuesday, she said.When he saw the cast photos earlier this month, he demanded through Blickers to know the ethnicity of the actors, she said. I couldn t stop myself from crying when I saw the photos and realized what was happening, Suh wrote in his e-mail.On Tuesday, the day after Suh s e-mail, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Indian-American comedian Aziz Ansari decrying the treatment of Asian, particularly Indian actors, in the media but also noted that such actors were harder to find.VIA: Reuters


By now, you ve probably heard that at a recent Ted Cruz rally, Carly Fiorina fell off the stage right after announcing the candidate and his family. She s fine, don t worry.Yet, leave it to Donald Trump to use this moment to his advantage in front of his band of merry morons.Trump told his crowd in Carmel, Indiana: Carly s perfectly nice. By the way, she fell off the stage the other day. Did anybody see that? And Cruz didn t do anything. Even I would have helped her, OK? Basically saying, even I, the biggest jerk on earth, would have given her a hand. Then he just kept going with it, because you know, Trump: They just showed it to me coming in. I said, No, I didn t see it. They just showed it to me and I said, wow, that s really cruel. She fell off she just went down. She went a long way down, right? She went down right in front of him and he was talking. He kept talking. He didn t even look like that was a weird deal. Man. And then they were both talking. She was talking from the back and he was talking from there. They re both talking. No, it was weird. Writing out a Trump transcript is very unique, because he will literally repeat himself over and over and over as though you didn t get it the first time.Of course, Trump is making a mountain out of a molehill. Cruz likely didn t even see her fall, and she was back to the stage within seconds. All that aside, it is still wildly bizarre that Carly Fiorina is a running mate of a person who likely won t come near enough delegates to secure the Republican nomination.Watch part of Trump s diatribe here:Trump: Even I would have helped Fiorina up: https://t.co/zsb3c5vlqO https://t.co/RLxk64Ae3o POLITICO (@politico) May 2, 2016Featured Photo via Win McNamee/Getty Images


By Mark S. McGrew  In the year 4874, an ancient document was unearthed. It described how the consciousness of the inhabitants of the earth changed from evil to goodness approximately 3,000 years ago.  We have translated this to our best ability.  And it came to pass, that the world was ruled by an evil Queen. A foul stench was laid upon the peoples of the earth.  She gave the land of her people to foreigners, taking away their power. And the foreigners were arrogant with their stolen gains. They offended the citizens.  And the Queen gave the industries of her citizens to foreigners. And the foreigners were arrogant, hiring only their own kind and displacing the citizens. And the foreigners brought with them, the lazy of their families. The thieves and the liars and the most vile in the families of the foreigners, ruled over the citizens.  And to the worst of the worst, in the foreigner's families, were given unto them, the fruits of the citizens' labor, while the evil Queen laughed down at the citizens.  And the citizens were homeless in their own villages. And the citizens were insulted and violated at will by the foreigners.  The people had only one thing of value left to them that was impossible for the evil Queen to take from them: Their faith. The people prayed.  The people in the village of the Queen prayed. And they sent messages, as a bird tweeting, to the villages nearby and those villages sent messages to the villages nearby and those people sent messages to the villages nearby, until the whole world knew to pray for a savior. And the whole world prayed for a savior.  And it came to pass, after generations, that there was a savior, being prepared, being trained to defeat the evil Queen. And the people prayed harder and longer and more loving, now to protect their young savior and to guide him in righteousness.  And one day, when the Queen was addressing her citizens, a violent wind came from the north, blowing her pantsuit away and the people saw her secrets. And she became known for her true self.  The evil Queen tried to punish the wind and it came again, exposing her generals and she swore to conquer the wind. She ordered all of her people to not feel the wind, to deny it existed. And the wind grew harder and became stronger again.  And the wind blew over all parts of the earth and cried out to all good men, "Join me!". And the people joined. From village to village across all the lands, they joined.  And on a dark windy night, the people were all joined in a field and the crowd was all of the good and right thinking people of the earth and it was quiet.  A lone voice cried out, "He is coming!" and he pointed to a star in the heavens. And the people saw that he was coming. On his left was a red angel and on his right was a green angel to guide and protect him. And the people saw that he was coming. They prayed for his safety.  They huddled together in fear as they felt the power of his chariot coming from the sky.  His chariot stopped in front of the multitudes and he spoke to them. They were calmed. They were excited. They knew him. They had seen him before without knowing his true purpose. And now, standing amongst them, he was unveiled and the people liked what they saw and what they were hearing. After generations of lie upon lie sent upon their lives, he spoke the truth. And the people were amazed at his truths.  And in the back of the crowd of people, several mountain ranges away, it was difficult to hear him and the people in the back whispered to the ones in front of them, "What does he say?". And those people asked the people in front of them, "What did He say?". And those people asked and the asking continued to the front of the crowd. And one man answered back in a whisper to the people behind him and those people whispered to the ones behind them, the words that were spoken by their savior and the whisper turned into a voice and the voice became a shout and the shout became a great noise and the great noise became like thunder echoing across all the lands of the earth, the words of the savior, "LOCK HER UP, LOCK HER UP, LOCK HER UP!!!"  And the people knew there was a savior standing before them. And they cheered and they cried with joy, knowing that their prayers had been answered.  And he told them, before he departed in his chariot, "You must help. You must work. You must spread my words to all."  When his chariot, with the green angel on his right and his red angel on his left began to leave, the people heard and felt the power of his wings and the people felt the warmth of his love. And the people in the back of the multitudes saw his chariot go into the Heavens, from where it had come. And the people believed him because he told them to believe in their own righteous honor. He did not say they were deplorable and irredeemable.  And the people did work and they did spread his word. And through the word of the people, the evil Queen's soldiers lost faith and they refused to fight the people again. And the words of the savior, being repeated by the people, caused the most trusted of the evil Queen's advisers to flee. And all of her servants fled. All the evil people of the Queen hurried to escape the people. They hid in their caves and in the forests. And she was left alone, with only her drink. And she drank.  And she drank until she was in such a stupor that the people quietly entered her palace and removed her.  And the foreigners were driven out of the lands and permitted to take nothing with them.  When all was prepared and the savior knew his people were righteous, He came back and one by one, he drained the swamp, eliminating the corrupt politicians and the corrupt lawyers and the corrupt jesters and all the corruption was destroyed. There was much destruction and much death at the hands of the savior, for he was savior only to the good and the honest and the just of this world.  The ungood, the dishonest and the unjust were sent away and prohibited from annoying the people anymore and the savior ignored them and let them die in their own time in their own way. And they died in very short time, because the people would not give them work, or food, or shelter or rest.  And he told the people, "Now you must work, and work hard, to rebuild your lives and rebuild your fortunes and to care for your children, and teach them my words and teach them my actions, for someday I must leave you."  And for a great time, there were no wars on the earth, for most of the leaders of nations had seen that the savior was a good man, an honest man and a just man. And they came from all parts of the earth to make peace with him.  And the leaders who did not hear his words and see his actions and learn from them were destroyed. And there was peace for 1,000 years, until this was written and evil does not exist anymore. Rate this:


By Wayne Allen Root – Review Journal  The election is Tuesday. So it's time to make my final case for Donald J. Trump. My case is pretty simple — it's Trump or it's the end of America.  I was raised as a middle-class kid in the greatest country in world history. A country built around mobility, opportunity and economic freedom. A country that allowed this son of a butcher to become a successful business owner, media personality, best-selling author and TV star and producer. Only in America.  I was taught by my wonderful, patriotic, true red, white and blue, salt-of-the-earth, American parents that certain specific things made America great. Here they are:  Faith in God, prayer, love of country, family, a belief in American exceptionalism, capitalism, Judeo-Christian values, the Constitution, limited government, personal responsibility, economic freedom, the military and police.  Well don't look now. But everything from that list above … everything we believe in … everything that made America great … has been under full-scale assault for eight long years — from multiple directions. And Hillary is here to finish the job. She already publicly stated she wants to be Obama's third term.  The truth is we either send a strong message heard around the world and elect Trump, or the America we know and love is gone. Forever.  Because if Trump doesn't win, no other Republican will ever be elected president again. President Hillary Clinton will make sure of that. Hillary will open the borders like never before to let in millions of illegal aliens who have no love for anything that made America great.  Foreigners come here not out of a love for America, but for a love of the cradle-to-grave welfare state that America has become. Eighty percent of them (or higher) will vote Democrat forever more to keep the welfare checks coming. That's Hillary's plan.  Don't believe me? See California. No Republican will ever again be elected to statewide office. This was the exact formula that destroyed California. Open the borders, let in millions of foreigners, make them dependent on government welfare checks and then train them to vote Democrat to keep the handouts coming.  It worked!  That was the experiment. Now Democrats are onto Plan B — to turn the rest of America into California.  Hillary will open the borders and tie the hands of border agents in order to flood the country with millions of new illegals. Hillary will legalize the 12 million to 15 million or so already here — and give them the right to vote.  Hillary will also enthusiastically import millions of Muslim refugees who have no love for America, capitalism, the Constitution, or certainly Judeo-Christian values. Some will become terrorists, almost all will require cradle-to-grave welfare.  Then it's over for America.  So vote. Drag your friends to the polls. Make phone calls to your entire address book. Leave no stone unturned.  Think of the U.S. Supreme Court.  Think of open borders.  Think of your children's and grandchildren's future.  Then vote for Trump like it's … Trump, or the end of America.  Because it is.  Wayne Allyn Root is a best-selling author and host of "WAR Now: The Wayne Allyn Root Show" 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. daily at 790 Talk Now. His R-J columns run Wednesdays and Sundays.  For once in our lifetime, we the people have an opportunity to elect a President who was NOT chosen by Multinational Corporations, Big Banks, DC Elites, and the Globalist Lapdog Mainstream Media.  Please like and share if you are a TRUMP VOTER!


Trump s Department of Justice has finally figured out they re stupid in one instance, at least. Back in January, a member of Code Pink named Desiree Fairooz laughed during Jeff Sessions confirmation hearing, was charged with disorderly conduct, found guilty, and faced up to a full year in prison for it. A D.C. court tossed out her conviction and set a new trial, but now the DOJ has dropped the case entirely:Here s the Justice Department s notice it s dropping charges against woman who laughed at Jeff Sessions during his confirmation hearing. pic.twitter.com/Dv5vqzxdPA Dominic Holden (@dominicholden) November 7, 2017Fairooz own reaction to the news says it all about the stupidity of this endeavor:Just received this, Governments Notice of Nolle Prosequi What a relief! Guess they ve got enough laughing matters to deal with! Desiree Fairooz (@desireefairooz) November 6, 2017She laughed because she felt Senator Shelby s overly-syrupy remarks about Sessions alleged record of treating everyone equally were as ridiculous as they sound. Sessions treats people anything but equally and he has a long track record of that. Code Pink s campaign director said Fairooz laughter was a reflex action more than anything, which actually does make a lot of sense. Fairooz herself didn t mean to actually laugh, but she did say: I felt it was my responsibility as a citizen to dissent at the confirmation hearing of Senator Jeff Sessions, a man who professes anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT policies, who has voted against several civil rights measures and who jokes about the white supremacist terrorist group the Ku Klux Klan. That s the whole problem, though: The Trump administration doesn t want dissent. And while it s true that Fairooz had several prior arrests for protesting, the number of cases publicly brought against dissenters of this administration is absolutely astonishing. This is a victory for all who stand for what s right which is the opposite of what Trump s administration stands for.


Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz (R-TX) secretly obtained a loan from the big pockets of financial giant Goldman Sachs, which he used to provide a decisive financial edge to his U.S. Senate campaign in 2012.Cruz has previously accused Goldman of being the beneficiary of crony capitalism, and said they they seek out and get special favors from government. The loans obtained by Cruz were not disclosed on forms filed with the federal government.Neither loan appears in reports the Ted Cruz for Senate Committee filed with the Federal Election Commission, in which candidates are required to disclose the source of money they borrow to finance their campaigns. Other campaigns have been investigated and fined for failing to make such disclosures, which are intended to inform voters and prevent candidates from receiving special treatment from lenders. There is no evidence that the Cruzes got a break on their loans.A spokeswoman for Mr. Cruz s presidential campaign, Catherine Frazier, acknowledged that the loan from Goldman Sachs, drawn against the value of the Cruzes brokerage account, was a source of money for the Senate race. Ms. Frazier added that Mr. Cruz also sold stocks and liquidated savings, but she did not address whether the Citibank loan was used.Cruz is now characterizing the omission of this information as inadvertent and a technical matter. He went on to say The facts of the underlying matter have been disclosed for many, many years. He also told reporters, All of the information has been public and transparent for many years, and that s the end of that. But the election was over in the fall of 2010, and it is now 2016 a six year gap between when he spent the money and when he finally acknowledged where it came from and how it was used. Cruz failed to amend or update this information for a large sum of money. Considering the candidate s history of playing fast and loose with the truth, there is no independent verification of his claim that the filing was inadvertent. Cruz s wife Heidi is a managing director at Goldman Sachs in Houston, but is currently on a leave of absence from her job as her husband campaigns for president. When speaking about his wife s career, Cruz omitted the ten years of experience she had at the company.


The U.S. Congress will pass legislation to raise the federal debt ceiling and lawmakers have a number of options for avoiding default, House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan said on Thursday. "We will pass legislation to make sure we pay our debts and we will not hit the debt ceiling. We'll do this before the debt ceiling," Ryan said during a tax reform event at a Boeing plant in Washington state. "There are many different options in front of us on how we achieve that," he added. "We pay our debts in this country. We will continue to do so." Later, in an interview with CNBC, Ryan said he had considered the option of attaching legislation raising the debt ceiling to a measure Congress passed recently extending money to veterans' programs. The comments came after President Donald Trump said on Twitter that Congress could have avoided a "mess" if Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had taken his advice to link the debt ceiling and veterans' funding measure. "That's an option we were looking at but the VA deadline came up and we weren't able to do that then," Ryan told CNBC. Congress passed the veterans' measure in early August and Trump signed it August 12. "I'm really not that worried about this, we have plenty of options ahead of us" to raise the debt ceiling, Ryan said, adding that he did not interpret Trump's tweets as "going after me." The speaker sidestepped a question as to whether the options included a "clean" hike of the debt ceiling, saying he did not want to "negotiate to the media." House conservative Republicans have been pushing for a variety of add-ons to a debt limit bill, such as deep spending cuts or the sale of government assets. The government bumped up against its statutory limit on borrowing at just under $20 trillion in March. Since then, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has had to take "extraordinary" measures to stave off a default until Congress agrees to raise the Treasury's borrowing capability. The Trump administration had been hoping Congress would pass a debt limit bill before embarking on a long summer recess.


Hollywood police spokeswoman Miranda Grossman said Thursday that the body of 37-year-old Beranton J. Whisenant Jr. was found early Wednesday by a passerby on the city s beach. She said detectives are trying to determine if the death was a homicide, suicide or something else. WPTVThe cause of death including whether Whisenant was murdered was still under investigation.However, The Miami Herald reported that the death is being investigated as a crime by the Hollywood Police Department.According to ABC News, the 37-year-old prosecutor s body bore a head wound.In 2013, CNN quoted an expert who called murders of prosecutors in the United States beyond rare, and reported that only 13 prosecutors have been killed in the line of duty in the past 100 years. Murders of federal prosecutors are rarer still, although it s not clear yet what happened to Whisenant.Whisenant worked for the U.S. Attorney s Office in Miami in its major crimes unit. He had joined the office in January. Court records show he had been handling several visa and passport fraud cases.The federal prosecutor s body was discovered lying on the city beach on Wednesday, May 24. His body had washed up on the beach, and The Miami Herald reported that it s not clear whether he died there. Whisenant may have suffered a head wound caused by a possible gunshot or other type of trauma, The Herald reported.According to ABC News, Whisenant was married and was a father of three. Whisenant lived in Miramar with his wife, Ebony, a physician who teaches at Florida International University s College of Medicine, reported Miami Herald.Whisenant was handling some serious cases for the federal prosecutor s office in Miami. PACER, the federal court record website, lists him as an attorney in 39 cases. Not all of those date from his time in the U.S. attorney s office, but there are a number of May filings listed.His recent cases focused on illegal immigration issues. For example, in one recent case, a woman was accused of re-entering the U.S. illegally from Guatemala who had previously been ordered removed from the United States. In another recent case, a man was accused of buying a fake Italian passport and trying to enter Miami with it.Whisenant was assigned to the Major Crimes Unit. His LinkedIn page says that Whisenant had only been in the U.S. Attorney s office for five months.According to ABC News, Whisenant had been working on visa and passport fraud cases, according to court documents. Heavy


The Democratic Party Got Crushed During The Obama Presidency. Here's Why The GOP may be in the midst of an identity crisis, but the Democratic Party is also facing a political crisis that could be made a lot worse if it doesn't win the White House in November. Part of President Obama's legacy is the health of his party. He's had many successes in office — health care reform, climate change regulations, Wall Street reform — but his legacy will also include one huge failure: a diminished Democratic Party. Every president sees his party lose hundreds of positions — it's the price a party holding the White House pays — but no president has come close to Obama. During Obama's eight years in office, the Democrats have lost more House, Senate, state legislative and governors seats than under any other president. When Obama took office, there were 60 Democratic senators; now there are 46. The number of House seats held by Democrats has shrunk from 257 to 188. There are now nine fewer Democratic governors than in 2009. Democrats currently hold fewer elected offices nationwide than at any time since the 1920s. 1. There are two different electorates in America There is Presidential Election America, where turnout is diverse. The electorate is younger, browner, more single, more secular — more Democratic. Then there's Midterm Election America, where the electorate is older, whiter, more rural, more church-going — in other words, more Republican. What's great for Republicans and bad for Democrats is that the vast majority of the governorships and state legislative seats are elected in the midterms. And those positions are the seed corn for a party — they're the farm teams for higher-level offices. Right now the Democrats are at a very low ebb. This is something President Obama lamented when he campaigned for Democrats in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014. Republicans manage to turn out their voters every two years, but Democrats, for some reason, only turn their voters out every four. Maybe, Obama mused, because Democrats just don't think midterms are "sexy enough." Democrats had one spectacularly bad piece of luck. The Republicans' Tea Party-fueled surge in 2010 was perfectly timed to coincide with the decennial census, after which new congressional and state legislative district boundaries are drawn by governors and state legislatures. Republicans' huge gains in the 2010 midterms put them in the driver's seat when it came time to draw new congressional districts in 2011. Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell remembers what happened when Republicans took over the governor's mansion and the Legislature in his state: "When I left office in January of 2011," says Rendell, "there were 13 Democratic congressman and six Republican congressman. As a result of redistricting in the 2010 election, that turned around and we now have 13 Republican congressmen and five Democratic congressman." It's not only bad timing and gerrymandering that have hollowed out the Democratic Party. Mo Elleithee, a former Democratic National Committee official, says Democrats have never put enough effort and resources into state legislative races. Republicans, on the other hand, make those races a top priority. 4. Too many Democrats live in cities This is another problem that makes it easier for Republicans to draw congressional and state legislative districts that disadvantage Democrats. Democratic voters are clumped together in urban areas. You could say that for the purposes of winning elections, Democratic voters are just not efficiently distributed. Its why even in red states like Texas and Utah there are cities that are solidly Democratic — and why lesbian mayors were elected in Houston and Salt Lake City. When Democrats cluster in and around cities, they win local elections, but that doesn't help them win suburban or rural congressional seats. This November, the stakes for Democrats couldn't be higher. Without the White House, assuming party control elsewhere remains the same, Democrats would be truly out in the cold.


Priorities priorities Arizona Sen. John McCain wants a subpoena issued immediately for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency to attend a hearing in his home state on the Colorado mine disaster the agency caused last year.The August disaster caused an uncontrolled rupture of an abandoned gold mine that caused 3 million gallons of toxic sludge to spill into the Animas River, which sullied the waterways of three states. It s my understanding that the EPA has decided not to send a representative to this field hearing, the Arizona Republican said Wednesday, requesting that the chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee issue a subpoena. EPA s response is unacceptable. It s a violation of our obligation to protect the interests of Native Americans and their tribes and EPA must be present at this hearing. I respectfully request that the committee issue a subpoena for EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy to appear at the field hearing. The hearing will be held on Earth Day, April 22, which is a big day for the EPA. McCarthy is expected to be part of President Obama s delegation to New York for a climate change meeting at the United Nations. Obama plans to sign a deal he agreed to in Paris to cut greenhouse gas emissions with nearly 200 other countries to fight global warming.The field hearing will be held in Phoenix at the request of American Indian tribes affected by the toxic spill that crossed through Navajo land.The EPA said it would send testimony from a high-ranking agency official in lieu of an actual official attending.


.@KrisKobach1787: Trump has made clear that sanctuary cities could lose federal grants if the mayors continue to defy federal law pic.twitter.com/mGrYjDCdFi FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) November 15, 2016


I first met Brandon Scott the day after Freddie Gray died. It was April 20, 2015. Mr. Scott, a member of the Baltimore City Council, was quietly observing a news conference where Baltimore police officials announced the suspension of six officers involved in the arrest of Mr. Gray, a black man who sustained a fatal spinal cord injury in a police transport van. In the blighted West Baltimore neighborhood where Mr. Gray grew up, protests were growing. Mr. Gray's death was wrenching for Baltimore a lot has transpired here since then. On the day Mr. Gray was buried, riots broke out, prompting Maryland's governor to call in the National Guard. The fiery state's attorney, Marilyn Mosby, promptly indicted the six officers on charges including murder. The city paid $6. 4 million to the Gray family. With the murder rate soaring, the mayor fired the police chief — and decided not to run for office again, as the city struggled to heal. Then came the officers' trials, which ended this week without a single conviction. Throughout, I have repeatedly interviewed Mr. Scott. He is 32, and the vice chairman of the Council committee that oversees the Baltimore police. Before being elected in 2011, he worked in city government and the 300 Men March, an group here. On Thursday, we spoke again, about the latest developments and what has changed. Below is an edited and condensed excerpt from that conversation. Ms. Mosby's team has just accused the Police Department of undermining the prosecution. Does that concern you? My concerns are first and foremost that moving forward, we are doing what we need to do to repair our city — to improve relations. I have spent a good deal of time over the last year working on body cameras, working on trainings with young people. The most important thing — what gets lost in all of this, is that we are talking about the loss of a life. But I will be following up with the police commissioner, even though this happened before the current commissioner, to provide a response to those claims. You mentioned body cameras. Are the Baltimore police using them? They will, just like in New York or any other major city, they're going to be rolled out. We already have body cameras out there at this point, we are close to 200 officers. Body cameras were in the works before Freddie Gray, but most definitely it ratcheted up the pace. What else has changed? The department decided to improve the vans, so that's a change. And I'm partnering with an organization called Community Mediation, fostering dialogue between youth and the police. Community Mediation is now mediating some internal affairs complaints. A lot of things have changed, things that people don't see because they're behind the scenes. I've talked to a lot of people who feel as though in the end, justice was not served — either for Freddie Gray or for the police. What do you say to that? I think what people must know about American justice is that the way the system is set up, you have to have a certain burden of proof and if it's not met, then it's not met. You can be as angry as you want to be, but you have to understand the system and respect it. What about you? Do you personally think justice was served? I can't personalize it. Like myself, what I would do in a situation like that is talk to the family and see how they feel. If Mr. Gray's family feels like everything, from the charges, from the state's attorney proceeding with the trials, everything that has come out of it equals justice to them, then it's justice. That's a careful answer. You've always been so measured in answering my questions. I'm the grandson of poor farmers in rural North Carolina. I truly understand what it means for me being a young black man in this country. But I try not to be divisive, I try not to be polarizing, because that's the last thing we need right now. We have enough of that going on. We've talked about changes in the city. Have you changed? Of course I have changed. I have shifted my work I've tried to do things a little differently. You have to be uncomfortable. If you're not uncomfortable, if you haven't changed the way you operate from April 2015 to now, then you're saying the way our city was, was O. K. — and it wasn't. So what are you doing differently? For example today, I'm on the labor committee in the City Council and we voted to send a bill to the full council raising the city's minimum wage to $15 by 2022. I don't think that would have happened before last April. Is Baltimore perhaps a better place now, as a result of Freddie Gray's death? I can say that there have been changes in Baltimore for the better. But I can't say that Baltimore is a complete better place, because we still have a lot of people dying. So Ms. Mosby never got any convictions. What, if anything, did she achieve? Many folks feel that her charging the officers would not have happened under the previous state's attorney. That alone is a big deal for thousands of people in the city. But I would also remember — I talked to you and every other media outlet last year, I said, everyone should stay middle ground, because it's just the beginning of the process. Are you surprised at how it turned out? I thought that at least there would be one charge that would stick with at least one officer, but I can't say I'm surprised that it turned out the way that it did.


The trend of young Muslim men targeting and attacking white non-Muslims continues world wide. A group of three Muslim men attacked strangers at the Liverpool city center because they were white non-Muslims. One witness feared the men were ISIS terrorists because they were using racist language, talking about Muslims and Christians. A very similar occurrence took place in one of Minneapolis more upscale neighborhoods last year when a mob of up to 30 young Somali men marched through the streets yelling disparaging comments and threatening homeowners:Somalis living in Minneapolis are almost all Sunni Muslims. Residents of the Lake Calhoun area say this wasn t the first time a group of Somali men have made an intimidating march through their neighborhood, which is filled with million-dollar homes.They first approached victim Gary Bohanna inquiring what religion he was affiliated with. When Bohanna answered I m a Christian, the attacker shouted Why aren t you a Muslim? before punching him twice. The three men then approached Paul Lynch, Labour councillor for Moss Bank, and his girlfriend. One of the men punched Mr. Lynch with a sickening blow that could be seen and heard. He did not utter any racist comments, but the attackers laughed as the victim fell. Both men were taken to the hospital for their injuries.Witness Edris Nosrati called police but one of the men tried to flee, so the witness chased and caught him. The teenager struck Mr. Nosrati, but the hero held on. When questioned by police, one of the men claimed he was too intoxicated to remember anything. Another denied the assaults and suggested they had been racially abused by other men. However, he later confessed to targeting people because they were white and non-Muslim. The Counter Terrorism Unit became involved in the investigation and the mens family homes were turned upside down by the police. Amin Mohmed cried in court as he was jailed for 42 weeks. Mohammed and Faruq Patel received 42 and 18 weeks respectively in a young offenders institution.


Viola Davis said that the issue of racial tensions in America now that Donald Trump has been elected really boils down to one fundamental question, which has more to do with who we are as a nation than who Trump is as a person.Speaking backstage at the Golden Globes on Sunday night, Davis was asked how we can ensure that the progress made over the years, especially in regards to racial tensions, isn t lost under a Trump presidency. Her response was spot on.Davis said that she would begin her answer by removing Trump from the equation. She went on to explain that it s bigger than him. I believe that it is our responsibility to uphold what it is to be an American and what America is about and what the true meaning of what it means to pursue the American dream. I think that America in and of itself has been an affirmation, But I think that we have fallen short a lot, Davis said. Because, there is no way that we can have anyone in office that is not an extension of our own belief system. So then what does that say about us? And I think that, if you answer that question, I think that that says it all. So just what does Trump s election say about America? It s a question that leads to some very uncomfortable answers.Watch Davis insightful interview, here:.@ViolaDavis was just asked about Donald Trump s presidency backstage. Watch her response #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/Yrj9Rv8So0 Variety (@Variety) January 9, 2017


It now appears a sudden, complete explosion caused by a bomb brought down the Airbus over the Mediterranean—but that doesn't mean it was ISIS. Flight tracking data showing its altitude, speed, and direction, ends instantaneously while the plane was at its cruise height of 37,000 feet. This can now be combined with reports that a military satellite using infrared technology detected a flash at the time and location where the airplane was last tracked, according to NBC News. U.S. officials told Reuters a review of preliminary satellite imagery has produced no sign of an explosion so far. If the Airbus A320 was stricken by a mechanical failure it is highly unlikely that the effects would have been so sudden, leaving the pilots at least some time to send a Mayday call. No call was made, officials say. Reports that wreckage has been found floating in the eastern Mediterranean were later denied by Egyptian officials. Once it is found, as it will be, and given the increasing indications that a bomb caused the disaster an urgent priority for investigators will be to look for evidence in the wreckage of blast and fire. If there is evidence of a bomb blast the next priority will be to establish where the bomb was placed on the airplane: in the cabin or in the cargo hold. Essential clues to that could be found both from physical wreckage from the airplane and from bodies of passengers, even down to their seat locations. In this situation the jet's black boxes—the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder—are of little value since their data would have been terminated with the sudden explosion, leaving only a record of what was until then an absolutely normal flight. Wreckage is where the story is to be told. There has yet been no credible claim by any terrorist group that they were responsible. If a bomb was successfully placed on the flight not only does this point to a weak point in security at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, the origin of the flight, but it could mean that bomb makers have found a new way of eluding current bomb-detecting technology. The man credited with being the world's most-ingenious bomb designer is al Qaeda's Ibrahim al-Asiri. Al Qaeda has recently been overshadowed by ISIS, and some experts believe that it wants to re-establish its superiority in attacks on what it has always regarded as the most effective Western target, commercial aviation. If the flight was brought down by a bomb, the timing of the blast could be a part of the signature of the bomb maker. Was it timed to detonate specifically at the only place on the EgyptAir jet's route when it was over water? The retrieval of wreckage and, particularly, of the flight data recorders, is far more difficult with a plunge into the sea than when the airplane falls in plain sight over land. On the other hand counter-terrorism experts have always believed that bombers would rather bring down a jet over land and, ideally, over a city for the maximum effect—as was the intention of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underpants bomber, on Christmas Day 2009, aiming for Detroit. The jet was flying what has become one of the most densely trafficked airline routes in the world, a crucial corridor in the sky for international flights. Following the downing by a missile of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in July 2014 that part of Eastern Europe was—belatedly—defined as a war zone. The main airline routes between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia were then diverted south to fly over Romania, Greece, Turkey, and across the eastern Mediterranean into Egyptian airspace. The corridor became even more crowded after the crash of the Russian Metrojet while flying over the Sinai Peninsula last October, when the Sinai airspace was also ruled too dangerous for commercial flights. This had the effect of pushing a lot more intercontinental flights further south, flying eastbound and westbound across Cairo, the Red Sea, and Saudi Arabia and Dubai (Dubai is now a major hub for flights between Europe, Africa, and Asia).


Videos New York Times Admits Key Al Qaeda Role In Aleppo In a backhand way, The New York Times admits that the U.S.-backed "moderate" rebels in east Aleppo are fighting alongside Al Qaeda jihadists, an almost casual admission of this long-obscured reality, writes Robert Parry. Be Sociable, Share! Syrian rebels walk in an alley in Idlib, Syria, Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2012. (AP Photo)  As much as The New York Times and the mainstream U.S. media have become propaganda outlets on most foreign policy issues, like the one-sided coverage of the bloody Syrian war, sometimes the truth seeps through in on-the-ground reporting by correspondents, even ones who usually are pushing the "propo."  Such was the case with Anne Barnard's new reporting from inside west Aleppo, the major portion of the city which is in government hands and copes with regular terror rocket and mortar attacks from rebel-held east Aleppo where Al Qaeda militants and U.S.-armed-and-funded "moderate" rebels fight side-by-side.  Almost in passing, Barnard's article on Sunday acknowledged the rarely admitted reality of the Al Qaeda/"moderate" rebel collaboration, which puts the United States into a de facto alliance with Al Qaeda terrorists and their jihadist allies, fighting under banners such as Nusra Front (recently renamed Syria Conquest Front) and Ahrar al-Sham.  Barnard also finally puts the blame for preventing civilians in east Aleppo from escaping the fighting on a rebel policy of keeping them in harm's way rather than letting them transit through "humanitarian corridors" to safety. Some of her earlier pro-rebel accounts suggested that it wasn't clear who was stopping movement of civilians through those corridors.  However, on Sunday, she reported: "We had arrived at a critical moment, as Russia said there was only one day left to pass through a corridor it had provided for people to escape eastern Aleppo before the rebel side was flattened, a corridor through which precious few had passed. The government says rebels are preventing civilians from leaving. Rebels refuse any evacuation without international supervision and a broader deal to deliver humanitarian aid."  Granted, you still have to read between the lines, but at least there is the acknowledgement that rebels are refusing civilian evacuations under the current conditions. How that is different from Islamic State terrorists in Mosul, Iraq, preventing departures from their areas – a practice which the Times and other U.S. outlets condemn as using women and children as "human shields" – isn't addressed. But Barnard's crimped admission is at least a start.  Barnard then writes: "Instead [of allowing civilians to move through the humanitarian corridors], they [the rebels] are trying to break the siege, with Qaeda-linked groups and those backed by the United States working together — the opposite of what Russia has demanded."  Again, that isn't the clearest description of the situation, which is stunning enough that one might have expected it in the lede rather than buried deep inside the story, but it is significant that the Times is recognizing that Al Qaeda and the U.S.-backed "moderates" are "working together" and that Russia opposes that collaboration.  She also noted that "Three Qaeda-linked suicide bombers attacked a military position with explosive-packed personnel carriers on Thursday, military officials said, and mortar fire was raining on neighborhoods that until now had been relatively safe. It was among the most intense rounds in four years of rebel shelling that officials say has killed 11,000 civilians."  While she then throws in a caveat about the impossibility of verifying the numbers, the acknowledgement that the U.S.-backed "moderate" rebels and their Al Qaeda comrades have been shelling civilians in west Aleppo is significant, too. Before this, all the American people heard was the other side, from rebel-held east Aleppo, about the human suffering there, often conveyed by "activists" with video cameras who have depicted the conflict as simply the willful killing of children by the evil Syrian government and the even more evil Russians.  More Balance A Syrian soldier carries Syria's national flag after successfully routing rebels from the Aleppo Military Academy in Aleppo, Syria. Sept. 05, 2016.  With the admission of rebel terror attacks on civilians in west Aleppo, the picture finally is put into more balance. The Al Qaeda and U.S.-backed rebels have been killing thousands of civilians in government-controlled areas and the Syrian military and its Russian allies have struck back only to be condemned for committing "war crimes."  Though the human toll in both sides of Aleppo is tragic, we have seen comparable situations before – in which the U.S. government has supported, supplied and encouraged governments to mount fierce offensives to silence rockets or mortars fired by rebels toward civilian areas.  For instance, senior U.S. government officials, including President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, have defended Israel's right to defend itself from rockets fired from inside Gaza even though those missiles rarely kill anyone. Yet, Israel is allowed to bomb the near-defenseless people of Gaza at will, killing thousands including the four little boys blown apart in July 2014 while playing on a beach during the last round of what the Israelis call "mowing the grass."  In the context of those deaths, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, who has built her career as a supposed humanitarian advocating a "responsibility to protect" civilians, laid the blame not on the Israeli military but on fighters in Gaza who had fired rockets that rarely hit anything besides sand.  At the United Nations on July 18, 2014, Power said , " President Obama spoke with [Israeli] Prime Minister Netanyahu this morning to reaffirm the United States' strong support for Israel's right to defend itself…. Hamas' attacks are unacceptable and would be unacceptable to any member state of the United Nations. Israel has the right to defend its citizens and prevent these attacks."  But that universal right apparently does not extend to Syria where U.S.-supplied rockets are fired into civilian neighborhoods of west Aleppo. In that case, Power and other U.S. officials apply an entirely different set of standards. Any Syrian or Russian destruction of east Aleppo with the goal of suppressing that rocket fire becomes a "war crime."  Perhaps it's expected that the U.S. government, like other governments, will engage in hypocrisy regarding affairs of state: one set of rules for U.S. allies and another for countries marked for U.S. "regime change." Statements by supposed "humanitarians" – such as Samantha Power, "Ms. R2P" – are no exception.  But double standards are even more distasteful when they come from allegedly "objective" journalists such as those who work at The New York Times, The Washington Post and other prestige American news outlets. When they take the "U.S. side" in a dispute and become crude propagandists, they encourage the kind of misguided "group thinks" that led to the criminal Iraq War and other disastrous "regime change" projects over the past two decades.  Yet, that is what we normally see. A thoughtful reader can't peruse the international reporting of the U.S. mainstream media without realizing that it is corrupted by propaganda from both government officials and from U.S.-funded operations, often disguised as "human rights activists" or "citizen journalists" whose supposed independence makes their "propo" even more effective.  So, it's worth noting those rare occasions when The New York Times and the rest of the MSM let some of the reality peek through. When evaluating the latest plans from Hillary Clinton and other interventionists to expand the U.S. military intervention in Syria – via prettily named "safe zones" and "no-fly zones" – the American people should realize that they are being asked to come to the aid of Al Qaeda. Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ). The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News editorial policy. Be Sociable, Share!


Tune in to the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR) for another LIVE broadcast of The Boiler Room starting at 6 PM PST | 9 PM EST every Wednesday. Join us for uncensored, uninterruptible talk radio, custom-made for barfly philosophers, misguided moralists, masochists, street corner evangelists, media-maniacs, savants, political animals and otherwise lovable rascals.Join ACR hosts Hesher, & Spore along with Andy Nowicki from Alt Right Blogspot, Randy J of 21Wire, Jay Dyer of Jays Analysis and Daniel Spaulding of Soul of the East. Tonight the Boiler Gang discusses psychological operations in the media, HIV/AIDS deniers, potentially staged gender politics, some out there B-movies with regards to esoteric symbolism, the metaphor of Reptiles as they relate to psychopathy in the elite establishment, and some good comedic relief. If you want to participate, bring something interesting to throw into the boiler Join us in the ALTERNATE CURRENT RADIO chat room.BOILER ROOM IS NOT A POLICTALLY CORRECT ZONE! LISTEN TO THE SHOW IN THE PLAYER BELOW ENJOY! REFERENCE LINKS:


The presumptive Republican nominee is reintroducing Americans to a panoply of dormant scandals, personal transgressions and partisan controversies that rocked Bill Clinton's White House and first lady Hillary Clinton in two turbulent presidential terms leading up to the end of the 20th Century. The goal is to link them with a flurry of more recent dramas such as those over Clinton's private email server and Benghazi, to depict her potential presidency as a return to unsavory days of rumor, innuendo and alleged malfeasance that would exhaust and disgust voters -- in effect, making the 2016 election a referendum on the Clintons, and the baggage that has always haunted their successful and resilient political careers. Case in point: a new Instagram video that pictures Bill Clinton chomping on a cigar and revives claims of wrongdoing against him by several women, which ends with the sound of Hillary Clinton laughing and a slogan: "Here we go again?" The billionaire also appears to be taking aim at the already upside-down approval ratings of Hillary Clinton to neutralize rock-bottom perceptions of his own character revealed by polls that threaten his general election appeal, especially with women voters, the majority of whom prefer his likely Democratic rival. "What he is doing is he is exposing, not just Bill Clinton for what he was and what he had done, but it's the same as it relates to Hillary," Michael Cohen, Trump's legal counsel, said on CNN's "New Day." "She attacked Mr. Trump as being a sexist, misogynist, and he is not any of those things," Cohen said, portraying Hillary Clinton as an "enabler" of her husband's dalliances. But Trump's personal broadsides against the Clintons are not risk-free. The New York billionaire real estate investor has had a colorful personal life himself, and has been accused by the former secretary of state's allies and in news reports of sexist behavior and a string of unflattering comments about women. Still, the strategy, from Trump's point of view, has the virtue of forcing Clinton into the painful personal position of recalling her husband's past wrongdoing when she would much prefer to focus on other issues. She answered with a terse "No" when asked by CNN's Chris Cuomo last week whether she ever felt compelled to defend her or her husband's honor against Trump. "I know that that's exactly what he is fishing for, and you know, I'm not going to be responding." Her campaign has dusted off the classic Clinton scandal playbook -- pivoting to focus on Trump's own vulnerabilities and stressing that the American people have more pressing concerns. "The reason he is doing it, is his own record his coming under scrutiny," said Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon on "New Day" Monday , as the Clinton camp lit into Trump over past comments that he hoped the real estate market would crash as it would benefit his businesses. Trump's attacks, aimed at fixing the picture of "Crooked Hillary" in the public mind as the general election gears up, recall earlier political branding hit jobs that he pulled against "low energy" Jeb Bush and "little" Marco Rubio in the GOP race. He also is showing he is ready to fight fire with a flamethrower. It is significant for instance that his first veiled reference to 1990s sexual allegations against Bill Clinton came after he concluded that the Clinton campaign was playing the "women card" was against him. Trump's attacks recall a tortured political era in which the Clinton White House seemed to stagger from scandal to scandal -- but repeatedly defied predictions of its demise to survive and prosper. As soon as the new First Couple arrived in Washington from Arkansas, they were beset by rumors of wrongdoing and mini ethics scandals. There was Whitewater, about the First Lady's real estate dealings in Arkansas. Travelgate, about firings of officials in the White House travel office, and Filegate about the alleged misuse of FBI papers. Early on, the Clinton White House was rocked by the suicide of legal counsel Vince Foster, a close friend of Hillary Clinton, which became the cue for another round of conspiracy theories. It all culminated in an independent counsel investigation by Ken Starr, which in turn led to the moment when Clinton became only the second President to be impeached by the House of Representatives, in 1998, for lying under oath about an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. He was subsequently acquitted in a trial before the U.S. Senate in February 1999. None of the other 'scandals' produced criminal charges against the Clintons and the Whitewater investigation was eventually wrapped up in 2002. All of that seemed like ancient history. Bill Clinton Clinton left office with a 66% approval rating, according to CNN/Gallup/USA Today polling, and threw himself into an energetic and philanthropic post presidency and built a personal fortune on the lucrative speech making circuit. Hillary Clinton pursued her own political career in the Senate, as secretary of state and her second presidential campaign. Even Starr has praised Clinton's redemptive post presidency and in remarks reported by the New York Times on Tuesday bemoaned the "tragic dimensions" of the Clinton scandals and investigations of which he was a part. But Trump is not interested in putting the past to rest. He's dredging it up. "It's the one thing with her, whether it's Whitewater or whether it's Vince or whether it's Benghazi. It's always a mess with Hillary," Trump said in the Post interview. The most pressing question raised by Trump's personal assault using the ugliest moments of the Clinton presidency is whether it will work. Tana Goertz, a senior Trump adviser, told CNN's Pamela Brown on Tuesday that there were no fears in the billionaire's camp that raising Bill Clinton's conduct would boost his wife's approval ratings, just as they did back in the 1990s. "Back then, people felt sorry for Hillary because her husband was unfaithful. They believed she was going to do the right thing for women and empower women, strengthen women and support women and none of that happened," Goertz said. "That might have been a sympathy vote back then, but that will not happen again." Throughout their turbulent political careers, the Clintons have shown an ability to court public support by portraying attacks against them as vicious partisan witch hunts and displayed an almost supernatural capacity to weather political crises. The period of personal anguish, self-reflection and humiliation that Hillary Clinton endured as she questioned whether to save her marriage after the Lewinsky saga meanwhile confounded her enemies as it stirred public empathy for her plight. But she also sparked a public debate over why she had chosen to stay with her husband amid claims by some critics that the marriage was simply a vehicle for her political ambition. But Hillary Clinton supporter Maria Cardona dismissed the idea that the ghosts of the 1990s will stalk her campaign a two decades later. "The Bill Clinton issue is already baked in. People know him," Cardona said on CNN. "An attack on her because of what her husband did is going to backfire in an incredibly big way -- she is going to continue to be focused on issues."


Germany s Social Democrats (SPD) voted on Thursday to hold talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel s conservatives on forming a government after their leader made an impassioned plea for a free hand to work for a social United States of Europe . The vote clears the way for talks that could resolve the impasse into which Europe s economic powerhouse was plunged after Merkel and the SPD shed support in a September election, greatly complicating the parliamentary arithmetic. Martin Schulz urged reluctant center-left SPD members to be open to Merkel s overtures to renew the coalition that has governed for the past four years, saying the party had a responsibility to revive social democracy in Germany. A new grand coalition with the reluctant SPD is Merkel s best hope of extending her 12 years in power after talks with two smaller parties failed, giving the smaller SPD greater leverage in any negotiations. The question isn t grand coalition or no grand coalition, he said in a speech to his party s biennial congress, Nor minority government or fresh elections. No - it s about how we exercise our responsibility, including to the next generation. Schulz said the party would only recover if it could offer a clear vision of a Germany and a Europe that worked for their citizens, calling for deeper European integration and a United States of Europe by 2025. Europe does not always work for its people, rather too often for the big companies, he said, outlining a populist vision that goes well beyond Merkel s own openness to limited structural reforms and bureaucratic streamlining. Talks between the two parties are expected to begin in earnest in the new year. A special congress will have to be convened at which party members will vote on whether to support a final agreement, which could fall short of a formal coalition, and could include tolerating a minority government. Stephan Weil, the influential premier of the state of Lower Saxony, said the SPD would want to see its policies reflected in return for supporting any government. I think the majority of the delegates see themselves as a European party and they expect that Germany becomes a driving force in Europe again, he said of Schulz s proposals regarding the European Union. Schulz s proposals were received more cautiously by Merkel. The (EU s) ability to act should be at the forefront now, she said at a Berlin press conference. So I will concentrate on more cooperation in defense by 2025 and on other issues, including employment and innovation. Outside the congress hall, SPD youth activists, many of whom want the party to chart a distinctive course after spending eight of the past 12 years in centrist coalitions, handed out red cards reading No Grand Coalition . Merkel leads this country without direction, said one speaker addressing the conference. She has no plan for Europe, she leads the country from week to week. We need a strong social democracy in this country. Schulz, who initially said his party should go into opposition after being punished for participating in the previous grand coalition under Merkel, apologized for his party s disastrous electoral result. Schulz attacked European moves to support big banks while doing little to counter high youth unemployment. When states can t balance their budgets they face draconian sanctions from Brussels. If we can mobilize billions for bank rescues but have to fight for paltry sums to support jobs for young people, then this is definitely not my Europe. He struck a tone that was more critical of big companies than French President Emmanuel Macron, who is pushing for deeper euro zone integration and pro-business reforms under a euro zone finance minister. He took aim at U.S. technology firms Apple, Facebook and Google, saying a strong Europe was needed to make them stick to the rules and protect the rights of workers in a changing economy. We don t want an app-directed service society but we want digitalization to lead to more individual freedom, he said to applause, calling for steps to protect the digital economy s self-employed from becoming self-exploiters . On the issue of immigration, one of the main reasons for the collapse of Merkel s first attempt at a coalition, the SPD opposes a conservative plan to extend a ban on the right to family reunions for some accepted asylum seekers. There can be no upper limit to the right to protection from war and persecution, Schulz told delegates, rejecting conservative demands for a ceiling of 200,000 immigrants a year.