The orange-faced duck-haired God-Emperor of the United States doesn't get much good press. In fact, even his good press tends to be bad press, except when it's coming from places like Breitbart and Fox. But sometimes even the most 'eminent' and 'respectable' sources can't help but pay Trump an unintentional compliment. The neocon-infested, U.S.-government-backed NGO Freedom House released a report today with attention-grabbing conclusions that would make Chicken Little die in a fit of acrobatic hysterics.

According to Freedom House, democracy is "under assault and retreating" around the world. The U.S. is "abdicating" its "traditional role" of acting as galactic champion of "democratic ideals". The Demon-Spawn Nations of Russia and China are "increasing repression" and exporting their "malign influence" abroad. Indeed, this is democracy's "most serious crisis in decades"; basic democratic tenets are "under siege" across the world, according to Freedom House President, Michael Abramowitz. The gates of hell have been opened, Satan has appeared, and he looks a lot like Xi, Putin and Trump.

US President Donald Trump has said that the allegations of his campaign colluding with Russia by the "fake news media" are "dead", as his former chief strategist Steve Bannon is set to testify before Congress and a grand jury.

Taking to his favorite social media platform, the POTUS accused the mainstream media of pushing conspiracy theories against him and his campaign.

"Do you notice the Fake News Mainstream Media never likes covering the great and record setting economic news, but rather talks about anything negative or that can be turned into the negative," Trump tweeted on Tuesday. "The Russian Collusion Hoax is dead, except as it pertains to the Dems. Public gets it!"

The reference to the Democratic Party presumably applies to the alleged wrongdoing on the part of Hillary Clinton in approving a uranium deal with a Russian company.

Trump's remarks come as his onetime ally Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and recently ousted executive chairman of the conservative outlet Breitbart News, is due to appear before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday to testify on the Russia allegations. Bannon, who was considered a leading figure in Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, went on to take a place in the White House but left in August last year.

Having been grilled by Democratic lawmakers over her recollections of a White House meeting in which President Trump described some poor nations sending immigrants to the United States as "shithole countries," Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirsten Nielsen dropped a potentially even bigger tape-bomb.

The Hill reports that Nielsen testified she did not recall Trump saying "shithole countries" while she spoke under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She described the meeting as heated and said many people in the room used coarse language.

"I don't remember the specific words [Trump used]," Nielsen said under questioning from Durbin. "What I was struck with, frankly as I'm sure you were as well, was the general profanity that was used in the room by almost everyone."

But then Nielsen shocked more than a few Democratic leaders across the nation, who appear to have grown accustomed to living beyond the law.

According to The Washington Times, Nielsen confirmed Tuesday that her department has asked federal prosecutors to see if they can lodge criminal charges against sanctuary cities that refuse to cooperate with federal deportation efforts.

December 18 was a day like any other in the Donbass region, the flashpoint of a grinding civil war between the Ukrainian military and pro-Russian separatists. That afternoon, a girl was badly wounded by a shell fired by Ukrainians into the separatist-held Golmovsky.

A few hours later, a hail of Grad rockets fired by pro-Russian forces poured down on the Ukrainian-controlled town of Novoluhanske, killing eight civilians in the middle of a community celebration and damaging over 100 buildings. The shelling continued into the night, killing three in the pro-Russian town of Stakhanov, including a 94-year-old woman.

Artillery exchanges like this have become a tragic routine in Donbass. Though the killing has slowed since the heaviest fighting, which occurred in 2015, over 10,000 have fallen in the conflict, and at least 1.4 million have been turned into refugees. With the war entering its fourth year, a decision by the Trump administration virtually ensured that the news from Donbass will grow dramatically worse.

Last month, the State Department approved the transfer of $50 million worth of lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military. Along with a shipment of M107A1 Barrett sniper rifles, the United States will be delivering 35 FGM Javelin anti-tank launching systems and 210 missiles.

In the summer of 2016, shortly after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, Trump vowed at the Republican National Convention to fill his seat on the Supreme Court with "a person of similar views, principles and judicial philosophies." After the election, Trump even went so far as to credit his victory in part to promising to nominate a successor "very much in the mold of Justice Scalia," a pledge that endeared him to a GOP base opposed to abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

Now, in a book written by one of Scalia's long-time friends, Bryan Garner, it seems as though Scalia may have also been a secret Trump supporter. In the book set to drop tomorrow, entitled Nino and Me, Garner says that Scalia respected Trump's "unfiltered and utterly frank" language and found it to be a refreshing alternative to the "airbrushed" rhetoric of seasoned politicians. Per the Wall Street Journal:

"Justice Scalia thought it was most refreshing to have a candidate who was pretty much unfiltered and utterly frank," said the late jurist's literary collaborator, Bryan Garner, a legal dictionary editor who spent two weeks in 2016 traveling with Justice Scalia through several Asian countries.

The justice thought well of Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor whose campaign for the Republican nomination stalled, said Mr. Garner, whose memoir of a decadelong friendship, "Nino and Me," comes out Tuesday. "But he was fascinated by the fact that Trump was so outspoken in an unfiltered way, and therefore we were seeing something a little more genuine than a candidate whose every utterance is airbrushed," Mr. Garner said in an interview.

A leading Serb politician in Kosovo has been gunned down in front of his party's office in Mitrovica. The killing of Oliver Ivanovic sparked outrage in Belgrade, which suspended talks with Pristina in protest.

Ivanovic, 64, was fatally injured by an unidentified assailant in front of the office of his Citizens' Initiative Party, Serbian state television reported. "Unfortunately, I wish it weren't true, but doctors declared Oliver dead at 9:30 this morning," Nebojsa Vlajic, Ivanovic's lawyer told AP by phone.

In protest over the killing, Serbia announced it would cut EU-mediated consultation with Pristina. The head of Belgrade's Office for Kosovo and Metohijam, Marko Duric, called the killing a "terrorist attack" targeting the entire Serbian people, TANJUG news agency said.

It took Pyongyang almost two weeks to respond to US President Donald Trump's bragging about the size of his 'nuclear button,' but a state-run newspaper has now called it "spasm of a lunatic" and the "bark of a rabid dog."

The response came in the latest edition of Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of North Korea's ruling party. In the controversial tweet, Trump mocked North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un for saying in his New Year address to the nation that he had a nuclear button on his desk and could order a strike against America if the country is threatened. The American president said "his button" was "a much bigger and more powerful one" that actually worked.

North Korea, which for decades used a unique style of communication involving flamboyant threats and insults against its enemies, seems to have found a more-than-willing counterpart in the Oval Office. Trump and Kim exchanged personal insults, as well as promises of death and destruction, as Pyongyang and Washington remain deadlocked over the North's latest advances in rocket and nuclear technology, which have given new credibility to the country's race for a nuclear deterrent against America.

Unlike Trump, Kim has no Twitter page, so the exchanges come at a slow pace, with insults traded days - or, as in this case, even weeks apart. Nevertheless, Kim at one point managed to amuse English-speakers by rediscovering the little-used word "dotard" to berate Trumps' mental capacity. The US president invented the nickname "little rocket man" for the North Korean leader and shamed him as "short and fat" in one of his tweets.

Trump's "shithole countries" statement about Haiti, Africa and El Salvador has been heard across the globe. Media outlets were quick to note an earlier meeting where Trump said that Haitians "all have AIDS" and that people from Nigeria would never "go back to their huts" if they came to the United States.

It's good that mainstream news organizations are calling out the pathology, that this is not dismissed as yet another slip of the tongue. But a very similar discourse and pathology, rightfully considered outrageous by many Americans, is rather mainstream in Israel.

So let's start from the left - indeed, let's start with a 'leftist hero' - former Prime Minister Ehud Barak:

Barak has depicted Israel's situation as a "villa in the jungle". This phrase has become iconic, and according to Haaretz chief editor Aluf Benn, is a sentiment shared by most Jewish Israelis. Think of it - the "villa in the jungle" notion combines both the "shithole countries" as well as the "Nigerian huts" notion. And Barak gets away with it. Indeed, Barak's racist incitement against Palestinians is not a one-time slip-of-the-tongue. In an interview with Israeli historian Benny Morris in 2002 in The New York Review of Books, Barak said of Palestinians:

They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie...creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't. They see themselves as emissaries of a national movement for whom everything is permissible. There is no such thing as "the truth."

If statesman A keeps calling statesman B a "smart guy," but the latter, instead of reciprocating, proceeds to praise person C, who is statesman A's famous enemy, as "a shrewd and mature politician," the message ought to be fairly obvious.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin heaped fulsome praise on his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong Un, whom US President Donald Trump derides as a "Little Rocket Man" with a "small button," it is at once symbolic and meaningful for US-Russia ties as well.

At a meeting with top Russian editors last Thursday at the Kremlin, Putin had the following to say about Kim:

"I think that Kim Jong Un has obviously won this round. He has achieved his strategic goal. He has a nuclear warhead, and now he also has a missile with a global range of up to 13,000 kilometres, which can reach almost any part of the globe, at least in the territory of his potential adversary. And now he wants to clear up, smooth over or calm down the situation. He is a shrewd and mature politician.

"However, we should be realistic, and... act extremely carefully. If we want to achieve the difficult goal of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, we should do this through dialogue and talks... we can accomplish this mission if all parties, including North Koreans, become convinced that their security can be also guaranteed without nuclear weapons."

Yesterday the people of Hawaii were temporarily terrorized by a notification sent to their mobile phones that a ballistic missile was headed straight for them and they needed to seek shelter immediately. They were not notified that it was a false alarm for 38 minutes, despite its reportedly being a simple human error triggered by an employee who "pushed the wrong button".

Many who are less trusting of official CNN narratives when it comes to the US power establishment have been voicing skepticism of this explanation, finding the timing highly suspect given that the Trump administration just caused international controversy by giving the okay for a $133 million sale of an anti-ballistic missile system to Japan. A sale which, according to Russia, violates international ballistic missile treaties and will put a strain on Moscow's relationship with Tokyo.


The general idea is that this deal has a lot less to do with the threat posed by North Korea, its ostensible object, and a lot more to do with the Russia-China tandem that the US power establishment is continually working to undermine. Placing an anti-ballistic missile system in the hands of a US ally right on the east edge of Asia weakens the effectiveness of mutually assured destruction (MAD), the understanding that if any nation launches a nuclear attack on another nuclear-armed country there will be full-scale retaliation and both countries will be destroyed. If some American officials get it into their heads that their country's rivals can be taken out via nuclear strikes and any retaliatory strikes nullified via missile defense systems, MAD is no longer a deterrent to this and we're looking at potentially billions of deaths and possible planetary extinction.