As the UK faces another decade of austerity, Britain's tax burden is to hit its highest level since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, a leading think tank has warned.

Despite almost seven years of implementing the longest and deepest cuts to public service spending on record, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) forecasts that the UK government will have to increase taxes before the 2020 general election in order to meet Chancellor Philip Hammond's goal of reducing public borrowing below two percent of national income by 2020-21.

The think tank also estimates that government revenues will have to rise to 37 percent of national income by the 2019/20 tax year in order to meet Hammond's target.

British MPs took 53 trips funded by oppressive regimes last year at a cost of more than £170,000, newly released figures show.

Politicians from all the main parties were found to have accepted trips to destinations including Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, North African regimes like Egypt, and Central Asian nations such as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.

Forty-one trips were taken by Conservatives, seven by Labour politicians, four by the SNP and one by a Liberal Democrat.

The trips were generally termed 'fact-finding' missions, with Qatar putting the most money into hosting British elected officials.

The revelations have angered campaigners at a time when UK arms sales to a number of the states named are a high-profile topic.

"MPs should not be taking hospitality from regimes with appalling human rights records," Andrew Smith of Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) told the Independent.

"This is lobbying plain and simple. These despots aren't paying for transport and flashy hotels because they're nice people, they're doing it because they want to win friends and buy influence," Smith said.

The US Senate has confirmed Betsy DeVos as education secretary, despite efforts by Democratic senators who held the floor for 24 hours in a filibuster. Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote.

All 48 members of the Democratic caucus and two Republicans - Senators Lisa Murkowski (AK) and Susan Collins (ME) - voted against DeVos' confirmation, leading to a 50/50 split.

DeVos, a Republican Party chairwoman from Michigan, has faced a number of hurdles in being approved for the post, prompting a wave of opposition which is unprecedented for the position of education secretary.

It comes after Senate Democrats held the floor for 24 hours, hoping that at least one Republican would vote against party lines and against DeVos' confirmation.


Speaking ahead of the filibuster on Monday, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said the move was aimed at doing "everything we can to persuade just one more Republican to join us."

From the outsider's perspective, the United States appears to have entered the peak stages of a psychotic meltdown over its newly elected president Donald J. Trump. His election and subsequent time in governance of the world's most powerful country has torn the mask from a stagnant pool of malcontents who have in the wake of political earthquakes been activated by their paymasters to cause as much panic, disruption, and violence as possible.

Not all of this will be mainstream news outside of the USA, and so I bring you this synopsis of events so that you can better understand exactly what is going on in Trump's America, and what he needs to do in order to deal with it, because the longer it is allowed to fester then the more dangerous the situation will be. Instigations like the ones I am going to list are not undertaken with no end-goal in mind. Just as similar radical assets of the globalist liberal cabal were activated in Georgia, Ukraine, and other places, utilizing both useful idiots and committed fanatics to bring about so-called color revolutions, so too are the seeds of a color revolution being sown in the United States.

The first thing to note is the vitriolic hatred of Russia that has emerged particularly from the 'liberal left' in the past year, and from which they justify much of their present activities. Once a bastion of the neoconservatives, fear and loathing concerning the Russian president and his omnipresent hacker collective have been whipped up by the mainstream media and the Democrats to convince the public that Russia somehow rigged the election in favor of Trump. This of course de-legitimizes the president, but also unleashes a stream of bile and insults against Russia itself. One such example is noxious so-called 'anti-racism educator' Tim Wise, a pseudo-academic who is routinely invited to American universities and news networks to deliver hate-filled rants. Tweeting out on the 15th of December, Wise said: "With each new day, I know why part of my family left sh**hole of imperial Russia. 100 years after last rev(olution) lets hope for another one" as well as "seriously, when your contribution to the world is Faberge eggs, autocracy and pogroms, no one should much care what you think." Leaving aside that pogroms first happened in the 1300s in Western Europe, autocracy is as old as humanity, and Faberge Eggs are auctioned for more than Tim Wise will make in a lifetime, the statements of this self-described anti-racist filled with nothing but utter loathing for ethnic Russians were but a taster of what was to come.

One of the most frustrating tasks is to try to debunk the Hollywood myths imprinted on the mind of Americans about warfare in general and about special forces and technology in particular. When last week I wrote my column about the first SNAFUs of the Trump Presidency I pretty much expected that some of the points I made would fall on deaf ears and that indeed did happen. What I propose to do today is to try, yet again, to explain the vast difference between what I would call "the American way of war" as seen in propaganda movies and the reality of warfare.

Hungary is planning to submit a proposal to the EU that would allow for all asylum seekers to be detained and kept in special camps until their applications are reviewed, the Hungarian government's chief spokesman said.

"No migrants - not even those who have already issued their request for asylum - will be able to move freely until there is a primary legal decision on whether they are entitled to political asylum, refugee status or anything else - so they are not entitled to move freely in the country," Hungary's government spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, said at a briefing in London, as cited by the Guardian.

Asylum seekers without any legal status will be taken to "shelters," where they will be provided with food and children will receive education that "will meet all the required EU standards," he said.

These camps will not be "detention centers, although the asylum seekers won't be able to move freely, he said, noting "we do not have a proper term yet for it - that is the challenge task to formulate. It is not about detention, it is about not giving the same opportunity for them as provided to European citizens. Do not be mistaken. There is a systematic abuse of that within Europe."

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has said he would send rogue cops to violence-prone southern areas of the country, where Islamic militants roam, as punishment. The move follows his disbanding of the anti-drugs force after massive evidence of police corruption.

On Tuesday, Duterte gathered up 400 police officers on the premises of the presidential palace, all of them under investigation for all manner of transgressions. Calling them things like "idiots" and "sons of b*tches," the leader at one point challenged them to a shootout, according to Reuters.

"I will send you to Basilan [in the southern Philippines], live there for two years. If you get out alive, you can return here. If you die there, I will tell the police not to spend anything to bring you back here but to bury you there," Duterte warned the officers.

Basilan is a stronghold of the home-grown, Islamic State-linked terrorists the Abu Sayyaf, notorious for beheading those they hold captive.

Until several days ago, the president's narcotics units were the most feared thing in the Philippines, and the subject of much controversy for the alleged extrajudicial killings being carried out in Duterte's war on drugs. However, the recent murder of a South Korean businessmen by rogue officers changed all that, and led to a massive about-face for Duterte, who disbanded the entire narcotics unit and brought in the military to deal with the problem.

A fresh report from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) voices concern that lone-wolf attacks could be carried out at US airports by individuals with access to secure areas, such as employees, who currently number around 900,000 people.

The report warns that there are currently no security mechanisms in place to prevent these kinds of attacks. Weak screening procedures contribute to these worries, as only three airports across the country - Miami and Orlando in Florida, and Atlanta International in Georgia - carry out a 100-percent screenings of their employees and their belongings.

Other airports only carry out random screenings.

Compounding this fear, the DHS has intercepted numerous communications between would-be attackers and found many that discussed a whole plethora of ways to cause serious damage.

In which I collect all the examples of this strange mental defect that have caught my attention in the last month of the seventeenth and first month of the eighteenth years of The New American Century.

THE SYNDROMES CONVERGE

US President Donald Trump has landed in hot water yet again when he told media that he respected Russian leader Vladimir Putin - in spite of (unfounded and sensationalist) accusations that the latter is responsible for killing journalists and political opponents.

Trump was being interviewed on Fox News by Bill O'Reilly, and while expressing respect for Putin as the president of Russia, his interlocutor interrupted with the terse assertion: «He's [Putin] a killer, though. Putin's a killer».

Unfazed, Trump replied: «We've got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country's so innocent?»