A recent survey revealed that only 45 percent of Germans are satisfied with the policy of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Moreover, two-thirds of respondents oppose her decision to start an investigation into German satirist Böhmermann's case, German newspaper Die Zeit reported.

Earlier, Turkish authorities sent the German government an official note in which they asked Berlin to prosecute German satirist Jan Böhmermann for mocking Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in his poem, which he performed during a TV show on the German TV Channel ZDF.

The prosecution of the journalist could be started only with the special permission of the German government, which after long consideration was issued last week.

Following the decision, the popularity of German Chancellor Angela Merkel has fallen by 11 percent in mere days. According to a recent ARD survey, only 45 percent of respondents are satisfied with the policy of the country's leader, compared to 56 percent of supporters in early April.

European countries like Germany, the UK and France should pick up more of the burden for their defense in NATO, Sen. Bernie Sanders said during the Democratic debate in Brooklyn, adding that the US alone spends "about 75% of the entire cost of the military aspect of NATO."

Sanders, 74 and Hillary Clinton, 68, held their ninth presidential debate in Brooklyn, and the US senator from Vermont asked to react to a statement he made in 1997 when he said that the US should stop "wasting tens of billions of dollars helping to defend Europe."

"If my memory is correct here, we spend about 75 percent of the entire cost of the military aspect of NATO," Sanders said. "Given the fact that France has a very good health care system and free public education, college education for their people, the UK has a good National Health Service and they also provide fairly reasonable higher education, you know what, yeah, I do believe that the countries of Europe should pick up more of the burden for their defense," he stated, noting that "with a huge deficit, with 47 million people living in poverty, with our inner cities collapsing, yeah, I do think countries like Germany and UK and France and European countries whose economy, or at least its standard of living and health care and education, they're doing pretty well."

America's longest-serving independent politician in history added: "I would not be embarrassed as president of the United States to say to our European allies, you know what, the United States of America cannot just support your economies. You got to put up your own fair share of the defense burden."The issue of US covering much of NATO expenses has been a point of tension for decades.

Hillary Clinton said she fully supported what she described as America's "continuing involvement in NATO," adding that "it is important to ask for our NATO allies to pay more of the cost," however. She invested all of her energy in praising NATO calling it "the most successful military alliance in probably human history." Yet the former secretary of state said Europeans should be paying more. "But that doesn't mean if they don't we leave, because I don't think that's in America's interests," Clinton said. When asked what she would do as commander-in-chief if the countries in the alliance refused to pay more, Clinton replied without hesitation: "I will stay in NATO."

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has become the latest Ankara official to threaten Brussels with the abandonment of last month's migrant agreement, just as the EU is considering making it easier to revoke the visa-free privileges it promised.

"The deal we struck with the EU is very clear. We want this human tragedy to end, our citizens to travel visa free, and the customs union to be updated," Cavosoglu told parliament in a speech.

"If the EU doesn't keep its word, including the migrants deal we will cancel all agreements."

According to the Turkey-inspired agreement, Ankara has promised to accept repatriated refugees from Greece with no EU entry permits, in exchange for sending the same number of vetted Syrian refugees. To finance this, Turkey would be given up to €6 billion in European funding over the next half-decade.

Sweden's housing minister has resigned after footage of him comparing the treatment of Palestinians by Israel to that of the Jews by the Nazis surfaced in local media. The politician has recently come under fire for his alleged ties to Turkish neo-fascist groups.

Mehmet Kaplan, a high-profile Swedish politician of Turkish origin and member of the Green party, was serving as a minister of Housing and Urban Development from 2014 until his resignation on Monday amid mounting controversy over his rumored close ties to the radical Turkish Islamist groups and his video interview from 2009 in which he says that "Israelis treat Palestinians in a way that is very like that in which Jews were treated during Germany in the 1930s."

Although the statement about Israel's policies towards Palestinians was made before Kaplan took office, Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, from the Social Democrats, said that "Mehmet Kaplan's overall assessment of the situation is that he will not be able to act as a minister and I share that assessment," while announcing his resignation from the government.

A huge explosion has rocked Kabul close to the US embassy, and several Afghan government ministries and security agencies. At least 28 people have been killed in the attack, AFP cited local police chief, while the Health Ministry confirmed 327 injured.

Reports of the number of injured vary. According to Pajhwok Afghan News, at least 100 people were wounded in the attack. Tolo news cited officials from Afghan Health Ministry who confirmed that some 198 people were injured in the Kabul suicide bombing. The casualties are expected to rise, Health Ministry spokesman Ismail Kawosi told Reuters, adding that civilians and Afghan security soldiers were among those killed and injured in the attack.

"Today's terrorist attack near the Puli Mahmood Khan area of Kabul City shows the clear defeat of the enemy in the face-to-face fight against Afghan security forces," the Afghan presidential palace said in a statement on Twitter.

"So Wall Street, US Big Oil and the proverbial "American interests" win this round at the circus ...

... The coup goes on. The real hyenas haven't yet pounced. So it's far from over."
The gloomy and repulsive night when the female President of the 7th largest economy in the world was the prey of choice fed to a lynch mob of hyenas in a drab, provincial Circus Maximus will forever live in infamy.

By 367 votes for and 137 against, the impeachment/coup/regime change-light drive against Dilma Rousseff cleared the Brazilian Congressional circus and will now go to the Senate, where a "special commission" will be set up. If approved, Rousseff will then be sidelined for 180 days and a low rent tropical Brutus, Vice-President Michel Temer, will ascend to power until the Senate's final verdict.

This lowly farce should serve as a wake-up call not only to the BRICS but to the whole Global South. Who needs NATO, R2P ("responsibility to protect") or "moderate rebels" when you can get your regime change just by tweaking a nation's political/judicial system?

The just completed visit of Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to India has generated considerable speculation. That is especially true in China, where opinion leaders noted not only was this was Carter's second trip to India during his relatively short tenure as Pentagon chief, but that he cancelled a previously scheduled trip to Beijing so that he could make this latest journey. That move, they feared, suggested a rather unsubtle tilt against China in favor of one of its potential geostrategic competitors.

The agreement that came from Carter's visit will do nothing to reassure the Chinese. Carter and his Indian counterpart, Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar, pledged to increase logistical cooperation in the military arena, especially maritime cooperation. Although that agreement is still a considerable distance away from constituting a full-fledged military alliance between the two nations, it continues a trend that has emerged over the past decade of ever deepening strategic ties. And mutual concerns about China's ambitions appear to be the driving force in the bilateral relationship.

In a fear and smear campaign being waged across NATO-dominated real estate, the Russian president is being portrayed as the personification of evil in an effort to hawk everything from military expansion to music videos.

George Orwell, in his timeless novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, demonstrated that the most effective method for keeping people under the jackboot of bureaucratic control is to foist upon them an enemy - even an imaginary one - that requires the 'benevolent' intervention of liberty-crushing government agencies and legislation.

Human nature being what it is, however, some less ethical readers interpreted Orwell's message more as an instruction manual than the warning it was meant to be.

"The way things are supposed to work is that we're supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that's why they're called public servants. They're supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that's why we're called private individuals. This dynamic - the hallmark of a healthy and free society - has been radically reversed.

Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That's the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable."

Glenn Greenwald

Government eyes are watching you.

They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you're watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

Simply by liking or sharing this article on Facebook or retweeting it on Twitter, you're most likely flagging yourself as a potential renegade, revolutionary or anti-government extremist—a.k.a. terrorist.

Yet whether or not you like or share this particular article, simply by reading it or any other articles related to government wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil liberties is enough to get you categorized as a particular kind of person with particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular kind of mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular kinds of activities.

Chances are, as the Washington Post reports, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you've had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren't inclined to march in lockstep to the police state's dictates.

The government has the know-how.

As The Intercept recently reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

Now all it needs is the data, which more than 90% of young adults and 65% of American adultsare happy to provide.

When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you've got nothing to worry about if you've got nothing to hide no longer applies.

Syria will do whatever it takes to take back the occupied Golan Heights from the Israeli regime, says a high-ranking official.

Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad made the announcement on Sunday, in response to remarks made earlier by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who claimed "the Golan Heights will remain in the hands of Israel forever," during the regime's first cabinet meeting in the occupied territory.

Noting that the occupied region belongs to Syria according to international law, Mekdad stressed that the Arab Syrian Golan Heights will be taken back from the Israelis.

"All options are on the table for getting back the occupied territory from Israel," he said during an interview aired on the Lebanese television channel al-Mayadeen.

"We are prepared to do anything in order to return the Golan to the Syrian motherland, including using military force," Mekdad (pictured below) asserted.