Former President George W Bush earned establishment praise by addressing the current turmoil with platitudes about institutional racism, oppression and empathy, but some weren't quite willing to absolve the invader of Iraq.

Saying he and his wife were "anguished" over the "suffocation" of African-American George Floyd in Minnesota last week, and the "injustice and fear that suffocate our country," Bush talked about "systemic racism" and "doctrine and habits of racial superiority."

"We can only see the reality of America's need by seeing it through the eyes of the threatened, oppressed, and disenfranchised," Bush wrote.

Why hasn't the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost all credibility? Any individual or institution that had been so often wrong would have lost public trust long ago. For instance, since people of every political persuasion have determined that media sources lack credibility, polls indicate that journalists are not regarded as particularly trustworthy.

A third of the country is showing signs of clinical anxiety or depression due to the severity of lockdown measures imposed by governors. More than 40 million workers are now unemployed. It is estimated that half of cancer patients and 80% of brain surgery patients have seen delays in crucial appointments. Schools remain closed, impeding education opportunities and hindering the return to work of parents.

Nobel laureate Michael Levitt noted that the lockdowns have caused damage:

"Social damage — domestic abuse, divorces, alcoholism — has been extreme. ... And then, you have those who were not treated for other conditions. The real virus was the panic virus. For reasons that were not clear to me, I think the leaders panicked and the people panicked."

While the federal government did not mandate policies to combat the coronavirus outbreak, the CDC, together with career bureaucrats Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, influenced the direction of the policies of state and local jurisdictions. The results: draconian guidelines and hysterical warnings based on horrifically bad models and science.

President Donald Trump has called the make-up of the G7, a club of wealthy developed nations, 'very outdated' and, right on cue, up pop the UK and Canadian governments to prove him right.

If you point one finger at someone, you have three pointing back at yourself. The truth of that old adage was proved once again with the news that the UK (along with Canada) is strongly opposing any plans to allow Russia back into the G7.

A Downing Street spokesman said that, while it was up to Donald Trump whether he invited Vladimir Putin to the next summit, which is to be hosted by the US, "Russia should not be readmitted to the G7 unless it ceases the aggressive and destabilising activity that threatens the safety of UK citizens and its allies."

Where does one even begin when faced with such incredible hypocrisy? "Aggressive and destabilising activity"? That describes very accurately what the UK got up to in the Balkans in the late 1990s, and later in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Boris Johnson said on Wednesday that he will have "no choice" but to offer UK visas to millions of Hong Kong residents if China pushes ahead with its plans for new national security legislation which critics fear would remove existing freedoms in the semi-autonomous region.

Writing in the Times of London newspaper on Wednesday, the prime minister warned that the new legislation would "dramatically erode" the island's autonomy, which currently enjoys judicial and political independence from mainland China.

The prime minister suggested that in response he would offer a 12-month extendable visa to all citizens on the island who are eligible to apply for a British National Overseas passport, some 3 million. It goes significantly further than the UK government's suggestion last week that it would extend visa rights to 300,000 holders of BNO passports, rather than all those eligible.

From an alleged plot to remove the president from office to Robert Mueller's appointment, the former deputy attorney general is going to face some intense interrogation Wednesday by senators.

Two years ago, then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein chafed when asked whether congressional Republicans might have legitimate reason to suspect the factual underpinnings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants that targeted Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in the Russia probe.

Seeming a bit perturbed, Rosenstein launched into a mini-lecture on how much care and work went into FISA applications at the FBI and Justice Department.

"There's a lot of talk about FISA applications. Many people I've seen talk about it seem not to recognize that a FISA application is actually a warrant, just like a search warrant. In order to get a FISA warrant, you need an affidavit signed by a career law enforcement officer who swears the information is true ... And if it is wrong, that person is going to face consequences," Rosenstein asserted.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken heat over refusing to hide a post from US President Donald Trump that Twitter claimed "glorified violence." But his reasons are more about placating power than defending free speech.

Zuckerberg's decision to leave up a Trump post condemning the riots in Minneapolis that warned "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" upset Facebook employees, a few of whom even threatened to appeal to the company's newly-appointed oversight board - notoriously larded with anti-Trump voices.

But the CEO's reasoning - "people should be able to see this for themselves, because ultimately accountability for those in positions of power can only happen when their speech is scrutinized out in the open" - had little in common with the fiery rhetoric of free speech activism. In fact, it was so mind-numbingly obvious it would likely have gone unremarked-upon in any other era. How, indeed, are Americans supposed to hold their leaders accountable if they don't know what those leaders are saying?

Peaceful protests degenerating into riots and arson, followed by violence, clashes with police and political demands for regime change: today's America, or what happened in Ukraine, North Africa and Serbia - or both?

How Americans view the events of the past week greatly depends on their political persuasion, media preferences and to large extent even ethnic identity. This is hardly the first death of an African-American man at the hands of police, nor the first time a peaceful protest turned violent and resulted in a city on fire. It is, however, the first Black Lives Matter protest that spread all over - and quickly gained an openly political, partisan dimension.

That ought to be baffling. The four officers involved in George Floyd's death were fired almost immediately, rather than suspended with pay pending investigation. One of them was charged with murder just days later. Conservatives and liberals alike agreed that Floyd was murdered and that the men responsible should face justice. Yet the riots started, and spread, anyway.

China's political, economic, industrial, technological, and military development poses the greatest threat to US hegemonic aims.

Its growing prominence on the world stage comes at a time of US decline.

The harder the US tries to reverse things by hardline policies, notably its endless wars by hot and other means, the further behind it falls.

In his book titled "The World in Crisis," historian Gabriel Kolko said US decline "began after the Korean War, was continued in relation to Cuba, and was greatly accelerated in Vietnam - but (Bush/Cheney did) much to exacerbate it further."

Obama/Biden followed the same counterproductive pattern. Do does Trump/Pence.

Historian Immanuel Wallerstein believed US decline began in the 1970s, accelerating post-9/11, adding:

"The economic, political and military factors that contributed to US hegemony are the same (ones) inexorably produc(ing) (its) decline."

'Political scientist Chalmers Johnson noted that the counterproductive path followed by the US is same dynamic that doomed past empires.

He cited "isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy," combined with growing homeland authoritarianism and loss of personal freedoms.

The Wiltshire county coroner investigating British Government allegations that Russian military agents using a Russian-made poison called Novichok caused the death of a woman, Dawn Sturgess, on July 8, 2018, has lied in his report of the inquest into her death.

This has been revealed by evidence gathered by the Wiltshire police two years ago, and recovered this week.

Senior Coroner David Ridley (lead image, right) has also concealed evidence from the coroner's court inquest file and withheld it from the Russian Government after promising "to assist with the Russian Federation's investigation of Ms Sturgess' death...if the Russian Federation were to be supplied with a copy of the coronial investigation file which focuses on Ms Sturgess' death."

Asked to respond to the police evidence and to say if he had passed the file to the Russian Government, Ridley refused to say. "You are not an Interested Person as defined by S47 Coroners and Justice Act 2009 [ click for link ], and therefore [Ridley] will not be responding to your e-mails or correspondence." But last December Ridley published a ruling identifying two Russians - the alleged Novichok assassins - as "Interested Persons", declaring "the same disclosure material...will be provided to all Interested Persons including Messrs Petrov and Boshirov."

Ridley did not provide the "disclosure material", according to the Russian Embassy in London.

The reason for Ridley's cover-up is that the "disclosure material" in the "coronial investigation file" includes Wiltshire police evidence, together with blood and toxicology tests from Salisbury District Hospital; these show Sturgess had taken illegal drugs, the contamination of which caused her death. The Wiltshire police and hospital medical reports were dated more than a week before the authorities claim to have discovered Novichok on the kitchen table at the apartment where Sturgess fell mortally ill.

The scientist behind lockdown in the UK has admitted that Sweden has achieved roughly the same suppression of coronavirus without draconian restrictions.

Neil Ferguson, who became known as "professor lockdown" after convincing Boris Johnson to radically curtail everyday freedoms, acknowledged that, despite relying on "quite similar science", the Swedish authorities had "got a long way to the same effect" without a full lockdown.

Sweden has adopted a far softer approach to Covid-19 than elsewhere in Europe, introducing voluntary social-distancing measures and keeping restaurants and bars and many schools open.