U.S. threats to crush Iran and North Korea may yet work, but as of now neither Tehran nor Pyongyang appears to be intimidated.

Repeated references by NSC adviser John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence to the "Libya model" for denuclearization of North Korea just helped sink the Singapore summit of President Trump and Kim Jong Un. To North Korea, the Libya model means the overthrow and murder of Libya strongman Col. Gadhafi, after he surrendered his WMD.

Wednesday, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui exploded at Pence's invocation of Libya:

"Vice-President Pence has made unbridled and impudent remarks that North Korea might end like Libya ... I cannot suppress my surprise at such ignorant and stupid remarks. Whether the U.S. will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown is entirely dependent upon the decision and behavior of the United States."

Yesterday, Trump canceled the Singapore summit.

Earlier this week at the Heritage Foundation, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid out our Plan B for Iran in a speech that called to mind Prussian Field Marshal Karl Von Moltke.

Italy's PM-designate Giuseppe Conte said he's given up on attempts to form a government after President Sergio Mattarella rejected his candidacy for economy minister. The country may now face a new election by the end of 2018.

"President [Mattarella] has received Prof. Giuseppe Conte .... who returned the mandate given to him on May 23 to form the government. The president has thanked him for his effort in fulfilling this task," Ugo Zampetti, an official within the presidential administration, told RAI. After the talk, Mattarella said that he was going to make a decision on the new parliamentary vote in the country in the coming hours.

Conte confirmed his failure to form "the government of change" in Italy, saying: "I can assure you that I did my utmost to try to fulfill this task."

Mattarella told the media that he "agreed to all the ministers except the finance minister" proposed by the coalition. "I asked for a figure, who would mean not risking an exit from the euro," he explained.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella has appointed IMF official Carlo Cottarelli as the interim prime minister tasked with forming a new government. The PM said elections will be held no later than August unless he wins the confidence of parliament.

President Mattarella announced his choice Monday, having diluted the deal between two Eurosceptic parties who had collective majority in the March elections and had since dedicated themselves to forming a new government.

The newly-appointed PM Cottarelli vowed to establish a new government "very quickly" to take the country through this period before fresh elections are held in the fall of 2018 or early next year.

"I'll present myself to parliament with a program which - if it wins the backing of parliament - would include the approval of the 2019 budget. Then parliament would be dissolved with elections at the beginning of 2019," Cottarelli said shortly after being named interim prime minister.

French Total will buy a 10-percent stake in Russian Novatek's LNG-2 project in the Arctic, Novatek's chief, Leonid Mikhelson, said, as quoted by Reuters.

France's President Emmanuel Macron visited Russia for the St. Petersburg economic forum and the Total deal was signed during his visit.

Total already holds a 20-percent stake in Novatek and is one of the partners developing the company's first LNG project in Yamal, along with Chinese CNPC and Silk Road Fund. This second deal for Arctic LNG-2 could be finalized in the first quarter of 2019, Mikhelson said, adding that the project could be worth around $25.5 billion. The final investment decision may be made in the second half of 2019.

Total, Novatek's CEO also said, will have an option of increasing its stake in the project by 5 percent, but the Russian company intends to maintain a share of at least 60 percent in Arctic LNG-2.

Total was recently forced to reconsider its participation in the South Pars field development in Iran by President Trump's reimposition of economic sanctions on Iran. The company has not yet pulled out of the project, but it has said it will have to unless the US Treasury Department grants it a sanction waiver. The EU is also trying to shield its companies from the Iran sanctions.

One and a half years after Russia and Turkey signed a deal to build the strategic "Turkish Stream" gas pipeline in October 2016, putting an end to a highly contentious period in Russia-Turkish relation which in late 2015 hit rock bottom after the NATO-member state shot down a Russian jet over Syria, on Saturday Russian state energy giant Gazprom and the Turkish government reached a deal on the construction of the land-based part of the Turkish Stream branch that will bring Russian gas to European consumers.

According to Reuters, the two counterparts signed a protocol that would allow the construction, which was stalled by a legal rift over gas prices, to go forward. Gazprom and Turkey's state-owned BOTAS agreed on the terms and conditions of the project, Gazprom said in a statement, adding that the deal "allows to move to practical steps for the implementation of the project." The actual construction would be carried out by a joint venture called TurkAkim Gaz Tasima which will be owned by Gazprom and BOTAS in equal shares, Gazprom said.

Earlier on Saturday, Turkish president Erdogan said that Gazprom and BOTAS resolved a long-running legal dispute over import prices in 2015-2016, and as a result Turkey would gain $1 billion as part of the gas-price settlement reached with Gazprom, in which Turkey and the Russian natgas giant agreed on a 10.25% price discount for gas supplied by Russia in 2015 and 2016.

In an interview with DER SPIEGEL, former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer talks about the danger of war against Iran, the deterioration of trans-Atlantic relations under U.S. President Donald Trump and the serious need for Germany to invest massively in the European Union's future.

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Fischer, you were -- together with your French and British colleagues -- among the first to embark on negotiations with Iran on its nuclear program in 2003. The 2015 agreement was to some extent your legacy. How did Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Iran deal affect you?

Fischer: I don't take this personally, but I am very concerned about the disastrous consequences of Trump's decision. They will be much more dramatic than portrayed in most of the comments so far. The aim of the agreement was to prevent a second disaster after the Iraq War, namely a large-scale land war in Iran. After the Iraq War, the Iranians tried in vain to divide Europe and the United States. Donald Trump has now managed to do just that.

DER SPIEGEL: Are you afraid that there will now be a war against Iran?

Fischer: I can't imagine that Trump could want that. One of the reasons Trump came into power was the frustration over these unwinnable, endless wars.

"The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out 'stop!' When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer." ― Bertolt Brecht, Selected Poems

There are days I wake up, and I'm not sure what country I live in anymore.

There are days I wake up and want to go right back to sleep in the hopes that this surreal landscape of government-sanctioned injustice, corruption and brutality is just a really bad dream.

There are days I am so battered by the never-ending wave of bad news that I have little outrage left in me: I am numb.

And then I get hold of myself, shake myself out of the doldrums, and remind myself that it's not yet time to give up: America needs our outrage and our alertness and our tenacity and our fierce determination to remain a free people in a land where justice matters.

This is still our country.

Don't just sit there.

Do something.

Welcome to Stratfor, the brainchild of George Friedman, a Texas academic and sometime U.S. government consultant, who became an intelligence entrepreneur and runs what the press routinely calls "a private CIA" out of an office building in downtown Austin. In a crowded market where The New York Times can't successfully charge for premium content, Friedman's thriving business targets a key market niche: corporate types with geopolitical exposure who are too busy or too ill-informed to use Google.

"Controlling costs but without skimping on quality" is the secret to the McDonald's-like commercial success of Stratfor, Friedman explains during a break from his New York book tour. "The secret is the division of labor: we have people who collect intelligence, people who analyze intelligence, and people who write," he says. "It's designed to give the subscriber a consistent product." Friedman is promoting an exercise in futurology titled The Next 100 Years - it's the book you get free with your $349 - that teems with counter-intuitive assertions, for example, that Poland will become Europe's great power by the middle of this century. Poland? I spent some time in the country a few years ago, pitching the Polish finance ministry on sovereign debt issues for Credit Suisse. You could have fooled me.

Friedman and I meet in the bar of a New York hotel, where I sip a cappuccino while Friedman drinks white wine. He checks the label of the bottle of house white burgundy with the eager eye of a man who has recently traded up to the good stuff from academic plonk. With his diminutive frame, wide mouth, and pedantic smile, he reminds me of Yoda, but without the Eastern European grammar. The child of Holocaust survivors who fled the Communist regime in Hungary, Friedman attended public schools in New York and put in 20 years teaching at middling colleges with side gigs consulting for the defense community. His children are yeshiva-educated, and two of them are serving as officers in the U.S. military.

Does being Jewish affect the way you view the world, I begin. "Being Jewish keeps things in perspective," he says, smiling. "We lost two temples."

Exporting Golan oil is problematic under international law but, were the U.S. to unilaterally recognize the Golan as Israel's, that oil could potentially be exported to the U.S. Major U.S. oil investors and lobbyists are therefore pushing hard for Trump to make that move.

While President Trump has reneged on many of his campaign promises - namely, those more populist and non-interventionist in nature - he has undeniably fulfilled those that appealed to his pro-Israel, Zionist supporters. First, Trump announced late last year that his administration would officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. This move was then followed by his more recent decision to unilaterally remove the U.S. from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran nuclear deal, which has long been criticized by Israel.

Both moves were highly controversial and poorly received by many U.S. allies, particularly European nations. They were also both orchestrated and promoted by Trump's top donor, Zionist billionaire and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who donated $30 million to the Republican Party following Trump's fulfillment of his two major pro-Israel promises. Adelson was also responsible for the removal of H.R. McMaster as National Security Adviser and his replacement with pro-Israel hawk and Adelson confidant John Bolton.

However, recent statements made by Israeli government officials suggest that Trump's work on behalf of pro-Israel hard-liners is only just beginning. According to an exclusive report published in Reuters, the Israeli government is now pushing the Trump administration to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a portion of Southern Syria that Israel has occupied since 1967 and annexed in 1981.

There was so much hope in January 2009 when Barack Obama took office. Here was the first black president of the United States, promising to be a leader for all Americans, to halt the rise of the oceans and to be the most transparent administration ever. Even black Americans were saying the Civil War was finally over.

Unfortunately for America, it didn't turn out that way. As more and more evidence is revealed daily on the evening news, it is now very clear the Obama administration was the most corrupt presidency in the history of the republic.

As Mr. Obama's favorite, President Abraham Lincoln, warned us, the most dangerous threats can come from domestic enemies.

First of all, that bit about being a leader for all Americans, color-blind if you will, was a tall tale. Mr. Obama never missed an opportunity to sew racial divide. During his term in the Oval Office, racial relations literally went off the cliff. Mr. Obama and first lady Michelle promoted the false narrative that white America was literally guilty of hunting down blacks with glee. They whipped up resentment in minority communities against the police, even though a Harvard study found that blacks are no more likely to be killed by police than whites.