As Donald Trump surges ahead in Iowa, taking the bellicose billionaire even closer to winning the Republican nomination, President Obama is busy trying to counter the GOP frontrunner's message about "radical Islamic extremism."

Trump has capitalized on events like the Paris attacks and the San Bernardino massacre. Those tragedies underscored the need to remain vigilant when it comes to immigration, a topic Trump has some rather strong opinions on. In a polarizing move, Trump officially called for a Muslim ban last month. No Muslims should be allowed to enter the country Trump said, until we can "figure out what's going on."

Needless to say, that message is starkly at odds with the President's views, but as extreme as Trump's position most certainly is, it's resonated with large swaths of the American electorate.

In a bid to counter the growing backlash against the Muslim world, Obama will make his first visit to a mosque on Wednesday when the President will stop by the Islamic Society of Baltimore, described as "a sprawling community center in the city's western suburbs that serves thousands of people with a place of worship, a housing complex and schools." Here's a fun image from the center where you can, should you choose to do so, jump rope:

A Dunedin woman says she had better food growing up in a Nazi-occupied country than the ''disgusting'' meals on wheels trucked from Auckland and Tauranga.

Petronella Wennekes (87) cancelled the service last Friday. She felt she had no choice given the quality of the meals.

The trucked and frozen meals are reheated before delivery under a controversial 15-year outsourcing deal between Southern District Health Board and Compass Group.

The Otago Daily Times reported on Saturday that fears have emerged about the viability of the volunteer delivery system run by Age Concern Otago, because of cancellations and shrinking delivery runs.

Two weeks ago, Compass started trucking meals from the North Island. Mrs Wennekes said the watery and soft vegetables formed a mush, including ''soft'' roast potatoes.

''It was disgusting.''

Lumpy desserts stuck to their cardboard packaging, and she had been unable to scrape them into a bowl.

''When I was young, I lived in Holland. I've been through five years of war in Holland, and the occupation from the Germans, and I never ate anything like this.''

She feared many older people would not speak up.

Since 1995 more than three lakh Indian farmers have committed suicide - the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history. Vidarbha district of Maharashtra alone has seen 3145 farmer suicides in the last three years. Though the causes of the poverty that drives farmers to suicide are multi-dimensional Professor K.Nagaraj's definitive study of Farmer Suicides identifies Neo-Liberal policies introduced in the 1990's as the precipitating factor of the agrarian crisis rocking rural India.

The introduction of Genetically Modified crops in the country is one such neo-liberal policy that is today acknowledged to have contributed significantly to trapping many farmers in a debt trap particularly in the cotton growing areas of Vidarbha district. BT cotton was introduced in India with the stated objective of making cotton pest resistant thereby reducing pesticide use, input costs and being environment friendly at the same time. 15 years of experience with BT cotton manifest the inefficiency of the seed with the pest developing resistance against the crop. The situation is further worsened with the development of secondary pests which turn out to be major cotton pests in some time. Thus BT cotton seeds which are prized substantially higher than traditional varieties turned out to be non pest resistant and a major pesticide guzzler thereby increasing the input costs of farmers by leaps and bounds without giving any return.

The Long, Sordid U.S. Policy of Using "Bad Guy" and "Expendable" Assets

"Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?"

This first line of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" opens the latest trailer for the upcoming big-budget super-hero movie Suicide Squad. It poses a pertinent question, because, unfortunately for those of us in real life, the central premise of the film's story is not just the stuff of comic book fantasy.

That premise is introduced in an earlier, more brooding trailer. Over a steak dinner at a fine restaurant, a government operative named Amanda Waller (played by Viola Davis) debriefs two other U.S. officials about her new top secret program: a black ops team nicknamed the "Suicide Squad."

When the "intifada of the knives" set off in October last year, Western reporters flooded in to Jerusalem to cover the new "escalation," interview people from "both sides of the conflict" and raise several variations of the old question: "Is this the beginning of a third intifada?"

Inevitably, the journalists left once a massive crackdown significantly reduced the number of deadly attacks against Israelis in the city. It is an all too familiar pattern for Palestinians, who know by now that it's only "escalation" when there are dead or wounded Israelis. Deaths, injuries, arrests and home demolitions inflicted on Palestinians by Israel are deemed business as usual, not worthy of further inquiry.

The daily acts of collective punishment suffered by Palestinians in Jerusalem and their slow ethnic cleansing are too routine to be considered newsworthy. The temporary checkpoints, closures and concrete blocks imposed during the crackdown may have gone and the numbers of Israeli troops on the streets may have been reduced. Yet the Israeli repression — and Palestinian resistance — remains.

Holding the dead hostage

One of Israel's most troubling tactics is its withholding the bodies of slain Palestinians.

In mid-October the Israeli security cabinet endorsed several measures to quell the unrest. One involved reviving a decades-long policy of withholding the bodies of Palestinians accused of carrying out attacks. Since then, more than 80 bodies have been withheld. Israel began gradually releasing the bodies in late December after weeks of mass protests, most notably in Hebron, but the bodies of 10 Palestinian Jerusalemites remain in Israeli morgues.

Thousands of people marched in 70 French cities, including Paris, to demand immediate action to stop France's ongoing state of emergency and openly voice outrage over government plans to revoke the French citizenship of dual nationals, many of them Muslims, convicted of terrorism.

Up to 20,000 protesters - many of them members of human rights groups, political parties and trade unions - took part in a peaceful protest in Paris on Saturday, RTL reported the organizers as saying.

According to police estimates, some 5,500 people gathered in the heart of the French capital, between Place de la République and the Palais-Royal, holding banners that read: "State of emergency, police state" and "My France of liberties, where are you?"

For reasons that greatly puzzle this writer, Democrats in the United States seem to have divided into two camps. We will call the first one Camp B, for those campers who apparently believe that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is the savior, the one the world has been waiting for. It is he, they seem to believe, who will usher in a new golden era of equality, one in which banks will be held accountable for their crimes, and students will be able to attend the university of their choice without going into lifelong debt. Under a Sanders administration, we are told, the United States will play a new role on the world stage, fostering independence and self-determination for all (except the Palestinians of course; we all know that they don't count) by means of diplomacy, and not weaponry. The monies stolen by the rich from the poor will be returned to those who rightfully earned them. The world's citizens will then, in some symbolic way, join hands and sing Kumbaya, as this new age of Aquarius dawns upon us all.

The remaining Democrats are encamped, it appears, in Camp H. These folks seem to believe that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is the one who will bring us into this bright new world. Never mind her vote to authorize then President George W. Bush to invade Iraq! As House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said, the voters aren't interested in the past; they want to know what the candidate will do in the future! Forget Mrs. Clinton's statement that, if Iran were to threaten her beloved Israel, she would, as president, obliterate Iran! Similar to Mr. Sanders, Palestinians are not worthy of her concern. And need we look at her close ties to every organization linked to wealth? While it may have been her husband who bedded an intern, Mrs. Clinton it seems has been intimate with every corporate industry associated with the 1%.

Court proceedings against a peace activist who scrawled "arms tested on children" on a battlefield truck bound for the world's biggest arms fair have been scrapped.

Vyara Glysen, 28, was arrested in September and charged with criminal damage after she graffitied a military vehicle that was en route to the Excel Center in east London. The exhibition space was being prepped for the Defense & Security Equipment International (DSEI) weapons fair, scheduled to take place the following week.

The fair is held every two years in London, and is regularly attended by representatives from repressive regimes. It has also previously provided a platform for weapons dealers to illegally promote arms that are used for torture.

A scandal broke out in one of Swedish schools after a 12-year-old girl born in Ethiopia found that a children's map depicted African people in offensive manner. The publisher had to quickly delete the "racist" map from the website.

"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Truthout shortly after a 9.0 earthquake in Japan caused a tsunami that destroyed the cooling system of Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan.

While this statement might sound overdramatic, Gundersen may be right.

Several nuclear reactor meltdowns in the plant, which at the time forced the mandatory evacuations of thousands of people living within a 15-mile radius of the damaged power plant, persist, and experts like Gundersen continue to warn that this problem is not going to go away.