Drama on the U.S.-Mexico border continues. Drama also continues in polls gauging voter reaction to illegal immigration challenges in the region.

Two-thirds of all voters now frown on accepting people with "questionable" asylum claims while 52% agree with President Trump's decision to declare a national emergency over "illegal crossings." Another 47% would approve a "mass action by the federal government to round up and remove thousands of illegal immigrants from the U.S."

So says a Harvard University Center for American Political Studies/Harris poll of 2,182 registered U.S. voters conducted June 26-29.

The controversial ex-F1 boss says the Russian president should be "running Europe" and that he is not a supporter of democracy.

The former boss of Formula One Group {F-1), which manages Formula One car racing and controls the commercial rights to the sport, Bernie Ecclestone, says he would stand in front of any gunman who tried to shoot Vladimir Putin because he is a "good guy" who had nothing to do with the novichok attack in Salisbury.

According to the billionaire, Mr Putin would have been "too busy" to have been involved in the attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who were poisoned with the nerve agent in March last year.

Mr Ecclestone, 88, told The Times: "If someone had a machine gun and was prepared to shoot Putin, I would stand in front of him.

Fired Jackson County Deputy Zach Wester was arrested Wednesday on racketeering and numerous other charges for allegedly planting meth and other street drugs on unsuspecting motorists before hauling them off to jail.

Agents with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, who have been investigating Wester for more than nine months, arrested him in Crawfordville and took him to the Wakulla County Jail, where he is being held without bail. Wester, expected to make his first court appearance on Thursday, invoked his right to remain silent and declined to speak with investigators.

He was arrested on 52 counts in all. Aside from the racketeering count, he was charged with a number of other felonies, including official misconduct, false imprisonment, fabricating evidence and possession of a controlled substance. He was also charged with misdemeanor charges of perjury, possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia, FDLE said.

Jackson County Sheriff Lou Roberts, State Attorney William "Bill" Eddins of the 1st Judicial Circuit and Chris Williams, special agent in charge of the FDLE's Pensacola office, discussed the case in an afternoon news conference. One of Wester's alleged victims, Teresa Odom, wept as they discussed details of the case.

"I'm overwhelmed," she said afterward, adding she was proud of one of the FDLE agents who worked with her during the investigation.

Workers belonging to the Indian ethnic group in Britain tend to have higher average earnings than their white British counterparts, a new study based on official statistics revealed on Tuesday.

The UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) found in its 'Ethnicity Pay Gaps in Great Britain: 2018' analysis that while on average ethnic minorities earn 3.8 per cent less than white ethnic groups, Indians and Chinese tend to buck the trend by having higher average earnings. Workers in the Bangladeshi and Pakistani ethnic groups tend to have the lowest average pay compared to their white British counterparts. Hugh Stickland, senior ONS analyst remarked:

"Overall, employees from certain ethnic groups such as Indian and Chinese, have higher average earnings than their white British counterparts. However, all other ethnic groups have average wages lower than for white British employees, with employees from the Bangladeshi ethnic group having the largest pay gap. However, once characteristics such as education and occupation are taken into account, the pay gap between white British and most other ethnic groups becomes narrower, though significant differences still remain."

The data, based on median gross hourly earnings between 2012 and 2018, shows that the Chinese ethnicity group is the highest paid, receiving 15.75 pounds an hour in 2018, followed by the Indian ethic group, which earns 13.47 pounds an hour.

There is a backlash growing across Asia against Western 'begpackers' who want the locals to fund their travels around the world.

People across the continent are growing tired of the sight of seeing relatively affluent Westerns begging on the streets in the hope that locals help pay for their journey to the next destination.

Bali has now officially cracked down on the growing issue of problematic "tourists".

One thousand employees co-signed Project Veritas has received and published documents from an insider at Google. The documents show Google employees discussing a letter asking Google leadership "to end Google's business relationship with Breitbart." This is the fifth release in a series of document releases from insiders at Google.

According to the documents, the letter was co-signed by over one thousand Google employees. Breitbart News has published similar materials which reportedly show a group at Google "sought to strike at Breitbart News' revenue by kicking the site off Google's market-dominating ad services."

Powered by nothing more than wokeness and self-regard Megan Rapinoe threatens to go on an intergalactic ego trip - but we are forced to earnestly listen to every pronouncement of this "shero."

One could forgive a soccer player for losing their head after leading their team to a World Cup, but Rapinoe had evidently decided to turn the past month into her personal political pulpit from which to issue her reference-free assertions before a ball had been kicked in France.

From the intellectually dishonest and self-serving demands for "equal" pay, to the claim that "you can't win without gays" ("that's science, right there" she assured, vaguely) to boasts that she wouldn't "f**king go to the White House" if invited after winning.

The origins of Jeffrey Epstein's financial empire remain a mystery to even billionaires. But the investor's former Wall Street mentor has one theory about how Epstein amassed his fortune: Fraud.

In a phone interview with Observer, Steven Hoffenberg alleged Epstein participated in a Ponzi scheme the two ran together in the 1980s, before using the ill-gotten gains to launch his investment company with the help of financial loans from Deutsche Bank.

"Its a very simplistic financial fraud that he concealed from everybody that gave him tainted money," said Hoffenberg. "He never told anybody, and I literally mean anybody, that gave him any money since he left Towers, that he was part of Towers. And that's a securities fraud because when you take money from people, you have to tell them your history."

Hoffenberg oversaw Towers Financial, but was sentenced to 20 years in jail in 1997 for defrauding clients out of $450 million. Although Epstein was never charged in the case, a lawsuit filed last year by former Towers investors lists the financier as "an uncharged co-conspirator," and alleges he "knowingly and intentionally utilized funds he fraudulently diverted and obtained from this massive Ponzi scheme for his own personal use to support a lavish lifestyle."

Democrats Control America's Most Dangerous Cities. So Why Do They Keep Passing the Buck on Gun Crime?
Progressives and conservatives traditionally have exhibited different attitudes to the lessons of history. While conservatives have tended to take cues from the past as they build measured hopes for the future, progressives have urged that we break free from tradition in order to create bold and ambitious blueprints for a society they consider to be more just. In the United States, however, this pattern appears to be breaking down, as it is now progressives who tend to embrace a more rigid, backward-looking approach, especially on issues tied to identity. Unlike conservatives, progressives aren't looking to revive a better, sometimes idealized version of their country. But they have become bogged down in the politics of historical redress, at the expense of forward-looking policies that would actually improve people's lives.

A microcosm of this larger tendency was put on display during last month's Democratic primary debates, which touched on the issue of urban gun violence. No Democratic presidential candidate expressed a sense of responsibility for the plague of violent crime in America's cities, even though the largest urban areas are almost all controlled by Democratic politicians.

The issue first came up during questions posed to Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana. NBC's moderators challenged Buttigieg by bringing up a recent incident in which a white police officer killed a 54-year-old black man. While that episode nominally relates to the issue of urban gun violence, it also allows Democrats to dwell in ideologically comfortable territory, since progressives have been drawing attention to police-involved shootings for years. (Indeed, it would be far more useful — and revealing — if it were instead conservative Republicans who were being pressed on this problem). Moreover, the preferred Democrat approach — tracing the problem to the country's original sin of racism — isn't especially helpful.

In answer to the question, Buttigieg dutifully offered a look back to history, noting "there's a wall of mistrust put up one racist act at a time." A question about the other shootings in South Bend — the vast majority of which are not committed by police officers — would have been far more illuminating. South Bend is one of the 30 most dangerous cities in America, with a per-capita homicide rate (16.8 per 100,000) comparable to that of Chicago (17.5 per 100,000). And this rate has remained virtually unchanged since Buttigieg became mayor in 2012, despite the seven years he's had to address the problem.

Europe now has to be honest with itself - with enemies in its midst, it can either sacrifice some of the legal rights it holds so dear, or tolerate the deaths of innocents as a price worth paying for keeping its principles.

The decision to pay €500 to Salah Abdeslam, the last man alive of the Paris attackers who killed 131 people in November 2015, as compensation for illegal 24/7 surveillance of his French prison cell since his arrest, has provoked widespread outrage. To many he is lucky to have avoided a public execution, a luxury not afforded to his jihadist gang's victims, never mind safeguarding his right to use the toilet without being watched.

But to advocates of the rule of law this is something of a pedantic triumph to the situation - according to the present legal system even a convicted man enjoys the same constitutional right to privacy. No one is below the law.