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Zimbabwe receives $150 million in U.S. aid funding annually to combat food insecurity and support climate resilience programs for 2.1 million people. A narrow dirt road snakes along the banks of a small river and leads to the remote village of Birirano. Marked by baobab trees and drought-tolerent shrubs, this small community is sandwiched between desolate mountains in Zimbabwe’s eastern district of Chipinge. Far from the main highway, it is largely cut off from the rest of the country and the world. With limited livelihood possibilities, villagers here have long been locked in an unending cycle of poverty. Over the...

How many IQ points do you lose from Trump Derangement Syndrome or similar conditions of blind political rage? I was asking myself that while listening to the stupefying question asked of Trump adviser Stephen Miller by CNN's Jim Acosta at Wednesday's White House press conference. Miller had been explaining -- with a level of clarity and specificity not often seen at these events -- the immigration proposal being proffered by Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue and now being backed by the president. The press audience appeared impatient with these details, however, waiting to pounce as it almost always does....

enezuela is a woeful reminder that no country is so rich that it can't be driven into the ground by revolutionary socialism. People are now literally starving — about three-quarters of the population lost weight last year — in what once was the fourth-richest country in the world on a per capita basis. A country that has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia is suffering shortages of basic supplies. Venezuela now totters on the brink of bankruptcy and civil war, in the national catastrophe known as the Bolivarian Revolution. The phrase is the coinage of the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo...

Former Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett is riding into a new role. On Monday, Lyft announced Jarrett will join the team as a member of the Board of Directors. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/former-obama-advisor-valerie-jarrett-joins-lyft-board-directors-n788606

/begin my translation N. Korea's Rodong Sinmun "U.S. Mainland in Crisis of Life and Death; Wave your White Flag" Kwon Soon-wan 2017.08.03 11:34 On Aug. 3, N. Korean media threatened U.S., saying, “Every minute and every second, the new reality that U.S. mainland is on the knife's edge of life and death is forcing U.S. administration to wave a white flag and fundamentally change her N. Korea policy.” Rodong Sinmun, the ruling party's newspaper, carried an individual column titled "Heed the Warning of Juche Korea." The column claimed, "It is not the denuclearization of N. Korea but the security of...

The talking heads in the media and Democrats in Congress have been obsessing about supposed Russian interference in last fall’s presidential election. In response to the continuous Trump-Russia-Putin litany, Congressman Steve King (R-IA) came back with his own list of the Obama administration’s interference in foreign elections — including one in Macedonia, which I had forgotten about. Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals translated into Macedonian, paid for by the American taxpayer!

State Dept. documents reveal exchanges of classified info over insecure email and alleged examples of Clinton Foundation donors receiving special treatment from Hillary Clintons staff.

It is not very common for Europeans to move to African countries. However, in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008 many Portuguese have sought a better future in former Portuguese colony Angola. Previously, many Angolans went to Portugal, but now labour migration is going in the opposite direction. Figures from 2014 show that between 100,000 and 150,000 Portuguese live in Angola and the migration does not seem to be subsiding. NAI researcher Lisa Åkesson is writing a book about this reverse migration. “The book has attracted a lot of attention, because it is a new form of migration...

Subtitle: Under the new chief of staff, H.R. McMaster and Steve Bannon have gone to the mattresses. General John Kelly may be trying to institute military-style discipline in the West Wing, but that hasn’t put a stop to the civil war happening over President Donald Trump’s National Security Council. If anything, the dawning of the Kelly era may have accelerated that war. The national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, has removed three NSC aides loyal to Trump aide Steve Bannon in the last three weeks. Bannon allies inside and outside the administration have fired back, starting rumors that McMaster is on...

Rediff.com  » News » Does Donald Trump deserve a chance? Does Donald Trump deserve a chance? August 03, 2017 08:35 IST While political observers are unable to make head or tail of the US President, those moving in high business and industry circles tell B S Raghavan that Trump's style is exactly that of an aggressive and successful businessman.Illustration: Dominic Xavier/Rediff.comUnited States President Donald J Trump, both during his campaign and after assuming office, has stood on their head all the canons held sacrosanct by students of leadership, management, public administration and governance.He has, in fact, set at naught a whole...

Venezuela is on a fast track to the apocalypse — with the regime’s efforts to lock in its control only making it worse. Thanks to the socialist misrule of the late Hugo Chavez, the country was already the murder and kidnapping capital of the world when Nicolás Maduro took over as president. Now it’s No. 1 in inflation, too. Food is scarce; medicine scarcer still. Regime thugs answer protests with deadly force. Maduro has used corrupt courts to sideline the opposition-run parliament, and is in the process of setting up a phony “constituent assembly” of loyalists to replace it. In...

August 3, 2017 Thursday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time Reading 1 Ex 40:16-21, 34-38Moses did exactly as the LORD had commanded him.On the first day of the first month of the second yearthe Dwelling was erected.It was Moses who erected the Dwelling.He placed its pedestals, set up its boards, put in its bars,and set up its columns.He spread the tent over the Dwellingand put the covering on top of the tent,as the LORD had commanded him.He took the commandments and put them in the ark;he placed poles alongside the ark and set the propitiatory upon it.He brought...

Los Angeles still leads the nation in television pilot production, but a study released today by FilmL.A. reveals that the home of Hollywood took a double-digit hit this year to fall to its lowest total since 2009. However, with pilots down this most recent cycle in all the major production centers except tax-incentive lucrative Louisiana, a jump in straight-to-series orders by cable outlets and the streaming services might be part of the problem.

Hillary to Dump Bill Globe (T/F)? Furious Hillary Clinton has dumped horndog hubby Bill — once and for all — after discovering a hidden love nest atop his presidential library in Little Rock, Ark., where he beds starstruck beauties! Now fed-up Hillary — who lost to Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election — is talking to lawyers and demanding a $350 million divorce settlement, sources say. “Hillary doesn’t need Bill anymore — and his secret, taxpayer-funded sex den was the final humiliation,” says a source. “She confronted Bill and told him: ‘It’s OVER!’ ” President Barack Obama’s former secretary...

The number of U.S. honeybees, a critical component to agricultural production, rose in 2017 from a year earlier, and deaths of the insects attributed to a mysterious malady that's affected hives in North America and Europe declined, according a U.S. Department of Agriculture honeybee health survey released Tuesday.

White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller found himself clashing with CNN correspondent Jim Acosta at Wednesday's White House press briefing. "What the president is proposing here does not sound like it's in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration. The Statue of Liberty says, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,'" Acosta said, quoting from the poem The New Colossus, which was inscribed on the statue after its erection.

Hillary has a new title. For years, she has basked in being addressed as "The Honorable This" or "The Honorable That." First it was the wife of the Attorney General of Arkansas, (well, someone has to be), married to some dweeb named Bill. Then it was First Lady of Arkansas, then First Lady of the United States, (although anyone who watched the Clintons knew she was not his first lady, nor on any given day his latest!) Then the titles were Senator, then Democratic Nominee-Presumptive, Then Madame Secretary, then Madam President-Presumptive.... but now, horror or horrors, NO TITLE. So, obviously,...

Black residents of Irvine? They’re virtually nonexistent. Yet, even if Mebane had known the African-American population in Irvine was 1.8 percent, he wouldn’t have been concerned. He was a football player with multiple multimillion-dollar contracts behind him. “For us,” Mebane said, “it was just find the right place where we would be comfortable.” The signs that renting a home in Irvine could be a problem came early. Mebane’s Realtor took him and his wife to several homes, only to face icy receptions. During one visit, Mebane extended his hand to greet an owner who extended his in return — while...

Since replacing Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster has worked to wrest control of the National Security Council away from the nationalist wing of the administration, carrying out a series of high-profile staffing changes in the process. The latest move: Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the NSC, was shown the door today by McMaster, who, according to a White House official, decided that "a different set of experiences is best-suited to carrying that work forward." The White House said that Cohen-Watnick will remain in another national security position in the administration. Think back: Cohen-Watnick first...