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Chinese government media has produced a video purported to be that of a Muslim Uighur musician reported to have died in a Chinese detention facility. The video dated Sunday shows Abdurehim Heyit saying he is in good health..... The ISIS holdouts are under assault from the US backed Kurdish forces in eastern Syria in what is reported to be the final assault to take the Islamic State out..... Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat Senator from Minnesota, announced her candidacy for President Sunday..... Politics in Israel and Supreme Court Justice Hanan Melcer, chairman of the Central Elections Committee, ordered a probe into...

Its all played out like a WWE wrestling show produced by President Trump's close friend Vince McMahon, but the drama over border wall funding is moving towards its climax as we approach Christmas.... General Jim Mattis is leaving as Secretary of Defense.... On to Afghanistan where President Trump has decided to pull out half of the US troops in that country.... This week US Afghanistan representative Zalmay Khalilzad met with the Taliban for two days of talks.... The Justice Department is charging two Chinese men with hacking into computer networks of private companies and government agencies..... Israel's "Haaretz" newspaper reported...

Good morning, its time for solid news instead of political Kool Aid. The US military has attacked Syrian army positions in Eastern Syria with 14 missiles, that's the world from Syria's defense ministry...... To the rising tensions over Brexit in the UK. The opposition Labor Party says the country faces a constitutional crisis if the Prime Minister does not reveal the legal advice she has been given by the Attorney General about Brexit..... Nigel Farage went on his radio show Sunday and he took time out from opposing Mrs. May's Brexit plan to trash the political party of Brexit he...

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez faces growing pressure from within his Socialist Party to call an early election, before scandals besetting his four-month-old minority government undermine a surge in voter support. Riding high in the polls, Sánchez aims to serve a full term to mid-2020 as he focuses on approving next year’s budget and countering renewed independence moves in the Catalonia region. But last week, his science minister was forced to deny media reports he cheated on his taxes, days after a recording emerged of the justice minister using a homophobic slur. Two other ministers have already been pushed out,...

The detailed analysis of this tool and the luminescence dating of the sediment that bears the wooden remains indicate that the objects were deposited around 90,000 years ago, and thus were made by neandertals. The Micro-CT analysis and a close examination of the surface have shown that a yew trunk was cut longitudinally into two halves. One of this halves was scraped with a stone tool and treated with fire to harden it and to facilitate the scraping to obtain a pointed morphology. Use-wear analysis revealed that it was used for digging in search of food, flint, or simply to...

(Nigel Farage at :52)"...... but other things are going on and there's a, I really think very big story out there and you'd struggle if you went through today's newspapers to really find it, the 'Sunday Times' has done more on it than anybody else, but it's what's going on in Italy. Often we get the impression in this country from those that wish us to remain in the European Union and would like to force a second referendum on us that we're the ones with the problem that everything in Brussels and across the EU is hunky dory. Well...

Last week saw one of the noblest acts of human courage in modern times. Yet it has been given far less attention than it should have been....... But the French police officer, Arnaud Beltrame, consciously and deliberately did give his life to save another. When the drug abuser, petty crook and jailbird Redouane Lakdim burst into the Super U supermarket in Trebes, in southern France, he wasted no time..... He shot dead two people, and was said to have laughed as he killed them. Then he took several hostages. He was persuaded to release all but one, a terrified woman....

Catalonia's ex-leader Carles Puigdemont has been detained by German police acting on a European arrest warrant. Mr. Puigdemonnt, who is wanted in Spain for sedition and rebellion, was held crossing from Denmark on the way to Belgium, his lawyer said. Mr. Puigdemont had been on a visit to Finland since Thursday. He has been living in self-imposed exile in Belgium since Catalonia's parliament unilaterally declared independence from Spain in October....... Tensions in Catalonia are very high and its separatist leaders abandoned plans to name a new president following the arrest of the latest candidate, Jordi Turull, on Friday. Crowds of...

There were 546 reported incidents of Islamophobia in Spain in 2017, according to a report released Friday by the Citizens’ Platform Against Islamophobia (PCI). […] The most frequent type of incident cited were those of “defamation, slander, and libel,” in which Muslim men were accused of being “violent, sexist, chauvinists, pedophiles, backwards, intolerant, or terrorists,” while Muslim women were characterized as being “submissive, oppressed, ignorant, or backwards.” The second leading category of incidents was those of discrimination or negation of rights. The report used the European Union’s definition of discrimination, citing it as the “conduct, action, or omission by which...

The singer Katy Perry has unwittingly waded into Catalonia’s independence row with the announcement of her one and only concert in Spain this summer. Using a post on Instagram to create some hype ahead of sales of the gig she wrote: "Trust and believe I'm coming for you too Barcelona. See you June 28." But the announcement was accompanied by her image with a backdrop of the colours of Spain's national flag and the shield that appears on it. Although technically correct – Barcelona, is after all, still a part of Spain - it immediately provoked a backlash among those...

Former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont has called on the Spanish government to finally and officially recognize last month's election results in Catalonia. From his safe haven in Brussels, the city where he's hiding from the tyrannical Madrid government, Puigdemont said that the regional government, which was disposed of by the Spanish government, has to be reinstated. And yes, he wants to once again lead his people (to independence). "What is Prime Minister Rajoy waiting for to acknowledge the result?" Puigdemont asked out loud on Old Year's Day. The answer, of course, is that Rajoy is simply hoping and praying that...

The parallels to the political situation are beautiful, regardless of whether Catalonians are exactly the culture we love. Messi - small and humble, always smiling or concentrating, at one with life. Ronaldo - always whiny, petulant, feminine-metrosexual, narcissistic, rigid. If I ever have kids, may they be like Messi and not Ronaldo. Barcelona won this morning 3 - 0. Sweet!

Despite the election results in Catalonia two days ago, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy says he will not negotiate with Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont. Puigdemont had offered to talk to Rajoy, albeit not in Spain but in a foreign country. He's currently hiding in Belgium, knowing full well that he will be arrested the very moment he sets foot in Spanish territory. "Prime Minister Rajoy has a wonderful opportunity to start siding with the solution seekers and to not create any more problems than he has already created," Puigdemont said after the elections. Rajoy disagrees, however. His response to the...

Breaking with the stance of other Western countries, Israel decided on Monday not to express an official opinion on the issue of Catalan independence in the meantime, NRG reported. According to the report, Spain asked Israel over the weekend to publicly declare that it does not support Catalan independence, as part of Spain’s efforts to garner international consensus on the matter. Israel’s ambivalence is a departure from the opposition to Catalan independence declared by the EU and US. On Friday, US State Dept. spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement that “Catalonia is an integral part of Spain, and the...

Catalonia's secessionist parties won enough votes Thursday to regain a majority in the regional parliament and give new momentum to their political struggle for independence from Spain. It was hardly an emphatic victory, however, as the separatists lost support compared to the previous vote in 2015, and a pro-unity party for the first time became biggest single bloc in the Catalan parliament. The result left more questions than answers about what's next for Catalonia, where a long-standing push for independence escalated to a full-on clash with the Spanish government two months ago.

Former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont couldn't vote in the election because he's currently in self-exile in Belgium, but he and his party won yesterday's elections in Catalonia, exit polls show. This means that Catalonian voters have strongly rebuked the aggressive anti-independence stance of Madrid and the European Union. In all, 70 out of the 135 seats in Catalonia's parliament will now be occupied by separatist parties, with Puigdemont's Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia) being the largest of those parties. The only party that's larger than Puigdemonts JPC is Ciudadanos (Citizens). Ironically, that's a unionist party. The reason the unionist...

n Madrid’s Audiencia Nacional yesterday they began to read the closing statements for the trial of the first part of the Gürtel case (1999-2005). This is the biggest corruption trial in the history of Spanish democracy and it involves a single party, the Partido Popular, which would love to see it hushed up. The prosecutor was particularly emphatic in her final remarks and penalty request for the 37 defendants. She explained that the ringleaders of Gürtel set up a slush fund to bribe PP officials, which became their “way of life”.The trouble is that Gürtel was not merely a corrupt...

Officials in Catalonia, Spain's richest and most highly industrialized region, whose capital is Barcelona, recently held a referendum in which there was a 92 percent vote in favor of independence from Spain. The Spanish authorities opposed the referendum and claimed that independence is illegal. Catalans are not the only Europeans seeking independence. Some Bavarian people are demanding independence from Germany, while others demand greater autonomy. Germany's Federal Constitutional Court ruled: "In the Federal Republic of Germany ... states are not 'masters of the constitution.' ... Therefore, there is no room under the constitution for individual states to attempt to secede....

(Nigel Farage at :12) .......President Trump he is the most extraordinary user of social media cause he's got over 35 million followers. And I know some of his tweets enrage people but others are actually quite funny. Try this from President Trump today. "We should have a contest as to which of the networks, plus CNN and not including Fox is the most dishonest, corrupt and or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite president........" (at 2:04) Its Carlos Puigdemont, the ousted Catalan leader because what he said today is quite extraordinary. He was talking about the European Union...

Following developments in Eastern Europe and Catalonia, EU foreign affairs ministers pledged more resources to fight against foreign interference in Europe, in particular coming from Russian actors. […] Propaganda and disinformation activities generated and multiplied by foreign actors based in Russia have become a concern, primarily in Ukraine and eastern EU member states. But following a swathe of fake news stories during the French elections and, more recently, during the Catalan crisis, ministers agreed that more needs to be done to counter this new type of threat aimed at destabilizing the bloc. After referring to the Catalan example, Spanish Foreign...