America

Brazilian superstar soccer player Neymar (yes one name... on the right in the image below), just smashed all previous records for crazy spending by European football soccer teams.

Dwarfing the money in America's NFL, NBA, or MLB, the 25-year-old forward has agreed to join French side Paris St.Germain (PSG) for a stunning EUR222 million ($250 million).

As Statista's Martin Armstrong notes, the previous record, set last season when Manchester United bought midfielder Paul Pogba from Juventus, was an already astronomical €105 million.

While Machiavellian disciples argue that for a leader it's better to be feared than loved, the United States often sees itself as a benign hegemon, holding its shielding hand over the world, ever since she won the Second World War.

In fact, as Statista's Dyfed Loesche notes, many people around the world today fear that the United States isn't always a force for good in international politics.

According to Pew Research Center, the United States' standing in the world has gone down overall.

Authored by Robert Birdge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made a calculated bet that the embattled Trump administration will interpret his expulsion of hundreds of US diplomats from Russia as more of a friendly warning than an overtly hostile act.

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

We should be scared to death that Sally Q. Yates served as a prosecutor in the Justice (sic) Department for 27 years. In the New York Times, Sally takes high umbrage to Trump’s criticism of his attorney general, Sessions, and blows Trump’s disappointment with Sessions into an attack by Trump on the rule of law.

Sally has it backwards. The rule of law is being attacked by the appointment of a special prosecutor to find something on Trump in the absence of any evidence of a crime.

Authored by Daniel McAdams via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,