America

Before you begin to mention the grandiose gains in the stock market since Obama took office, bear in mind a few things.

1. The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to zero percent, making bonds and interest bearing accounts untenable for retirees, effectively forcing people into stocks. Also, the Fed's balance sheet went from ~$750b to $4.5t over that time frame -- rigging both equity, currency, and bond markets over Obama's entire 8 year term.

Authored by Robert Parry via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

It’s almost getting comical how everything that happens in the United States gets blamed on Russia! Russia! Russia! And, if any American points out the absurdity of this argument, he or she must be a “Moscow stooge” or a “Putin puppet.”

The FX series, “The Americans,” a spy thriller about two deep-cover Soviet spies in the 1980s

Since not a day passes without someone opining on the biggest witch hunt since the days of Senator Joe McCarthy to keep the "Trump is Putin's agent" media narrative going, and keeping at least half of America engaged with the "evil empire" plotline (we didn't say it was original), today it was Mark Cuban who decided to engage in some freestyle twitter narrative-shaping on whether Trump is involved some grand Russian hacking conspiracy.

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

The true face of the EU is presently on display in Greece, not in Germany or Holland or France. Brussels must first fix what’s going wrong in Athens and the Aegean, and there’s a lot going wrong, before it can move on towards the future, indeed towards any future at all. It has a very tough job in Italy as well, which it’s trying hard to ignore.

A month ago, Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh wrote to federal authorities asking that they declare the state's courts, schools and hospitals off limits to immigration agents. Frosh, a Democrat, wrote that he was sending the letter in response to new immigration guidelines issued by the Trump administration that greatly expand the number of people considered a priority for removal from the country.