Politics

A Turkish court has just fanned the flames of an incipient diplomatic crisis between the US and NATO's most problematic member, when it found a Wall Street Journal reporter guilty of engaging in "terrorist propaganda" in support of a banned Kurdish organization. Ayla Albayrak was sentenced to more than two years in prison for writing a 2015 story about clashes between Turkish security forces and Kurdish separatists in the country’s restive southeast.

Over the past couple of weeks, President Trump has taken a beating in the mainstream media for, among other things, suggesting that the mayor of San Juan had politicized federal disaster relief efforts in response to Hurricane Maria and that it was, in fact, local mayors and residents who were failing to help the recovery effort and not the federal government.  Here are just a couple of the tweets as a refresher on the topic:

Authored by Adam Dick via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

In a new interview with host Jesse Ventura at RT, former United States presidential candidate and House of Representatives Member Dennis Kucinich stressed the importance of the American people challenging the “two-party duopoly that’s committed to war.”

There is a lot of confusion as to what is going on in Spain at this moment, with The Spain Report noting that "TV presenters asking politicians and guests if there has been a declaration of independence or not, and that "Spain confused."

Wikipedia took a more pragmatic approach, and defined Catalonia's independence as lasting all of 9 seconds: from the moments Puidgemont announced independence, to his declaration literally 9 seconds later he was suspending the outcome of the Catalan referendum.

It did not help that moments ago, the following two Bloomberg headlines hit:

It has been a hectic day for Spain where moments ago separatist Catalonia appeared to step back from the brink of officially declaring independence - with potentially dire consequences -  even as Puigdemont asked for a mandate to delare indpendence for Catalonia but proposed to suspend the result of the referendum vote "for weeks", in an attempt to achieve dialogue with the Spanish government "to arrive at an agreed solution to advance with the demands of the people of Catalonia."