Politics

In the latest shot across the bow by Italy in Europe's latest refugee crisis, BBC and AP report that the Italian Coast Guard has impounded a German NGO migrant rescue boat and is questioning its crew on the isle of Lampedusa, amid a growing dispute over Italy's code of conduct for handling migrants at sea. Lampedusa is a tiny Italian island near North Africa which has struggled to house boatloads of migrants in recent years.

With each passing day, it's looking increasingly like the only people qualified to serve on Special Counsel Mueller's investigative team are lawyers who have either directly worked for and/or contributed to the campaigns of Barack Obama and/or Hillary Clinton.  As Reuters points out today, Mueller's latest hire is Greg Andres, a former DOJ attorney who was appointed during the Obama administartion and served under Attorney General Eric Holder.

In the latest Turkish crackdown on civil freedoms, the governor's office
in Turkey's capital, Ankara, announced a month-long ban on public
gatherings and all forms of protests, including sit-ins, hunger strikes,
concerts and similar gatherings in order to "protect public order"
claiming that such activities increase the chances of terrorist attacks.

President Trump has given China six months to prove that it is committed to preventing a nuclear-armed North Korea, and it seems his tolerance for China’s dithering has finally reached its limit. Now that President Xi Jinping has established that his government is unwilling to engage in a meaningful crackdown on its neighbor, the era of using carrots like improving trade relations to coax China into helping solve the “North Korea problem” has ended. It is now time for the stick.

Two days after Russian President Vladimir Putin formally expelled 755 American diplomats and announced plans to seize two compounds used by US State Department employees, US officials have started "removing furniture and equipment from the compounds", according to Reuters.