Politics

At the start of February, a shocking poll revealed that Germany's Social Democrat, or SPD, party - under the new leadership of former Europarliament head Martin Schulz - had managed to overtake Angela Merkel's dominant CDU ahead of Germany's federal elections in the fall of 2017.  However, just three months later, "Schulz' fairytale turned into a nightmare for Germany’s SPD" as the party scored its worst ever result in today's election in Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia (or NRW).

After North Korea provoked both its neighbors and the US when on Sunday morning it fired off yet another ballistic missile from Kusong near the border with China  - one which this time did not explode upon launch  - just days after the election of a new South Korean president who ironically advocates more engagement with Pyongyang, experts said the missile appeared to be a new type of ballistic missile, and had a far greater range than any other weapon North Korea has successfully launched.

Authored by Paul Criag Roberts,

“Fifty years ago, the streets of Leningrad taught me one thing: If a fight is inevitable, you must strike first.” Vladimir Putin

In George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel, 1984, information that no longer is consistent with Big Brother’s explanations is chucked down the Memory Hole. In the real American dystopia in which we currently live, the information is never reported at all.

Authored by Brian Cloughley via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

On the eve of a summit in Beijing, and just hours after Pyongyang's chief nuclear negotiator said North Korea is ready to hold talks with the United States "if the conditions are mature", South Korea's Yonhap reports that North Korea has fired a projectile believed to be a ballistic missile, from a region named Kusong located northwest of Pyongyang, where the North previously test-launched its intermediate-range missile.

The nature of the projectile was not immediately clear, a South Korean military official told Reuters.