United States

For months now, Senator Lindsey Graham has been trying to get an answer to a very simple question, namely 'if his conversations are 'incidentally' captured while he's overseas talking with a foreign leader who's being surveilled by the U.S. intelligence community and his name is subsequently unmasked, is he, as a United States citizen and/or as a U.S. Senator, legally entitled to know that he's been unmasked?'

One week ago, Illinois state comptroller, Susana Mendoza, gave a detailed explanation in her letter to Gov. Rauner and members of the state legislature - two parties that have been locked in a nearly three year long confrontation, preventing them from agreeing on a state budget - explaining why Illinois was on the verge of total collapse.

The following article by David Haggith was published first on The Great Recession Blog: 

What could be smellier and more tempting bait to get ISIS to launch a chemical-weapon attack than a US guarantee that “any” chemical weapon attack in Syria will be automatically blamed on Assad’s regime and will automatically result in the US attacking Assad and all of ISIS’s other enemies?

Today the White House offered ISIS that ironclad guarantee.

White House issues preemptive warning to Syria on chemical attack

Via The Daily Bell

Finally, Congress is doing something about a serious issue on everyone’s mind; they have introduced a bill to ban dog and cat meat from being sold and eaten in the United States.

But wait, isn’t this cultural insensitivity towards those from countries who regularly eat dogs and cats?

Two weeks after Trump's ominous "China "tried and failed" to contain North Korea tweet, the US president appears to be getting closer to that default condition in US-China relations which many had anticipated from day one: a not particularly cooperative one. Here's Reuters: