Reports that Donald Trump sees Greenland as a good real estate prospect were no joke, with the White House economic adviser confirming that the US president is really mulling the purchase of world’s largest island. Read Full Article at RT.com

Former Chicago Bears, Cincinnati Bengals and Green Bay Packers running back Cedric Benson has been confirmed as one of two people killed in a motorcycle accident in Austin, Texas, according to reports. The sports star was 36. Read Full Article at RT.com

Frank Lampard is still without a win three games into his tenure as Chelsea's head coach after a second half Wilfred Ndidi header canceled out an opener from Mason Mount to increase the pressure on the club's new boss. Read Full Article at RT.com

Throughout the presidency of Donald Trump, the media has parroted the GOP talking point that the economy is “great” (or “booming” or “strong” or “humming along” or whatever word Republicans happened to be using on any given day). Never mind the fact that the economy Trump inherited from President Obama was doing pretty well, thank you very much, and that it has continued to grow, although any argument about which president had the stronger economy is still evolving and won’t be settled until after Trump’s presidency is over. Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump continually trashed the “Obama economy,” and the media dutifully repeated his words, spreading the idea that the U.S. economy was failing under the 44th president. And too many voters believed both Trump and the media. During the campaign, Trump continually lied about the unemployment rate, claiming that the lowered rate under Obama was much higher than reported and might even be as high as 42%. Trump bragged that the economy would boom once he was in charge, growing by 4% per year and maybe even as high as 6% per year. Need we add that such growth never occurred? It never even reached his downgraded promise of 3% growth, and quarterly growth rates keep being downgraded. Certainly, cutting regulations for businesses and cutting taxes for those same businesses did create a temporary boost. But for the most part, instead of benefiting the average American, the GOP corporate tax cuts only enriched those at the top. Companies have been buying back stocks at levels never seen before—buybacks that have reached what some analysts are calling dangerous levels. All the while, corporate executives reaped the profits. When the U.S. stock market tumbles and the Dow Jones Industrial Average drops 800 points in one day, that’s a big deal. The media and the markets declare that the sky is falling, while economists deliver doom-and-gloom predictions, describing the warning signs of a possible global recession. Yet until very recently, most of the media continued the upbeat reporting about the economy, playing sound bites of Trump and other Republicans bragging about the U.S. economy and why it would be Trump’s trump card to win reelection. If that’s the trump card, it sounds like the deck just got reshuffled.

A new report says that elderly people living in the UK suffer some of the highest levels of poverty in western Europe. The findings coincide with a Tory-linked policy paper that calls for the pension age to be raised to 75. Read Full Article at RT.com

A brutal murder has blindsided a Russian village after a local teenager, who had been the pride of his class, hacked his entire family to death with an axe, so that they wouldn’t become upset by his suicide. Read Full Article at RT.com

What would us Jews ever do without President Charlottesville? It’s amazing to me that we even survived almost 5,800 years before he took up shop in the Oval Office. We are so lucky we have him to look out for us, to tell us who hates us and who doesn’t, whom we should fear and whom we should embrace. When he bear hugged that American flag, all I could think was that I wish he could be hugging the Jewish people, all of us together, at the same time. Oh, and Ivanka’s Jewish now, which is just the icing on the cake at the Viennese table that is Trump’s overstuffed, sweet love for us.  Who could ever doubt Trump’s love after a rally full of neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” led him to declare that there were “very fine people on both sides” of that rally—a statement he’s even this week still lying about (Aaron Blake at The Washington Post did a terrific job debunking the most recent round of lies). Bear in mind, that chant derives from exactly the same content—namely the idea that Jews supposedly want to bring in lots of brown immigrants to “replace” the white Christian majority in the United States—that motivated the terrorist who murdered 11 Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as well as the one who attacked a synagogue in Poway, California, murdering Lori Gilbert Kaye. That white nationalist terrorist wrote: “[Latinos] and [blacks] are useful puppets for the Jew in terms of replacing Whites.” Very fine sentiments indeed. Although I don’t speak Yiddish all that well, I’ve managed to learn a few phrases over the years from family members. I’ll use one of my favorites here to discuss how much Jews actually do benefit from and need the care provided us by Donald Trump. We need it like we need a loch in kop. Here’s a translation: “Literally a hole in the head, refers to things one definitely does not need.” This provides some of the background for what the Man Who Lost The Popular Vote did this week. As I mentioned earlier, he told Jews who hates us. Specifically, he told us that Democrats Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan “hate Israel & all Jewish people.” Not only that, Trump added “there is nothing that can be said or done to change their minds.” He shared these insights because the two congresswomen—whom he has attacked in hateful, racist terms numerous times in recent weeks—had been planning an official visit to Israel. Trump tweeted that if Israel allowed Omar and Tlaib to make such a visit it would show “great weakness.”

Frodo's compassion for the PTSD-sufferer Smeagol lends a new humanist relevance to LOTR

US president Donald Trump ramped up his attacks on the “failing New York Times” on Sunday, accusing the paper of engaging in a “Racism Witch Hunt” following leaked comments from the news outlet’s executive editor. Read Full Article at RT.com

Flint and Newark are only the tip of a massive, poisoned iceberg: Lead contamination threatens an entire generation

Donald Trump likes to believe he’s the most popular politician in the history of the universe, just as he likes to think the women he pays for sex are actually attracted to him. But his cultists are outraged that publicly available information is being used to boycott businesses associated with Trump’s political donors. These are the same principled geniuses who burned their Nike shoes because that corporation publicly supports athletes who protest against violent racism. And of course, the perpetually gaslit Trump-enabling media play right along, wondering aloud if it is indeed wrong to publicize information that is already publicly available. They apparently believe it’s the job of ostensible news organizations to question the dissemination of publicly available information—news. And that would be the same media organizations that published lists of donors to the Clintons’ charitable foundation and spent an entire presidential campaign frothing over Hillary Clinton’s staffers illegally stolen emails. Emails that, it turns out, were stolen by a hostile foreign government with the deliberate intention of helping to elect as U.S. president a man they believed would best serve their hostile purposes against the United States. Mission accomplished. And the media will not self-reflect on what they have done. They will continue to serve Trump’s—and Putin’s—purposes. And apparently hope that future historians either won’t be allowed to tell the truth or somehow won’t be capable of stating what already is obvious. But here’s the question about media-enabled right-wing outrage over Trump’s political donors being widely known to the public: What are they ashamed of? If Trump is as beloved as he likes to pretend he is, he should be proud to have his donors known. They should be proud to be known. So, why aren’t they? I have given money to the presidential campaigns of Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, and I undoubtedly will give them more. And if neither wins the Democratic presidential nomination I certainly will give money to whomever does. I’m proud of my political support. Democrats are imperfect, and every Democratic candidate is imperfect, because humans are imperfect, but I have no doubt that whomever wins the Democratic presidential nomination will, as president, make the United States and the world better places.

The moral panic around teen selfies is old fear dressed in new tech. Selfies aren't just narcissistic overshares

Three-quarters of Germans say that a US troop pullout won’t leave them defenseless, but almost as many believe their own army would be of little effect, a poll found, amid reports that Washington may move its assets to Poland. Read Full Article at RT.com

Modified pig hearts could be used for human transplants within just three years, according to the pioneering surgeon who performed the first transplantation in the UK 40 years ago. Read Full Article at RT.com

A Russian T-72B3 main battle tank reached a speed of 84 kph (52.1 mph) during a tank biathlon event outside the capital. It’s an all-time record for the competition – and an impressive feat for a 64-ton armored behemoth. Read Full Article at RT.com

'Cool Hand' Luke Keeler says an angry Conor McGregor phoned him after he made comments on social media criticizing the Irish UFC star's actions following the recent footage showing him appearing to punch a man in a Dublin pub. Read Full Article at RT.com

You can’t exactly ask a rat to point to where it hurts in an experiment.

Tehran is in talks with Moscow over plans to establish a ferry service across the Caspian Sea that would link Iran with Russia’s Dagestan. Read Full Article at RT.com

Donald Trump's new White House press secretary hasn't given a single press briefing since she was appointed in June, and the odds are she never will. No briefing has been held there in more than 150 days, as Trump moves to drastically cut off the fourth estate’s access. It's just another example of how reporters are being denied a chance to keep watch over Trump and his team. And one of the desired effects, as Trump moves to eliminate transparency, is that reporters increasingly seem to have very little idea of what's happening inside the White House. Permanently stuck in reactive mode as they respond to Trump's catalog of bizarre and untrue pronouncements, journalists have largely become spectators. Just as importantly, they refuse to concede that a titanic shift has occurred at the White House. Instead, they cling to the illusion that they're plugged in and have the pulse of the Oval Office. «Reminder: There is no White House, not in the sense journalists have always used the term,» New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen recently tweeted, hitting on a media critique he has amplified for more than a year. «It's just Trump—and people who work in the building. The term is still in use because what else are ‘White House’ reporters going to do? But there's no referent for it. The metonymy broke.» Rosen’s accurate appraisal pulls back the curtain and reveals that the “White House« that reporters are so busy reporting on and referring to is, at this point, basically a media concoction. It's a prop that's being held up because “the White House» is how journalists have always referred to the sprawling West Wing enterprise that powers and supports each American president. Mercurial Trump, though, has basically dismantled that infrastructure (he doesn't like listening to people who don’t agree with him), yet the press still holds on to preferred tradition. The press keeps pretending «the White House» exists, and keeps presenting a false narrative about what's happened to our executive branch. Let's look at recent examples. Trump's Labor Secretary Alex Acosta was forced to resign over his role in offering wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a sweetheart plea deal back in July when Acosta served as U.S. attorney for southern Florida. His resignation came specifically after news accounts appeared suggesting that the press conference he staged in hopes of saving his job had gone well and that Trump was happy with the outcome.

British officials are struggling to stay on message after the publication of a leaked report warning of food and fuel shortages in the event of a hard Brexit, contradicting one another in their attempts at damage control. Read Full Article at RT.com

The moment a meteorite blasted through the Earth’s atmosphere and created an enormous fireball that lit up the skies over the Italian island of Sardinia has been captured in awe-inspiring dashcam footage. Read Full Article at RT.com

The 1619 Project in The New York Times Magazine opens with these words: In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. In the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.         What is the 1619 Project? The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are. When I saw this project announced some time ago, I made a note to make sure I was following its development. Now it is here, and if the introductory segments are any indication of its importance, it does not disappoint.

MAGA-supporting welterweight contender Colby Covington hasn't made many friends during his recent run in the UFC due to a series of outspoken antics, and the UFC 241 attendees certainly made him aware of it on Saturday night. Read Full Article at RT.com

Read Full Article at RT.com

Refugees frequenting their war-ravaged countries on vacations will risk being deported from Germany, as such “holidaymaking” means they are no longer in danger at home, the European country’s interior minister has warned. Read Full Article at RT.com