Americans Think Race Relations Are at Their Worst Point in Years, Poll Finds Source time.com) Americans believe that racial discontent is at the highest point since the Obama presidency began, with 69 percent of respondents in a new poll saying race relations in the country right now are poor. The New York Times and CBS conducted the poll from Friday through Tuesday, the period directly after the killings of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile and five police officers in Dallas. The poll also found that 6 out of 10 respondents thought race relations in America are getting worse — a marked increase from 38 percent who said the same a year ago, the Times reports. The poll surveyed 1,600 people throughout the United States. The racial strife found in the poll matches the levels recorded during the riots in Los Angeles in 1992 over the Rodney King beating case.

FBI, Homeland Security chiefs preparing for violence at political conventions (Source Reuters)

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers on Thursday that they were preparing their agencies for the possibility of violence, both from unruly demonstrators and terrorists, at the upcoming Republican and Democratic nominating conventions.

Speaking before the House Homeland Security Committee, Johnson said he was concerned that demonstrations at the events could get out of hand. In an interview with Reuters following his testimony, Johnson said he knew of no specific or credible threat to either convention but that it was important to be prepared. Johnson said the Department of Homeland Security would be sending more than 3,000 personnel to each convention. Recent clashes between attendees and protesters at rallies for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump have led to physical assaults and arrests. The Republican National Convention being held July 18-21 in Cleveland and the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia from July 25-28 follow a string of high-profile shootings.

America Is Acting Locally, the Islamic State Is Thinking Globally (Source Yahoo.com)

U.S. special envoy Brett McGurk has called the Islamic State’s recent attacks a sign of weakness, spurred by its mounting losses in Iraq and Syria. “ISIL and its leaders have retreated to the shadows,” he testified recently, using another acronym for the jihadist group. In fact, the opposite is true. The Islamic State’s attacks prove that, despite its recent losses, it remains strong and capable of executing its global strategy to undermine modern states, expand as a caliphate, and spark an apocalyptic war with the West. The United States will fail to defeat the Islamic State and protect the homeland if it does not reframe its strategy to contend with the Islamic State globally, rather than focusing on tactical successes in Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State’s strategy is both local and global. The group pursues interlocking campaigns across multiple geographic areas: Its local strategy in Iraq and Syria is to remain in control of terrain as a caliphate, while its regional strategy is to expand that caliphate across the Middle East by incorporating more fighting groups, which will allow it to further destabilize states and gain control of more terrain. Its global strategy, meanwhile, is to set the conditions for an apocalyptic war with the West, first and foremost by polarizing societies to be for or against Islam.

The US missile defense system is a joke (Source nypost.com) The ground-based midcourse missile defense system, which has deployed 30 interceptors in Alaska and California, has been tested under highly scripted conditions only nine times since being deployed in 2004, and failed to destroy its target two-thirds of the time, the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a report. “After nearly 15 years of effort to build the GMD homeland missile defense system, it still has no demonstrated real-world capability to defend the United States,” said Laura Grego, a UCS physicist who co-authored the report. The Missile Defense Agency said in a statement the rapid deployment requirement in the law that created the system was “a driving factor” in the delivery of a ground-based interceptor with “reliability challenges.” The agency said the problems had led to changes in the interceptor’s design and a program to improve reliability, including use of more mature technologies. The MDA said it was seeking ways to reduce the risks of deploying equipment still under development. The UCS report echoed criticisms the homeland missile defense system has faced from other quarters. A Pentagon assessment in 2015 found that flight testing of the system was still “insufficient to demonstrate that an operationally useful defense capability exists.”

Rise in transgender children puts British primary schools under pressure (Source RT)

UK primary schools are attempting to enforce “trans-inclusive environments and curricula” as the number of British children who want to change their gender is at an all-time high. England’s only center for trans children and adolescents, the Tavistock Clinic, says the number of British children who want to change their gender has doubled in six months. According to the Guardian, the clinic says it is under huge pressure, with many of the referrals involving children under the age of 10, including one three-year-old and 12 four-year-olds, the Guardian reports. Schools are responding to the increasing numbers by creating “new gender neutral environments” and holding “transgender days” to encourage pupils to think about gender fluidity. Others are getting rid of the distinctions between boys’ and girls’ uniforms. About 80 state schools, including 40 primaries, now have a gender-neutral stance towards uniforms. In time, British primary school students could expect to take part in non-gendered biology lessons, classes on creating unisex spaces, and physical education lessons mixing boys and girls together, the Guardian reports. Stories are emerging of boys at all-boys’ schools who are being asked to be identified as girls, and vice versa. Helen Porter, a science teacher at an all-girls’ school, told the newspaper that in one year 11 cohort, two pupils requested to stay on as young men. She says the fact it was a single-sex school made that more challenging, but the school offered them places.

U.S. ENDORSES EXPANSION OF MILITARY FORCE USED BY U.N. PEACEKEEPERS IN COMBAT ZONES (Source blacklistednews.com) In yet another step towards the establishment of a world military force that seeks peace through the absence of dissent, the United States announced its support in May for a set of principles that will allow the United Nations’ peacekeeping troops and UN police to use force in order to “protect civilians” in combat zones and areas of armed conflict. U.S. Ambassador the U.N. and notorious warmonger against Libya and Syria, Samantha Power stated that the Kigali Principles would “make peacekeeping missions more effective, improve security and save lives.” “The Kigali Principles are designed to make sure that civilians are not abandoned by the international community again,” said Power. The Kigali Principles call for countries who contribute troops to UN missions to give UN Peacekeeping Commanders the authority to use military force against “armed actors with clear hostile intent to harm civilians” without waiting for approval from the United Nations and its member states. “If a commander has to wait hours and hours for guidance from capital, it may mean not being able to react in time to repel a fast-approaching attack on a nearby village,” Power added.

Europe’s Economic Crisis Has Spread from the Periphery to the Core (Source washingtonsblog.com) We’ve noted for more than 5 years that the European crisis would spread in the following order … more or less: Greece → Ireland → Portugal → Spain → Italy → UK. We also warned that the EU’s approach to economic problems in the periphery would lead the cancer to spread. Britain is – of course -in trouble.  But it’s not just Brexit …Europe has been stuck in a downturn worse than the Great Depression for years.  The former Bank of England head Mervyn King said recently that the “depression” in Europe “has happened almost as a deliberate act of policy”. Specifically, King said that the formation of the European Union has doomed Europe to economic malaise. Even Germany’s largest bank, and the bank with the highest exposure to derivatives anywhere in the world – Deutsche Bank – is in big trouble. Deutsche Bank’s chief economist just said: Europe is extremely sick and must start dealing with its problems extremely quickly, or else there may be an accident. He’s calling for a $166 billion dollar bailout of European banks. Europe has made bad choices since the 2008 crisis … so Europe’s economic crisis has spread from the periphery to the core.

Video capturing aftermath of man shot by Minnesota police officer sparks outrage (Source Yahoo)

Police fatally shot 32-year-old Philando Castile during a routine traffic stop in a suburb of St. Paul, Minn., late Wednesday. The aftermath of the incident was captured on video by the victim’s girlfriend and live-streamed on Facebook under the name Lavish Reynolds. The video was viewed by millions overnight and sparked protests outside the Minnesota’s governor’s mansion in St. Paul. This is the second fatal shooting this week of a black man by police officers, following the death of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La. Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton spoke out Thursday following the shooting of Philando Castile at the hands of a police officer, saying the victim’s fate would have been different had he been white. “Would this have happened if the driver and the passengers had been white? I don’t think so,” the governor declared. Dayton added: “I can’t say how shocked I am and deeply, deeply offended that this would happen to somebody in Minnesota. No one should be shot in Minnesota for a tail light being out of function. No one should be killed in Minnesota while seated in their car.” Castile died Wednesday night after being shot by an officer in Falcon Heights during a traffic stop. His girlfriend, Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds, recorded the aftermath of the shooting, broadcasting it on Facebook Live. The shooting occurred after Castile allegedly told the police officer he was carrying a permitted firearm. Castile, who would have been 33 in 10 days, was shot multiple times as he reached for his license and registration that the officer had requested, Reynolds said.

NATO  Can Reduce the Threat of Escalation With Russia (Source Bloomberg) The North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit starting in Warsaw on July 8 will probably lead to increased — and unnecessary — tension between NATO and Russia. Yet it may also yield good results: Acknowledging the increased hostility might make it possible for the two sides to ensure there are fewer dangerous incidents. The most imminent threat to NATO countries today has little to do with Russia. Rather, it’s instability in the Middle East — the chaos that has created the refugee crisis and spawned well-funded human-trafficking networks. This threat is killing people right now, in Syria and Iraq but also in the West, in terrorist attacks and in leaky boats on the Aegean Sea. Yet NATO is doing little to counter these threats. As an organization, it is not involved in operations against Islamic State, and though it’s dispatched a maritime force to the Aegean, it’s not playing a particularly active role there. It should be clear to NATO members that they had been wrong to suspend the so-called Cooperative Airspace Initiative (CAI) with Russia at the previous summit two years ago. The CAI was about the joint monitoring of airspace, mainly to prevent terrorist threats. It can also be used to make Russia and NATO’s shared area safer, though: The technical capability has existed since 2011. It won’t be easy to agree on how to use it, since the Baltic states would be wary of any information-sharing between Russia and NATO, but the inevitable escalation makes it necessary to set up reliable security protocols. NATO and Russia will hold a high-level meeting in Brussels after the Warsaw summit to discuss these arrangements, and, despite Putin’s unpredictability, this could be the most positive result of this weekend’s discussions. If NATO is going to concentrate on a theoretical threat in the Baltic region rather than the existing deadly threats elsewhere, it certainly makes sense to take every precaution to stop theory from turning inadvertently into practice and symbolic deterrence from growing into a real war.

Beijing ‘won’t flinch’ if US, allies encroach on South China Sea: Paper (Source CNBC) China “must be prepared” for any military confrontation in the South China Sea, the country’s Global Times newspaper said in an editorial. The editorial comes amid rising tensions as China conducts a military drill in the disputed waters ahead of an international court judgment on July 12 on the Philippines‘ case against China. Manila is contesting China’s expansive territorial claims in the South China Sea, which the Philippines contends are invalid under international law.China however has said the arbitration tribunal has “no jurisdiction” over the matter and will resolve such disputes directly with the countries involved. Control of the region is valuable because more than $5 trillion worth of global trade passes through the South China Sea each year, and China has been accused of ramping up tensions over control in recent years by building artificial islands on reefs, on which it has added airstrips and other military-style installations. Global Times said the dispute had been “greatly complicated” by heavy U.S. intervention and the involvement of the international tribunal