“We have allowed China to become an economic powerhouse in one generation, effectively by destroying America’s industrial heartland; letting them cheat on trade deals; manipulate their currency; [and] steal hundreds of millions of dollars of our intellectual property,” said Zmirak. “Every weapons system that we build at the cost of billions of dollars in research and development, they just pick up and copy it because we let them.”

China’s military expansions are directed towards America, said Zmirak.

“The United States is the R & D department for the Chinese People’s Army, which is being built to counter no one but us,” said Zmirak. “There is no threat to China but us. Japan is pacifist and demilitarized. Russia has a gross national product equal to the state of New York. India is not going to attack China. China has no enemy but the United States, and yet, it continues to increase its military budget by double digits every year. It’s arming faster than Hitler was arming in the thirties.”

Unchanged, the status quo will create dangerous vulnerabilities of dependence on America, Zmirak said.

“Soon, we won’t be able to build defense computers without parts from China,” said Zmirak. “We won’t be able to build ships and tanks because they’ll have our steel industry. I’m a free trader, generally, but I would like to see Trump do tariffs targeted at China — not at specific industries — at China. China has not played fair for fifty years on these trade agreements, and it has devastated America. More importantly, it is building up a dangerous foreign enemy.”

...then Trump turned a little more diplomatic:

"Our relationship with China has been a very good one, and we look forward to seeing what ideas they come back with. We must act soon!"

"China has been asked to develop a plan for the year of a One Billion Dollar reduction in their massive Trade Deficit with the United States. Our relationship with China has been a very good one, and we look forward to seeing what ideas they come back with. We must act soon!"

— Donald J Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 7, 2018

We look forward to China's response too...

But Mr Trump has rejected their plea, prompting the EU to draw up plans to hit back by slapping higher charges on a range of US exports heading to Europe. This will include new 25 per cent charges on yachts, peanut butter, lipstick, bed linen, motorbikes and trousers. And it will also slap the charge on goods in the industrial sector - including tubes, pipes and rolled steels. And it will include appliances such as grills, ventilators, ladders - and even the kitchen sink. Together the total value of the target is estimated to be 2.83 billion euros - the equivalent of £2.53 billion, according to the Politico website.

EU commissioners are set to discuss the plans for the fleet of tariffs today, and they will be rolled out if Mr Trump goes ahead with the restrictions he announced last week. Some tariffs appear to clearly target politically sensitive Republican-run states.

The move comes as Mr Trump's top economics adviser, Gary Cohn, quit in protest at the tariff plan. Mr Cohn, who headed the National Economic Council and worked at Goldman Sachs, was seen as a crucial moderating influence on the President. And he was a key proponent of free trade - as opposed to the nationalist and protectionist voices in the White House.

Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, a member of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), told public broadcaster ARD on Wednesday morning that the Bundeswehr needs to redirect its efforts in Iraq after the successful defeat of the Islamic State (IS) militia in the country. The focus would now be supporting Iraq's reconstruction efforts. 

"It's in our interests that it becomes a stable country over the years," she said. Von der Leyen claimed that the Bundeswehr mission to train the Kurdish peshmerga fighters in northern Iraq, which is due to end at the end of April, had been "a great success," and pushed to expand it. In the future, the Bundeswehr would also maintain a presence in Baghdad and Irbil, where it would advise on building ministries and providing soldiers with medical supplies, the defense minister said. 

The Health Ranger is refusing to go quietly after YouTube censored him by deleting his channel and the 1700 videos he created about health and wellness and government tyranny.  Using a new platform, Adams says that the country is on a collision course with mass chaos and there’s little we can do about it except hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

“It will very likely erupt into widespread social unrest,” Adams begins. Adams says that the vast amount of political infighting is going to eventually spill over and affect us all.  He’s right of course, but that begs the very question: what do we even need the government for anymore? They don’t really do anything except limit our rights and devalue our labor and money by selling our freedom to the highest corporate bidder or global elitist.

“We’re gonna have an eruption of social chaos no matter who gets to the finish line first. Let me explain. If the Democrats get to the finish line first, and they manage to fabricate some kind of crime and attribute it to Donald Trump or fabricate evidence that quote ‘proves that there was collusion with Russia,’ …and they call for impeachment and there is an actual impeachment effort underway, middle America will erupt.”

“The people who elected Donald Trump will not stand for a political coup to take place in Washington DC.”

“On the flip side… if Obama and Hillary Clinton are named in the corruption, guess what? The left goes berzerk. The left goes insane… the left is just waiting for an excuse to engage in mass chaos.”

Adams is not calling for mass chaos, he explains that he’s simply predicting that all of this will happen because of the polarization in politics at this point in history. “I don’t see how America gets out of this without social chaos,” Adams said.

If you don’t stand up when you see others being censored, then please don’t complain when the social media giants censor you as well.  I think that Dr Michael Brown made this point exceedingly well in his most recent article…

First they came for Infowars, and I did not speak out — because I found them offensive.

Then they came for Geller and Spencer, and I did not speak out — because I found them obnoxious.

Then they came for Prager U, and I did not speak out — because I found them opinionated.

Then they came for a host of others, and I did not speak out — because I have my own life to live.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

Top 20 cities at risk‚ identified by WWF:

1. Cape Town

2. Tel Aviv‚ Israel

3. Valparaíso‚ Chile

4. Amman‚ Jordan

5. Havana‚ Cuba

6. Oxnard‚ US

7. Santa Barbara‚ US

8. Agadir‚ Morocco

9. Casablanca‚ Morocco

10. Tunis‚ Tunisia

11. Bathinda‚ India

12. Meerut‚ India

13. Tbilisi‚ Georgia

14. Madrid‚ Spain

15. João Pessoa‚ Brazil

16. Santiago‚ Chile

17. Chengdu‚ China

18. San Diego‚ US

19. Gurgaon‚ India

20. Siliguri‚ India.

"Mrs Merkel has a lot of responsibility for what's happened, because she took a unilateral decision (referring to migration), without any real discussion with her EU partners," said one Italian man in Brussels. Another added: "I don't think that the Italians are Eurosceptics, I think Italians have been waiting for answers from politicians. The answers haven't come for many years. So people vote to make politicians react."

But in Brussels, there's a feeling that voters have become confused about the issues at the heart of Italy's vote. "This is a European trend, like with Brexit. Unfortunately people talk about migration by connecting it to social distress, that is actually a result of the economic crisis," said Cecile Kyenge, an Italian centre-left MEP.

For forces in the EU parliament, driving a Eurosceptic agenda, the outcome of Italy's poll is a step forward. "They do not wish the EU to continue in this way of a federal Europe or united states of Europe or deeper integration, and hope that this message will be heard by Mr Juncker, Chancellor Merkel and President Macron," said Jan Zahradil, a Czech Conservative MEP.

Germany should replace “Vaterland”, or fatherland, with “Heimatland,” or homeland, and substitute “courageously with heart and hand” for “brotherly with heart and hand”, she wrote. The proposal surfaced hours before Germany’s center-left Social Democrats (SPD) announced that 66 percent of its members backed a re-run of the coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives that has ruled Germany since 2013.

The SPD is slated to retain the family ministry in the new government, while Horst Seehofer, leader of the CSU Bavarian conservatives, will head an expanded interior ministry that will also focus on “Heimat” or homeland. The first stanza, with its words “Germany, Germany above all else” - which stemmed from efforts to unify Germany in the 19th century - and the second, with its refrain of “Germany women, German loyalty, German wine and German song” were officially dropped from the anthem in 1991 following reunification.

“Completely over the top, and not even an April Fool’s joke,” tweeted a branch of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. Another said: “If that happens, I want to change (the phrase) ‘mother tongue’ too.”

The Washington Post reports that after Democrats settled down, Delegate Joseph Lindsey (Democrat for Norfolk) told the House that “today, I have been offended as I can never recall since being a part of this body. And I have seen many of my colleagues emotionally shaken and bothered.” 

Freitas: “I just want to remind everyone of something very quickly. It was not our party that supported slavery, that fought women’s suffrage, that rounded up tens of thousands of Asian Americans and put them in concentration camps, that supported Jim Crow, that supported segregation or supported mass resistance. That wasn’t our party. That was the Democrat party.”

Freitas served with the 82nd Airborne Division and 25th Light Infantry Division as an Infantryman. Following the terror attack on September 11 2001, Nick volunteered for US Army Special Forces (Green Berets) and eventually served 2 tours in Iraq as a Special Forces Weapons Sergeant and Special Forces Intelligence Sergeant.

Online behaviour will inevitably be a big part of what is monitored, and algorithms will be key to everything, though there remain doubts about whether something so ambitious will ever come to full fruition. One of the scheme’s basic aims is to use a vast amount of data to create individual ratings, which will decide people’s access – or lack of it – to everything from travel to jobs.

In the short term, the biggest consequences will arrive in the field of insurance, where the collective pooling of risk is set to be supplanted by models that focus tightly on individuals. Thanks to connected devices, insurers could soon know how much television you watch, whether you always obey traffic signals, and how well your household plumbing works. Already, car insurance schemes offer lower premiums if people install tracking devices that monitor their driving habits; and health insurance companies such as the British firm Vitality offer deals based on access to data from fitness trackers.

In the near future, as with Sesame Credit, people will presumably sign up for surveillance-based insurance in their droves because of such simple incentives, and those squeamish about privacy may simply have to pay more. Many people, of course, will simply be deemed impossible to protect.

First the team fed a neural network huge numbers of pictures of faces, which taught it to spot characteristics and patterns in the photos. After it had learned to distinguish these characteristics it was then taught to match these characteristics with patterns of brain activity recorded in EEG scans, whilst observing the same faces.

“When we see something, our brain creates a mental percept, which is essentially a mental impression of that thing," Dan Nemrodov, who works at the lab explained in a statement. "We were able to capture this percept using EEG to get a direct illustration of what’s happening in the brain during this process.” 

Volunteers in the experiment had EEG sensors attached to them before they were shown images of faces. The AI was then able to reconstruct faces using information read from these EEG scans with astonishing and slightly creepy accuracy.