“Those statements are just absurd,” Pompeo said. “Just pure fantasy … The president is engaged, he understands the complexity, he asks really difficult questions of our team at the CIA so we can provide any information that he needs to make good, informed policy decisions.”

He also fired back at assertions the president isn’t fit to be in office, declaring Trump is “completely fit.” “It’s just a ludicrous question,” he said. “These are from people who just have not yet accepted the fact that President Trump is the United States’ president. I’m sorry for them."

In his White House tell-all, “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff reported that economic adviser Gary Cohn claimed that “Trump won’t read anything — not the one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”

“Today, North and South Korea will engage in talks in a serious and sincere stance,” Ri Son Gwon, the chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country, said. Ri, who leads the 5-member North Korean negotiation team, shook hands with his South Korean counterpart, Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon at the start of the talks, saying he hopes for “precious” results.

During the course of their discussions, Seoul proposed reviving military talks with Pyongyang, which would include engagement on the critical issue of denuclearization, Yonhap reports. South Korea also suggested convening a reunification meeting next month for families separated by the Korean War. “North Korea said that they are determined to make today’s talks fruitful, and make it a groundbreaking opportunity,” South Korean Deputy Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung said.

The US, meanwhile, cast doubt on Pyongyang’s motives and the overall purpose of the talks, with State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert suggesting the North Korean leader is not to be trusted as he essentially may be trying “to drive a wedge” between the US and South Korea during the talks.

Hamstrung by her inability to move the “big beasts” and constrained by the need to preserve the fragile balance of power over Brexit around her Cabinet table, the UK prime minister largely stuck to the status quo, keeping the figures — or in Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, the most beastly figure from the vantage point of 10 Downing Street — who have made her life so difficult these past 18 months in power. “Is that it?” tweeted Nicholas Soames, a long-standing Tory MP and Winston Churchill’s grandson.

In a sign of just how fragile May’s authority has become, an attempt to move her former ally, Justine Greening, from education to work and pensions ended with Greening refusing to take the new job and leaving government altogether. “It was a very big mistake letting Justine go,” said a Tory MP who did not want to be named. “The reshuffle was a farce showing the prime minister is weak.”

So dismal is the prospect of stability in Afghanistan that, in 2016, the Obama White House cancelled a planned withdrawal of its forces, ordering more than 8,000 troops to remain in the country indefinitely.

In the American failure lies a paradox: Washington’s massive military juggernaut has been stopped in its steel tracks by a small pink flower – the opium poppy. Throughout its three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium – and suffered when they failed to complement it.

In one of history’s bitter ironies, Afghanistan’s unique ecology converged with American military technology to transform this remote, landlocked nation into the world’s first true narco-state – a country where illicit drugs dominate the economy, define political choices and determine the fate of foreign interventions.

Most refugees come to Europe not because they are fleeing dangerous conditions at home but because they want to take advantage of economic opportunities, Orbán, one of the bloc’s most vocal anti-refugee leaders, told German newspaper Bild.

As such, they shouldn’t be considered “refugees” so much as “Muslim invaders,” he said. In keeping refugees out of Hungary, Orbán asserted he is merely following the will of his people — an indirect dig at Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose open-door refugee policy has come under fire in Germany.

Orbán’s comments echo those he made last week at a meeting of the Christian Social Union (CSU), Merkel’s conservative allies. The Hungarian prime minister predicted 2018 would see the “restoration of the will of the people” and criticized European leaders who “are not doing what the people want them to.”

[Five] months after Germans went to the polls, they are still without a government. Their frustration is apparently growing, with the new study finding that 34 percent of respondents want new elections. The Insa survey, commissioned by Germany's Focus magazine showed that only 30 percent expressed support for a continuation of talks to try and form a grand coalition.

A minority government would be viewed favorably by just 15 percent of Germans. Some 52 percent said Chancellor Merkel should not spearhead her Christian Democratic Party (CDU) in a 'fresh election.'

The current talks are exploratory, and are not expected to result in any final decisions. The two parties would engage in full-blown coalition talks, but only if the SPD leadership is backed by enough members who would endorse such a move. And that could last for another couple of months. Germany faces new elections or a minority Merkel government should the negotiations collapse.

A mini market on the street with false walls, secret hiding places, and an underground “cell” where an illegal migrant was held as a kind of slave was the heart of a criminal enterprise dealing in drugs, human trafficking, and unlicensed tobacco, according to reports. “Illicit tobacco was being used to fund criminality, primarily drug supply and human trafficking. Senior members of Kurdish organised crime have been using it to fund criminality in the Radford Road area,” said Police Constable Lee Wilson.

“A Kurdish businessman offered us £5,000 a month to cease the tobacco investigation,” he added. “With others involved in the operation, we had a search dog and were told, ‘police are not welcome on the street’. It was described as a ‘Kurdish street’.” Trading standards officer Paul Wheddon described how a “failed asylum seeker with no rights in the UK” was found in a hidden cellar lined with illegal cigarettes, with his sole purpose being to pass them up to the sellers.

“Effectively it was a cell. He couldn’t get out of it. There was no escape had there been an emergency,” remarked District Judge Leo Pyle, who ordered the mini market to be closed for three months. Judge Pyle insisted “There are no ‘no-go’ areas in this land,” and that there is “no such thing as a ‘Kurdish street'” — but evidence of a severe breakdown in Britain’s social cohesion is mounting.

In 2015, a journalist wearing traditional Jewish dress was subjected to ten anti-Semitic incidents in the space of an hour on Manchester’s ‘curry road’, and youths shouted ‘You’re a Jew, not a Muslim… Jew, Jew, Jew run!’ at him when he repeated the experiment in multicultural Bradford. In August 2017, graffiti warning ‘NO Whites Allowed After 8 pm’ was discovered in Birmingham — one of several explicitly anti-white incidents which have been becoming increasingly common in areas with large migrant and migrant-descended populations.

“Rouhani is one of the architects of the national security state [in Iran]. He’s got so much blood on his hands, he’ll never be able to wash it off,” proclaimed Reuel Gerecht, a senior FDD fellow who focuses on Iran, during an event Friday titled “The Iran Protests: Implications for the Islamic Republic and Beyond.” He went on to say that President Rouhani and the ruling Iranian regime as a whole are incapable of employing moderate policies.

“The protests are still continuing despite the regime’s best efforts to say that they’ve been crushed.” To the dismay of Iran’s leadership, US President Donald Trump has come out in support of the anti-establishment protesters in Iran, which has officially been designated a leading state-sponsor of terrorism by the American government.