“We were expecting the United Kingdom, in particular, to play an effective role in the international system that rejects the Israeli occupation and its settlement enterprise,” Palestine Liberation Organization Secretary-General Saeb Erekat said in a statement released Monday evening, hours after the government of Prime Minister Theresa May blocked a French effort to have the European Union endorse a peace conference it held Sunday.

“The United Kingdom should revise its positions by holding Israel accountable, as well as support the Palestinian and international initiatives. It is time to end the historic injustice that befell our people who will soon mark the anniversary of the infamous Balfour Declaration.”  Hanan Ashrawi, another senior PLO official, charged that instead of “rectifying its historical responsibility” for the Palestinian “tragedy,” London is “compounding its culpability.” 

...Just a week and half before the Security Council vote, May delivered a speech overflowing with praise and support for Israel. Addressing the Conservative Friends of Israel, the prime minister hailed the Jewish state as “a remarkable country” and “a beacon of tolerance.” Ties with Jerusalem were “crucial,” she said, promising to raise the bilateral trade relationship to new heights and describing the Balfour Declaration as “one of the most important letters in history.”

The “New Civics” uses attractive, bipartisan-sounding words like “civics” and “service learning” to trick Americans and their representatives into allowing progressive political machinery to hijack public funds and young minds, finds “Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics.”

“The content of civics education is the content of our children’s minds, and a progressive takeover of the colleges will end up as a progressive takeover of the country. We have been warned,” concludes the report. NAS is a membership and research organization focused on American higher education. This new, anti-American approach is supplanting traditional civics — teaching kids about the structure and ideals of American government, basics about her history, and citizenship duties such as military service, voting, and jury duty.

Poor civics instruction has increased over the past half-century, likely contributing to the broad decline of American civic life: volunteering has dropped dramatically despite increases in unemployment and free time, far fewer Americans participate in social activities and organizations, those who join the military are increasingly drawn from a narrowing subset of Americans, and many adults have scant knowledge of American government and history (but still can vote!).

Vanderbilt’s 2016-2017 catalog says the divinity school “commits continuously and explicitly to include gender as an analyzed category and to mitigate sexism” in its teachings. “This includes consistent attention to the use of inclusive language, especially in relation to the Divine,” the divinity school catalog says.

Vanderbilt faculty vary in their views about how to express the divine, Snarr said. “It is up to the individual professor’s interpretation for their classes and is suggestive rather than mandatory,” she said of the 2016-2017 guidelines. Duke’s divinity school has a more detailed set of guidelines — but also one that applies to fewer of its students.

The “inclusive language” guidelines were created for a divinity school program geared toward people already working in the Methodist church, taking supplemental weekend or summer classes. That’s “a totally different path than matriculated students,” said a Duke spokeswoman.

Duke’s guidelines offers suggestions “as a beginning point for developing a more inclusive language about God.”

His remarks in a string of discursive and sometimes contradictory interviews have escalated tensions with China while also infuriating allies and institutions critical to America’s traditional leadership of the West. No one knows where exactly he is headed — except that the one country he is not criticizing is Russia and its president, Vladimir V Putin. For now. And that he is an enthusiastic cheerleader of Brexit and an unaffiliated Britain. For now.

Mr Trump’s unpredictability is perhaps his most predictable characteristic. The world is accustomed to his provocative Twitter messages, but is less clear about whether his remarks represent meaningful new policy guidelines, personal judgments or passing whims. In the interviews, Mr Trump described the European Union as “basically a vehicle for Germany” and predicted that the bloc would probably see other countries follow Britain’s example and vote to leave.

Mr Trump also said Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, had made a “catastrophic mistake” in allowing refugees to pour into Europe. The barrage of inflammatory comments in joint interviews published Sunday and Monday in Britain and Germany elicited alarm and outrage in Europe, even as Ms Merkel dryly characterized Mr Trump’s positions as nothing new. “They have been known for a while — my positions are also known,” Ms Merkel said Monday in Berlin. “I think we Europeans have control of our destiny.”

Mr.Trump’s comments “are a direct assault on the liberal order we’ve built since 1945 and a repudiation of the idea that the United States should lead the West,” said R Nicholas Burns, a former senior State Department official and ambassador to NATO, who also advised the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.

These protesters plan to set up blockades, disrupt inaugural balls and generally cause as much chaos as they possibly can.  In fact, a spokesperson for #DisruptJ20 says that the goal of his organization is for Trump to be inaugurated “amid complete chaos”… Let’s hope that law enforcement personnel are able to keep the protests relatively bottled up over the course of this week, because the potential exists for things to spiral out of control very rapidly. 

Sometimes there is a temptation to allow protesters a little space so that they “can blow off steam”, but if scenes of chaos and violence start appearing on television there is a very real possibility that the streets of Washington DC could quickly come to resemble a war zone.

The CIA is an internal threat to the rule of law and to the government that it supposedly serves. Senator Schumer acknowledges the CIA’s unbridled power, its subversive power, its power to undermine even a president, especially one that wishes to control or alter the organization, when he says:

“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. For a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

Schumer is saying that the CIA is so powerful that a president should not attempt to control it or else! The CIA is so powerful that elections do not matter when it comes to the CIA. The CIA stands alone. The Constitution that empowers the president as the Executive, the boss of government operations, does not matter. Basic American institutions and laws must bow before the threats that the CIA possesses. This is the assessment of a Senator beginning his 4th term and who is the highest ranking Democrat in the Senate in his post as minority leader.

A new school textbook that aims to teach boys how to be "masculine" men has been released. Called "Little Men," the book covers the differences between boys and girls, the importance of the father-son relationship as well as the importance of interacting with nature and managing money. The colorfully illustrated book was first published in December 2016 by Shanghai Educational Publishing House and has been approved for fourth and fifth grade classes across the country, after a trial period in selected schools.

"This course is necessary for boys," Miao Li, 36, a businessman, told NBC News while waiting to pick up his daughter recently outside a Beijing primary school. "They are so over-protected by the family they don't do physical activities anymore." "Nowadays, girls are becoming more like boys while the boys are becoming more like girls, introvert and shy," echoed another parent called Huang, a hotel employee.

Neither investigation relied on the CMP undercover videos to come to their conclusions.They carried out their own investigations — interviewing officials and employees under oath and using the power of subpoena to get their records. What they found is horrifying and criminal. It’s disturbing that the results have been virtually ignored in the mainstream media.

Advanced Biosciences Resources (ABR) had a “technician” embedded at a Planned Parenthood clinic who reportedly harvested and sold the skin of a Down Syndrome baby for $325. Yes, that’s correct, in America today, you can buy the skin of an aborted Down Syndrome child for $325. The same baby’s leg was sold for $325.

The Senate investigation published invoices which showed in June 2014 ABR bought a fetus from Planned Parenthood for $60. From that one fetus ABR “sold its brain to one customer for $325; both of its eyes for $325 each ($650 total) to a second customer, a portion of its liver for $325 to a third customer; its thymus for $325 and another portion of liver to a fourth customer; and its lung for $325 to a fifth customer.”

Then, the report says, they piled on fees for “disease screening” and shipping. That one aborted baby reportedly brought the company $2,275. The House Investigative Panel found Stem Express generally marked up the baby parts by 400% to 600%.

So will the next four years bring us together as a nation, or will anger, frustration, strife and discord tear us much farther apart?  It is being projected that extremely large crowds of supporters will attend Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20th, but the mainstream media is also reporting that “hundreds of thousands of protesters” are on their way to Washington.  Many on the far left are hoping to turn Trump’s inauguration into one of the biggest riots in US history, but thousands of law enforcement personnel are going to do their very best to prevent that from happening.

This is going to be a week that none of us will ever forget. Many are hoping (myself included) that the protests will soon fade and that Trump’s presidency will represent a true turning point for America. But there are many others that are literally gearing up for a “war”, and they intend to fight for as long as it takes to achieve their goals.

We are a nation that is deeply, deeply divided, and it isn’t going to take much to push us over the edge. So this week is definitely a beginning, but is it the beginning of a wonderful new chapter in American history, or is it the beginning of the end for our once great nation? This story will unfold over the next four years, and let us hope that it is a good one.

This year, the likes of Matt Damon, Will.i.am and Shakira will be jostling for pole position against Bill Gates, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Theresa May. Donald Trump's fast-approaching reign as US president, the Brexit vote and climate change are likely to be among the big themes.

As you can imagine, there are lots of meetings, surrounded by varying degrees of secrecy. The public ones - which anyone can attend. The closed ones - which only those participants with a white badge can attend (ie they've paid to attend the conference or have been invited) and then the private ones that you don't even know have happened. Those are where the big deals are discussed, behind closed doors.

The idea behind the gathering is to spark ideas and conversations - it doesn't pretend to solve them there and then. Perhaps the best-known outcome is Turkey not going to war with Greece in the 1980s when tensions escalated. The former Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Ozal had met his Greek counterpart Andreas Papandreou in Davos and felt he could trust him. More recently, the Brics New Development Bank - an alternative to the World Bank and the IMF launched last year - was conceived during a conversation between economists Lord Stern and Joseph Stiglitz in Davos in 2011.

Presenting its findings on the dawn of the annual gathering of the global political and business elites in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, anti-poverty organization Oxfam says the gap between the very rich and poor is far greater than just a year ago. It's urging leaders to do more than pay lip-service to the problem.

If not, it warns, public anger against this kind of inequality will continue to grow and lead to more seismic political changes akin to last year's election of Donald Trump as US president and Britain's vote to leave the European Union.

"It is obscene for so much wealth to be held in the hands of so few when 1 in 10 people survive on less than $2 a day," said Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International, who will be attending the meeting in Davos. "Inequality is trapping hundreds of millions in poverty; it is fracturing our societies and undermining democracy."