Tunisia's government announced on May 17 that it would not allow the Salafist group, Ansar al-Shariah, to hold its annual congress this weekend in the city of Kairouan, citing a threat to public order. Rached Ghannouchi, head of the moderate Islamist ruling party Ennahda, had warned of the coming ban earlier this week.

The failure of at least three and likely four Arizona community banks in the past week has drawn attention to the increased rate of such failures in 2013 — though not back to the levels of 2009-10, yet.

Barack Obama's so-called President's weekly radio address today was about how he was going to "travel to more cities," spend more time outside the Beltway, address middle class's real concerns rather than Washington's passing obsessions, etc. In other words, how he was attempting to flee from the multiple serious scandals piling up around the White House.

In further comments to the media on May 17, following a meeting in Sochi with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed Western criticism of Moscow for supplying weapons to Syria's government.

The Obama White House continues to hunker down and fend off the growing scandals that hit the Administration beginning last week. But some leading Democrats are now already breaking ranks and warning that Obama is in deep trouble.

At least two West Coast tea party websites/chapters put up the LaRouchePAC press release on Sen. Tom Harkin's S985 today. The "Before It's News" site and the Ventura County Tea Party site showed that restoring Glass-Steagall continues to be the issue on which tea party conservatives and progressive Democrats agree.

It is as if a doctor prescribes a medicine for your illness and then says a few weeks later that it will kill you. The International Monetary Fund forecast that the Cyprus economy will get worse than was expected, when it, as part of the EC-ECB-IMF Troika forced the bail-in bailout on Cyprus.

As of May, 48% of the area of the U.S. contiguous states is in drought, down from 67% last Fall, but many areas are in more severe condition than ever before. Details were presented May 16, at the annual "Summer Drought Outlook" event, hosted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The reports constitute an S.O.S.

Like the other Eurozone bailout countries, Cyprus is targeted for genocide, beginning with cuts in the country's health-care system. The Troika (as the overseers from the European Commission, ECB, and IMF are known) have issued orders for these cuts. This started with the government's cancelling long-delayed plans for setting up new regional ambulance stations.

Sara Hall Ingram, the head of the IRS tax-exempt office from 2009 to 2012 — the time that the targeting of "Tea Party," "Patriot," "912," and other conservative organizations was at its height — has been promoted to be the lead enforcer of mandatory health insurance for Obamacare.