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German Chancellor Angela Merkel gestures during a joint press conference with Prime Minister of Italy Matteo Renzi as part of a meeting at the chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Friday, Jan. 29, 2016. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn) BERLIN – A nationalist, anti-immigration party performed strongly in a German state election Sunday in the region where Chancellor AngelaMerkelhas her political base, overtaking her conservatives to take second place amid discontent with her migrant policies, projections indicated. The three-year-old Alteative for Germany, or AfD, won 21 to 22 percent of votes in the election for the state legislature in Mecklenburg-Weste Pomerania, according to projections for ARD and ...

Top Trump campaign officials on Sunday expressed optimism about recent poll numbers amid the fallout from Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s FBI email investigation and sought to defend the Republican presidential nominee's immigration plan in advance of the White House race intensifying after Labor Day. “The polling data that you showed earlier really tells the tale,” Trump campaign manager Kellyae Conway told ABC’s “This Week.” “Hillary Clinton is having a hard time being accepted as a truthful and honest candidate vis-à-vis the American people.” Clinton’s poll numbers have dropped in recent weeks amid further revelations about her use of a private email server while secretary of s...

A sculpture, titled “Mother of the Martyr,” depicts a slender peasant woman, a traditional artistic representation of Egypt, with her arms outstretched with a helmeted soldier standing behind her. (AP) A provincial goveor in Egypt has ordered changes to a sculpture honoring fallen soldiers, which used to have a helmeted soldier standing behind the woman. (AP) Previous Next CAIRO – A provincial goveor in Egypt has ordered changes to a sculpture honoring fallen soldiers after many on social media said it appeared to depict an unwanted advance on a woman symbolizing the country. The concrete sculpture, titled "Mother of the Martyr," depicts a slender peasant woman, a traditional ...

Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday that negotiations have stalled between the United States and Russia to stop fighting in Syria between Russian-backed govement troops and U.S.-supported rebels. Kerry said at the G20 economic summit in China that the talks have stalled over some "technical" issues but they would resume Monday.Obama and Putin were also expected to meet Monday. The countries have tried for weeks to broker a cease-fire between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's govement and moderate rebels in an effort to expand access and humanitarian aid for the hundreds of thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire. The strategy has hinged on an unlikely U.S.-Russian milit...

The G20 summit got off to a contentious start Saturday with Chinese officials reportedly confronting National Security Advisor Susan Rice and other U.S. officials in at least three incidents, as President Obama arrived in China for the two-day inteational economic talks. Within minutes of Obama arriving on Air Force One, a member of the Chinese delegation started screaming at White House staff, according to reporters on the tarmac. One reporter described the scene as “a bit of chaos,” as the Chinese official appeared furious about joualists being so near Obama’s arrival, though they purportedly were standing in the area Chinese officials had designated for them. White House officials...

British prisons have become alarmingly fertile breeding grounds for terrorism, according to new govement research that supports the long and widely held beliefs that UK lockups too often double as jihadi training camps. Many of the terror attacks that have plagued Europe in recent years bear a common, chilling hallmark: They were carried out by attackers who went into prison as petty criminals and emerged as hardened terrorists. Officials armed with sobering new research now want to take steps to isolate known jihadists from the general prison population in a bid to stop recruitment. “We caot have a situation where we have extremist prisoners influencing others who are vulnerable to ...

Several dozen pages of documents released Friday from the FBI’s Hillary Clinton email probe show the former secretary of state repeatedly claimed to have little training or understanding about the classification process – despite leading the department that handled such information on a regular basis and having a security clearance. The document dump also revealed the gaps that remain in the record. Not only were numerous sections – and entire pages – redacted, but the files showed the FBI could not obtain 13 Clinton mobile devices that may have been used to send emails from her personal email address, in addition to two iPads. And they showed Clinton claiming she could not recall n...

Colin Kaepeick and San Francisco 49ers safety Eric Reid kneeled during the national anthem Thursday night, continuing the quarterback's preseason protest of American racial injustice and minority oppression. Kaepeick and Reid dropped to one knee while a naval officer sang "The Star-Spangled Baer" and dozens of military members unfurled an oversized flag at the Chargers' Qualcomm Stadium. Kaepeick and Reid received scattered boos when they dropped to a knee amid a crowd of teammates, but the protest was otherwise unremarked by the San Diego crowd. The 49ers' visit coincided with the aual Salute to the Military preseason game for the Chargers, who have strong fan support in their city'...

Sept. 1, 2016: A man tries out the Samsung's latest smartphone Galaxy Note 7 at a roadshow booth outside a shopping mall in Beijing. (AP) Samsung halted sales of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone Friday after finding batteries of some of the devices exploded while they were charged. Koh Dong-jin, president of Samsung’s mobile business, said customers who already bought Note 7s will be able to swap them for new smartphones, regardless of when they purchased them. Note 7 sales launched just two weeks ago. Samsung issued its first global recall of the flagship smartphone because it has not found ways to specify exactly which phones may endanger the user. The smartphones are being yanked from she...

The State Department agreed Thursday to tu over all the plaing schedules from HillaryClinton'stime serving as secretary of state to The Associated Press by mid-October in an abrupt reversal from U.S. govement lawyers' waing last week that hundreds of pages would not be released until after the presidential election. The decision will make available all ofClinton'sminute-by-minute schedules before the presidential election. Those plaing documents offer a detailed look atClinton'sdaily routine during her four-year tenure as secretary of state between 2009 and 2013. The State Department provided the AP some of the Democratic presidential nominee's official calendars from her time at the...

People from the Florida Panhandle down to the Tampa area braced Thursday for Hurricane Hermine, as it lashes the area with strong winds and potentially dangerous storm surge. The National Hurricane Center said the storm's winds ratched up from 75 mph in the afteoon to 80 mph by evening as the former tropical storm gained new fury. Hermine was set to make landfall late Thursday or early Friday, forecasters said. A hurricane waing was in effect for Florida's Big Bend from the Suwaee River to Mexico Beach. And on the East Coast, a tropical storm waing was issued for an area that extended from Marineland, Florida, northward to the South Santee River in South Carolina. [embedded content...

(REUTERS/Brian Snyder) A public school district near Louisville, Kentucky has come down with a bad case of what I call “Participation Trophy Syndrome” – or PTS. The Greater Clark County School Board in Jeffersonville, Indiana, is considering a plan to eliminate the valedictorian system because it creates “unhealthy competition,” according to Supt. Andrew Melin. Click here to join Todd’s American Dispatch: a must-read for Conservatives! Unhealthy competition? Is he serious? Did a kid suffer a concussion while trying to parse a participle? “When students are competing for the Val and the Sal, they’re trying to find ways to maneuver through the system to try and get the best grades they can...

Donald Trump vowed Thursday to “rebuild our depleted military” and ensure America’s soldiers are the best-equipped in the world as he addressed the American Legion's aual convention – and sought to rebut Hillary Clinton’s suggestion to the same crowd a day earlier that he doesn’t believe America is “exceptional.” Kicking off the address in Cinciati, Ohio, by invoking his campaign slogan, “America First,” Trump tried to settle any doubts about his support for the Armed Forces. He called for a state-of-the-art missile defense, a “total reform” of the Veterans Affairs Department and a policy of “peace through strength.” “Nobody will be able to compete with us,” Trump said. His Democrati...

President Obama may be struggling to tilt the balance of the Supreme Court – but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t already made his mark on the bench. The president, over the course of his two terms, has appointed hundreds of justices to the lower federal courts, leading to a majority of appeals courts now dominated by Democratic picks. While those nomination battles aren’t nearly as high-profile as they are for the high court, the impact of the appointments is just as pronounced. “It's often overlooked, but nominees to the lower courts ... are often one of the most important legacies a president leaves behind,” said Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center. ...

John Legend is standing with Colin Kaepeick in his decision not to stand during the national anthem, calling the "Star Spangled Baer" "weak," and saying he doesn't "truly love" the song. "For those defending the current anthem, do you really truly love that song? I don't and I'm very good at singing it. Like, one of the best," he wrote on Twitter. For those defending the current anthem, do you really truly love that song? I don't and I'm very good at singing it. Like, one of the best — John Legend (@johnlegend) August 30, 2016 He continued, "My vote is for 'America the Beautiful.' 'Star Spangled Baer' is a weak song anyway." My vote is for America the Beautiful. Star spangled baer ...

A powerful signal has been spotted coming from the vicinity of a sunlike star, and now astronomers are trying to figure out what it means. In May 2015, researchers using a radio telescope in Russia detected a candidate SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) signal that seems to originate from HD 164595, a star system that lies about 94 light-years from Earth, the website Centauri Dreams reported over the weekend. The astronomers have not yet published a study about the detection; they plan to discuss it next month at the 67th Inteational Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, according to Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster, who wrote that one of the team members for...

FILE - In this Aug. 27, 2016 file photo, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP) Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Tuesday that he had accepted an invitation to visit Mexico from President Enrique Pena Nieto ahead of his immigration policy speech in Arizona. President Nieto confirmed that Trump accepted the invitation and that the two would meet in private Wednesday. The visit will come as Trump looks to clarify his stance on immigration, which is the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. Trump has called for the deportation of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. and building a wall along with country’s Mexican border and havi...

Newly released State Department emails shed light on top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s close dealings with Clinton Foundation matters while she was working at the State Department – as well as aides' frustration with their boss’s email practices. Emails obtained by Fox News show how Abedin used her State Department email address to deal with issues relating to a Clinton Global Initiative event. In an email dated Sept. 16, 2009, Abedin was forwarded an email chain about how campaign donor Geri Shapiro first accepted an invitation to an event, but then declined when she discovered that her husband was not allowed to attend. Abedin responded from her State Department email: “Why wa...

Debbie Wasserman Schultz is fighting Tuesday to hold onto her House seat after losing her post atop the Democratic National Committee last month over a leaked email scandal, amid waings from her primary challenger that she’s taken her base “for granted.” First-time candidate Tim Canova, a law professor backed by Beie Sanders, is trying to unseat the incumbent Tuesday, in one of several big end-of-the-season primaries. Canova’s longshot bid to upset Wasserman Schultz got a huge boost this spring when Sanders endorsed him and even hinted at coming to Florida to campaign for him. He benefited again when Wasserman Schultz was caught up in the leak of emails showing top DNC officials crit...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump criticized San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepeick Monday, calling Kaepeick's refusal to stand for the national anthem "a terrible thing." "I think it’s personally not a good thing," Trump told Seattle radio station KIRO when asked about the controversy. "I think it’s a terrible thing, and you know, maybe he should find a country that works better for him, let him try, it’s not goa happen." Kaepeick became the subject of national controversy over the weekend when he remained seated on the San Francisco bench during the playing of the "Star-Spangled Baer" prior to Friday night's preseason game against the Green Bay Packers. While e...