By Erica Pandey @ Axios.com, 4 hrs. ago

China is leveraging debts to gain control of strategic ports and secure primary access to African oil in Angola, Kenya and Djibouti.

Why it matters: The Chinese are offering up attractive infrastructure projects to the countries that need them most and following up with escalating demands for influence. That approach will spread to even more of the globe under Beijing's trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative.

Angola is using its precious resource, crude oil, to chip away at a $25 billion debt to China [....]

By Kate Bennet @ CNN.com, May 14 3:44 pm

[....] "This morning, first lady Melania Trump underwent an embolization procedure to treat a benign kidney condition. The procedure was successful, and there were no complications," the first lady's communications director, Stephanie Grisham, said in a statement.

"Mrs. Trump is at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and will likely remain there for the duration of the week. The first lady looks forward to a full recovery so she can continue her work on behalf of children everywhere," Grisham wrote. President Donald Trump remained in the White House during Melania Trump's surgery [....]

Op-ed by Corey Rosen @ TheHill.com, May 14

Sens. Kirsten Gillbrand (D-N.Y.) and James Risch (R-Idaho) are about as blue state liberal and red state conservative opposites as they can be. But they are the prime sponsors of a bill, The Main Street Employee Ownership Act, that is based on nothing less than the notion that we should be rethinking capitalism in a way that makes more workers owners. On May 8, the House passed the bill on a voice vote, and its prospects are good in the Senate. The bill would direct the Small Business Administration to strengthen its loan program and outreach efforts for companies with Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and worker cooperatives. In itself, the bill is a small but important step. But it represents a larger concept that there are ways in this seemingly hopelessly divided landscape to take on major issues in a way we can all agree on.

Perhaps the biggest issue in the recent election was that while the economy may be working well for many people, it is not working well at all for many others. Finding common ground on ways to address this gap has been wrenchingly difficult [....]

Corey Rosen ([email protected]) is the founder and senior staff member of the National Center for Employee Ownership (www.nceo.org), a nonprofit membership, information, and research organization. The NCEO is not a lobbying organization. 

By Loveday Morris & Hazem Balousha @ WashingtonPost.com, May 14

ZEITOUN, Gaza Strip — Israeli soldiers on Monday killed 52 Palestinians demonstrating along the border fence between Israel and the Gaza Strip and wounded more than 2,400 in the bloodiest day in the enclave since the 2014 war with Israel, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

An estimated 35,000 Palestinians gathered on the edges of Gaza as the U.S. Embassy opened in Jerusalem, fanning out along the fence in the largest demonstrations yet.

At a gathering point east of Gaza City, organizers urged demonstrators to burst through the fence, telling them Israeli soldiers were fleeing their positions, even as they were reinforcing them [....]

By Benjamin Hart @ DailyIntelligencer @ NYMag.com, May 12

Title says it all.

'Oh, you dirty boy, you!, the mayor exclaims and slaps Mr Trump in the face,' says former New York mayor's alter-ego

By Maya Oppenheim @ The Independent, May 10 (with the video clip)

A video of US president Donald Trump pushing his face into former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s chest for a drag queen comedy sketch has resurfaced.

The spoof, which was recorded in 2000 when Mr Trump was a property magnate, transpired as part of the Mayor’s Inner Circle Press Roast. This was an annual event which sees New York politicians and White House journalists stage skits and parody themselves for charity.

The clip sees Mr Giuliani, who joined Mr Trump’s legal team last month to represent him through the Justice Department’s investigation into Russia meddling in the 2016 presidential election, dressed in drag flirting with the president. The video culminates in Mr Trump nuzzling his face into Mr Giuliani's fake breasts [....]

By Josh Lederman @ APnews.com, March 11

WASHINGTON  — Officially, their governments don’t speak. The United Arab Emirates doesn’t even formally recognize that Israel exists. But an impromptu bit of dinner diplomacy between Israel’s prime minister and a prominent Emirati ambassador sheds light on one of the worst kept secrets in the Arab world: the quiet ties between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors that are increasingly coming out in the open as they find common cause against mutual foe Iran.

The venue back in March was Cafe Milano, the upscale Georgetown restaurant often frequented by powerful Washingtonians [....]

Video @ Twitter feed of NowThis, May 11 which was re-tweeted by Preet Bharara with interesting tweeted replies on the topic of IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNIN CIVICS ANYMORE? With some examples given in the comments of things like teachers with bachelor's degrees teaching that Obama wasn't a citizen and confused about when dinosaurs roamed the earth. All of this actually begs this question for me: What is a low info voter? One would presume a low info voter is not someone who watches C-SPAN! But nooooo, wrong, here Mr. Low Info Voter, watching C-Span and even calling in. Maybe there is a flip side to this event, maybe every voter should be required to answer the same test questions that immigrants do for their citizenship test?

By Michael D. Shear & Nicole Perlroth @ NYTimes.com, May 10

WASHINGTON — Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, told colleagues she was close to resigning after President Trump berated her on Wednesday in front of the entire cabinet for what he said was her failure to adequately secure the nation’s borders, according to several current and former officials familiar with the episode.

Ms. Nielsen, who is a protégée of John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, has drafted a resignation letter but has not submitted it, according to two of the people. As the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Ms. Nielsen is in charge of the 20,000 employees who work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mr. Trump’s anger toward Ms. Nielsen, who was sitting several seats to his left at the meeting, was part of a lengthy tirade in which the president railed at his cabinet about what he said was its lack of progress toward sealing the country’s borders against illegal immigrants, according to one person who was present at the meeting [....]

"Dispatch from Pyongyang" by Carol Morello @ WashingtonPost.com, May 10

Alt title: My journey to North Korea with the secretary of state

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he had no guarantees when he flew into Pyongyang whether he would be allowed to leave with the three Americans who had been detained for more than a year. Neither he nor his staff knew who he would meet with, or when.