A new study from CardHub.com says credit card debt in the US has jumped by about $71 billion to $917.7 billion in 2015. The average American household with credit card debt now owes $7,879, which is the highest figure since the 2008 financial crisis. [...]

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton suffered an interesting memory lapse when slating her opponent’s track record on healthcare reform at a political event Saturday. Speaking at a rally in St. Louis, Missouri, Clinton was addressing the issue of “standing up” against “powerful forces” to reform US healthcare when she questioned Sanders’ past efforts in this area. [...]

Now that Trump is under attack from a fair part of the Republican establishment, it is worth remembering that much of Trump’s noxious shtick is consistent with the longstanding GOP playbook. What are we to make of the arch-authoritarian, white-nationalist Donald Trump phenomenon? [...]

The four remaining Republican presidential candidates clamored during their latest debate to be considered most likely to begin another massive ground war in the Middle East, this time in pursuit of an end to jihadist group Islamic State. On Thursday night, during their 12th presidential debate, GOP candidates Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich [...]

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, whose novel Time of the Octopus provided the basis for the upcoming movie “Snowden” shot by Oliver Stone, spoke to RT about the unexpected challenges filmmakers encountered in the US. Simply called Snowden, the biographical thriller directed by Oliver Stone tells the story of the US National Security Agency whistleblow [...]

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, fresh from his upset win in Michigan, received an unexpected endorsement from a real-life symbol of Wall Street greed. Asher Edelman, who inspired the Gordon “greed is good” Gekko character in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street films, was asked who he supported for president on CNBC’s Fast Money program. [...]

Bernie Sanders’ triumph in Michigan is a huge unexpected victory as pundits predicted Hilary Clinton would defeat the ‘socialist’, investigative journalist Max Blumenthal told RT. Bernie Sanders won in Michigan despite projections it would be an easy win for Clinton. How significant is this state in the race? [...]

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said that the FBI’s claim to need Apple to unlock the iPhone a San Bernardino shooter is a sham. The FBI says that only Apple has the ability to crack the work phone left behind by the San Bernardino terrorists, and last month convinced a federal judge to compel the tech giant to write a custom operating system with intentionally weakened security mechanisms. [...]

The FBI has changed its privacy rules regarding how freely agents can gain access to and search data collected by the National Security Agency that involves the communications of Americans. It just won’t say what the changes are. Additionally, there’s no word on when the changes were actually made, since that information is classified as well. [...]

Orbital Sciences Corporation, the US maker of the Antares rocket, has ordered eight additional RD-181 engines under an option of the 2014 contract with Energomash, the Russian company announced. Antares was initially designed to use AJ26 engines in its first stage, which are refurbished Soviet NK-33 engines [...]

Hillary Clinton has judged that she can wait out public calls for her to release the transcripts of speeches to Goldman Sachs, which earned her $675,000 in 2013, since she expects to soon wrap up the Democratic presidential nomination, as Chelsea Gilmour describes. One of Bernie Sander’s standard attack lines against Hillary Clinton has been to call attention to the hundreds of thousands of d [...]

In the lead-up to International Women's Day on March 8th, we present an excerpt from False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Clinton. In March 2003, just before the US invasion of Iraq, about one hundred CODEPINK women dressed in pink slips weaved [...]

Foreign diplomats are expressing alarm to U.S. government officials about what they say are inflammatory and insulting public statements by Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, according to senior U.S. officials. Officials from Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia [...]

A recent survey carried out in the United States and European countries shows that an overwhelming majority of US citizens do not believe that Europe is is playing an important role in the fight against Daesh terror group. /* */ [...]

As eccentric billionaire Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump continues to rack up primary victories, the party's establishment is beginning to wonder whether the political outsider can be stopped. Alarmed, neoconservative pundit Anne Applebaum goes so far as to suggest that a Trump presidency would mark "the end of the West as we know it." [...]

Republican front runner Donald Trump is 'repetitive' and a lot could happen over the next two weeks to change the course of the US presidential nominations, Dr. Robert Guttman, Director of the George Mason University’s School of Policy, Government and International Affairs, told Sputnik.ure of the world with a truly diverse range of views, Sputnik tells the untold. [...]

As the race for the White House heats up, Russian observers have noticed something different this cycle: that one of the race's leading contenders isn't anti-Russian, for a change. Political analyst Gevorg Mirzayan takes a closer look at candidates Clinton, Sanders and Trump, trying to fathom their positions on Russia.   [...]

Instead of leaving the period of the Cold War, the West made a serious political mistake which has led to a significant deterioration of relations with Russia, German analyst Thomas Kunze said in an interview with Spiegel Online. The current policy of the US and Europe is a huge disappointment for those who understand that global stability and security are impossible without effective cooperati [...]

The West continues to rapidly lose its clout, which had been based on democracy and human rights, according to the German newspaper Tagesspiegel. Tagesspiegel columnist Malte Lehming believes that even though Western countries are still full of ambitions, they are swiftly losing their power, which had previously based on their adherence to democratic principles and respect for human rights, RIA [...]

Amid official economic statistics that claim “the world’s largest paper economy is in a marvelous recovery” and the insistence of leading US economists that the national debt doesn’t matter as it is owed to itself, geopolitical analyst F. William Engdahl argues that the country is almost bankrupt and its end could be nearer than any of us imagine. [...]

Vladimir Lenin said, “There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.” I can’t think of a better description of Ted Cruz’s relationship with the DC-Wall Street Establishment – Cruz being the scoundrel of course. Cruz’s claim of not being a tool of the political elite is like Bill Clinton telling the world, � [...]

The consensus among US political analysts is that Trump is an aberration, a candidate who stands in contradiction to the high morals and ideas associated not with only the White House but also the US itself. They couldn’t be more wrong if they tried. In truth, Trump represents not the idea but the reality of America, the ugly reality of a country and society with its mask removed. [...]