According to an organizer, the demonstration was planned to send a message to Donald Trump during inauguration weekend. A Facebook page for the march was published just hours after Trump officially won the presidential election in the early hours of November 9.

“We’re doing it his very first day in office because we are making a statement,” organizer Breanne Butler said in an interview days after the election. Of the marginalized groups she accused Mr Trump of attacking during his campaign, she said, “We are here and we are watching. And, like, ‘Welcome to the White House.’”

Organizers claim that as many as 200,000 people may participate in the march, many of which will be university-affiliated persons. Many university professors and their students from around the country have been raising money so that they can attend the march on January 21. Others have been organizing sister marches that will take place in various cities around the country.

While the march’s website claims that “we join in diversity” by “defending the most marginalized among us,” women who are pro-life or defend traditional marriage and family fall outside the stated qualifications of those who wish to march and are not welcome. The “unity principles” that narrow the scope of the march specifically espouse “reproductive rights” and “LGBTQIA rights,” while omitting the rights to religious freedom or the fundamental right to life.

“We believe in Reproductive Freedom,” the guidelines state. “This means open access to safe, legal, affordable abortion and birth control for all people, regardless of income, location or education.” Planned Parenthood advocate Scarlett Johansson, for instance, announced, “I am marching on Washington to let our next president know that we, men and women alike, will not stand down or be silenced and will fight to protect our bodies and our choices.”

Actress Debra Messing of Will & Grace went further still, saying, “An attack on Planned Parenthood is an attack on all American women.” Conspicuous by their absence will be the tens of millions of “American women” who believe in the right to life for all, including the unborn.

“When you see the situation in Washington, I think they are not willing, those who lost the election, to accept the new president whose name is Trump… What’s going on in Washington sounds like the beginning of a civil war,” said Wimmer, who is a former MP with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and also served as vice president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

“There is a network of resistance against the President who will be in office on the 20th of January and I think when you look at the reality in Europe, people of all our European countries – they want to live in good [relations] with [the] Russian Federation,” Wimmer said, adding that the media campaign aimed at vilifying Trump resembles the way the mainstream media used to demonize Russia.

“There is no hostility [between Russia and Europe], the hostility is organized in a very artificial way and it is the same way of organizing hostilities as we see nowadays against Trump,” the former MP said.

Babies made without mothers could come sooner than we think, leading biologists claim. Late last year, a team at the University of Bath discovered that sperm and skin cells – or any other kind of non-egg cell – might be all you need for conception. At the time, they said the scenario of men conceiving with men was ‘speculative and fanciful’.

But in a new report published today, the top embryologists at Harvard and Brown Universities urge nations to begin contemplating the legal minefield that would surround mother-less babies. ‘With science and medicine hurtling forward at breakneck speed, the rapid transformation of reproductive and regenerative medicine may surprise us,’ they write.

‘Before the inevitable, society will be well advised to strike and maintain a vigorous public conversation on the ethical challenges of IVG [in vitro gametogenesis].’

He said: “In 10 years we will all be Muslims because of our stupidity. Italy and Europe live in a pagan and atheist way, they make laws that go against God and they have traditions that are proper of paganism. All of this moral and religious decadence favours Islam.”

He added: “We have a weak Christian faith. The Church nowadays does not work well and seminaries are empty. Parishes are the only thing still standing. We need a true Christian life. All this paves the way to Islam. In addition to this, they have children and we do not. We are in full decline.”

He added: “We help without delay those coming from outside and we forget many poor and old Italians who are eating from the trash. We need policies that take care of Italians first: our young people and the unemployed. I am a protester. If I were not a priest, I’d be out there demonstrating in the squares. What is the point of so many migrants that instead of thanking for the food we give them, they just throw it, spend hours with their cell phones and even organise riots?”

A faction of right-wing parties in the European Parliament is organizing the January 21 meeting, which will include members of France's Front National, Italy's Northern League, the Party for Freedom of the Netherlands and the Alternative for Germany (AfD). The German anti-immigration party has risen to third place in public opinion polls ahead of the country's general election, which is expected in about nine months.

The meeting will feature National Front leader Marine Le Pen and the Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders, as well as AfD co-leader Frauke Petry and the party's European lawmaker Marcus Pretzell. Ludovic de Danne, an advisor to Petry, was quoted by the Paris newspaper "Le Figaro" as describing the meeting as a "European counter-summit." It will mark Petry's first sit-down with National Front head Le Pen, with both women expected to discuss the overlap in their parties' policies, de Danne said.

A host of other highly regarded German news organizations were also being blocked from the event, including the "Handelsblatt" business daily, the weekly "Der Spiegel" and the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" newspaper, according to Pretzell.

Former Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn, a regular attendee in the past, told the group he would skip 2017 after being named in December to head the National Economic Council, said people familiar with the conference. Other top Trump appointees will also pass up the forum.

A senior member of Trump’s transition team said the president-elect thought it would betray his populist-fueled movement to have a presence at the high-powered annual gathering in the Swiss Alps. The gathering of millionaires, billionaires, political leaders and celebrities represents the power structure that fueled the populist anger that helped Trump win the election, said the person, who asked for anonymity to discuss the matter. 

While the Trump team stays away, Xi Jinping is set to become the first Chinese president to attend the forum, bringing with him a contingent of China’s wealthiest executives. China is casting itself as an advocate of globalization, in contrast to Trump’s “America First” platform critical of free-trade deals.

But one of the things that has people the most concerned is his endless provoking of Russia.  Every few days it seems like Obama is doing something else to aggravate Russia, and if he wasn’t leaving office in about a week I am sure that the mainstream media would be full of speculation about a possible war.

Lame duck presidents are not supposed to make risky moves like this once a new president has been elected.  On Thursday, we learned that US troops have been permanently deployed to Poland for the very first time. Poland was once a key member of the Warsaw Pact alliance, and the Russians are quite alarmed that US troops will now be stationed so close to the Russian heartland.

And it has also been announced that NATO troops will arrive in Lithuania in late January.  If you will remember, Lithuania was actually part of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. All of a sudden, Russia has become enemy number one.  Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say that Russia is to blame for Clinton’s election loss, and so at the end of December Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats from the country.

That is the sort of thing that you do before a war starts.

As The Washington Post reports, Major General Errol R Schwartz’s departure will come in the midst of the presidential ceremony, classified as a national special security event — and while thousands of his troops are deployed to help protect the nation’s capital during an inauguration he has spent months helping to plan.

Unlike in states, where the governor appoints the National Guard commander, in the District that duty falls to the president. Schwartz said that he has not been told why he was asked to step down. “I’m a soldier,” he said, noting that he was following orders and has no regrets. “I’m a presidential appointee, therefore the president has the power to remove me.”

Is this just another part of Obama's "smooth" transition? Or is something even more sinister at work here, since we already know that anti-Trump activists are planning "the biggest protest in US history" on the day of the inauguration?

“We don’t need everybody to eat insects,” said Robert Nathan Allen, founder and director of Little Herds, an educational nonprofit in Austin, Texas, that promotes the use of insects for human food and animal feed. “The point we really like to highlight with the education is that if only a small percent of people add this to their diet, there’s a huge environmental impact.”

Cricket fans say if only 1 percent of the US population substituted even just 1 percent of their meat consumption with insects, millions of gallons of water in drinking and irrigation would be saved, along with thousands of metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions from machinery and animals.

At least one study finds the claims overstated that crickets are a viable protein source to supplement or replace meat, but bottom line, it generally takes fewer resources to raise and harvest crickets than, say, cattle.