A tree gifted to President Donald Trump by French President Emmanuel Macron has disappeared.

The pair planted the sapling, taken from the site of a World War One battle in north-east France, during Mr Macron's state visit last week.

Mr Macron said the tree would be a reminder of "these ties that bind us".

But a Reuters photographer on Saturday took a shot of only a yellow patch of grass on the White House south lawn where the tree once stood.

Last year, a man from Philadelphia visited a bar in New York City and ended up leaving “humiliated, degraded, victimized, embarrassed and emotionally distressed” after he was refused service.

Greg Piatek, 31, claimed he was denied drinks at The Happiest Hour bar last January because he was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat. According to Piatek, the episode left him with “anxiety and severe emotional distress,” prompting him to sue the bar’s owner for “egregious, unlawful, and discriminatory conduct.”
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“The Make American Great Again hat was part of his spiritual belief,” Piatek’s attorney, Paul Liggieri, claimed in court according to VICE News. “Rather than remove his hat, instead he held true to his spiritual belief and was forced from the bar.”

The bar’s legal team argued that support for Trump “is not a religion” and is not covered by state discrimination laws. The judge agreed and ruled Piatek’s team failed to establish “any faith-based principle to which the hat relates,” thus dismissing the lawsuit.

Oklahoma lawmakers have voted in favour of a bill which enable adoption and foster agencies to reject same-sex couples because of their religious beliefs.

The Oklahoma House of Representatives approved Senate Bill 1140 on April 26, after the bill had been passed by the state Senate on March 13. 

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n 2016, a federal judge ruled that Mississippi’s ban on same-sex couples adopting children was unconstitutional – making same-sex adoption legal in all 50 states.

But many states have tried to find ways around this ruling, mostly through the idea that there should be a religious exception for people and agencies who believe LGB people should not be parents because of their faith.

After Trump's victory, pundits debated the influence of factors such as economic hardship and racial anxiety. With the absence of hard evidence, Professor Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania questioned 1,200 voters.

She observed:

Candidate preferences in 2016 reflected increasing anxiety among high-status groups rather than complaints about past treatment among low-status groups.

Both growing domestic racial diversity and globalization contributed to a sense that white Americans are under siege by these engines of change.

Mutz concluded that the people most likely to vote for Trump, after either voting Democrat previously or not voting at all, were those who felt their place in the world was being threatened.

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Brexit voters were found to have greater nationalism, conservatism, and support for authoritarian policies. The paper concludes that these reasons accounted for almost half (47.6 percent) of the variability in support for Brexit.

Zmigrod added:

In today’s politically-polarised climate, it is important to understand more about the psychological processes behind nationalistic and social attitudes if we are to build bridges between communities.

Minorities in America owe President Donald Trump an apology — and even thanks — according to a new column posted on Newsmax.

The apologies were demanded by former Trump campaign advisor Jeff Ballaborn, writing with Bruce Abramson for the website owned by Trump confidante Christopher Ruddy.

“The leadership of America’s Jewish community owes President Trump — and America’s Jews — an apology,” they wrote. “In a world of rationality and justice, American Jews would be grateful to President Trump.”
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“The leadership of America’s Black community owes President Trump and African Americans a similar apology,” they wrote. “In a world of rationality and justice, African Americans would be grateful.”
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“The leadership of America’s Muslim community also owes President Trump and Muslim Americans an apology,” they continued. “In a world of rationality and justice, American Muslims would be grateful.”
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“Still, it’s unfair to single out America’s Jewish, Black, or Muslim leadership. The leadership of American immigrant, LGBT, Asian, and feminist communities have been little better,” they argued.

“President Trump has never once discriminated among Americans,” they concluded.

He calls entire nations “shitholes”, called white supremacists “very fine people”, and demanded a total ban on Muslims entering the United States, eventually targeting several Muslim-majority nations. Anti-Muslim hatred in the US is soaring under his administration. He has attempted to ban trans people from serving in the US military. And yet, because he is the world’s most powerful man, we risk becoming numb to such hatred, and our capacity for shock or revulsion risks becoming worn down; while his fanatical followers revel in the vulgarity of his hatred as a way to drive back gains won by women, minorities and LGBTQ people.

Although many British people opposed Theresa May’s offer of a state visit last year – on the basis that it was conferring an honour on a racist demagogue that some presidents never receive, and none have been offered so swiftly – Trump is entitled to a working visit. And equally, those of us who abhor what he represents are entitled to exercise the right to protest. When he arrives on 13 July, the Stop Trump and Stand Up to Trump campaigns will protest together: “Together Against Trump” is the banner under which we will march.

The cynical comebacks are out in force already: isn’t your protest a futile sham, just the hysterical bleating of the snowflake army? The first objective is to stop the normalisation of Trump and his bigotry. Trump’s election was a source of jubilation for the far right, which looks to him to legitimise its brand of politics. He retweeted Britain First’s racist videos, one of which claimed to depict a migrant (he wasn’t) beating up a boy on crutches.