monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

There has been an explosion at the US Embassy in Montenegro, the government says.

An unidentified attacker threw an explosive device into the embassy compound in the capital Podgorica, before killing himself, it tweeted.

It said the device thrown was likely a hand grenade. No other injuries have been reported.

The US embassy issued a security alert, advising people to stay away from the mission.

The explosion is reported to have taken place at midnight local time on Wednesday.

Police are investigating the incident and who might have been behind it. A senior official from the US state department told the New York Times that the motive for the attack was unknown.

Steve Goldstein, the under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, said no-one in the embassy was injured.

A guard at a nearby sports centre told the AFP news agency he "heard two explosions, one after another".

He added: "Police came very quickly and the body of a man was taken away."

Human rights group Amnesty International has accused Donald Trump of "hateful" politics and of being a threat to human rights.

"President Trump takes actions that violate human rights at home and abroad," the group said.

Amnesty put Mr Trump in the same group as the leaders of Egypt, Russia, China, the Philippines, and Venezuela.

The organisation was launching its annual report, staging the event in Washington for the first time.

"The spectres of hatred and fear now loom large in world affairs, and we have few governments standing up for human rights in these disturbing times," said Salil Shetty, head of Amnesty.

"Instead, leaders such as [Egyptian President Abdel Fattah] al-Sisi, [the Philippines President Rodrigo] Duterte, [Venezuelan President Nicolas] Maduro, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, Trump and [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] are callously undermining the rights of millions," referring to the leaders of Egypt, the Philippines, Venezuela, Russia, the US and China.

It also called Mr Trump's travel ban - implemented days after he took office - a "transparently hateful move".

The ban - which targeted a number of Muslim-majority countries - "set the scene for a year in which leaders took the politics of hate to its most dangerous conclusion", Ms Shetty said.

The 400-page report summarises human rights issues of concern to Amnesty in 159 countries across the world.

Among the many issues highlighted in the report are:

The "horrific military campaign of ethnic cleansing" against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar
"Crimes against humanity" and war crimes in Iraq, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen
Attempts to roll back women's rights in the US, Russia, and Poland
Sweeping crackdowns on LGBT communities in Chechnya and Egypt
President Duterte's "contempt" for rights in his war on drugs in the Philippines
Northern Ireland's abortion restrictions and UK police counter-terrorism powers
It criticised what it called a "feeble response" by world leaders to human rights issues and what it called the willingness to tout "fake news" in order to manipulate public opinion.

But the group also highlighted the work of activists and protest movements around the world inspired by what it called regressive policies.

"Donald Trump's policies may have marked a new era of human rights regression but they are not unique," Ms Shetty said.

She called on world leaders to "tackle the big challenges" in the year ahead.

You have no idea of what my origins might be.

Thou protests too much.

I'm not sure this is just a matter of availability.

If physicians were more restrained in their prescribing, the logic went, fewer of their patients would become addicted, and the pipeline to painkiller addiction and ultimately to heroin would run dry.

It’s not turning out that way. While the volume of prescriptions has trended down since 2011, total opioid-related deaths have risen. The drivers for the past few years are heroin and, mostly, fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is 50 times as potent as heroin. Fentanyl has legitimate medical use, but there is also illicit fentanyl, trafficked mostly from China, often via the Dark Web. Fentanyl and heroin (which itself is usually tainted to some extent with the fentanyl) together were present in more than two-thirds of all opioid-related deaths in 2016, according to CDC data.

David Hogg, 17, went from Florida high school student to mass shooting survivor to telegenic advocate for gun-control laws in a few days. And just as quickly, online conspiracy theorists began spinning viral lies attacking the teenager’s credibility.

By Wednesday — a week after a gunman wielding a semiautomatic rifle killed 17 people at Hogg’s Parkland, Fla., school — online media sites including YouTube swelled with false ­allegations that Hogg was ­secretly a “crisis actor” playing the part of a grieving student in local and national television news reports.

Hogg was not the only one targeted by an online campaign that flared up on anonymous forums such as 4chan and Reddit before it reached conservative websites, Twitter, Facebook and Google’s video platform. Collectively the posts questioned the honesty and credibility of the grieving students as they spoke out against gun violence and in some cases publicly challenged President Trump, the National Rifle Association and lawmakers opposed to gun control.

“It’s annoying. I hate it. But it’s part of American democracy,” Hogg said in a phone interview. “Am I an actor? No. Am I a witness? Yes.”

The falsehoods about Parkland students come even after the technology giants have tried to tamp down disinformation campaigns by hiring thousands of moderators, changing the algorithms that surface information and enacting stricter policies. The Parkland flare-up underscores how efforts to quell the spread of such online conspiracies remain incomplete on platforms that derive profits by attracting eyeballs en masse.

The incident has also highlighted how nobody — even a group of teens just days removed from seeing their fellow students gunned down — is off limits in the no-holds-barred world of online commentary, with its often-toxic mix of rumor, innuendo and unrefuted accusation.

The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. was among the many people who “liked” a tweet criticizing Hogg. On YouTube, a video featuring one conspiracy theory reached the top of the service’s “Trending” clips list and was viewed more than 200,000 times before the company admitted that its filtering of news had not functioned as intended and it blocked the video. A search for Hogg’s name on YouTube on Wednesday turned up eight conspiracy videos and only two legitimate news reports in a top-10 listing before YouTube intervened.

I don't think D.C. can ignore them.

We have a few useful laws on the books, but no one is enforcing them.

I hope these kids are in lawmakers' faces.

66% of Americans want common sense restrictions enforced.

The case against van der Zwaan may increase the pressure on Gates and Manafort. In pleading guilty to false statements, van der Zwaan admitted that he had conversations with Gates and someone in Ukraine that he later tried to hide from U.S. investigators. The case also shows that Mueller can secure a conviction against a non-U.S. citizen. Van der Zwaan, born in Brussels, is a Dutch citizen.

What Mueller may not gain, however, is a cooperator who can provide an inside account of events and documents that prosecutors are trying to unravel. The 33-year-old lawyer was a point person for Skadden in Ukraine, working on cases on behalf of wealthy Russian and Ukrainian clients.

Fluent in English, French, Dutch and Russian, he also is married to the daughter of Russian oligarch German Khan, according to the London Tatler. Van der Zwaan hopes to be punished and freed by August so he can return to his home in London before his wife gives birth, his defense lawyer, William Schwartz, said in court Tuesday.