What is interesting is that Sen. Warren and former Sec. of State Clinton are both playing their cards close to the vest. Sen. Warren is clearly not anti-Clinton. Clinton and Warren have met privately in the past, and the former Sec. of State has sought advice from the Senator from Massachuttes. In 2013, Warren signed a letter urging Clinton to run for president which she made clear was not an endorsement, but the letter was also a sign that Warren wasn’t going to stand in Clinton’s way in 2016.

Sen. Warren understands that her political power would be diminished if she supported Clinton or Sanders. Warren could have been a powerful force to tip the Massachusetts Democratic primary to Sen. Sanders, but her endorsement never came, because Elizabeth Warren is a member of the Senate Democratic leadership and very loyal to her party. Warren tirelessly campaigns and raises money for Democratic candidates all across the country. Warren’s 2016 goals have always been about Democrats taking back the Senate and keeping the White House. The best way for Elizabeth Warren to maintain her power and appeal is to stay out of the Democratic primary.

Art galleries in Germany and Switzerland are due to exhibit a priceless collection of paintings and sketches discovered two years ago in the home of a German recluse.

The managers of the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, and the Kunstmuseum Bern said their exhibitions would run simultaneously and would put the prized works in a “historically and scientifically contextualised framework”, in an attempt to shed light on the origin of many of the pieces, some of which were looted from their Jewish owners by the Nazis.

The discovery between 2012 and 2014 of the 1,500 works, including paintings by Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Max Liebermann, caused an international sensation. They were found in the Munich and Salzburg apartments of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a Nazi-era art dealer who was commissioned by Adolf Hitler to help seize works from museums and Jewish collectors.

Many of the works are believed to have been looted or have belonged to owners who were forced to sell them far below their market value.

Entering to her campaign theme “Fight Song,” Clinton got a thundering reception from the mostly female audience, complete with a “Hillary! Hillary!” chant. The Democratic frontrunner, who is facing a similar threat to her nomination in Bernie Sanders to the one she succumbed to in 2008 with Barack Obama, began by sharing some of the lessons she’s carried into her current campaign. In a shot at Sanders, and perhaps Obama, Clinton said the biggest test for a president is the ability to “actually produce results for people, not just talk about it.”

But quickly, thanks to co-host Joy Behar, the conversation turned to this issue of sexism in the 2016 race, on both sides of the nomination process. Referencing Trump’s Twitter attacks on Heidi Cruz, his campaign manager’s battery against a reporter, and comments about “punishing” women for getting abortions, Behar asked, “What do you think will happen to women if Trump wins, god forbid?”
...
While Clinton played up her rivalry with Trump, she also played down any animosity between herself and Sanders. “I’m very proud of the campaign that Senator Sanders and I have run, because we’ve run it on issues compared to insults,” she said. “We’ve really tried to stay on issues and where we stand and what we would do, but we do have contrasts.” She pointed to a difference on guns as one example.

Maya Angelou would have turned 88 today, and while she is no longer with us, her words live on. The author and civil rights activist is best known for her 1969 memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first non-fiction bestseller by an African-American woman.

The poet, who passed away in 2014 at the age of 86, inspired so many with her gorgeous words. From her 1994 Grammy win to her 2010 acceptance of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Angelou was a beloved American icon.

Adam Parkhomenko, the political operative who founded the Ready for Hillary super PAC, will lead Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in Maryland, an aide said Monday.

Clinton's campaign announced several staff appointments in the state, including Parkhomenko and Quincey Gamble, a veteran political operative and Baltimore native, who will serve as a senior adviser to the campaign.

Parkhomenko, who previously served as the campaign's director of grassroots engagement, founded "Ready for Hillary," the super PAC created to draft Clinton into the race. Gamble is former executive director of the Maryland Democratic Party, adviser to former Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown and political director of 1199SEIU -- one of the state's most politically active labor groups.

An office in Downtown Brooklyn is with her -- Hillary Clinton, that is.

It's been a year since the presidential hopeful signed the lease at her campaign headquarters at One Pierrepont Plaza.

With 1,243 pledged delegates already under her belt and two weeks to go before New York’s April 19 primary, operations at the Brooklyn Heights office won’t be slowing down anytime soon.

amNewYork took a tour of the campaign headquarters back on March 23, just a day after Clinton won the Arizona primary -- in fact, a staffer was updating a delegate tracking wall with the new tally while we were there. The colorful delegate tracker shows Clinton's pledged delegates in blue, far outpacing Sanders' delegates, shown in pink, and it's one of many visual walls that seem geared toward inspiring Clinton's campaign staff.

The idea that Sanders might have done better in the delegate count if he’d attacked her email arrangement misses a crucial point about Sanders’s decision not to do that. It wasn’t just about a desire by Sanders to preserve the moral high ground, though that was part of it. It was also key to what made his campaign what it was early on, when it gained momentum. When Sanders shouted at a debate last fall that “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,” the reason it elicited such rousing applause — and became such an important moment for Democrats — was not simply that he’d given a fellow Dem a pass. It was that he was declaring our political system — and our political media — to be hopelessly mired in trivia, rendering it borderline pathologically unable to grapple with the major challenges facing our country.

Given how crucial that broader story-line has been to Sanders’s candidacy — that our political system and media are dithering while the middle class, our democracy, and our planet are facing quasi-existential threats from creeping oligarchy and climate change — it might have been difficult for him to prosecute a case against Clinton’s email arrangement. For many Dems the media obsession with it had already become a symbol of the dysfunctional, frivolous Beltway political culture Sanders is running against.

The idea that Sanders didn’t attack Clinton hard enough over her Wall Street speeches also deserves some skepticism. The Sanders campaign aired an ad implicitly hitting Clinton over the speeches as early as the end of January, before the very first voting in the Iowa caucuses. What’s more, Sanders’s criticism of Clinton over Wall Street money has long been problematic for him, too, because it shed light back on to a tension within his own candidacy. Sanders has offered up a critique of our broader system as corrupt and in thrall to big money interests, which has had the salutary effect of forcing the topic squarely on to the Democratic agenda. But his campaign has sometimes seemed to equivocate on whether it wants to be seen implying that Clinton herself is bought and paid for, or at least that her policy positions are the direct result of donations to her campaign. One charitable interpretation is that Sanders has been uncomfortable with this latter implication, but that he and his campaign have at times succumbed to the temptation to indulge in it, because, after all, he’s trying to defeat her.

Both Clinton and Sanders are effective progressive fighters. Sanders is not a purer progressive choice, merely a different one. While this piece has examined the holes in the Sanders mythology, I believe without reservation that both Democratic candidates represent positive values and a more progressive path to the future.

When I head into the polling booth, I’m looking for the person with the best proven record of influencing positive change. I will vote for the Democratic nominee in the general election. Period.

The strongest person in this primary race is Hillary Clinton, a successful Secretary of State whose career has been marked by bold positions on major issues, like granting children access to healthcare and ensuring the rights of women abroad.

I’m proud to cast my vote, once again, for a whip-smart, pragmatic and effective progressive woman. And I can’t wait for little girls across this country to hear the phrase “Madame President” for the first time in history.

Most importantly, I’m proud to cast my vote for a party that has shown moral growth and represents the best of our country, as opposed to the greed and fear-driven party of opposition.

The three Punic wars were a struggle for dominance of the Mediterranean region by the two great trading and military powers of the third and second centuries BC: Carthage and Rome. Carthage, a former Phoenician city-state in present-day Tunis, had an empire extending over most of the north African coast as well as the southern tip of Iberia. Rome was then still a republic, and the two states were locked in a power struggle apt to flare into open war, until the Romans annihilated Carthage in 146BC.

Hannibal, son of general Hamilcar who led troops in the first Punic war, gave Carthage its most glorious hour. He is ranked alongside Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and his nemesis Scipio as one of the greatest military strategists of the ancient world, and his alpine crossing plays a big part in that reputation. Most of what we know about it comes from the accounts given by the Roman writers Polybius (c200-118BC) and Livy (59BC-AD17). They make it sound truly harrowing.

As the Carthaginian army ascended from the Rhône valley in Gaul, they were harassed and attacked by mountain tribes who, knowing the territory, set ambushes, dropped boulders and generally wrought havoc. During the descent the Carthaginians were mostly unmolested, but now the mountains themselves threatened mortal danger. The Alps are steeper on the Italian side, and the path is narrow, hemmed in by precipices.

“Because of the snow and of the dangers of his route [Hannibal] lost nearly as many men as he had done on the ascent,” wrote Polybius. “Since neither the men nor the animals could be sure of their footing on account of the snow, any who stepped wide of the path or stumbled, overbalanced and fell down the precipices.”