As Americans lay to rest one of the world's great statesmen, former United States of America President Jimmy Carter, 100, the world is bracing for the return of Donald J Trump to the White House, following his announced plans for Canada, Iceland, the Panama Canal and the Gulf of Mexico, where Trump has declined to rule out the use of military and economic forces to achieve his plans.

Trump's latest controversial ambitions have drawn attention to a warning from the grave by the late world-famous cosmologist and number one bestselling author of A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking. In his later book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions published posthumously, Hawking said this.

 In 1947, the clock was originally set at seven minutes to midnight. It is now closer to Doomsday than at any time since then, save in the early 1950s at the start of the Cold War. The clock and its movements are, of course, entirely symbolic but I feel compelled to point out that such an alarming warning from other scientists, prompted at least in part by the election of Donald Trump, must be taken seriously. Is the clock, and the idea that time is ticking or even running out for the human race, realistic or alarmist? Is its warning timely or time-wasting?

Our take is that the warning is timely and the idea that time is running out is realistic.

The warning was prompted, in part, by the election of Donald Trump, for the first time, when. he won the White House by the votes of the Electoral College but he lost the popular vote by quite a few million votes. This time, Trump can rightly claim a landslide as he won both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

Before he is even sworn in Trump is flexing his muscles by saying: "All hell will break loose" if Hamas does not release the hostages by the date he has set.

Donald Trump is an angry man. The Supreme Court didn’t help him this time. The Court's 5-4 decision Thursday to deny the president-elect’s last-minute effort to delay sentencing in his New York hush money case came on Friday morning, just 10 days before Trump will be sworn in for a second term.

Judge Juan Merchan had already said he wouldn’t impose a jail term, and in sentencing Trump on Friday morning to an unconditional discharge, he noted the unique circumstances.

“To be sure, it is the legal protections afforded to the office of the president of the United States that are extraordinary, not the occupant of the office,” Merchan said, noting that those protections “do not reduce the seriousness of the crime.”

The hearing underscored that Trump will be the first president to take office with a criminal conviction written into his official record.

The proximity of the sentencing to Trump’s inauguration creates a stunning juxtaposition. A defendant who was subject to the authority of a judge and a jury verdict will within days assume the vast powers of the presidency and become the ultimate guardian of the nation’s laws and the Constitution.

Will he use those vast powers against his political enemies as he has announced in the past? What will he do as a 'dictator' on his first day in office, as he said he would?

An old headline Donald Trump: The New Ugly American being dragged up from the archives does not help calm the president-elect's troubled mind.

In this article, Shellie Karabel wrote: “The Ugly American” – a phrase made famous by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer's 1958 political novel about U.S. policy in Southeast Asia—can no longer refer just to the prototypical loud, ignorant American. Today, the title has taken on a real human face, and that is Donald Trump's face.

A new survey by the Pew Research Center shows that worldwide confidence in the U.S. president is at some of the lowest levels since the organization began assessing the U.S. image abroad 15 years ago.

In terms of personal characteristics, the survey found, Trump is seen by most publics around the world as “arrogant, intolerant and even dangerous.”

The survey, carried out before Trump announced the US pullout from the Paris climate accords and published just two weeks before Michael Wolf’s tell-all book about the Trump White House, surveyed people in 37 countries in 2011.

A Vote Of No Confidence?

The survey found that a whopping three-quarters (74%) of those surveyed said they have little to no confidence in the new U.S. leader; a median of only 22% say they have “confidence in Trump to do the right thing regarding world affairs.” This starkly contrasts the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency, when “a median of 64% expressed confidence in President Obama to direct America’s role in the world.” Before this report, a similarly large shift in attitudes toward the U.S. occurred with the change from George W. Bush’s administration to Obama’s – this time the shift was positive. Views of the U.S. improved in Europe and other regions, as did trust in how the new president would handle world affairs.

Trump’s greatest support in the current poll comes from Filipinos, 69% of whom say they have confidence in the U.S. president. Other publics in which more than half of those surveyed offer a positive opinion of Trump include Nigeria (58%), Vietnam

(58%), Israel (56%) and Russia (53%) – countries whose leadership does not stand out as a shining example of participatory democracy.

In contrast, only 5% in Mexico and 7% in Spain have confidence in Trump. In Latin America and Europe, only 14% and 18% of medians have confidence in him.

That was the world's assessment of Donald J Trump during his first term as 'the leader of the free world'. How will he do in his second term? Time will tell.

Against that record how do our politicians compare?

Ia manuia lava le vaiaso fou.