Fresh from toppling the president of Venezuela and taking control of the world’s largest oil reserves, the Trump administration’s top diplomat arrived at the Munich security conference on Saturday with a rather new and very disturbing message for European governments.

Empire is great. Empire is back. Empire is American.

The US secretary of state delivered what can only be described as a 22-minute ode to empire. A love letter to conquest and colonialism. A proud defense of the west’s territorial expansion.

That secretary of state was, of course, Marco Rubio – the longtime foreign-policy hawk who is now one of the most influential voices in a Maga-dominated Republican party that once pretended it wanted to end “forever wars”.

Robert Duvall, the steely-eyed actor whose performances in the first two Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, The Great Santini, Lonesome Dove and The Apostle made him one of the finest actors of any generation, has died. He was 95.

Duvall, who received an Academy Award — one of his seven Oscar nominations — for his performance as an alcoholic country singer in Tender Mercies (1983), died Sunday at home on his Virginia ranch “surrounded by love and comfort,” his wife, Luciana, announced.

“I may be poor …” began the call-and-response Rev. Jesse Jackson led in various forms before rapt audiences for more than half a century. “But I am … somebody! I may be on welfare. But I am … somebody! I may be in jail. But I am … somebody! I may be uneducated, But I am … somebody. I am Black. Beautiful. Proud. I must be respected. I must be protected. I am … somebody!”

That, in essence, is the message Rev. Jackson devoted his life to championing — for Black people in general and himself in particular. From leading Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s open housing campaign in Chicago in 1964, through his close association with the great civil rights leader during the last three years of King’s life, to the tumultuous 1970s, when Jackson started what became the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, to the 1980s, when he ran the first viable presidential campaign by a Black candidate in the United States, to the 1990s, when he traveled the globe, to free hostages, advise leaders, join picket lines and lend his internationally famous name to often desperate causes. To his later years, when he settled into the role as a revered elder statesman of Black Chicago and an unceasing voice for social justice.