Brendan Rodgers has insisted that the Premier League and not Europe will be Liverpool's overwhelming priority for the upcoming season.

The Reds open their Europa League campaign with the first leg of their third qualifying round clash with Belarus's Gomel on Thursday night. Rodgers, overseeing his first competitive match as Liverpool manager, embraces the competition, but says the league dominates the club's thinking.

"I don't want to disrespect the Europa League but there's no doubt the league is our priority and we want to finish as high as we possibly can," he told the club's website. "The Europa League is a competition we'd like to do well in. Obviously to do well in it you've got to play a lot of games and hopefully that will be the case. WhenFormer Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., claimed Sunday that Barack Obama "exacerbated racism" by aligning himself with anti-police activists whenever people of color were targeted by law enforcement during his presidency.

Santorum made the comment during a CNN segment about President Trump's success in 2016, and whether he capitalized on Republican backlash to the first African-American president.

"You elect the first black president and there was an uproar. ... What Donald Trump did was he tapped into it," Karine Jean-Pierre, a spokeswoman for the progressive group Move On, said during the segment.

But Santorum fired back, suggesting it was Obama who regularly contributed to division while in office.

"What is being ignored here is the way that Barack Obama played into all this. We can't just go from, 'Oh we elected our first