ISRAEL - The ruling Palestinian Fatah faction on Saturday warned Hamas against reaching a cease-fire agreement with Israel in return for humanitarian and economic aid to the Gaza Strip and said such a deal would be a “free gift to Israel.” The warning came amid unconfirmed reports that Israel and Hamas were close to reaching a long-term truce agreement. Fatah spokesman Osama Qawasmeh warned Hamas against striking such a deal with Israel “at the expense of national unity.” He said such a deal would be considered a “free gift to Israel and another coup against the Palestinian people and their homeland.” He was referring to Hamas’s violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007.

USA - On Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics told us that the unemployment rate was 3.9%. The 3.9% unemployment rate is not due to employment. It results from not counting discouraged workers who have ceased to search for jobs because there are no jobs to be had. If an unemployed person is not actively searching for a job, he is not counted as being in the labor force. The way the unemployment rate is measured makes it a hoax. The government tells us that there is essentially no inflation despite the fact that prices have been rising strongly - the price of food, the price of home repairs, the price of drugs, the price of almost everything. Incomes, of course, have not doubled. In real terms incomes have declined

UK - The UK government has taken one step further towards bringing into effect an ‘opt-in’ organ donation system which will presume a person is an organ donor in moves that one medical ethicist warns could mean increasing donations by “slight of hand”. Conservative Government ministers are to go ahead with reformations to organ ‘donation’ laws which they said could increase the availability of organs for transplant by 700 per year, reports the BBC. The legislation is expected to be brought before the House of Commons when MPs return from recess in Autumn, and if Parliament approves the organ donation law, it will come into effect in England by Spring 2020.

USA - Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-semite. Julian Assange is a rapist, a Russian agent and a terrorist. Donald Trump is an anti-semite, a rapist AND a Russian agent. Vladimir Putin wants to invade and enslave the entire western world and to that end employs Assange, Trump, maybe also Corbyn(?), as well as thousands upon thousands of hackers and murderers who make people vote for whoever Putin chooses, and poison former Russian agents on western soil.

UK - Social media and video games are creating a generation of children with the mental and emotional immaturity of three-year-olds, one of Britain’s most eminent brain scientists has warned. Baroness Susan Greenfield, a senior research fellow at Oxford University and former director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, said she was concerned children were losing their ability to think for themselves, empathise and communicate with each other. Instead, they were being bombarded with instant gratification through social media and gaming which meant that like three-year-olds they would need “something every moment to distract them so they can’t have their own inner narrative, their own inner thought...”

USA - - Everyone seems to look perfect on Snapchat. That's thanks to a vast array of filters and editing options that can change our real-life appearance in an instant. But obsessively tinkering with how we look on social media can have damaging effects. Doctors have coined a new term, "Snapchat dysmorphia," to describe the psychology of patients who seek cosmetic surgery procedures to look more like the filtered versions of themselves. 

ISRAEL - Contrary to Palestinian claims, the core of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not Jewish settlement activity but the Palestinian refusal to accept Israel’s existence, contended Breitbart Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein. Klein was asked to comment on the matter during a panel discussion on Israel’s i24NEWS. Klein stated: “There is no problem I believe with Jewish construction in already existing Jewish communities and to believe that somehow the construction – that Jews building homes – is the core of the conflict is absurd.”

USA - Underneath the US-North Korea talks, the American elite, or the so-called "deep state," really doesn't want anything to do with peace because it would trigger the United States' inevitable decline. "The American elite doesn't want peace," Beal told show hosts Brian Becker and John Kiriakou. "It doesn't necessarily want war, but it doesn't want peace. The military-industrial complex is predicated on war, the threat of war and the possibility of war, so, any break out of peace is a problem," he added. And that's not all. "The further problem is that if they have peace, it gives an example to other small countries that they can stand up to the United States and force the United States into a peaceful coexistence," Beal stressed. At the end of the day, the notion of peace, from the viewpoint of the American elite, "is dreadful because it could spell the end of American hegemony."

IRAN - The widespread economic protests that struck major Iranian cities at the beginning of this week, following protests beginning on December 28 over the Islamic Republic’s foreign adventurism, finally reached Iran’s capital city Tehran on Thursday. Iran’s currency dropped past 100,000 rials per one US dollar on Sunday, exceeding record-lows to plunge to 111,500 rials. On August 7, the United States will reimpose economic sanctions on Iran. In June, thousands of Iranians took over Tehran’s historic Grand Bazaar, forcing its shutdown in protest over Iran’s decision to spend money on the Islamic Republic’s adventurism abroad instead of helping fuel its troubled economy at home. Over 40 percent of Iranians remain unemployed.

USA - Thanks to its reliance on information from Wikipedia, the top Google search result for “leader of the free world” is not the President of the United States, with whom the term is normally associated, but crisis-engulfed German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Searches for the term currently return a picture of Merkel as the top result, and two links to the Wikipedia page on “free world.” Immediately following those results is a CNN opinion piece stating that President Trump is “no longer leader of the free world.”

USA - Donald Trump Jr has come under fire for equating the Democrats’ platform and that of the Nazi party in an attempt to dismiss the concerns of “kids in dreadlocks running around screaming about fascism” in the US. Trump made the remarks at the premiere of Dinesh D’Souza’s new film, ‘Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party,’ which argues Adolf Hitler was a progressive liberal.

USA - In January 2017, just days before the president was inaugurated, we reported that he planned to cut entire federal agencies as he sought $10.5 trillion in cuts over a period of 10 years. Who but a billionaire businessman knows better how to balance budgets by trimming costs and eliminating duplication and waste?

SOUTH AFRICA - There will be huge food shortages and riots on the streets following plans to seize white South African farmers’ land, it has been warned. Experts have said the country will face dire consequences if plans to alter the country’s constitution are pushed through. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa recently announced plans to allow white people’s land to be taken without compensation. It will then be distributed to black people in a move Ramaphosa said will be good for the economy. But critics worldwide have blasted the proposed change, saying it will spark riots as well as a deep economic recession.

USA - Last year, a pair of photographers from National Geographic captured disturbing video footage of an emaciated polar bear that they uploaded to the magazine’s website with the opening line: “This is what climate change looks like.” There’s just one problem, though: the polar bear’s plight had absolutely nothing to do with climate change, it has now been revealed.

INDONESIA - A powerful earthquake rocked Indonesia on Sunday, causing death and destruction as homes were flattened and at least 142 people were killed. Rescuers still have not reached some of the most hard-hit areas so the death toll could climb. Thousands of homes and buildings were damaged and 20,000 people are in temporary shelters. Lombok was hit a week earlier, on July 29, by a 6.4 magnitude earthquake which killed 17 people, injured hundreds and briefly stranded several hundred trekkers on the slopes of a volcano.