USA - Technocrats should back up a few steps and look at the foolishness of their plans: To power America with 100% renewable energy they propose 500,000 wind turbines, 18 billion square feet of solar panels, 75 million residential rooftop systems, 50,000 wind and solar farms. The projected cost is a minimum of $15.2 Trillion. However, we are already fully powered with enough oil, natural gas and coal resources to last another 200 years.

UK - Julian Assange and WikiLeaks perform a valuable public service and should be praised rather than vilified, former CIA and FBI agents told RT America, adding that prosecuting Assange would be a disgrace for freedom of the press. “Julian performs a function that no longer exists in the mainstream press, and he should be rewarded rather than vilified,” former CIA analyst Ray McGovern said, appearing on RT America’s Debate Week news special. “He’s been promoting the truth. He even got a left-handed compliment from the US intelligence people by saying that the reason WikiLeaks is believed is because they don’t adulterate any of the information they have,” McGovern added.

USA - Twitter might have packed in more characters per tweet — but the move hasn’t helped it assemble more users. In its second-quarter earnings report, the company announced it had 355 million monthly active users, down 1 million from the first quarter. Wall Street closely watches Twitter’s user count as a proxy for the health of the company. Twitter shares dropped 20.5 percent to $34.12 Friday, wiping $6.6 billion off its value. While not as momentous as Facebook’s historic $119 billion loss in market capitalization following an earnings report that showed a slowdown in user growth, it’s the largest drop Twitter’s stock has seen in two years. During that period, CEO Jack Dorsey had started to win back Wall Street by improving the company’s financial performance and user numbers.

USA - Facebook’s shareholders have reportedly drawn up a proposal to remove Mark Zuckerberg as the company’s chairman. Trillium Asset Management, a group that controls approximately $11 million worth of Facebook stock, has drawn up a new proposal to remove Mark Zuckerberg as chairman of the social media company that he founded. The proposal was filed hours before Facebook’s recent brutal earnings report on Wednesday which saw Facebook’s stock price drop by as much as 24 percent. This devalued Facebook by approximately $148 billion.

USA - An expert in smart meter microwave transmission power has published new research showing that, contrary to the official government narrative, the radiation emitted from smart meters directly interferes with normal heart function. To come to this conclusion, Warren Woodward connected himself to an EKG monitor while lying near an Elster smart meter, which was connected to a high-frequency analyzer that measures microwave frequencies.

USA - “…Some of the biggest states, that are in deep water,” Mitch Daniels, a Republican, said during an interview with FOX Business’ Stuart Varney on Thursday.  “I think it is irretrievable.  Pensions is the core of it. It’s not the only fiscal recklessness that they have practiced, but in some of those cases, the bill are genuinely unpayable.” Connecticut isn’t the only state struggling with a debt crisis: California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York are unable to make pension payments to retired government workers. New York’s more than $356 billion in debt; New Jersey more than $104 billion; and California more than $428 billion.  “They’re just one of a number of states, including some of the biggest states, that are in deep water,” Daniels said. 

USA - As the White House convenes a policy meeting on Iran Thursday involving senior Pentagon officials and cabinet advisers under national security adviser John Bolton, and after a week of intense saber-rattling by President Donald Trump and his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani, a new bombshell report by Australia's ABC says the White House is drawing up plans to strike Iran's alleged nuclear facilities as early as next month. 

ISRAEL - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Chinese President Xi Jinping have met on a number of occasions to boost ties between the two countries. The Pentagon is worried that Israel could become a backdoor through which China could acquire capabilities that it could not get in the US… Israeli-Chinese deals could cause artificial intelligence capabilities to find their way into a new generation of Chinese weapons that would threaten American troops. “If an American pilot were ever shot down by a Chinese missile powered by Israeli technology, it would be a real problem for the Israeli government.”

USA - Countries tend to go to war with one another when they have irreconcilable differences on a big issue on which they entertain very different points of view. The same would seem to be true of trade wars.  This must make one think that the present dialog of the deal between the United States and German governments on the question of Germany’s outsized external current account surplus will eventually end in a full-scale trade war between those two nations. 

USA - US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley slammed Arab states on Tuesday for paying “generous” lip service to the Palestinians while not actually giving them much in terms of aid money. “No group of countries is more generous with their words than the Palestinians’ Arab neighbors and other OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation) member states,” Haley told the Security Council. “But all of the words spoken here in New York do not feed, clothe, or educate a single Palestinian child. All they do is get the international community riled up.”

USA - Last October, four US soldiers – including two commandos – were killed in an ambush in Niger. Since then, talk of US special operations in Africa has centered on missions being curtailed and troop levels cut. Press accounts have suggested that the number of special operators on the front lines has been reduced, with the head of US Special Operations forces in Africa directing his troops to take fewer risks.

USA - A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey has found that 71 percent of all American voters are opposed to overturning Roe vs Wade. I must admit that I was rather dismayed when I saw the results of that poll. The pro-life movement in the US has been fighting so hard for so long, and yet it seems like we just continue to lose ground. Yes, surveys have shown that a slight majority of Americans favor having some restrictions on abortion, but when it comes to getting rid of Roe vs Wade completely, voters are overwhelmingly against it. In fact, this brand new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll discovered that just 23 percent of voters want Roe vs Wade to be overturned… This is America: two-thirds support gay marriage, and more than two-thirds want to keep Roe vs Wade.

GREECE - Just before Greece’s third crisis program expires, German economists are skeptical about the country’s future prospects and are calling for more deregulation measures. Athens did "not use the crisis as an opportunity," the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) notes in its recent analysis. This is why the gross added value of Greek private businesses remains too low to reach a higher economic growth. The DIW regrets that when the crisis program ends, so will the "reform pressure." The German "reform pressure" on Greece has, in fact, ruined the country’s economy and increased public debt by 50 percent - to 180 percent of the GDP - created mass unemployment and forced hundreds of thousands to emigrate in search for employment. In the end, even the IMF has rejected the German austerity policy, and US media note that Greece is stuck "in the worst collapse a rich country has ever gone through."

GREECE - Heavy rains led to flash flooding Thursday in the north of Athens, three days after devastating wildfires killed scores of people in the region around the Greek capital. Fire services said they received at least 10 calls from motorists whose vehicles were stranded when roads became rivers after storms in the upscale districts of Maroussi and Ekali. A civil defence spokesman said "dozens of cars were stuck on several main roads" after the early afternoon downpour, adding that traffic was gradually returning to normal.

TURKEY - Turkey plans to keep purchasing Iranian oil in defiance of American sanctions on the rogue regime, according to the NATO ally’s top diplomat. “We buy oil from Iran and we purchase it in proper conditions,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Tuesday. “What is the other option?”