NORTHERN IRELAND - Northern Ireland is facing further challenges amid drought fears after its hottest June in 175 years. Armagh Observatory said this June was the warmest since 1846. It was recorded as being drier than average, with a higher than average number of hours of strong sunshine. The Met Office has said the warm weather is here to stay, with temperatures today expected to reach 25C and little to no rain is expected until the end of next week. Water levels at Spelga Dam in County Down have dropped so low that the road and bridge, which ran through the area before the dam was built, are now visible.

USA - The dry times are back. Drought has returned with a vengeance across much of the United States, with the worst conditions across southern and western parts of the nation. As of Thursday, 38.4% of the continental US is in a drought, according to the US Drought Monitor. That is the highest percentage since the 40% recorded in May 2014. In California, which emerged from a brutal four-year drought last year, 44% of the state is now considered to be in a moderate drought. That's a dramatic jump from just last week, when the figure was 13%.

AFGHANISTAN - The evolving drought situation exacerbates underlying challenges to food security from conflict and weak labour markets. WFP is preparing for a possible drought response to up to 1 million people. La Niña has had a devastating effect on this year’s planting season, with a rain, snow and sleet deficit of 70 per cent prevailing across most of the country. With last year’s wheat production already reported to be 57 per cent below the five-year average, the 2018 harvest is forecast to be even lower: down from 4.2 million metric tons to 3.5 million metric tons. Early assessments by local authorities indicate that more than 50,000 people could be affected by the loss of crops and livestock and will be forced to move in the near future.

EUROPE - Looking out over his parched fields south of Berlin, dairy and grains farmer Thomas Gaebert is wishing for rains to save his crops after relentless hot weather. He’s one of many farmers battling for survival after a heatwave and drought swept across northern parts of the continent, damaging crops from wheat to barley. Many German growers could go bankrupt if they suffer another crop failure, and too much rain in France is set to reduce output there. All combined, it’s shaping up to be the bloc’s smallest grains harvest in six years. “It looks like a desert out there,” Gaebert said of his farm in Trebbin. His colleagues, who have been farming for 40 years, say they’ve never seen anything like this. Gaebert stands to lose a third of his usual wheat harvest and more than half his rapeseed output after heat and a lack of rain withered plants.

EUROPE - Dry summer weather is causing sudden damage to wheat crops in European Baltic Sea countries, putting a question mark over wheat export supplies, experts said on Friday. Denmark and Sweden may even need imports. “EU Baltic Sea countries are large exporters of high quality, high protein wheat and a very dry summer means the outlook for the crop is poor,” one German trader said. “Crop stress from dryness means the harvest is now uncertain.” Germany’s 2018 wheat crop may fall 6.5 percent to 22.89 million tonnes after dryness stress. Polish wheat also suffered from drought and recent rain was not enough to solve the problem, said Wojtek Sabaranski of analysts Sparks Polska.

DENMARK - Denmark witnessed its driest May in 130 years. But while most Danes frolic in the sunshine, the country's farmers are left watching their crops wither in the fields. Total losses could be as high as €1 billion.

EUROPE - Farmers across northern and central Europe are facing crop failure and bankruptcy as one of the most intense regional droughts in recent memory strengthens its grip. States of emergency have been declared in Latvia and Lithuania, while the sun continues to bake Swedish fields that have received only 12% of their normal rainfall. The abnormally hot temperatures – which have topped 30C in the Arctic Circle – are in line with climate change trends, according to the World Meteorological Organization. And as about 50 wildfires rage across Sweden, no respite from the heatwave is yet in sight. If anything, the situation is even worse in Poland, Belarus and the Czech Republic, where vegetation stress has taken hold. In parts of Germany, some farmers are reportedly destroying arid crops.

ITALY - Italian durum wheat and dairy farmer Attilio Tocchi saw warning signs during the winter of the dramatic drought to come at his holding a mile away from the Tuscan coast. “When it still hadn’t rained at the beginning of spring we realized it was already irreparable,” he said, adding that he had installed fans to try and cool his cows that were suffering in the heat. Drought in southern Europe threatens to reduce cereal production in Italy and parts of Spain to its lowest level in at least 20 years, and hit other regional crops including olives and almonds. Castile and Leon, the largest cereal growing region in Spain, has been particularly badly affected, with crop losses estimated at around 60 to 70 percent. “This year was not bad, it was catastrophic.”

IRAN - Iran is arid with low levels of annual precipitation and limited water resources that have been shrinking. Drought has gripped most parts of the country for at least a decade now, and precipitation has decreased drastically to its lowest level on record in 50 years. However, the situation is expected to get even worse. The latest figures by the World Resources Institute predict the rise of water stress globally in the next two decades due to climate change. In particular, most parts of the Middle East, including Iran, are projected to face high-risk water stress. With recent clashes in the central province of Isfahan over water shortages, experts warn that the issue has already turned into one of security. They also warn of mass migration as well as serious socio-economic and political repercussions if the problem is left unresolved.

SWEDEN - Wildfires are ravaging parts of the Arctic Circle, and they’re big enough to see from space. The wildfires started in early June, and more than 50 have now cropped up in parts of Sweden inside the Arctic Circle, according to the European Space Agency, which has kept tabs on the situation with satellites from space. Sweden doesn’t often have to deal with fires, but so far the blazes have swallowed up $70 million worth of land, according to Swedish news agency TT. The country has asked for help from Norway and Italy, which sent along helicopters and planes to help contain the flames, according to the New York Times. The wildfires follow the longest sustained drought on record in Sweden and heat waves that have engulfed most of Europe. And to scientists, they look a lot like what you’d expect human-caused climate change to look like.

AUSTRALIA - Australia is a continent defined by extremes, and recent decades have seen some extraordinary climate events. But droughts, floods, heatwaves, and fires have battered Australia for millennia. Are recent extreme events really worse than those in the past? In a recent paper, we reconstructed 800 years of seasonal rainfall patterns across the Australian continent. Our new records show that parts of Northern Australia are wetter than ever before, and that major droughts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in southern Australia are likely without precedent over the past 400 years.

SOUTH AFRICA - South Africa has declared a national disaster over the drought afflicting southern and western regions including Cape Town… Running water in the port city of 4 million has been affected by a wider pattern of climate change seen around the country including the Western Cape, where Cape Town is located, the Northern Cape and Eastern Cape provinces. Supplies have yet to recover from an El Nino-triggered drought that began two years ago and is now raising the risk of a shortage that could hit industrial and agricultural output.

USA - US special forces have already deployed to 133 nations in the first half of 2018, signaling a sharp increase in the Pentagon’s shadowy operations when compared to previous years, according to a new report. America’s Special Operations forces (SOF) are stationed all around the world, where they participate in a wide range of missions, including special reconnaissance, unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, hostage rescue, as well as training and advising foreign troops. But special forces soldiers are also regularly involved in shadowy combat operations that receive little to no oversight. Shrouded in secrecy, these global operations continue to grow in quantity, size and expense – despite the fact that even Congress is often left in the dark... According to Turse, last year US special forces deployed to a staggering 149 countries –about 75 percent of the nations on the planet.

USA - While ever-hope-filled expectations among the left are for a 'blue wave' in the Mid-term elections, we suspect things may not turn out quite as planned given the last week's "crisis". Even before President Trump had set foot in Helsinki, the left and the media were banging the drums of war against "the thug" Putin and how he would trump Trump, and once the press conference furore was over, all hell broke loose as the left-leaning world attempted to out-signal one another's virtue as to the "treasonous", "surrender" that had occurred.

UK - British officials botched the translation of Theresa May’s discredited White Paper into European languages, part of a UK strategy to win concessions from Brussels, and failed to translate the document into Irish, despite being locked in fraught Brexit talks over Ireland’s border. The paper’s executive summary, which Britain hopes to use to help solve the vexed border issue, has been translated, poorly, into 22 languages. The full 100-page document has only been translated into one other language, Welsh, which, unlike Irish, is not an official EU language. After The Telegraph contacted the British Government, an Irish version was published on Thursday afternoon, two days after the other translations...