I have been repeatedly warning that we are way overdue for a stock market crash, and many are concerned that we may be on the precipice of another great financial crisis.  We shall see what happens on Monday, because that will set the tone for the rest of the week.  If we see another huge decline early Monday morning, that could easily set off full-blown panic selling on Wall Street.

It is quite rare for the market to drop this much in a single day.  The largest single daily decline was a 777 point drop in 2008, and overall the Dow has fallen by more than 600 points less than 10 times throughout history… Once a market landslide begins, the movement can be absolutely breathtaking.  But none of this should come as any sort of a surprise, because even the Washington Post admits that “speculation of a market pullback” has been seemingly everywhere in recent days…

Right now we are in the terminal phase of a historic “double bubble” in both stocks and bonds.  Many times we will see one or the other get clobbered on a particular day, but Friday was a “bloodbath” for all asset classes… But it would be foolish to ignore the fear that appears to be growing on Wall Street.  At this point, even Bloomberg is openly wondering if this “is the start of something big?”… If the stock market does crash in 2018, it will not be a surprise. The only surprise will be that it took this long to happen.

Analysts estimate between 30,000 and 70,000 seasonal workers could lose their jobs this year. …"They're taking the water away to the city. So it's a little bit unfair. As long as there's enough water for us, we don't mind. But with the drought, they're taking more and more water from agriculture," Bourbon-Leftley says.

The water is being diverted to Cape Town to avoid Day Zero, when the city's taps will be shut off and residents will have to stand in line for a daily water ration. …If the dams don't fill, there will be no groundwater. And since so many farmers are now relying on boreholes, they're depleting the underground water supply.

Elsewhere in America, preschoolers at the Learning Collaborative in Charlotte, North Carolina, were thrilled to receive a set of gently used playground equipment. But the kids soon found out they would not be allowed to use it, because it was resting on grass, not wood chips. “It’s a safety issue,” explained a day care spokeswoman. Playing on grass is against local regulations.

And then there was the query that ran in Parents magazine a few years back: “Your child’s old enough to stay home briefly, and often does. But is it okay to leave her and her playmate home while you dash to the dry cleaner?” Absolutely not, the magazine averred: “Take the kids with you, or save your errand for another time.” After all, “you want to make sure that no one’s feelings get too hurt if there’s a squabble.”

The principle here is simple: This generation of kids must be protected like none other. They can’t use tools, they can’t play on grass, and they certainly can’t be expected to work through a spat with a friend. And this, it could be argued, is why we have “safe spaces” on college campuses and millennials missing adult milestones today. We told a generation of kids that they can never be too safe — and they believed us.

We’ve had the best of intentions, of course. But efforts to protect our children may be backfiring. When we raise kids unaccustomed to facing anything on their own, including risk, failure, and hurt feelings, our society and even our economy are threatened. Yet modern child-rearing practices and laws seem all but designed to cultivate this lack of preparedness.

There’s the fear that everything children see, do, eat, hear, and lick could hurt them. And there’s a newer belief that has been spreading through higher education that words and ideas themselves can be traumatizing.

The abuse of power now evident at the highest levels of the Obama regime — which weaponized the government to target and destroy political enemies — is the most egregious political scandal in the history of this nation, easily dwarfing the relatively minor events surrounding Watergate.

Yet despite the shocking abuse of power that now confirms America functioned as a police state regime under Obama, the criminal actions of top FBI / DOJ officials are not being called out by a single prominent Democrat or left-wing media publisher. In every single case, Democrats and fake news media outlets are choosing to attack the FISA memo instead of apologizing for their role in perpetuating these outrageous abuses of power that qualify as treason.

Remember: The entire purpose of this deep state operation was to remove a democratically elected President from power by any means necessary, including the weaponization of police state powers in a corrupt government that targeted American citizens.

What this means is that we have a government that is divided, but the division is not an even split. Most of the politicos (we don’t have representation in the United States Congress anymore) want to see complete control over the people with individual rights removed. They want this.

For proof? It was a Republican (Representative Bob Goodlatte, Republican for Virginia) who introduced HR 4760, with a “harmless and patriotic” title for the public to gobble down with a smile: The Securing America’s Future Act of 2018. Wonder how much they paid “Smilin’ Bob” to introduce that one? A harmless, patriotic act in our national interests, yes?

No. Securing the citizenry under the “lock and key” of a National ID Card with biometric data and complete storage of individual records back to the time of birth. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution: it will be gone with “the stroke of a pen…”

Kenya’s opposition leader Raila Odinga — who swore himself in as president on Tuesday — claimed that at least 500,000 young girls and women may be infertile, following a tetanus vaccine administered by the government in 2014 and 2015.

The controversy began coming to a head in 2016 when Agriq-Quest Ltd, a Nairobi-based pharmaceutical company got in a dispute with Kenya’s Ministry of Health over their tetanus and polio vaccinations. A group of Catholic doctors originally made the accusations claiming that the vaccines may contain a hormone that is dangerous to young women and can cause potential sterilization.

Confronted with an emboldened, aggressive Iran, and populations eager for economic opportunity, many leaders understand now that Israel is not the problem — in fact, Israel could be part of the solution.

Despite criticism following President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, for the most part I have seen a growing receptivity to peace across the region. During my travels, I found Israelis, Palestinians, and Arabs, young and old alike, secular and religious, Muslim, Christian, or Jewish, to be increasingly inspired by the possibility of peace. President Trump has brought a fresh set of eyes and energy to the task of peacemaking.

It is clear that President Trump’s actions and language have changed expectations about what is possible. He has revitalized the discussion and language of peace in the region.

As she answered customer questions in fluent Hebrew, she slipped jeans, skirts, and blouses out of plastic bags, refolded them so the creases matched and organized them for shelving. Then she explained to two visitors, in her native Arabic, why she works in a Jewish area of west Jerusalem, rather than in east Jerusalem, where she lives, as do most of the more than 300,000 Arabs of Jerusalem. “I tried to work several times on the Arab side, but it didn’t work out,” said Ro’aa, who declined to allow her family name to be used because of the sensitivity of the subject.

“There were no benefits, my salary was always two months late. On the Israeli side you get paid more and receive all your benefits, and if they see you are working hard you get promoted.” Marik Shtern, a researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies who has delved into the economic gap, says that the city’s Arabs remain underrepresented in knowledge industries where the salary is higher, although there are signs this is changing. They are principally salespeople, security guards and call-center employees.

Even so, both sides gain from the economic interchange. “The thing that holds the city together from fragmentation is the economy and the shared interest both sides have in this dual economy,” Shtern said. “The Palestinians are dependent on the Israelis for a source of income and the Israelis are dependent on them as workers. In some way this stabilizes the situation and keeps it from deteriorating into war in the streets.”

Sometimes we forget if we look back 50 years that the spark which really ignited the Six-Day War came also from Israel’s south, when Egypt imposed a naval blockade at the Straits of Tiran, closing off Israeli shipping through the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. The Red Sea still has the potential of generating conflict in the future. It requires that we be very aware of what is going on there.

The first development that is causing a vast increase in tensions throughout this area is the struggle over the sources of the Nile River. For most of recent history, Egypt was the dominant actor over the Nile and, through various treaties negotiated by the British, the Egyptians also dominated the tributaries of the Nile. But now several things have happened.

First, the countries along the White Nile, which goes deep into Africa up to Lake Victoria, in the past were underdeveloped and their water needs were very limited. Now they are insisting on a greater share of water, which will affect the ultimate flow of water to the Nile River and to Egypt.

But far more serious is what’s going on with the other tributary of the Nile known as the Blue Nile. It flows through Ethiopia. There, Ethiopia is planning what is called the “Grand Ethiopia Renaissance Dam, and by damming the Blue Nile, despite all the guarantees that Ethiopia can offer, Egypt is very concerned that its principal source of water for the Nile River may be denied.

Of all the nations that are positioning themselves in the Horn of Africa, like Iran, the US, Turkey, France, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia, careful attention should be given to the presence of China in Djibouti where China has constructed one of its first naval bases at the gateway to the Middle East. Given the interests of all the actors appearing now in the Red Sea, the whole region has become far more combustible than it was in the past.

With all the focus on Syria and Iraq in recent years, it may be necessary to give greater attention to the theater of the Red Sea which in the next decade could become a serious source of international conflict.