The hydrogen-bomb test embarrassingly overshadowed the carefully choreographed summit. Worryingly for China, this was not the first time – and very likely not the last – its junior communist neighbor had deliberately chosen a key moment to humiliate its leadership.

In March, when China’s top political figures met at the annual National People’s Congress, the country’s parliament, Pyongyang test-fired a quartet of ballistic missiles.

A month later, just a day before Xi’s first encounter with his US counterpart, Donald Trump, in Florida, the Kim Jong-un regime launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile.

In May, when China’s core leadership was about to inaugurate a huge international summit for Xi’s signature trillion-dollar One Belt One Road initiative, the young dictator in Pyongyang ordered another ballistic-missile test. However, of these confluences, North Korea’s nuclear test last Sunday was probably the most humiliating for China and Xi.

For nearly 70 years, Beijing has protected and nourished the dictatorial and hereditary Kim regime in Pyongyang because it saw its junior communist neighbor as a crucial buffer against the US and its Asian democratic allies. Yet for all the huge costs, including colossal human sacrifices, China paid to defend and sustain the Kim empire, instead of serving as a submissive client state and a bulwark against US encroachment, North Korea is now a troubling neighbor and a key reason for an increased US military presence in its backyard. In many aspects, North Korea is now a nightmare for the Chinese leadership.

"And also unprecedented is that this particular storm, Irma, has sustained intensity for the longest period of time of any hurricane or typhoon in any ocean of the world since the satellite era began," Myers said. "This is a story for many days to come, and Florida will be ravaged the most through Sunday night and maybe north Florida Monday morning," Myers said.

"We believe the damage estimate from Irma to be about $100 billion, among the costliest hurricanes of all time. This amounts to 0.5 of a percentage point of the GDP of $19 trillion," Myers said.

"We estimated that Hurricane Harvey is to be the costliest weather disaster in US history at $190 billion or one full percentage point of the GDP. Together, AccuWeather predicts these two disasters amount to 1.5 of a percentage point of the GDP, “which will about equal and therefore counter the natural growth of the economy for the period of mid-August through the end of the fourth quarter," Myers added.

"Some of the losses will be covered by insurance, some will not, so the losses will be felt in a variety of ways by millions of people. Many millions of people have already been evacuated, so their lives have already been affected and they have incurred costs of one sort or another," Myers said.

Now, just two years since the start of his transition, Mitchell says he feels like his biological sex. The harsh truth is, the adults surrounding Mitchell who encouraged his transition failed him. While they might have had good intentions, facilitating a young boy's "transition" comes with life-long emotional and physical affects. Studies have found that upward of 80% of children who suffer from gender confusion grow out of it before adulthood, eventually identifying with the sex they were born.

As Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro put it, "Adults should be free to make decisions about their sexuality and their bodies. But children should not be subjected to the whims of politically driven adults when it comes to massive bodily mutilation that impairs function for a lifetime – all before the child has experienced puberty." Mitchell is yet another young person victimized by adults who buy into leftist "tolerance" propaganda concerning gender and biological sex.

“In my view… the introduction of adequate moratorium power for authorities is needed in order to react with the needed flexibility, if the situation of a bank deteriorates rapidly,” Nouy told a member of the European Parliament in a letter. “Given the potentially swift evolution of liquidity crises, a moratorium tool could be necessary to ensure there is adequate time for ensuring a credible solution,” Nouy said, adding that the ECB will soon publish an opinion on this issue.

The recent collapse and resolution of Spain’s Banco Popular and Italy’s Monte dei Paschi di Siena lent more impetus to this new regulatory push that has been quietly in the works for a while.

“An Ecumenism of Hate” identifies Trump voters, Protestant and Catholic, as in need of correction, as they “diverge from true Christian faith, and pose a threat to American democracy and world peace.” These Trump voters are wrong about, or are handling in an incorrect way, the following: abortion, same-sex marriage, the environment, education, welfare, immigration, the current influx of migrants into Europe, and Islam. Given that the article was understood as a papally-endorsed, full-frontal attack on the president of the United States and his supporters, it received wide attention.

New York Times’ readers exulted. “Glory hallelujah,” says the reader response voted most popular by other readers. “I am not a Catholic but I believe Pope Francis is a true disciple of Christ,” reads the second most popular response. “I wholly support Pope Francis’ crusade against greed and exploitation… and hate-inspired exclusionary policies,” “I am CHEERING,” “Pope Francis … is the true moral leader of the world.”

Hurricane Harvey just broke the all-time record for rainfall in the continental United States, Hurricane Irma is so immensely powerful that it has been called “a lawnmower from the sky”, vast stretches of our country out west are literally being consumed by fire, and the magnitude-8.2 earthquake that just hit Mexico was completely unexpected.  As I have stated so many times before, our planet is becoming increasingly unstable, but most people simply do not understand what is happening.

California is on fire.

Oregon is on fire.

Washington is on fire.

British Columbia is on fire.

Alberta is on fire.

Montana is on fire.

Nova Scotia is on fire.

Greece is on fire.

Brazil is on fire.

Portugal is on fire.

Algeria is on fire.

Tunisia is on fire.

Greenland is on fire.

The Sakha Republic of Russia is on fire.

Siberia is on fire.

Texas is under water.

India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, experience record monsoons and massive death toll.

Sierra Leone and Niger experience massive floods, mudslides, and deaths in the thousands.

Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia are crushed in the death grip of a triple digit heat wave, dubbed Lucifer.

Southern California continues to swelter under triple digit heat that shows no sign of letting up.

In usually chilly August, the city of San Francisco shatters an all-time record at 106 degrees, while it reaches 115 degrees south of the city. Northern California continues to bake in the triple digits.

Yellowstone volcano is hit with an earthquake swarm of over 2,300 tremors since June, recording a 4.4 quake on June 15, 2017 and 3.3 shaker on August 21, 2017.

5.3 earthquake rumbles through Idaho.

Japan earthquake 6.1 possible tsunami.

Mexico earthquake 8.2 imminent tsunami. Beach lines are receded at least 50+ meters.

Hurricanes Harvey, Irma (biggest ever recorded), Jose and Katia are barreling around the Atlantic with 8 more potentials forming.

And last but not least an X10 CME solar flare two nights ago. The highest recorded solar flare ever!

It is absolutely imperative that we all begin to understand that something has fundamentally changed.  Our world has become much less stable, and “apocalyptic events” are starting to hit us one after another.

Jens Stoltenberg, secretary general of the military alliance, said the sheer number of converging threats was making the world increasingly perilous.

Asked in a Guardian interview whether he had known a more dangerous time in his 30-year career, Stoltenberg said: “It is more unpredictable, and it’s more difficult because we have so many challenges at the same time.

“We have proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in North Korea, we have terrorists, instability, and we have a more assertive Russia,” Stoltenberg said during a break from visiting British troops stationed in Estonia. “It is a more dangerous world.”

For the moment, though (Friday morning), it’s a little hard to calculate the effect of a complete scrape-off, wash, and rinse of the state of Florida vis-à-vis the ongoing viability of the US economy. There’s going to be a big hole with dollars rushing into it and that will likely prompt the combined powers of the US Treasury, Congress, and the Federal Reserve to materialize tens of billions of new dollars.

Overnight the DXY plunged to a new low for the year. Am I the only observer wondering if Irma may be a fatal blow to the banking system? The mind reels at the insurance implications of what’s about to happen. Urgent obligations triggered by an event of this scale can’t possibly be serviced. Look for it to snap the chain of counterparty leverage that has been propping up the banks, insurers, and pension funds on mere promises for years on end.

Finance, both private and public, has been feeding off unreality since well before the tremor of 2008. The destruction of Florida (and whatever else stands in the way up the line) will be as real as it gets.

While the internet and social media have made us more interconnected than ever, it’s also meant constant surveillance by companies — in other words, the feeling that on the internet, we are always being watched. Our clicks are logged, categorised, interpreted and rated. It’s leading to what Tijmen Schep, a Dutch technology critic, calls “social cooling” — a society of increasing social conformity and rigidity, in which we self-censor or second guess what we do online for fear of repercussions.

Schep says it all starts with the collection of our data. “There’s a huge business of companies called data brokers,” Schep, the author of Design My Privacy, a “beginners guide to ethical design for the Internet of Things”, told Lateline. That’s given rise to something called the reputation economy. “Where in the past you had your money to increase your value, increasingly your social capital — your reputation — is now being gathered in these systems,” Schep said.

But should voters really be impressed by support from the Big End of Town? After all, if you hear a CEO bluster that workplace safety regulations are too expensive, are you impressed? If you hear a CEO argue for the abolition of a minimum wage, are you impressed? Why are the views of a CEO on marriage wiser than those of a bus driver?

In fact, CEOs are said to have higher than average divorce rates, suggesting that they might know less about marriage than bus drivers. What corporate CEOs are good at is getting their own way. So when corporate Australia backs same-sex marriage, we can expect both gassy rhetoric about “a happy workforce” and a lot of arm-twisting. Which is more or less what Alan Joyce, the CEO of Qantas and the unofficial spokesman for gay marriage in corporate Australia, told a gay newspaper a couple of years ago:

“We have 580 companies involved with the [Australian Marriage Equality] ad campaign. If you’re unhappy with a company that’s involved with the campaign you won’t be able to bank and you won’t be able to fly anywhere.” So how will this play out inside the 628 corporations? Will their human resources departments ferret out dissidents and offer them re-education programs? If they believe that their profitability rests on a united front on gay marriage, perhaps they will.