UK - The study found people in Sheffield on average spent just four minutes and 36 seconds in natural spaces each day. People’s connection to nature has declined by more than 60% since 1800, almost exactly mirroring the disappearance of nature words such as river, moss and blossom from books, according to a study. Computer modelling predicts that levels of nature connectedness will continue to decline unless there are far-reaching policy and societal changes – with introducing children to nature at a young age and radically greening urban environments the most effective interventions. “Nature connectedness is now accepted as a key root cause of the environmental crisis,” said Richardson. “It’s vitally important for our own mental health as well. It unites people and nature’s wellbeing. There’s a need for transformational change if we’re going to change society’s relationship with nature.”

USA - WINDS OF PEACE: Armenia and Azerbaijan Sign Trump-brokered Deal to End a 35-year Conflict. Many tried before, but TRUMP is the only one who succeeded. As we anticipated yesterday, the peace effort by the Trump administration has yielded yet another fruit, as today (8th) the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Nikol Pashinyan and Ilham Aliyev, traveled to Washington, DC and met in the White House. Pashinyan and Aliyev signed a historical peace agreement brokered by President Trump, aiming to put an end to almost four decades of a bloody Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. 'We are today establishing peace in the South Caucasus’, Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev said. ‘Today we writing a great new history’. Armenian Premier Pashinyan added that this agreement represented ‘opening a chapter of peace’. ‘(We are) laying foundations to a better story that the one we had in the past’, he added. 'The countries of Armenia and Azerbaijan are committing to ending all fighting forever’, Trump said at a joint press conference with the two leaders. ‘They suffered greatly for so many years, many tried to find resolution, the European Union, the Russians, never happened’, he added. ‘But with this accord we finally succeeded making peace’.

UK - Too much tolerance risks violence and anarchy. Britain's turning somersaults to accommodate cultures whose values are opposite to our own: Liberal thinking, the kind that is practically compulsory in most universities, teaches that whenever different societies meet and overlap, the results can be overwhelmingly positive. Every culture is good, and no culture is worse than any other, unless, so many say, it is the ‘colonialist’ culture of the West.

UK - In a successful multi-faith democracy, religious freedom should be enjoyed equally by all. Simon Pearson, the teacher accused of Islamophobia and sacked for saying that Lucy Connolly was a victim of two-tier justice, has said that he believes he would still be in a job if he had been accused of offending Christians and not Muslims.

IRAN - The shock revelations came at a press conference hosted by the Washington, DC, Office of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has sanctioned the execution of Donald Trump, dissidents with access to leaked internal documents said today. The Islamic dictator’s website even has a video showing a remotely controlled gun targeting the US President. The shock revelations came at a press conference hosted by the Washington Office of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), where NCRI Deputy Director Alireza Jafarzadeh demanded the immediate closure of Iran’s Embassy in London, which is close to Albert Hall, and its Consular Section in nearby Kensington Court, South Kensington. The NCRI is both a grassroots opposition group in Iran and an international lobbying body working for an end to the Islamic theocracy in Tehran and restoring Iran to full and free democracy.

USA - After the news of the upcoming meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin meeting in Alaska, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine won't be ceding any land. Trump suggested there could be "swapping of territories" as part of a deal to end the war in Ukraine. Ukraine “will not give Russia any awards for what it has done," Zelensky said on Telegram. “Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier.” Zelensky posted a video on X after the announcement of the meeting. "Ukraine is ready for real decisions that can bring peace. Any decisions that are against us, any decisions that are without Ukraine, are at the same time decisions against peace," the post said. "They will not achieve anything. These are stillborn decisions. They are unworkable decisions. And we all need real and genuine peace. Peace that people will respect."

USA - A silent epidemic is sweeping across America, with millions unknowingly affected. Discover the hidden crisis that's raising alarms nationwide. More than 2.3 million Americans are living with sexually transmitted diseases, with some rates now spiralling so high it has even been declared a nationwide epidemic by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. According to a 2023 report produced by the agency using the most up to date information available, a staggering 2,306,776 Americans were reportedly infected with the three main notifiable STDs: Gonorrhoea, Chlamydia and Syphilis.

MIDDLE EAST - In any war, the first casualty is truth. But in Gaza, truth wasn’t just felled by the fog of war — it was methodically suffocated by a terror regime that understood the power of images and the vanity of Western press culture. And for nearly two years, much of the global media — voluntarily or not — served as the willing mouthpiece of Hamas’s grotesque narrative theatre. Let us be clear: Hamas did not win a military war. It waged an information war — and the Western media helped it win it. While Hamas rocketed Israeli civilians from schoolyards and hospitals, while its foot soldiers hoarded aid and filmed hostages as trophies of war, foreign journalists turned their cameras — at best — toward selective misery, and at worst, toward outright manufactured imagery. They reported, almost universally, casualty numbers sourced exclusively from the Gaza Health Ministry — a euphemism for a Hamas propaganda arm with no interest in truth and every interest in manipulation.

UK - Drag Queen Story Hour is vehicle for indoctrination – we're not bigots for pointing it out. There is nothing remotely progressive about this nonsense. The surrender of officialdom to the lunacy of transgender dogma has been remarkable in its scale and speed. Instead of upholding the structures and values that built our civilisation, our political class has imposed a social revolution that subverts family life, wrecks the innocence of childhood, and defies biological science. The advocates of change like to prattle about tolerance, but theirs is a cruel, destructive culture that can leave women deprived of their rights and young people mutilated by unnecessary surgery.

UK - Plans for a £2.5 million 'mega mosque' in a Lake District town with just 11 Muslims is threatening a new explosion of racial tension: Locals tell RONAN O'REILLY their fears ahead of fresh protests. Tensions in this quaint town have flared this summer over plans to build a three-storey 'mega-mosque' on its outskirts – the first such centre in the Lake District. With further demonstrations planned, the £2.5 million project is set to become an increasingly poisonous issue in the weeks and months ahead – and the strong feelings in the community are evident. 'There is a tiny Muslim population in the area, the mosque isn't needed and a lot of people in the area don't want it,' says Kelsie Dixon, a 37-year-old mum with two daughters. 'We are very concerned parents. We are not racist, we are not far-Right, we are just concerned mums of little girls.' Her fears echo those of the mothers who led protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, which was housing an asylum seeker charged with sexually assaulting a schoolgirl last month.

MOZAMBIQUE - The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) warned this week of a “silent genocide” in Mozambique, where Islamic State jihadis are destroying churches, burning down villages, and beheading Christians – and then posting triumphant photos and videos of their atrocities online. MEMRI has long specialized in posting and translating videos from the Middle East that have been ignored or suppressed by local and international media outlets. The Washington, DC-based Institute’s work frequently demonstrates that what Arab leaders say to domestic audiences is very different from what they tell foreign reporters. In this case, ISIS terrorists in Mozambique have been giddily posting evidence of their attacks on Christians, but it took MEMRI to pull the gruesome social media posts together into a narrative about ethnic and religious cleansing. It is no secret that Mozambique has a serious problem with jihadis.

MIDDLE EAST - UN confirms 2,309 out of 2,604 aid trucks entering Gaza between May 19 and August 5 were intercepted before arrival. “The United Nations published data on Tuesday showing that 88.7% of aid trucks collected by the international organisation in the Gaza Strip in recent months were intercepted before reaching their destination.” Tom Fletcher, UN under-secretary, told Piers Morgan: “The vast, vast majority of the aid that we get in gets to civilians.” UNOPS data released days later shows only 300 trucks reached their destination. No source explains why the UN kept sending trucks into a corridor where 9 out of 10 were looted. No operational change. No accountability. No redesign. Just more trucks. Turns out “delivery” means “grab it before it gets there.”

USA - A coordinated effort is underway to alter the legal definition of death, and it’s not to reflect new and innovative medical advancements. The reason is much more cynical. They want to redefine death in order to widen the pool of transplantable organs. And this effort is not grounded in scientific consensus. It is driven by utilitarian logic and money and is enabled by a broken system that discards viable organs while demanding that families relinquish loved ones to accommodate its inefficiencies. At stake is far more than policy; it is another ethical boundary that separates medicine from exploitation. In a recent New York Times op-ed, three cardiologists from Northwell Health, Drs Sandeep Jauhar, Snehal Patel, and Deane Smith urge lawmakers to expand the definition of brain death. They propose that patients who have permanently lost higher brain functions such as memory, awareness, and intent but retain brainstem activity should be considered legally dead.

SPAIN - One hundred thousand olive trees are due to be uprooted to clear way for a mammoth solar farm in Spain. Regional government Junta de Andalucia has deployed a Franco-era law to turn hundreds of hectares into huge solar panels and wind farms - leading to serious losses for around 100 local farmers. Clean energy company Greenalia is preparing to turn 900 hectares into farms, largely affecting the Jaen municipalities of Lopera, Arjona and Marmolejo. Currently, around 5,000 olive trees have been ripped out of the ground so far, sources told The Telegraph. In retaliation, farmers are demonstrating against the axe being taken to hundreds of thousands of the trees. Olive farmer Juan Campos, 67, from Jaen, said: "We have no support from the politicians of the Andalucian government, nor from the agricultural unions; they have never contacted us, nor have the environmentalists. Where are the environmentalists?" Andalucia is responsible for producing a third of the nation's much-loved olive oil - and 10 per cent of the oil used in the rest of the world.

UK - A 'shocked and devastated' farming family have hit out at the Labour government for allowing a large solar farm to be built on their prime farmland. The minister's decision to approve the scheme in the pursuit of net zero means the Sturdy family, who have worked the land at Malton, North Yorkshire, for three generations, face a struggle to survive. The decision is being seen as a dangerous precedent that will raise the threat to the future of other tenant farms across the country. They pay rent to the landowner the Fitzwilliam Trust. Landowners can receive significantly higher rent from solar panel operators than farmers. George Dunn, chief executive of the Tenant Farmers Association, said it was a 'crushing blow' to the tenanted farming sector. Kevin Hollinrake, Tory MP for Thirsk and Malton, said the solar farm approval 'is a deeply flawed and irresponsible move that threatens the future of British agriculture, local communities, and the Sturdy family, who will suffer substantial and irreparable harm as a result.' He said the decision 'signalled that energy security is now more important than food security – an alarming and shortsighted policy direction.'