SPAIN - Spain has demanded the UK close its military base in Gibraltar, as political tensions between the two countries threaten to explode. Gibraltar enjoys a strategic location at the western entrance to the Mediterranean, where the straits between Europe and Africa are only 14 km wide. As such, the Overseas territory is routinely used by Royal Navy ships, RAF aircraft and other units that temporarily deploy to conduct training. The MoD also employs 952 personnel in Gibraltar, of which 528 are locally employed civilians. The remainder are military and UK-based civil servants. The presence of the base as well as Gibraltar's status as a British colony have become sources of growing frustration and anger in Spain.

ISRAEL - Hezbollah and Israel could accidentally "trigger" a wider regional conflict despite ongoing attempts to avoid exacerbating tensions in the Middle East, a former Israeli intelligence operative warned. The two sides have been engaging in low-intensity fighting since October when the Lebanon-based militant group declared its support for Hamas and said it would target Israeli forces engaged in bombing the Gaza Strip. Hezbollah has repeatedly targeted Israel's territory with missile strikes, which have been met with a consistent response from Tel Aviv but have not escalated further. However, former officer Avi Melamed told the Daily Express there remains a considerable risk that the "growing crossfire" could accidentally result in a much bigger direct confrontation.

UK - Jeremy Clarkson has claimed it would be near-impossible for farmers to continue feeding the country if the government continues towards Net Zero targets. Ahead of next month's election, political parties are currently gearing up their plans to try and negate the amount of greenhouse gases produced by human activity. Labour has pledged for clean power by 2030 - something critics deem an uphill battle of the steepest sort - while the Tories are aiming for 2035. However, Clarkson has suggested that "strong economic growth and net zero" are mutually exclusive - they cannot work side by side. "It’s very important that we have the ability to feed ourselves, but we simply cannot do that when the main mission is to achieve Net Zero," Clarkson stated in his latest column.

USA - The Post fire, which grew to more than 14,600 acres, is one of nearly a dozen wildfires actively burning in California. Firefighters in California are battling blazes in challenging conditions after several wildfires broke out over the weekend, forcing evacuations and consuming thousands of acres of land. Los Angeles county is dealing with its first major wildfire of the year after a blaze dubbed the Post fire swiftly grew to more than 14,600 acres (5,900 hectares). The fire, which broke out on Saturday, is burning through the mountains along the major Interstate 5 highway, fueled by strong winds that are pushing the flames through dry brush. Firefighters managed to gain ground against the flames on Monday, increasing containment of the fire to 8%.

USA - Despite the fact that summer, and the heat associated with that season, comes around reliably every year, the climate activists behave as if such a thing has never happened before. Ever since “global warming” and “climate change” (formerly known as “weather”) became the environmental bogeymen, any slight increase in temperature over the summer has been spun as the first sign of the climate apocalypse. According to The Washington Post, the US will be assaulted by abnormally high temperatures thanks to a “heat dome” forming over the mainland United States.

VATICAN - Pope Francis warned world leaders that 'no machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being,' as he spoke about the risks posed by AI while becoming the first pontiff to ever address the G7 summit. In his historic address to the leading politicians, Pope Francis said humans needed to remain at the centre of any decisions made by AI systems and that it was vital to maintain 'human dignity' in any processes used. He was especially emphatic on the need for humans to make decisions, not machines, when it came to using weapons. 'We would condemn humanity to a future without hope if we took away people's ability to make decisions about themselves and their lives, by dooming them to depend on the choices of machines,' he said.

YEMEN - The leader of the Iran-backed Yemeni terrorist group Ansarallah, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, warned neighboring Saudi Arabia on Thursday that any normalization deal would “disgrace” the country, implying his terrorists would consider the Saudis a legitimate target. Ansarallah, known commonly as the “Houthis” after the family that runs the organization, has been embroiled in a bloody civil war with the legitimate government of Yemen since 2014. The Saudi government backed the legitimate Yemeni government against the Houthis for years, turning the civil war into a proxy war with Iran. The Houthis responded by directly targeting Saudi territory for years, bombing oil depots and other civilian facilities in the country. Those attacks largely stopped after peace talks in September 2023.

AUSTRALIA - Aussies have flocked to ATMs all over the country to withdraw thousands of dollars in cash as part of a massive awareness campaign against card payments. The Cash is King Australia Facebook group promoted the unofficial Cash Out Day to their 27,000+ followers, calling on anti-card activists to withdraw from bank branches or machines. “Cash out tomorrow June 14th,” the group wrote to its followers on Thursday night. “Bank branch or ATM, get it out, use it don’t lose it.” The event has gained momentum as a protest against the increase in card-only payment options.

USA - A single waste management facility in Pennsylvania has collected $10 million in lost coins since it began picking them out of the trash in 2017, a company executive said. According to the Wall Street Journal, Reworld began sorting through coins in 2017. Out of the $10 million collected, about $6 million were in good enough shape to be put back into circulation. That $6 million was “turned over to a third party to be counted and deposited to local banks. The company estimates that Americans throw away approximately $68 million in change each year.

SAUDI ARABIA - This past Sunday (June 9, 2024) Saudi Arabia made the historical move to not renew an 80-year-old agreement with the United States that established the US Dollar as the world currency to purchase Saudi oil, in what should have been headline news, but seems to have been blacklisted in US financial news publications, even in alternative financial news publications such as ZeroHedge News. Here is the coverage of this historic event from The Business Standard, a Bangladeshi daily newspaper.

USA - Where have all the Teslas gone? Stored in parking lots, every one. Last quarter Tesla produced 433,371 Teslas. It delivered just 386,810, meaning there were about 47,000 extra Teslas around, more than double what it was a year ago and its biggest imbalance to date. This surplus is happening as the electric car company deals with a number of headwinds, including slowing electric vehicle sales growth, growing competition, and chaotic leadership. Of course, some of these Teslas could be en route to happy owners. But the mass of them piling up is getting harder to ignore.

EUROPE - About one month after President Joe Biden slapped new tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, steel, aluminum, and medical equipment, the European Commission has followed suit with its own set of tariffs. The Commission announced Wednesday that it would apply additional duties of between 17% and 38% on imported Chinese EVs beginning early next month. The duties will be applied to an existing 10% tariff on all Chinese EVs, which indicates some vehicles will have duties as high as 48%. "As part of its ongoing investigation, the Commission has provisionally concluded that the battery electric vehicles (BEV) value chain in China benefits from unfair subsidization, which is causing a threat of economic injury to EU BEV producers," the EU wrote in a press release.

ISRAEL - More than 19,000 unguided rockets have been fired into Israel since the October 7 attacks, the IDF announced in a statement on Monday. While most of the rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip by Iranian proxies Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), rocket attacks from Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon have been rapidly increasing on Israel's northern border in recent months. In addition, scores of guided anti-tank missiles have been fired at Israel by Hezbollah, while hundreds of rockets launched by the terrorist groups in Gaza have misfired and landed inside the Strip. The Hezbollah attacks have sparked wildfires in northern Israel, causing much destruction.

USA - When we read about ancient societies that worshipped their gods by conducting child sacrifices, many of us recoil in horror. But the truth is that far more children are being murdered in our time, and the vast majority of the population is perfectly okay with that. In ancient times, in most cases it wasn’t children that were wanted that were brought to the child sacrifices. Instead, in most cases such ceremonies were a perfect opportunity to get rid of children that were not wanted.

USA - Montana has more cows than people. Why are locals eating beef from Brazil? While many people can conjure up romantic visions of a Montana ranch — vast valleys, cold streams, snow-capped mountains — few understand what happens when the cattle leave those pastures. Most of them, it turns out, don’t stay in Montana. Even here, in a state with nearly twice as many cows as people, only around 1 percent of the beef purchased by Montana households is raised and processed locally, according to estimates from Highland Economics, a consulting firm. As is true in the rest of the country, many Montanans instead eat beef from as far away as Brazil.