FRANCE - A growing migrant crisis, sewage-filled Seine, a bedbug infestation, alienated residents... and comparisons to a 'warzone'. Minister for sport must be one of the most ­unenviable jobs in France right now. At the ­weekend, Amelie Oudea-Castera plunged into the murky waters of the Seine in an effort to ­persuade ­competitors that it would be safe to take part in the triathlon and open-water swimming events in the fast-approaching Paris Olympics. Despite a £1.1 billion clean-up operation, unsafe levels of E.coli were recently found in the river three weeks running, from late June and into July. For the time being, Seine waters are — just — within safe levels, but little else in the French capital augurs well for the Games, due to start in just over a week.

GERMANY - German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (Social Democrats) ordered police to shut down the leading right-wing monthly magazine “Compact” and sent 200 armed officers to raid the home of publisher Jürgen Elsaesser Monday. Now the crackdown on free speech seems to be backfiring, however, as more and more call for Faeser’s resignation and Elon Musk chimes in. Renowned conservative legal scholar Rupert Scholz and free-speech lawyer Jürgen Steinhöfel both called the shutdown “obviously unconstitutional.” Constitutional lawyer Professor Volker Boehme-Nesler said the raid shows “methods of authoritarian states against freedom of the press” by the Antifa minister. Elon Musk chimed in, accusing the German government of “crushing freedom of speech under a jackboot”.

USA - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has indicated he would be less willing to defend Taiwan from mainland China than his Democratic rival and incumbent US President Joe Biden. It is “stupid” for Washington to offer protection to Taipei for free, Trump insisted in an interview with Bloomberg recorded on June 25 but published in full on Tuesday. “I know the people very well, respect them greatly. They did take about 100% of our chip business. I think Taiwan should pay us for defense,” he said. The self-governed island of Taiwan, which China views as part of its territory, produces an estimated 90% of the world’s super-advanced semiconductor chips. “I don’t think we are any different from an insurance policy,” the former president stressed. “Taiwan doesn’t give us anything” despite being “immensely wealthy,” he added. Beijing vigorously opposes contacts between Washington and Taipei, repeatedly calling the Taiwanese issue its “red line.”

CHINA - Responsibility for the breakdown “lies fully with the US,” a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry has said. China has frozen arms control talks with the US in response to Washington’s continued weapons sales to Taiwan, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has said. The US and China held a long-awaited round of nuclear non-proliferation talks in November, the first such meeting since 2018. While the talks produced no concrete results, they were seen as a crucial step in defusing tensions between the two superpowers, after Beijing severed almost all military communication with Washington a year earlier, over then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

ISRAEL - Armed and funded by Iran, they constitute the largest non-state army on the planet with some 50,000 foot soldiers, hundreds of thousands of rockets and thousands of drones. They can overwhelm Tel Aviv's Iron Dome air defences and hit critical targets anywhere in Israel. Despite expressing support for Hamas following its October 7 assault and ­hitting Israel with rockets in a show of solidarity, Hezbollah has so far confined its attacks to the north of the country.

UK - The evidence linking smartphone use with mental health harms in children is growing and one grass-roots organization in the UK is supporting parents who are refraining from giving their kids the devices. Smartphone Free Childhood, founded by Daisy Greenwell and Clare Fernyhough in February, set up various group chats for parents locally across the UK and grew to over 60,000 members in a few weeks, according to its website. Interest in the movement is driven by concerns about the normalization of children with smartphones. By the age of 12, 97% of children in the UK have a mobile phone, according to Ofcom, a government-approved regulator for the use of communication services in the UK.

POLAND - This month, the Polish Sejm, the lower chamber of Poland’s parliament, narrowly rejected a bill decriminalizing assisting a woman to obtain an illegal abortion. According to the Associated Press (AP), 218 members of the parliament voted in opposition to the bill, and 215 voted in favor of it. Two members of parliament abstained from the vote. Abortion is only legal in Poland until 12 weeks of pregnancy, and even then, the abortion has to be in cases of sexual assault, incest, or when the mother’s life is at risk, according to Catholic News Agency. Women who obtain illegal abortions do not face criminal penalties. “However, an abortionist who performs an illegal abortion and any person who assists the woman or the abortionist in the legal abortion could face up to three years in prison for their roles,” the article said.

GAZA - The CIA believes Hamas' leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, is under pressure from his commanders to agree to an urgent ceasefire with Israel due to the extensive suffering of people in Gaza, according to a well-placed source. CIA director Bill Burns told an off-the-record conference that Sinwar is facing blame for the thousands of deaths and displacements of civilians resulting from Israel's offensive in the Palestinian enclave, an anonymous source attending told CNN. Burns, speaking at the Allen & Company summer retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho, allegedly told the conference on Saturday that pressure has grown in the last two weeks from senior leaders worn down by the battle to seek a lasting resolution. The war has forced 90 percent of Gaza's 2.4 million people to flee their homes.

CHINA - At least 40 high-risk Chinese banks have been lost to mergers in the first six months of this year alone as local lenders buckle under exposure to debts, according to reports. Many of these local lenders have been hit hard by China’s economic slowdown, in particular exposure to the debt crisis roiling the country’s real estate market, which earlier this year saw a Hong Kong court order property developer, Evergrande, to liquidate. The People’s Bank of China drained a net 3 billion yuan ($414 million) of cash via its medium-term lending facility on Monday, while holding the interest rate on its one-year policy loans at 2.5%, as the Third Plenum gets underway in the nation’s capital. The twice-a-decade meeting of China’s top leadership has at times marked pivotal policy shifts.

USA - The delayed day of reckoning has arrived for millions of Americans who purchased vehicles with absurdly high monthly payments they no longer can afford. New data shows auto repossessions surged in the first half of the year, driven by elevated inflation and high interest rates, resulting in increased consumer distress as the labor market slows. Cox data shows repos jumped 23% in the first six months of this year compared with the same period in 2023. Repos started moving higher last year and have now exceeded pre-Covid levels, up 14% compared to the first half of 2019. Robb warned, "More people are getting behind on payments because everything is more expensive." What's clear is that consumers have used more debt than ever to fund near-record new car purchases. Fast-forward to today and the ominous new development is that high monthly payments in a period of elevated inflation and high interest rates have made these vehicles unaffordable for some.

UK - A major new survey launched on the heels of the General Election has revealed that the majority of older people in Britain today feel overlooked in many areas of everyday life, with more than a third believing that being old is like being cancelled. This rises to nearly half (43 per cent) for older women over the age of 75, with almost a third of older men (32 per cent) of the same age believing this to be the case. The sense of isolation leads to increased loneliness for hundreds of thousands of elderly people across the country.

WALES - Wales will roll back its default 20mph speed limit this autumn after ministers admitted “errors were made” when the scheme was introduced. Ken Skates, the Welsh transport minister, told the devolved Senedd parliament that guidance would allow local authorities to begin raising the speed limit back to 30mph on certain roads from September — a year after the policy came into force. Wales is the only UK nation to have reduced the default speed limit in built-up areas but it faced a significant backlash from the public, with widespread vandalism of new signs. A petition to reverse the policy attracted almost half a million signatures.

USA - Assassination attempts aren't new in US politics but there has been a sharp rise in violent discourse in recent years, says Peter Sheridan. This is the moment that could change the course of American history. Bloody but unbowed, head held high and pumping his fist in the air seconds after escaping an assassin’s bullets on Saturday, former president Donald Trump faced the stunned and shaken crowd at his campaign rally in Pennsylvania and shouted: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

USA - “A veteran of the sniper team with the world’s longest confirmed kill refuses to believe untrained gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks was so easily able to shoot former President Donald Trump — saying even “a seventh-grader” would know the rooftop he climbed onto was “the most obvious” place to check. “I’m very familiar with the layout of these types of things and what the job should be,” retired sniper Dallas Alexander said in an Instagram post Sunday of the previous day’s attempted assassination at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. “And yesterday what happened, I have no doubts in my mind that the shooter had help from somewhere within an agency, an organization, or the government,” Alexander stated firmly.

USA - America’s liberal-dominated media and “progressive” ruling elites have finally woken up to the reality of President Biden’s rapid mental and physical decline. They are now in a huge state of panic as the November presidential election looms large on the horizon. At the same time, America’s allies are witnessing a rapidly unfolding White House train wreck on the international stage, one that is immensely damaging to the standing and image of the world’s superpower.