USA - Approximately 1,300 DOE employees took a year’s unpaid leave, including benefits, agreeing that, by September 5, they would show proof of COVID vaccinations in compliance with New York City’s vaccine mandate or be “deemed to have voluntarily resigned.” Only 450 teachers and paraprofessionals are returning to work, having complied with the order. With the school year having started, some COVID restrictions were eased for students and staff, but not vaccine mandates. Councilman Joe Borelli, a Republican, believes it’s time to lift the order, calling it “absurd,” according to SI Live.

GERMANY - German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said Germany has a chance of getting through the winter "comfortably" despite the lack of Russian gas. Germany is on track to meet a 95% storage capacity target by November. "If everything goes well, savings in Germany are high and if we have a bit of luck with the weather, we will have a chance at getting through the winter comfortably," Economy Minister Robert Habeck said on Monday. "That means, however, that the storage facilities will be empty again at the end of the winter — in this case really empty, because we are going to use the gas," he added.

GERMANY - Germany’s ruling class is using NATO’s war in Ukraine against Russia to aggressively reinvigorate militarism both at home and abroad. Recent speeches by Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht and Chancellor Olaf Scholz (both Social Democrats, SPD) leave no doubt about this. The return of German militarism has been long prepared behind the backs of the population and was publicly announced as early as the 2014 Munich Security Conference. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD), as foreign minister at the time, declared that Germany was “too big and economically too strong for us to comment on world politics only from the sidelines.” History is returning with a vengeance. Almost 70 years after the crimes of the Nazis and its defeat in World War II, the German ruling class is once again adopting the imperialist great power politics of the Kaiser’s Empire and Hitler. The speed of the escalation of the war propaganda against Russia recalls the eve of World War I and World War II.

UNITED NATIONS - The world’s problems seized the spotlight Tuesday as the UN General Assembly’s yearly meeting of world leaders opened with dire assessments of a planet beset by escalating crises and conflicts that an ageing international order seems increasingly ill-equipped to tackle. After two years when many leaders weighed in by video because of the coronavirus pandemic, now presidents, premiers, monarchs and foreign ministers have gathered almost entirely in person for diplomacy’s premier global event. But the tone is far from celebratory. Instead, it’s the blare of a tense and worried world. “We are gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, adding that “our world is in peril — and paralyzed.”

RUSSIA - Clash of the two systems of governance, as George Soros formulated it in his remarks to the World Economic Forum conference in May, seems to have reached a phase transition. Russian President Vladimir Putin has returned from last week’s summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization conference in Samarkand with a palpable sense of confidence and determination, and it does appear that he has obtained reassurances of support from all the key leaders during the event, including China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Iran’s Ebrahim Raisi, and even the new PM of Pakistan, Shehbaz Sharif.

EUROPE - Bloc “clearly” lacks leadership, vision and strategy, Alexis Tsipras claimed. Aside from Ukraine, the second biggest loser in the ongoing conflict in Eastern Europe, both economically and geostrategically, is the European Union, according to a former prime minister and current leader of the opposition in Greece. “The US is not losing, neither economically nor geostrategically,” Syriza party leader Alexis Tsipras said during a lengthy press conference on the sidelines of the Thessaloniki International Fair on Sunday. “Economically, Russia is not losing either,” he said, arguing that the “ruble has become one of the strongest currencies,” while Moscow, due to record high prices of natural gas, has become a “regulator” capable of “opening and closing the tap” at will. While expressing his solidarity with the people of Ukraine and saying “we must do everything to put an end to the war,” Tsipras claimed that apart from innocent civilians the “biggest loser” is the European Union, which is in “turmoil,” and “clearly lacks leadership, vision, strategy.” “We need to re-evaluate the sanctions. Were the measures correct or are we shooting ourselves in the foot?”

VATICAN - Putin says he will not 'bluff' on using all means amid reversals. It is madness to think of using nuclear weapons, Pope Francis told his weekly general audience in the Vatican on Wednesday after Russian President Vkladuimir Putin said he would not bluff on using all means in Ukraine amid recent reversals.Recalling his recent visit to Kazakhstan, the pope said "we must recognize that Kazakhstan has made very positive choices, like saying No to nuclear weapons". "In this it was brave, at a time when this tragic war (in Ukraine) leads some people to think about nuclear weapons, that madness!" Pope Francis said he spoke yesterday to Cardinal Konrad Krajewski who was in Ukraine on his fourth humanitarian and pastoral mission to the nation.

RUSSIA - Vladimir Putin has threatened the West with nuclear weapons over Ukraine, telling leaders: 'I'm not bluffing'. Desperate despot also announced mobilisation of 300,000 reservists, first Russian mobilisation since WW2. Occupied Ukrainian territories will be annexed to Russia, he said, and 'all means' will be used to defend them. Ukraine dismissed the threat, saying it is 'predictable' and shows the war is not going as Putin had planned. He vowed to use 'all means' to defend the regions, saying: 'If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will use all available means to protect Russia and our people - this is not a bluff... I shall stress - by all means available to us. Those trying to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the tables can turn on them.' Putin's gambit comes after Ukraine routed a large part of the Russian army last week, leaving him backed into a corner of his own making and facing the possible collapse of his so-called 'special military operation'.

RUSSIA - The Russian president had earlier warned that Moscow is ready to defend its territory using all available means. Washington has slammed as “irresponsible” a recent warning by President Vladimir Putin that Russia is prepared to use any means necessary to protect its territorial integrity. Speaking to ABC News on Wednesday, White House spokesman John Kirby said “We always have to take this kind of rhetoric seriously,” but condemned Putin’s reference to the use of nuclear weapons, adding that “it’s irresponsible rhetoric for a nuclear power to talk that way.” Kirby said Washington was monitoring the situation “as best we can” but noted there has been no indication that Russia has shifted its strategic posture and that the US currently sees no need to adjust its own. In the event that Russia does decide to deploy nuclear weapons, Kirby warned that there would be “severe consequences” for Moscow, referring to a previous statement by US President Joe Biden, in which he urged Russia to avoid using nukes, saying it would “change the face of war unlike anything since WWII.”

NATO - The head of the US-led bloc didn’t elaborate on who would emerge victorious. NATO has told Moscow very clearly that Russia cannot win a nuclear war and has been amassing troops on its eastern border to “remove any room for miscalculation or misunderstanding,” the secretary general of the US-led bloc, Jens Stoltenberg, told Reuters on Wednesday. “This is dangerous and reckless nuclear rhetoric,” he told Reuters editor-in-chief Alessandra Galloni on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. “He knows very well that a nuclear war should never be fought and cannot be won and it will have unprecedented consequences for Russia,” he added, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Stoltenberg insisted that the Russian leader had “made a strategic mistake” with Ukraine and that the conflict there is not going according to his plan – as inferred by NATO, anyway. He also argued that Russian forces are ill-equipped and struggling with command, control and supplies, while Ukraine has the unified support of the collective West, which Russia “totally underestimated.”

UK - Is 2022 the driest year recorded? Europe and parts of China have experienced extreme temperatures this summer, dry conditions in Africa have put millions at risk of starvation, and the American West continues to see a persistent lack of rainfall. Scientists say warmer and drier seasons are likely to become the norm, but have these past few months been the driest on record? How dry is the earth? One measure of drought conditions used by scientists is based on the level of moisture in the soil as measured by satellite imagery. We have compared these dry conditions over the past three months to average conditions since the beginning of this century, to build up a picture of how extreme recent weather patterns have been.

USA - Just over the past few days, our planet has been hit over and over again by major natural disasters. So why is this happening? At this moment, we are reaching the end of a summer that many of us will remember for a long time to come. The western United States, Europe and China are all in the midst of the worst droughts that they have experienced in centuries, and meanwhile relentless flooding has absolutely devastated other areas. For example, unprecedented flooding resulted in a third of the entire nation of Pakistan being under water for an extended period of time. We could definitely use a break, but instead the past few days have brought us an extremely alarming series of historic disasters. For example, the western coast of Mexico was just hit by an extremely powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake…

UK - Farewell to the US-UK trade deal. That's the news from Liz Truss's trip to the UN assembly in New York. The British prime minister has told journos on the flight over that the UK will not strike an agreement with America for many years to come. Truss, the UK's former international trade secretary, suggested that talks were unlikely to even start in the medium term: "There isn't currently any negotiation taking place with the US and I don't have an expectation that those are going to start in the short to medium term."

USA - China is entirely capable of imposing a naval blockade on Taiwan, commander of the US Seventh Fleet, Vice Admiral Karl Thomas, acknowledged in an interview with The Wall Street Journal published on Monday. “They have a very large navy, and if they want to bully and put ships around Taiwan, they very much can do that,” the admiral said. China has already created a large and modern navy, Thomas stated, with the number of military vessels at Beijing’s disposal continuing to grow rapidly. The admiral said that he did not, however, know whether China is seeking to take any actual action against Taiwan, which Beijing regards as an integral part of its territory, whether through an all-out invasion or a naval blockade.

USA - What bothers Baker and many others in the power-generation business is switching off older coal and nuclear plants, like this one in southwest Michigan, that closed earlier this year. They say it’s leaving a power gap that renewables can’t yet fill. Eric Baker: I think more and more wind and solar is a good idea. Where it’s challenging is when it gets to the margin of the assets that we need to keep the lights on. Because we don’t have a technology that can store energy today, and I don’t think we will in a decade, and I don’t know that we will in two decades, have a meaningful storage technology that can collect power today and discharge that over several days in the future. The risk is only going to increase over the next few years if we don’t fix that core problem of increasing the amount of new electric-generating resources on the system in order to meet the growing demand for electricity. As millions of Americans working from home put added strains on the system, and others consume more too, keeping everything from phones to laptops to electric cars in a constant state of charge.