ISRAEL - Last month, high-ranking international banking representatives and organizations convened in Israel for a worldwide “war game” simulation portraying the global financial system’s downfall. The tabletop experiment was similar to “Event 201,” a pandemic simulation drill held in October 2019, just before COVID-19 made its global debut. Commencing December 9, 2021, the “Collective Strength” project was hosted at the Israeli Finance Ministry in Jerusalem for ten days. Reservations over the Omicron variant led to its relocation from the Dubai World Expo to Jerusalem. Treasury officials from the United States, Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates were among the ten countries represented amongst the Israel led contingent.

EUROPE - On 23 August, on the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes is observed. It was on that day in 1939 that an agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union opened the gate to the Second World War and all kinds of totalitarian violence: from forced migration through slave labour and war crimes to genocide, including an event unprecedented in world history – the Holocaust. 23 August brings back the memory of millions of those who fell victim to totalitarian regimes, including the inmates of Nazi concentration camps, death camps, Soviet gulags and Stalinist prisons. Our aim is to recall their individual stories. The aim of the "Remember. August 23" is to cultivate memory of the victims of Nazism, Stalinism and all other totalitarian ideologies, whom we strive to portray not as an anonymous collective, but individuals with their own distinctive stories and fates. By doing so, we also want to increase public awareness of the threats posed by extremist ideologies.

ETHIOPIA - “The worst disaster on Earth:” That’s how the head of the World Health Organization on Wednesday described the ongoing crisis in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who is himself from Tigray, said the situation caused by the conflict in his home country is worse than any other humanitarian crisis in the world. He said that the 6 million people in Tigray have been “under siege” for the last 21 months, and “Nowhere in the world would you see this level of cruelty.”

UK - Virtual children that can play with you, cuddle you, and even look like you could help to combat overpopulation, according to an artificial intelligence expert. In her recently published book, Catriona Campbell, one of the UK’s leading authorities in AI, predicted that these computer-generated babies will be commonplace in 50 years as concerns about overpopulation (a scam on par with the climate crisis) will prompt society to embrace digital children. She said they will only exist in the immersive digital world known as the ‘metaverse’ and will cost next to nothing to bring up, as they will require minimal resources. They will be accessed using virtual reality technology to make the user feel as if they’re face-to-face with the child.

SWITZERLAND - The latest highly controversial technology/policy that the World Economic Forum (WEF) has set out to explore is the idea of implanting tracking chips into humans. It wasn’t that long ago that those speculating on a future where this is happening would get dismissed as conspiracy theorists, but now the world elites’ most vocal outlet is predicting that chip implants will eventually become just a commodity. And an article on the WEF website makes a case that implanting chips into children could be viewed by parents as a “solid, rational” move. All of this crops up in a blog post on the organization’s website dedicated to the future of augmented reality (AR), and what is referred to as “an augmented society.” Like in many of WEF’s other takes on the future of various types of technology, the emphasis is put on inserting the “right,” ie, its own “vision” in the direction these should be developing, with the inevitable mention of undefined society stakeholders who will hold the key to the ethics issue of it all.

USA - Dallas County confirmed the first fatality from the record breaking flooding that impacted the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex on Monday, with some parts of the city picking up more than 15 inches of rain. The Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex was overtaken by a slow-moving thunderstorm late Sunday night into Monday, resulting in a rain event that established the area's highest 24-hour precipitation total in nearly 90 years, leaving one dead and prompting a barrage of flash flooding and subsequent water rescues. Dallas has been in the throes of an exceptional drought this summer, according to the US Drought Monitor, and experienced a 67-day streak during which no measurable rain fell - the second-longest such streak in city history. That streak ended on August 10, but drought conditions, as well as unusually hot weather, have persisted until the deluge that occurred Sunday into Monday.

EUROPE - The head of Poland’s central bank has claimed that Germany is eying up ways of seizing territory lost to Poland after the end of the Second World War. Adam Glapiński, the President of the Central Bank of Poland, also accused former Polish prime minister and European Council president Donald Tusk, whose “centrist” party was ousted by the current national conservative one, of aiming to overthrow Poland’s current political order with the backing of Germany in the hopes of creating a federal EU superstate — a stated aim of the current sitting German government.

FRANCE - A senior minister in France has demanded that the country create 3,000 ‘green police’ posts in the face of global warming. Gérald Darmanin, who serves as France’s Minister of the Interior, has announced that he aims to create 3,000 posts for new “green police” officials, a move that he has deemed necessary in the force to tackle climate change. News of the potential creation of these new posts in France follows calls from European Union bigwigs for the creation of a bloc-wide “Civil Protection Force” - to fight the effects of climate change - under the control of Brussels, a move slammed by some as an attempt by Eurocrats to hoard even more power.

UK - Fears are growing that the huge strikes which militant unions have unleashed at Felixstowe - Britain's biggest container port and gateway to global trade - will trigger widespread disruption to the UK supply chain, interrupt £700 million worth of trade and lead to shortages until Christmas. Around 1,900 members of Unite have begun eight days of industrial action at the port in Suffolk as hardline union bosses play chicken with the UK economy and potentially the living standards of millions of households in a dispute over pay. The unprecedented strike at Felixstowe, which handles nearly half of the containerised freight entering the country, is estimated to disrupt hundreds of millions of pounds in trade and trigger goods shortages, including at supermarkets such as Asda, Tesco and Marks & Spencer. Experts have warned that shortages could put pressure on the price of goods and fuel already-rampant inflation - perhaps even sending it through the roof by Christmas - as Britons face the most severe cost of living crisis in 60 years.

UNITED NATIONS - Small farmers are the world’s primary food providers. It’s imperative for policymakers to listen to them, not the big corporates. Worsening harvests, infertile soil and increasing food poverty are affecting the majority of small farmers across the globe, especially in the Global South. But the climate and food crises are not isolated phenomena. They are the result of a global capitalist system – and a neoliberal agenda – that has prioritised big corporate agricultural profits over people and the planet. “Most farmers can no longer produce adequate food for their families,” says Vladimir Chilinya. “Profit-making entities control our food systems… including the production and distribution of seed.” Wheat prices have surged by 59 percent since the start of 2022.

USA - Today, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) released its latest figures of global drug regulatory agency warnings about psychotropic drug risks, reporting a 34% increase in cautions about violence-related side effects and a 27% increase in self-harm and suicidal effects since June 2017. These figures raise questions about whether the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry has been misleading consumers for the past 30 years about the potential violence- and suicide-inducing effects of psychotropic drugs, in the same way patients were deceived into believing that a chemical imbalance in the brain causes mental disorders, requiring the drugs to correct it. University College London (UCL) researchers recently disproved the decades-old theory that a brain-based chemical abnormality causes depression. Since the early 1990s, the industry has propagated this fabricated theory, while also denying the drugs used to “treat” it can induce violent and suicidal behavior.

USA - A cemetery just outside the city of Philadelphia revealed that 90 percent of new burials are victims of the city’s burgeoning violent gun crime. Fox 29, a local news station, reported that “grave diggers at Friends Southwestern Burial Ground in Upper Darby can barely keep up with demand.” Fox 29 also noted that cemetery officials said they are “literally running out of room for burial plots.” Located in Delaware County, the cemetery is the final resting place of many of Mustafa Ali’s family and close friends who died due to violent gun crime. Ali told Fox 29 that many of the victims are minors, saying, “It’s a lot of 15, 16, 17-year-olds out here, people who didn’t even live to see 18.” Two men were killed in a shooting this year while they were driving in a funeral procession on their way to Friends Southwestern to honor the life of yet another shooting victim. The city has experienced a whopping 1,193 nonfatal shootings and 313 fatal shootings between the start of 2022 and August 18.

USA - Have you ever wondered what makes a person snap? What causes a normal, quiet, everyday citizen, loving mother, or doting father to lose it all and fight like a caged animal? What can cause a small village to rise up and rebel against an oppressive police force and start killing them? What is the switch that gets flipped that causes a city to pour two million people into the streets, chanting and demanding to be heard by their government?

RUSSIA - The United States has doomed the EU to hunger, cold and isolation by pressuring the bloc to cut its ties with Moscow, Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said on Friday. He wrote on Telegram that Washington would “stop at nothing to cling to its power over the world as it throws under the bus the citizens’ welfare and the economies of European countries to achieve this end.” He noted that natural gas in the US costs $333 per 1,000 cubic meters. “At the same time, Washington sells it to Europe for a price which is 7.3 [times] higher, rendering the EU economy uncompetitive,” he wrote, adding that the eurozone’s annual inflation rate had hit a record 8.9%. The EU’s decision to phase out Russian energy supplies and cut economic ties with Moscow “have been made under Washington’s pressure,” the State Duma speaker claimed.

RUSSIA - The author and holocaust survivor, Victor Klemperer, identified two distinct styles of language that defined Hitler’s propaganda against the Jews: either “scornful derision” of the inferior race or “panic-stricken fear” of their threat to civilisation. Anti-Russian propaganda over the past centuries has similarly produced two contradictory positions – disdain for Russians as an uncivilised and backward people, and simultaneously an immeasurable threat looming over Europe. A state of affairs described by one writer as "Russophrenia: the idea that Russia is simultaneously about to fall apart, and also take over the world."