USA - We previously reported at The Gateway Pundit about the lawsuit filed in May by the states of Missouri and Louisiana against all of the major government players in Big Tech Censorship, including Joe Biden, Jen Psaki, Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the NIH, the Department of Homeland Security, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and many others. The lawsuit alleges that the Biden administration conspired with – and at times outright coerced – Facebook, Twitter, Google, and every other major tech monopoly, to enforce speech and thought conformity on the internet. We later wrote about a whistleblower who dumped a cache of internal documents from the Department of Homeland Security into the lap of Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. The documents confirm that DHS has maintained an ongoing “disinformation” censorship program, targeting anyone with COVID vaccine concerns and 2020 election fraud concerns – and anyone else thinking Wrongthink.

USA - According to the Pennsylvania Department of Education, children as young as three years old can identify themselves as transgender, and the department recognizes the pronouns “ne, ve, ze/zie, and xe” as valid options for use. As stated on the Department of Education’s website in the section titled “Creating Gender-Inclusive Schools and Classrooms,” teachers are urged to inquire as to their students’ preferred pronouns to prevent making inaccurate assumptions about their gender identities. “In addition to the traditional pronouns (he/him, she/her, they), some people prefer to use gender-neutral pronouns, such as ne, ve, ze/zie and xe,” according to the website. “If you don’t know a student’s preferred personal pronoun, it’s always best to ask.” The website also provides a definition of “binary gender” as the “faulty concept that there are only two genders: male and female.”

USA - Hollywood is coming for your preschoolers, with the aim to hook them for life on a never-ending stream of superhero franchise characters. Major studios are aggressively targeting kids ages two to five in unprecedented ways in the hopes of turning them into lifelong consumers of their content, according to a report in The Wrap. Studios engaged in the long game include The Walt Disney Co and Warner Bros Discovery, the latter of which recently launched the preschool-focused Cartoonito block of programming on the Cartoon Network. One of the studios’ main strategies is introducing toddler-friendly versions of adult superheros, like Batman. As kids and teens gravitate increasingly toward smartphones, preschoolers are still TV-centric when it comes to media consumption. “Television still remains the media of choice among young children, with kids younger than 8-years-old spending 45 minutes watching TV each day,” a recent Statista report found.

LEBANON - A Syrian-flagged ship named the Laodicea that docked in the Lebanese port of Tripoli was detained last Saturday, preventing desperately needed flour and barley from reaching people in the Middle East. The move came after Western threats against Beirut and unsubstantiated claims from Kiev that the cargo was stolen from Ukraine. The ship, which has been on a US blacklist since 2015 for allegedly carrying shipments from sanctioned Crimea, is now under investigation. The country is currently suffering its worst ever economic collapse, enduring shortages in food, medicine, electricity and essential goods. According to some UN estimates, some 78% of the Lebanese population now live in poverty. The food shortage has led to long queues at bakeries, sometimes resulting in gunfire and brawls between people fighting over the limited supply of bread.

HUNGARY - Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban lashed out at the European Union on Monday evening in a Facebook post, reminding his followers that Brussels doesn’t dictate European affairs. “The European Union is not in Brussels. The European Union is in Vienna, Budapest and Warsaw, Berlin and Madrid,” the prime minister said. “Brussels is not our boss. We are an independent, sovereign Hungarian nation. We make decisions together. If they’re not good for us, we’ll tell them. If they are not good and we can prevent them, the common decision will not be made.” Orban has made international headlines in recent weeks for his blunt statements criticizing the West’s policies.

USA - Water levels in wells across Texas are running low because of the extreme drought, groundwater experts say. Drought conditions in the state are getting worse by the week. As of July 28, 97% of Texas was in a drought, affecting 24.1 million Texans, per the US Drought Monitor. “A lot of public supply wells and a lot of even domestic wells have started going dry,” Natalie Ballew, director of the groundwater division at the Texas Water Development Board, told the Star-Telegram. Many communities, specifically in Central Texas, are experiencing significant water supply issues and they’re having to truck water in from other places, Ballew said. That includes areas like Concan and Utopia in Uvalde County, and Leakey in Real County. That’s causing a myriad of issues for those residents, with ranchers going as far as selling off their cattle because they don’t have water for them.

USA - The governors of California and Illinois declared states of emergency to bolster their monkeypox vaccination efforts as the virus spreads nationwide. Monday's declarations come as more than 5,800 probable or confirmed cases of monkeypox have been reported in the US. California had more than 800 cases Tuesday, while Illinois had more than 500, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the World Health Organization has declared the monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, the Biden administration has not issued a nationwide public health emergency declaration. Illinois' declaration also will make more resources available to combat the virus, Governor J B Pritzker said. The Chicago and state public health departments announced Illinois' first presumptive case June 2. "I am declaring a state of emergency to expand the resources and coordination efforts of state agencies in responding to, treating, and preventing the spread of MPV," Pritzker tweeted. "In Illinois, we will ensure our LGBTQ+ community has the resources they need to stay safe while ensuring members are not stigmatized as they access critical health care."

USA - When teachers discuss sex with school kids and urge them to keep that a secret from parents, the teachers are using the same tactics that child molesters use on their young victims. Not that parents didn’t know it. But now that truth has something of an official imprimatur. Clinical psychologists told the Daily Caller that teachers and schools are using predatory grooming techniques. And as five minutes scrolling through the Libs of TikTok Twitter feed shows, predatory grooming in schools is rampant. Sex-pervert and mentally ill teachers frequently post confessional videos in which they explain just how they’re twisting the minds of kids. Beyond keeping secrets, grooming also involves showing young kids inappropriate sexual material. “They start to bring up some kind of sexual content at some point so that they can start to initiate some contact with the child,” Newlin told the Caller. And that content isn’t, of course, just basic biology. “A recent pride event labeled ‘family-friendly’ in Rome, Georgia, featured sex toys, condoms and explicit drag queen performances,” the website reported.

USA - A video posted to Twitter features a girl dancing on stage with a drag queen while adults throw cash tips. Libs of TikTok reposted a video Tuesday showing a little girl dancing on stage while a man dressed in a thong and drag outfit moves around the stage, encouraging the girl to continue performing. The girl can be seen smiling and dancing as two adults were recorded throwing cash at the girl’s feet. The adult female was recorded fanning the cash onto the girl as she danced, similar to a move used in many strip clubs and music videos. As the music fades away, the man in the thong outfit is seen getting on stage to help direct the little girl, while the announcer tells the minor to pick up all the cash tips she made dancing for the adults. “Oh my goodness!! How in the world?!” the man in drag is recorded saying to the little girl. “Look at all that money you just made! Look at all that. My goodness! You just made yourself some money!” The man in drag continues to praise the minor while adults bring more money to the stage...

USA - US household debt increased by 2% to $16.2 trillion in the second quarter, with mortgages, auto loans and credit-card balances all seeing sizable increases, according to a report by the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The increase in borrowing, which equals to $312 billion over three months, reflected in part higher prices for homes and cars. Americans also are putting more on their credit cards to cover rising costs amid decades-high inflation. The main driver was mortgage debt, which accounted for two-thirds of the rise last quarter. And the 13% jump in credit-card debt year-over-year was the sharpest gain in more than 20 years, the New York Fed said in its quarterly report on household debt and credit. Since the pandemic started, about 42 million new credit card accounts have been opened, and consumers now hold more than 750 million auto-loan, credit-card, mortgage, and home-equity lines of credit. Overall, consumers ages 30 to 59 have record levels of debt.

USA - The Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report today showing that employers eliminated over 600,000 jobs in the month of June. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported this morning: The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) produces a monthly report of available job openings. The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary (JOLTS report) shows the number of available jobs at a captured moment in time. This JOLTS report is a summary of the last day in June. The number of available jobs dropped by 605,000 in this report. This is the absolutely wrong direction for the economy to be moving. Without new jobs, there are fewer people working, more people on government subsidies, costing taxpayers billions, and fewer people purchasing things.

GERMANY - Germany, which has been high-and-mighty within the European Union and has imposed austerity against weaker European economies such as in Greece, Spain, Italy, and Portugal, is now demanding that other EU member nations bail Germans out of what will soon inevitably be an energy emergency that results from Germany’s having complied with America’s demand to not only join with America’s sanctions against Russia, but to even terminate Germany’s Nord Stream 2 Russian gas pipeline that was supposed to be increasing — instead of (as now will be the case) decreasing — Russia’s natural-gas supplies to Europe. Germany was, until recently, the industrial motor of the EU, and therefore has the most to lose from reduced and far costlier energy supplies; but this has now happened, and will escalate in the coming winter. As those energy supplies get reduced, energy prices will rise, then soar, and Germany’s economy will get crushed. Something will have to give, probably the EU itself, because the resultant rapidly escalating internal hostilities between EU nations — especially between Germany and the nations that it now expects to bail it out of this crisis — could blow the EU itself irrevocably apart.

UNITED NATIONS - The escalating regulatory attack on agricultural producers from Holland and the United States to Sri Lanka and beyond is closely tied to the United Nations’ “Agenda 2030” Sustainable Development Goals and the UN’s partners at the World Economic Forum (WEF), numerous experts told The Epoch Times. Indeed, several of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are directly implicated in policies that are squeezing farmers, ranchers, and food supplies around the world. High-level Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members within the UN system helped create the SDGs and are currently helping lead the organization’s implementation of the global plan... If left unchecked, multiple experts said, the UN backed sustainability policies on agriculture and food production would lead to economic devastation, shortages of critical goods, widespread famine, and a dramatic loss of individual freedoms. Already, millions of people worldwide are facing dangerous food shortages, and officials around the world say those are set to get worse as the year goes on.

USA - Food pantries and food banks are a key economic indicator for tracking poverty levels and financial instability in the US, and in the past few months they have been ringing alarm bells. Stagflationary pressures have all but wiped out the savings of the average American and driven up credit card debt to historic highs. Only in the past month have credit spending and debt levels begun to slide, but this is more a sign that consumers are tapped out rather than a sign of a return to normalcy. High prices are slowly but surely overwhelming lower wage workers in particular. The average living wage across most US states is around $16 an hour; over 30% of American workers make less than $15 an hour.

USA - Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that as the third most senior official in the US government, Nancy Pelosi is free to make her own decisions and travel plans, warning China not to escalate tensions if the House of Representatives Speaker ends up visiting Taiwan. “The speaker will make her own decisions about whether or not to visit Taiwan. Congress is an independent, coequal branch of government. The decision is entirely the speaker’s,” Blinken told reporters… US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby has also emphasized that the Biden administration has no control over Pelosi’s possible visit, given that Congress is an independent branch of government, and that her trip would not reflect any change in US policy.