AUSTRALIA - Consumers are being warned to get used to cabbage in their burgers or paying more than $10 for a lettuce, with no end in sight for high fruit and vegetable prices. While the sudden price spike hit quickly, wholesalers say it will take longer for prices to come down as growers face a 'perfect storm' of bad conditions. Anthony Joseph, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler and exporter, said wet weather in south-east Queensland meant growers lost one crop and struggled to plant the next one as freezing temperatures set in. "Things like baby leaf spinach and wombok are going for three to four times their normal price," he said. Mr Joseph, who is the managing director of Alfred E Chave, at the Brisbane Markets, said the flood event in February was detrimental to land preparation for the autumn and winter crops, which, he said, caused the gap in supply experienced over the past four to six weeks.

GERMANY - If Berlin was determined to signal a step change, it would have to address mid-term defense spending through the regular budget, far beyond the 100 billion euros committed as top-up for the next few years. The Bundeswehr would have to receive sustained funding for growing its starved land force. German industry would require significant government funding to allow scaled-up production, after decades of languishing on limited purchases by the Bundeswehr and relying on the export market just to keep its limited assembly capacity running. That we have not seen any tangible declarations in those regards should ring alarm bells. It renders Scholz’s intention to provide a truly long-term perspective to Germany’s allies and partners hollow. Zeitenwende risks being not a turning point for German national security, but merely a flash in the pan.

RUSSIA - When Vladimir Putin announced the twin goals of the Special Military Operation in February ie demilitarization and denazification, it sounded strangely familiar. Well there is a reason for that. At the end of World War II, the UK, the US and Russia reached an agreement at Potsdam. During the Potsdam Conference, on 30 July 1945, the Allied Control Council was constituted in Berlin to execute the Allied resolutions... Putin’s reiteration of the Denazification and Demilitarization principles established from the 1945 Potsdam Conference is not just some quaint tip of the hat to history. He was laying down a marker to the United States and United Kingdom that the agreement reached at Potsdam in 1945 is still relevant and valid.

USA - We’re told looming food shortages are primarily the result of climate change and the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Yet in July 2020, The Rockefeller Foundation had already predicted it, and was calling for a revamp of the food system as a whole to address it. “Reset the Table: Meeting the Moment to Transform the US Food System,” published by The Rockefeller Foundation July 28, 2020, describes how the COVID pandemic caused “a hunger and nutrition crisis” in the US "unlike any this country has seen in generations”.

USA - Continuing to do the same action and expecting different results is the Einsteinian definition of insanity... but that hasn't stopped the Biden administration in the case of its attack of his oil/gas prices. This morning, despite DOE's servers being reportedly fried, they managed to report that the US released 6.9 million barrels of crude from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) last week (~985,000 b/d). As Bloomberg's Javier Blas notes, the latest weekly release has pushed the SPR below the 500 million barrels mark for the first time since 1986... the plummeting SPR is not having the impact on prices that President Biden hoped (which explains why he is blaming everyone and everything else for the rise in gas prices - as it becomes clear it's a refining capacity issue as much as anything else).

USA - It was never enough just to tamper with your produce and grains. The biotechnology industry is now setting its sights on replacing all meat with genetically engineered (GMO) impostors, too. Beef, poultry, fish, and dairy products are all on the chopping block as the architects behind the Great Reset shift society away from real, nutritious food and straight into laboratory abominations from hell. Using technologies like synthetic biology and precision fermentation, mad scientists are concocting cultured “meat” synthetics along with other cell-based and gene-edited parodies of real food. “Transitioning to cultured meat, made from animal cells grown in a petri dish, is a Great Reset goal for the global food industry,” warns Dr Joseph Mercola. “The aim is to control populations by creating dependence on private companies that control the food supply.”

RUSSIA - So, what has happened in the past weeks and months that suddenly made Putin risk all that capital built up over the past 20 years to take on Ukraine. Is it national pride or is it a longer-term strategy against the West? The powerful Old Testament image of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse has been repeatedly brought back into discussion when humanity has faced peril and war. Ezekiel and Zachariah have often been interpreted as describing the four horsemen as plague, war, famine and finally death.

RUSSIA - Russia’s invasion of Ukraine confirmed what has long been apparent: the rules-based order created after World War II is at risk of collapse. Russia is not content to be a responsible stakeholder in a system set up by others, and neither is China, which has supported Moscow’s aggression. Both countries want to remake the order to serve their autocratic interests. As US President Joe Biden said in Warsaw in March, the West now faces “a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”

UK - Nigerian Senator Ike Ekweremadu and his wife Beatrice Nwanneka Ekweremadu were arrested in London on Tuesday and charged with planning to bring a 15-year-old boy into the United Kingdom so they could harvest his organs. The couple were taken into custody on Tuesday at Heathrow airport as they prepared to board a flight to Turkey. They have been under investigation since last month when British police were alerted to possible offenses against anti-slavery legislation. The offense apparently involved bringing a homeless 15-year-old boy into the UK for the purposes of harvesting his organs. The boy is reportedly in protective custody. “Organ harvesting is a massive problem in Nigeria itself. This is the first prosecution in the UK that I’m aware of,” Debbie Ariyo of London-based charity Africans Unite Against Child Abuse told the UK Guardian on Thursday.

ISRAEL - The announcement of the Israeli governing coalition’s collapse and the preparations for a fifth election in less than four years was met with exasperation by many Israelis. But the news came as a resounding victory for Benjamin Netanyahu, who, over the past year as the head of the opposition, has been preparing for his own comeback. It is not immediately clear how that would happen, however, since polls show that most Israelis will continue to vote the way they have in the past few elections, producing a polarized, deadlocked Knesset and fragile coalition governments. Netanyahu, who led Israel for much of the past 20 years, seems to be betting on breaking the political stalemate by galvanizing his right-wing base and painting his opponents as a threat to society.

USA - One of the largest chicken producers in the US announces Tennessee Plant shutdown. Joe Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ is not working as planned… Or is it? One of the top ten largest vertically integrated chicken producers in the US, supplying a broad range of quality poultry products, announced that it will be shutting down one of its plants in Campbell County, Tennessee. According to WVLT-TV, George’s Inc Poultry and Prepared Foods announced it will close one of its food processing plants. The reason for the closure has not yet been disclosed, even the locals were surprised by the sudden decision. Campbell County Mayor E L Morton told the WVLT-TV that he’s doing his best to keep the plant open. “I have contacted the Tennessee Economic and Community Development staff to request assistance in keeping the plant open or facilitating a sale to another operator,” Morton said.

USA - Children younger than ten watched fully nude bikers at the Seattle Pride Parade, which was kicked off by the Boy Scouts of America. Though it’s not clear what group the nude cyclists were representing, their purpose appeared to address body image, with one sign that read, “Challenge body shame. Build self-esteem.” Both men and women were nude: The parade reportedly began with the Boy Scouts of America leading the proceedings as they carried both pride flags and American flags. Pro-abortion protesters challenging the recent Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v Wade were also enthusiastically received. Activist workers with Amazon also marched in the parade and challenged the company to remove “transphobic” books from its platform. Seattle police officers were reportedly barred from marching in the parade.

UK - Britain's state-broadcaster BBC hired “trans and nonbinary inclusion” consultants to tell its staff that there are more than 150 genders and instruct them to police each other’s use of gender pronouns, the Telegraph reported on Saturday. According to the report, the BBC emailed its radio producers and program editors urging them to attend several training sessions last year organized by Global Butterflies, a group that describes itself on LinkedIn as offering “Trans & Non-binary Corporate Inclusion Training and Consultation.”

GERMANY - Germany is facing a “Lehman Brothers” collapse in its energy market that could spark a domino effect leading to a severe recession should the gas-addicted economic powerhouse of the European Union be fully cut off from Russian energy supplies. Economy Minister and Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck said on Friday that Europe’s largest economy could be forced to shut down certain industries should gas supplies run thin by the winter. “Companies would have to stop production, lay off their workers, supply chains would collapse, people would go into debt to pay their heating bills, that people would become poorer,” he said according to DW. The Green Party politician warned that there could be “a kind of Lehman-Brothers effect in the energy market,” spreading through municipal utilities, industrial and commercial companies, “And then you have a domino effect that would lead to a severe recession.”

GERMANY - “Perestroika” literally meant reconstruction, but it was a code word for radical change. In Germany’s case today, the code word here is Zeitenwende, or “turning point”, as announced by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a speech delivered to the Bundestag in February, three days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.