USA - Imperial College professor Friederike Otto, who is also a climate crisis activist, has been selected to be the coordinating lead author on the next IPCC assessment report on climate change for the chapter on extreme weather events. Professor Otto is also the founder and head of World Weather Attribution, which monitors extreme weather events to assess the influence of human-induced climate change and is funded by global foundations that fund most of the climate crisis agenda.

USA - The post-1945 world trading system is succumbing to conflict that beckons parallels with the tensions in the 1930s over intractable current account imbalances and rising protectionism. Today, trade wars, the exercise of coercion, the weaponisation of technology, finance and products such as rare earths, and the proliferation of industrial policies reflect rising fragmentation that could, if poorly managed, become the basis for broader instability in markets, and in international relations. The effective US tariff, if fully passed through, is now a bit over 18 per cent, its highest level since 1933. The IMF reports that globally, new restrictive trade measures and domestic subsidies that distort trade are running about 10 times higher than during 2009-2017. Global imbalances are unquestionably unsettling the world economy.

CHINA - President Xi Jinping will gather more than 20 world leaders at a regional security forum in China next week in a powerful show of Global South solidarity in the age of Donald Trump, while also helping sanctions-hit Russia pull off another diplomatic coup. Aside from Russian President Vladimir Putin, leaders from Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia have been invited to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, to be held in the northern port city of Tianjin from August 31 to September 1. The summit will feature Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to China in more than seven years as the two neighbors work on further defusing tensions roiled by deadly border clashes in 2020. Modi last shared the same stage with Xi and Putin at last year’s BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, even as Western leaders turned their backs on the Russian leader amid the war in Ukraine. Russian embassy officials in New Delhi last week said Moscow hopes trilateral talks with China and India will take place soon.

UK - Paying wind farms not to produce electricity was not part of Labour’s net zero prospectus. Even supporters of the Government’s green ambitions must admit that handing out astonishingly high sums of public cash to compensate generators while charging households ever more for electricity is not an election-winning look. The reason for this absurd pantomime is that the National Electricity System Operator (NESO), previously known as National Grid, must pay to either bring on or turn off electricity generation to keep supply and demand in balance at all times. The more unpredictable sources of generation are, such as with renewables, the more difficult the task becomes.

USA - Restoring marriage, amid the devastating attack coming against it, is essential to saving the nation and civilization, explained North Carolina judge turned Southern Evangelical Seminary President Phil Ginn in this interview on Conversations That Matter with The New American magazine’s Alex Newman. Ginn, whose seminary is hosting a marriage conference in October to defend the institution, pointed out that the biblical understanding of marriage has largely been lost. The Bible says marriage is a representation of the relationship between Christ and the church, which offers clear insight into how it should run. Judge Ginn believes the crumbling of marriage is a symptom of the broader collapse of culture. But it is not too late to turn it around. He believes that saving marriages could be part of a larger revival that might transform America once again.

USA - The president’s intention to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook could give him sway over the central bank’s rate-setting power. President Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook is the most dramatic step yet in his effort to take control of the independent central bank and its vast authority over interest rates. Trump has for months demanded that the Fed lower rates to boost the economy, make housing more affordable, and lower the cost of servicing the national debt. He has castigated Fed Chair Jerome Powell for not moving sooner to cut them. By replacing Cook, he could add enough voices to the seven-member board of governors to potentially outvote Powell and move interest rates in his preferred direction.

USA - A new McMaster University study found no increased mortality risk from animal protein consumption and even a slight reduction in cancer deaths. Anti-meat narratives are driven by corporate interests pushing synthetic foods, not science. Processed meats and plant-based substitutes are the real health risks, not clean, organic animal protein. Globalist agendas aim to replace real food with patented alternatives under the guise of climate concerns. Quality, balance, and natural sources matter more than fear-based dietary restrictions.

USA - Democrat commentator Julian Epstein said on Fox Business Wednesday that its leaders are driving themselves into political ruin by embracing fringe ideas that alienate voters. “The reason for that is they continue to pray at the altar of these Pagan idols:

• Let’s erase gender.


• Let’s erase borders.


• Let’s ignore crime and erase the police.


• Let’s erase our energy dominance.

And to most people, Ashley, these things are nuts. But they come from the academic. These ideas come from the academic and the activist left who is not concerned with voters,” Epstein told guest host Ashley Webster.

GERMANY - Robert Habeck, former economy minister in Olaf Scholz’s cabinet, has told the press he can’t find answers in the system he helped build. A former German vice chancellor and economy minister has announced he is quitting active politics, warning that if current trends continue, “mainstream party dominance will be over.” “Politically desirable democratic alternatives are not on offer... A new approach must be found. And I can’t find that within the confines of the system I helped build over the last 20 years,” he said. Under the new government, the economic woes have continued unchecked, with Chancellor Merz acknowledging on Saturday that Germany is “not just in a period of economic weakness, we are in a structural crisis.” Moscow has repeatedly claimed that Berlin’s decision to de-couple from inexpensive Russian energy supplies in the wake of the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, was self-defeating.

FRANCE - France is facing a staggering £2.58 trillion 'debt explosion' and could soon be forced into the humiliation of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout as Emmanuel Macron's government teeters on the edge of collapse. Eric Lombard, the Minister of Economics and Finance, issued a stark warning that 'a risk exists' that the IMF will be forced to bail out Paris. The revelation comes amid widespread predictions that the French Government may be toppled in a matter of weeks after Prime Minister Francois Bayrou, 74, said he would seek a vote of no confidence in Parliament. Nicole Dubre-Chirat, one of Bayrou's MPs, said his decision to seek a vote of confidence was 'suicidal'. Olivier Blanchard, a former French chief economist of the IMF, said a 'debt explosion' would be 'catastrophic' for an economy that has not run a budget surplus since 1974.

UK - It is difficult to maintain the view that high levels of migration are an economic necessity when domestic worklessness continues to rise at such a rapid pace. There are now some 6.5 million people receiving incapacity benefits, unemployment support, or Universal Credit payments made to those out of work across the country, with the number of working-age adults in receipt of such benefits rising 79 per cent since early 2018. Small wonder, then, that the bond markets are looking askance at Rachel Reeves’s inability to bring public spending under control. With the Chancellor facing a potential £5 billion hole in the public finances, we seem likely to face a second brutal growth-crushing tax raid in the autumn. Even so, we remain on a manifestly unsustainable fiscal course, and the measures taken to prop up current policies are now worsening this situation. Yet as economists warned last weekend, a reckoning with reality will come eventually.

USA - Flesh-Eating Parasites, Brain-Eating Amoebas, A Virus That Can Cause Years Of Severe Joint Pain, And Gigantic Dust Storms Hit The Western US. How many plagues have to hit us before people finally start waking up? So far this month I have written about rabbits with “black, tentacle-like protrusions coming from their heads”, squirrels with “ghastly growths that burst open”, deer that have “tumor-like growths hanging off their bodies”, and a “mysterious fungus” that is transforming spiders in the United States and elsewhere into “zombies”. Nature is in a state of chaos all around us... How many more times do we have to be pummeled by major plagues before the skeptics finally stop insisting that “everything is fine”? Every day there are more headlines about pestilences, more headlines about earthquakes, more headlines about fires, more headlines about floods, and more headlines about military conflict. You would think that at some point the light bulb would go on and the skeptics would want to start figuring out what is really happening to us.

USA - Phoenix, Arizona was blanketed with a thick wall of dust known as a haboob that darkened the skies and knocked out power to thousands as a major monsoon hit the area Monday night. The dusty conditions began around 4pm near Interstate-10 in Casa Grande and Eloy, south of Phoenix, according to the National Weather Service. But the storms quickly made their way north, prompting dust storm warnings just before 5pm that remained in effect until 7pm. Shocking time-lapse videos showed a wall of dust rolling through the Arizona valley, completely overtaking neighborhoods. More than 35,000 residents and businesses throughout Maricopa County are now left without power from the powerful storm, according to PowerOutage.us, which monitors outages nationwide. Flash flood warnings were also issued for multiple parts of western Arizona, near the border with California.

USA - President Trump has not even had control over Washington, DC, for 30 days, and I have on my For You page video after video showing DC — specifically Union Station — and how clean and safe it is. People don’t understand how big of a deal it is, specifically for Union Station, because there is a bridge — whether it’s the bypass, it’s either 95, 395, or 495 — where the homeless, as well as people who are abusing drugs, as well as the drug dealers, they just squat. And it’s clean. It’s all gone. This was also an underpass bridge where people would throw their waste. So you would drive on the main road, and to the left and right of you, it was nothing but trash. It’s all clean. People don’t understand how big of a deal this is because the Capitol is right there, within like a six- or seven-minute walk. And then also, local residents did not like walking there, whether in the daytime or the evening. Some people would take taxis just to avoid any type of encounters. And people have been talking about cleaning this up for a decade. And you mean to tell me President Trump hasn’t even had control for 30 days, and he cleaned it all up?

USA - It’s that time of year. Tens of thousands of ‘Burners’ flocked to the Nevada desert this year to engage in debauchery. Burning Man is a yearly drug-infested music and art festival in Northern Nevada, in Black Rock City. A wicked dust storm kicked up on the first day of the festival this year and it ruined camp sites. Winds reached more than 45 miles per hour, according to a spokesperson for Burning Man. The Orgy Dome was also completely destroyed by the storm and camp sites were destroyed and blown away.