CANADA - The Toronto Zoo absurdly claimed that animals under its care are “voluntarily” getting injected with the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine, implying that zoo animals are granting informed consent to be injected with experimental injections that come with the risk of serious side effects or death. Toronto Zoo CEO Dolf DeJong told Canadian news outlet CP24: “These are voluntary inoculations. The animals choose to come over and interact with the animal care staff, and then are delivered the vaccine. Some days, they participate; some days, they don’t.” He added that the zoo will keep working until all its 120 animals are vaccinated. While animals in the Toronto Zoo can choose to walk away from vaccination, human workers in the capital of Canada’s Ontario province are not afforded the same privilege. The Toronto Sun reported in January that 461 city workers were fired for non-compliance with the vaccine mandate.

RUSSIA - A nuclear world war is now a "real" danger as British and NATO weapons are already "legitimate" targets in Ukraine, Russia's foreign minister has warned. In a chilling message, Sergei Lavrov said the risk of World War 3 is now "considerable" - saying the West is essentially fighting a proxy war against Moscow via its support for Kyiv. Lavrov accused NATO forces of "pouring oil on the fire" by "pumping weapons into Ukraine". In an interview with Russian news agencies, he said: "This is our key position on which we base everything." The risks now are considerable. But it is feared doing anything more could spark open war with Moscow - something which could easily spiral into a nuclear exchange. And with this danger hanging over the region, the world is sitting on the edge - with international tensions at highest point since the Cold War.

USA - What we have witnessed so far is just the beginning of the story. The global response to the COVID pandemic during 2020 and 2021 created the most epic supply chain crisis in modern times, and now “black swan events” such as the war in Ukraine and the bird flu pandemic are making that supply chain crisis even worse. Unfortunately, more global difficulties are coming. There will be more war, there will be more pestilences, there will be more natural disasters, and even the United Nations is admitting that we are heading into the worst global food crisis since World War II. So if you think that global supply chain problems are severe now, just wait until you see what is coming next.

FINLAND/SWEDEN - Finland and Sweden are expected to jointly apply for NATO membership in mid-May, according to reports published yesterday in both countries. Thus, both Helsinki and Stockholm are definitively giving up what is left of their formal neutrality. The Finnish-Swedish rapprochement to NATO – including their participation in NATO wars – had already begun back in the 1990s. Both countries have been so closely linked to the alliance that experts recently remarked that their joining NATO is almost nothing more than a “matter of formalization.” This “formalization” will now take place. It will create a new strategic imbalance in northeastern Europe. Sweden’s island, Gotland, which will soon become part of NATO, can control the sea routes, for example, to St Petersburg and to Kaliningrad. The approximately 1,340 km long Finnish-Russian border will become NATO’s external border. Moscow has announced it will counter this with arms buildup measures in the High North and possibly deploying nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad.

ISRAEL - Israel has no plans to divide the Temple Mount holy site in Jerusalem between Jews and Muslims, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said on Sunday, urging Muslim leaders to step up the fight against “fake news.” Temple Mount is the holiest place in Judaism and is known in the Islamic world as the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the third-holiest site for Muslims. Amid the recent violent clashes between Palestinians and the Israeli police, as well as wide-spread criticism of the authorities’ handling of the situation, rumors spread on social media that Israel was allegedly trying to split the holy site into two parts. However, during a press conference on Sunday, and later on Twitter, Lapid was forced to reaffirm Israel’s commitment to maintain the status quo at Temple Mount and to prevent provocations from both Palestinians and Jews.

USA - When President Biden and other advocates of wind and solar generation speak, they appear to believe that the challenge posed is just a matter of currently having too much fossil fuel generation and not enough wind and solar; and therefore, accomplishing the transition to "net zero" will be a simple matter of building sufficient wind and solar facilities and having those facilities replace the current ones that use the fossil fuels. They are completely wrong about that. The proposed transition to "net zero" via wind and solar power is not only not easy, but is a total fantasy. It likely cannot occur at all without dramatically undermining our economy, lifestyle and security, and it certainly cannot occur at anything remotely approaching reasonable cost. At some point, the ongoing forced transition... will crash and burn. It doesn't matter whether you build a million wind turbines and solar panels, or a billion, or a trillion. On a calm night, they will still produce nothing, and will require full back-up from some other source. No sane, let alone competent, government would ever be headed down this path.

GERMANY - Five weeks after the Russian intervention in Ukraine, western powers still fail to globally isolate Russia. During a visit to India yesterday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s foreign policy adviser Jens Plötner tried to persuade New Delhi to abandon its cooperation with Moscow. Other representatives of western states had already previously traveled to the Indian capital, pursuing the same objective – to no avail. India is increasing its purchase of Russian oil and is continuing to develop a payment system independent of the US dollar and SWIFT. Still only 48 countries are participating in the western sanctions against Russia. Three-quarters of all UN member states are refusing to comply, despite the considerable pressure being exerted on them.

USA - The West is in the grips of a climate change-fueled megadrought, and Lake Mead - the largest manmade reservoir in the country and a source of water for millions of people - has fallen to an unprecedented low. The lake's plummeting water level has exposed one of the reservoir's original water intake valves for the first time, officials say. The valve had been in service since 1971 but can no longer draw water, according to the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which is responsible for managing water resources for 2.2 million people in Southern Nevada, including Las Vegas. Across the West, extreme drought is already taking a toll this year and summertime heat hasn't even arrived yet. Drought conditions worsened in the Southwest over the past week, the US Drought Monitor reported Thursday. Extreme and exceptional drought, the two worst designations, expanded across New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado - all states that are part of the Colorado River basin. New Mexico's drought has been steadily intensifying since the beginning of the year, and extreme or exceptional drought now covers 68% of the state.

USA - America is following an “arsenal of democracy” strategy in Ukraine: It has avoided direct intervention against the Russian invaders, while working with allies and partners to provide the Kyiv government with money and guns. That strategy, reminiscent of US support for Britain in 1940-41, has worked wonders. Yet as the war reaches a critical stage, with the Russians preparing to consolidate their grip on eastern Ukraine, the arsenal of democracy is being depleted. That could cause a fatal shortfall for Ukrainian forces in this conflict, and it is revealing American weaknesses that could be laid bare in the next great-power fight. This is presenting Western countries with a stark choice between pouring more supplies into Ukraine or husbanding finite capabilities they may need for their own defense.

USA - Kristalina Georgieva, director of the board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said the following during an event hosted by CNBC on Thursday: KRISTALINA GEORGIEVA, IMF: “I think we are not paying sufficient attention to the law of unintended consequences. We take decisions with an objective in mind and rarely think through what may happen that is not our objective. And then we wrestle with the impact of it. Take any decision that is a massive decision, like the decision that we need to spend to support the economy. At that time, we did recognize that there was maybe too much money in circulation and too few goods, but didn't really quite think through the consequence in a way that upfront would have informed better what we do. I subscribe entirely to what Christine [LaGarde, the president of the European Central Bank] said about climate shocks. We are already out of time. And the fact that whenever something hits us, we forget about these other crises is incredibly troubling. Our ability to deal with more than one crisis at one time is very, very limited. We have to zero in on the really big things that could determine the future and keep our attention on them.”

USA - In the last several weeks, farmers in the Northern Plains have been battered by blizzards, winter storms, high winds, and extreme flooding. These weather phenomena have delayed farmers from plantings in high-producing crop regions. Every week plantings are delayed, the harvest yield shrinks, and this comes at a precarious time as the global food supply chain is fracturing.

UK - The war in Ukraine is set to cause the "largest commodity shock" since the 1970s, the World Bank has warned. Energy prices are set to increase more than 50%, pushing up bills for households and businesses, the World Bank says. Similarly oil prices are expected to remain elevated into 2024 with a barrel of the benchmark measure, Brent Crude, projected to average $100 this year, something which will lead to widespread inflation. Wheat is set for record highs. The World Bank commodity outlook also warned many foods are set to see steep rises in their costs. The UN food prices index already shows they are at their highest since records began 60 years ago. "Wheat is one of the hardest agriculture exports to replace," according to a research note from the Bank of America. The chief executive of Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world's four big food commodity traders, said he does not expect prices to come down soon. A forecast 69% increase in fertiliser prices this year means "there's a real risk that as farmers start to use fewer fertilisers, agricultural yields will decline".

USA - The Satanic Temple has filed a lawsuit against an American elementary school, after it was blocked from implementing an after school program for children. The Northern York County School Board members in Pennsylvania voted down the approval of the program on April 19, after parents expressed concern of the devil having a place in the classroom. The Satanic Temple, despite its name, has nothing to do with Lucifer but in fact focuses on teaching rational and scientific ways of thinking. According to local news reports, hundreds of parents showed up to the school board meeting to have their voices heard about letting 'Satan' into their children's education.

USA - Young people in the United States are being subjected to communist-style sexualization, according to author and expert James Lindsay. The goal is to destabilize society to make it ripe for communists to grab power...and their plan has been afoot for more than a century. “This is a deliberate program that Marxists have employed since at least the 1910s, starting in Hungary, to try to sexualize children to cause sexual and gender confusion so that they become political activists on behalf of some other agenda,” he said. Lindsay pointed to Georg Lukacs, a devout Hungarian Marxist who served as deputy commissar of education in 1919 during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. He introduced sex education to children at the elementary level, he said. “Lukacs sexualized the children of Hungary in order to separate them from their family, to separate them from their religion, their nation and their culture,” Lindsay said. “Essentially getting children … all into these ideas so that when they go home, they would tell their parents, ‘you know, things have changed, or the Bible is wrong, or whatever our religion is wrong, our traditions are wrong.’”

USA - 50 years ago… 20 years ago… even 2 years ago under Trump… Would you ever have imagined, in your wildest nightmares, that radical leftist activists calling themselves teachers would be setting up secret areas at school for children to undress and change into trans outfits? And in middle school, no less? Well, unfortunately, that’s exactly the hell that America has found itself in.