HONG KONG - The chef Tsang Chiu King is preparing a subtle-but-significant change to his menu: He’s replacing the fish in some dishes with a plant-based alternative. “Its flavor is light and bland and the texture, like grouper, is a bit tougher,” Mr Tsang said, referring to the alternative fish varieties he has been testing at Ming Court, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Hong Kong. To boost the flavor, he adds ingredients like dates and goji berries. “This may give our customers a new experience or surprise, and that will help our business,” he said. Plant-based products have been breaking into the foodie mainstream in the United States, after years in which vegan burgers and milk alternatives hovered on the market’s periphery. That is partly because more companies are targeting omnivores who seek to reduce the amount of meat they eat, rather than forswear it altogether.

MEXICO - At least one person has been killed after a powerful 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck near the Mexican tourist hotspot of Acapulco on Tuesday night – sparking huge tremors as far as the capital Mexico City 230 miles away. A tsunami warning was issued by the US Geological Survey after the quake struck 11 miles northeast of the resort of Acapulco, Guerrero, shaking hillsides around the city, downing trees and sending large boulders onto roads.

USA - From the very beginning, God has had His own calendar, and it is very different from our calendar. For instance, God’s days don’t start at midnight. That is an entirely arbitrary human invention. God’s days begin at sunset, and we see this all throughout the Bible. And there are certain days throughout the year that God has set aside as particularly special. They are His “appointed times”, and historically they have been incredibly significant. Over and over again we have seen God do big things during His appointed times, but even most Christians do not understand this pattern.

EUROPE - The United States’ embarrassing evacuation from Afghanistan has resulted in renewed calls for the European Union to form its own army. The idea is not new, but Biden’s actions have made it much harder to argue against. The EU fanatics must have been rubbing their hands with glee when watching the calamity in Kabul unfold on our television screens. Ever on the lookout for opportunities to increase their own powers, they would have realised what was happening in Afghanistan represented a huge opportunity for Brussels to accumulate even more control over its member states. With the US’ reputation sullied on the world stage, and a president who is viewed as a weak and unreliable ally, the EU is already using the situation to further its own objectives.

IRAQ - It's not about Jonah and the whale. If President Biden chooses to evacuate Iraq, two historic peoples – the Assyrian Christians and Yazidis – will be no more. In 2003, about the time of the invasion of Iraq, there were 1.5 million Assyrian Christians, who are among the world’s oldest Christian communities, in the world. Today, there remain 150,000 Assyrian Christians in their homeland. The numbers of Yazidis shrank from 600,000 to 400,000. The bottom line is that the US created a vacuum that enabled the terrorist group ISIS to plunder, pillage, murder and rape its way through Iraq. Yet on July 27, Joe Biden, now president, announced the remaining symbolic US forces will be leaving Iraq again “for good.” If President Biden doesn’t cancel that move, two historic peoples – the Assyrian Christians and Yazidis – will be no more. And the keys to Nineveh plains will surely be scooped up by Iran with a long coveted strategic prize – an unfettered route to the Mediterranean Sea and a new powerful front to threaten the very existence of another people, the nation of Israel.

USA - The great computer chip shortage of 2021 will likely get worse before it gets better. This conclusion was reached following brief study and anecdotal review. Moreover, while COVID lockdowns may have initially triggered the shortage, several decades of shortsighted decisions and simmering geopolitical tensions make it much more than a matter of fixing a few broken links in the supply chain. Here’s why…

USA - If you live near a major US city, you don’t have to go to a movie theater to see a horror show. Instead, just find out where fentanyl-laced heroin is being sold and go hang out with the drug addicts for a few hours. If you survive the encounter, it will be an experience that you will never forget. In city after city, hopelessly addicted men and women wander the streets of our core urban areas like zombies. Unfortunately, many of them won’t last very long because it is exceptionally easy to die from a fentanyl overdose. Philadelphia played such a critical role in the American Revolution, and it was once such a beautiful city… It has now become a complete and utter hellhole. Authorities know that this is going on right out in the open, and they do nothing to stop it. Needless to say, what is happening in Philadelphia is just a very small fraction of the overall crisis that we are facing in this country. From coast to coast, thousands upon thousands of addicts are dying. As the economic suffering in this nation intensifies, it is inevitable that even more people will turn to drugs to try to deal with the pain.

TAIWAN - World War Three fears are mounting after China flew 19 nuke bombers and fighter jets into Taiwan air space for "invasion" war games. The latest Chinese military incursion on Sunday involved 10 J-16 and four Su-30 fighter jets, an anti-submarine aircraft, and four H-6 bombers, which can carry nuclear weapons, Taiwan's Defence Ministry said. The Taiwanese air force responded by scrambling combat aircraft, issuing radio warnings and deploying air defence missile systems to monitor the activity, the defence ministry added.

UK - Faith groups have been accused of not protecting children from paedophiles but blaming the victims instead. Religious organisations are guilty of "blatant hypocrisy" by covering up appalling abuse to save their reputations, a hard-hitting probe has found. Abuse of power and discouraging reporting of crimes are among the shock findings identified yesterday by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

USA - The US Supreme Court majority insisted it was merely issuing a procedural order late Wednesday night when it let Texas ban most abortions after six weeks. But with the court set to consider overturning the landmark Roe vs Wade case in coming months, the 5-4 decision stands as an ominous sign for the fate of constitutional abortion rights. The one-paragraph order brushed aside arguments that the law is a clear violation of the court’s long-standing precedents protecting abortion rights until much later into pregnancy. The majority included Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, who in other types of cases haven’t been as quick to overturn precedents as their fellow conservatives.

USA - Two faith-based organizations associated with Harvard University have claimed the New York Times story about the unanimous election of an atheist humanist as head “chaplain” at the school was mischaracterized since the role is “purely administrative” and has “no influence.” The Harvard Catholic Center and the school’s Christian Alumni Society defended the decision of more than 40 chaplains to elect atheist Greg Epstein, author of Good Without God, to be its new president of the chaplains’ organization. “There is a rising group of people who no longer identify with any religious tradition but still experience a real need for conversation and support around what it means to be a good human and live an ethical life,” Epstein told the New York Times, where he was presented as having arisen to the role largely because university students have grown increasingly secular. “We don’t look to a god for answers,” he said. “We are each other’s answers.” According to the Times, Epstein has been “teaching students about the progressive movement that centers people’s relationships with one another instead of with God.”

USA - Things just continue to get crazier and crazier. In all of the years that I have been writing about the economy, I have never seen anything like this. The latest employment report that was released on Friday is being described as a “huge disappointment” because the number of Americans that were hired last month was way, way below expectations. Employment only rose by 235,000, but economists were expecting a number about triple that size. Normally when this sort of thing happens it is because of a lack of available jobs. But that is definitely not the case right now. There are literally millions upon millions of jobs that are open, but for a variety of reasons people simply don’t want them.

USA - There are few people more hypocritical than COVID-19 vaccine authoritarians who also support abortion on demand, especially when the person happens to be the Vice President of the United States. Kamala Harris has been all-in for Americans to get vaccinated after she and Joe Biden won the White House last November. “As recently as 2019,” when Harris was still a US senator, Favocci notes, she “voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act that would require doctors to give medical care to infants born alive after a botched abortion (truly a barbaric world when a procedure is deemed a failure when a baby survives it).” There’s more to this hypocrisy. Like all abortion advocates, we are told it’s a “choice” — ‘a woman’s body, a woman’s choice.’ But suddenly, Americans don’t have a “choice” when it comes to the COVID vaccine; we’re to take it and shut up if we want our ‘normal’ lives back.

Why is that?

USA - Over the last decade, governments worldwide have intentionally shut down the internet at least 850 times, with a whopping 90% of those shutdowns taking place over just the last five years. What's behind this troubling trend? "More people are getting online and getting access to the internet," said Marianne Díaz Hernández, a lawyer in Venezuela and a fellow with the nonprofit Access Now. "As governments see this as a threat, they start thinking the internet is something they need to control." These staggering statistics come from a new report released Wednesday by Access Now and Jigsaw, a division of Alphabet that focuses on addressing societal threats with technology. The report documents the history of internet shutdowns over the last decade, the economic toll shutdowns take on the countries that impose them and what governments and the broader business and civil society community can do to stop what has fast become a widespread and grave human rights violation.

ISRAEL - Mordechai Kedar was a member of IDF intelligence for 25 years. The Researcher at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, internationally known scholar, columnist and lecturer, spoke to Italian journalist Giulio Meotti about the fall of Kabul. “Kabul is pumping new blood into the arteries of the jihad and the results are seen all over the world. We must understand that the Islamic mentality is a ‘zero sum game’. When Islam wins, Christianity loses and the ‘crusaders’ lose. They always see a connection between what happened in the 10th century and what happens in the 21st century”, said Kedar.