AUSTRALIA - Australia's Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has signalled an end to the country's zero-Covid policy, saying that it is "not a sustainable way to live." During a press conference on August 23, Prime Minister Morrison said that the country's goal is to "live with this virus, not to live in fear of it". He said that Australia had been "cautious" during the pandemic, and that this approach had "saved lives, and saved livelihoods." Since the start of the pandemic, Australia has used a 'zero-Covid' strategy. It has enforced strict lockdowns when there have been tiny numbers of cases and has kept tens of thousands of Australians waiting overseas to return home through limits on how many can return each month. However Mr Morrison has how said that cases will be allowed to rise as long as hospitals can cope with a plan to drop most restrictions once 80% of adults are vaccinated. He said: "Once you get to 70% of your eligible population being vaccinated, and 80%, the plan sets out we have to move forward. We cannot hold back. Our task between that day and now is to ready ourselves for that next phase."

EUROPE - The European Union database of suspected drug reaction reports is EudraVigilance, and they are now reporting 20,595 fatalities, and 1,960,607 injuries, following COVID-19 injections. A Health Impact News subscriber from Europe reminded us that this database maintained at EudraVigilance is only for countries in Europe who are part of the European Union (EU), which comprises 27 countries. The total number of countries in Europe is much higher, almost twice as many, numbering around 50. (There are some differences of opinion as to which countries are technically part of Europe.) So as high as these numbers are, they do NOT reflect all of Europe. The actual number in Europe who are reported dead or injured due to COVID-19 shots would be much higher than what we are reporting here.

SAUDI ARABIA - Saudi Arabia and Russia have signed a military cooperation agreement at an arms expo outside Moscow. Saudi Deputy Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman announced on Twitter on August 24 that he signed the agreement with Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin “aimed at developing joint military cooperation between the two countries.” Salman also met with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu during his visit outside Moscow to the arms expo International Military-Technical Forum Army-2021. The deputy defense minister said the meeting explored ways to "strengthen military and defense cooperation between our two countries." He noted that Russia had many new weapons systems that have “proven themselves well in Syria," where Russia's military intervened to support President Bashar al-Assad in that country’s civil war.

POLAND - The Polish government has formally requested President Andrzej Duda to declare an emergency in two eastern regions amid concerns Belarus’ dictator Alexander Lukashenko is deliberately pushing migrants into the European Union. Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki said: “Lukashenko’s regime decided to push these people onto Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian territory in an effort to destabilise.” Belarus has been accused of conducting a “hybrid war” against Brussels after the country’s relations with the EU worsening since President Lukashenko claimed victory in an election his critics claim was fraudulent. Mr Morawiecki has accused President Lukashenko of flying migrants into Belarus, from Iraq and Turkey, before “shoving” them into the EU. “The situation on the border with Belarus is a crisis,” he added.

ISRAEL - Prime Minister Naftali Bennett met with US President Joe Biden at the White House on Friday and said: "We cannot lose sight for even one moment that we're in the toughest neighborhood in the world. We've got ISIS on our southern border. Hizbullah on our northern border, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Iranian militias that surround us." "All of them want to kill us, kill Israelis. They all want to annihilate the Jewish state. And that's why Israel always has to be overwhelmingly stronger than any of our enemies, and indeed, of all our enemies combined."

ISRAEL - Bennett wanted to create a positive, unmediated connection between himself and US President Joe Biden. That was probably the easiest one. Both sides wanted, at the very least, to show that the US-Israel relationship is on track and doing well in the post-Netanyahu, post-Trump era. They held a 50-minute, one-on-one meeting – which, unusually, took place over tea in Biden’s private dining room off of the Oval Office. The prime minister said after the meeting that the atmosphere was “excellent,” he felt Biden and his top brass were open to listening to what he had to say, and that he can now call Biden directly. During his visit to the White House on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's biggest goal was to get the US and Israel aligned on Iran. "We are going to discuss the threat from Iran and our commitment to ensure Iran never develops a nuclear weapon," Biden said. “We’re putting diplomacy first and seeing where that takes us. But if diplomacy fails, we’re ready to turn to other options.”

JORDAN - Veteran Israeli analyst Ehud Yaari wrote Sunday on the N12 website that Iran is steadily entrenching itself in the Syrian Golan region along the border with Israel. In southern Syria, the Syrian army along with Hizbullah and Iran-backed militias are besieging the city of Daraa, one of the last redoubts of the anti-Assad rebellion. Jordan’s King Abdullah is attempting a delicate balancing act, argues Yaari, noting that the king has expressed a willingness to renew ties with Assad and help do the same with the rest of the Arab world, but does not want a Hezbollah-Iranian presence on his border. This is particularly the case because divisions of the Syrian regular army in the region are now essentially controlled by Iran and Hezbollah, of which Abdullah is well aware.

AFGHANISTAN - As we watch the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in real time, it’s pretty sickening to know that the new regime will be aided by the veritable war chest left behind by the US military. The roughly 40 aircraft and 2,000 armored vehicles are a boon for the Taliban’s ragtag forces — and the situation is panning out quite nicely for Afghanistan’s neighbor Iran as well.

NORTH KOREA - A nuclear reactor in North Korea that closed for a short period of time during former President Donald Trump’s negotiations with the country appears to have been reactivated. According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the UN atomic agency said that a plutonium-producing reactor in Yongbyon, North Korea, appears to have resumed operations in violation of the United Nations Security Council resolutions. “Since early July, there have been indications, including the discharge of cooling water, consistent with the operation of the reactor,” said the International Atomic Energy Agency in its annual report. “While North Korea already has a significant stockpile of nuclear weapons, this suggests it is moving to expand its current arsenal.” News of North Korea’s resumed nuclear reactor comes on the heels of the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.

VATICAN - Arlington Bishop Michael Burbidge has written a letter denouncing gender ideology and insisting that “no one” is transgender, NBC News reported this weekend. In his “controversial” letter, Bishop Burbidge condemns transgender ideology because it “presents a view of the human person contrary to the truth” by disconnecting the idea of gender from that of the biological sex of a person. The human person “is created male or female,” the bishop writes, and a person’s sex “is an immutable biological reality, determined at conception”, which “reveals God’s design” for each individual person. “The faithful should avoid using ‘gender-affirming’ terms or pronouns that convey approval of or reinforce the person’s rejection of the truth,” Burbidge writes. “It is not harsh or judgmental to decline to use such language.”

RUSSIA - Bone-chilling winter temperatures. Sub-Arctic taiga forests as far as the eye can see. Blinding clouds of mosquitos. Vast deposits of diamonds, gold, and other minerals. Add to the list of qualities for the vast Siberian region known as Yakutia: home to the world’s largest wildfires this year. In the United States, the largest blaze wreaking havoc this season is in California, the so-called Dixie Fire, and is currently burning nearly 3,000 square kilometers - about the size of Luxembourg. In Yakutia, the total area of the fires scorching the taiga this season are 10 times that. But there's more: according to the environmental group Greenpeace on August 16, more than 170,000 square kilometers have burned across Russia this year - making the 2021 fires the worst in a decade, and possibly ever. That's an area about the size of the US state of Florida. And the fire season still has weeks to go.

UK - Is it time to stop obsessing over Covid figures? Statistics reveal virus is NOT the biggest killer - with heart disease, dementia and cancer each claiming four times as many lives in an average week last month. They're the figures that have ruled our lives for the past 18 months; decided our freedoms; deepened our fears. Back in January, the dashboard attracted 76 million views in a single day. Other scientists have warned of the psychological impact of constant reminders of how many people are still catching Covid. ‘There’s a worry, that in the scramble to get out these daily updates, we’re alarming people disproportionately,’ says Professor Robert Dingwall... Last week, experts warned that the UK’s ever-growing toll of diabetes could soon bankrupt the NHS, after official data showed it spends more than £1 billion a year on treating the disease – up a quarter in five years.

USA - Reading the news has become like going to a freak show. You never know what you are going to see each day, but it is almost certainly going to be nutty. Some of the things that I am going to share with you in this article are weird, others are infuriating, but they all point to the same conclusion. From the very top to the very bottom, America is going crazy. And I mean that in the worst way possible. We truly have become an “idiocracy”, and it seems like those that are the most incompetent of all are often rewarded by being elevated to the top of the food chain. Meanwhile, those of us that still try to approach things rationally are increasingly being pushed to the fringes of society.

UK - Legendary British actor John Cleese has never been shy about his feelings on cancel culture, telling Reuters last year that he thinks it “misunderstands the main purposes of life which is to have fun.” “Everything humorous is critical. If you have someone who is perfectly kind and intelligent and flexible and who always behaves appropriately, they’re not funny,” the 81-year-old said, adding, “The problem with political correctness is that comedians have to set the bar according to what we are told by the most touchy, most emotionally unstable and fragile and least stoic people in the country.” The Monty Python alum has also blasted legislative speech suppression saying in October that a proposed Scottish hate speech law would hamper creativity. Now, the comedian is putting his money where his mouth is, releasing a documentary series on what cancel culture is and how it impacts its victims.

UK - In the sphere of economics, examples abound of the misuse of terms and concepts all of which advance the interests of the politically-connected elites, technocrats, governments, and the banking establishment at the expense of everyone else. One of the most glaring examples which, after the financial collapse in 2020, has now become more prominent in daily life, has been the meaning of the word “inflation.”