USA - A man who thinks he is a female just struck gold in a statewide beauty pageant. If this isn’t offputting to you, the West’s morally bankrupt elites have succeeded in training you to reject truth. Kataluna Enriquez, a 27-year-old male who has been competing in transgender pageants since 2016, was awarded first place in the female Miss Nevada USA beauty pageant. Enriquez’s victory comes after success in other contests, including being crowned Miss Silver State USA as a preliminary event to the statewide one. Only since 2020 has Enriquez begun competing in non-trans pageants.

USA - Here in the middle of 2021, Americans are generally feeling pretty good about things. The COVID pandemic appears to be subsiding, our sports stadiums are full of fans again, the stock market has been soaring, and all over the country people are in the mood to party. In fact, July 4th celebrations across the nation are likely to be quite boisterous this year. But in China the mood is quite different, and the same thing is true in Russia.

GERMANY - The second longest and bloodiest military mission of the Federal Republic of Germany has come to an end. After nearly twenty years of war, the last soldiers of the Bundeswehr, who left Afghanistan the night before, landed yesterday, Wednesday, at the Wunstorf Airbase near Hanover. According to the "Costs of War Project" at the Ivy League Brown University in the USA, around a quarter of a million people lost their lives in combat at the Hindu Kush, and an unknown number of victims lost their lives due to the direct consequences of the war. Nearly seven million Afghans have fled their homes; the countless numbers are wounded or maimed, including tens of thousands of children. US expenditure alone for that slaughter amount to more that US $2.2 trillion; the German government puts its expenditures for the Bundeswehr mission at €12.2 billion. As the western troops withdraw, the Taliban is taking control of ever larger portions of that country. Soon the balance of power that had existed just before the war began in September 2001, will be re-established.

USA - Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell (June 25, 1903-January 21, 1950) has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state. It’s been more than 70 years since Orwell — dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation is the norm — depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism, and totalitarianism in ‘1984’. Who could have predicted that so many years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother?

GERMANY - German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier responded to questions submitted by Ha'aretz in advance of his visit to Israel which began Wednesday: "Germany lives with the historical legacy of the monstrous abuses of political power perpetrated by the Nazi regime… Israel has repeatedly experienced discrimination and pressure in its dealings with the United Nations and associated organizations… It has much greater confidence in itself than in international organizations." "Regarding the opening of investigations [of Israel]: the German government's position is that the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction in this matter due to the absence of Palestinian statehood. A Palestinian state and the determination of territorial borders can only be achieved through direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians."

UNITED NATIONS - President says Israelis and Palestinians 'destined to live together' in speech to UN ambassadors. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin on Tuesday appealed to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "We are not condemned to live together, we are destined to live together," Rivlin said before various United Nations ambassadors at UN headquarters in New York... "Our Middle East region needs to build trust among peoples. Peace between Israel and the Palestinians will never be achieved through anti-Israel decisions or commissions of inquiry," he said, according to a statement from his office. "The bias against Israel in the UN institutions must end," Rivlin emphasized.

CANADA - Protesters have pulled down and desecrated a statue of Queen Elizabeth II in Canada in a spark of fury against the monarch. Protesters tied a rope around the statue before toppling it on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislative building on Thursday. The protest took place on Canada Day where footage showed groups who gathered to remove the statue of Her Majesty. In a separate incident, a statue of Queen Victoria was covered in red and orange paint before also being trampled on by protesters.

GERMANY - Perhaps the most absurd thing ever said about Angela Merkel is that she was the de facto leader of the western world. She has certainly been one of Europe’s most successful politicians, if you define success as political survival. But as she comes to the end of her 16 years in office, her luck is deserting her and the mess she has created is becoming horribly apparent. She leaves behind a split EU that is not just unled but might now be unleadable.

RUSSIA - Russian authorities have issued a blistering critique of the failing US regime under President-imposed Joe Biden, suggesting that America is guilty of all the sins they try to project on their opposing regimes abroad. “It is astonishing to see how the West is trying to divide our diverse world into two completely artificial camps – a supposedly democratic one and a supposedly authoritarian one,” Russian Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service Sergey Naryshkin said. “The US and other so-called models of liberal democracy seem not to notice that they themselves are rapidly turning into a liberal-totalitarian regime,” he added. Russia is taking a stand for Trump supporters at a time when most Republican politicians are either silent or cheering on Democrat oppression against them. Even if it’s for mere geopolitical points on the world stage, the fact that Putin, of all people, can claim more concern for dissidents than the current leadership of the United States is a remarkable sign of the times.

RUSSIA - Putin has taunted the US, saying their world dominance is “over” and threatened to strike back if any “boundaries are crossed”. The Russian president issued the stark warning during a televised Q&A on Wednesday, during which he also boasted that even if Russia had sunk HMS Defender it would not have caused World War Three.

CHINA - Communist dictator Xi Jinping delivered a violent hour-long speech on Thursday to celebrate the 100th anniversary of China’s Communist Party, vowing that anyone seeking to liberate the Chinese people would have their “heads bashed bloody” and threatening sovereign Taiwan with “reunification.” As translated by Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), Xi threatened would be subjugators and “bullies” of the Chinese people with certain death, without mentioning any nation in particular. “Anyone who dares try to do that will have their heads bashed bloody against the Great Wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people,” Xi asserted. While triumphant, Xi’s tone differed significantly from what has become his most historic speech, delivered to debut his philosophy, “Xi Jinping Thought,” in 2017. On that occasion, the opening of the Communist Party Congress, Xi spoke for three hours, not addressing the United States or other rival powers and instead proclaiming, “it is time for us to take center stage in the world and to make a greater contribution to humankind.”

USA - Active duty members of the Navy in San Diego were reportedly forced to take part in a "Pride Hike" on Friday "in honor of Pride Month" carrying a "rainbow American flag." "In honor of Pride Month, Construction Battalion Maintenance Unit 303 went on a Pride Hike at Sunset Cliff on June 25, 2021," the Navy unit out of San Diego said on Facebook. The pictures contained no American flags... In addition to being forced to take part in Gay Pride Hikes, all active duty and veterans were recently offered free sex changes. In related news, our new Biden-appointed Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of Health and Human Services is a transgender "woman" by the name of "Rachel" Levine who is an advocate of sex changes for kids and the drugging of children with puberty blockers. Biden's [team] tweeted out last week that protecting kids from child sex changes "is bullying." This is what Democrats are talking about when they reference "our values."

CHINA - Religious freedom is barely even a concept in communist China, and now it's under fresh assault from the anti-Christian regime. Chinese American Pastor Bob Fu of the group China Aid, which provides legal aid to Christians in the People's Republic, recently tweeted, "New Cultural Revolution" starts in #CCPChina this notice to students in a 1st Grade class demanding all parents and teachers to hunt all "religious books, antagonistic books & overseas books including books & videos that are copied/duplicated &translated. Everyone is mandated!" "CCP controlled 'three-self church' sings 'Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China'. The choir waves Communist Party flags on the pulpit. We've got an Olympics coming up and the Chinese communist government does not want any disruptions for the Olympics," Lane said during an interview during Monday's edition of CBN's Newswatch. "They really fear there could be protests, a pro-democracy movement going, and so forth, leading up to the Olympics and during the Olympics."

EUROPE - Jewish leaders in Europe say the European Union is not only banning some methods of kosher and halal slaughter, but telling Jews and Muslims how to practice their religions. That’s according to many who have read a recent ruling by the EU’s highest court. It upholds bans in Belgium on producing kosher and halal meat, outlawing a practice whereby livestock is slaughtered without first being stunned electrically into unconsciousness. Jewish and Muslims authorities forego stunning under similar religious laws that require animals be conscious when they are killed for meat. The court and animal rights activists say that’s cruel. But the decision on December 17 by the Court of the European Union goes a step further: Remarkably, the 11,000-word document suggests that Jews and Muslims should and could find a way to allow animals to be stunned using electricity. This aspect of the ruling is already rekindling internal communal debates in Muslim and Jewish communities amid allegations that the court is eroding the separation of church and state.

AFGHANISTAN - The past 20 years of conflict have achieved nothing apart from bloodshed and pain, and now the foes the West invaded to depose are about to get back into power. Afghanistan needs an economic solution, not a military one. To nobody’s surprise, the rapid US withdrawal from Afghanistan has resulted in a massive advance of the Taliban, who have overrun hundreds of districts in a matter of weeks and are continuing to gain territory, seizing countryside areas and surrounding the major cities. The end of the stagnant and seemingly useless conflict is, of course, welcomed. The momentum of the group, despite their militant ideology, has always been fundamentally buoyed by the foremost desire to drive the foreign invaders away in a country that has spent most of the past 40 years in a state of ruin and despair. It’s time to relegate the failed US experiment in Afghanistan to the ash heap of history and see what others can come up with.