USA - Radiant sunsets are in the forecast for parts of Florida thanks in part to a weather pattern currently underway across another continent. Dust kicked up across the Sahara Desert and carried by trade winds has been pouring off the coast of Africa in recent weeks and floating clear across the Atlantic Ocean toward the Caribbean and Florida. The dusty air is brought about by a weather pattern known as the African easterly jet, which consists of strong low to midlevel winds in the atmosphere over central Africa. “There are a lot of thunderstorms across central and southwest Africa, indicating a very active east African jet which should bring more robust tropical waves into the Atlantic during the next couple of weeks,” AccuWeather Hurricane Expert Dan Kottlowski said. “These features will bring more dust, but we can’t tell at this point whether there will be any mega dust outbreaks like we saw last year. We will just have to wait and watch.” Health experts say that the dust could be troublesome for those with allergies and may even produce symptoms similar to COVID-19.

TAIWAN - Taiwan is facing huge power and water shortages amid a global shortage of microchips, a supply-chain-mapping CEO has told Express.co.uk. The island nation which controls about two-thirds of all microchip production is under pressure from companies worldwide but is struggling to keep up with demand due to limitations in production. Bindiya Vakil, CEO of Resilinc, a California based software company and supply-chain-mapping servicer told Express.co.uk that production of the vital technology has halted in some locations. She said: “Currently the island’s economy is grappling with water and power shortages leading to halted production, suspended operations, and tightened restrictions on water consumption.

USA - If you are shopping for a home right now, I really do feel sorry for you. Home prices in many areas of the country have officially crossed the line into “absurd” territory, and they just keep going higher. Thanks to wild spending by the federal government and the economic malpractice that has been happening at the Federal Reserve, we now have way too many dollars chasing way too few goods and services. Inflation is showing up in every sector of our economy, but it is not showing up equally in all sectors. One area where inflation threatens to spiral completely out of control is in home prices. Right now we are seeing the wildest bidding wars in US history, and in many, many cases buyers end up paying way over listing price.

USA - The catastrophic drought that’s gripping the US West is claiming a new victim: the hydropower dams that much of the region depends on for electricity supplies. Low water levels in key reservoirs mean that hydropower supplies are declining. One of the hardest hit areas is California, where output has tumbled to the lowest in more than five years. Nationally, the US Energy Information Administration predicts electricity generation from conventional hydro sources will drop about 11% this year from 2020. That’s at a time when electric grids across the West are already forecast to be stretched this summer as heat waves send power demand surging. With less hydropower, the challenge of meeting peak demand may get even tougher, especially in California. Already in the state, hydropower is down about 40% this month compared with June 2020, according to BNEF.

USA - Big Pharma and mainstream media are largely owned by two asset management firms: BlackRock and Vanguard. Vanguard and BlackRock are the top two owners of Time Warner, Comcast, Disney and News Corp, four of the six media companies that control more than 90% of the US media landscape. BlackRock and Vanguard form a secret monopoly that own just about everything else you can think of too. In all, they have ownership in 1,600 American firms, which in 2015 had combined revenues of $9.1 trillion. When you add in the third-largest global owner, State Street, their combined ownership encompasses nearly 90% of all S&P 500 firms. Vanguard is the largest shareholder of BlackRock. Vanguard itself, on the other hand, has a unique structure that makes its ownership more difficult to discern, but many of the oldest, richest families in the world can be linked to Vanguard funds.

UK - Brexit leader Nigel Farage has had harsh words for England’s national football (soccer) team taking the knee for the Black Lives Matter movement during the belated UEFA European Football Championship 2020. “Look, you cannot separate taking the knee from the Black Lives Matter movement,” said Mr Farage during an interview with the newly launched GB News network. “It is an avowedly, openly Marxist organisation that wants to defund the police and wants to bring down the whole of Western civilisation — don’t take my word for it, just read the website — and you can’t separate the two,” explained the former UKIP and Reform UK party leader.

GERMANY - A majority of German citizens believe that freedom of expression is in danger, the latest poll shows. ‘Patriotism’ and Islam were named among topics one should be particularly careful about. Only 45% of Germans still believe they can express their political opinion freely, says a survey conducted by the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy – one of Germany’s oldest and most respectable polling agencies. That is the lowest figure since 1953, when the institute started conducting such polls. Just a few years ago, two-thirds of Germans believed that nothing stops them from expressing their opinion freely. Most believe that their freedom of expression is in danger, while 44% feel one had better be careful about what one says, according to the survey published in Germany’s FAZ newspaper on Wednesday.

SWITZERLAND - President Joe Biden gave Russian President Vladimir Putin almost everything he could have wanted at their Geneva summit. He elevated Putin above other leaders, including American allies; and failed to force any real concessions on Russian policy. The degree to which the summit was a disaster became evident when Putin emerged for his press conference — alone with a forum all to himself. The Biden team did not want to appear with Putin at a joint conference after the meeting– both because Biden would look frail next to Putin, and because of the media dogma that President Donald Trump had somehow done something terrible by behaving cordially when appearing alongside Putin in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018. Putin fielded softball questions from Russian news agencies, but he also welcomed hostile questions from the US media. In fact, Putin, an enemy of press freedom, was more polite than Biden would be, and took far tougher questions.

UK - A Woke campaign that seeks to bully advertisers into boycotting GB News has been slammed by many Brits. The channel launched earlier this week promising to “lend an ear to some of Britain’s marginalised and overlooked voices”. This rhetoric appears to have gone down well with viewers as chairman Andrew Neil and host Dan Wootton helped it attract higher figures than both the BBC and Sky News channels on its launch night. Despite the mainstream channel clearly having a wide appeal, woke lefties determined to silence any opinions other than their own seem out to get it. A website called Boycott GB News has adopted a similar campaign to Stop Funding Hate - by publishing the names and contact details of the channel’s advertisers. It then urges people to bombard them with messages urging them to stop advertising with the channel. Kopparberg, Grolsch, Nivea and the Open University have since announced that they are pulling their advertising.

VATICAN - Joe Biden’s entourage requested permission for the president to attend Mass with Pope Francis during his European visit, which the Vatican “nixed,” according to a Wednesday report from Catholic News Agency (CNA). The Vatican’s refusal stemmed from “the impact that Biden receiving Holy Communion from the pope would have on the discussions the USCCB [US Conference of Catholic Bishops] is planning to have during their meeting starting Wednesday, June 16,” the report stated, citing an unnamed Vatican source. Tuesday’s report corrects a prior CNA story alleging that the president would meet with the pope on June 15, which will apparently not occur.

HUNGARY - A law prohibiting the sharing of content portraying homosexuality and transgenderism to those under the age of 18 has been passed by Hungary’s National Assembly. The vote passed on Tuesday by a vote of 157-1. The law was included in a larger bill cracking down on pedophilia by creating a register of child sex offenders, implementing stricter punishments for child pornography, and barring pedophile offenders from jobs where they would encounter children. It also singled out the promotion of LGBT affairs in schools. Sex education in schools “must not be aimed” at “promoting homosexuality” or “changing gender,” said Fidesz, the ruling party of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, in a press release following the vote. Additionally, those under the age of 18 cannot be shown pornographic content, or any content, deemed as promoting homosexuality or transgenderism – with television shows, movies, and advertisements included.

USA - There was plenty of talk about China at the latest meeting of NATO, a country far removed from the North Atlantic. Do we need any more proof that the organization is now just a vehicle for promoting American hegemony? Following the weekend’s G7 meeting, the NATO summit followed on Monday and predictably adopted a similar theme: China. Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg denied that the West was in a “Cold War” with Beijing, but nonetheless proceeded to say China presented “systemic challenges” due to its rising capabilities, which posed a threat to the security of the alliance. Beijing hit back by claiming NATO was obsessed with the “China threat theory” and stirring up trouble, urging it to view the country’s “development rationally.” What is obvious is that NATO is not so much a security organization for European states as it is a vehicle to prop up American hegemony. If this logic is taken at face value, is China really the threat it is being depicted as? Who is really seeking global domination here?

USA - After 55 years of special privileges and special pleading for black Americans, where do we stand? Integration has failed. Black Americans, or more correctly, those who speak for them, want black-only towns, black-only college dorms, black-only dining halls, and a black national anthem. Except for the black anthem, that’s what they had a half century ago prior to “affirmative action.” How is it that when blacks demand segregation, it is not racism? asks the leading political economist and author, Dr Paul Craig Roberts, a regular at The Herland Report. As Lawrence Stratton and I demonstrated in our book The New Color Line, racial quotas were strictly prohibited by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Nevertheless, the law was stood upside down and quotas were imposed. As a result many young whites, especially males, had their careers foreclosed. Less qualified people took their place in universities, in employment and in promotions. New wrongs against whites were justified by white liberals as compensation for past wrongs against blacks. The sins of the fathers were visited upon the sons. This is the New Justice.

USA - New satellite images reveal how badly western US reservoirs have been depleted as a result of the mega-drought plaguing much of that region, impacting millions. The European Space Agency's (ESA) Sentinel-2 satellite captured alarming images of the reservoirs stretching from California to Utah and up to Oregon this year, along with shots from 2020 that shows a dramatic decline in water levels. Lake Shasta, California's largest reservoir, is filled only to 42 percent capacity, while Lake Powell sits below 35 percent.

USA - Texas power grid operator struggles to provide power in heat, just as it did in cold. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) called for Texans to conserve electricity on Monday afternoon. For the second time this year, the council blamed “a significant number of forced generation outages” and record demand for the “tight grid conditions” that are expected to last until Friday, June 18.