NIGERIA - Armed gunmen raided a Sunday morning service last week at Haske Baptist Church in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, killing one and kidnapping at least four others, the Barnabas Fund reported Tuesday. The April 25 attack took place in Manini Tasha village, in Kaduna State, where Fulani raiders have carried out ongoing targeted attacks on the Christian population.

USA - If you are too young to have been alive during the 1970s, you might want to read up on that decade, because current economic conditions are starting to become eerily similar to what we experienced back then. In the 1970s, an energy crisis caused tremendously long lines at gas stations all over the country. In 2021, we don’t have a shortage of gasoline, but shortages of other key products are starting to cause very serious problems. In fact even the Biden administration is publicly admitting that there will be “supply chain disruptions” in the months ahead. The 1970s also featured extremely painful inflation, and I certainly don’t need to tell you that prices have been rising very aggressively lately. In fact, Bloomberg is using the term “skyrocketing” to describe the “upward trajectory” of commodity prices…

GERMANY - When the ruling class in Germany prepares an offensive for war and rearmament it can rely on the Green Party. That was the case in 1998, when then Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer organised Germany’s first post-war international military intervention, sending the German army (Bundeswehr) off to war against Serbia, and so it is again today. ...Since Annalena Baerbock was appointed the Green Party’s choice as potential chancellor, the warmongering of the Greens has taken on outright hysterical forms. ...One asks: has she lost her senses? Has she ever considered what this means? ...Accepting Ukraine into NATO would be tantamount to a declaration of war against Russia and would immediately set off alarm bells in Moscow. It would raise the prospect of an armed conflict with the world’s second-largest nuclear power, a conflict which could cause millions of deaths in Europe and threaten all of humanity.

USA - Speaking with the USS Arizona Memorial and the Battleship Missouri Memorial in the background, Austin cautioned that the US military cannot be satisfied with believing it is the strongest and most capability military in the world today — “not at a time when our potential adversaries are very deliberately working to blunt our edge.” He appeared to be referring to China, which other officials say has accelerated its military modernization and sped up its construction of a wide range of sophisticated weaponry while the US was focused for two decades on combating extremist groups like al-Qaida in Afghanistan and, more recently, the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria. ...Austin said US defense will continue to rest on maintaining deterrence, which he described as “fixing a basic truth within the minds of our potential foes: The costs and risks of aggression are out of line with any conceivable benefit.”

RUSSIA - In terms of global trends, modern shipbuilders aim for increased maneuverability and efficiency at a decreased displacement. Present-day analysts agree that aircraft carriers are useful only if you don’t plan on invading a nation any stronger than a banana republic. In a naval standoff between equal powers, they’d be taken out first because they’re easy targets for guided missiles. It’s really hard to imagine this type of ship making a safe approach to the Russian shores under any circumstances. Both nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines and attack submarines, in general, however, are set to stay with us for the foreseeable future.

USA - Sarah Margon has been nominated for the post of assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. She has been a "conflict policy adviser" for Oxfam, a bitter critic of Israel, a major funder of Palestinian groups and a promoter of boycotts of Israeli settlements. She was also a foreign-policy adviser for the Open Society Foundations. As NGO Monitor has documented, Open Society's funding fuels the conflict in myriad ways and does its best to undermine and attack Israel.

NORTH KOREA - The Foreign Ministry of North Korea responded on Sunday, nearly a week later, to a passing reference President Joe Biden made to the country in his first speech to Congress as president, calling his words “intolerable.” North Korea’s government-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) published remarks by senior American relations diplomat Kwon Jong-gun in which he described Biden’s words as a “blunder” and a “slip of the tongue.” Given that Biden had allegedly threatened Pyongyang, Kwon argued, North Korea would have to retaliate and place the US in a “very grave situation.” North Korea and the United States have technically been at war since 1950, when the Korean War began. While active hostilities ended in 1953, no side ever signed a peace treaty.

USA - Scientists have known for a while that SARS-CoV-2’s distinctive “spike” proteins help the virus infect its host by latching on to healthy cells. Now, a major new study shows that they also play a key role in the disease itself. The paper, published on April 30, 2021, in Circulation Research, also shows conclusively that COVID-19 is a vascular disease, demonstrating exactly how the SARS-CoV-2 virus damages and attacks the vascular system on a cellular level. The findings help explain COVID-19’s wide variety of seemingly unconnected complications, and could open the door for new research into more effective therapies. “A lot of people think of it as a respiratory disease, but it’s really a vascular disease,” says Assistant Research Professor Uri Manor, who is co-senior author of the study. “That could explain why some people have strokes, and why some people have issues in other parts of the body. The commonality between them is that they all have vascular underpinnings.”

USA - As yet another season of drought returns to California, the mood has grown increasingly grim across the vast and fertile San Joaquin Valley. Renowned for its bounty of dairies, row crops, grapes, almonds, pistachios and fruit trees, this agricultural heartland is still reeling from the effects of the last punishing drought, which left the region geologically depressed and mentally traumatized.

CHINA - Joe Biden’s prediction of a technological war with Beijing will be played out in outer space. And as the creation of a new space station and other successful missions demonstrate, China is intent on winning the strategic battle. On Thursday, China sent the core module of its first-ever space station, the Tianhe – or ‘Harmony of the Heavens’ – up into orbit. It’s long been under development, and marks a huge breakthrough in the country’s space program. A series of follow-up missions will seek to assemble the new station, which may become Earth’s only one, as the International Space Station is likely to be retired in the next few years. The mission is yet another sign that, despite being a late starter, China is rapidly catching up with the US on outer space, with its Chang’e-5 program having successfully brought back rock samples from the moon at the end of 2020. China’s space ambitions are only just getting started.

USA - It’s one thing to have policies against violence, abuse, and harassment. But in “protecting” users, Twitter is hell-bent on censoring voices that rock the boat, even when all they have tweeted is a peer-reviewed scientific paper. Last week, Simon Goddek, who has a PhD in biotechnology and researches system dynamics, tweeted a link to a scientific study titled, “Is a Mask That Covers the Mouth and Nose Free from Undesirable Side Effects in Everyday Use and Free of Potential Hazards?” Some time later, his account was frozen and he received a notice from Twitter that it would remain frozen until he deleted the offending tweet, and for the 12 hours following that. In his Telegram group, he wrote: “I was put into Twitter jail for citing a peer-reviewed scientific paper. Cancel science is real. I searched for more examples of extreme Twitter censorship and found further censorship of vaccine related information, and one person’s hypothesis on why vaccine talk is so particularly taboo: “$157 billion buys a lot of Facebook and Twitter bans.”

USA - There once was a time when capitalists were only interested in making money. Now major corporations have no qualms in moralising to the public. Curbing their power should be a priority… When a commentator writing for the American business magazine Forbes informs readers that woke capitalism is good for the profit margins, it becomes evident that capitalism has undergone a massive rebranding exercise. In his article ‘A Free-Market Defense of Coca-Cola, Delta, And ‘Woke’ Capitalism’, columnist John Tamny counsels conservatives who are fed-up with being dumped on by Big Business to relax, since there’s a “good, capitalistic reason for corporations to play the political game.” Advocacy of woke capitalism is the new normal in the world of finance and business. It is claimed that “wokeness is useful in motivating change.”

UK - The term ‘woke’ is at the centre of many of the fiercest political and cultural debates at the moment. Some people say being woke is a sign of awareness to social issues, others whip out the term as an insult. But what does the term really mean, and why do many people get fired up about its use? The dictionary defines it as “originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice”. In other words, it means to be awake to sensitive social issues, such as racism.

GERMANY - At least 93 police officers were injured and 354 protesters were detained after traditional May Day rallies in Berlin turned violent, the city’s top security official said Sunday. More than 20 different rallies took place in the German capital on Saturday and the vast majority of them were peaceful. However, a leftist march of 8,000 people through the city’s Neukoelln and Kreuzberg neighborhood, which has seen clashes in past decades, turned violent. Protesters threw bottles and rocks at officers, and burned garbage cans and wooden pallets in the streets. “Violence against police officers and a blind, destructive rage has nothing to do with political protest,” Berlin state interior minister Andreas Geisel said. Geisel condemned the throwing of bottles and rocks, the burning barricades on the streets and especially the violence toward police. “The high number of injured officer leaves me stunned. I wish all of those who were injured in the line of duty a quick recovery,” he said.

VATICAN - The traditional obligation for Catholics to attend Mass every Sunday was lifted in Britain and virtually everywhere else in the world more than a year ago. So the familiar distinction between practising and non-practising Catholics was suspended. This week, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales have issued “The Day of the Lord”, a reflection on the way back to normality.