USA - The US financial system could be on the cusp of calamity. This time, we might not be able to save it. After months of living with the coronavirus pandemic, American citizens are well aware of the toll it has taken on the economy: broken supply chains, record unemployment, failing small businesses. All of these factors are serious and could mire the United States in a deep, prolonged recession. But there’s another threat to the economy, too. It lurks on the balance sheets of the big banks, and it could be cataclysmic. Imagine if, in addition to all the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, you woke up one morning to find that the financial sector had collapsed. You may think that such a crisis is unlikely, with memories of the 2008 crash still so fresh. But banks learned few lessons from that calamity, and new laws intended to keep them from taking on too much risk have failed to do so. As a result, we could be on the precipice of another crash, one different from 2008 less in kind than in degree. This one could be worse.

AUSTRALIA - Australia has hit back at threats from China to punish Australia for daring to question the origin of the coronavirus, after Beijing vowed to wipe £20 billion off the Australian economy. China has told its students to avoid studying in Australia - putting at risk Australia's fourth-largest export industry, international education, worth 38 billion Australian dollars (£20 billion) annually. Ties between China and Australia have worsened after Australia called for an inquiry into the origin and spread of the coronavirus. The World Health Assembly last month voted to back a review into the pandemic after lobbying by Australia and the EU. This decision infuriated Beijing, which retaliated by banning Australian beef imports and imposing 80 percent tariffs on Australian barley. China followed this up by warning last week for Chinese tourists to avoid Australia.

UK - Abortions in England and Wales last year were at their highest number since the 1967 Abortion Act was introduced. Of the 209,519 terminated pregnancies in the two countries in 2019, 207,384 were for women resident there, the Department of Health confirmed yesterday. Both the total number and the number for women living in England and Wales have risen to the highest since the Act was brought in more than five decades ago.

POLAND - Andrzej Duda has vowed to “defend children from LGBT ideology” if he wins a second term at presidential elections in Poland later this month. The Polish president promised to ban the propagation of LGBT ideology in public institutions and the promotion of homosexuality in schools. “It is a foreign ideology. There is no consent for this phenomenon to happen in our country in any way.” Duda said, stressing that “parents are responsible for the sexual education of their children”. On Wednesday, he unveiled a ‘Family Charter’ of proposals which includes pledges to preserve and expand popular schemes subsidising pensioners and families who have children. The Law and Justice (PiS) party politician promised to “protect the interests of the family” from dangers such as pornography and to “defend the institution of marriage”, stressing that the nuclear family is rooted in Polish tradition and is the institution on which society is built.

UNITED NATIONS - The world has entered a critical period, as depression unfolds, a virus pandemic rages, socio-economic chaos will flourish to unmanageable levels for governments and central banks. UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, warned Tuesday that the world is on the brink of the worst food crisis ever witnessed in the post-World War II era. Guterres said the virus pandemic could push more than 50 million into instant poverty, further saying countries must act now to shore up food security or risk imminent crisis:

UK - Britain’s economy shrank by a record 20.4% in April as the first full month of the coronavirus lockdown triggered an economic crash three times greater than the 2008 financial crisis. Revealing the scale of the downturn, the official figures for gross domestic product (GDP) from the Office for National Statistics showed no area of the economy was left unscathed as the government imposed tight controls on business and social life to limit the spread of the disease.

EUROPE - The Eurozone may be facing a devastating crisis as coronavirus has unearthed ignored and significant flaws in the system ultimately threatening its future use in Europe, claimed Lord Michael Howard. Mr Howard claimed tensions were flaring up in the Eurozone as the coronavirus crisis showed clear wealth differences. Lord Howard said: "Coronavirus has exposed the fundamental flaw in the whole concept of the Euro and the Eurozone. I don't think you can have a single currency without a single Government. Single currency might work well when you have large scale transfer payments from those parts of the currency zone that are prosperous to those that are less prosperous. The sort of thing that happens within a country, the Eurozone is not a country and it has a single currency." Lord Howard explained the tension building in countries that use the Euro due to the wealth differences.

UK - Brexiteer Richard Tice argued the EU is panicking at the possibility of Britain prospering after cutting ties with the bloc. Brexit Party Chairman and former MEP Richard Tice claimed there were many benefits of Brexit for Britain that the EU is petrified of. During an interview with Express.co.uk, Mr Tice said if Britain becomes a success story it could spell trouble for the European Union. He said other countries will look at Britain as an example and may question whether they want to remain a member of the bloc.

VATICAN - It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, so the gospels say. What that might mean for the inhabitants of the Vatican – where the apostolic estate is worth as much as $15 billion (£11.9 billion) – is unclear, although the Pope insists the Holy See’s treasures belong to humanity. Coinciding with efforts to shed more light on the Vatican’s opaque finances following a real estate scandal last year, Pope Francis is lifting the lid on vast sums of wealth held in a secretive investment vehicle based in Finsbury Circus, in the City of London. British Grolux Investments – whose ties to the Vatican were obscure until a few years ago – has built up a network of prime London properties using cash handed over by Italy’s fascist dictator Mussolini…

USA - The debt of the federal government topped $26 trillion for the first time on Tuesday, when it climbed from $25,960,547,920,986.11 to $26,003,751,512,344.91, according to data released today by the Treasury Department. Only 35 days had elapsed from when the debt topped that $25-trillion threshold on May 5 to yesterday, when it topped $26 trillion for the first time.

USA - 2020 has been quite a year so far. It has been one nightmare after another, and yet the economic optimists continue to insist that economic activity will soon snap back to normal levels somehow. So the economic optimists aren’t really alarmed by the fact that the core areas of our major cities have been torched, gutted and looted by rioters, because they assume that all of this violence is just a temporary phenomenon and that any damage that has been done can be repaired.

USA - Mass looting throughout the nation. Police precincts burned to the ground. Murdered cops. An historic church in Lafayette Park set on fire. Video after horrifying video of innocent Americans being beaten senseless by gangs of thugs, as one political party demands: “DEFUND THE POLICE!” Everyone is saying it: I no longer recognize my country.

USA - The United States reached two million reported cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday. Though some countries are close to the one million mark, the US is the only nation to not only surpass that mark, but double it. Just before midnight on Wednesday, Johns Hopkins University's world map of coronavirus cases put the US at 2,000,464 confirmed cases. The death toll in the US is 112,924.

GERMANY - For years, Germany held these truths to be self-evident: no big budget deficits, no common European debt issuance and no European fiscal union. In the last few weeks, those principles have been revised with an alacrity that has stunned Germany’s neighbours. A country that was long ultra-cautious on Europe and wedded to balanced budgets seems to have had a Damascene conversion. Few better epitomise the shift than Jörg Kukies. a former Goldman Sachs banker, who has served as deputy finance minister for the last two years, he was one of the drivers of last month’s Franco-German proposal to raise €500 billion through common EU debt and hand it out as grants, not loans, to countries hit by coronavirus.

For Mr Kukies, the fund is a key milestone on the road to a full European fiscal union — to an EU with the powers not only to issue bonds but also raise its own revenues. “We talk a lot about European sovereignty, but you can’t expect [that] to evolve as long as fiscal union remains incomplete,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times.

USA - The city of Chicago notched a grim milestone last weekend, as 18 people were murdered on Sunday, May 31 alone, marking the deadliest day in the city since at least 1961. The University of Chicago Crime Lab's numbers do not go back further than 1961, so it's impossible to say how long it's been — if ever — since so many people were murdered in the city in one 24-hour stretch. In the entire weekend stretching from 7 pm Friday, May 29, through 11 pm Sunday, May 31, 24 people were killed in Chicago and another 85 were wounded by gunfire. The next-highest murder total for a single day in Chicago was on August 4, 1991, when 13 people were killed. "We've never seen anything like it, at all," said Max Kapustin, the senior research director at the crime lab. "... I don't even know how to put it into context. It's beyond anything that we've ever seen before."