On the official UN website, the United Nations is openly using the term “biblical proportion” to describe the famines that are coming. Even if COVID-19 miraculously disappeared tomorrow, a lot of people on the other side of the world would still starve to death, but of course COVID-19 is not going anywhere any time soon.

Here in the United States, our stores still have plenty of food. But empty shelves have started to appear, and food prices are starting to go up aggressively. In fact, we just witnessed the largest one month increase in food prices that we have seen since 1974.

Production of luxe varieties like heritage pork, grass-fed beef and Amish-raised chicken are expanding at a time when coronavirus outbreaks at mammoth plants operated by Tyson Foods Inc and Cargill Inc have wiped out about 40% of conventional US beef and pork capacity in recent weeks. So while lower-income consumers are finding meat hard to come by — with Kroger Co and Costco Wholesale Corp rationing purchases — richer Americans have their pick of fancy offerings that often cost twice as much, or more.

This is just the latest way that the coronavirus pandemic has exposed a socioeconomic divide in America, disproportionately affecting low-income and minority populations more than others. In the end, it could dictate who has access to affordable meat and who doesn’t.

Prior to this year, the all-time record for the most new unemployment claims in a single week was 695,000. That record was set all the way back in 1982, and it had survived all the way until 2020. But now we have been absolutely dwarfing that number week after week. On Thursday, we learned that another 2.9 million Americans filed initial claims for unemployment benefits last week, and that brings the grand total for this pandemic to more than 36 million… To put that in perspective, at the lowest point of the Great Depression only 15 million Americans were unemployed.

Taiwan is a sovereign nation off the coast of Communist China. The Communist Party considers the island a renegade province despite the lack of any history in which Taiwan was ruled by Beijing. Taiwan is currently a democracy with a long history of free and fair elections and functional state institutions like a lawmaking body, a military, and extensive education and health care infrastructures.

Despite its status as an independent country, the WHO does not acknowledge its sovereignty in response to Communist Party pressure. The agency used to invite Taiwan to the World Health Assembly, its annual meeting, but stopped in 2016 after the Taiwanese people elected President Tsai Ing-wen, who has vocally challenged Beijing’s illegal attempts to control much of the South China Sea region.

In a statement issued on its Facebook page, the US Pacific Fleet said the USS McCampbell had passed through the narrow strait yesterday, showing pictures of the ship under way. Taiwan's Defence Ministry said the ship had sailed south on what it called an "ordinary mission", and was continuing in that direction. Tsai, will be sworn in for her second and final term next Wednesday, having been re-elected by a landslide majority in January after running on a platform of defending Taiwan's democracy and standing up to China.

The European Central Bank was quick to react, arguing that it follows decisions taken by the European Court of Justice — not national courts. However, the German ruling has sparked an unprecedented legal minefield and has led to new questions about the future of the euro zone.

Erik Nielsen, chief economist at UniCredit, said the embarrassment of the ruling for the Bundestag (the German parliament) was notable. “As illustrated when Bundestag President, and long-time ECB critic, Wolfgang Schäuble said ... that ‘it may well be that the existence of the euro is now being questioned in other EU member states — because every national constitutional court can judge for itself’,” he said in a note Sunday.

Typically, state government bureaucrats make above average salaries and those jobs often come with very nice benefit packages. Once those jobs have been eliminated, they will not be easy to replace. Fear of the coronavirus has paralyzed economic demand, and this is causing businesses all over America to fail. As more businesses fail, that creates even more economic fear, and lenders get even tighter with their money.

The team linked the phenomenon to declines in snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains, which feeds the Upper Missouri River Basin and accounts for around 30 percent of the river's total water flow. 'Snow provides the water for stream flow to the Upper Missouri, and we’ve designed our agriculture and infrastructure around expectations that this water will be provided at a certain pace over a certain part of the year.'

The Missouri River is the longest in the US, spanning 2,342 miles between Brower's Spring, Montana and Spanish Lake near St Louis, Missouri, where it joins the Mississippi River.The Missouri River is a critical water source for the midwest, according to the researchers, 'supporting megafarms, hydropower, tourism and healthy ecosystems.'

The researchers worry that the continuing drought could mirror the effects of a similar regional aridity sweeping across the west, 'contributing to drier soil, widespread tree death, and more severe wildfires.'

A 3.1-magnitude earthquake was reported 8 miles from Palm Springs on Monday morning at 9:40 am, the US Geological Survey (USGS) reported. On Sunday afternoon, a 4.5-magnitude earthquake shook San Diego County, striking about 10.5 miles southeast of Ocotillo Wells at a depth of 6.2 miles. According to the California Institute of Technology, there have been more than 1,200 quakes in California and Nevada during the last week. In addition, several quakes have taken place along a portion of the Ring of Fire along the west coast of South America.

"The number of children under the age of 15 who need help to get milk or food to eat has risen to 700,000," the farmers organization Coldiretti said in a statement released on Sunday, which was Mother’s Day in Italy. The "critical" situation has been "aggravated in many families by the closure of schools and school restaurants" which were where many children received a guaranteed hot meal every day, the union said.

The children affected are often from families whose parents lost temporary employment due to the Covid-19 lockdown, as well as "small traders or artisans who have had to close.” Undocumented workers “who do not receive special subsidies or public aid and have no savings” are also struggling, it added.

In fact, Dr Anthony Fauci just told a Senate Committee that it may not be safe for schools all over America to reopen when the next school year begins in the fall. Apparently Fauci and other medical “experts” believe that it will not be possible for us to fully go back to our normal lives as long as this virus keeps spreading. But how long are we really supposed to wait?

The truth is that this pandemic could still potentially be in the early chapters. The Spanish Flu pandemic lasted for three full years, and we could possibly be facing a similar scenario. And this week WHO official Mike Ryan warned that this virus could even become “endemic”, and if that happens it “may never go away”…

Now people’s calls and texts, which have leveled off in the past couple of weeks, are more about their isolation and depression. Ultimately, the psychological impact of the pandemic will harm far more people than the virus itself. And the widespread emotional trauma it’s evoking will be long lasting, experts say. Already, more than 4 in 10 Americans say that stress related to the pandemic has had a negative impact on their mental health, according to an April poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“There’s no doubt that the coronavirus pandemic will be the most psychologically toxic disaster in anyone’s lifetime,” said George Everly, who teaches disaster mental health and human resilience at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “This pandemic is a disaster of uncertainty,” he explained, “and the greater the uncertainty surrounding a disaster, the greater the psychological casualties.”

“NATO’s nuclear sharing is a multilateral arrangement that ensures the benefits, responsibilities and risks of nuclear deterrence are shared among allies,” he wrote in an op-ed first posted on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung website. “Politically, this is significant. It means that participating allies, like Germany, make joint decisions on nuclear policy and planning, and maintain appropriate equipment.”

The policy prescribes that a smattering of countries in Europe that don’t possess atomic weapons will host such arms on their territory and maintain the means to deploy them. In the case of Germany, there are 20 B61 bombs reportedly stored at Büchel Air Base in western Germany’s state of Rhineland-Palatinate. If called upon, German Tornado pilots would fly the weapons into enemy territory and toss them at the targets in a lofting maneuver, releasing them during a sharp upward and backward turn to maximize bomb airtime.