USA - A consortium of powerful interests that include Visa and Mastercard, the International Monetary Fund, billionaire Bill Gates and the US Treasury have been slowly lobbying for cash to be abolished worldwide and replaced with digital only currencies.

EUROPE - Former Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan has claimed the EU will never recover the power it is losing thanks to the coronavirus crisis. Mr Hannan had represented South East England since July 1999. Writing a column piece in The Telegraph, he said that coronavirus had put the project into intensive care. He explained: “While surpluses of medical equipment piled up in Germany, Italy was forced to turn to China for help. A bloc notionally devoted to trade liberalisation imposed export bans”.

EUROPE - European leaders are also nowhere to be found. The Brits have drifted away from the Old Continent together with Brexit and Boris Johnson’s medical condition. In Berlin, the future of Angela Merkel and Germany’s political system are still unknown. In the prosperous city of Paris, protesters are telling Emmanuel Macron that they are hungry. It deprives the French President of any mandate to suggest a concerted international effort. In both Italy and Spain, tens of thousands of people have already died. The debate on potential Eurobonds has come to a standstill. European capitals are trying to monitor the developments taking place in distant Asian countries. However, such models cannot be implemented in Europe due to societal and ideological differences. In this case, where will recovery plans for the Western Civilisation come from and who will lead the way out of the recession?

USA - Another three million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits during the week ending May 2, which brings the total claims over the seven weeks of the Covid-19 lockdown to over 33 million. Some 3.839 million initial jobless claims have been registered in the past week. Florida saw the highest number of initial filings, at an estimated 432,000 on an unadjusted basis, from 507,000 in the week prior.

USA - The Evergreen State has had quite a 2020 so far. First, it had the early cases of the coronavirus. Then, it was the "murder hornet." Now, Washington is facing a new enemy: the Asian gypsy moth. The issue of the new flying bug is so worrisome that the governor issued an emergency proclamation this week, saying there is an "imminent danger of an infestation."

USA - Catholic League president Bill Donohue has decried a coordinated left-wing attack on the project of the US Commission on Unalienable Rights in an attempt to downgrade religious freedom and elevate LGBT and “reproductive” rights. Dozens of international left-wing organizations “recently signed a statement lecturing the US State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights,” Dr Donohue noted, including “the Center for Reproductive Rights, Human Rights Watch, and the International Women’s Health Coalition. Their opposition to religious liberty was on grand display,” Donohue said. “In their world, every time religious liberty clashes with abortion rights or the LGBT agenda, the former must bow to the latter.”

GERMANY - Foreign policy experts in Germany and the EU's Foreign Affairs Commissioner Josep Borrell are warning that Brussels' corona relief measures could widen the EU's economic gap. So far, the EU's reaction to the Corona crisis has led to companies in economically stronger countries receiving more relief assistance than their competitors in more heavily indebted countries, according to a proximate analysis by the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP).

After the crisis, German companies will probably be in a stronger position than, for example, their Italian competitors. "The north-south divide that was already in place before the crisis, could become even more pronounced afterwards," Borrell predicts. The growing inequality could threaten the EU's "political project" in the foreseeable future, the DGAP writes.

In the competition within the EU, German companies are benefiting from the fact that, by fostering a bottom-to-top redistribution, national corona relief measures are already to their advantage - a development that exacerbates the crisis.

UK - The Bank of England has warned that the UK economy is heading towards its sharpest recession on record. The coronavirus impact would see the economy shrink 14% this year, based on the lockdown being relaxed in June. Scenarios drawn up by the Bank to illustrate the economic impact said Covid-19 was "dramatically reducing jobs and incomes in the UK". Bank governor Andrew Bailey told the BBC there would be no quick return to normality.

USA - Have you noticed that people are a lot more emotional these days? People are angry about the lockdowns, people are angry because others are not “properly” observing the social distancing rules, people are angry about losing their jobs, people are angry about the shortages in the stores, and more than anything else people are angry at our politicians. Even before COVID-19 came along, I was repeatedly warning my readers that anger was rising to a very dangerous level in this country, and now this pandemic has made things far worse.

USA - Nearly one in five young children in the US are going hungry. That’s according to a new survey of households by the Brookings Institution, which found that 17.4 percent of children were not eating enough. The level is three times as high as in 2008, during the Great Recession.

Disruptions in school meal programs during the pandemic may be part of the problem, the lead researcher said, with some families unable to reach distribution sites and older siblings at home competing for limited food. As hunger rises, Democrats in Washington are seeking to raise food stamp benefits for the duration of the economic crisis, but Republicans have balked at a long-term expansion of the program.

UK - Almost 80 mobile towers have reportedly been burned down in the UK due to coronavirus conspiracy theories that blame the spread of COVID-19 on 5G. The arson attacks began in early April, with 77 towers now damaged, Business Insider reported Wednesday citing industry group Mobile UK. "Daily attacks are very low now but have not stopped entirely," a Mobile UK spokesman told Business Insider. As of April 21, 40 employees of one UK carrier have also been attacked physically or verbally, according to BT CEO Philip Jansen. "We've even had one Openreach engineer stabbed and put in hospital," Jansen said. The conspiracy theory is wrong - radio waves cannot cause a virus. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have all committed to taking down misinformation posts saying otherwise. UK carriers have also asked people to stop burning mobile towers, and the UK's national medical director called the 5G conspiracy theory "complete and utter rubbish."

AFRICA - Think of locusts as giant, hormonally charged, very hungry grasshoppers. They can move more than 100 miles in a day, depending on the wind. Governments and UN agencies have repeatedly warned that locusts will cause calamitous food shortages if they end up on cropland. "It is a race against time to ensure these new swarms do not breed," said Hamisi Williams, a senior Food and Agriculture Organization official in Kenya. "When this happens, we will be talking about the locusts at plague level."

Tens of thousands of liters of pesticides have been delayed in reaching the region because of border closures caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Regional governments have appealed for financial assistance, but with attention almost totally consumed by the COVID-19 pandemic, locusts have tumbled down the priority list. The locusts and the coronavirus seem to be converging toward a catastrophe if a third generation is able to hatch in June and July.

UNITED NATIONS - The head of the United Nations called for global leaders to “use the pandemic recovery” to roll out their global climate change agenda, including allowing fossil fuel companies to collapse and using taxpayer stimulus money to fund green jobs. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said during the Petersberg Virtual Dialogue, a two-day international conference on global warming, in Berlin, Germany that the economic turmoil caused by the coronavirus pandemic presents a “rare and short window of opportunity” to accelerate their globalist 2030 Agenda project.

USA - The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was linked to the rise of the Nazi party, a federal paper has revealed - sparking fresh fears of American division over the nation's response to COVID-19. The Nazi party's ascension to power was in part triggered by the fallout from the pandemic, which killed more than 50 million people and infected one-third of the global population, according to a research paper written by bank economist Kristian Blickle and published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The shocking connection raises concerns over life post-coronavirus pandemic, with tensions visibly mounting between the far-right and the liberals and deep divides already emerging across the US. The stark research paper released Monday found extremist parties - notably the Nazi party - gained a spike in voters following the 1918 pandemic.

EUROPE - EU officials have forecast "the deepest economic recession" in the bloc's history as a result of the coronavirus. Failure to agree on common solutions for the post-pandemic recovery could undermine the European project. European Commissioner for the Economy Paolo Gentiloni told reporters on Wednesday that the bloc is headed for "a recession of historic proportions this year" as a result of the novel coronavirus pandemic. "It is now quite clear that the EU has entered the deepest economic recession in its history," Gentiloni said. "Economic activity in the EU dropped by around one-third practically overnight." The novel coronavirus pandemic has hit the global economy hard. Governments have enacted tough restrictions on mobility along with social distancing measures aimed at curbing the pandemic. However, those measures have also severely limited business operations and economic activity.