JAPAN - Outgoing Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has taken the Japanese defense policy away from its post-war pacifism to a growing military with an increasingly loose sense of self-defense. A week before stepping down, he’s talking taking it a step farther. Abe now says he wants Japan to have “first-strike” capabilities to attack enemy bases around the area. Abe argued that would increase deterrence, meaning this is the ultimate extension of “self-defense,” where the nation would be flagrantly attacking other countries and claiming defense. Abe suggested intercepting missiles was no longer sufficient, and called for a new revised defense policy. With Japan’s two main rivals being China and North Korea, any Japanese first strikes would likely start a major war. Abe’s call is likely to be supported by his successor, with his party’s leadership largely leaning hawkish, particularly when it comes to China. Given US hostility toward China, it’s likely the US will push them toward this action as well.

ISRAEL - The cabinet has given its approval to a three-week full nationwide closure, beginning Friday [18 Sept 2020] at 2 pm, according to Hebrew media reports. Ministers Amir Peretz, Zeev Elkin, and Asaf Zamir vote against it, while Itzhik Shmuli and Ofir Akunis abstain. The final details are not immediately confirmed by the government, but are reported to include a ban on venturing more than 500 meters from home, except for essential errands.

USA - Clouds of mosquitoes have been so thick in southwest Louisiana since Hurricane Laura that they're killing cattle and horses. Farmers in a five-parish area east and northeast of the parishes where the storm made its landfall August 27 have probably lost 300 to 400 cattle, said Dr Craig Fontenot, a large-animal veterinarian based in Ville Platte. He said the swarms are so thick that the vast number of bites leave horses and cattle anemic and bleeding under their skins. The animals also become exhausted from constantly moving in an attempt to avoid the biting insects, he said in a phone interview Wednesday with The Associated Press.

USA - As wildfires burn throughout Oregon and close in on Portland, a number of arrests and reports suggest that some of these fires may have been started intentionally. The FBI has dismissed reports of arson as “conspiracy theories.” Multiple suspects have been arrested and charged with arson within the city itself, with the arrestees usually linked to the ongoing protests and riots. Previously, Molotov cocktails have been thrown at police officers, buildings set on fire, and powerful fireworks launched at federal agents protecting the city’s Justice Center and courthouse. However, law enforcement officers have caught several arsonists outside Portland too. A man was charged on Friday with multiple counts of arson after allegedly setting a wildfire near Phoenix in southern Oregon on Tuesday. Officers arresting the man found him standing near a large blaze that was threatening several houses, and discovered two ounces of methamphetamine on his person. His political leanings are unknown.

EUROPE - One of Germany’s most experienced diplomats had to wait three months this year before Warsaw would approve his appointment as Berlin’s ambassador to Poland. However, it isn’t just relations between Berlin and Warsaw that are being affected by war memories, or what Germans see as their weaponization. Beneath the surface, war-tied resentments are bubbling in other parts of Europe, too, with possible important ramifications for the consolidation of the EU, a bloc founded partly to ensure European nations would cease squabbling and to avert the chance of any future conflict emerging among them. Pollsters have noted a rise in anti-German sentiment in the southern European states of Italy and Spain, and in Greece, where the country’s post-2008 debt crisis and Germany’s handling of it still grates. In Hungary and elsewhere in Central Europe, as well as Italy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is blamed for encouraging the 2015 migrant influx into Europe with her open-door policy for asylum-seekers.

USA - Fauci was asked in the interview on Friday about the president’s most recent comments on the virus, in which he also said: “We’re rounding the final turn, and a lot of good things are happening.” Fauci said: “I’m sorry, but I have to disagree with that, because if you look at the thing that you just mentioned, the statistics, Andrea, they’re disturbing. We’re plateauing at around 40,000 [new] cases a day and the deaths are around 1,000.” Fauci was speaking with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell a day after the president told a White House press briefing: “I really do believe we’re rounding the corner.” The US has a world record 6.3 million cases of Covid-19 and almost 200,000 people have died, according to Johns Hopkins data.

USA - Hundreds of firefighters battled two large wildfires Friday that threatened to merge near the most populated part of Oregon, including the suburbs of Portland, and the governor said dozens of people are missing in other parts of the state. The state’s emergency management director, Andrew Phelps, said officials are “preparing for a mass fatality event” and that thousands of structures have been destroyed. Governor Kate Brown said more than 40,000 Oregonians have been evacuated and about 500,000 are in different levels of evacuation zones, either having been told to leave or to prepare to do so. Dozens of people are missing in Jackson County in the south and Marion County, where a fire continues to burn east of Salem, Brown told a news conference Friday. Also Friday, authorities announced that a man had been arrested on two counts of arson for allegedly starting a fire in southern Oregon on Tuesday.

USA - 2020 has been an incredibly difficult year for the US as a whole, but no part of the country has been hit harder than the states along the west coast. It has just been one thing after another all year long, and now unprecedented wildfires have turned the skies bright orange and blood red over vast stretches of California and Oregon. Many are using the word “apocalyptic” to describe what is happening, and others have said that the skies look like something out of a science fiction movie. And even though hundreds of thousands of acres have already burned in Oregon and Washington, and even though more than two million acres have already burned in California, officials are warning that conditions will get even worse as we head into “the teeth of the wildfire season”.

USA - Four people have now been arrested on the West Coast for deliberately starting blazes as wildfires rage. Cops detained two men in Washington, man in Oregon and woman in California as the desperate battle to contain the fires continues. So far 24 people have been killed though the authorities in Oregon have told residents to brace themselves for a “mass fatality incident”. Photos show the towns of Phoenix and Talent reduced to ashes after the Almeda fire tore through. It has killed two people, destroyed a thousand homes and laid waste to 5700 acres.

USA - Emergency responders in the Pacific Northwest are fighting misinformation along with raging wildfires as people spread unsubstantiated social media posts blaming coordinated groups of arsonists from both the far left and far right for setting the blazes. The FBI said Friday that it’s investigated several claims and found them to be untrue, while officials in Oregon and Washington state have turned to Facebook to knock down the competing narratives — some posts blamed far-left antifa activists and others claimed the far-right group the Proud Boys was responsible for the fires scorching wide swaths of the region.

USA - A storm surge warning has been issued from Port Fourchon Louisiana to Mississippi/Alabama border.

A hurricane warning has been issued from Grand Isle Louisiana northeast to Ocean Springs Mississippi...including New Orleans...Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas.

A hurricane watch has been issued from east of Morgan City Louisiana to west of Grand Isle.

A tropical storm warning has been issued from east of Ocean Springs Mississippi to Indian Pass Florida.

USA - President Trump has spoken of how supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which has grown online in the US, appear to like him very much. Mr Trump told journalists that he didn't know much about the movement, but added that he'd heard that "these were people who love our country." So what is QAnon and who believes in it? At its heart, QAnon is a wide-ranging, unfounded conspiracy theory that says that President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media. QAnon believers have speculated that this fight will lead to a day of reckoning where prominent people such as former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will be arrested and executed. That's the basic story, but there are so many offshoots, detours and internal debates that the total list of QAnon claims is enormous - and often contradictory. Adherents draw in news events, historical facts and numerology to develop their own far-fetched conclusions.

EUROPE - The politicization of the central banks. The new Fed strategy is the strongest sign that the central banks are taking on more and more tasks for which politicians are responsible, such as fighting unemployment. The ECB, which intends to present its new strategy in 2021, will follow in the Fed's footsteps. We are witnessing the end of independent central banks. Eurozone member states are growing at radically different speeds. Germany could tolerate inflation rates of 3 to 4 percent, if only to reduce its export surplus. But that would practically be the death knell for Italian competitiveness. The eurozone does not have a finance minister or an economics minister because there is no political union. This is the birth defect of monetary union.

USA - The United States military on Wednesday announced that it would be reducing its presence in Iraq from 5,200 to 3,000 troops this month, formalizing a move that had been long expected. Last month, Reuters reported that the United States was expected to reduce the troop presence in Iraq by about a third. The United States has around 5,200 troops that were deployed in Iraq to fight the Islamic State militant group. Officials in the US-led coalition say Iraqi forces are now mostly able to handle the remnants of Islamic State on their own.

AFRICA - The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the pinnacle of funding for global vaccination programs, including polio vaccines in Africa. It has been finally admitted that the polio vaccine itself has sparked a new polio outbreak. Countries affected include Angola, Congo, Nigeria and Zambia, among others. Thirty-eight countries have suspended the vaccine. This is the same Bill Gates who is desperately pushing for mandated coronavirus vaccines in the United States as well as around the world. However, there has never been a successful virus vaccine and even Dr Anthony Fauci says it may only be 40% effective when it arrives.