AUSTRALIA - Australia's bushfire crisis drew worldwide attention, but it wasn’t the only extreme weather event to plague the nation in recent months. Drought, dust storms, fires and floods are normal during an Australian summer. But the severity and duration of these events made this season one of the worst people can remember. People around the country told the BBC what it was like to live through these events, and how they feel about this becoming their "new normal".

USA - The business of vaccines is soon to become a major source of profits for the world’s largest pharmaceutical corporations. A press release (Business Wire, January 21st 2016) published by marketwatch.com says that Technavio, one of the leading technology research and advisory companies in the world predicts that pharmaceutical corporations who produce vaccines will reach an estimated $61 billion in profits by 2020. Today the vaccine market is worth close to $24 billion. The report titled ‘Global Human Vaccines Market 2016-2020’ gives an “in-depth analysis” of the possible revenues and “emerging market trends” globally. Due to the increasing prevalence rates of various infectious diseases such as diphtheria, influenza, hepatitis, pneumococcal diseases, and meningococcal diseases, there has been a notable increase in the use of vaccines across the globe

USA - We now have bombshell, smoking gun evidence that the CoVid-19 “Wuhan” coronavirus was specifically engineered as an offensive biological warfare weapon, designed to target to exterminate human beings. A new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Antiviral Research (Volume 16, April 2020) is entitled, “The spike glycoprotein of the new coronavirus 2019-nCoV contains a furin-like cleavage site absent in CoV of the same clade.” It reveals that the CoVid-19 coronavirus contains unique features that allow it to function as a more efficient weapon system for human-to-human transmission, which helps explain why the virus has been impossible to contain (even under “quarantine” conditions, which have universally failed in China, Japan, Korea and elsewhere).

CHINA - China has turned to an army of ducks to fight off the billions of locusts arriving at its borders from Africa. Chinese authorities have dispatched the 100,000 birds to its Xinjiang border in the far west of the country, where it meets Pakistan and India as the locusts continue to swarm eastwards. Pakistan declared a national emergency because the grasshoppers caused food shortages by destroying crops. Imran Khan, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, called the event “the worst locust attack in decades”.

USA - The more scientists study this new coronavirus, the more alarming it becomes. When this outbreak first emerged, officials told us that it was very unlikely that it could be transmitted from human to human. When that was shown to be obviously wrong, officials started claiming that human to human transmission would be “limited” like we saw during the SARS epidemic. Of course that was completely wrong too, and now we know that this new coronavirus actually spreads like wildfire among human populations, and that is because it is much different from the SARS virus. In fact, brand new research conducted by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin has discovered that this coronavirus “is up to 20 times more likely to bind to human cell receptors”…

CHINA - The number of infections outside of China has exploded to 1,199, more than doubling in just one week: Yet the entire fake news “mainstream” media continues to lie to the world, telling viewers that this pandemic is “no worse than the flu.” In downplaying the severity and aggressiveness of this outbreak, the fake news media is complicit in the spread of infections and deaths because people are failing to take appropriate precautions against this rapidly exploding global pandemic. Right now, there are 2.4 million people under lockdown in South Korea as confirmed cases there have exploded to over 100. Simultaneously, 1.2 million people have been ordered into similar lockdown status in Iran. According to rumors, Iran has already seen 20 deaths from the coronavirus, although the Iranian government is only officially reporting two deaths.

AUSTRALIA - No wonder cynical mining companies like BHP are going green – they smell a jackpot from the coming green boom in demand for steel, aluminium, lithium, copper, nickel, graphite, cobalt, rare earths and nuclear fuels. And no wonder Tesla supports green energy – the total annual output of the world’s biggest battery factory in Nevada would store less than five minutes of annual US electricity demand.

USA - Why is the mainstream media so scared of asking difficult questions about this coronavirus outbreak? At one time the United States had the greatest investigative journalists in the entire world, but today it is very rare to see any of our major news outlets go much beyond the basic facts of a story. In particular, the coverage of this coronavirus outbreak has been absolutely abysmal.

AUSTRALIA - Global food production is being hit from seemingly every side. Thanks to absolutely crazy weather patterns, giant locust armies in Africa and the Middle East, and an unprecedented outbreak of African Swine Fever in China, a lot less food is being produced around the world than originally anticipated. Even during the best of years we really struggle to feed everyone on the planet, and so a lot of people are wondering what is going to happen as global food supplies become tighter and tighter. The mainstream media in the United States is so obsessed with politics right now that they haven’t been paying much attention to this emerging crisis, but the truth is that this growing nightmare is only going to intensify in the months ahead. In Australia, conditions have been extremely hot and extremely dry, and that helped to fuel the horrific wildfires that we recently witnessed. And everyone knew that agricultural production in Australia was going to be disappointing this year, but it turns out that it is actually going to be the worst ever recorded…

USA - If you want a shock, read this essay by two biologists in the Wall Street Journal titled “The Dangerous Denial of Sex.” The shock is not the thesis: that there are two biological sexes is obvious and has been obvious for, oh, the past million years or so. Nor is it a shock that our culture has reached the point at which the observation that there are two human sexes is expressed in an “opinion” piece. Even a cursory glance at the morning news affirms our cultural devolution. The shock is that these scientists are lone voices affirming the most basic fact of human biology — unsupported by mainstream scientific journals and organizations — and that they risk their careers for affirming publicly the biological fact that there are two, and only two, human sexes. If the scientific elites will not affirm the fact that humans have two sexes or the fact that life begins at conception, why would anyone in their right mind accept their claims about Darwinism?

GERMANY - This past weekend’s Munich Security Conference (MSC) focused on great power competition, China’s relentless rise and the West’s assumed division and decline (captured by the MSC’s provocative theme of “Westlessness”). What was missing was an urgently required focus on the quadruple shock challenging Germany’s role as Europe’s pillar of stability and irreplaceable leader. Those four challenges – listed here in no order of importance – are Brexit’s hit to the European balance, President Trump’s transatlantic test, Germany’s political fragmentation, and its slowing, endangered economy. They also raise what has been known historically as “the German Question” for a new era. In short, the German Question pertains to the problem of a Germany that has either been too weak (17th and 18th centuries) or too strong (late 19th and first half of 20th century), to live easily beside other European powers.

EUROPE - It appears even the Europeans are fed up with the Palestinian method of "human rights activist by day and terrorist by night" – not to mention the demand to keep funding it. Throughout the years, the European Union has provided economic support in the tens of millions of shekels to Palestinian civilian organizations based on a standard stipulation applied to NGOs worldwide: To receive financial aid, they must have no affiliations with terrorist elements.

CHINA - New evidence from Bloomberg reveals cracking global supply chains are fast emerging at major Chinese ports with thousands of containers of frozen meat piling up with nowhere to go. The Covid19 outbreak will remain a dominant issue for 1Q as supply chain shocks are being felt by multinationals on either side of the hemisphere. Sources told Bloomberg that containers of frozen pork, chicken, and beef (mostly from South America, Europe, and the US) are piling up at Tianjin, Shanghai, and Ningbo ports because of the lack of truck drivers and many transportation networks remain closed. Seaports in China are quickly running out of room to house the containers and cannot provide enough electricity points to keep existing containers cold.

USA - During President Donald Trump's Senate impeachment trial, Democrats repeatedly asserted that he is "not above the law." But since his acquittal two weeks ago, the president has taken a series of steps aimed at showing that, essentially, he is the law. On Tuesday, Trump granted clemency to a clutch of political allies, circumventing the usual Justice Department process. The pardons and commutations followed Trump's moves to punish witnesses in his impeachment trial, publicly intervene in a pending legal case to urge leniency for a friend, criticize a federal judge, accuse a juror of bias and threaten to sue his own government for investigating him. Trump defended his actions, saying he has the right to shape the country's legal systems as he sees fit. "I'm allowed to be totally involved," he told reporters as he left Washington on Tuesday for a trip to California, Nevada and Arizona. "I'm actually, I guess, the chief law enforcement officer of the country. But I've chosen not to be involved."

UK - Prominent evangelical pastor Franklin Graham said Sunday that LGBTQ activists are trying to ban “the truth of the Gospel” from British society by having him barred from preaching in the UK. In parallel posts on Facebook and Twitter, Rev Graham lamented efforts “by LGBTQ activists” to have his eight-city evangelistic tour across the UK cancelled. “Opposition to the Gospel shouldn’t really surprise us. Jesus warned that it would come,” Graham wrote. “As you may know, my eight-city evangelistic tour across the UK has been met with resistance by LGBTQ activists who inaccurately claim that I am homophobic, Islamophobic, and say that I speak hate.” “Anyone who knows me or has heard me speak knows that this really isn’t true — but, I DO preach the TRUTH of the Gospel. Could it be, rather, that these folks are truthophobic or free-speech-ophobic?” Graham asks.