UK - Britain is in the grip of a cauliflower crisis, with supermarket shelves emptying after heavy rain destroyed this year’s crop in Lincolnshire, while alternative European supplies are drying up after the continental heatwave. Tesco only has organic cauliflowers left for sale on its online site, telling buyers that standard single cauliflowers and large cauliflowers are not available. Wholesale prices rise by 400% as restaurants are advised to take cauliflower-related meals off menus.

UK - Boris Johnson is preparing for a parliamentary battle against MPs trying to block a no-deal Brexit in the second week of September, as his cross-party opponents continue to be divided about the best way to stop the UK crashing out on 31 October. A senior government source said Downing Street believed the first legislative showdown over no deal would be on 9 September, when parliament is due to debate a progress report on power-sharing in Northern Ireland. The expectation is that a cross-party group of MPs will try to use this to carve out time to legislate against a no-deal Brexit by requesting an extension to article 50. The prime minister could face a confidence motion brought by Jeremy Corbyn aimed at collapsing his government as early as 3 September, when MPs return from their summer break.

USA - “The undeniable truth is that neither slavery nor Jim Crow nor the harshest racism has decimated the black family the way the welfare state has,” said George Mason professor Walter Williams. There is little evidence to support the idea that slavery, racial discrimination and poverty caused the problems of today’s black Americans, the economics professor wrote.

USA - The most recent FBI crime stats show that more people were killed in 2017 with hammers and clubs than were killed with rifles of any kind. Breitbart News reported the most recent numbers – those for 2017 – on September 26, 2018. Those figures showed that 467 people were killed with “blunt objects (hammers, clubs, etc),” while 403 were killed with rifles. And it must be noted that the category of “rifles” used by the FBI includes bolt action, pump action, single shot, and semi-automatic, as well as those the left describes as “assault weapons.” This means only a percentage of the 403 deaths attributed to “rifles” would have been carried out with an “assault weapon.” Breitbart News also reported that the 2017 crime figures showed 1,591 people were killed with “knives or cutting instruments” while 403 were killed with “rifles.” This means nearly four times as many people were stabbed to death as were killed with any kind of rifle.

UK - The sugar-rich Western diet is fueling a superbug which has evolved to thrive in hospitals, scientists have warned. The gut-infecting bacterium Clostridium difficile (C.diff) is evolving into two separate species, with one group increasingly adapting to live in the guts of people with poor diets, while growing ever better at avoiding the harsh disinfectants used to clean wards. More than 13,000 NHS patients each year are infected with C.diff, which can cause debilitating diarrhea and leave sick people dangerously dehydrated. Bacteria are also becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, and if not treated quickly enough an infection can be fatal. Nearly 2,000 people die from the bacterium…

UK - National Grid had experienced three blackout “near-misses” in as many months before Friday’s major outage left almost a million homes in the dark and forced trains to a standstill around the UK. The system operator, already under investigation by the energy watchdog, faces criticism from within the industry that it has not done enough to guard against the risk of blackouts. National Grid blamed the “incredibly rare” nationwide power cut on a severe slump in the grid’s frequency – a measure of energy intensity – following the unexpected shutdown of two power generators.

ISRAEL - Archaeologists from the University of North Carolina made a remarkable discovery while digging on Mount Zion in Jerusalem that is evidence of the Babylonian conquest of the city in 586 BCE: a golden earring. Dr Rafi Lewis, co-director of the project, explained the importance of the tiny earring. “With finds like this, there is a material value but, more importantly, there is a spiritual and emotional value,” Dr Lewis told Breaking Israel News. “On that level, this find is quite literally priceless. We can establish the context as the destruction of the First Temple without any doubt. We have made similar finds outside of the city but this is the first time we made such finds inside the city. It gives us an idea of the richness of Jerusalem at the time,” Dr Lewis said. “This is something aristocratic. It could have been a piece of jewelry or hung from an article of clothing or even a bigger artifact.”

USA - The volunteers at the University of Chicago’s Brain Dynamics Laboratory, all otherwise young and healthy, were tied together by really only one thing: nearly off-the-chart scores on the most widely used scale measuring loneliness. Asked how often they felt they had no one they could turn to, how often they felt their relationships seemed superficial and forced, how often they felt alone, left out, isolated or no longer close to anyone, the answer, almost always, was “always.”

EUROPE - German industry is in the deepest slump since the global financial crisis and threatens to push Europe’s powerhouse economy into full-blown recession. The darkening outlook is forcing the European Central Bank to contemplate ever more perilous measures. The influential Ifo Institute in Munich said its business climate indicator for manufacturing went into “free fall” in July as the delayed damage from global trade conflict takes its toll and confidence wilts. It goes far beyond the woes of the car industry. More than 80 percent of Germany’s factories are in outright contraction.

USA - Assertions and speculations spread like wildfire. Epstein was murdered. He isn’t dead at all, he was ferreted out of jail and taken to Israel. He killed himself. The video cameras in jail malfunctioned (were turned off on purpose). Epstein paid off guards so he could engineer his covert escape. He’s dead, a victim of the rising Clinton body count. Trump is in the Epstein scandal up to his eyeballs. And so on.

CHINA - Step aside Baoshang Bank and Bank of Jinzhou, it's time for Chinese bank bailout #3… overnight, the SCMP reported that China’s sovereign wealth fund has taken over Heng Feng Bank - one with roughly $200 billion in assets - a troubled lender linked to fugitive financier Xiao Jianhua, in the third case in as many months of the state exerting its grip over wayward financial institutions. In short, a 3rd Chinese bank in as many months received an implicit (or explicit) state bailout, and with the dominoes now falling, it's just a matter of time before most if not all of the banks collapse. The only thing that's left is for China to admit that this is indeed the case, so sit back, relax and watch as bank after bank on the list above fails and China's financial cancer spreads across the country with the $40 trillion in assets (which is certainly not bad news for either gold or bitcoin).

HONG KONG - The Chinese government has begun moving troops across the Shenzhen Qianhai Guangshen Coastal Expressway Bridge into Hong Kong. Minutes ago, in a military operation to put down protests against the government of Beijing, hundreds of military trucks carrying soldiers and guns began moving at this hour across the Bridge into Hong Kong. Army troops have now entered downtown Hong Kong.

EUROPE - The European Union is poised to mandate that Israeli products made in contested territories carry consumer warning labels, a decision that could trigger American anti-boycott laws and open up what legal experts describe as a "Pandora's box" of litigation, according to multiple sources involved in the legal dispute who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon. The Advocate General of the European Court of Justice recently issued non-binding opinion arguing that EU law requires Israeli-made products to be labeled as coming from "settlements" and "Israeli colonies." The decision was seen as a major win for supporters of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS, which seeks to wage economic warfare on Israel and its citizens. Pro-Israel activists, as well as the Jewish businesses involved in the legal dispute, see the decision as an ominous warning sign that they say is reminiscent of Holocaust-era boycotts of Jewish businesses.

GERMANY - A five-century-old boys’ choir has been accused of gender discrimination for not accepting a nine-year-old girl. Her woke mother is suing Berlin’s oldest musical institution for not embracing modern world realities. The State and Cathedral Choir Berlin’s gender-based admissions criteria violate Germany’s constitution, the girl’s mother has declared, hauling the boys-only choir into court on charges that it violates her daughter’s right to equal opportunities in state support. The internationally famous choir has never admitted any females in its 554-year history, although it has a girls-only partner choir that her daughter is welcome to join. In a statement to the court, they explained that girls’ and boys’ choirs sound different for anatomical reasons, and maintained they were permitted to reject whom they wished on grounds of artistic freedom.

ISRAEL - The site of the Jewish temple is still considered holy by believers. There is a prophecy that promises the temple will one day be rebuilt. A glimmer of hope that the foretelling could come to pass has arisen after a connected prediction about foxes heading to the remains of the Second Jewish Temple, the Western Wall, was fulfilled literally.