USA - Major cover-up underway? Why are mainstream sources and officials reporting only one shooter when eyewitnesses claim that they saw 3 to 4 armed men dressed in all black enter the store and start shooting? Remarkably, several eyewitnesses to the shooting, a mother and her daughter, were captured on video recounting how three men dressed in all black entered through the front doors of the store as the shooting started. Additionally, it is important to point out that El Paso Mayor Dee Margo originally told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer early on after the shooting that three suspects were taken into custody. Not to mention, an image taken from security camera footage reveals a shooter who entered the store may have been wearing different pants than the suspect apprehended by police who was pictured in handcuffs.

USA - Our trade war with China has begun to spiral out of control, and as a result global financial markets have been thrown into a state of turmoil. On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 767 points, and that represented the sixth-largest single day stock market decline in all of US history. To put that into perspective, the biggest single day decline during the financial crisis of 2008 was just 777 points. So what we witnessed on Monday was definitely very serious. And the Nasdaq just got absolutely monkey-hammered as well. On a percentage basis, it was down even more than the Dow was, and it has now fallen for six days in a row. We have not seen a losing streak that long for the Nasdaq since President Trump was elected, and some analysts are convinced that even more chaos is on the way. Overall, 1.4 trillion dollars in stock market wealth has been completely wiped out in less than a week… our financial markets are more primed for a crash than they have ever been before.  And we are moving into the season when big crashes tend to happen.

GERMANY - The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has received a groundswell of support in Eastern Germany, leading in polls just weeks before regional elections in three states. Support for major parties is at a historic low. In an outcome sure to unnerve Germany’s more conventional politicians, a series of polls conducted in June and July has demonstrated that the anti-establishment force has moved to the fore in the former Eastern Bloc territory, where they enjoy steady public backing – all ahead of the crucial regional elections, two of which are scheduled in about a month’s time. By contrast, the heavyweights of German politics – Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and their coalition partners in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) – are facing what might be called a near collapse of popular support in the same eastern regions.

USA - A leading New Testament scholar working at Unified Unity Divinity School has published a paper criticizing Jesus for a lack of diversity among the apostles He chose in the gospel accounts. The woman, Dr Diana T Manger, pointed out that Jesus only chose Jewish males, refusing to implement diversity quotas for his group of disciples.

UK - Boris Johnson has set the UK on an apparent course towards a no-deal Brexit by playing down the likelihood of any talks with the EU unless Brussels agrees to scrap the existing withdrawal agreement and Irish backstop, both of which it has ruled out. The seemingly intransigent tone prompted Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister, to warn that a no-deal departure could lead more people in Northern Ireland to seek a united Ireland. Johnson’s spokesman said there were no talks with the EU scheduled, and that if they happened it must be “clear what the basis for those discussions needs to be” – a message the new PM then delivered personally to Angela Merkel. According to No 10, Johnson told the German chancellor in a phone call on Friday that while he would seek a deal, the “only solution” involved entirely scrapping the backstop, and that in the interim the UK must prepare for the prospect of there being no deal.

USA - The high-altitude balloons promise a cheap monitoring platform that could follow multiple cars and boats for extended periods. The US military is conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons, documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveal. Up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons are being launched from rural South Dakota and drifting 250 miles through an area spanning portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in central Illinois. Travelling in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 65,000ft, the balloons are intended to “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats”, according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation, an aerospace and defence company.

UK - The fetid, stagnant waters of the Theresa May era have been replaced by the foaming effervescence of The Boris Interregnum. It will be thus described whatever happens in the next election, which cannot be delayed for long. Turbo-charging the political scene with his customary élan, Boris Johnson cuts a dash to be sure, especially in comparison to the Artificial Intelligence which preceded him. Future generations will marvel at what possible question there could have been to which Mrs May was thought to be the answer.

UK - Given the ever-growing body of research, it can no longer be denied that repeated porn exposure has a tangible effect on consumers, and is connected to declining relationship satisfaction as well as various forms of exploitation. This isn’t a moral argument, it’s simply something to consider given the facts. Pornography is more widely accepted, accessible, affordable, and anonymous than ever before. For years, porn has often been thought of as an isolated issue, something that can be easily compartmentalized in the lives of consumers, unrelated to anything else that’s going on. Thanks to decades of research from major institutions, the world is beginning to see just how inaccurate that line of thinking is. "There isn’t pornography over here, and trafficking over there… they’re interlinked".

(Melissa Farley PhD, Executive Director, Prostitution Research and Education)

USA - Information technology company IBM is facing a number of lawsuits over firing some 100,000 employees to boost its appeal to younger generations and make it appear “cool” and “trendy” instead of “an old fuddy duddy organization.” IBM, which is short for International Business Machines Corp, has been hit by several lawsuits accusing the tech giant of discrimination against older workers, including a class-action case in Manhattan and individual civil lawsuits in California, Pennsylvania and Texas. According to the Manhattan case, the company started trying to “correct [its] seniority mix” back in 2014, as Bloomberg reported. Back then, IBM began sacking elderly workers to substitute them with the younger generation, who the company’s consulting department claimed to be “generally much more innovative and receptive to technology.”

USA - Have relations between the United States and China finally reached the point of no return? At this moment, it would be difficult to overstate how angry the Chinese are with the United States. Most Americans spend very little time thinking about relations with China, but over in China they are absolutely furious with us right now, and the developing situation in Hong Kong is one of the biggest reasons for that anger. Millions of people have flooded the streets of Hong Kong in recent weeks, and it appears that the Chinese have decided that enough is enough.

CHINA - China’s Communist Party is “very happy to kill tens of thousands of Americans each year” with its FENTANYL exports, knowing of overdoses related to the opiate’s abuse, said Gordon Chang, Daily Beast columnist and expert on China... Pollak asked Chang about China’s stated commitment to restrict manufacturing and exporting of fentanyl to the US, following President Donald Trump’s request for cooperation from Chinese President Xi Jinping on the matter.

USA - Why is there raw feces strewn across nearly all the beaches along the West Coast? The answer is simple: Liberal policies allow people to openly crap all over their own cities (like San Franshitsco), causing untreated raw human sewage to be flushed directly into the oceans every time it rains. Since liberal city mayors have refused to enforce basic human sanitation, liberal cities have been transformed into actual sh#tholes of human filth and feces, where diseases like Bubonic Plague (the “Black Death”) are on the verge of surging back. The extreme filth of liberal cities is the perfect metaphor for the filth and lunacy of liberalism itself, which defies biological reality and attempts to exist in an artificial bubble of sheer denial of reality.

USA - In an interview with CNBC, Goldman Sachs' CTO of electronic trading revealed that the investment bank has committed to investing $100 million to overhaul its stock trading platform to make it more appealing to the biggest quant funds like Renaissance Technologies and Two Sigma, who are among the bank's "most demanding clients from a technology perspective." While Mike Blum, the Goldman quant CTO, didn't offer any specifics about what he bank's "Project Atlas" will entail, at a time when banks' trading revenue is shrinking, eliciting layoffs for hundreds of human traders, the biggest banks will be battling one another for a bigger piece of a shrinking pie, as more equity trading - and even some credit trading - shifts to high-frequency players who rely on algorithms to place orders at speeds that human traders couldn't possibly detect.

POLAND - The archbishop of Krakow in southern Poland is facing backlash for comparing the “red plague” of Communism to the gay rights movement, describing the latter as a “rainbow plague” brainwashing his countrymen. "Our land is no longer affected by the red plague, which does not mean that there is no new one that wants to control our souls, hearts and minds," Archbishop Marek Jedraszewski said on Thursday, delivering a mass to mark the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising against the Nazi occupation. Jedraszewski argued that the communist ideology and the LGTB-championed ideas of equal rights for sexual minorities are effectively rooted in the same source. In May, a Polish LGTB activist was arrested for offending religious beliefs after she printed out posters showing baby Jesus and Madonna with rainbow halos over their heads. Gay rights events in Poland are often marred by violence.

UK - A Liberal Democrat councillor said schools could suggest prostitution as a career choice for pupils, at a party conference. Dennis Parsons, chairman of the Cheltenham Lib Dems, made the off-hand suggestion at a special session in Brighton on sex work. The father-of-five said school career advisors are currently not allowed to mention prostitution as a line of work, then added: "Why shouldn’t they?" He also compared prostitution to accountancy in a debate to combat the stigma attached to sex work. Mr Parsons said: "The fact that we are asking ‘should we seek to prevent people entering sex work?’ is part of the problem. You wouldn’t ask the question ‘should we prevent people becoming accountants?’ You’d just take it for granted."