USA - Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes isn't just idly wondering if regulators might break up the tech behemoth he helped launch. He's going on a personal tour, meeting with state and federal officials to lay out in detail the way he thinks it could be done. Hughes has met with members of Congress, the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, the Federal Trade Commission, and the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James to make a detailed case arguing Facebook is too big for its own good, according to separate reports from The Washington Post and The New York Times. Hughes penned a lengthy op-ed in The New York Times saying his former colleague Mark Zuckerberg wielded too much power. "I’m disappointed in myself and the early Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders," Hughes wrote at the time. "And I’m worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them."

USA - The ISIS terrorist organization is threatening to launch new attacks in San Francisco, New York, and London, according to new warning messages posted on the group's social media channels. The messages, carried across the internet via the Telegram networking website, feature the three cities and call for adherents of the terror group's radical ideology to "kill them all," according to copies of the warnings obtained by the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, a group that monitors jihadi networks.

GERMANY - Germany has warned it will not help the UK fight the escalating conflict with Iran as long as it continues to seek support from the US. “Britain is now returning to a robust American-flagged military mission,” before warning this would create an “enormous escalation risk”. Mr Mützenich insisted Germany will “do everything for a diplomatic solution” as part of its current membership in the UN Security Council. On Monday, Iran released footage appearing to show its Revolutionary Guard commandos warning Royal Navy warship HMS Montrose the lives of its crew could be in danger. The exchanges between the two sides were released by Tehran as Royal Navy destroyer HMS Duncan arrived in the Gulf to protect British ships. The video includes a shot apparently filmed on the day the Stena Impero was captured from above HMS Montrose in an attempt to show the Royal Navy was unable to prevent Iran seizing the oil tanker.

UK - Boris Johnson and Leo Varadkar clashed over the Irish backstop in their first phone call since the prime minister entered Downing Street, in a testy phone call where the taoiseach said the EU was united in the view that it cannot be scrapped. Johnson finally spoke to Varadkar almost a week after becoming prime minister, telling him the UK would never put physical checks or infrastructure at the border with Northern Ireland after Brexit but demanding the backstop be scrapped.

USA - Anti-establishment Democrat and presidential candidate Representative Tulsi Gabbard (Democrat for Hawai), who is suing Google over alleged censorship, released a new video today calling for conservatives and liberals to unite against Big Tech’s assault on free expression. “This concentration of power and influence is a direct threat to our democracy, which is why I’ve taken action against Google and will continue to advocate for breaking up these tech monopolies and ending their power to undermine our freedom of speech,” said Gabbard. “They have banned voices, who, while controversial and maybe even distasteful, have not incited violence or threatened others. Their sole offense was expressing a view that these corporations deemed unacceptable.” The campaign seeks a legal injunction against Google to prevent further election meddling, as well as $50 million in damages.

JAPAN - Japan’s central bank has promised to act “without hesitation” to battle any economic slump caused by the trade malaise spreading through Asia. The Bank of Japan left its interest rate in negative territory at -0.1 percent but told investors it could announce more stimulus as Donald Trump’s trade war rattles the region’s economy. Haruhiko Kuroda, Bank of Japan Governor, warned heightened risks overseas “threaten the economy’s momentum” as its central bankers became the latest to signal a shift towards looser policy.

CENTRAL AFRICA - The Ebola outbreak is only going to get worse as people are refusing treatment, fearing government is ‘behind disease’, according to an aid worker on the front line. Ebola is sweeping through central Africa with the current outbreak becoming the second worst in history. Experts even believe it could equal or surpass the worst on record, where 11,323 people died from December 2013 to January 2016. Olivia added around a third of communities in Beni, a city in north-eastern DRC, believe the disease is a conspiracy. While the outbreak remains at a local level, there is the chance of it going global. We previously revealed how Ebola could be spread around the world by someone getting on a plane. Ebola is one of the world’s deadliest diseases, killing more than half the people it infects. The current outbreak began in August last year, and has spread hundreds of miles from its origin in Kivu.

RUSSIA - Russia on Monday declared a state of emergency in two regions of Siberia as wildfires rage across 12,000 square miles of countryside. Terrified residents in the Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk regions called on the state to act as flames engulfed an area the size of Belgium. There are few inhabited zones in the path of the inferno but smoke has blanketed major cities in Siberia and the Far East, making it hard to breathe and posing health risks for the population. The fires have been caused by record high temperatures combined with lightning and strong winds. The governor of Krasnoyarsk, Alexander Uss, defended the government’s reluctance to put out the fires by comparing them to winter blizzards. He said that it can be “pointless and sometimes even harmful” to try and extinguish flames in unpopulated areas.

USA - Jeffrey Epstein's life may be in danger as his powerful pals do not want him to reveal their secrets, his victims' lawyer has claimed. Spencer Kuvin, who represents three of the billionaire perv's sex trafficking accusers, threw doubt on claims the financier attempted suicide. Epstein was found "sprawled on the floor" and "blue in the face" in a New York jail, last Tuesday according to reports. Investigators are still probing whether it was a suicide attempt or if the shamed 66-year-old was attacked. Now Kuvin believes Epstein knows so much dirt about his rich and famous friends that there may be some individuals willing to organise a "hit" on him to prevent that information ever getting out.

USA - A segment from the Alex Jones Show exposing the truth about Big Tech’s elite power players is going viral. The Drudge Report picked up the video that reveals the drugs these people are taking, as well as the technology they believe will allow them to live forever. Earlier this month, Elon Musk’s brain interface company Neuralink announced the eventual release of a brain chip that connects the user’s brain to the internet. In the released video, Jones explains how connecting the brain to artificial intelligence is the mark of the beast the Bible warns about.

USA - Doctors have turned the brain signals for speech into written sentences in a research project that aims to transform how patients with severe disabilities communicate in the future. The breakthrough is the first to demonstrate how the intention to say specific words can be extracted from brain activity and converted into text rapidly enough to keep pace with natural conversation. In its current form, the brain-reading software works only for certain sentences it has been trained on, but scientists believe it is a stepping stone towards a more powerful system that can decode in real time the words a person intends to say. Winston Chiong, a neuroethicist at UCSF who was not involved in the latest study, said it was important to debate the ethical issues such systems might raise in the future. For example, could a “speech neuroprosthesis” unintentionally reveal people’s most private thoughts?

USA - An absolutely massive hole has formed in the upper atmosphere of the Sun, and our planet will align with that hole later this week. Once the alignment happens, Earth will be bombarded by a “solar storm”, and nobody is quite sure yet how bad it will be. According to the Express, “the solar storm will hit Earth on July 31 or August 1″…Earth’s orbit around the Sun will soon align with a coronal hole – a hole in the Sun’s upper atmosphere – and solar particles will subsequently bombard the planet after they have made their way through space. Experts predict that the solar storm will hit Earth on July 31 or August 1. People in the northern hemisphere are likely to be treated to northern lights – or aurora borealis – as the solar winds bombard the upper reaches of the planet.

USA - So there is a lot of buzz that the Federal Reserve is about to cut interest rates – and it might actually happen. We’ll see. But if it does happen, it will directly contradict the carefully crafted narrative about the economy that the Federal Reserve has been perpetuating all this time. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has repeatedly insisted that the US economy is in great shape even when there has been a tremendous amount of evidence indicating otherwise.

UK - Britain told Iran on Monday that if it wants to “come out of the dark” it must follow international rules and release a British-flagged oil tanker seized by its forces in the Gulf. Iranian commandos seized the Stena Impero near the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important waterway for oil shipments, on July 19. That was two weeks after British forces captured an Iranian oil tanker near Gibraltar accused of violating sanctions on Syria. “If the Iranians want to come of the dark and be accepted as a responsible member of the intentional community they need to adhere to rules-based system of the international community,” Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told Sky News. “You cannot go about detaining unlawfully foreign vessels.”

USA - The use of ultra-low interest rates and bond-buying programs by the world’s major central banks including the ECB, BOJ and the Federal Reserve has pushed the total amount of debt with yields below zero to a record of $13 trillion. RT’s Keiser Report discusses the issue with Chris Martenson of PeakProsperity.com who says “central bankers are really intellectuals yet idiots.” They make completely ridiculous statements and are not questioned or challenged at all, according to Martenson. “They are able to say completely dumb stuff… It’s kind of listen what the king says that he is wearing clothes when he is just totally naked."