GERMANY - The US under Donald Trump is exacerbating tensions with Iran, leading many to fear war may be just around the corner. Any military conflict would have dire consequences for Europe, but the Americans remain undeterred. At no point since the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988 has the threat of war been greater. It's little surprise that Trump's confrontational Middle Eastern policy has exacerbated the tensions between the US and its European allies, because, unlike the situation in Venezuela, Europe would be directly affected. The continent's very security is at stake. Europeans blame Washington for the escalation in the Middle East.

USA - The self-proclaimed master of deal-making, US President Donald Trump, has warned Beijing against waiting out his term in hopes of a more lenient approach from a successor, saying he will insist on even worse conditions after 2020. In an apparent attempt to coerce China into making concessions following a round of high-level trade talks in Washington that ended with no breakthrough, Trump resorted to a racketeering tactic, urging China to come on board with his terms now, unless it wants to deal with a much tougher post-2020 Trump.

VATICAN - Pope Francis, like other popes before him, desires global government. This was made clear in his call for globalism on Thursday, during a speech before the members of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences within the Apostolic Palace. Francis demanded that a new “supranational, legal constituted body” enforce the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and their climate change policies. Rather than calling for the outright abolition of Nation States, the Pope insisted they all be subjected to external, global governing authorities. I am beginning to think that Pope Francis, who is also the ruling king of the Roman Vatican City state nation, is perhaps getting ready to make a real power move soon. From his throne at the papal Apostolic Palace, King Francis spoke frankly of his desire to see global rule on a far-greater scale and scope than that of the United Nations... To boil it down into only 3 words, King Francis called for a One World Government.

IRAN - Iran could target US commercial ships including oil tankers, the US Maritime Administration said on Friday,  as a senior Iranian cleric said a US Navy fleet could be "destroyed with one missile."  In the latest tense exchange between Tehran and Washington, Iran's hardline Revolutionary Guards separately said Iran would not negotiate with the United States, a stance that seemed partly aimed at discouraging Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and his moderate allies from taking up a US offer of talks.  US President Donald Trump on Thursday urged Iran's leaders talk with him about giving up their nuclear program and said he could not rule out a military confrontation. 

USA - Eighty percent of the world’s almonds are grown in California’s Central Valley. Honeybees trucked in by the billions to pollinate the trees are as essential as rain and sunshine. Without them, only a fraction of the acreage under self-pollinating almond varieties would produce nuts. Cattle raiding and horse thieving were common crimes in the Wild West, but bee rustling is a relatively new offense for the lawbooks. That’s thanks in large part to the increasing necessity and profitability of trucking billions of bees to vast commercial orchards in dire need of pollination, as well as a thriving international market for gourmet honey. “It’s the perfect crime,” said Butte County police detective Rowdy Jay Freeman, a member of the state’s Rural Crime Prevention Task Force and a commercial apiarist himself. “You see a person in a white suit, and it looks like a beekeeper, but it could be a thief too — you’d never know.”

EUROPE - It’s time to sound the alarm. Seven decades after the end of the second world war on European soil, the Europe we have built since then is under attack. As the cathedral of Notre Dame burned, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National was polling neck and neck with Emmanuel Macron’s movement for what he calls a “European renaissance”. In Spain, a far-right party called Vox, promoting the kind of reactionary nationalist ideas against which Spain’s post-Franco democracy was supposedly immunised, has won the favour of one in 10 voters in a national election.

USA - US Representative Alex Mooney (Republican for West Virginia) introduced legislation this week to provide for the first audit of United States gold reserves since the Eisenhower Administration. The Gold Reserve Transparency Act (HR 2559) – backed by the Sound Money Defense League and government accountability advocates – directs the Comptroller of the United States to conduct a “full assay, inventory, and audit of all gold reserves, including any gold in ‘deep storage,’ of the United States at the place or places where such reserves are kept.” The bill directs the Government Accountability Office to provide the results of the audit to Congress as well as make them available to the public without redactions.

RUSSIA - Russian President Vladimir Putin took a defiant tone at Moscow's annual military Victory Day parade in Red Square, declaring that the country will continue to strengthen its armed forces. The Kremlin strongman watched on as 13,000 troops and more than 130 pieces of weaponry were paraded through the capital in a show of Russian military power. Referring to his country's battle with Nazi Germany, Putin then warned 'the lessons of the past war are relevant once again' as he made his case for 'guaranteeing the high capabilities of our armed forces'. Russia's ties with the West soured following its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and Moscow has continued to challenge the United States through its staunch support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro.

USA - In 2017, blacks in Michigan committed 68% of the homicides… they represent only 14 percent of the States population. The state of Michigan is roughly 76 percent white and 14 percent black. The state of Michigan puts out an incredible document entitled Michigan Incident Crime Reporting (MICR). Basically, the state has the racial makeup of roughly 1980–1990s America, just as the impact of the 1965 Immigration Act flooded the nation with nonwhites. But what’s so stunning about this data is the color of crime in the state of Michigan it exposes, with cities such as Detroit, Pontiac, Flint, Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor basically being war zones where black crime is driving away white civilization.

USA - “It’s Pornography”: California is targeting children as young as Kindergarten with transgender propaganda in a revised sex education guide for teachers. Even more appalling, middle school students and high schoolers (minor pre-teens/teens) would be recommended to read obscene books describing graphic sex acts. The California State Board of Education was scheduled Wednesday to consider feedback on teaching about various health topics such as sex ed, tobacco, alcohol and nutrition. The overhauling of the sex ed curriculum, including gender identity and transgender propaganda to 5-year-olds didn’t go over so well with many parents. One parent accurately described the new sex education curriculum as pornography.

USA - It has been quite a year. In March, catastrophic flooding in the Midwest absolutely crippled thousands of farms and “as many as a million calves” were lost in Nebraska alone. Then in April we learned that African Swine Fever has wiped out “150-200 million pigs” in China. To put that in perspective, that is more pigs than the entire US pork industry produces in an entire year.

USA - As I was doing research for this story, something curious began to emerge glaringly from the social landscape. Last week, when Facebook started purging accounts it deems unworthy, I was unable to find any Liberal sites or blogs that had been banned. I thought I would do a quick Facebook search to see if Liberal hate groups were still active.

USA - At 12:01 AM eastern time on Friday, President Trump followed through on his threats and hit China with a massive tariff increase. China immediately pledged to retaliate. US and Chinese officials will continue to negotiate throughout the day on Friday, but if US officials were optimistic that a deal was imminent the trigger never would have been pulled on these tariffs. At this point the gap between the negotiating positions of the two sides is still enormous, and that does not seem likely to change.

USA - It sure looks like nothing can stop the trade war now, and that could potentially be absolutely disastrous for the global economy. The last major trade war began in 1930, and it turned an economic downturn into the Great Depression of the 1930s. But without a doubt something needed to be done about China.

GERMANY - Recent criticism of Germany hints at the larger truth that Germany must begin to understand the responsibility it bears in Europe and on the world stage in order to confront the challenges that face it, "…remember all that ordnance dropped by the Allies during the second world war now dormant in German soil? Think of Europe today as an unexploded bomb, its detonator intact and functional, its explosives still live.” It’s a troubling choice of metaphor, because it questions the reality of homegrown change and agency in postwar Europe. If America leaves, the jungle returns. And, with it, the undead ghosts of European and German history.