UNITED NATIONS - In Saudi Arabia, every adult woman must have a male guardian’s permission to travel, receive a higher education, or get married. Women are not allowed to drive cars.  Their testimony in court is worth half of a man’s testimony. Yet, Saudi Arabia was elected to a UN commission, called The Status of Women, which supposedly promotes gender equality around the world. Can you spell the word hypocrisy?

USA - Mike Pompeo, in his first speech as director of the CIA, chose to declare war on free speech rather than on the United States’ actual adversaries. He went after WikiLeaks, where I [Julian Assange] serve as editor, as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.”

UNITED NATIONS - The head of the United Nations’ cultural body UNESCO defended Jewish links to holy sites in Jerusalem on Monday, criticizing her own agency’s governing board for passing a series of resolutions that downplay or deny any Jewish connection to its most sacred spaces.

ISRAEL - In an interview with Fox News, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed peace prospects with the Palestinians, saying, “I think the first test of peace is to say to them, ‘Hey, you want peace? Prove it. Confront terrorism, stop rewarding terrorism, stop paying terrorists’.” The interview with Netanyahu was conducted by host Sean Hannity, who accompanied US Secretary of Defense James Mattis on his visit to Israel. Netanyahu made his comments a week before Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is set to travel to Washington to meet President Trump.

GAZA - “It is so bad here that all we can do is laugh about it. We have four hours of electricity and then there’s none for half a day. Then we get another four hours, and then 12 more hours without it. Do you understand? But then, this is Gaza, where anything is possible — including stealing residents’ money by imposing new taxes on top of old taxes, and manufacturing a humanitarian crisis in order to blame it on the Palestinian Authority and on Israel.”

JAPAN - Japan warns citizens they might have only 10 minutes to prepare for a North Korean missile. North Korea might be talking about building missiles that can reach the United States, but Kim Jong Un’s regime already has lots of missiles that can reach Japan. So the Japanese government is preparing its citizens in case a missile comes their way — possibly with less than 10 minutes warning.

GERMANY - Germany's right-wing, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has picked a new team to lead it into September's general election. AfD co-founder Alexander Gauland, 76, and 38-year-old economist Alice Weidel will jointly head the campaign. The party's current co-leader and public face of the party, Frauke Petry, has announced she will not take part. She suffered a blow on Saturday attempting to set the AfD on a more moderate course. The party is seeking to enter the national parliament for the first time in September's vote, but opinion polls suggest a sharp drop in the AfD's popularity. As well as backing Mr Gauland and Ms Weidel, delegates also approved the party's election programme. It includes a call to declare Islam incompatible with German culture and plans to strip immigrants convicted of serious crimes of their German passports.

NEW ZEALAND - Kiwi scientists have helped discover incredible new submarine volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean - some rising up to 2.5km from the sea floor. The discoveries were made by a team of international scientists who have just returned from a six-week voyage probing the volcanic Kermadec Arc, around 1000km northeast of the North Island. Funded by the German government and led by scientists from Kiel-based GEOMAR and GNS Science, the project explored the seabed to provide new information about the dynamic geological history of New Zealand's offshore territory.

USA - Why have sightings of unidentified flying objects around the nation more than tripled since 2001? Why is July the busiest month for UFO sightings? Why did they spike in Texas in 2008, or in New Mexico in September 2015? And how in the world, or out of it, has Manhattan racked up New York State’s second-highest tally of UFO sightings in this century? These questions and many others emerge from the first comprehensive statistical summary of so-called close encounters: 121,036 eyewitness accounts, organized county by county in each state and the District of Columbia, from 2001 to 2015.

USA - Behind the Trump administration’s sudden urgency in dealing with the North Korean nuclear crisis lies a stark calculus: a growing body of expert studies and classified intelligence reports that conclude the country is capable of producing a nuclear bomb every six or seven weeks.

USA - On Sunday, the US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson began joint exercises with Japan, in another show of force against the North Korean regime, which may be on the brink of a sixth nuclear bomb test. Japan and South Korea are increasingly concerned that they could be first in the firing line of nuclear or chemical warheads. 

USA - The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) has been receiving membership requests ever since Donald Trump was elected President. US citizens with Marxist ideas were among the first to organize following the October Revolution of 1917, while their party, founded in 1919, is soon set to celebrate its 100th anniversary. Since its establishment, the CPUSA has lived through the inter-war period and Cold War repression, which practically forced the organization underground. Of the country’s 300 million inhabitants, the organization currently has some 5,000 members nationwide. Speaking to Granma International, Emile Schepers, CPUSA International Secretary, said, “Although the phantom of the McCarthy era still looms across the US, there is growing interest in communist ideas.”

USA - Officials at Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa, Florida are being asked to stop the bullying by a math teacher who is an open advocate for the LGBT lifestyle and has, among other things, banned students from wearing cross necklaces in her classroom. The nonprofit legal group Liberty Counsel said it would prefer for the district to rein in the teacher, Lora Jane Riedas, without the necessity of a court case.

USA - The office of BGLTQ Student Life at Harvard University has released a new school-sponsored guide telling students to “fight transphobia” and “get the facts about gender diversity.” The guide, which was distributed to students on campus, declares that “there are more than two sexes” and that “gender is fluid and changing,” adding that someone’s gender identity “can be affirmed and/or expressed in many ways,” and can even “change from day to day.” “For many people gender expression, identity, and self-understanding can change from day to day.” “Sex assigned at birth and gender identity are not necessarily the same,” the flyer begins, elaborating that anatomical characteristics may not always align with “gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, hormonal makeup, physical anatomy, and/or how one is perceived in daily life.”

USA - Caitlyn Jenner has issued a warning to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party: treat the LGBT community unfairly, and you’ll have to deal with me. The former Olympic gold medalist-turned-reality TV star, formerly known as Bruce Jenner, challenged the president in a 20/20 interview with Diane Sawyer set to air Friday night. “Yes, I did vote for Trump, but here’s the deal breaker with the Republican party,” Jenner told Sawyer, according to a preview clip of the interview released Friday. “And the deal breaker is, you mess with my community, you do the wrong thing with our community, you don’t give us equality and a fair shot, I’m coming after you.”