USA - I'm impressed by the coolness and steadiness of our media in suppressing any news about immigration. It's as if they've built a triple-layer fence with border guards around immigration topics. And guess what? Their fence is working! How many thousands of news stories have there been on Ferguson, ISIS, Chris Christie's "Bridgegate" or men becoming women?
EUROPE - Markets ignored clear warnings in Europe and America that money supply is catching fire, signalling a surge of inflation later this year. The global deflation trade is unwinding with a vengeance. Yields on 10-year Bunds blew through 1 percent today, spearheading a violent repricing of credit across the world.
GREECE - Two weeks after Greece’s leftwing Syriza party won power at a general election in January, Panayotis Fotiades pulled his deposits from an Athens bank. “I felt certain there’d be a confrontation before long with the troika [of bailout monitors],” said the 55-year-old businessman.
GERMANY - Wintershall, the giant German gas company, has begun reorienting the focus of its expansion drive westward. This subsidiary of the mega chemical company, BASF, had set high hopes on having direct access to Russia's enormous gas deposits - the largest in the world - which would have brought it to within reach of the summit of the world's natural gas sector. This perspective was obliterated by the escalation of tensions between Moscow and the West.
UK - An ambitious robotics project that combines artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced sensors to understand and assist humans in real time could be truly "revolutionary", according to the team working on it. The SecondHands humanoid, being developed for online supermarket Ocado, could soon be helping factory engineers fix mechanical faults and even learn on the job.
CHINA - Over the last decade, China has become, in the eyes of much of the world, a job-eating monster, consuming entire industries with its seemingly limitless supply of low-wage workers. But the reality is that China is now shifting its appetite to robots, a transition that will have significant consequences for China’s economy — and the world’s.
UK - One in three British women will have an abortion in her lifetime, the boss of the British Pregnancy Advisory Services has said. Ann Furedi, chief executive of the BPAS, said: "One in three women will have an abortion in her lifetime. It is a fundamental part of women's reproductive healthcare, as these statistics demonstrate. "It makes no sense that abortion remains within the criminal law in this country, and that women still need the authorisation of two doctors before they can end their own pregnancy. Medical abortions, using two sets of pills, accounted for 51 per cent of all terminations in England and Wales in 2014, according to the Department of Health. The total number of abortions carried out in England and Wales last year was 184,571.
MIDDLE EAST - The Isis militant group has seized enough radioactive material from government facilities to suggest it has the capacity to build a large and devastating “dirty” bomb, according to Australian intelligence reports. Isis declared its ambition to develop weapons of mass destruction in the most recent edition of its propaganda magazine Dabiq, and Indian defence officials have previously warned of the possibility the militants could acquire a nuclear weapon from Pakistan.
IRAQ - Iraqi security forces lost 2,300 Humvee armored vehicles when Islamic State overran the northern city of Mosul in June 2014, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Sunday in an interview with Iraqiya state television. Coupled with previous losses of American weapons, the conclusion is simple: The United States is effectively supplying Islamic State with tools of war the militant group cannot otherwise hope to acquire from its patrons.
USA - In the newly released video reports, we get an up-close-and-personal look at what our videographer herself calls 'martial law' drills in 'police state' Flint, Michigan. Complete with low flying helicopters, the sound of explosions and shooting in the background and an American populace looking on, partly stunned, the commentary given by Jia is quite priceless as she shares with us watching her country turning into something out of a war zone or a 3rd world country. Jia tells us, "if it can happen 'here', it can happen anywhere." It certainly is happening everywhere as the [evidence] shows, a militarized show of force across America weeks before Jade Helm 15 is officially launched.
RUSSIA/CHINA - Gazprom Now Settling All Crude Sales To China In Renminbi. Two topics we’ve deemed critically important to a thorough understanding of both global finance and the shifting geopolitical landscape are the death of the petrodollar and the idea of yuan hegemony.
GREECE - Negotiators have submitted a new plan thought to include tougher austerity targets. Greece could be edging closer to a deal with its creditors after submitting fresh proposals which are thought to include concessions on tougher austerity targets.
UK - Aggression is the human race’s biggest failing and it “threatens to destroy us all”, Stephen Hawking has said, urging people to be more empathetic. Professor Hawking spoke at the Science Museum while giving a tour to Californian Adaeze Uyanwah, who beat 10,000 international entrants to win a special trip to London, in which he is shown the sights by celebrity guides.
GERMANY - The German government has decided to buy the MEADS missile defense system built by European defense group MBDA and Lockheed Martin Corp, instead of the Patriot system built by Raytheon Co, a German government source said late Monday, confirming reports in German and US media.
USA - As NATO faces a resurgent Russian military, a substantial number of Europeans do not believe that their own countries should rush to defend an ally against attack, according to a comprehensive survey to be made public on Wednesday. NATO’s charter states that an attack against one member should be considered an attack against all, but the survey points to the challenges the alliance faces in trying to maintain its cohesion in the face of an increasingly aggressive Russia.