FRANCE - Citizens hoped to see the country transformed without pain; the former prime minister could not deliver the much-needed bitter pill. A few hours before French PM François Bayrou went down in flames in parliament, having failed to win a vote of confidence for his cutbacks programme to reduce France’s national debt, two ministers from his own government (Green Transition and Industry) announced yet another handout of state money. Buyers of electric cars fitted with European-built batteries would be entitled to an additional €1,000 besides an already-existing bonus reaching up to €4,200, “with the aim to reshore electric vehicle components manufacturing, and create industrial jobs in Europe.” When many voted for Emmanuel Macron, his unsaid promise was to deliver more while not rocking the boat. He had the usual diplomas and pedigree of the French civil servant and technocrat: when a changing world showed that this was not enough, many of his voters felt swindled. They had hoped to see France transformed without pain, and while retaining old luxuries, from a competent technocracy to an efficient welfare net: blood, sweat and tears do not belong to the French vocabulary.

UK - This Friday the Lords must reject a Bill that gives the state the right to decide when patients should live or die. It is an important principle of a good law that it is what it says it is. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which returns from the Commons to the Lords on Friday, falls at this first hurdle. The phrase “end of life” is a creepy euphemism, which evades human agency. This legislation allows people who want to kill themselves, but physically cannot do it alone, to get someone else to help them do so. The most accurate description would be “assisted suicide”. When this Bill was first proposed after Labour’s election victory last year, I had an interesting debate with Lord Falconer about it, for The Spectator. I asked him why he shied away from the phrase “assisted suicide”, since that it is what the legislation is intended to permit. He replied: “I prefer ‘assisted dying’ because when you talk to people who are in this position, they don’t see it in terms of suicide. They see it in terms of how they will die in the context of terminal illness.”

USA - Donald Trump posted an AI-generated spoof of a poster for the film Apocalypse Now to Truth Social with the phrase ‘Chipocalypse now’. The Trump administration has launched an immigration crackdown in Chicago after weeks of taunting by the president. On Monday, the department of homeland security announced it had commenced “Operation Midway Blitz” to arrest illegal migrants in the city en masse. The department said the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation will focus on detaining those drawn to the city for its government’s supposedly soft-touch approach to immigration. “This ICE operation will target the criminal illegal aliens who flocked to Chicago and Illinois because they knew Governor Pritzker and his sanctuary policies would protect them and allow them to roam free on American streets,” the department wrote on X.

UK - Shell’s decision to scrap plans for a biofuel factory sounds the death knell for sustainable aviation. We would be a global force in “jet zero”, promised Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, five years ago. Britain would lead the way in creating “sustainable aviation”, with world-leading research on planes that could fly across the Atlantic without doing any harm to the environment. Right across the Western world, leaders were making similar pledges, investing billions in new types of fuels and engines, while slapping punitive taxes on the old, dirty jets to make sure we switched to cleaner ones as quickly as possible.

USA - The US President Donald Trump has threatened to start a 'Section 301 proceeding' which he says will "nullify the unfair penalties being charged" to US tech. The president took to Truth Social to vent about a multi-billion dollar fine imposed on Google by the EU, "effectively taking money that would otherwise go to American Investments and Jobs." Section 301 refers to the US Trade Act of 1974, which authorizes the president to obtain the removal of any act, policy, or practice of a foreign government that violates an international trade agreement. Trump's explosive threats have ignited new tensions between the EU and the US after the nations agreed to a trade deal at the end of July to reduce American tariffs on imports from the EU.

UK - "British Ambassador to US, Lord Peter Mandelson: ‘The King Is Going to Roll Out the Red Carpet for President Trump’ in State Visit." British Ambassador to the United States Lord Peter Mandelson told Breitbart News exclusively that the United Kingdom is very much looking forward to hosting US President Donald Trump at Windsor Castle for a historic second state visit for Trump later this month, and that King Charles “is going to roll out the red carpet” for the leader of the United States. Trump’s state visit to the UK will take place from September 17 to September 19, and represents his second such state visit — unique for an American president because of interesting circumstances that include the fact that Trump’s two terms in the White House are non-consecutive and that there is a new monarch in the UK after Queen Elizabeth’s passing and King Charles’s ascension to the throne.

USA - A Supreme Court decision on Donald Trump’s tariff powers will be key to ordinary Americans’ standard of living as well as Washington’s standing in the world. There are two ways we Americans are looking at the world as you read this: near-term and longer-term. Investors are focused on the Federal Reserve board’s monetary policy committee decision ten days hence, when they will learn whether it will lower its benchmark interest rate as expected. Investors’ edginess is increased because, historically, markets are at their weakest in September and we might face a government shutdown on October 1. Serious policymakers take a longer view. They want to determine whether he who sowed the wind with claims of untrammelled power has forced us to inherit the whirlwind, and just how much of the America we have known was caught up in that.

USA - Chicago is a crime-ridden hellhole. It deserves a dose of Trump’s military medicine. The US president surely has both the legal right and a good reason to intervene in the Windy City. “Chicago is the murder capital of the world,” Donald Trump declared on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday. Over the Labor Day holiday weekend alone, 58 people were shot in the city – eight of them fatally – in 37 separate incidents. Those grim statistics contribute to the total of 278 murders in the Windy City so far this year. Ever since Trump announced his plan to federalise law enforcement in Washington last month – a highly successful measure that, as of Thursday, had resulted in 1,841 arrests and the removal of much urban blight – Chicago has been in the president’s sights. It’s a disastrous city where hundreds of citizens are killed every year while many more are terrorised by violence.

ISRAEL - Last week Israel mobilised 60,000 more reservists – almost the size of the entire British regular army – to generate sufficient forces to launch an attack on Gaza City, pretty much Hamas’s last major stronghold. Over the previous week or so the IDF has been ratcheting up pressure on Hamas in the city, including the destruction on Friday of Mushtaha tower, a high rise building used for surveillance and other military purposes. The entire city is infested with terrorists and their infrastructure. Fortifications and military facilities are both above and below ground, and we are likely to see many more tower blocks and other buildings hit in the coming days before the expected assault begins.

UK - People say things online they would never do in real life. The cloak of anonymity is now a threat to democracy itself. There is no doubt that freedom of speech is under attack in this country. When a small platoon of police arrive to arrest a comedian who has posted online what, at worst, might be considered a tasteless joke, you know you have a problem. What is going on? How does a country until recently renowned for its tolerance of differences and its sense of humour, end up in this mess? “Mess” is the operative word here: what we have before us is not a planned consistent policy of tyrannical oppression but a mix of confused absurdity, contradictory messages and, not least, utter stupidity. Doctrines that were originally framed in terms of “kindness” now involve threats of imprisonment and the extinction of careers. But much of the time we are living in a world in which fantasy – sometimes of a particularly vicious kind – is indistinguishable from reality.

FRANCE - France has been plunged into a new political crisis with the defeat of Prime Minister Francois Bayrou at a confidence vote in the National Assembly. The defeat – by 364 votes to 194 – means that Bayrou will tomorrow present his government’s resignation to President Macron, who must now decide how to replace him. Macron’s office said this would happen “in the coming days”. France is thus en route to getting its fifth prime minister in less than two years – a dismal record that underscores the drift and disenchantment that have marked President Macron’s second term.

USA - Foreign governments now hold more gold than US Treasuries, a clear sign the financial order is turning against America. When foreign governments choose gold over Treasuries, it means they no longer trust Washington to protect the value of their reserves. This is the clearest sign yet that the post–World War II financial order is cracking. If demand for US debt keeps falling, interest rates will spike, deficits will explode, and the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency will be on borrowed time.

USA - The employment numbers are screaming that we have a major crisis on our hands. The employment numbers for the month of August were just released, and they are horrible. Sadly, they have now been horrible for several months in a row, and many economists are warning that conditions will get even worse during the months ahead. Other than during the early days of the pandemic in 2020, we haven’t seen anything like this since the Great Recession. If you have a job that you value, hold on to it very tightly, and if you are currently looking for work try to find something as soon as you can before competition for jobs becomes even more intense. Each month, the US economy must add about 150,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth. According to the BLS, the US economy only added 22,000 new jobs during the month of August…

FRANCE - As if France did not have enough problems in the real world, now her fake version of it is in turmoil: there is a clairvoyance crisis. As The Times reported last week: “The French authorities are under pressure to regulate… after claims by the National Institute of Divinatory Arts that three quarters of the country’s 100,000 or so fortune-tellers are incompetent and dishonest. Yes, the nation’s respectable charlatans are appalled by the decline in standards, caused by the proliferation of online fortune-telling. The institute’s chairman, Youcef Sissaoui, said most fortune-tellers in France “are only trained to defraud people” and estimated that at best 5 per cent of them were “honest and really competent”. What the astrologer never does is to suggest the client has the slightest possibility of moral failings. It is all in THE LANGUAGE OF FLATTERY AND REASSURANCE.

USA - A major eruption of just one of the Earth’s supervolcanoes would have the potential to produce a long-term “volcanic winter” and a horrifying global famine in which hundreds of millions of people would die. So should we be alarmed that several of those supervolcanoes appear to be waking up simultaneously? There are many in the scientific community that are deeply concerned that all of this seismic activity may be building up to some sort of a crescendo, but so far most people in the general population are not paying attention to the warnings. Scientists tell us that there are 20 supervolcanoes on our planet, and one of the largest is right here in the United States. A full-blown eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano could literally bury almost the entire nation in volcanic ash and absolutely destroy US food production. Meanwhile, we are being warned that a supervolcano that is located in northern Nevada appears to be “awakening”… On the other side of the world, the Campi Flegrei supervolcano in southern Italy has been shaking like crazy this year… On top of everything else, we are being told that the New Madrid Seismic Zone “is overdue for a major seismic event”…