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”…

USA - Nobody can deny that the US economy deteriorated dramatically during the four years that Joe Biden was in the White House. In fact, it was probably the biggest reason why the Democrats lost control of the White House. The American people were desperate for change, because economic conditions had become extremely painful. Of course the Biden years were just one chapter in America’s long-term economic decline. Debt levels have been exploding and our standard of living has been deteriorating for a very long time, but there was hope that conditions would start to improve in 2025.

UK - The Government has only three choices to fix the financial crisis: cut, borrow or tax. We’re broke. And this time it is serious. This week the UK’s benchmark debt costs hit a 27-year high. It matters more because we’re not the same as we were the last time borrowing got this expensive. When our 30-year government bond yields soared to 5.72 per cent today, it wasn’t just another financial market blip. It was the bond market, the measured consideration of the people who lend us money, sending us a very clear message: they’re getting worried about how we are going to pay them back.

ISRAEL - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has put on hold a controversial plan to apply Israeli sovereignty to Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, after receiving sharp warnings from both regional allies and Western nations. The issue was slated for a ministerial discussion on Thursday but has been replaced by a session focused on the mounting security challenges in the area. The Jerusalem Post reported that defense officials will caution ministers that the West Bank “could erupt instantly” as momentum builds at the United Nations for several Western countries to recognize a Palestinian state later this month. The decision follows a stern warning from the United Arab Emirates to both Israel and President Trump that annexing the West Bank would threaten the Abraham Accords, signed nearly five years ago as a cornerstone of Israel’s normalization with Arab states. Emirati special envoy Lana Nusseibeh told The Times of Israel that annexation would be a “red line” for Abu Dhabi, foreclosing peace efforts and “the idea of regional integration.”

MIDDLE EAST - US President Donald Trump called for Hamas to "IMMEDIATELY give back all 20 hostages" in a Wednesday post on Truth Social. "Not 2 or 5 or 7!" he added. If Hamas does this, then "things will change rapidly," he added, concluding, "IT WILL END!" Trump notably only referred to the 20 hostages presumed to be alive, rather than the total 48 hostages held in captivity. In a direct message to the US president, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said: "This nightmare cannot end for our nation until ALL 48 hostages are accounted for - both those who survived and those who were brutally murdered during these 700 days of hell." They reiterated their demand for Trump to make every effort to ensure that all 48 hostages held in captivity are returned to Israel.

ISRAEL - The Hostage Families Forum on Friday staged “an emergency call” calling for the release of the remaining 48 hostages held in Gaza as Israel marks 700 days since October 7, 2023. Representatives from the forum stood dressed in yellow, spelling out “S.O.S,” along with an hourglass representing the time running out for the hostages. “700 days since they were abducted, and we are with them,” the forum wrote on X/Twitter on Thursday night. “Government of Israel - the excuses are over! A deal must be made now, before it's too late.”

HOLLAND - Global sea levels have not continued to rise at the rates predicted by many scientists — and there is no evidence that climate change has contributed to any such acceleration, a new first-of-its-kind study has claimed. The research found that the average sea level rise in 2020 was only around 1.5mm per year, or 6 inches per century, according to the paper’s authors, Dutch engineering consultant Hessel Voortman and independent researcher Rob de Vos. “This is significantly lower than the 3 to 4 mm/year often reported by climate scientists in scientific literature and the media,” Voortman told independent journalist Michael Shellenberger. Voortman was shocked that no researcher before had performed an analysis of real-world local data.