USA - Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarly troubling. The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren’t married or living with a romantic partner went up to 38 percent in 2019, from 29 percent in 1990. A record-high 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. More than half of all Americans say that no one knows them well. The percentage of high-school students who report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021.

CHINA - In a bid to secure a domestic food supply and cut down reliance on foreign imports, China is expanding its farmlands. As explained by the newspaper the China Daily, “the rapidly ageing rural population has made it more challenging for China to ensure food security,” bringing about a decline in the number of farmers and forcing the country to depend more on imported produce. Since China is the world’s second-most populous country, with over 1.4 billion people, it is natural that its food demands are astronomical and growing year on year, as the population eats more with development and imports increasing accordingly.

GERMANY - A survey shows nearly two-thirds of voters want to pull the plug on Germany's ruling coalition. The poll comes immediately after figures that show most Germans are unhappy with Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his government. As many as 64% of Germans who answered in the survey released on Saturday said a change of government would make the country a better place. The poll, for the mass-circulation newspaper Bild, comes the day after a separate survey found that most Germans were dissatisfied with Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the coalition.

RUSSIA - Russia’s first moon mission in 47 years failed when its Luna-25 space craft spun out of control and crashed into the moon after a problem preparing for prelanding orbit, underscoring the post-Soviet decline of a once mighty space programme. Russia’s state space corporation, Roskosmos, said it lost contact with the craft 1.57pm (SA time) on Saturday after a problem as the craft was shunted into prelanding orbit. A soft landing had been planned for Monday. “The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the moon,” Roskosmos said. Russia has been racing against India, whose Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is scheduled to land on the moon’s south pole this week, and more broadly against China and the US which both have advanced lunar ambitions.

MEXICO - As US relations with China have fractured over the years, Mexico has emerged as the new manufacturing base for America. Doing business overseas has become increasingly more expensive. Due to the rising costs, experts believe that Mexico has now overtaken China to become the top manufacturer for American companies. At the beginning of 2023, Mexico became the top US trading partner with bilateral trade between the two countries totaling $263 billion during the first four months of this year, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “Mexico’s emergence followed fractious US relations with China, which had moved past Canada to claim the top trading spot in 2014,” said the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

USA - Rural hospitals in Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Oregon are closing down their maternity wards due to a staff shortage and lower birth rates, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. University hospitals in Ashland, Ohio, OSF Healthcare in Pontiac, Illinois, and Trinity Health in Troy, New York, and Baker City, Oregon, will all shut down their maternity wards by the end of the year. In Pontiac, the local hospital, OSF St James, saw a decline in births. The number of deliveries went from 500 babies a year to less than 180 a year. “Hospitals across the country are experiencing a trend of declining birth rates. This, along with staffing shortages, has resulted in having to make this difficult decision,” the hospital’s chief operating officer said.

UK - Britain’s top demographics expert has said the falling number of babies born in Britain is a “good thing” after new data showed the number of births had hit a 20-year low. Professor Sarah Harper CBE, founder and director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and a former government adviser, said falling birth rates in the West were “good for… our planet”. Her comments came after official figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed there were 605,479 live births in England and Wales last year, the lowest number since 2002. The total was down 3.1 percent compared to 2021 and is part of a long-term decline in the number of births across Britain and the developed world.

USA - In a country where the search for common ground is increasingly elusive, many Americans can agree on this: They believe the political system is broken and that it fails to represent them. They aren’t wrong. Faced with big and challenging problems — climate, immigration, inequality, guns, debt and deficits — government and politicians seem incapable of achieving consensus. On each of those issues, the public is split, often bitterly. But on each, there are also areas of agreement. What’s broken is the will of those in power to see past the divisions enough to reach compromise. Henry Brady, professor of political science and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, has been studying these issues for many years. As he surveys the current state of the United States’ democracy, he comes away deeply pessimistic. “I’m terrified,” he said. “I think we are in bad shape, and I don’t know a way out.”

USA - American universities are far more committed to creating an incompetent society consisting of a Tower of Babel than they are to creating well educated citizens that the society needs. For decades American universities have discriminated against white applicants of merit in favor of less capable “preferred minorities. This is called “white privilege.” But the issue is not only unequal racial treatment in university admissions. The much larger problem is that American universities value race over merit and prefer a non-meritorious society to the United States Constitution. This is the general problem of all US institutions, not only universities and public schools, which are degenerating into indoctrination centers against the white majority, but also of corporations, such as Starbucks that discriminates against white Americans in hiring and promotion, and Democrat legislators, governors, mayors, judges and prosecutors who believe that blacks should be punished less, if at all, than whites for the same crimes.

CHINA - The China economy is in trouble, like the rest of the world’s economies. The Evergrande failure has been in the works for some time now. Once one of the most prestigious firms in China, it’s now facing bankruptcy. The Boston Globe reported earlier today: “Evergrande, the heavily indebted Chinese property giant, filed for bankruptcy protection Thursday in New York, raising concerns about ripple effects as China faces slow economic growth and a sluggish real estate sector. Evergrande is seeking protection from creditors under Chapter 15 of the US bankruptcy code, which applies to insolvency cases involving multiple countries, while it makes efforts to restructure its debt.”

SOUTH AFRICA - Next week is poised to be a momentous one, as the BRICS countries gather in a summit hosted by South Africa in Johannesburg from 22 to 24 August, and literally dozens of ‘Global South’ nations queue up to join. Add to that that both the Russian and the Indian lunar missions are expected to touch down in Earth’s satellite during the days of the club’s meeting, and you have what promises to be an historical event. South Africa’s President Ramaphosa will host Chinese President Xi Jinping, Brazil’s Lula da Silva and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi – Putin will participate via video link and will be represented by Foreign Minister Lavrov. BRICS are bonded by the skepticism about a world order serving the interests of the United States and its allies promoting international norms they enforce but don’t respect.

USA - The collapse of the Russian ruble and the Chinese yuan shows why a potential BRICS currency is not a threat to the US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, Breitbart Economics Editor John Carney told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow Friday. As the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa prepare to meet next week in Johannesburg, the currencies of two of its members are falling fast. “I would bail out of that club if I were Brazil and India,” Carney quipped. When asked if BRICS is a threat to the dollar, Carney shot back, “Absolutely not. And what we’re seeing in the collapse of the ruble and the collapse of China’s currency is the rest of the world wants nothing to do with these controlled economy currencies.”

CANADA - One man learned that going green is a crock the hard way. Dalbir Bala, a resident of Winnipeg, bought an electric Ford F-150 for $85,000 and was forced to abandon it after discovering it wasn’t worth the cost. Moreover, it’s not for working people who must spend an arm and a leg installing the charging station in their home. This individual spent around $130,000 on this green initiative, with the bonus of discovering that the fast charging stations only charge his batteries up to 90 percent. It’s more expensive to recharge these vehicles than refueling a gas-powered car. Bala declared that electric cars were the “biggest scam of modern times”.

SWITZERLAND - Switzerland will step up its military cooperation with NATO “as much as possible,” a new policy document has revealed. While the country’s military leaders have pushed for more integration with the US-led bloc for some time, lawmakers in Bern are concerned that Switzerland’s famous neutrality will be compromised. Swiss troops already attend some foreign training exercises, but military chiefs will “expand this bilateral and multilateral training cooperation as much as possible,” according to a report published on Thursday by the Swiss army. Although air force and special forces units sometimes train with NATO countries, the report calls for Switzerland’s ground troops to take part in the bloc’s joint exercises, and to operate in line with NATO doctrine.

USA - Hurricane Hilary is expected to hit Southern California as a tropical storm, bringing heavy rainfall as early as this weekend after it makes its way up Mexico's Baja California Peninsula. The storm prompted officials at the National Hurricane Center on Friday to issue a tropical storm watch for parts of Southern California for the first time. As of Friday morning, Hurricane Hilary was located about 360 miles south-southwest of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, with maximum sustained winds of 145 mph, making it a "major" Category 4, the hurricane center said, adding that it is "large and powerful." "It is rare — indeed nearly unprecedented in the modern record — to have a tropical system like this move through Southern California," Postel told CBS News.