TURKEY - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened on Sunday to invade Israel in order to support the Palestinians as the Israel Defense Forces continues to battle Hamas terrorists in Gaza, The Times of Israel reported. "We must be very strong so that Israel can't do these things to Palestine," Erdogan said at a political meeting of his Justice and Development Party in Rize. "Just as we entered [Nagorno-] Karabakh, just as we entered Libya, we might do the same to them. There is nothing we can't do. We must only be strong." The threats from Erdogan, who is one of the most bitter critics of Israel on the international stage, comes as the international community is attempting to prevent a larger regional war after Hezbollah launched an Iranian rocket from Lebanon. The resulting blast killed 12 children in the Druze village of Majdal Sham in Israel's Golan Heights on Saturday, The Jerusalem Post reported. Turkey is a member of NATO, which includes some of Israel's closest allies.

HUNGARY - Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said on Saturday that the EU was sliding toward oblivion, in a rambling anti-west speech in which he warned of a new, Asia-oriented “world order” while throwing his support behind Donald Trump’s US presidential bid. “Europe has given up defending its own interests,” Orbán said in Băile Tuşnad, a majority ethnic Hungarian town in central Romania. “All Europe is doing today is following the US’s pro-Democrat foreign policy unconditionally… even at the cost of self-destruction. A change is coming that has not been seen for 500 years. What we are facing is in fact a world order change,” he added, naming China, India, Pakistan and Indonesia as becoming the “dominant centre” of the world.

UK - Britain's youth are hungrily ”shopping for faith” to counter the uncertainty of a post truth-world, new research has found. Of 2,075 adults polled across the UK, it was those aged 18-24 who, remarkably, were the most influenced by faith when choosing the UK’s Prime Minister in this month’s General Election. She added: “What the data shows us is that young people are clearly shopping for faith in a post-truth world where they spend much more time online and truth is an increasingly subjective notion. They want a deeper drive for meaning when there are so many different variants of so-called truth out there. This may well be a reaction against the wokery of Generation Z and Millennials," she said.

FRANCE - The organising committee of Paris 2024 has apologised to Catholics and other Christian groups who were outraged by a scene during the opening ceremony that evoked Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper painting with drag queens, a transgender model and a singer made up as the Greek god of wine. The parody of the biblical scene, performed against the backdrop of the River Seine, was intended to interpret Dionysus and raise awareness “of the absurdity of violence between human beings”, organisers wrote on X. “Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group. [The opening ceremony] tried to celebrate community tolerance,” the Paris 2024 spokesperson Anne Descamps told a press conference. “We believe this ambition was achieved. If people have taken any offence we are really sorry.”

UK - Threatened with ‘eternal damnation’ and told he was akin to a paedophile, Seth Pinnock says he has finally found acceptance and hopes to ‘help change the trajectory of someone’s life’. The declaration by a highly influential black Christian gospel star that he is gay has exposed a generational divide in attitudes towards sexuality that could signal a transformation within evangelical churches. Seth Pinnock, who founded a gospel choir and youth orchestra and was hailed by the Tony Blair Foundation as a “young leader to watch”, experienced depression, anxiety, self-hatred and drug addiction as a result of believing his sexuality was sinful.

USA - A single county has reported more than 60 earthquakes in the last week, sparking a State of Emergency to be declared. Scurry County in West Texas was hit by a 5.1-magnitude quake on Friday, which was felt as far north as Oklahoma, followed by a 4.5-magnitude the next day. The epicenter in Hermleigh has now experienced 62 seismic events since last Monday (July 23). County Judge Dan Hicks declared a disaster in the county Friday to get assistance from the state and is asking anyone with damage or losses to fill out a survey that will help them identify the scope of damage in the area.

USA - While the left is trying it's hardest to recast Kamala Harris as a moderate Democrat - quietly scrubbing her public record over the past 5 years - her actual positions have always been radical. For starters, she's on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, ban fracking and offshore drilling, defund the police, provide US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and ban private health insurance. Meanwhile, during the 2020 Democratic primary debate Harris said that if elected president, she would "ban by executive order the importation of assault weapons." She also said she would reinstate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status and DACA protection for illegal immigrants, and end other Trump-era immigration policies.

ISRAEL - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proposed the creation of a new military bloc modeled after NATO and called the “Abraham Alliance,” aimed against Iran. Netanyahu spoke before the joint session of the US Congress on Wednesday. It was his fourth address to American lawmakers, beating Winston Churchill’s record, although about 70 House and Senate members declined to attend for one reason or another. “America forged a security alliance in Europe to counter the growing Soviet threat,” Netanyahu said at one point. “Likewise, America and Israel today can forge a security alliance in the Middle East to counter the growing Iranian threat.” “I think we should call it the Abraham Alliance,” he said of the proposed NATO-like bloc.

ISRAEL - Hezbollah “crossed all lines” with a rocket attack that killed ten people, Israel Katz has said. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz has vowed to launch a “disproportionate” response after Hezbollah allegedly killed ten people in a rocket attack on a football field in the Golan Heights. The incident has brought Israel to the brink of “all-out war” with the group, Katz has warned. Most of the dead were children, and more than a dozen were injured by the strike in the town of Majdal Shams on Saturday, according to Israel’s Magen David Adom ambulance service. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) blamed the attack on “the Hezbollah terror group.”

ISRAEL - The airstrike on Saturday that killed 12 children has devastated the Druze community and threatens to spark an escalation that no one wants. The rocket, which Israel claims was fired from a Hezbollah launcher on Saturday evening, was probably aimed at an Israeli base on Mount Hermon — a mountain that straddles the border of Lebanon, Syria and the Golan Heights — but overshot and landed in Majdal Shams. The militant group, which has fired more than 6,000 projectiles into Israel since October 7, has denied firing the rocket. But before the terrible results became known Hezbollah media had boasted that it had launched the projectile. This is the “miscalculation” both sides have feared all along. An inadvertent escalation that would break “the rules” and force the other side to escalate as well.

CHINA - Beijing has warned Manila against hosting US intermediate-range missile systems in the country, stating that it could ultimately trigger an “arms race” in the region. The comments were made by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Saturday as he met with his Philippines counterpart, Enrique Manalo, on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in Vientiane, Laos. The Philippines and China are facing serious difficulties and risk further straining relations since Manila has “repeatedly violated the consensus of both sides and its own commitments,” Wang said. The potential deployment of US intermediate-range missiles is particularly concerning for Beijing, he added.

SWEDEN - Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum has been pushing for people to eat insects instead of meat to stop climate change. Because apparently cows are now bad for the planet and fart too much. So a Swedish company called Tebrito has been working hard to produce mealworms for insect proteins to put in human food like granola and protein bars. They got a whopping $4.2 million in investments to push this stuff. And now they have gone bankrupt because it seems like nobody wants to eat their insects. In 2023 they only had a revenue of a meager $49,000 and lost almost $12.6 million! In other words, nobody is buying their insects. Looks like people are REJECTING the WEF agenda.

FRANCE - The 2024 Summer Olympics are finally set to get underway in Paris today amid some substantial safety concerns like ISIS threats and this morning, large-scale vandalism of France's train network. These high-level issues are momentarily distracting observers from another train wreck affecting most Olympic Games: cost overrun. Spending more than you have budgeted for has become the norm for host cities, but as Statista's Katharina Buchholz reports, Paris is actually not the worst of the bunch (as of current estimates) despite an overrun of more than 100 percent landing it at a cost of $8.7 billion for hosting the Games (excluding investments in urban and transportation infrastructure). This is easily topped by Barcelona, which ran 266 percent over cost in 1992 and Rio de Janeiro in 2016, which was a whopping 352 percent over budget.

USA - Several X accounts that posted videos and/or screenshots about the absurdities of the Olympics' opening ceremonies have been hit with Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints enforced by Elon Musk's social media platform. As we penned earlier, the opening ceremonies were just absolutely bizarre - and, in some cases, inappropriate for children to watch. To sum up, the Olympics can't tolerate mockery and criticism of the "Woke Games," so they resort to censorship. Sports spectacles like the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the Commonwealth Games and a host of other events have become increasingly political in their messaging and their pageantry in recent years.

UK - Quiz question: how much time do you suppose the House of Commons devoted to debating net zero before it made it the law of the land? The question is of more than academic interest: eliminating carbon emissions is the single biggest industrial challenge humanity has set itself. That we were the first large country to write that ambition into law was a very big deal. Yet we never really had a national conversation about why we’re actually doing this and what the consequences will be. In 2019, when that law went onto the statute book, the conventional wisdom was that it was all about climate change — about showing global leadership, even if it required domestic sacrifices.