USA - The world economy is heading for its worst year outside a recession since 2008 with almost all major economies suffering growth downgrades, the World Bank has said. Donald Trump’s tariff uncertainty has wiped 0.5 percentage points off global GDP projections this year to 2.3 per cent, it said in its latest global economic prospects report. If its forecasts for the next two years materialise, an average growth rate of 2.5 per cent would make the 2020s the worst decade for the world economy since the 1960s, it said.

UK - The state is stifling criticism of Islam because of fears of a violent mob reaction, a senior MP has claimed. Nick Timothy, a front-bench Tory MP, issued the warning ahead of his Bill aimed at protecting free speech and the right to criticise religions, including Islam, being presented before Parliament on Tuesday. It follows the conviction of Hamit Coskun, 50, for setting fire to a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London earlier this year while declaring that Islam was a “religion of terrorism”. He was found guilty of committing a racially aggravated public order offence during a peaceful protest. Politicians and free speech campaigners claimed the “grotesque” prosecution was an attempt to revive long-abolished blasphemy laws.

NORTHEN IRELAND - Fifteen police officers were injured and four houses set alight in anti-migrant riots after two teenagers, thought to be Romanian, were charged with the sexual assault of a girl in Northern Ireland. Two 14-year-old boys appeared at a local court by video link on Monday, charged with attempted rape. The charges were read to them by a Romanian interpreter. Violence erupted in Ballymena, County Antrim, on Monday night after a peaceful vigil by hundreds of people had been held in the town centre. Jim Allister, the North Antrim MP, said Ballymena had been “overburdened” by “unchecked migration”, which was a source of “past and future tensions”. Mr Frew said in Stormont: “Sadly, my warnings have been followed by two shocking incidents of serious sexual assault on teenage girls, carried out in broad daylight.”

UK - The contrast could not have been greater. At around midday UK time, it emerged the Government would sanction two ultra-nationalist Israeli cabinet ministers. The measures against Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the security minister, reflect dismay at much of their behaviour, but particularly their efforts to frustrate a two-state solution. Within two hours, however, an interview with Mike Huckabee, Donald Trump’s new ambassador to Israel, sent a different message. In it, the Republican evangelical pastor, who is close to Mr Smotrich, appeared to almost completely withdraw US support for a Palestinian state. Asked if the two-state solution remained a US policy goal, as it has been for decades, he said: “I don’t think so.” He suggested he would rather see a legal home for the Palestinians carved out of a Muslim country than the West Bank, where the majority currently live.

USA - Officers on horseback dispersed those who defied an 8pm to 6am curfew, as President Trump said he might yet invoke the Insurrection Act to quell violence. A curfew has been enforced in the downtown area of central Los Angeles, where hundreds of police were deployed to combat unrest as protests spread to several other major US cities. In the largest display of force seen since disturbances began last week, riot police on horses and officers armed with flash bangs and rubber bullets swept the streets to disperse those who had defied the city’s 8pm to 6am curfew. Los Angeles officials said the measures were necessary to stop vandalism and looting, which had broken out the night before in the city’s central district. Hours before, Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, urged demonstrators to remain peaceful.

EUROPE - The EU has signed “a deal with the devil to flood Europe with migrants, dilute the population and wipe out European culture”, Marine Le Pen said on Monday. Addressing a gathering of European nationalists near Paris, she claimed Brussels’s migration and asylum pact stripped “states of their most sacred right, that of deciding who enters and who remains on their soil”. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, was among the speakers at the event, which was held to mark the first anniversary of Ms Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) coming first in European Parliament elections in France. “We will not let them destroy our cities, rape our girls and women, kill peaceful citizens,” he told the several thousand present. Ms Le Pen said a “woke and ultra-liberal” European Union was a “graveyard of politically unfulfilled promises”.

USA - The DNA data from around 15 million people around the world is going on sale. As Nature reports, consumer-genomics company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy — and legal permission to auction off all of that data. To some, it's an enormous risk to consumer privacy, but to some scientists, it's a major opportunity for research. "As far as I know, this is the most amount of genetic data that is potentially changing hands," University of Iowa bioethicist Anya Prince told Nature. Besides the threat of changing terms of service, 23andMe has already proven to be vulnerable to hacking. The personal data of nearly seven million customers was exposed in 2023, the result of a "very dumb" security lapse.

NATO - For all the stark warnings and ominous predictions made by the head of NATO today, one key fact remained unmentioned. The West is still funding the Russian war effort to the tune of billions by buying oil and gas, funnelling vast amounts into an economy that is now fully militarised. Russian gas exports to Europe went up by 20% last year and its LNG exports to the EU are now at record levels. Vladimir Putin's Russia is now making more money from selling fossil fuels than Ukraine receives from allies.

UK - All things fall apart. Orders, whether domestic or geopolitical, eventually collapse. So too do monetary cycles, typically rising and falling every 80 years or so. The big cycle that began in 1945 is coming to a close as the bond markets begin to crack. Bookmark this piece: a debt crisis is coming.

FAR EAST - Everywhere you look, you can see the decline of Western hegemony, as the world is increasingly multipolar. Ben Norton analyzes the rise of China, development of Global South economies, and increasing unity in Asia. A symbol of this was the historic ASEAN-GCC-China Summit held in Malaysia, which supplements BRICS in pursuit of dedollarization, South-South economic integration, and infrastructure construction.

USA - Senator Mike Lee (Republican for Utah) has proposed a constitutional amendment that would make all members of Congress ineligible to run for re-election “whenever inflation exceeds 3%” or when the deficit exceeds 3% of gross domestic product (GDP). The proposal revives an idea first suggested by Warren Buffett more than 10 years ago in which Buffett suggested he could “end the deficit in five minutes” by disqualifying lawmakers based on the nation’s economic health. In a post on X, Lee wrote, “It’s better to disqualify politicians than for an entire nation to suffer under the yoke of inflation.”

USA - President Trump has called for the California governor’s arrest as pro-immigrant protests spread to other US cities after violence in Los Angeles. Trump called Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor, “grossly incompetent” and claimed that “a civil war would happen if you left it to people like him”. LA faced a fourth consecutive day of unrest after violent clashes in San Francisco, where 60 people were arrested on Sunday, and demonstrations in Houston and San Antonio, Texas.

USA - What you need to know:

Los Angeles residents have protested against immigration raids in which hundreds of immigrants were rounded up and arrested.

President Trump deployed the National Guard to quell the protests, going over the head of Gavin Newsom, the California governor, who says the deployment was excessive and plans to sue.

California’s undocumented migrant population leads the US, and LA is a “sanctuary city”, meaning it has policies to protect undocumented immigrants from federal immigration enforcement.

Activists accuse law enforcement of arresting suspected illegal immigrants without warrants or documentation. Protests descended into violence in Los Angeles over the weekend as police faced off with demonstrators decrying workplace raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

ISRAEL - Screens and social media reshape our minds. Israeli expert warns digital overload in childhood rewires the brain; screen-induced attention loss, emotional gaps and physical decline linked to early device exposure. In today’s world, it’s nearly impossible to avoid screens. From smartphones and tablets to televisions and computers, children are exposed to digital devices from an early age — and often for hours each day. But while the convenience of digital entertainment is undeniable, experts warn it comes at a steep cost. Chava Treitel, head of R&D at the “Attention Revolution” initiative, paints a concerning picture of how screens — particularly those used during early childhood — can fundamentally alter brain development, shorten attention spans, and disrupt emotional and social growth.

USA - Historic volcanic eruptions and enormous earthquakes are happening on an almost daily basis now, but they have become so common that most of them barely even make a blip in the news cycle. The natural disasters that do tend to make a lot of headlines are the ones that cause a lot of deaths. But even those are quickly forgotten. For example, nobody really talks about the magnitude 7.7 earthquake that hit Myanmar on March 28th and killed thousands of people anymore. We literally have become numb to the death and destruction which is constantly going on all around us.