MIDDLE EAST - The biblical “sin cities” of Sodom and Gomorrah could have been destroyed by a meteor “cloudburst” that incinerated all 8,000 inhabitants, a fascinating new study suggests. The giant space rock exploded over the town 3,650 years ago, creating a fireball. Scientists say the same event might also have given rise to the tale of Jericho’s walls “tumbling down,” as that city was just 20 miles away.In the Bible, God was said to have been enraged by the wickedness of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, raining “fire and brimstone” upon them. Now there seems to be hard evidence that a “heavenly event” really did happen around that time. The cosmic calamity laid waste to the Jordan River Valley’s northern shore, razing a huge 100-acre city to the ground. It also exterminated other cities and multiple small villages. There would have been no survivors.

ISRAEL - Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi said Tuesday that Israel will continue to launch attacks to “destroy” Iran’s capabilities, including its civilian nuclear program. “Operations to destroy Iranian capabilities will continue, in any arena and at any time, and the operational plans against Iran’s nuclear program will continue to be developed and improved,” Kohavi said. While the IDF has not launched an overt attack inside Iran, the Israelis frequently carry out covert attacks against the Iranian nuclear program. Most recently, Iran has accused Israel of attacking an Iranian nuclear warehouse with a drone in June. The attack damaged equipment belonging to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Iran is calling on the nuclear watchdog to condemn the incident. Over the past few months, Kohavi has repeatedly said the IDF is “accelerating” plans to attack Iran’s nuclear program, signaling that Israel is planning a more overt operation inside the country.

IRAN - A deadly attack on an oil tanker by explosive-laden drones. Unmanned aircraft launched from the Gaza Strip hitting Israeli neighborhoods. Strikes on Saudi Arabian refineries and pipelines and on bases housing US troops in Iraq. Behind this wave of attacks, US, European and Israeli defense officials say: Iran and its allies across the Middle East. They say Tehran’s rapidly developing ability to build and deploy drones is changing the security equation in a region already on edge. The drones themselves are often made with widely available components used in the ever-growing commercial drone market and by hobbyists, the officials say. Some mimic the designs of Israeli and American military drones. “Developing a nuclear weapon would take years. With drones, just a few months,” an Iranian official told The Wall Street Journal. “Drones have changed the balance of power in the Middle East.” Iran has used copies of the most sensitive pieces of technology developed by US and Israeli companies.

MIDDLE EAST - The Middle East was a crucial arena in the Cold War. It was then that Israel first acquired its value to the US as a bulwark against perceived Soviet penetration into the Middle East. Nations chose blocks, and the Middle East was divided up into Cold War camps. As the Second Cold War dawns, it has not yet risen over the Middle East. Most of the countries that had joined the American side are still on the American side. But if there is not a cold war, there is a cool war. Several countries that are on the American side and still look to the US are also glancing-at least a little – at Russia and China. And some that are not on the American side are moving firmly into a block with Russia and China.

ISRAEL - It’s no secret that in recent years, Uncle Sam has found himself asleep at the wheel while China has been pushing ahead in the global race. Four decades of pursuing a policy of friendship towards Beijing had simply opened the door to exploitation. With political, economic, academic and cultural spheres united under a nationalist agenda, China has been quietly rolling out a strategy for dominance. In the last two decades, there have been more than 460 Chinese investments and mergers and acquisitions in Israel, totaling tens of billions of dollars. Today, there are up to 45 new deals annually. It will come as no surprise that these deals focus on infrastructure and technology — two key areas of security sensitivity. The most controversial of these was the Haifa Port development, which was awarded to a Chinese state-backed investor, Shanghai International Port Group, in 2015. Haifa is the biggest port in Israel, and a critical future transportation hub. It is also the place where the Sixth Fleet of the US Navy docks. Washington feared that this would provide an opening for Chinese surveillance of the eastern Mediterranean.

TAIWAN - Taiwan is committed to defending its democracy against an increasingly aggressive China, the island’s president has vowed, warning of “catastrophic consequences” for the region should it fall. The comments from Tsai Ing-wen, in an essay published on Tuesday, came amid record-breaking incursions by Chinese warplanes into its air defence zone. On Tuesday Taiwan’s premier, Su Tseng-chang, said the “over the top” activity violated regional peace, and Taiwan needed to be on alert.

USA - While accusing the giant social network of pursuing profits over safety, a former Facebook data scientist told Congress Tuesday she believes stricter government oversight could alleviate the dangers the company poses, from harming children to inciting political violence to fueling misinformation. Frances Haugen, testifying to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, presented a wide-ranging condemnation of Facebook. She accused the company of failing to make changes to Instagram after internal research showed apparent harm to some teens and being dishonest in its public fight against hate and misinformation. Haugen’s accusations were buttressed by tens of thousands of pages of internal research documents she secretly copied before leaving her job in the company’s civic integrity unit. “Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy,” Haugen said. “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.”

RUSSIA - Russia today threatened Facebook with huge fines if the US social media giant fails to remove 'dangerous information.' The Kremlin's broadside comes amid blood in the water for Mark Zuckerberg's firm after it suffered a record seven-hour blackout on Monday which saw $47billion wiped off its share price. Vladimir Putin's media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, said that it would fine Facebook '5 to 10 percent' of its 'annual revenue' as part of a new protocol drawn up after it repeatedly failed 'to remove information dangerous to citizens' on Facebook and Instagram.' Russia regularly takes legal action against internet platforms for not removing content it labels illegal, such as pornographic material or posts condoning drugs and suicide. The country has already fined Facebook 90 million rubles ($1 million) for various penalties, according to Russian news agencies, including not deleting banned content.

AFRICA - Every few years, it is devastating to watch the same tragedy: a weather cycle that brings debilitating drought and hunger to East Africa, threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya. The weather cycle responsible for these episodes is a climate-change-enhanced “La Niña”. La Niña is driven by the cooling of ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific sea, causing dry spells in eastern Africa. Kenya has already declared a drought emergency. With more drought shocks likely on the horizon, it will be important for governments and other actors to be proactive. Without effective early action, all the data collection and modelling is of limited value, and people end up suffering.

USA - A five-day course of molnupiravir, the new medicine being hailed as a “huge advance” in the treatment of Covid-19, costs $17.74 to produce, according to a report issued last week by drug pricing experts at the Harvard School of Public Health and King’s College Hospital in London. Merck is charging the US government $712 for the same amount of medicine, or 40 times the price. Last Friday’s announcement that the new medicine cut the risk of hospitalization among clinical trial participants with moderate or mild illness in half could have huge implications for the course of the coronavirus pandemic. Because it’s a pill — as opposed to monoclonal antibodies, a comparable antiviral treatment that is administered intravenously — molnupiravir is expected to be more widely used and, hopefully, will cut the death rate. In the first 29 days of the trial, no deaths were reported among the 385 patients who received the drug, while eight of the people who received a placebo died, according to the statement put out by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, the two companies that are jointly launching it.

Historically, the start of most wars has not been a surprise. Usually, there is a very clear build up before hostilities begin, and we are seeing the same pattern today. A “shadow war” has already been going on for quite some time, and at some point missiles will start flying back and forth between the two countries. Likewise, by now it should be exceedingly clear that China very much wants to invade Taiwan. “Reunification” is a top national priority for the CCP, and as you will see below, we are being warned that Xi Jinping has apparently decided that Taiwan is “not a problem that will be passed down to the next generation”.

USA - A former Google executive has warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) when he astonishingly claimed researchers are "creating God". Mo Gawdat, who joined the tech giant in 2007, has shed new light on Google's mysterious research branch in a candid new interview. According to the Silicon Valley guru, researchers could be on track to develop the sort of artificial intelligence that has terrified filmgoers since 1991's Terminator 2. During his stint at Google, Mr Gawdat served as the Chief Business Officer for Google's secretive research and development facility known then as Google X.

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger went down for users around the world for more than five hours on Monday in a catastrophic outage that is understood to have been caused by a server update gone wrong. According to DownDetector, the issues started at around 16:44 BST (11:44 ET), with nearly 80,000 reports for WhatsApp and more than 50,000 for Facebook. NetBlocks, which tracks internet outages and their impact, estimate the outage cost the global economy $160m (£117 million), and sent the Facebook share price down by more than five per cent - meaning that the firm's founder Mark Zuckerberg lost around $7billion of his fortune in a matter of hours. The exact cause of the outage has not been confirmed by Facebook, but one expert said the problem may have been caused by an internal error made by staff that effectively erased the site from the internet.

USA - Where were you when Facebook and Instagram went down for six hours? For many Internet addicts, the trauma of the “mini apocalypse” that Facebook and Instagram experienced on Monday will linger for quite some time to come. Millions of users suddenly cried out in terror when they tried to log into their accounts and the sites were seemingly gone. Before too long, the entire world was in an uproar and everyone wanted to know when Facebook and Instagram would finally be restored. Of course Twitter was still up, and so hordes of social media denizens quickly rushed over there to share what they were feeling… Even officials from Facebook and Instagram were using Twitter to update everyone on the crisis, and a lot of people found that to be quite humorous... please excuse me if I don’t have too much sympathy for those that “suffered” because Facebook was down for six whole hours. If people can’t handle that, how in the world are they going to handle everything else that is eventually coming?

USA - To understand how global supply chains operate the way they do today, you really need to go back to Japan just after World War II. The country, defeated and impoverished, desperately needed to restart its industrial base. It did so by producing what it could with a minimum of capital. That meant, for example, no capital-intensive vertical integration; there were parts suppliers, and then there were final assembly companies. It also meant keeping the supply chain tightly integrated to maximize throughput. This spawned a new production model, now commonly known as lean manufacturing, and Japan’s auto companies led the way in its adoption.