POLAND - The Polish government has formally requested President Andrzej Duda to declare an emergency in two eastern regions amid concerns Belarus’ dictator Alexander Lukashenko is deliberately pushing migrants into the European Union. Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki said: “Lukashenko’s regime decided to push these people onto Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian territory in an effort to destabilise.” Belarus has been accused of conducting a “hybrid war” against Brussels after the country’s relations with the EU worsening since President Lukashenko claimed victory in an election his critics claim was fraudulent. Mr Morawiecki has accused President Lukashenko of flying migrants into Belarus, from Iraq and Turkey, before “shoving” them into the EU. “The situation on the border with Belarus is a crisis,” he added.

ISRAEL - Prime Minister Naftali Bennett met with US President Joe Biden at the White House on Friday and said: "We cannot lose sight for even one moment that we're in the toughest neighborhood in the world. We've got ISIS on our southern border. Hizbullah on our northern border, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Iranian militias that surround us." "All of them want to kill us, kill Israelis. They all want to annihilate the Jewish state. And that's why Israel always has to be overwhelmingly stronger than any of our enemies, and indeed, of all our enemies combined."

ISRAEL - Bennett wanted to create a positive, unmediated connection between himself and US President Joe Biden. That was probably the easiest one. Both sides wanted, at the very least, to show that the US-Israel relationship is on track and doing well in the post-Netanyahu, post-Trump era. They held a 50-minute, one-on-one meeting – which, unusually, took place over tea in Biden’s private dining room off of the Oval Office. The prime minister said after the meeting that the atmosphere was “excellent,” he felt Biden and his top brass were open to listening to what he had to say, and that he can now call Biden directly. During his visit to the White House on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's biggest goal was to get the US and Israel aligned on Iran. "We are going to discuss the threat from Iran and our commitment to ensure Iran never develops a nuclear weapon," Biden said. “We’re putting diplomacy first and seeing where that takes us. But if diplomacy fails, we’re ready to turn to other options.”

JORDAN - Veteran Israeli analyst Ehud Yaari wrote Sunday on the N12 website that Iran is steadily entrenching itself in the Syrian Golan region along the border with Israel. In southern Syria, the Syrian army along with Hizbullah and Iran-backed militias are besieging the city of Daraa, one of the last redoubts of the anti-Assad rebellion. Jordan’s King Abdullah is attempting a delicate balancing act, argues Yaari, noting that the king has expressed a willingness to renew ties with Assad and help do the same with the rest of the Arab world, but does not want a Hezbollah-Iranian presence on his border. This is particularly the case because divisions of the Syrian regular army in the region are now essentially controlled by Iran and Hezbollah, of which Abdullah is well aware.

AFGHANISTAN - As we watch the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in real time, it’s pretty sickening to know that the new regime will be aided by the veritable war chest left behind by the US military. The roughly 40 aircraft and 2,000 armored vehicles are a boon for the Taliban’s ragtag forces — and the situation is panning out quite nicely for Afghanistan’s neighbor Iran as well.

NORTH KOREA - A nuclear reactor in North Korea that closed for a short period of time during former President Donald Trump’s negotiations with the country appears to have been reactivated. According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the UN atomic agency said that a plutonium-producing reactor in Yongbyon, North Korea, appears to have resumed operations in violation of the United Nations Security Council resolutions. “Since early July, there have been indications, including the discharge of cooling water, consistent with the operation of the reactor,” said the International Atomic Energy Agency in its annual report. “While North Korea already has a significant stockpile of nuclear weapons, this suggests it is moving to expand its current arsenal.” News of North Korea’s resumed nuclear reactor comes on the heels of the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.

VATICAN - Arlington Bishop Michael Burbidge has written a letter denouncing gender ideology and insisting that “no one” is transgender, NBC News reported this weekend. In his “controversial” letter, Bishop Burbidge condemns transgender ideology because it “presents a view of the human person contrary to the truth” by disconnecting the idea of gender from that of the biological sex of a person. The human person “is created male or female,” the bishop writes, and a person’s sex “is an immutable biological reality, determined at conception”, which “reveals God’s design” for each individual person. “The faithful should avoid using ‘gender-affirming’ terms or pronouns that convey approval of or reinforce the person’s rejection of the truth,” Burbidge writes. “It is not harsh or judgmental to decline to use such language.”

RUSSIA - Bone-chilling winter temperatures. Sub-Arctic taiga forests as far as the eye can see. Blinding clouds of mosquitos. Vast deposits of diamonds, gold, and other minerals. Add to the list of qualities for the vast Siberian region known as Yakutia: home to the world’s largest wildfires this year. In the United States, the largest blaze wreaking havoc this season is in California, the so-called Dixie Fire, and is currently burning nearly 3,000 square kilometers - about the size of Luxembourg. In Yakutia, the total area of the fires scorching the taiga this season are 10 times that. But there's more: according to the environmental group Greenpeace on August 16, more than 170,000 square kilometers have burned across Russia this year - making the 2021 fires the worst in a decade, and possibly ever. That's an area about the size of the US state of Florida. And the fire season still has weeks to go.

UK - Is it time to stop obsessing over Covid figures? Statistics reveal virus is NOT the biggest killer - with heart disease, dementia and cancer each claiming four times as many lives in an average week last month. They're the figures that have ruled our lives for the past 18 months; decided our freedoms; deepened our fears. Back in January, the dashboard attracted 76 million views in a single day. Other scientists have warned of the psychological impact of constant reminders of how many people are still catching Covid. ‘There’s a worry, that in the scramble to get out these daily updates, we’re alarming people disproportionately,’ says Professor Robert Dingwall... Last week, experts warned that the UK’s ever-growing toll of diabetes could soon bankrupt the NHS, after official data showed it spends more than £1 billion a year on treating the disease – up a quarter in five years.

USA - Reading the news has become like going to a freak show. You never know what you are going to see each day, but it is almost certainly going to be nutty. Some of the things that I am going to share with you in this article are weird, others are infuriating, but they all point to the same conclusion. From the very top to the very bottom, America is going crazy. And I mean that in the worst way possible. We truly have become an “idiocracy”, and it seems like those that are the most incompetent of all are often rewarded by being elevated to the top of the food chain. Meanwhile, those of us that still try to approach things rationally are increasingly being pushed to the fringes of society.

UK - Legendary British actor John Cleese has never been shy about his feelings on cancel culture, telling Reuters last year that he thinks it “misunderstands the main purposes of life which is to have fun.” “Everything humorous is critical. If you have someone who is perfectly kind and intelligent and flexible and who always behaves appropriately, they’re not funny,” the 81-year-old said, adding, “The problem with political correctness is that comedians have to set the bar according to what we are told by the most touchy, most emotionally unstable and fragile and least stoic people in the country.” The Monty Python alum has also blasted legislative speech suppression saying in October that a proposed Scottish hate speech law would hamper creativity. Now, the comedian is putting his money where his mouth is, releasing a documentary series on what cancel culture is and how it impacts its victims.

UK - In the sphere of economics, examples abound of the misuse of terms and concepts all of which advance the interests of the politically-connected elites, technocrats, governments, and the banking establishment at the expense of everyone else. One of the most glaring examples which, after the financial collapse in 2020, has now become more prominent in daily life, has been the meaning of the word “inflation.”

USA - Delays, product shortages and rising costs continue to bedevil businesses large and small. And consumers are confronted with an experience once rare in modern times: no stock available, and no idea when it will come in.

USA - Thousands of people rushed to leave South Lake Tahoe as the entire resort city came under evacuation orders and wildfire raced toward Lake Tahoe, a large freshwater lake straddling California and Nevada. Evacuation warnings issued for the city of 22,000 on Sunday turned into orders Monday. Vehicles loaded with bikes and camping gear and hauling boats were stuck in traffic, stalled in hazy, brown air that smelled of campfire. Police and other emergency vehicles whizzed by. “This is a systematic evacuation, one neighborhood at a time,” South Lake Tahoe police Lieutenant Travis Cabral said on social media. “I am asking you as our community to please remain calm.” The new orders came a day after communities several miles south of the lake were abruptly ordered evacuated as the Caldor Fire raged nearby. In California alone, more than 15,200 firefighters are fighting more than a dozen large fires. Flames have destroyed about 2,000 buildings and forced thousands to evacuate this year while blanketing large swaths of the West in unhealthy smoke.

USA - Twenty years of US war in Afghanistan draws to a close at the stroke of midnight on August 31. There will be plenty of time to dissect the root causes of failure. What is needed now is accountability for the disastrous endgame. A video of active duty Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller demanding accountability for the humanitarian disaster that had come to define the US-led evacuation from Kabul, Afghanistan, quickly went viral. Scheller, who commanded the advanced infantry training battalion at the Marine Corps School of Infantry, at the time the video was made, had spent 17 years as a Marine, with multiple combat deployments. He knowingly placed this distinguished career at risk by publicly demanding that someone be held accountable for the bungled evacuation, which had left at least 14 American servicemen dead, along with hundreds of Afghans, some with dual citizenship in allied nations. Scheller’s commanders immediately relieved him of his command. This was a consequence Scheller anticipated, which makes his decision to sacrifice his career in the name of accountability even more remarkable.