ISRAEL - Israel’s defense minister has said the country’s armed forces are ready to strike Iran should it become necessary, as tensions rise further after an Iran-linked attack on an Israeli tanker killed two people. On Thursday, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz was asked by Ynet news whether Israel was ready to strike Iran. Gantz answered simply with one word – “Yes”. The minister went on to say that Tel Aviv sees it as important to mobilize the international community to counter Iran’s influence and growing assertiveness. “We can’t tag Iran as solely an Israeli problem and absolve the rest of the world from this issue.”

USA - The elimination of baby girls through sex-selective abortions will lead to an increase in the gender gap by 4.7 million over the next nine years, according to a report Wednesday in MedicalNewsToday. The current widening of the gender gap at the expense of girls is added to the estimated 45 million “missing” female births between 1970 and 2017 as a consequence of sex-selective abortions, the report stated. “Skewed levels of the sex ratio at birth (SRB) due to sex-selective abortions have been observed in several countries since the 1970s,” declares an August 4 study published in BMJ Global Health. “They will lead to long-term sex imbalances in more than one-third of the world’s population with yet unknown social and economic impacts on affected countries.” “Sex-selective abortion is the ultimate violence against females,” said Reggie Littlejohn, President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers. “Aborting a baby just because she is a girl is the ultimate act of gender discrimination.”

UK - The BBC’s Woman’s Hour programme has seemingly attempted to normalise the question of providing pornography to children, asking the public whether they believe “age-appropriate pornography” should be made for them. On Monday, the social media account for Woman’s Hour posited the questions: “What’s the best way to inform teenagers about porn? Should there be age-appropriate porn as has been suggested so they can learn about consent and what’s respectful and what’s not? What do you think?” “Email us your opinions,” the publicly-funded programme went on to urge.

VATICAN - Pope Francis made his first public appearance Wednesday since being hospitalized for colon surgery on July 4, telling crowds the gospel of Jesus Christ must be accepted exactly as it is. “With the truth of the Gospel, one cannot negotiate,” the pontiff told pilgrims gathered in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall. “Either you receive the Gospel as it is, as it was announced, or you receive any other thing.”

USA - Thousands of Marines and sailors are taking part in the US Navy's largest war games in 40 years as Washington "prepares" for a future world war amid rising tensions with Russia and China. Fleets began the Large Scale Exercise on Tuesday and the drills across 17 time zones will continue until August 16. Forces will participate in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the exercises are designed to show the US' "readiness" for a potential global conflict.

ISRAEL - Military action may be needed to stop further attacks by Iran, Israel's Defense Minister Benny Gantz said, days after a deadly drone strike on an Israeli-managed tanker off the coast of Oman. “Now is the time for deeds - words are not enough,” Gantz said on Wednesday. “It is time for diplomatic, economic and even military deeds. Otherwise the attacks will continue.” Iran denies involvement in the assault. Gantz spoke in a meeting with ambassadors from United Nations Security Council countries. The US, Israel and the UK have all vowed to respond to the drone attack, with Israel saying it maintains its right to act independently. The fatal strike has raised tensions in the Persian Gulf at a delicate time. Iran has just inaugurated an ultraconservative new president, and talks with world powers over the 2015 nuclear deal have stalled.

USA - If you make a conscious choice to ignore all long-term consequences, managing your personal finances can be a lot of fun. For example, instead of rationally evaluating what sort of mortgage payment you can actually afford, why not take a plunge and buy a $600,000 house? You only live once, right? And instead of making your current dumpy vehicle last another year or two, why not take out a huge loan on a brand new $60,000 SUV? You know you deserve it. While you are at it, why don’t you go on another huge spending spree and max out all of your credit cards again. Paying off those credit cards will be very painful in the long run, but nobody thinks much about long-term consequences these days. Just look at the federal government. They are 28 trillion dollars in debt and yet our politicians continue to throw money around like a bunch of drunken sailors.

UK - The Government and most businesses want us all to go out and spend again. In May, consumers borrowed more money than they paid off for the first time since August 2020, according to the Bank of England. Consumer confidence is on the up - but is that confidence misplaced? The anecdotal inflation that many of us are observing at the weekly shop, or the interval drink at the theatre bar or the B&B booking, is already coming through in official figures.

USA - Bayer will stop selling Glyphosate. Bayer (Monsanto), the maker of the deadly herbicide glyphosate/Roundup, after hinting in May that it would end the weed killer’s residential uses in the US, made it official last week. With its announcement to shareholders, Bayer puts an end to residential uses beginning in 2023 and allocates $4.5 billion to cover “the company’s potential long-term exposure” from lawsuits by those harmed by the chemical.

EUROPE - Europe is to continue to suffer an "extreme dangerous heat" according to the latest BBC weather maps. Europe is bracing for more blistering conditions as countries in the southern Mediterranean suffer through a record heatwave. BBC Weatherman Nick Miller has warned temperatures in Greece and Turkey are set to remain "particularly nasty" as both countries battle widespread wildfires amid humid conditions. Elsewhere parts of eastern Europe and the United Kingdom are due to experience heavy downpours in the coming days.

UK - Piled high with pizza, bulging with burgers and fit to burst with doughnuts, sweets and crisps, it sounds like a fast-food fantasy. Yet the cupboard in Leyla Kandemir's kitchen is anything but appetising. For every single item in her collection — fondly dubbed 'Mum's Museum' by her two children and husband Murat — is at least 12 months old. Comprising burgers and chips from McDonald's, Greggs sausage rolls, Domino's pizza, and pastries, bread and buns from her local Tesco, some of these 'Frankenfoods' date back to April 2019 and are part of a groundbreaking experiment. Not only do they look like they have failed to decay, despite being stored in a simple kitchen cupboard, they all appear almost identical to the day she bought them. Her unorthodox experiment started in April 2019 when she was cleaning her son's bedroom and found the remnants of a three-day-old pizza under his bed. 'I couldn't believe it hadn't gone off over the weekend, so I decided to keep a few slices and see what would happen,' she says. Two years and four months later, the original pizza slices are still there, apparently unchanged.

USA - 750,000 divorces happen, on average, every year in the US. While some call that a shame, others see it as a total addressable market. Take, for example, online divorce startup Hello Divorce. They have just raised $2 million to help couples streamline to the inevitable: splitting up. The company provides a combination of software and legal services that start at $99 and average at about $2,000. The total cost of divorce is, on average, between $8,400 and $17,500. The industry as a whole is valued around $50 billion per annum, the report notes. The company was started in 2018 by family law attorney Erin Levine, who called billable hours for divorce an "antiquated process”. It currently is available in just four states: California, Colorado, Texas and Utah. The company says that most people spend 2 to 5 years thinking about divorce and that 80% of them won't have access to counsel.

UK - The UK is set to be hit with yet another supermarket crisis as driver shortages could lead to shelves in shops being empty for months. Empty shelves in supermarkets are likely to continue for many months unless the Government does more to tackle the worker shortages hitting haulage firms, suppliers have warned. Several logistic organisations have said that August is a pinch point in the labour crisis as employees take summer breaks. On top of that, firms offering bonuses and sign-on fees to recruit drivers make matters worse. The situation has also been worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. And now wholesalers are unable to get goods to shops. On Friday, a major dairy producer Arla said it could not get milk to a quarter of the supermarkets it supplies. Ms Hunnisett also urged consumers to be patient and not overbuy. She said: “There is plenty of stock in the supply chain, in all the warehouses. And plenty of fresh homegrown produce.”

USA - The mood of the nation has dramatically changed. Survey after survey has shown that Americans are much less optimistic than they were during the first half of 2021, and that could have enormous implications for the economy as we roll through the second half of this calendar year. When consumers are pessimistic about the future, they tend to hold on to their money more tightly, and they also tend to allocate money to different priorities. Earlier this year, so many pundits were telling us that a new golden era of prosperity was ahead because the worst of the pandemic was behind us and Joe Biden was now in the White House. But now the Delta variant is causing another wave of mass panic, and an increasing number of Americans are losing faith in the Biden administration. Needless to say, the honeymoon is over, and Americans are not pleased with what they see as they peer into a very bleak future. I know that most Americans just want life to “return to normal”, but the truth is that the past couple of years have changed the US and nations all over the globe on a permanent basis.

USA - Dr Shiva discovered that Twitter built a special portal offered to certain governmental entities so that government officials can flag and delete content they dislike for any reason, as part of what they call their “Twitter Partner Status.” Dr Shiva Ayyadurai, the man who invented email, ran for US Senate in Massachusetts as a Republican and made allegations of voter fraud on Twitter. These tweets were then deleted by the far-left tech giant. Later it was discovered that they were deleted at the direction of government employees of the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office.