USA - No water for crops, horrific wildfires, colossal dust storms and draconian water restrictions. The megadrought that has almost the entire western half of the country in a death grip is starting to become extremely painful. In some areas, irrigation water is being totally cut off for farmers, and that is going to result in a totally lost year for many of them.

USA - Report finds that obesity, criminal records and other reasons preclude most from US military service. Make no mistake, the United States Army is in the midst of an identity crisis. Bloomberg is out with a report chronicling the sad state of affairs the US military has found itself in these days. According to the report, almost 71% of those aged 17 to 24 — roughly 24 million out of 34 million people — are ineligible to join the military because of “obesity, lack of high school diploma, or a criminal record,” according to Pentagon data. In order to lure the eligible Gen-Z’ers, the Army will be spending US$425 million on marketing, with the goal of recruiting 60,000 to 70,000 active-duty soldiers, along with 40,000-45,000 National Guardsmen, and 13,000 to 17,000 members of the reserve. Members of Gen Z are more racially and ethnically diverse than any previous generation, and they are on track to be the most well-educated generation yet. They are also digital natives who have little or no memory of the world as it existed before smartphones.

UK - BBC presenter Andrew Marr said it will become “very hard” to continue being neutral while working for the corporation. Mr Marr said his “biggest single frustration” was losing his ability to voice his opinion and that he wanted to “get out” at some point. He said: “There are many privileges of working at the BBC, including the size of the audience and all of that, but the biggest single frustration by far is losing your own voice, not being able to speak in your own voice.” It comes as viewers began to show support for GB News, a new 24-hour news network set to rival the BBC. GB news will launch from around the end of this month on Freeview 236, Sky and other platforms. It will be a 24-hour news channel. Bye bye BBC news programmes! Goodbye Maitlis, Bradby and other woke wonders.

UK - Voters from “Red Wall” seats will be parachuted onto boards running the UK’s museum and heritage bodies to stop them bowing to pressure from “woke” activists. Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden announced the move so the country’s top cultural organisations have “the courage to stand up against the political fads and noisy movements of the moment”. His announcement was prompted after liberals have been accused of trying to scrub away the UK’s history with recent protests. While acknowledging the UK’s history is far from spotless, many argued that people should be judged in the context of the time in which they lived. He added: “And as national institutions, heritage organisations should take into account the views of the entire nation: the people for whom they were set up, and whose taxes pay for them. That’s why I want to make sure the boards of these bodies are genuinely diverse and not solely governed by people from metropolitan bubbles.”

UK - Ladies & gentlemen, boys & girls, it’s time to tell the non-binary woke warriors where to stick their pronouns. The pronoun police have struck again, with a UK train operator apologising to a passenger who complained about a friendly conductor using the term ‘ladies and gentlemen’.

ISRAEL - There is a vast gulf between the way Israel is attempting to explain and market “Operation Guardian of the Walls” and the way in which Hamas is succeeding in presenting its fight against Israel to the Palestinian and Arab public. While Israel is seeking and achieving tactical successes — such as the air assault on Hamas’s “metro” network of tunnels across northern Gaza, the toppling of high-rise blocs of Hamas significance, and strikes at weapons stores and rocket launchers — Hamas is achieving strategic success, attaining primacy in the Palestinian, Arab and even Israeli spheres. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year policy to contain Hamas, while enabling it to strengthen militarily undisturbed, must be reconsidered. It is unthinkable that Israel continue to permit Hamas to improve and manufacture its rockets with impunity, that it allows Qatari and other aid into Gaza and all manner of other humanitarian support, under what is either the delusion that this will sate and calm the monster or the misconception that Hamas is being deterred.

UK - The Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) has worked in partnership with the German Bundeswehr Office for Defence Planning to understand the future implications of human augmentation (HA), setting the foundation for more detailed Defence research and development. There are mature technologies that could be integrated today with manageable policy considerations, such as personalised nutrition, wearables and exoskeletons. There are other technologies in the future with promises of bigger potential such as genetic engineering and brain-computer interfaces. HA will become increasingly relevant in the future because it is the binding agent between the unique skills of humans and machines. The winners of future wars will not be those with the most advanced technology, but those who can most effectively integrate the unique skills of both human and machine. The growing significance of human-machine teaming is already widely acknowledged but this has so far been discussed from a technology-centric perspective. This HA project represents the missing part of the puzzle.

USA - A crack in a bridge over the Mississippi River has stranded more than 700 barges, cutting off the biggest route for US agricultural exports when the critical waterway is at its busiest. The route is shut near Memphis while the Tennessee Department of Transportation inspects a large crack in a highway bridge spanning the river, according to the US Coast Guard. A queue has expanded to 47 vessels and 771 barges, with 430 of those heading north and the rest going south, Petty Officer Carlos Galarza of the Coast Guard’s 8th District said Thursday afternoon by email. The Mississippi River is the main artery for US crop exports, with covered barges full of grain and soy floating to terminals along the Gulf of Mexico, while crude oil as well as imported steel also travel through sections of the waterway. Any sustained outage would disrupt shipments out of the Gulf. Corn futures tumbled by the most allowed under CME Group rules partly on speculation that exports would back up.

USA - President Biden spoke today with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He condemned the rocket attacks by Hamas and other terrorist groups, including against Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He conveyed his unwavering support for Israel’s security and for Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself and its people, while protecting civilians. He also conveyed the United States’ encouragement of a pathway toward restoring a sustainable calm. He shared his conviction that Jerusalem, a city of such importance to people of faith from around the world, must be a place of peace. He updated the Prime Minister on the United States’ diplomatic engagement with regional countries, including Egypt, Jordan, and Qatar, as well as with Palestinian officials. The two leaders agreed to maintain the close consultation between their teams, which has included consistent engagement by their respective foreign ministers, defense ministers, chiefs of defense, and national security advisors, and to stay in touch personally in the days ahead.

CHINA - The editor of China's hawkish Communist Party newspaper has insisted the United States "will be defeated" if it engages in combat with the nation in its adjacent waters. Hu Xijin, Global Times editor-in-chief, called for more expansion of China's military in order to counter Washington's strategy of containment and force a change in attitude among key US partners. Wednesday's editorial came a day after Tokyo began hosting US, French and Australian troops for the first such joint military exercises on Japanese soil. The drills will last through next Monday, when their respective navies will train in the East China Sea. "The purpose of the exercise is to pressure China and send a signal that the US and Japan could bring more allies together to contain China," Hu wrote, adding that he felt the administration of President Joe Biden has been testing China's response to the multilateral defense strategy.

USA - It's the size of a dust mite. Electronics are getting imperceptibly small, opening new avenues for medical technology to place advanced monitoring and treatment devices inside our bodies. And Columbia University engineers just demonstrated a new and revolutionary version of this, creating the world's smallest single-chip system ever developed, according to a recent study published in the journal Science Advances.

GERMANY - The German government is seizing on the struggle against the Covid-19 pandemic to help German biotech companies become world champions in the mRNA future technology. BioNTech, located in Mainz, is the main beneficiary. Under pressure from Berlin, and against resistance from Paris, the company has been given a de facto monopoly for supplying the EU in the future, while a French competitor was left out in the cold. Because the BioNTech vaccine is several times more expensive than those of other companies, poorer EU-member states in East and Southeast Europe must now pay huge sums to the German company. Whereas other companies are supplying vaccines at their cost prices during the acute phase of the pandemic, BioNTech has made a net profit of €1.13 billion during the first quarter of 2021 alone. It is now using this profit to expand - aided by the fact that Berlin is blocking vaccine patent waivers. With the rise of BioNTech, Germany can hope to achieve a leading position as a biotech center. It is suggested that Germany is already "one of the world's centers of gravity" for mRNA technology.

USA - Our enemies now understand that you can completely paralyze America by taking out just a handful of pipelines. Even though all of us knew that any gasoline shortages were just going to be temporary, the shut down of the Colonial Pipeline caused a frenzied wave of “panic buying” all along the east coast. But if something caused the gasoline to stop flowing for a longer period of time, not being able to fill up our vehicles would be among the least of our problems.

ISRAEL - “The Latest” is an Associated Press feature which provides the day’s collection of brief updates about a large, developing event. Today’s “The Latest: Israeli Aircraft Strike Another Building in Gaza” is a collection of all that is wrong with the news agency’s coverage of Hamas attacks on Israel, and Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes. The roundup begins with five paragraphs on the Israeli airstrike overnight on a nine-storey building in Gaza City. While it notes that the building “houses residential apartments, medical production companies and a dental clinic,” it omits the fact that the army identified it as the location of a Hamas control center, which is the reason why Israel hit that particular building.

Newly discovered Wi-Fi security vulnerabilities collectively known as FragAttacks (fragmentation and aggregation attacks) are impacting all Wi-Fi devices (including computers, smartphones, and smart devices) going back as far as 1997. Three of these bugs are Wi-Fi 802.11 standard design flaws in the frame aggregation and frame fragmentation functionalities affecting most devices, while others are programing mistakes in Wi-Fi products. Attackers abusing these design and implementation flaws have to be in the Wi-Fi range of targeted devices to steal sensitive user data and execute malicious code following successful exploitation, potentially leading to full device takeover.