USA - The US president is meeting G7 nations in London this week and is expected to call for a global minimum tax rate on corporate profits. The European Union could end up with an extra €50 billion ($61 billion) in its pockets if Joe Biden’s plan for a 15 percent global corporate tax rate gets the green light from other nations, according to the newly-established EU Tax Observatory group. Meanwhile, the EU Tax Observatory believes that enforcing the minimal rate will also endow other countries, such as the United Kingdom, with additional cash injections. The group estimates that London will get an extra €200 million ($245 million) from British multinational BP alone, while some €400 million would be added from Barclays bank. Biden is expected to push for the 15 percent proposal – or even higher - during Friday's meeting with the G7 economies. For the United States, the adoption of an internationally-accepted corporate tax target would mark a big win...The scenario is still expected to meet serious resistance from countries with low corporate tax rates, including Ireland, where it currently sits at just 12.5 percent.

CHINA - China has threatened the United States with an "intense nuclear showdown" as it ramps up its atomic program. The Chinese Communist Party's mouthpiece newspaper launched a blistering attack on the West, saying China’s nuclear plan was now vital to the country’s "strategic deterrence" against the US. Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times, said "the number of China's nuclear warheads must reach the quantity that makes US elites shiver". "We must be prepared for an intense showdown between China and the US," Hu wrote in a chilling op-ed for the Chinese state-run newspaper. "In that scenario, a large number of Dongfeng-41, and JL-2 and JL-3 (both intercontinental-range submarine-launched ballistic missiles) will form the pillar of our strategic will.

USA - Joe Biden has threatened tariffs on a number of EU states unless the bloc agrees to his new tax demands. The US President has given the EU a six-month ultimatum to negotiate his global corporate tax proposals or face whopping 25 percent retaliatory tariffs on goods. The move would see tariffs on $2 billion (€1.6 billion - £1.4 billion) worth of goods from six countries, including Spain, Italy and Austria, over their tech taxes. The ultimatum aims at upping pressure on the EU to agree to a 15 percent global tax on big corporations which would replace the bloc's taxes on US digital giants such as Amazon and Google. US Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the tariffs would be suspended for 180 days to give the bloc and the non-EU countries time to complete negotiations. The threat seems to be working as the G7 wealthy democracies are expected to endorse Washington's proposal for an ambitious global corporate minimum tax when their leaders meet later this week in Britain.

USA - With the public asking more questions about UFOs, more officials appear willing to answer them. “There are a lot more sightings than have been made public,” John Ratcliffe, the former director of national intelligence, told Fox News in March. Quite a few of them, he said, “are difficult to explain.” John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, said in a podcast last year that some of the unexplained sightings might be “some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.” The lead-up to the report’s expected release has seen quite a bit of mainstream media attention in recent weeks, including a 13,000-word article in The New Yorker in April, and a segment on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” Mr Rubio told “60 Minutes” that there should be a process by which reports of UFOs are “cataloged and constantly analyzed, until we get some answers.”

USA - Americans convinced they can spot fake news are actually more likely to be conned by it, according to a new study that also found a whopping 9 out of 10 respondents believed their ability to spot fake news was top-notch. Participants in the study were shown Facebook news headlines and asked to evaluate their ability to suss out fake news. Of the 8,285 participants, those more likely to believe in their ability to spot fakes were also more likely to visit websites “known to spread false or misleading news,” according to Ben Lyons, the author of the study, which was published Monday – and the most likely to be overconfident in their misinformation-busting abilities. Worse, the “overconfident respondents” were also “less able to distinguish between true and false claims about current events and report higher willingness to share false content, especially when it align[ed] with their political leanings,” Lyons, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Utah, revealed.

USA - We already know that Social Security will be dealing with tough challenges in just a few years if something truly significant doesn’t change, and soon. We also know that last year’s pandemic probably made things much worse. In fact, this year the “new normal” for Social Security could turn any cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for next year into an empty gesture. Overall, the bureaucrats who should be working around the clock to come up with real solutions for retirement savers are giving us the impression that… “Benefits are going to get cut. Deal with it.” This is not comforting.

USA - Meat production in the US is climbing back toward normal levels, with the government pressing other companies to boost output while JBS SA’s meat plants recover from last weekend’s cyberattack. More of JBS’s beef plants were running at least one shift Thursday. Still, even as the facilities return to at least partial operation, workers returning to a meat-processing plant in Texas on Wednesday afternoon were told to be ready to do things by hand. With everything from knife sharpening to production-line speed controls relying on automation, coming back from a cyberattack that forced the world’s largest meat producer to halt operations across the globe is set to be a bumpy ride. Cattle-slaughtering had essentially returned to normal, with 120,000 head slaughtered Thursday, just 1,000 less than a week earlier, according to the US Agriculture Department.

RUSSIA - Russia’s sovereign wealth fund will take a punt on gold and slash $40 billion of US currency entirely out of its investment portfolio amid growing tensions with Washington, the country’s finance minister announced on Thursday. Anton Siluanov said that the National Wealth Fund would reduce its share of dollars to zero within the next month. Speaking as part of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, he said that the process would be “fast enough” and would mirror a similar move by the country’s central bank to reduce assets held in American currency. Under the plans, the proportion of dollars in the fund will fall from 35% to zero, while assets held in euro and the Chinese yuan will increase to 40% and 30%, respectively. The share of the British pound will halve, from 10% to 5%, while the investment vehicle will buy into gold for the first time, with 20% of its assets to be hedged on the precious metal.

AUSTRALIA - A former Australian Major General has warned of a "very big war" between the US and China in the event that Beijing decides to take back Taiwan by force. He also conceded that Washington is "not convinced" that it could win any such military conflict and that Australia could face "collateral attacks" from China. Speculation has been rife about China's intentions towards Taipei, with one US Navy officer predicting Beijing could annex Taiwan within the next six years. Those fears have been stoked by China's increasingly aggressive behaviour towards its neighbour, coupled with ever more belligerent rhetoric. In April, China's Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng insisted that Beijing "will never allow Taiwan to be independent. In order to do it they have to take down Guam… and they have to negate US bases in Japan. To me that sounds like a very big war."

USA - You probably don’t need me to tell you that society is coming apart at the seams all around us. If you live in a major city, you can just walk outside and watch it happen right in front of you. Prior to 2020, social decay was steadily eating away at our society, but once the pandemic hit many of our societal problems greatly accelerated. Even while the Federal Reserve was making sure that wealthy Wall Street investors were being taken care of well, poverty and homelessness were absolutely exploding in major cities all over the nation. Meanwhile, an increasing number of Americans have been turning to drugs to cope with their problems, and this has particularly been true in our urban areas.

ISRAEL - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief political rival formally declared Wednesday night that he had put together a governing coalition with sufficient parliamentary backing to dislodge Netanyahu, the country’s longest-serving leader. The news amounted to a political earthquake in Israel, where the 71-year-old prime minister has been a commanding political presence for a generation, but the new government will not be sworn in until later this month, which could mean a tense interlude for the country.

MIDDLE EAST - The Palestinian people are fed up, and are refusing to have their capabilities shackled by the decisions of an aging president, while seeing their land usurped even as the same president's "sacred" security cooperation with the Israeli occupation authorities continues. Thousands of Palestinian individuals have thus signed a petition, the contents of which reflects the conscience of the people. The text is as follows: “We, the undersigned Palestinian intellectuals, academics and public figures, address the Palestinian people including all of its active and struggling forces with this petition in order to strip what remains of the legitimacy of President Mahmoud Abbas, and demand his resignation or immediate dismissal from all his leadership positions: the Presidency of the Palestinian Authority, the presidency of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and the presidency of the Fatah movement. We call on them to support the national campaign to rebuild the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and the election of an alternative leadership for the Palestinian people.”

USA - There is no question that large corporations absolutely dominate our society today. They control what we eat, they control what we watch on television, they own most of the stores that we shop at, they provide the energy that our nation depends upon, and they make almost all of the products that we use. Tens of millions of Americans make a living by serving these colossal firms, and at this point some of the biggest corporations are larger than many small countries. But of course the corporations aren’t the top of the food chain. They have owners, and there are 3 giant financial companies that the global elite use to control 88 percent of the corporations that are currently listed on the S&P 500.

USA - If there are things that you need to stock up on, you should do it right away. For weeks, I have been writing articles about the rampant inflation that we are witnessing right now. We haven’t seen anything like this since the Jimmy Carter era of the 1970s, and many are warning that it is going to get even worse in the months ahead. So that means that prices are never going to be lower than they are at this moment. Even more importantly, we are also being warned that the widespread shortages in our economy are about to get even worse. In fact, the largest meatpacker in the entire world was just hit by a cyberattack, and this has forced it to stop activity “at its plants in several US states”…

UK - British prime minister Boris Johnson was allowed marry Carrie Symonds, also Catholic, in Westminster Cathedral on Saturday as his two previous marriages were not seen as valid by the Catholic Church. The Archdiocese of Westminster said that, while they did not comment on specific situations, “in general terms, a baptised Catholic who has contracted a marriage recognised in civil law but without observing the requirements of Catholic canon law is not recognised as validly married in the eyes of the Catholic Church.” Mr Johnson, who is Britain’s first Catholic prime minister, and his wife “are both parishioners of the Westminster Cathedral parish and baptised Catholics,” an archdiocese spokesperson said, and that “all necessary steps were taken, in both Church and civil law, and all formalities completed before the wedding.” Mr Johnson had been married twice before with his first marriage annulled and the second ending in divorce. Neither marriage took place in a Catholic setting. Ms Symonds is a practising Catholic and their son Wilfred, born in April 2020, was baptised in the Catholic Church.