USA - As cities across the country are discussing defunding or disbanding their police departments, truck drivers are voicing concerns of safety. Seventy-seven percent of truck drivers say they will refuse to deliver freight to cities with defunded police departments. Truck driving is historically ranked as one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. In 2018, US Bureau of Labor Statistic reported truck driving as the most deadly job in the country. Truck drivers have spent the last year on the front line of a global pandemic and protests. Now many are fearful of what might happen if police departments disband or are defunded.

TURKEY - Turkey’s top religious official vowed over the weekend to continue Islam’s struggle “until Jerusalem is completely free” and called on the Muslim world to rally against Israel. “It is never possible for Muslims to give up on the blessed city” of Jerusalem, President of Religious Affairs Ali Erbas said in Turkish-language comments carried by T24 media and translated by the Jerusalem Post. According to Erbas, Jerusalem has “universal value” for the Islamic world. His views echo those of Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu who recently said, “The ummah [Islamic community] will never give up on a sovereign Palestinian state with Quds al-Sharif as its capital.” Erbas’ Twitter background features a photo of Jerusalem, not Mecca, the Post noted, despite the fact that Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the Quran. Turkey has a long history of courting the Hamas terror group and has sought to expand its role in Palestinian society.

INDIA - India has been urged to hit China where it hurts as tensions between the two Asian superpowers threaten to boil over amid a fierce standoff. Urgent talks between both sides have been scheduled for this week over the foreboding border row in eastern Ladakh. Last week a senior source in the Indian Army confirmed that Chinese troops had occupied more than 60 sq km of Indian territory in eastern Ladakh. The move marked a dramatic escalation in tensions between New Delhi and Beijing and was seen as a direct hit by China at Modi's cozying up to the United States. Up to 12,000 Chinese soldiers crossed the border from China into India last month, according to The Daily Telegraph. Now, ahead of this week's crunch talks, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been urged to fight his corner in the dispute. Writing for The Print, an Indian news website, Rajesh Rajogopalan urged Mr Modi to wake up to China's "salami-slicing tactics" of grabbing territory from the Indians inch by inch.

USA - The era of the US dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” as the world’s primary reserve currency is coming to an end. Then French Finance Minister Valery Giscard d’Estaing coined that phrase in the 1960s largely out of frustration, bemoaning a US that drew freely on the rest of the world to support its over-extended standard of living. For almost 60 years, the world complained but did nothing about it. Those days are over.

Already stressed by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, US living standards are about to be squeezed as never before. At the same time, the world is having serious doubts about the once widely accepted presumption of American exceptionalism. Currencies set the equilibrium between these two forces — domestic economic fundamentals and foreign perceptions of a nation’s strength or weakness. The balance is shifting, and a crash in the dollar could well be in the offing.

USA - Officers under General Lee are seen today as ‘traitors’ and ‘white supremacists,’ part of an unfolding narrative in the US that sees the current police brutality and racism as linked to the Civil War. As statues of the Confederates have been toppled – and calls to rename US military bases that are named after Confederate generals are pushed forward – US President Donald Trump waded in on Wednesday, arguing that Fort Hood or Fort Bragg are part of America’s history and heritage. “These are traitors” were the replies on social media. These American generals, whose names adorn bases and who were generally not seen as traitors either in the time of Lincoln or after, are now seen as traitors

...There is another question that may loom over all this. What about the minorities, nonwhites, who served the Confederacy? If all the Confederates were traitors, it might be good to look at the history of some Jewish Confederates, such as Judah Benjamin, a politician and member of Jefferson Davis’s cabinet.

TAIWAN - Taiwan has fired missiles off its coastline as it boosts the island’s defence against the increasingly aggressive China. The test is understood to have taken place off the coast of the easterly Taitung county and at the Jiupeng military base in the southernmost county of Pinging on Thursday. Taiwan is an island off the south-east coast of China which is independent from the superpower. Taiwan’s defence ministry said it was part of a four-day missile test and other weapons would follow a similar drill in the coming days. But, it did not reveal what missiles were tested or whether future tests would be carried out between Friday and Tuesday. The developer of the missiles, National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, also declined to name the missiles, saying the test was in line with the defence ministry’s plan to develop the island’s own weapons.

TAIWAN - The South China Morning Post (SCMP) is reporting that Taiwan has test-fired missiles off its eastern and southern coasts as the self-ruled island increases its defense capabilities against mainland China. The tests were held near Taiwan's eastern county of Taitung and the Jiupeng military base in the southern part of the island on Thursday night. Local media said the surface-to-air missiles were part of an interceptor system that would shield the island from a guided-missile attack by China.

GAZA - How can Hamas and its supporters around the world continue to complain about poverty and misery when new shopping malls and supermarkets filled with clothes, and various types of luxury goods are being opened every few weeks in the Gaza Strip? These images are also an embarrassment to anti-Israel propagandists seeking to portray a completely different reality of life in the Gaza Strip as part of their campaign to delegitimize Israel and demonize Jews by holding them fully responsible for the "suffering" of Palestinians.

USA - Blackouts that hit millions of Californians in 2019 could be doubly calamitous this year with tech giants Google, Twitter Inc and Facebook Inc among the many companies keeping offices closed until the fall or later in response to the global Covid-19 pandemic. If utilities cut power again, home offices set up during the pandemic could go dark and stay dark for days, and they’ll have no corporate offices to flee to for power. In October 2019, more than 3 million people were affected by a series of rolling blackouts over more than a week as PG&E Corp and Edison International tried to prevent live wires from sparking wildfires.

VATICAN - Pope Francis urged Christians Saturday to live in hope despite the many serious troubles and sorrows that plague our world. “Bad news fills the pages of newspapers, websites and television screens, to the point that evil seems to reign supreme. But that is not the case,” the pope said in his annual message for the World Day of the Poor. “To be sure, malice and violence, abuse and corruption abound,” he said, “but life is interwoven too with acts of respect and generosity that not only compensate for evil, but inspire us to take an extra step and fill our hearts with hope.”

Last week, Francis reached out to Americans in the midst of riots and looting, urging all to work toward national reconciliation while insisting that violence is “self-destructive and self-defeating.” “I have witnessed with great concern the disturbing social unrest in your nation in these past days, following the tragic death of Mr George Floyd,” Francis said.

USA - The US financial system could be on the cusp of calamity. This time, we might not be able to save it. After months of living with the coronavirus pandemic, American citizens are well aware of the toll it has taken on the economy: broken supply chains, record unemployment, failing small businesses. All of these factors are serious and could mire the United States in a deep, prolonged recession. But there’s another threat to the economy, too. It lurks on the balance sheets of the big banks, and it could be cataclysmic. Imagine if, in addition to all the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, you woke up one morning to find that the financial sector had collapsed. You may think that such a crisis is unlikely, with memories of the 2008 crash still so fresh. But banks learned few lessons from that calamity, and new laws intended to keep them from taking on too much risk have failed to do so. As a result, we could be on the precipice of another crash, one different from 2008 less in kind than in degree. This one could be worse.

AUSTRALIA - Australia has hit back at threats from China to punish Australia for daring to question the origin of the coronavirus, after Beijing vowed to wipe £20 billion off the Australian economy. China has told its students to avoid studying in Australia - putting at risk Australia's fourth-largest export industry, international education, worth 38 billion Australian dollars (£20 billion) annually. Ties between China and Australia have worsened after Australia called for an inquiry into the origin and spread of the coronavirus. The World Health Assembly last month voted to back a review into the pandemic after lobbying by Australia and the EU. This decision infuriated Beijing, which retaliated by banning Australian beef imports and imposing 80 percent tariffs on Australian barley. China followed this up by warning last week for Chinese tourists to avoid Australia.

UK - Abortions in England and Wales last year were at their highest number since the 1967 Abortion Act was introduced. Of the 209,519 terminated pregnancies in the two countries in 2019, 207,384 were for women resident there, the Department of Health confirmed yesterday. Both the total number and the number for women living in England and Wales have risen to the highest since the Act was brought in more than five decades ago.

POLAND - Andrzej Duda has vowed to “defend children from LGBT ideology” if he wins a second term at presidential elections in Poland later this month. The Polish president promised to ban the propagation of LGBT ideology in public institutions and the promotion of homosexuality in schools. “It is a foreign ideology. There is no consent for this phenomenon to happen in our country in any way.” Duda said, stressing that “parents are responsible for the sexual education of their children”. On Wednesday, he unveiled a ‘Family Charter’ of proposals which includes pledges to preserve and expand popular schemes subsidising pensioners and families who have children. The Law and Justice (PiS) party politician promised to “protect the interests of the family” from dangers such as pornography and to “defend the institution of marriage”, stressing that the nuclear family is rooted in Polish tradition and is the institution on which society is built.

UNITED NATIONS - The world has entered a critical period, as depression unfolds, a virus pandemic rages, socio-economic chaos will flourish to unmanageable levels for governments and central banks. UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, warned Tuesday that the world is on the brink of the worst food crisis ever witnessed in the post-World War II era. Guterres said the virus pandemic could push more than 50 million into instant poverty, further saying countries must act now to shore up food security or risk imminent crisis: