UK - Britain’s economy shrank by a record 20.4% in April as the first full month of the coronavirus lockdown triggered an economic crash three times greater than the 2008 financial crisis. Revealing the scale of the downturn, the official figures for gross domestic product (GDP) from the Office for National Statistics showed no area of the economy was left unscathed as the government imposed tight controls on business and social life to limit the spread of the disease.

EUROPE - The Eurozone may be facing a devastating crisis as coronavirus has unearthed ignored and significant flaws in the system ultimately threatening its future use in Europe, claimed Lord Michael Howard. Mr Howard claimed tensions were flaring up in the Eurozone as the coronavirus crisis showed clear wealth differences. Lord Howard said: "Coronavirus has exposed the fundamental flaw in the whole concept of the Euro and the Eurozone. I don't think you can have a single currency without a single Government. Single currency might work well when you have large scale transfer payments from those parts of the currency zone that are prosperous to those that are less prosperous. The sort of thing that happens within a country, the Eurozone is not a country and it has a single currency." Lord Howard explained the tension building in countries that use the Euro due to the wealth differences.

UK - Brexiteer Richard Tice argued the EU is panicking at the possibility of Britain prospering after cutting ties with the bloc. Brexit Party Chairman and former MEP Richard Tice claimed there were many benefits of Brexit for Britain that the EU is petrified of. During an interview with Express.co.uk, Mr Tice said if Britain becomes a success story it could spell trouble for the European Union. He said other countries will look at Britain as an example and may question whether they want to remain a member of the bloc.

VATICAN - It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, so the gospels say. What that might mean for the inhabitants of the Vatican – where the apostolic estate is worth as much as $15 billion (£11.9 billion) – is unclear, although the Pope insists the Holy See’s treasures belong to humanity. Coinciding with efforts to shed more light on the Vatican’s opaque finances following a real estate scandal last year, Pope Francis is lifting the lid on vast sums of wealth held in a secretive investment vehicle based in Finsbury Circus, in the City of London. British Grolux Investments – whose ties to the Vatican were obscure until a few years ago – has built up a network of prime London properties using cash handed over by Italy’s fascist dictator Mussolini…

USA - The debt of the federal government topped $26 trillion for the first time on Tuesday, when it climbed from $25,960,547,920,986.11 to $26,003,751,512,344.91, according to data released today by the Treasury Department. Only 35 days had elapsed from when the debt topped that $25-trillion threshold on May 5 to yesterday, when it topped $26 trillion for the first time.

USA - 2020 has been quite a year so far. It has been one nightmare after another, and yet the economic optimists continue to insist that economic activity will soon snap back to normal levels somehow. So the economic optimists aren’t really alarmed by the fact that the core areas of our major cities have been torched, gutted and looted by rioters, because they assume that all of this violence is just a temporary phenomenon and that any damage that has been done can be repaired.

USA - Mass looting throughout the nation. Police precincts burned to the ground. Murdered cops. An historic church in Lafayette Park set on fire. Video after horrifying video of innocent Americans being beaten senseless by gangs of thugs, as one political party demands: “DEFUND THE POLICE!” Everyone is saying it: I no longer recognize my country.

USA - The United States reached two million reported cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday. Though some countries are close to the one million mark, the US is the only nation to not only surpass that mark, but double it. Just before midnight on Wednesday, Johns Hopkins University's world map of coronavirus cases put the US at 2,000,464 confirmed cases. The death toll in the US is 112,924.

GERMANY - For years, Germany held these truths to be self-evident: no big budget deficits, no common European debt issuance and no European fiscal union. In the last few weeks, those principles have been revised with an alacrity that has stunned Germany’s neighbours. A country that was long ultra-cautious on Europe and wedded to balanced budgets seems to have had a Damascene conversion. Few better epitomise the shift than Jörg Kukies. a former Goldman Sachs banker, who has served as deputy finance minister for the last two years, he was one of the drivers of last month’s Franco-German proposal to raise €500 billion through common EU debt and hand it out as grants, not loans, to countries hit by coronavirus.

For Mr Kukies, the fund is a key milestone on the road to a full European fiscal union — to an EU with the powers not only to issue bonds but also raise its own revenues. “We talk a lot about European sovereignty, but you can’t expect [that] to evolve as long as fiscal union remains incomplete,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times.

USA - The city of Chicago notched a grim milestone last weekend, as 18 people were murdered on Sunday, May 31 alone, marking the deadliest day in the city since at least 1961. The University of Chicago Crime Lab's numbers do not go back further than 1961, so it's impossible to say how long it's been — if ever — since so many people were murdered in the city in one 24-hour stretch. In the entire weekend stretching from 7 pm Friday, May 29, through 11 pm Sunday, May 31, 24 people were killed in Chicago and another 85 were wounded by gunfire. The next-highest murder total for a single day in Chicago was on August 4, 1991, when 13 people were killed. "We've never seen anything like it, at all," said Max Kapustin, the senior research director at the crime lab. "... I don't even know how to put it into context. It's beyond anything that we've ever seen before."

USA - Texas has reported two consecutive days of record-breaking Covid-19 hospitalizations as the state continues to open businesses and resume activities that were temporarily shuttered due to the coronavirus. There are currently 2,056 patients sickened with Covid-19 in hospitals across the state as of early Tuesday afternoon, up from a record 1,935 patients Monday, according to updated data from the Texas Department of State Health Services. Texas was among the first states to relax its statewide stay-at-home order, allowing it to expire April 30 and some businesses to resume operations May 1.

UK - Oxford University Chancellor Lord Patten questioned protests demanding the removal of a statue honouring mining magnate Cecil Rhodes amid ongoing Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Oxford University has come under fire after students and protesters demanded the removal of a statue commemorating imperialist Cecil Rhodes. Demonstrators brought Oxford to a standstill on Tuesday as they sat down in the middle of the road urging the university to take down the statue from outside Oriel College.

AFRICA - Although Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) and Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) were not contemporaries, they both played important roles in South African history. Mandela, of course, survived imprisonment for nearly 27 years for his struggle against the apartheid regime in that country to become its president and a world-renowned figure. Rhodes was an Englishman who earned a fortune from mining diamonds (De Beers Consolidated Mines) in that country and neighboring Zimbabwe (f/k/a Rhodesia) and who served as Prime Minister in the Cape Colony. In 1903 his will established the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford University in England.

EUROPE - Since the beginning of the year, the corona crisis has monopolized news coverage to the extent that a lot of very important stories and developments either went underreported or were ignored altogether. One such example was the very surprising ruling that came out of the German Constitutional Court in early May, which challenged the actions and remit of the European Central Bank (ECB).

USA - Have the events of 2020 caused you to consider moving somewhere else? If so, you are definitely not alone. The COVID-19 pandemic, a historic economic downturn and extremely violent riots in major cities all across America are fueling a sudden surge in interest in rural and suburban properties. This represents a major shift, because prior to 2020 we had seen a tremendous boom in real estate prices in large cities such as New York, San Francisco and Seattle.

Now a lot of those buyers have become very motivated sellers, but there just isn’t a lot of demand for tremendously overpriced homes in core urban areas that are currently being torn to pieces by rioters. Meanwhile, prices for rural and suburban homes are being pushed up as an increasing number of Americans seek to get away from the major cities. In fact, one poll found that approximately 40 percent of all city dwellers “are considering leaving”…