USA - This summer, for the first time, genetically modified mosquitoes could be released in the US. On May 1, 2020, the company Oxitec received an experimental use permit from the US Environmental Protection Agency to release millions of GM mosquitoes (labeled by Oxitec as OX5034) every week over the next two years in Florida and Texas. Females of this mosquito species, Aedes aegypti, transmit dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever and Zika viruses. When these lab-bred GM males are released and mate with wild females, their female offspring die. Continual, large-scale releases of these OX5034 GM males should eventually cause the temporary collapse of a wild population. However, as vector biologists, geneticists, policy experts and bioethicists, we are concerned that current government oversight and scientific evaluation of GM mosquitoes do not ensure their responsible deployment.

USA - Left-wing Wikipedia editors are using articles about the police-involved death of George Floyd and subsequent protests to attack President Donald Trump, including creating individual articles attacking his statements and actions to get them on Wikipedia’s front page. Editors have unduly favored comments criticizing Trump or America, even uncritically repeating attacks from authoritarian governments such as China and Iran, and emphasized police violence over violence from protestors, including Antifa. Such efforts have extended to pushing claims of “far-right” involvement.

A “BlackLivesMatter” group was formed by left-wing Wikipedia editors to coordinate work on articles about police violence and race relations. Others have tried rallying editors to remove or minimize mentions of violence from Antifa’s Wikipedia page after Trump and Attorney General Barr labeled the group domestic terrorists. Despite criticism of this bias, the site continues to be relied on widely by Big Tech as an “arbiter of truth” in the era of hysteria over “fake news” online.

GERMANY - Germany wanted to tackle the eurozone debt crisis by creating a European super-state with spending and tax plans set in Brussels in 2011, unearthed reports suggest. The plan is, nonetheless, a huge turn-around move for normally fiscally cautious Germany, whose Chancellor has opposed similar proposals for years.

USA - Authoritarian regimes throughout the world are pushing narratives that appear to gloat over and celebrate that chaos unfolding in the United States. On Monday, Iran’s media pushed stories that highlighted the “collapse,” while quoting Russian sources portraying that the US is flailing about as its world order comes crashing down.

USA - The Department of Justice has announced that it is attempting to determine if there is a “coordinated command and control” behind the violent riots that have erupted all over the United States. In recent days, officials all over the country have used words such as “organized” and “organizers” to describe the orchestration that they have been witnessing in their respective cities. And all over the US, law enforcement officials have reported finding huge piles of rocks and bricks pre-staged at protest locations in advance, and scouts have often been used to direct rioters to locations where police are not present.

In addition, something that we have been hearing over and over again is that many of the people that are involved in the violence are not known by any of the locals. At this point, the evidence appears to be so overwhelming that some sort of national coordination is taking place that the Department of Justice has decided to launch a formal investigation…

USA - After a massive uprising in Minneapolis, Minnesota that subsequently spread to nearly every state in the country, significant change appears to be on the horizon. Several city council members in Minneapolis are reportedly in talks to disband the Minneapolis Police Department. This would be a revolutionary move to affect positive change and allow the city to start over with a police force designed around public safety instead of predation and extortion.

“Several of us on the council are working on finding out, what it would take to disband the MPD,” says Steve Fletcher, a member of the 13-person assembly that serves as the legislative branch of Minneapolis government, according to Alpha News Minnesota. The talks over disbanding the police department come just days after one of the most chaotic weeks in American history that left many parts of Minneapolis and other cities burned to the ground and heavily damaged. All of the chaos stemmed from a single flash point when officer Derek Chauvin put his knee on the neck of George Floyd and kept it there until he died.

USA - This wasn’t supposed to happen. Once states started to “reopen” their economies, the tsunami of unemployment was supposed to end. But instead, we continue to see Americans lose jobs at a pace that is far beyond anything we have ever seen before in all of US history. All the way back in 1982, there was a week when 695,000 Americans filed initial claims for unemployment benefits, and that all-time record was never broken until this year. Of course we have seen monster number after monster number here in 2020, and we just learned that last week another 1.877 million Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits.

Overall, a grand total of 42.6 million Americans have now lost their jobs since the pandemic began, and that makes this the largest spike in unemployment in all of US history by a very wide margin. An “economic recovery” was supposed to have started by now, but that isn’t happening. And now the horrifying riots that have erupted all over the nation are going to make things even worse.

GERMANY - Germany’s federal government and mainstream media are engaged in damage control after a report that challenges the established Corona narrative leaked from the interior ministry.

USA - Can 2020 get crazier? You bet. We’re just getting started.If you wrote a screenplay of what’s happened so far in 2020 and gave it to Hollywood producers, they’d laugh you right out of the room. “So, your movie,” they’d say, “has the president of the United States being impeached, a pandemic killing more than 100,000 Americans and 375,000 worldwide, race riots and looting in dozens of US cities, a billion animals killed in Australian wildfires, Brexit, royals abdicating, drone strikes whacking terrorists — and a wave of killer hornets to boot? Get out!” Still to come, more riots, more craziness, then the most contentious presidential election in history. Is there any way we can all just go back to bed and wake up in 2021?

USA - Moscow agrees with Donald Trump’s criticism of G7 as a “very outdated” institution that does not represent “what’s going on in the world,” but cannot see how it can be improved without China’s participation. The US president lashed out at the group of seven major industrialized nations last week as he canceled a planned G7 summit in the US. The event was scheduled for June, but Trump said he wanted an extended meeting in September, and wanted Russia to attend.

USA - There is “no clear evidence” white supremacists are participating in the rioting and looting sweeping US cities across America following the death of George Floyd, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) conceded in a New York Times report published Sunday. “Signs of any organized effort or even participation in the violence were relatively rare,” the Times acknowledged in the bottom half of its article, referring to white supremacists.

USA - Americans are abused and killed on a daily basis by increasingly militarized law enforcement, yet officers almost never see punishment, said RT’s Lee Camp, as a wave of anger and unrest over police brutality sweeps the US. “We are not actually having the real discussion about why our police are all over the place, like an infestation, and armed to the teeth and ready to kill. That is not normal, that is not how most countries do it,” Camp said, citing research showing that between 900 and 1,000 people are killed by the police in the US annually. They rarely face charges, with only one percent of police-involved killings resulting in any indictment. “When you call the police, you’re inviting the possibility of someone getting murdered into the situation. You’ve invited guys with guns who can kill with impunity.”

UK - Finally, we can say with confidence what many of us have suspected for weeks: not only is the end of the pandemic now in sight but also the people best-placed to recharge our economy have little to fear from it. Thanks to definitive figures released yesterday by Public Health England, we know that Covid-19 is not a random killer, but one that targets specific groups – namely the old and those with pre-existing conditions such as diabetes or dementia.

The statistics are astounding: those aged over 80 are fully 70 times more likely to die of the disease than those under 40, while being morbidly obese increases your risk of dying by two and a half times. And fortunately the death rate among children is very low. All of which means that the challenge now is to get the economy back to work, to get the children into schools, and our hospitals returning to the crucial diagnostic work and routine procedures that have been put on hold with devastating consequences we have yet to see.

ISRAEL - Israel’s announcement last week that an Israeli consortium would build Sorek 2, the world’s largest desalination plant, surprised many who had been watching the deal: The contract had been expected to go to a Hong Kong-based company. But that was before the Trump administration ramped up pressure on Israel to diminish its ties to China. For years, Israel has been working to dramatically expand trade with China, one of the world’s largest markets.

That push is suddenly running up against strong opposition from the White House, as the Trump administration pivots from the decades-old policy of increasing US engagement with China to treating the country as an increasingly bitter rival. The Sorek 2 deal was widely seen as a bow to pressure from the Trump administration, which is pushing Israel and other key allies to curtail trade with China.

TURKEY - Turkey, which is increasing its real estate holdings and its influence on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City, is threatening to depose the Jordanians from their role as the custodians over the Muslim holy sites on the Mount. At the same time, old rivals Jordan and Saudi Arabia could be headed toward rapprochement due to their shared animosity toward Turkey. The Jordanians and Saudis have been dueling for control of the Muslim holy sites for 100 years. The Hashemite dynasty, which now controls Jordan, ruled Saudi Arabia until 1924 and was kicked out by the House of Saud. The Hashemites lost their custodianship of Mecca and Medina and have never forgiven the Saudis for it. Jordan's current about-face may stem from its tardy realization of Erdogan's growing power in eastern Jerusalem.