USA - Hurricane Dorian caused limited damage in the northern Caribbean as it left the region Wednesday night, setting its sights on the US mainland as it threatened to grow into a dangerous Category 3 storm. Power outages and flooding were reported across the US Virgin Islands, the British Virgin Islands and the Puerto Rican islands of Vieques and Culebra after Dorian hit St Thomas as a Category 1 storm. The Hurricane Center said the storm could grow into a dangerous Category 3 storm as it pushes northwest in the general direction of Florida. Dennis Feltgen, a Hurricane Center meteorologist in Miami, said Dorian may grow in size and could land anywhere from South Florida to South Carolina on Sunday or Monday.

UK - What did they expect? The great and the good, the men and women we empower with our votes to carry out a sacred duty to enact the will of the people? What did they expect? Our MPs who have again and again stood in the way of a democratically mandated instruction to leave the European Union. What did they expect? The we-know-better than you 'experts', the London political elite who see all those who voted for Brexit as the enemy. They talk of democracy but since losing the vote on 23 June 2016 this rabble of disrespectful MPs have done nothing to honour the referendum result but have again and again sabotaged Brexit, and by extension sabotaged Britain. But it's now game over.

USA - In the US, corporate insiders have been selling stocks at an average rate of 600 million dollars per day during the month of August. This kind of wild selling indicates that there is a tremendous amount of fear among corporate insiders right now, and such selling would only make sense if a stock market crash is imminent. And without a doubt, we have already seen volatility return to Wall Street in a major way as our trade war with China has dramatically escalated. Many Americans are hoping that things will start to calm down and that our trade conflict with China can be resolved calmly, because if things take a bad turn many analysts are warning that we could soon be facing the worst financial crisis since 2008.

MIDDLE EAST - Are we about to see World War 3 erupt in the Middle East? Over the past several days, Israel has attempted to prevent attacks by Iranian forces and their allies by striking targets in Syria, Gaza, Lebanon and Iraq. As you will see below, political leaders in both Lebanon and Iraq are now accusing Israel of a “declaration of war”, and Hezbollah is pledging to strike Israel back extremely hard. Of course if a full-blown war erupts between Israel and one of her neighbors, it is likely to become a multi-front war almost immediately. But at the core, this is a conflict between Israel and Iran. The Iranians have repeatedly pledged to wipe the nation of Israel off the face of the planet, and the coming “final war” is going to literally be a matter of life or death for those two nations. Both sides have been preparing for this “final war” for a very long time, and once it fully erupts the death and destruction that we will witness will be off the charts.

UK - Boris Johnson has repeatedly refused to rule out proroguing parliament to try to push through his Brexit policy. Pressed repeatedly at a press conference at the end of the G7 summit about what he would do if MPs tried to thwart his policy, the British prime minister declined to rule out shutting down parliament. “I think that this really is a matter for parliamentarians to get right ourselves,” he said. “We asked the people to vote on whether they wanted to stay in or leave the EU; they voted to leave by a big majority.” “I think people have just about had enough of this conversation, and I think they’re yearning for the moment when Brexit comes off the front pages of the national papers, and that will only happen when we come out of the EU on 31 October, and that is what I am calling on all my fellow MPs to do.”

UK - Boris Johnson has asked the attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, whether parliament can be shut down for five weeks from 9 September in what appears to be a concerted plan to stop MPs forcing a further extension to Brexit, according to leaked government correspondence. An email from senior government advisers to an adviser in No 10 – written within the last 10 days and seen by the Observer – makes clear that the prime minister has recently requested guidance on the legality of such a move, known as prorogation. The initial legal guidance given in the email is that shutting parliament may well be possible, unless action being taken in the courts to block such a move by anti-Brexit campaigners succeeds in the meantime.

GERMANY - All eyes are on eastern Germany as elections take place in Saxony and Brandenburg on Sunday, September 1st. For the first time in German history, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) could win in state elections – and make it extremely difficult for the established parties to form a government. The elections will also send shock waves to Berlin where the so-called grand coalition between Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) is already on shaky grounds. The AfD in Brandenburg is making waves over their use of campaign posters – not for the first time. For this election, the slogan is "Wende 2.0". Wende (turnaround) describes the period of political change when the Berlin Wall fell and Germany was reunified.

USA - Donald Trump escalated his attacks on China on Friday, bumping up tariffs on Chinese imports and ordering US companies to leave China. Trump’s announcements on Friday – all on Twitter – came after the president launched another blistering criticism of the Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, asking: “Who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or [China’s] Chairman Xi?” Moments after Powell warned the US central bank was facing a “new challenge” as it deals with the Trump administration’s seesaw trade policies and continuing dispute with China on Friday morning, Trump went on a Twitter rampage calling for a US boycott. “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”

USA - Reflecting a demographic shift, 109 US counties have become majority nonwhite since 2000. In the United States, the white share of the population is declining as Hispanic, Asian and black populations grow. But the shift to a more diverse nation is happening more quickly in some places than in others. As the nation’s racial and ethnic diversity grows, whites remain the single largest racial or ethnic group in the US when looking at the country as a whole, accounting for 60% of all Americans.

UK - About 2 million elderly people in the UK are on at least seven different medications and at risk of potentially life-threatening harm from interactions between the drugs or side-effects from pills that are no longer right for them. Older people are being let down by a healthcare system that is allowing medicines to do more harm than good, according to a report from Age UK. One in five prescriptions for elderly people living at home are inappropriate, it said. Care home residents take an average of at least eight medicines, with a one in 10 risk of a mistake when the drugs are prescribed or given to them. More is not always better, said the report. Doctors tend to add new tablets each time an elderly person develops another health condition, but without stopping the old ones. The more medicines elderly people take, the greater their risk of having a fall, which can put them in hospital.

USA - The Eternals will include the Marvel Cinematic Universe's first openly gay character. Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, confirmed the news during an interview with Good Morning America. "He's married, he's got a family, and that is just part of who he is," Feige said, though he did not clarify which character he was discussing. The Eternals is one of Marvel's most ambitious projects making its way to the big screen, with a star-studded cast that includes Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Richard Madden, Kit Harington, Gemma Chan, Kumail Nanjiani, Brian Tyree Henry and more. Feige's confirmation follows Disney's big presentation at D23 Expo over the weekend, where Marvel announced additional cast members joining The Eternals and revealed concept art previewing the ensemble's superhero looks in the film.

ISRAEL - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday ordered his top defense aides to brief chief political rival Benny Gantz of the Blue and White party on security developments, an extremely rare move reflecting threats of war on multiple fronts. The premier’s military secretary Avi Blut and National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat were told to update Gantz, a former IDF chief of staff, the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement.

GERMANY - German business confidence has fallen for a fifth consecutive month and hit a nearly seven-year low, a closely watched survey found Monday — adding to mounting worries that Europe’s biggest economy is headed for a recession. The Ifo institute said its monthly confidence index declined to 94.3 points in August from 95.8 in July. Managers’ views of the current situation and the outlook for the next six months both worsened. It was the lowest reading for the index since November 2012. In the manufacturing sector, “the last time that industrial companies demonstrated such pessimism was in the crisis year of 2009,” Fuest said. He added that “not a single ray of light was to be seen in any of Germany’s key industries.”

UK - British prime minister Boris Johnson has reiterated his determination that Brexit takes place on October 31st at a G7 meeting with Donald Tusk, President of the European Council. President Tusk is at the Group of Seven (G7) summit in Biarritz, France, despite the fact he does not represent a G7 country, and holds his unelected position as a European Union functionary despite the opposition of the government in his native Poland.

EUROPE - With their ‘inaccurate’ coverage of his meetings with world leaders, the US ‘fake news’ media have become the laughing stock of the G7 summit in France, US President Donald Trump has claimed. “In France we are all laughing at how knowingly inaccurate the US reporting of events and conversations at the G-7 is,” Trump tweeted on Sunday evening. “These Leaders, and many others, are getting a major case study of Fake News at it’s (sic) finest!” Starting his Sunday morning routine by slamming the mainstream media’s ‘anti-Trump bias,’ the US president spent the rest of the afternoon tweeting how he and his opinions are valued, supported, and respected by the other leaders.