USA - Representative Ralph Abraham (Republican for Louisiana) released a television ad Thursday, charging, as a doctor, that “there are only two genders.” In contrast, Louisiana Democrat Governor John Bel Edwards pushed for transgender bathrooms in 2016. Abraham’s gubernatorial campaign, touting his populist and conservative credentials, which includes believing that life begins at conception, government is too big, the Second Amendment is “self-explanatory,” and that, “as a doctor,” he is certain that “there are only two genders.” Three years ago, Governor Edwards issued an executive order that mandated state contractors accommodate employees who identify another gender other than their biological sex, which could have delayed vital infrastructure projects if contractors did not comply with the order.

USA - Just when things seemed to be settling down a little bit, our conflict with China has suddenly escalated to a dangerous new phase. This is not simply just a “trade war” any longer, and our relationship with China will never be the same again. As you will see below, President Trump just referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as our “enemy”, and this is something that the Chinese are going to take extremely seriously.

USA - New York Times Executive Editor, Dean Baquet, held an inter-office staff meeting last week to clarify the paper’s policy for reporting news relating to President Trump. This followed backlash from Democrats when the Times ran a front-page headline that read “Trump Urges Unity vs Racism”. The problem was this did not cast the President in a negative light – so the paper quickly changed the headline to read “Assailing Hate But Not Guns”. During the meeting, Baquet said that the original headline was an oversight and instructed everyone to be alert to ways to shift the anti-Trump-news narrative from Russia Collusion to racism. He said, “…race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story.”

BRAZIL - Seemingly everybody has heard about the fires burning in the Amazon, creating smoke and haze events in cities as far away as Sao Paulo. The question is, who is spreading the alarm and is it real or fake? The hysteria over Brazil’s “lungs of the earth” has even become a central contention at the G7 meeting in Europe, with global leaders calling for intervention to save the Amazon jungle. The problem is that most pictures being circulated on social media are NOT of this year’s fires at all! Photos are being dragged out from fires dating back to 1989 and presented as if they were taken in 2019. This is fake news and blatant disinformation at its worst, but the world’s news media is using it to fan the fires of outrage in an attempt to achieve a political outcome, namely, Sustainable Development. In particular, the Amazon rain forest is seen as vital to countering global warming. Apparently fire and smoke is seen as proof of global warming.

AFRICA - Forest fires are tearing through the Amazon rainforest, prompting worldwide protests and demands for action to protect the “lungs of the world.” But, away from the spotlight, the Brazilian fires are dwarfed by blazes in Africa. As protesters in London chanted “Hey hey, ho ho, Bolsonaro’s got to go!” two even bigger blazes burned unnoticed in Africa. Over Thursday and Friday, more fires were recorded in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo than in Brazil, Bloomberg reported, citing NASA satellite data. In those two days alone, 6,902 fires were recorded in Angola and 3,395 in the DRC. 2,127 were spotted in Brazil in the same period. In Africa, it’s more difficult to know what’s happening, as next to no news reports on the fires in Angola and the DRC have surfaced in the west.

UK - The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) has been forced to into a humiliating U-turn after a post on their website appeared to suggest universal benefits claimants should work as strippers. The post which made the provocative suggestion has since been deleted. Amber Rudd is the Secretary responsible for the department… As reported by the Daily Mirror, a section entitled “work you can do”, listed “striptease artist” as part of a list of “elementary services occupations”. It explained “dances in adult entertainment establishments” was an options as it required “no formal academic” skills. It added: “Training is typically received on-the-job” for a role which would typically take 42 hours a week and earn the worker £350. The website also suggests becoming a fortune teller and three different jobs working in bingo. A DWP spokesman said: “This is inappropriate and we will immediately review this to determine why it is mistakenly listed.”

USA -We are at war with the mosquito. A swarming and consuming army of 110 trillion enemy mosquitoes patrols every inch of the globe save Antarctica, Iceland, the Seychelles, and a handful of French Polynesian micro-islands. Since 2000, the annual average number of human deaths caused by the mosquito has hovered around 2 million. We come in a distant second at 475,000, followed by snakes (50,000), dogs and sand flies (25,000 each), the tsetse fly, and the assassin or kissing bug (10,000 each). The fierce killers of lore and Hollywood celebrity appear much further down our list. The crocodile is ranked #10 with 1,000 annual deaths. Next on the list are hippos with 500, and elephants and lions with 100 fatalities each. The much-slandered shark and wolf share the #15 position, killing an average of ten people per annum. The mosquito has killed more people than any other cause of death in human history.

UK - A jubilant Boris Johnson won a surprise Brexit boost yesterday from Emmanuel Macron. The French President suggested the EU Withdrawal Agreement could after all be amended to allow the UK to quit the bloc with a deal. The concession saw the Prime Minister raise his hands in the air in apparent triumph on his return to Downing Street from his talks in Paris.

USA - President Donald Trump is expected to unleash multibillion dollar tariffs on the European Union’s imports, an EU chief has warned. The European Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmstrom has warned the bloc that they need to prepare themselves for Trump’s sanctions as trade tensions continue. Products including whisky, cheese and olives, could be affected following a dispute over aircraft subsidies. The European company Airbus attacked the US’s Boeing ‘Dreamliner’ programme as only being possible due to illegal subsidies. Last month, Mr Trump tweeted: “The World Trade Organisation finds that the European Union subsidies to Airbus has adversely impacted the United States, which will now put tariffs on $11 billion of EU products. The EU has taken advantage of the US on trade for many years. It will soon stop.” The Trump administration has now claimed that the estimated damage to Boeing following the ‘illegal subsidies of Airbus’ is $11 billion.

EUROPE - Like an annual holiday gathering where the main goal is to get through the day without a family explosion, one of France’s main objectives as host of this weekend’s Group of Seven summit is to minimize the chances that President Trump will blow it up. Subjects on which to tread lightly include some of the biggest problems the world’s major economies are facing – including trade, the system of international rules that has ordered the democratic world for decades and climate change, according to US and other G-7 officials.

USA - US President Donald Trump is about to return to Europe. He sets off on Friday for the G-7 summit in France and is back again at the end of August for a trip to Poland to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II. Although he'll be right next door, Trump has made no moves to visit German Chancellor Angela Merkel either on this trip or in the foreseeable future. In over two years as president, Trump has only met Merkel in Germany once — at the 2017 G-20 summit in Hamburg — and never as her guest in Berlin.

ITALY - Matteo Salvini slipped the rosary out of his pocket right before Premier Giuseppe Conte began his speech to Parliament. He took it out and kissed it again midway through the address, just as Conte began admonishing him for exploiting his Catholic faith for political ends. The interior minister’s blatant brandishing of Catholic symbols has gone down as one of the most significant exchanges of his successful bid to topple Conte’s 14-month-old government, which collapsed Tuesday after Salvini’s League party withdrew its support. While right-wing populists in the US and Europe have increasingly invoked their Christian roots to justify policies against Muslims and other migrants, Salvini’s gestures and rhetoric have carried particular resonance here since they directly challenge those of Italy’s other major figure: Pope Francis. Francis has made caring for migrants a hallmark of his papacy…

USA - The US ambitions have put the world on the brink of a new arms race that can easily spiral out of control, warned the Russian envoy to the UN. Washington responded by blaming Moscow for the INF treaty’s collapse. “Are you aware of the fact that all of us have found ourselves just one step away from an uncontrolled arms race, because of the US geopolitical ambitions?” Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN, said at the emergency session of the Security Council that Moscow and Beijing convened on Thursday, in the wake of the US missile tests. Washington apparently planned to leave Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty long before announcing its withdrawal from the 1987 agreement back in February, Polyanskiy added, since this is the only way it could have tested a new ground-launched cruise missile that violated the accord mere weeks after it officially expired.

USA - Since cannibalism is found throughout the animal kingdom and therefore is something natural, perhaps it is time for humans to rethink the “ultimate taboo” against eating human flesh, Newsweek proposes in an article Wednesday. There is nothing necessarily unethical or unreasonable about eating human flesh, declare psychologists Jared Piazza and Neil McLatchie of Lancaster University, but careful reasoning over the merits of cannibalism is often “overridden by our feelings of repulsion and disgust.” While not going so far as to recommend cannibalism, saying “there is no need to overcome our repulsion for the foreseeable future,” the two authors suggest that humans could master their aversion for human flesh if they needed to.

USA - From ‘felon’ to ‘justice-involved person’... Amid a rising tide of crime, inequality, and literal human waste, San Francisco, California has chosen to sanitize – language. Felons, offenders and addicts will now have to be called new, more politically correct names. The new “person-first” language guidelines were recently introduced by the city’s Board of Supervisors, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. From now on, a convicted felon released from jail will be called a “justice-involved person” or a “returning resident.” A juvenile delinquent will now be delicately referred to as a “young person impacted by the juvenile justice system.” A drug addict will be called “a person with a history of substance use,” while someone out on parole will be called a “person under supervision.”