USA - The fabric of America is crumbling. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gives the nation's infrastructure a D+ grade - that's the roads and bridges we drive on every day, the airports we use for business and vacation travel, and the schools where we send our children to learn. And newer networks critical to modern life, like broadband internet, haven't even reached many areas yet.

President Donald Trump declared at his inauguration, "We will build new roads, and highways, and bridges, and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation." At least seven times, his White House has declared that the chosen theme of a week would be infrastructure, but each time the issue has become lost in other events, often generated by the President himself.

USA - Asked to visualize what an apocalyptic end of the world might look like, few people would picture death by superbug, and yet uncontrollable, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are one of the greatest threats facing mankind. The World Health Organization warns that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has the potential to be more deadly than cancer, with the ability to kill as many as 10 million people a year. In addition to costing the world economy upwards of $100 trillion annually, left unchecked, AMR threatens to reverse all the health gains and longer lifespans that antibiotics made possible in the 20th century.

UK - The United Kingdom will send elite forces to the Gulf of Oman to protect its warships amid rising tensions with Iran, according to the Sunday Times. The planned deployment follows Thursday's attacks on two oil tankers, which the US has blamed on Iran. British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt on Friday said the UK would make its own assessment, but believed the US claim that Tehran was behind the incident. One hundred Royal Marines are expected to be deployed “within weeks” to join naval ships operating from the UK's new naval base in Bahrain, the Times reported, citing unnamed military sources. The Marines will police the strait from helicopters and smaller boats, in a “force protection” mission that has been planned for several weeks due to rising tensions with Iran, according to the newspaper.

GERMANY - NATO members in Europe should band together and sharpen their focus on short- to medium-range air defense, with Germany taking the lead in forging a coalition, analysts on the continent argue. The call by the German Council on Foreign Relations is based on the assumption that air superiority can no longer be taken for granted in future conflicts. Researchers argue that the playing field of air warfare has leveled out in recent years, with more countries deploying aircraft, missiles and drones capable of threatening NATO from the skies. “Effective defense is only possible if threats can be identified early and jointly. National systems are not sufficient,” the study says.

SWEDEN - The number of warheads has decreased over the past year, even as countries continue to modernize their nuclear forces, according to an annual assessment of global nuclear arms. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute released the SIPRI Yearbook 2019 on the current state of armaments, disarmament and international security. The report found that 13,865 warheads in existence at the start of 2019 were owned by nine nations: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. The year before hosted an arsenal of 14,465 warheads. “A key finding is that despite an overall decrease in the number of nuclear warheads in 2018, all nuclear weapon-possessing states continue to modernize their nuclear arsenals,” Jan Eliasson, SIPRI Governing Board chair ambassador and former deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, said in a news release.

FRANCE - France will declare a state of natural disaster after rain and hail storms lashed a swathe of the south-east on Saturday, devastating crops. The flash storms, which brought hailstones as big as pingpong balls to some areas, killed two people in France and Switzerland, and injured at least 10 others. The worst-hit area, the Auvergne-Rhône-Alps region, is at the heart of France’s food production and known as the “orchard of France”. Didier Guillaume, the agriculture minister, said the government would organise a “general mobilisation” and introduce emergency measures to deal with what he described as a catastrophe for farmers. Guillaume said many farmers had lost 80-100% of their crops. “It lasted 10 minutes, but 10 minutes of a hail storm… there’s a lot of damage in a 10km zone in the Drôme,” the minister added.

POLAND - Ms Misiewicz’s story is the opening to a documentary about paedophilia in the Catholic Church that has sent shock waves through the remaining faithful in one of Europe’s most devout nations. Tell No One, by brothers Tomasz and Marek Sekielski, is not the first attempt to broach the topic of abuse and cover-ups by the Church in Poland. But its impact has been unlike any other. In the five weeks since it was released on YouTube, the documentary has been viewed more than 22 million times, including 18.7 million in Poland. The country’s population is just 38 million. “For many years the Polish Church was able to say that these [cases of paedophilia in the church] happened... somewhere in the west, but in Poland nothing really happened on that scale or severity,” says Lukasz Lipinski, a political commentator. This is the biggest challenge the Church has faced since [Poland returned to democracy in] 1989.”

UK - A Chinese-owned company is making circuit boards for the top-secret next generation F-35 warplanes flown by Britain and the United States, Sky News can reveal. Exception PCB, a printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturer in Gloucestershire, south west England, produces circuit boards that "control many of the F-35's core capabilities", according to publicity material produced by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD). This includes "its engines, lighting, fuel and navigation systems", it said.

USA - The reason that Big Tech censorship seems so disjointed is because it is. Facebook gathers data about you from online and offline sources, determines all your associations, what posts you share, who you interview, who you ‘Like’ and then slaps you with a hate score. Once tagged as a ‘Hate Agent’, the designation will blacklist you for years to come. Once shared with other Big Tech companies, your blacklisting will become universal. TN Editor

USA - Much of the US is set to be hammered with days-long thunderstorms this weekend and into next week, reports AccuWeather. Heavy rain will put parts of Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas at risk of flash floods and major river flooding. Parts of the region could receive 4 to 8 inches of rain, threatening crops. Rains and floods have already affected the growing season in agricultural areas in the Plains and Midwest, and the forthcoming storms could set farmers even further back. The Northeast and southern New England will also see ongoing severe weather that ranges from dangerously strong winds to mere showers that could disrupt Father's Day plans.

MIDDLE EAST - Mysterious attacks on oil tankers near the strategic Strait of Hormuz this week show how one of the world's crucial chokepoints for global energy supplies can be easily targeted, 30 years after the US Navy and Iran were entangled in a similarly shadowy conflict called the "Tanker War." While the current tensions are nowhere near the damage done then, it underscores how dangerous the situation is and how explosive it can become.

USA – From the New York Times: The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said. In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously unreported deployment of American computer code inside Russia’s grid and other targets as a classified companion to more publicly discussed action directed at Moscow’s disinformation and hacking units around the 2018 midterm elections.

USA - President Trump late Saturday ramped up his attacks against The New York Times, accusing the newspaper of committing "a virtual act of Treason" over its report about the US increasing cyberattacks on Russia's electric power grid. "Do you believe that the Failing New York Times just did a story stating that the United States is substantially increasing Cyber Attacks on Russia," Trump tweeted. "This is a virtual act of Treason by a once great paper so desperate for a story, any story, even if bad for our Country." Trump claimed in a separate tweet that the story was "NOT TRUE!" "Anything goes with our Corrupt News Media today," he added. "They will do, or say, whatever it takes, with not even the slightest thought of consequence! These are true cowards and without doubt, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!"

USA - Donald Trump’s USA boasts the most powerful armies the world has ever seen – but today military experts warned they would NEVER beat Iran in a military conflict even as the possibility of a hot war between Iran and the USA increased as British and US servicemen raced to the aid of two oil-tankers attacked off the Iranian coast in the Gulf of Oman. Military threats and sabre-rattling rhetoric have littered dialogue between the two nations in recent months with Iran’s foreign minister warning the US just hours ago it “cannot expect to stay safe” while Donald Trump counter-warned any conflict would be “the end of Iran”.

USA - US hegemony in the post–Cold War era was like nothing the world had seen since the Roman Empire. Washington Squandered the Unipolar Moment. Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. What remains, then, are American ideas. The United States has been a unique hegemon in that it expanded its influence to establish a new world order, one dreamed of by President Woodrow Wilson and most fully conceived of by President Franklin Roosevelt.