USA - We are facing a corporate debt bomb that is far, far greater than what we faced in 2008, and we are being warned that this “unexploded bomb” will “amplify everything” once the financial system starts melting down. Thanks to exceedingly low interest rates, over the last decade US corporations have been able to go on the greatest corporate debt binge in history. It has been a tremendous “boom”, but it has also set the stage for a tremendous “bust”. Large corporations all over the country are now really struggling to deal with their colossal debt burdens, and defaults on the riskiest class of corporate debt are on pace to hit their highest level since 2008. Everyone can see that a major corporate debt disaster is looming, but nobody seems to know how to stop it.

USA - Urban growth and surge in irrigation fuel fight between Georgia and Florida; soybeans or oysters? Water stress, a hallmark of the American West, is spreading east. The shift is evident on Casey Cox’s family farm in Georgia’s agricultural heartland, where she turned on five giant rotating sprinklers to see her sweet corn through weeks of hot, dry weather last spring. “If we hadn’t had irrigation, our crop would have burned..."

USA - Former Kansas Secretary of State and United States Senate candidate Kris Kobach says the political left is now quite honest about their longheld intent to turn the nation blue through mass legal immigration. During an exclusive interview with host Alex Marlow on SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Daily, Kobach said in the past Democrats would only talk behind closed doors about their efforts to transform the nation state-by-state through immigration, but that today they are honest about the plan. “I think there are also many people on the left who are more politically motivated who say out loud that they want people to come into the United States who are more likely to become dependent on the welfare quickly because they want them to become Democrat voters,” Kobach said. “And that used to be something that was once whispered, they now say it out loud.”

UNITED NATIONS - The World Health Organization (WHO) is finally coming clean about the fact that oral polio vaccines, which government officials claim prevent polio infection, are actually spreading polio all throughout Africa. Nigeria, Congo, Central African Republic, and Angola are all reporting new cases of polio caused by the oral polio vaccine, which is causing children to become paralyzed and die in the name of “disease prevention.” Amazingly, the WHO is still claiming that more than 95 percent of the world’s population needs to be “immunized” in order to “eradicate polio,” even as this “public health” arm of the United Nations (UN) admits that oral polio vaccines don’t even work. According to the Independent Monitoring Board, a group established by the WHO to assess polio eradication, health authorities in Africa are already “failing badly” to achieve their goal of stopping these vaccine-induced polio outbreaks within 120 days of detection.

USA - Donald Trump arrives in the UK on Monday to meet Nato allies who are fearful that he could pose a serious threat to the survival of the alliance if he wins re-election next year. Days before Wednesday’s leaders’ meeting just outside London to mark Nato’s 70th anniversary, the US announced it was cutting its contribution to joint Nato projects. Nato officials say the cut (which reduces the US contribution to equivalence with Germany’s) was mutually agreed, but it comes against a backdrop of Trump’s longstanding ambivalence about the value of the alliance, and suggestions that US security guarantees to allied nations were dependent on their military spending. "It’s actually a very small budget within the Nato context,” said Rachel Ellehuus, deputy director of the Europe programme at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. “So it’s largely symbolic that the US is cutting its contribution. But the US administration was very clear that we wanted to have our share of common funding more in line with what Germany was paying.”

GERMANY - Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer says SPD’s new leftwing leaders can accept current deal or leave. The prospect of early elections or a minority government in Germany has increased after leading politicians in the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) dismissed demands by the new left wing leadership duo of their junior coalition partner to renegotiate the terms of their alliance. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the head of the Christian Democrats (CDU), said the coalition deal with the Social Democrats (SPD) would either stay intact or the SPD would have to leave the government. It represented a challenge to the SPD’s new co-leaders, Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans, to decide whether or not they wanted to remain in power. “We are not a therapy outfit for the respective coalition government parties,” she told the German public broadcaster ZDF. If the SPD abandons the government, Germany will either face new elections or the CDU will continue ruling as a minority government.

GERMANY - The German car industry is facing disaster with up to 50,000 jobs under threat or expected to be lost before the end of the year in what has been described as the “biggest crisis since the invention of the automobile”. Volkswagen chief executive Herbert Diess warned “the auto industry is in the middle of a far-reaching upheaval”, and followed another announcement from VW in the spring, where it said 7,000 jobs would be axed with the savings to be pumped back into electric cars.

UNITED NATIONS - As the “science” behind man-made global warming has been increasingly discredited, the story has changed. Now it’s not about saving the environment but about redistributing wealth, says a leading member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Ottmar Edenhofer, a co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group III and a lead author of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, 2007 (its latest), recently said, “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.” Edenhofer told a German news outlet (NZZ AM Sonntag): “Basically, it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War.”

ITALY - Italian police said on Thursday they uncovered a plot to form a new Nazi party and seized a cache of weapons during searches across the country. Police in 16 towns and cities from the Mediterranean island of Sicily to the Alps in northern Italy took part in the investigation, which was launched two years ago. The probe revealed a “huge and varied array of subjects, residents in different places, united by the same ideological fanaticism and willing to create an openly pro-Nazi, xenophobic and anti-Semitic movement”, a police statement said. Police did not say how many people joined the group or how many arrests were made. In Italy “defense of fascism” and efforts to revive fascist parties are crimes.

ASIA - Food prices are climbing fast in the world's biggest emerging markets, posing a possible inflation threat after months of dormant pressures. Asia's two largest developing economies face a price surge for staple products - pork in China and onions in India - that are central to consumers' diets. In Turkey and Nigeria, supply problems are driving up costs, while United Nations data show global food prices rose at the fastest pace in October in more than two years. Pork prices doubled in October following massive livestock culls to protect against swine fever… In India a 26% year-on-year rise in vegetable prices... In Turkey food inflation hovered near 30% in the first quarter and has remained above 15% for much of the year… In Africa, monthly food inflation in Zimbabwe has reached almost 50% as supplies dwindle. In Nigeria, the price of imported rice has surged 7.3% since August...

PHILIPPINES - Typhoon Kammuri has hit central Philippines making landfall in the southern region of Luzon Island. The country has been preparing for the storm’s arrival with over 200,000 residents having been evacuated from coastal and mountainous areas due to fears of flooding, landslides and storm surges. Operations at Manila airport were suspended for 12 hours from 11:00 on Tuesday (03:00 GMT). The storm, is boasting winds of up to 155km/h (96mph), with gusts of up to 235km/h (146mph). Huge storm surges are also expected of up to three metres (nearly 10ft), the weather service said.

GERMANY - Hers is a government for undemanding times, with none of the ambition needed to face the giant challenges of today. If Germany is the heart of Europe, then it is currently the slow-beating heart of a well-fed businessman resting on his office couch after an ample lunch. For Europe’s sake, and for Germany’s own, that heart needs to beat a little faster.

GERMANY - The future of Germany's government has been thrown into question after the centre-left Social Democrats elected a relatively unknown left-wing duo who campaigned on a threat to pull out of Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition. Relative unknowns just days ago, Nobert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken were comfortably elected Saturday by the SPD, beating Finance Minister Olaf Scholz and his running mate Klara Geywitz. It's a clear indication of the party's dissatisfaction with its role in the ruling coalition. The "anti-Merkel coalition" pair, as dubbed by German media, have vowed to lead the SPD “out of the neoliberal wilderness” and said they would consider quitting the chancellor's government.

GERMANY - The future of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition has been thrown into doubt after her deputy chancellor lost the leadership race of his party. Olaf Scholz, who is also finance minister, lost his bid to become leader of the centre-left SPD. The party is now expected to vote on whether to stay in the coalition with Ms Merkel's conservative CDU/CSU. Mr Scholz's joint challengers, Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken, have been highly critical of the coalition... they want to renegotiate the coalition deal with Ms Merkel's conservatives to focus more on social justice and investment. Poor election results and mixed views of Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who replaced Ms Merkel as CDU leader in 2018, have led to discontent within the party.

GERMANY - Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken, the new leaders of Germany’s Social Democrats (SPD), may be about to do Germany and Europe a favor. That’s not thanks to any inherent qualities they possess; both are colorless and unimaginative left-wingers vaguely resembling Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn, though not quite as reckless. Rather it’s because they may want to take their party out of its coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right bloc, a possibility that has sparked a full-blown government crisis. Anything that shakes the country out of its torpor offers a ray of hope.