AUSTRALIA - Scorching temperatures in New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state which includes Sydney, have forced authorities to impose water restrictions for the first time in a decade. With levels at the Warragamba Dam at barely 50 percent as a result of a prolonged period of drought, New South Wales Water Minister Melinda Pavey confirmed drastic measures were now necessary. In a statement issued today she said: “The Bureau of Meteorology’s latest forecast is predicting below-average rainfall and higher temperatures for June to August, which are key drivers of stronger water demand. Water restrictions are an important drought response because they target the outdoor water use of all households.” The Warragamba Dam supplies much of New South Wales...

USA - President Trump loves to blame China for the job losses that have devastated American workers under globalization. But the truth is that Trump is blaming the wrong party. Trump’s reckless trade war against China is misguided and amounts to a colossal charade that will not solve the actual problem. Yes, it is true that numerous American manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas to China, thereby leaving American workers jobless and suffering. But China did not steal these jobs. No. These jobs were given to China. It was all legal and legitimate. China merely accepted the gift.

USA - We haven’t seen stock prices slide like this in a long time, and if this keeps up we could soon be looking at an avalanche. Our rapidly escalating trade war with China and more bad US economic numbers pushed stocks down once again this week, and at this point the Dow Industrial Average has now fallen for five weeks in a row. We haven’t seen a losing streak this long since June 2011, and it is yet another indication that we have reached a major turning point. Some positive comments about China from President Trump on Friday helped to lift stocks a little, but it wasn’t enough to put stocks into the green for the week. Of course the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq are both working on losing streaks as well. The stage is being set for the sort of global economic meltdown that we have been anticipating.

POLAND - Poland thought it had started confronting the problem of clerical abuse and its cover-up by church authorities. Then a bombshell came: A documentary with victim testimony so harrowing it has forced an unprecedented reckoning with pedophile priests in one of Europe’s most deeply Catholic societies. Poland’s bishops acknowledged this week they face a crisis and made a rare admission that they have failed to protect the young. It’s also a crisis for the country’s conservative government, which is closely aligned with the Catholic Church, putting the ruling Law and Justice party on the defensive before Sunday’s European Parliament vote in Poland… “If you are about to start a revolution, then you’d better have a plan for the aftermath,” Suszek said. “And nobody has a clear-cut idea about how to deal with the void that would inevitably come about when you remove the institutional church from the public sphere.”

USA - Having access to fluoridated drinking water that can supposedly improve your dental health sounds like a first-world luxury on the surface – but the truth is that it’s a recipe for ill health and experts are calling for this dangerous practice to be stopped. In fact, America is one of very few developed countries that fluoridates its water, with Green Med Info reporting that just 5 percent of the world’s population consumes this type of water. Most people never take the time to question where all that fluoride added to our water comes from, and the answer is shocking: It is generally pollutants captured from the phosphate fertilizer industry in Florida or chemical imports that come from China, known for a lack of regulation and adulteration. These chemicals aren’t purified before they’re added to drinking water, and it’s not at all unusual for them to contain significant amounts of heavy metals like arsenic, mercury and lead.

USA - Every single day, most Americans eagerly gobble down foods that contain ingredients that have been genetically-modified without ever considering the consequences. Most of us simply assume that the federal government would never allow us to eat GMOs if they were not safe. Unfortunately, it appears that the federal government has completely failed us. We are monkeying around with life itself, and we really have no idea what the long-term consequences will look like. Do you think that it is actually safe to eat such “food”? Sadly, the health consequences from eating GMO food may not just be temporary. In fact, one study found that the effects of eating genetically-modified food could last for a lot longer than anyone had anticipated…

USA - A bitter feud between the Philippines and Canada over a shipment of garbage made world headlines when President Rodrigo Duterte threatened to dump the waste in the North American country’s territorial waters, but this situation is in fact only the tip of the iceberg, or the garbage pile. The developed nations that are among the biggest garbage producers have turned out to be unable to safely process it. As it increasingly looks like developed countries will be forced to rely mostly on themselves in their future waste treatment they are facing an uneasy task of either drastically limiting their waste production or finding an extremely efficient way to process their garbage unless they are comfortable with the prospect of being almost literally buried in trash.

UK - Hundreds of rivers around the world from the Thames to the Tigris are awash with dangerously high levels of antibiotics, the largest global study on the subject has found. Antibiotic pollution is one of the key routes by which bacteria are able to develop resistance to the life-saving medicines, rendering them ineffective for human use. “A lot of the resistance genes we see in human pathogens originated from environmental bacteria,” said Professor William Gaze, a microbial ecologist at the University of Exeter who studies antimicrobial resistance but was not involved in the study. The rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a global health emergency that could kill 10 million people by 2050, the UN said last month.

UK - Nigel Farage today warned the Tories he will wipe them out at a general election unless they push through Brexit by Halloween - after securing a stunning triumph in EU polls. The stark ultimatum came after the Brexit Party won at least 28 MEP seats and 31 per cent of the vote, despite only being formed six weeks ago. In grim contrast, the Conservatives have dropped to fifth place across much of the country on just 9 per cent of the vote.

EUROPE - Battering for mainstream parties across Europe as Marine Le Pen calls for 'powerful' group of far-right parties to join forces in EU Parliament - and Greens also make gains. France's Marine Le Pen has called for a 'powerful' far-right group in the European Parliament after her party beat Emmanuel Macron's in this weekend's elections with more nationalist parties making huge gains across the continent.

USA - "Progressives" have now jumped the shark and are fully invested in calling for violence against their opponents in order to have them silenced or killed. Corporate media organizations, activists and private businesses are all joining in on the cult-like rage, claiming their calls for violence are justified because no one should be allowed to engage in "hate." Except that "progressives" have become the haters, and they are now pushing a dangerous, authoritarian obedience cult that will soon unleash death squads against their political enemies. Now is the time to speak out against this insanity before it goes to the next level. If this cannot be stopped, America is going to devolve into a large, nationwide shooting war. While the lunatic Left claims to stand for “diversity” and “tolerance,” in truth Leftists are increasingly and openly calling for acts of violence — including murder — against conservatives and Christians.

ISRAEL - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu embarked on Sunday on what he termed a "final effort" to break a deadlock on forming a governing coalition ahead of a Wednesday deadline for a deal. In power for the past decade, Netanyahu has unexpectedly struggled to seal an agreement with a clutch of right-wing, far-right and ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties that would align with his Likud party and ensure him a fifth term following Israel's April 9 election.

USA - Thanks to high-crime, squalor, relaxed drug laws and an excruciatingly high cost of living, San Francisco has become one of the nation's most depressing places to live, according to the City-Journal's Erica Sandberg. And it's not just the s**t-covered streets which require highly-compensated "poop patrollers" to try and keep up with the fecal fiasco, or the thousands of used drug needles littering the ground, or the shocking number of aggressive homeless people terrifying tourists; San Francisco is a bastion of property crime - in fact, it's the worst city in the nation when it comes to burglary, larceny, shoplifting and vandalism, according to the report.

EUROPE - President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker says that people who love their countries are “stupid”. “These populist, nationalists, stupid nationalists, they are in love with their own countries,” Juncker told CNN, as if that was a bad thing. How much of an out of touch globalist do you need to be not to recognize the total and complete self-own of a comment like that? Juncker just gifted every Euro-skeptic movement on the continent a quote that they will throw back in the EU’s face for years to come. A poll conducted last week found that the majority of Europeans expect the EU to collapse within 20 years. Perhaps Juncker should spend more time trying to prop up the collapsing pillars of the EU rather than insulting patriots.

CHINA - If China wants to cause a massive amount of pain for the US economy in this trade war, they certainly have the firepower to do so. Today, China accounts for more than 80 percent of the world’s rare earth element production, and approximately 80 percent of the rare earth elements that are used by US companies are imported from China. The US does have one facility that mines rare earth elements in California, but everything that is mined there has to be shipped to China for processing. So at this point we do not have the ability to supply our own rare earth element needs, and that gives the Chinese a tremendous amount of leverage.