USA - Flesh-Eating Parasites, Brain-Eating Amoebas, A Virus That Can Cause Years Of Severe Joint Pain, And Gigantic Dust Storms Hit The Western US. How many plagues have to hit us before people finally start waking up? So far this month I have written about rabbits with “black, tentacle-like protrusions coming from their heads”, squirrels with “ghastly growths that burst open”, deer that have “tumor-like growths hanging off their bodies”, and a “mysterious fungus” that is transforming spiders in the United States and elsewhere into “zombies”. Nature is in a state of chaos all around us... How many more times do we have to be pummeled by major plagues before the skeptics finally stop insisting that “everything is fine”? Every day there are more headlines about pestilences, more headlines about earthquakes, more headlines about fires, more headlines about floods, and more headlines about military conflict. You would think that at some point the light bulb would go on and the skeptics would want to start figuring out what is really happening to us.

USA - Phoenix, Arizona was blanketed with a thick wall of dust known as a haboob that darkened the skies and knocked out power to thousands as a major monsoon hit the area Monday night. The dusty conditions began around 4pm near Interstate-10 in Casa Grande and Eloy, south of Phoenix, according to the National Weather Service. But the storms quickly made their way north, prompting dust storm warnings just before 5pm that remained in effect until 7pm. Shocking time-lapse videos showed a wall of dust rolling through the Arizona valley, completely overtaking neighborhoods. More than 35,000 residents and businesses throughout Maricopa County are now left without power from the powerful storm, according to PowerOutage.us, which monitors outages nationwide. Flash flood warnings were also issued for multiple parts of western Arizona, near the border with California.

USA - President Trump has not even had control over Washington, DC, for 30 days, and I have on my For You page video after video showing DC — specifically Union Station — and how clean and safe it is. People don’t understand how big of a deal it is, specifically for Union Station, because there is a bridge — whether it’s the bypass, it’s either 95, 395, or 495 — where the homeless, as well as people who are abusing drugs, as well as the drug dealers, they just squat. And it’s clean. It’s all gone. This was also an underpass bridge where people would throw their waste. So you would drive on the main road, and to the left and right of you, it was nothing but trash. It’s all clean. People don’t understand how big of a deal this is because the Capitol is right there, within like a six- or seven-minute walk. And then also, local residents did not like walking there, whether in the daytime or the evening. Some people would take taxis just to avoid any type of encounters. And people have been talking about cleaning this up for a decade. And you mean to tell me President Trump hasn’t even had control for 30 days, and he cleaned it all up?

USA - It’s that time of year. Tens of thousands of ‘Burners’ flocked to the Nevada desert this year to engage in debauchery. Burning Man is a yearly drug-infested music and art festival in Northern Nevada, in Black Rock City. A wicked dust storm kicked up on the first day of the festival this year and it ruined camp sites. Winds reached more than 45 miles per hour, according to a spokesperson for Burning Man. The Orgy Dome was also completely destroyed by the storm and camp sites were destroyed and blown away.

UK - Countries can decline as well as rise. Take Argentina. Once one of the world’s richest countries, it was still one of the world’s leading nations by the 1960s, wealthier in per capita terms than Spain, Japan, Russia and Ireland and only a short way behind Italy. Yet earlier this year, Buenos Aires received its 23rd IMF bailout. The country is lucky that its president Javier Milei, is a brilliant economist who is trying to turn around its 100-year decline, but the terrible truth is that Britain is now in danger of going the way of Argentina. The fact that we were once rich is no guarantee of our future prosperity. As a set of senior economists today warn, the size of Britain’s debts, combined with high inflation and taxes, mean that we can no longer take continued solvency for granted. It is far from inconceivable that Rachel Reeves may have to follow the example of her predecessor Denis Healey in begging for funds from an international body, a calamitous humiliation if ever there were one.

UK - Food price inflation in the UK has accelerated to a 17-month high this month, worrying policymakers at the Bank of England and worsening the cost of living pressures on British households. The latest measure of shop prices from the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and NielsenQ (NIQ) said food price inflation was 4.2 per cent in August year-on-year, up from 4 per cent in July. The Bank is growing increasingly concerned about renewed inflationary pressures spreading from food prices through to other parts of the economy. According to its estimates, food price inflation could accelerate to exceed 5 per cent later this year. The BRC said the biggest increase in prices was for “staple” items such as eggs and butter, while chocolate prices rose after poor cocoa harvests.

USA - President Trump has advanced plans to mould the National Guard into a branch of US law enforcement with an executive order creating specialised units to deal with public disorder. The order builds on Trump’s deployments to Los Angeles and Washington as test beds for using the National Guard on American streets — a rare exception under previous presidents that he aims to use more regularly. Troops appeared carrying M17 handguns and M4 rifles in the capital for the first time at the weekend, despite concerns the soldiers have little training in civilian law and risk being drawn into firing on American citizens. On Monday Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, said arming them was “just common sense”. “Washington was the most dangerous place in this country and now, you know what? It’s probably the safest place in our country,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Monday. “We arrested some very bad people and in the last 11 days… we’ve had no murders. That’s the first time that’s taken place in years. Actually years.”

UK - Nigel Farage said the influx of migrants to Britain was an “invasion” that he had been warning about for years. He said: “It is an invasion, as these young men illegally break into our country.” Farage accused Britain and France of “colluding in their support of criminal activity” with operations in the Channel, and said: “This issue has become a scourge of modern Britain. Just think about the hotels, think about the houses of multiple occupancy, and not just the cost of it, but think how unfair that is, unfair to the 1.3 million British people currently on the social housing list, unfair to those who have legally made their way into the United Kingdom. It’s unfair and the cost, frankly, is eye watering.”

UK - Nigel Farage said he was concerned by migrants potentially facing torture after deportation but said he was more bothered about what was happening on the streets of Britain. The Reform UK leader said: “Of course it bothers me, but what really bothers me is what is happening on the streets of our country. What really bothers me is what is happening to British citizens. What really bothers me is, and you’ve seen this from the Bell Hotel onwards, the growing concern with justifiable evidence that women and girls are far less safe on the streets than they were before this began. So it’s all about whose side are you on?”

ISRAEL - Against the backdrop of the change in policy on the Temple Mount, Finance Minister (RZP) Bezalel Smotrich spoke to thousands of participants at a conference marking the anniversary of Rabbi Kook’s passing on Sunday. Smotrich spoke twice during the event, which took place at the Jerusalem International Convention Center. His first speech in the afternoon addressed the ongoing war. When Smotrich took the stage for a second time, in front of the thousands of people present, Smotrich smiled at Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion and said, "I will give the money, you will build the Temple." The crowd burst into laughter, and sources who were there told Walla that Smotrich said it "as a joke." While it was intended as a joke, it comes at a time when there is, in fact, a de facto shift in the policy surrounding the Temple Mount.

UK - A rat-catcher has warned that this winter will be “horrendous” for major rodent infestations. Kieran Sampler, the founder of the Yorkshire Rat Pack, said the scorching summer, rampant takeaway culture and crumbling infrastructure would create perfect conditions for enormous rodents. The 31-year-old from Wakefield, who hunts rats in the traditional way with his two Lakeland terriers, said his group was now catching rats longer than 20 inches. “It is going to be a bad winter for rats, and people don’t realise – it is going to be horrendous,” he told The Telegraph. It is estimated that there could be around 250 million rats in the UK. They can carry illnesses such as Weil’s disease, which can be passed to humans. “There is always going to be a bad winter after a good summer.”

UK - Ed Miliband has set the UK an impossible and expensive task, to deliver zero carbon electricity by 2030. It has just got more difficult. The private sector that he relies on to invest massively in new renewables, new storage, and new grid has had a torrid time with green investments. Over the year under Miliband, shares in Greencoat, a leading renewable investment company, are down 19 per cent. Orsted, a wind farm investor, is down 43 per cent. SSE is down 5 per cent. HICL, an infrastructure investor with a majority of its investments in the UK, is down 5 per cent. AES Solar is down 25 per cent and First Solar down 1 per cent. Green companies have been delaying and cancelling projects. This has happened despite the UK and US main share indices being up more than 10 per cent. Miliband needs confidence from those with the money to deliver all the colossal investment needed.

GERMANY - Germany’s welfare state is no longer financially sustainable, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned, citing mounting financial constraints. Merz made the remarks on Saturday during a speech to fellow Christian Democratic Union (CDU) members in Osnabrueck, a city in Lower Saxony that is home to carmaker Volkswagen. “The welfare state as we have it today can no longer be financed with what we can economically afford,” Merz said, calling for a fundamental reassessment of the benefits system. He noted that welfare spending hit a record €47 billion ($55 billion) last year and continues to rise this year.

HUNGARY - In the swirl of the Ukraine war, headlines rarely fail to shock. Yet the latest spat between Kiev and Budapest raises a question that would have been unthinkable two years ago: has Ukraine effectively opened a second front – albeit hybrid, rhetorical, and economic – against an EU state? The immediate spark was the Druzhba (“Friendship”) oil pipeline that still delivers crude from Russia to Central Europe. Several Ukrainian drone strikes targeted the pipeline in recent weeks, halting supplies to Hungary and Slovakia. A Ukrainian commander, known by the call sign Madyar, publicly admitted involvement. For Hungary and Slovakia, this was more than an economic disruption. Both countries rely heavily on the pipeline, and in response, their leaders called on the European Commission to guarantee supply security.

EGYPT - Egypt has firmly rejected Israeli plans to displace Palestinians from their historical homeland, warning that such actions would amount to the "liquidation" of the Palestinian cause. Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty has been unequivocal in his condemnation of any displacement efforts. In a recent interview with CNN, he stated, "Displacement is a red line. We will not accept it, we will not participate in it and we will not allow it to happen." Abdelatty emphasized that the displacement of Palestinians would be a "one-way ticket" out of Gaza, leading to the "liquidation" of their cause and the end of the Palestinian goal.