USA - President Donald Trump again touted the findings of Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, who said his panel has yet to find evidence of collusion between the president's 2016 campaign and Russia. The president raged about the conclusion in a tweet filled with capital letters after complaining the media wasn't covering Burr's findings in enough detail.   'Senator Richard Burr, The Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, just announced that after almost two years, more than two hundred interviews, and thousands of documents, they have found NO COLLUSION BETWEEN TRUMP AND RUSSIA! Is anybody really surprised by this?,' he tweeted on Sunday. The senator was not officially declaring no collusion between Trump and Russia. He qualified his remarks by saying it was based on 'evidence to date.'

FRANCE - A vicious street brawl between rival “yellow vest” factions has highlighted bitter divisions among the anti-government protesters as the speaker of the National Assembly warned of a culture of violence engulfing French politics. Dozens of far Right supporters and ultra-Leftists taking part in “yellow vest” protests fought with fists, rocks and sticks in the eastern city of Lyon on Saturday night. The violence was seen as further evidence of widening splits in the leaderless grass roots movement. It began in protest at fuel prices but has since widened into a more general revolt against a political class seen as out of touch with common people. Clashes with police erupted across France, with protesters torching cars and smashing the windows of shops and banks on the 13th consecutive weekend of “yellow vest” demonstrations.

USA - American farmers are battling several issues when it comes to producing our food. Regulated low prices, tariffs, and the inability to export have all cut into the salaries of farmers. They are officially in crisis mode, just like the United States’ food supply. With no end to the disastrous trade war in sight, many farmers have traveled to Washington to share their plights with the president himself hoping that he’ll end the trade war that’s exacerbating an already precarious food crisis. Farmers make up a fairly large chunk of president Trump’s base, and an unwillingness to put food production in the United States first could be detrimental for Trump re-election chances in 2020. It could also be the beginning of a catastrophic food shortage.

UK - The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review. More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century. The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are “essential” for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.

GERMANY - Germans have little faith in the US as an ally under President Donald Trump, a survey has found. More than 40 percent even trust Beijing more than Washington. Germans have an increasingly negative view of the relationship between their country and the US, a survey released on Friday indicated, with many seeing China as a more reliable partner. Just over 42 percent of Germans who took part in the study said they saw China as a more reliable partner than the US, compared with 23.1 percent who favored the US over China. Some 85 percent of Germans have a negative or very negative opinion of current US-German relations, with only just over 10 percent viewing them in a positive light.

EUROPE - No major decisions should be made before the European parliamentary elections “when European citizens will make their choice”, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said at a meeting of Visegrad Group prime ministers and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Participants in the meeting agreed on the need for a strong Europe and pledged to cooperate to that end, the prime minister added. The European Union “will not be the same as it was before” once the elections have taken place, he said. Orban insisted that “we want a democratic EU” and added that “its character and directions will be decided upon by the people”.

GERMANY - Islamic State is far from defeated, and instead is morphing into an asymmetrical warfare force after the militant group lost almost all of the territory it once controlled in Syria, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Friday. Merkel's remarks at the inauguration of the Berlin headquarters of Germany's foreign intelligence agency BND contradicted statements by US President Donald Trump that the Islamist group has been defeated. "The so-called Islamic State has been luckily driven out of its territory but this unfortunately doesn't mean that Islamic State has disappeared," Merkel said. "It is transforming into an asymmetrical warfare force. And this, of course, is a threat." The conservative chancellor said monitoring events in Syria was one of the BND's top priorities, which also include tracking cyber threats and fake news designed to influence democratic elections.

USA - “The Taliban are the victors,” says retired US Brigadier General Don Bolduc, who saw 69 of his soldiers killed in Afghanistan. “We just haven’t figured that out yet.” Absorbing the fact that the US has lost militarily in Afghanistan will be a "bitter pill" for the soldiers he fought with, Bolduc told Yahoo News Friday. "They did what they were asked, they did the right thing, and they watched their teammates get maimed, get killed, and because of the failure of our policy makers and our senior military leaders, they're going to have to swallow this pill," he said. The retired Special Forces officer says he has the dog tags of all 69 men who were lost during his five years in Afghanistan as a token to remind him of the "price for bad policy and strategy."

USA - No one knows how many laws there are in the United States.  Apparently, no one can count that high. They’ve been accumulating, of course, for more than 200 years.  When federal laws were first codified in 1927, they fit into a single volume.  By the 1980s, there were 50 volumes of more than 23,000 pages. And today?  Online sources say that no one knows.  The Internal Revenue Code alone, first codified in 1874, contains more than 3.4 million words and, if printed 60 lines to the page, is more than 7,500 pages long.  There are about 20,000 laws just governing the use and ownership of guns. New laws mean new crimes.  From the start of 2000 through 2007, Congress had created at least 452 new crimes, so that at that time the total number of Federal crimes exceeded 4,450.

NEW ZEALAND - Strong winds are expected to fan forest fires that have been burning for a week through New Zealand’s South Island, forcing thousands of people from their homes. Early on Sunday, 155 firefighters were battling the blaze on the ground with air support from 23 helicopters and three fixed wing planes, making it the largest aerial firefight on record in New Zealand. Up to 3,000 people have been forced to leave the Wakefield and Pigeon Valley areas, the civil defence controller, Roger Ball, told a news conference on Saturday. More people were likely to be forced from their homes on Sunday. Fires started on Monday and Tuesday and quickly spread. On Wednesday, authorities declared a state of emergency.

GERMANY - The woman largely expected to take over as chancellor of Germany has echoed calls by her mentor Angela Merkel and French ally Emmanuel Macron for a “European army” to avoid becoming a “plaything” of Russia, China, and the United States on the global stage.

GERMANY - Ambassador Richard Grenell has accused Berlin of failing to meet its defense spending commitments under the alliance. While the German government has backed plans to gradually increase spending, some see it as a waste. US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell on Sunday criticized Germany's pledge to incrementally raise its defense spending to 1.5 percent until 2024 in an interview with German Sunday newspaper Welt am Sonntag.

USA - Mike Pence is the most hated vice-president in modern American history, and mountains of abuse have been heaped upon his wife Karen Pence.  The left hates them with a passion, and the reason they are hated so much is actually very simple.  It is because they are Bible-believing Christians.  In America today, there is so much fuss about the political rancor between “the right” and “the left”, but what we are facing in this country is so much deeper than that.  In reality, we are in the midst of a culture war that has been raging for decades, and the anti-Christian worldview that the left espouses has been winning that war.  But now Donald Trump and Mike Pence are attempting to reverse the tide of the battle, and this is driving the left nuts.  And even though Mike Pence is a very mild-mannered individual, celebrities such as Lady Gaga and Joy Behar have made national headlines by viciously attacking his Christian faith.

USA - Farmers all across the middle part of the country are going bankrupt at an astounding rate, and over half of all farms in America are now losing money.  The trade war with China has been the most devastating crisis to hit the US farming community in decades, and at this point there is no end in sight.  Farm after farm is being financially wiped out, and we haven’t seen this kind of economic pain for farmers since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  In fact, it is being reported that bankruptcies in the key farming regions of the country are way above the level that we witnessed during the last recession.

USA - The Baltic Dry Index represents the cost of renting an ocean-going container ship to move goods from, say, Chinese factories to the Port of Los Angeles. The more stuff being made and sold, the higher the demand for such ships, and thus the higher the price to rent one. And vice versa. This is definitely one of the vice versa times. After rising to robust levels in mid-2018 the Baltic Dry Index has since plunged by about two-thirds.