UK - Nigel Farage has furiously warned Parliament they will face a “massive backlash” from voters after Theresa May’s Brexit plans were left in tatters on Wednesday night. On Twitter he wrote: “No majority for anything in Parliament, but there is a majority in the country to leave the EU. Our politicians must stop trying to undo our vote or face a massive backlash from voters.”

USA - US President Donald Trump has warned that Russia must get out of Venezuela. Two planeloads of Russian troops are currently in the Latin American country under the terms of a 2001 cooperation treaty. Speaking at the White House, Trump also warned that “all options are open” when it comes to getting Russia out of Venezuela. Around 100 Russian troops touched down in Caracas on Saturday in a show of support for President Nicolas Maduro’s government. The move caused consternation in Washington, however, with Vice President Mike Pence calling the deployment an “unnecessary provocation.” Pence also called on Russia to withdraw its support of Maduro and “stand with Juan Guaido,” the Washington-sponsored opposition leader who declared himself interim president in January.

RUSSIA - The Trump administration should make good on its own promise to pull troops out of Syria before telling others where they should or shouldn't be, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in reply to Washington's threat over Venezuela. "Before they have their say in the lawful interests of other nations, I would advise the US administration to fulfill the promises that it had given to the international community," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, referring to US President Donald Trump's pledge to get American troops out of Syria.

RUSSIA - Russiagate hysteria has ushered in a “dark period” for mainstream journalism, Wikileaks’ editor-in-chief told RT, adding that in a just world, the countless journalists who peddled the Russia collusion theory would be out of work.

USA - When economic conditions initially begin to slow down, businesses continue to order goods like they normally would but those goods don’t sell as quickly as they previously did. As a result, inventory levels begin to rise, and that is precisely what is happening right now. In fact, the US inventory to sales ratio has risen sharply for five months in a row. This is mirroring the pattern that we witnessed just prior to the financial crisis of 2008, and it is exactly what we would expect to see if a new recession was now beginning.

USA - If the bond market is correct, the US economy is definitely heading into a recession.  Over the past 50 years, there have been six previous occasions when the yield on three-month Treasury bonds has risen above the yield on ten-year Treasury bonds, and in each of those instances a recession has followed.  Now it has happened again, and this comes at a time when a whole host of other economic indicators are screaming that a recession is coming.  Of course we have seen recession indicators triggered at other times in recent years, and the Federal Reserve was able to intervene and successfully extend this cycle on multiple occasions.  But now that the global economy is clearly the weakest it has been since the last recession, have we finally reached a breaking point?

USA - US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested Wednesday that an upcoming US peace plan would break with longstanding understandings on issues such as Jerusalem and Israeli settlements, saying the old approach had failed.  US President Donald Trump’s administration is expected to present an outline of an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan shortly after Israel’s April 9 election, although the Palestinian Authority has rejected US mediation over Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. 

USA - In a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration's legal battle against President Obama's health care law, Justice Department lawyers now say the entire Affordable Care Act should be struck down. Having previously argued, under AG Jeff Sessions, that only the law's pre-existing condition protections should be struck down, DoJ lawyers told a federal appeals court Monday it thinks the whole of ObamaCare is unconstitutional, siding with a Texas district court ruling that found Obamacare unconstitutional. The challengers then argue that all of ObamaCare should be invalidated because the mandate is unconstitutional.

USA - For the past two years, a large swath of the media engaged in a mass act of self-deception and partisan groupthink. Perhaps it was Watergate envy, or bitterness over Donald Trump’s victory, or antagonism towards Republicans in general — or, most likely, a little bit of all the above. But now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has delivered his report on Russian collusion, it’s clear that political journalists did the bidding of those who wanted to delegitimize and overturn Trump’s election.

USA - Warning lights are flashing red. Alarms are sounding. Markets are being rocked by a growing chorus of voices warning that a recession is around the corner. The clearest sign that the end times are near, for this economic cycle at least, appeared on Friday. Markets exhibited behaviour last spotted in 2007 shortly before the financial crisis: the yield curve inverted. This is a topsy-turvy moment in financial circles, when the normal rules are scrapped. The New York Fed, a part of the US’s central bank, uses this as an indicator that a recession may be on the way: “Simple rules of thumb are available, such as the fact that yield curve inversions are followed by recessions.”

USA - Global warming zealots, including Green New Deal advocates, are throwing an enraged fit against president Trump’s Climate Science Committee that seeks to establish the factual truth about climate change.

USA - Wall Street Journal assistant editor James Freeman and Senator Rand Paul are on the same page: the Mueller report confirms it is now time for the Obama administration to account for its flagrant abuse of the surveillance powers of the federal government… The report confirms it is former President Barack Obama who “owes the country an explanation” for his administration’s “historic abuse of government surveillance powers.”

USA - Neo-Nazi groups have been allowed to remain on Facebook because the social media giant found they did not violate its “community standards”, it has been revealed. Pages operated by factions of international white supremacist organisations including Combat 18 and the Misanthropic Division were reported, but Facebook refused to remove the content and told researchers to unfollow pages if they found them “offensive”. Facebook refused to take down a page used by Combat 18’s Greek wing, despite its cover photo showing a man performing a Nazi salute, in front of a wall sprayed with a swastika.

USA - The push to turn America's cities into Chinese-style surveillance networks has found a new partner in Detroit, Michigan. The only difference between what is happening in San Diego and what is happening in Detroit is, they are not using the same smart street lights to spy on everyone. Detroit uses Intellistreets a company known to have strong ties to Homeland Security. What started out as a voluntary police-cam share program in Saginaw, Michigan has morphed into a massive 1000 surveillance camera network which includes 500 businesses in Detroit.

UK - A widespread loss of pollinating insects in recent decades has been revealed by the first national survey in Britain, which scientists say “highlights a fundamental deterioration” in nature. The analysis of 353 wild bee and hoverfly species found the insects have been lost from a quarter of the places they were found in 1980. A third of the species now occupy smaller ranges, with just one in 10 expanding their extent, and the average number of species found in a square kilometre fell by 11. Researchers have become increasingly concerned about dramatic drops in populations of insects, which underpin much of nature. Some warned in February that these falls threaten a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, while studies from Germany and Puerto Rico have shown plunging numbers in the last 25 to 35 years.