USA - US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has blamed Iran for "unprovoked attacks" on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. He said the US had made its assessment based on intelligence about the type of weapons used. A senior Iranian official earlier told the BBC "Iran has no connection" with the explosions on Thursday morning. Dozens of crew members were rescued after the blasts on the Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous and the Front Altair, owned by Norway. Both Iran and the US said they evacuated the crew. The blasts in one of the world's busiest oil routes comes a month after four oil tankers were attacked off the United Arab Emirates. No group or country has admitted the incident in May, which also caused no casualties. The US at the time blamed Iran - but Tehran denied the accusations.

USA - Once again tonight, countless numbers of Americans will sleep in their vehicles, and this is a problem that is getting worse with each passing year. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the homeless population in the United States hit 552,830 in 2018, but many believe that the true number is actually a lot higher. Because in order to accurately count the homeless you have got to find them first, and many homeless do not want to be found. But even if the HUD figure is accurate, it is still a great national tragedy to have such a high number of homeless, and a large percentage of those homeless Americans are living in their vehicles.

VATICAN - The former Vatican ambassador to the United States told the Washington Post a gay mafia among Church leadership is blocking attempts to seriously address clerical sexual abuse. In an extensive interview, snippets of which were published Monday, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò said that the sexual abuse crisis would be “far less severe” if the “problem of homosexuality in the priesthood were honestly acknowledged and properly addressed.” “Given the overwhelming evidence, it is mind-boggling that the word ‘homosexuality’ has not appeared once, in any of the recent official documents of the Holy See” dealing with clerical sexual abuse, Viganò told the Post.

GERMANY - State premiers in eastern Germany want to end crippling sanctions against Russia. With the far-right Alternative for Germany gaining ground in the east, that position has more to do with politics than anything else. Political leaders from Germany's formerly communist eastern states are calling for an end to hefty economic sanctions against Russia, deepening political fault lines between the nation's east and west with pivotal regional elections on the horizon. Michael Kretschmer, state premier of Saxony, sparked controversy over the weekend when he called for an end to the European Union's economic sanctions against Russia after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at an economic forum in St Petersburg.

USA - Opening the floodgates for the normalization of child exploitation and pedophilia is none other than the far-Left media streaming service Netflix, which has reportedly renewed for a second season a grotesque and utterly depraved “original” show called “Dancing Queen” that features underage boys dressed in drag dancing around with LGBTQP perverts like it’s no big deal.

USA - James O’Keefe, founder and head of Project Veritas, joined Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak to discuss how Pinterest secretly used censorship against news media outlets such as Gateway Pundit, PJ Media, and Zero Hedge.

USA - Game over. The grand central bank experiment of the last 10 years has ended in utter and complete failure. The games of cheap money and constant intervention that have brought you record global debt to the tune of $250 trillion and record wealth inequality are about to embark on a new round of peddling blue meth again. Australia has already cut, so has India. The ECB is talking about it, markets are already pricing in multiple Fed cuts. The new global rate cutting cycle begins anew before the last one ever ended. Brace yourselves as no one, absolutely no one, can know how this will turn out.

FRANCE - French President Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday that the world is mired in a “deep crisis” that could spiral into war if left uncontrolled, as he called for a global effort to tackle the dangers of inequality, unbridled technology and climate change. The centrist has sought to position himself as the leader of a liberal movement countering the rise of the extreme right, but EU populists are putting up a tough fight and gaining support. The 41-year-old centrist said in a speech to mark the centenary of the UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) in Geneva: “The crisis that we are experiencing can lead to war and to the disintegration of democracies. I am deeply convinced of it. Chaos is here."

GERMANY - The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has courted growing anti-immigrant opinion in Germany by claiming the country’s attempts to create a multicultural society have “utterly failed”. Speaking to a meeting of young members of her Christian Democratic Union party, Merkel said the idea of people from different cultural backgrounds living happily “side by side” did not work. She said the onus was on immigrants to do more to integrate into German society. “This [multicultural] approach has failed, utterly failed,” Merkel told the meeting in Potsdam, west of Berlin, yesterday. Her remarks will stir a debate about immigration in a country which is home to around 4 million Muslims.

USA - “History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively. In our own time and place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age. The freedom to speak without risking arrest is ‘one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation.’”—Justice Neil Gorsuch

USA - Hundreds of boxes. Millions of records. From Michigan to New Mexico this month, attorneys general are sifting through files on clergy sex abuse, seized through search warrants and subpoenas at dozens of archdioceses. They’re looking to prosecute, and not just priests. If the boxes lining the hallways of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s offices contain enough evidence, she said, she is considering using state racketeering laws usually reserved for organized crime. Prosecutors in Michigan are even volunteering on weekends to get through all the documents as quickly as possible. “Some of the things I’ve seen in the files makes your blood boil, to be honest with you,” Nessel said. “When you’re investigating gangs or the Mafia, we would call some of this conduct a criminal enterprise.” Some defenders of the church bristle at the notion of increased legal action, saying the Catholic institution is being singled out by overzealous prosecutors.

VATICAN - The Vatican has sparked fury after releasing an official document claiming people cannot choose or change their gender - claiming that transgenderism is an attempt to “annihilate nature”. LGBT rights advocates denounced the 30-page official Catholic document, called “Male and Female He Created Them”, as harmful and said it would encourage hatred and bigotry. The document, the Vatican’s first on gender theory, branded gender fluidity a symptom of “momentary desires” and a “confused concept of freedom”. It was released as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people around the world celebrate “Pride Month”. And it came amid demand for acceptance of the idea that gender is more complex and fluid than the binary categories of male and female and depends on more than visible sex characteristics. Pope Francis has repeatedly argued people cannot choose their genders.

USA - This summer, PBS Kids premiered an episode of the children's show Arthur in which a teacher, Mr Ratburn, "marries" another male character. Even before this premiere, PBS was already infusing the LGBT agenda into its programming. In between its shows, a happy song about families included an image of two dads with a baby and lyrics to that effect. Disney and other children's stations long ago jumped onto the LGBT bandwagon with their line-up.

UK - Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state. It’s been 70 years since Orwell — dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm — depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984. Who could have predicted that 70 years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would fail to heed his warning and come to love Big Brother.

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!” — George Orwell

CHINA - One of my favorite TV shows was Person of Interest. In that show, a genius programmer was hired by the government to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) computer to tap into and analyze communication feeds and predict activities that may pose a threat. Unfortunately, as you can imagine, things spun out of control; the system that was designed to benefit society was not always beneficial to citizens. As amusing as it is to watch escapist fiction such as this, it’s not so enjoyable when you realize it’s no longer fiction. In the city of Shenzhen, when an offender is observed jaywalking via video surveillance, they will publicly humiliate you by showing your face on screens located around the city. Now that’s bad enough but they’re going a step further. Those identified will have their cell phone ‘pinged’ and be sent an immediate fine.