Mr Juncker, who has held the EU’s top job since 2014, has signalled his intentions to step down from the position after the next European elections.  The EPP is currently the most powerful and biggest political group in the European parliament and Manfred Weber has already received declarations of support from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.  An important member of Mr Juncker’s current team of top eurocrats, Gunther Oettinger, also claimed to support the German MEP.

Mr Weber is not the only German who could succeed Mr Juncker - another name on the cards is Peter Altmaier, a long-time ally of Mrs Merkel and current German minister for economic affairs and energy. Might Angela Merkel herself seek to be the first woman president of the commission?

According to RT, USW opened its Moscow office in 1992 for “closer cooperation with the Russian government and representatives of the country’s agrarian sector.” The organization said in a report that “over the next ten years, Russia imported a total of about 400,000 metric tons of wheat from the United States, including through a program of assistance in conditions of poor harvest and economic difficulties in Russia in 1998-1999.”

This appears to be a signal to the global economy that Russia is now rapidly becoming an agricultural superpower. In fact, the USW noted that the organization has had to switch to quality monitoring and price policy in the industry. “The Russian Federation has shifted from being a net importer of wheat to become the largest single wheat exporting country in the world,” said USW. Russia has been able to successfully capture more than half of the wheat market in recent years, becoming the world’s biggest exporter of grain, thanks in large part to bumper (unusually productive) harvests and attractive pricing.

The intelligence community hoped that the nation’s leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital information network.

That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today. The story of the deliberate creation of the modern mass-surveillance state includes elements of Google’s surprising, and largely unknown, origin. It is a somewhat different creation story than the one the public has heard, and explains what Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page set out to build, and why.

But this isn’t just the origin story of Google: It’s the origin story of the mass-surveillance state, and the government money that funded it.

Among the more attention-grabbing findings: More than one in four people have deleted the Facebook app from their phones, a figure that gets a lot higher when you focus just on 18- to 29-year-olds (44 percent of whom say they’ve done so). All told, 74 percent of Facebook users, according to the Pew data, say they’ve taken one of the following actions in the past year.

They’ve either: adjusted their privacy settings, taken a break from Facebook for at least a few weeks, or deleted it from their phone altogether. Pew gathered these findings by surveying a group of US adults between May 29 and June 11, so definitely with plenty of time for them to have formed opinions and changed their behaviors in light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Trump later tweeted, “TREASON?” and in an extraordinary move demanded that if “the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!” The writer, claiming to be part of the “resistance” to Trump but not from the left, said, “Many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.” The newspaper described the author of the column only as a senior official in the Trump administration.

“It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room,” the author continued. “We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.” A defiant Trump, appearing at an unrelated event at the White House, lashed out at the Times for publishing the op-ed. “They don’t like Donald Trump and I don’t like them,” he said of the newspaper. The op-ed pages of the newspaper are managed separately from its news department.

The essay immediately triggered a wild guessing game as to the author’s identity on social media, in newsrooms and inside the West Wing, where officials were blindsided by its publication. And in a blistering statement, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders accused the author of choosing to “deceive” the president by remaining in the administration.

“He is not putting country first, but putting himself and his ego ahead of the will of the American people,” she said. “The coward should do the right thing and resign.” Sanders also called on the Times to “issue an apology” for publishing the piece, calling it a “pathetic, reckless, and selfish op-ed.”

He predicted that if immigration was not brought under control, public anger and disillusionment would grow, warning “Chemnitz is around the corner” — a reference to the large-scale public protests against Germany’s migrant policy following the fatal stabbing of a local man, allegedly by a Syrian and an Iraqi with a string of previous convictions.

He was very clear that the Czech Republic, like Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, would continue to defy the EU’s attempts to redistribute migrants arriving in the EU under a compulsory quota system.

Scientists are reporting that the sun has been free of sunspots for a total of 133 days this year. With only 241 days of 2018 passing, that means the sun has been blank for the majority of the year. Experts warn this is a sign that the solar minimum is on its way. Website Space Weather says: “The sun is spotless again. For the 133rd day this year, the face of the sun is blank.”

“To find a year with fewer sunspots, you have to go back to 2009 when the sun was experiencing the deepest solar minimum in a century. Solar minimum has returned, bringing extra cosmic rays, long-lasting holes in the sun’s atmosphere, and strangely pink auroras.” The sun follows cycles of roughly 11 years where it reaches a solar maximum and then a solar minimum.

During a solar maximum, the sun gives off more heat and is littered with sunspots. Less heat in a solar minimum is due to a decrease in magnetic waves. The sun was not expected to head into a solar minimum until around 2020, but it appears to be heading in early which could prove to be bad news. The last time there was a prolonged solar minimum, it led to a ‘mini ice-age’…

Unfortunately, many in the eastern half of the country don’t even realize that this is happening. The mighty Colorado River once seemed to be virtually invulnerable, but now it doesn’t even run all the way to the ocean any longer. Demand for water is continually increasing as major cities in the Southwest continue to grow, and this is happening at a time when that entire region just keeps getting drier and drier. To say that we are facing a “water crisis” would be a major understatement.

Of course most Americans don’t really care as long as water keeps coming out of the taps. And for the moment, nobody is going without water. But that could change if this drought continues to intensify. According to the Denver Post, Lake Powell and Lake Mead have both dropped “to dangerous levels”… Water levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell are dropping to dangerous levels, reflecting the Colorado River’s worsening “structural deficit,” scientists said. A “structural deficit” is simply a very fancy way of saying that we are using water faster than it is being replenished.

Many Americans don’t realize how exceedingly important these two lakes are. Approximately 40 million people in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and northwestern Mexico rely on water from the Colorado River basin, and it has been steadily drying out for about 20 years… If things don’t change, and there is no reason to believe that they will, we will soon have a shortfall. What that means is that certain areas would have their water allocations reduced, and Arizona and Nevada would be at the top of that list…

During the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s, vast numbers of Americans migrated to other areas due to heat, drought, massive dust storms and a lack of water. Now Dust Bowl conditions are returning, and it is entirely possible that we could see a new wave of migration in the years ahead. Despite all of our advanced technology, we haven’t discovered a way to defeat drought, and the devastating drought that is currently gripping the Southwest seems to be getting worse with each passing day.