ITALY - Italian durum wheat and dairy farmer Attilio Tocchi saw warning signs during the winter of the dramatic drought to come at his holding a mile away from the Tuscan coast. “When it still hadn’t rained at the beginning of spring we realized it was already irreparable,” he said, adding that he had installed fans to try and cool his cows that were suffering in the heat. Drought in southern Europe threatens to reduce cereal production in Italy and parts of Spain to its lowest level in at least 20 years, and hit other regional crops including olives and almonds. Castile and Leon, the largest cereal growing region in Spain, has been particularly badly affected, with crop losses estimated at around 60 to 70 percent. “This year was not bad, it was catastrophic.”

IRAN - Iran is arid with low levels of annual precipitation and limited water resources that have been shrinking. Drought has gripped most parts of the country for at least a decade now, and precipitation has decreased drastically to its lowest level on record in 50 years. However, the situation is expected to get even worse. The latest figures by the World Resources Institute predict the rise of water stress globally in the next two decades due to climate change. In particular, most parts of the Middle East, including Iran, are projected to face high-risk water stress. With recent clashes in the central province of Isfahan over water shortages, experts warn that the issue has already turned into one of security. They also warn of mass migration as well as serious socio-economic and political repercussions if the problem is left unresolved.

SWEDEN - Wildfires are ravaging parts of the Arctic Circle, and they’re big enough to see from space. The wildfires started in early June, and more than 50 have now cropped up in parts of Sweden inside the Arctic Circle, according to the European Space Agency, which has kept tabs on the situation with satellites from space. Sweden doesn’t often have to deal with fires, but so far the blazes have swallowed up $70 million worth of land, according to Swedish news agency TT. The country has asked for help from Norway and Italy, which sent along helicopters and planes to help contain the flames, according to the New York Times. The wildfires follow the longest sustained drought on record in Sweden and heat waves that have engulfed most of Europe. And to scientists, they look a lot like what you’d expect human-caused climate change to look like.

AUSTRALIA - Australia is a continent defined by extremes, and recent decades have seen some extraordinary climate events. But droughts, floods, heatwaves, and fires have battered Australia for millennia. Are recent extreme events really worse than those in the past? In a recent paper, we reconstructed 800 years of seasonal rainfall patterns across the Australian continent. Our new records show that parts of Northern Australia are wetter than ever before, and that major droughts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in southern Australia are likely without precedent over the past 400 years.

SOUTH AFRICA - South Africa has declared a national disaster over the drought afflicting southern and western regions including Cape Town… Running water in the port city of 4 million has been affected by a wider pattern of climate change seen around the country including the Western Cape, where Cape Town is located, the Northern Cape and Eastern Cape provinces. Supplies have yet to recover from an El Nino-triggered drought that began two years ago and is now raising the risk of a shortage that could hit industrial and agricultural output.

USA - US special forces have already deployed to 133 nations in the first half of 2018, signaling a sharp increase in the Pentagon’s shadowy operations when compared to previous years, according to a new report. America’s Special Operations forces (SOF) are stationed all around the world, where they participate in a wide range of missions, including special reconnaissance, unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, hostage rescue, as well as training and advising foreign troops. But special forces soldiers are also regularly involved in shadowy combat operations that receive little to no oversight. Shrouded in secrecy, these global operations continue to grow in quantity, size and expense – despite the fact that even Congress is often left in the dark... According to Turse, last year US special forces deployed to a staggering 149 countries –about 75 percent of the nations on the planet.

USA - While ever-hope-filled expectations among the left are for a 'blue wave' in the Mid-term elections, we suspect things may not turn out quite as planned given the last week's "crisis". Even before President Trump had set foot in Helsinki, the left and the media were banging the drums of war against "the thug" Putin and how he would trump Trump, and once the press conference furore was over, all hell broke loose as the left-leaning world attempted to out-signal one another's virtue as to the "treasonous", "surrender" that had occurred.

UK - British officials botched the translation of Theresa May’s discredited White Paper into European languages, part of a UK strategy to win concessions from Brussels, and failed to translate the document into Irish, despite being locked in fraught Brexit talks over Ireland’s border. The paper’s executive summary, which Britain hopes to use to help solve the vexed border issue, has been translated, poorly, into 22 languages. The full 100-page document has only been translated into one other language, Welsh, which, unlike Irish, is not an official EU language. After The Telegraph contacted the British Government, an Irish version was published on Thursday afternoon, two days after the other translations...

USA - Donald Trump hinted that he may block trade routes with Europe after its lawmakers hit Google with a record £3.9 billion fine over its smartphone business. The US president took to Twitter to lash out at the European Union, which handed the penalty to the search giant over its Android operating system. “I told you so! The European Union just slapped a Five Billion Dollar fine on one of our great companies, Google. They truly have taken advantage of the US, but not for long!," he wrote on the social network. It comes just days after he called the bloc a “foe of US”  for “what they do to us in trade”. Relations have hit a low point...

USA - The left-wing media has become a dangerous lynch mob, desperately calling for Infowars to be completely “deplatformed” (blacklisted) from all prominent online platforms. The calls for such drastic censorship action against Infowars centre around an array of utterly false accusations which fraudulently assert that Alex Jones claimed no children died in the Parkland shootings — a claim that is utterly false and fraudulent. Jones never uttered any such thing, and no one has produced a single video clip of him making such an assertion.

USA - One in every three Americans will “contract” some form of cancer in their lifetime, and only about 50 percent will survive that attack. Those are some grim statistics, huh? Now get this: Has any doctor reviewed with you or your loved ones the odds of chemotherapy actually working, or what the statistics are for Americans getting killed by the now infamous chemical medicine that’s supposedly “designed” to kill the cancer?

USA - Instagram deleted a meme comparing the number of blacks lynched by the Ku Klux Klan to the number of black fetuses aborted by Planned Parenthood. Ryan Bomberger, black co-founder of the pro-life Radiance Foundation who was conceived during the rape of his mother, is defending a controversial meme he created blasting abortion giant Planned Parenthood as worse than the KKK after Instagram said it encourages violence. “While writing this article, we were censored by Deities of Diversity. Apparently, Instagram deleted our post, threatening to restrict or disable our account if we violate their guidelines again. But … we didn’t violate any guidelines,” Bomberger wrote in his defense of the meme Friday.

USA - North Texas smashed a 93-year-old daily heat record Thursday, with the mercury climbing to 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42 Celsius) in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. “Delay walking your dog until sunset” during the heat wave, the National Weather Service said in a message posted on Twitter. “Our infrared thermometer measured 136 degrees this afternoon on the sidewalk. These temperatures are hot enough to burn Fido’s paws.” Texas was set to break its power-demand record for the second day in a row, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator. “It’s insanely hot here,” said Ercot spokeswoman Leslie Sopko. “You can only be outside if you’re in a swimming pool.”

USA - A flurry of tornadoes swept through central Iowa Thursday afternoon, flattening buildings and damaging the courthouse in Marshalltown and hitting an agricultural machinery plant in Pella as people were working. Authorities said a hospital was evacuated and there were some injuries from the storms, but no reports of deaths. Hardest hit appeared to be Marshalltown , a city of 27,000 people about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northeast of Des Moines, where brick walls collapsed in the streets, roofs were blown off buildings and the cupola of the historic courthouse tumbled 175 feet (53 meters) to the ground.

UK - Boris Johnson launched an excoriating attack on Theresa May's 'dithering' Brexit strategy today in his first Commons speech since quitting. The former foreign secretary exploded back into the political fray by lambasting her 'miserable' strategy as the Prime Minister struggles to contain open warfare in the Tory party. He complained that a 'fog of self doubt' had descended on the government after Mrs May's landmark Lancaster House speech on Brexit last year, and she had allowed negotiations with the EU to be dictated by questions about the Irish border.