USA - NATO allies must step up defence spending “immediately” or face consequences, the Trump administration said on the eve of a key summit. US officials warned that many allies were “lagging behind” their pledge to spend 5 per cent of GDP on the military by 2035. Sir Keir Starmer announced a £15 billion uplift in defence spending this week but that will only raise the UK figure to 2.7 per cent of GDP by 2029. Matt Whitaker, the US ambassador to NATO, said on Sunday night: “Some allies are doing more than others. Poland, the Nordic countries, the Baltic countries lead the way. But many others are lagging behind, and President Trump expects all allies to step up immediately and not only get on a sustainable path to the 5 per cent but to get to 5 per cent as soon as possible.” Donald Trump is thought to be planning to reward or punish countries based on their defence spending.

EUROPE - On the eve of a tense NATO summit in Ankara, some of the alliance’s frontline states have issued ominous prophecies of imminent Russian aggression. Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, conjured up the spectre of the 1939 Gleiwitz incident, when Nazi Germany faked an attack on its own radio centre and blamed it on the Poles as a pretext for the invasion that started the Second World War. “Our message to Vladimir Putin is this: we know what you are planning. Don’t do it,” Sikorski told reporters on Friday. Colonel Pawel Szota, the head of the Polish foreign intelligence agency, underlined the sense of threat in a rare public interview, warning that NATO had to “act as if an armed conflict with Russia were a near-term prospect”. “The level of Russian aggression is very high, and the risk of military confrontation is real,” he told Rzeczpospolita, a newspaper. There is certainly something approaching a consensus among the “like-minded” northern and central European allies that NATO is entering a period fraught with risk.

RUSSIA - Not long ago, BRICS was largely seen as an economic acronym – a loose coalition of emerging powers united by their ambition to reshape global finance and give the developing world a stronger voice in international economic governance. Today, that image is rapidly becoming outdated. As wars spread, supply chains fracture, cyber threats multiply, and established international institutions struggle to keep pace with an increasingly turbulent world, BRICS is expanding its ambitions. What began as an economic partnership is steadily evolving into a platform where major emerging powers discuss not only prosperity, but security. The evolution of BRICS into a forum addressing both economic and security questions is therefore worth watching – not because it has resolved today’s geopolitical divisions, but because it represents one of the clearest attempts to manage them within an increasingly multipolar world.

YEMEN - Yemen’s Iran-backed terrorists accused Riyadh of sending fighter jets to stop an Iranian civilian plane from landing in Sanaa, warning that continued ‘aggression’ would trigger attacks on airports and vital interests on land and at sea. Yemen’s Houthi terrorists accused Saudi Arabia on Friday evening of violating their airspace and threatened to attack the kingdom if what they called “aggression” continues. AFP reported that Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree claimed the group had “confronted” Saudi fighter jets after they allegedly tried to prevent an Iranian civilian aircraft from landing at the international airport in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. “We warn the criminal Saudi enemy against any further attempt to violate our airspace or carry out any aggression,” Saree said in a recorded statement.

ITALY - Mount Etna has erupted in Sicily, forcing Catania Airport to cancel all flights as volcanic ash clouds trigger a red aviation alert across Italy. A red alert has been declared and flights have been disrupted and cancelled in Italy as Mount Etna spews vast clouds of ash high into the sky. Local news outlet La Sicilia has reported that Catania Airport has been compelled to cancel all incoming flights owing to safety concerns as the volcano releases ash across Sicily.

INDIA - At least 14 people, including several children, were killed in heavy rainfall across South Asian countries.In the eastern suburbs of India's Mumbai, at least six people were killed when a group of buildings collapsed on Sunday, the latest casualties of heavy rains that have disrupted travel and shut down schools in the city. Rains also triggered landslides on the expressway connecting Mumbai with Pune, forcing its closure and disrupting traffic between the two cities. Besides road transport, flights were disrupted and long-distance train services, including those running between Mumbai and Pune, were also canceled.

USA - GridStatus' website shows the PJM Interconnection under severe peak-demand stress as heat-driven cooling loads surge across the Mid-Atlantic and eastern US. The fuel-mix chart shows the grid is heavily reliant on natural gas and coal, which together account for about 64.2% of all power, with nuclear at 20.6%. In total, gas, coal, and nuclear account for about 84.8% of the power being generated, while solar and wind remain in the high single digits. The grid is operating near record load and relying heavily on gas-fired generation to prevent rolling blackouts.

USA - In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, then the nation’s leading oil producer, warned that the US had only four years of oil remaining. Forty years later, in 1914, when oil still hadn’t run out, the federal government said the US had only a ten-year supply remaining. In 1940, the government announced that reserves would be depleted within a decade and a half.

USA - America’s national debt has always reflected the trajectory of the nation itself — one rising as the other, at least economically, wavers — but rarely has that story been as stark as it is today. From a mere $71 million in the country’s early days to now more than $39 trillion on the eve of its semiquincentennial, the scale of US borrowing has expanded exponentially and to a level almost beyond comprehension over two and a half centuries. This 55,000-percent rise has been punctuated by wars, financial collapses and global shocks, before settling into periods of relative stability, only to climb again. And the history of US debt displays a familiar pattern: spending in times of need and expansion, enabled by the country’s economic strength and its increasingly central position in the global financial system. But as concern rises among lawmakers as well as the public, and more of Uncle Sam’s budget goes toward paying interest on a ballooning balance sheet, questions are mounting over how long this economic strength can postpone an economic crisis.

USA - California Democrats are advancing a new bill that would establish two Muslim holy days as state holidays while authorizing the state to develop a new model curriculum for students to “acknowledge and celebrate” these Islamic observances in the classroom. Funny how the Democrats are militant about separation of church and state but mosque and state? Not so much.