INDONESIA - Bali and Lombok have been struck by a 6.2 magnitude earthquake causing buildings to collapse days after more than 300 died in major earthquakes in Indonesia since Sunday, the Southeast Asian nation's meteorology and geophysics agency said. The latest quake was felt strongly on the island and followed a 6.9 quake on Sunday that killed at least 131 people and damaged thousands of houses, and another measuring 6.4 on July 29 which resulted in 14 deaths. A witness told Reuters the latest quake sent people into the streets in panic and caused buildings to collapse. A humanitarian crisis is also looming in Lombok, where thousands have been left homeless and in desperate need of clean water, food, medicine and shelter.
USA - Major changes are happening to our planet, and the experts are groping for answers. In recent days some have suggested that what we are witnessing is the natural progression of “man-made climate change”, but that explanation has generally been received with a lot of skepticism. Something truly dramatic appears to be happening to the globe, and it isn’t just because the amount of carbon dioxide in the air suddenly reached some sort of magical “tipping point”.
USA - President Donald Trump warned foreign countries on Tuesday not to do business with Iran – or lose business with the United States. “Anyone doing business with Iran will NOT be doing business with the United States,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “I am asking for WORLD PEACE, nothing less!” Trump commented on the issue after signing an executive order restoring the sanctions loosened by former President Barack Obama as a result of the Iran deal.
EUROPE - European companies doing business with Iran could soon find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Should they comply with US sanctions and abandon Tehran, they may in turn face sanctions in their home EU. If European companies cave in to US President Donald Trump's threat of secondary sanctions and stop doing business in Iran, they will be punished by the EU itself, says the aide to Federica Mogherini, the bloc's foreign policy chief.
GERMANY - While Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen's spokesman said Monday that the discussion is "good and important," the proposal is vague and the response has been mixed. Germany dropped the draft in 2011, one of many tenets of conservative orthodoxy brushed aside under Merkel — a trend that has irked some on the right of her party. Only the nationalist Alternative for Germany opposition party whole-heartedly backs the idea. Von der Leyen's spokesman, Jens Flosdorff, said the discussion of some kind of national service is helpful because "it draws attention to the high added value of young people's service for the state," but said any such service should bring "tangible personal advantages" to those performing it.
GERMANY - No, this isn’t a fantasy ...but a real debate, happening in present-day Berlin. As Germany’s foreign policy establishment becomes increasingly convinced that Donald Trump’s aggressive rhetoric toward Berlin and NATO represents a seminal shift in transatlantic relations, some are daring to think the unthinkable.
USA - The US Constitution explicitly forbids government censorship. So Silicon Valley big-tech companies made themselves the gatekeepers of 'goodthink,' de-platforming anyone who runs afoul of their arbitrary ‘community standards.’ Alex Jones, the host of InfoWars, has often been derided by establishment media as a conspiracy theorist. Yet on Monday, Apple, Spotify, YouTube and Facebook proved right the motto of his show – “There’s a war on for your mind!” – by blocking or deleting InfoWars accounts from their platforms, saying he allegedly engaged in “hate speech” and violated their “community standards.”
USA - August 6th was one of darkest days in the history of the Internet. When I learned that Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Pinterest and others had colluded to take down content from Alex Jones all on the same day, I knew exactly what was happening. They timed their attack so that it would hit the press at the beginning of the weekly news cycle on Monday so that their purge would have maximum societal impact. And the fact that there was such overt collusion was obviously meant to send a message.
EUROPE - First came abortion-on-demand, then elderly assisted suicide and euthanasia, and now euthanasia of children. Technocrats who believe in and practice ‘herd management’ of society see no problem with the selective culling of weaker members. With white coats and prestigious titles, these killers are no better than all the Hitler-type tyrants who are sprinkled throughout history. ⁃ TN Editor
USA - Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil of Google and North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un have two things in common: they both want to conquer immortality and bring their fathers back to life. Moreover, North Korea has been experimenting with human cloning for at least 10 years already. With zero ethical restraints, these Technocrat scientists are free to do anything their minds can conceive. TN Editor
ISRAEL - The ruling Palestinian Fatah faction on Saturday warned Hamas against reaching a cease-fire agreement with Israel in return for humanitarian and economic aid to the Gaza Strip and said such a deal would be a “free gift to Israel.” The warning came amid unconfirmed reports that Israel and Hamas were close to reaching a long-term truce agreement. Fatah spokesman Osama Qawasmeh warned Hamas against striking such a deal with Israel “at the expense of national unity.” He said such a deal would be considered a “free gift to Israel and another coup against the Palestinian people and their homeland.” He was referring to Hamas’s violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007.
USA - On Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics told us that the unemployment rate was 3.9%. The 3.9% unemployment rate is not due to employment. It results from not counting discouraged workers who have ceased to search for jobs because there are no jobs to be had. If an unemployed person is not actively searching for a job, he is not counted as being in the labor force. The way the unemployment rate is measured makes it a hoax. The government tells us that there is essentially no inflation despite the fact that prices have been rising strongly - the price of food, the price of home repairs, the price of drugs, the price of almost everything. Incomes, of course, have not doubled. In real terms incomes have declined
UK - The UK government has taken one step further towards bringing into effect an ‘opt-in’ organ donation system which will presume a person is an organ donor in moves that one medical ethicist warns could mean increasing donations by “slight of hand”. Conservative Government ministers are to go ahead with reformations to organ ‘donation’ laws which they said could increase the availability of organs for transplant by 700 per year, reports the BBC. The legislation is expected to be brought before the House of Commons when MPs return from recess in Autumn, and if Parliament approves the organ donation law, it will come into effect in England by Spring 2020.
USA - Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-semite. Julian Assange is a rapist, a Russian agent and a terrorist. Donald Trump is an anti-semite, a rapist AND a Russian agent. Vladimir Putin wants to invade and enslave the entire western world and to that end employs Assange, Trump, maybe also Corbyn(?), as well as thousands upon thousands of hackers and murderers who make people vote for whoever Putin chooses, and poison former Russian agents on western soil.
UK - Social media and video games are creating a generation of children with the mental and emotional immaturity of three-year-olds, one of Britain’s most eminent brain scientists has warned. Baroness Susan Greenfield, a senior research fellow at Oxford University and former director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, said she was concerned children were losing their ability to think for themselves, empathise and communicate with each other. Instead, they were being bombarded with instant gratification through social media and gaming which meant that like three-year-olds they would need “something every moment to distract them so they can’t have their own inner narrative, their own inner thought...”
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The views expressed in this section are not our own, unless specifically stated, but are provided to highlight what may prove to be prophetically relevant material appearing in the media.