VATICAN - Arlington Bishop Michael Burbidge has written a letter denouncing gender ideology and insisting that “no one” is transgender, NBC News reported this weekend. In his “controversial” letter, Bishop Burbidge condemns transgender ideology because it “presents a view of the human person contrary to the truth” by disconnecting the idea of gender from that of the biological sex of a person. The human person “is created male or female,” the bishop writes, and a person’s sex “is an immutable biological reality, determined at conception”, which “reveals God’s design” for each individual person. “The faithful should avoid using ‘gender-affirming’ terms or pronouns that convey approval of or reinforce the person’s rejection of the truth,” Burbidge writes. “It is not harsh or judgmental to decline to use such language.”

RUSSIA - Bone-chilling winter temperatures. Sub-Arctic taiga forests as far as the eye can see. Blinding clouds of mosquitos. Vast deposits of diamonds, gold, and other minerals. Add to the list of qualities for the vast Siberian region known as Yakutia: home to the world’s largest wildfires this year. In the United States, the largest blaze wreaking havoc this season is in California, the so-called Dixie Fire, and is currently burning nearly 3,000 square kilometers - about the size of Luxembourg. In Yakutia, the total area of the fires scorching the taiga this season are 10 times that. But there's more: according to the environmental group Greenpeace on August 16, more than 170,000 square kilometers have burned across Russia this year - making the 2021 fires the worst in a decade, and possibly ever. That's an area about the size of the US state of Florida. And the fire season still has weeks to go.

UK - Is it time to stop obsessing over Covid figures? Statistics reveal virus is NOT the biggest killer - with heart disease, dementia and cancer each claiming four times as many lives in an average week last month. They're the figures that have ruled our lives for the past 18 months; decided our freedoms; deepened our fears. Back in January, the dashboard attracted 76 million views in a single day. Other scientists have warned of the psychological impact of constant reminders of how many people are still catching Covid. ‘There’s a worry, that in the scramble to get out these daily updates, we’re alarming people disproportionately,’ says Professor Robert Dingwall... Last week, experts warned that the UK’s ever-growing toll of diabetes could soon bankrupt the NHS, after official data showed it spends more than £1 billion a year on treating the disease – up a quarter in five years.

USA - Reading the news has become like going to a freak show. You never know what you are going to see each day, but it is almost certainly going to be nutty. Some of the things that I am going to share with you in this article are weird, others are infuriating, but they all point to the same conclusion. From the very top to the very bottom, America is going crazy. And I mean that in the worst way possible. We truly have become an “idiocracy”, and it seems like those that are the most incompetent of all are often rewarded by being elevated to the top of the food chain. Meanwhile, those of us that still try to approach things rationally are increasingly being pushed to the fringes of society.

UK - Legendary British actor John Cleese has never been shy about his feelings on cancel culture, telling Reuters last year that he thinks it “misunderstands the main purposes of life which is to have fun.” “Everything humorous is critical. If you have someone who is perfectly kind and intelligent and flexible and who always behaves appropriately, they’re not funny,” the 81-year-old said, adding, “The problem with political correctness is that comedians have to set the bar according to what we are told by the most touchy, most emotionally unstable and fragile and least stoic people in the country.” The Monty Python alum has also blasted legislative speech suppression saying in October that a proposed Scottish hate speech law would hamper creativity. Now, the comedian is putting his money where his mouth is, releasing a documentary series on what cancel culture is and how it impacts its victims.

UK - In the sphere of economics, examples abound of the misuse of terms and concepts all of which advance the interests of the politically-connected elites, technocrats, governments, and the banking establishment at the expense of everyone else. One of the most glaring examples which, after the financial collapse in 2020, has now become more prominent in daily life, has been the meaning of the word “inflation.”

USA - Delays, product shortages and rising costs continue to bedevil businesses large and small. And consumers are confronted with an experience once rare in modern times: no stock available, and no idea when it will come in.

USA - Thousands of people rushed to leave South Lake Tahoe as the entire resort city came under evacuation orders and wildfire raced toward Lake Tahoe, a large freshwater lake straddling California and Nevada. Evacuation warnings issued for the city of 22,000 on Sunday turned into orders Monday. Vehicles loaded with bikes and camping gear and hauling boats were stuck in traffic, stalled in hazy, brown air that smelled of campfire. Police and other emergency vehicles whizzed by. “This is a systematic evacuation, one neighborhood at a time,” South Lake Tahoe police Lieutenant Travis Cabral said on social media. “I am asking you as our community to please remain calm.” The new orders came a day after communities several miles south of the lake were abruptly ordered evacuated as the Caldor Fire raged nearby. In California alone, more than 15,200 firefighters are fighting more than a dozen large fires. Flames have destroyed about 2,000 buildings and forced thousands to evacuate this year while blanketing large swaths of the West in unhealthy smoke.

USA - Twenty years of US war in Afghanistan draws to a close at the stroke of midnight on August 31. There will be plenty of time to dissect the root causes of failure. What is needed now is accountability for the disastrous endgame. A video of active duty Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller demanding accountability for the humanitarian disaster that had come to define the US-led evacuation from Kabul, Afghanistan, quickly went viral. Scheller, who commanded the advanced infantry training battalion at the Marine Corps School of Infantry, at the time the video was made, had spent 17 years as a Marine, with multiple combat deployments. He knowingly placed this distinguished career at risk by publicly demanding that someone be held accountable for the bungled evacuation, which had left at least 14 American servicemen dead, along with hundreds of Afghans, some with dual citizenship in allied nations. Scheller’s commanders immediately relieved him of his command. This was a consequence Scheller anticipated, which makes his decision to sacrifice his career in the name of accountability even more remarkable.

USA - Hurricane IDA has battered the US state of Louisiana, with a "major disaster" declared in the US state. Hurricane Ida initially brought 150mph winds when it first struck Louisiana. One death has been reported so far due to a tree falling on a house near the Baton Rouge area. The storm’s path has continued to move northwards, with the system hitting New Orleans today. The US city has been left without power due to the hurricane, with only generators working. US President, Joe Biden, has said restoring power could take weeks. In Louisiana, more than one million homes have been left without power. Although Storm Ida has now been downgraded to a Category 1 storm, it continues to cause costly damage. Although New Orleans has since had its flood defences strengthened, many fear the storm could cause flooding.

USA - The Biden administration released a “back-to-school” video that serves as a message it intends to “enforce” its transgender ideology and “use children as enforcers,” states the founder of an organization that helps victims of what she refers to as the “Sexual State.” Jennifer Roback Morse, PhD, founder of the Ruth Institute, wrote Tuesday at National Catholic Register about the video released last week jointly by the Biden Departments of Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services (HHS) that, ultimately, encourages transgender youth to file federal complaints against their parents, school officials, and other adults who do not immediately affirm their new gender identity.

USA - The far-left cesspool of San Francisco has decided to suspend nearly two dozen employees who work at the local police, fire and sheriff’s departments for refusing to disclose their Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccination” status. According to reports, hundreds of other employees from additional departments are also slated to be temporarily axed after the city sent out notifications warning that the targets in question had failed to meet an August 12 disclosure deadline. Meanwhile, some residents of San Francisco are wondering what will become of their city once a chunk of the police and firefighting force are removed – as if the Bay Area is not already plagued by enough rampant lawlessness to last a lifetime.

AFGHANISTAN - The Pentagon used a special Hellfire missile that packs no explosives to strike Islamic State militants in Afghanistan on Saturday in retaliation for a suicide bomb attack at the Kabul airport last week, according to two US officials. The airstrike, carried out by a Reaper drone flown from the Persian Gulf region, killed two militants associated with the Afghanistan offshoot of the Islamic State extremist group, and injured a third individual. The missile used by the US in the airstrike, called an R9X, is inert. Instead of exploding, the weapon ejects a halo of six large blades stowed inside the skin of the missile, which deploy at the last minute to shred the target of the strike, allowing military commanders to pinpoint their target and reduce the possibility for civilian casualties.

USA - The media's addiction to Covid-19 ‘fear porn’ is perpetuating an ever-worsening cycle of societal damage across the world. Over the past year and a half, hysterical media reporting on matters Covid-19 has reduced some people to a fearful state of unquestioning compliance – including a great number of otherwise critically-thinking journalists. With screaming headlines in bold and large font such as, ‘Will this nightmare ever end?’ and ‘Mutant virus skyrockets…’ and ‘Fear grows across the country: VIRUS PANIC’, and ‘Coronavirus horror: Social media footage shows infected Wuhan residents 'act like zombies’, it is no wonder many people are in a state of panic.

USA - At a time when American society is torn on myriad other issues – from gun control and healthcare to welfare and abortions - imperial retreat has been one aim that Donald Trump as well as Barack Obama and Joe Biden all shared and practiced, albeit with varying degrees of clumsiness. Considering imperial history, international circumstances, and American society’s genetic code, global retreat is indeed what Uncle Sam should now do. The American imperium planted 800 bases worldwide, more than 20 times what the other four superpowers have combined. The number of US troops stationed abroad, 200,000, is equal to the size of the entire standing army of France. Some 150 of the world’s 195 countries host American troops. America’s annual military spending, more than $770 billion, is larger than the next five military spenders combined. The 11 aircraft carriers with which Uncle Sam navigates the high seas equal the combined total of all other countries’ carriers.