USA - The Caldor Fire continued its explosive growth in California's El Dorado County on Wednesday, expanding to nearly 63,000 acres. The blaze has destroyed a school, a church, and many other buildings, and forced thousands of people to flee rural homes. The fire just started last weekend. Caldor fire response spokesperson Chris Vestal said its behavior has been "unprecedented," with unusually high flame lengths and rapid expansion as it ripped through steep terrain, fueled by what Cal Fire described as "large amounts of dry vegetation." The massive Dixie Fire, which has burned more than 635,000 acres, also continued to burn on Wednesday, threatening the communities of Janesville and Susanville in Lassen County.

USA - Former President Donald Trump slammed President Joe Biden in a statement Saturday night, saying that “Biden gets it wrong every time on foreign policy,” and because of that, the Taliban no longer fears or respects America. Trump said in his statement that “everyone knew” that Biden would not have done a good job under pressure, and in addition, Biden has gotten it wrong whenever it comes to making foreign policy decisions.

USA - Unlike former President Donald Trump, the faces and voices of the reconstituted Taliban regime in Afghanistan can apparently tweet to their hearts’ content. In a statement obtained by Mediaite Tuesday, Twitter ducked the question of whether it would bar representatives of the Islamic fundamentalist government from getting their message out 280 characters at a time — saying only that it would “continue to proactively enforce” its rules outlawing the “glorification of violence, platform manipulation and spam.” Big Tech critics have expressed outrage over Twitter’s tolerance toward the Taliban after it banned Trump in the aftermath of the deadly January 6 riot at the US Capitol. The company also recently suspended Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (Republican for Georgia) after she questioned the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, but has permitted accounts affiliated with repressive governments like China and Iran to spread anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda. “Why does the Taliban spokesman have an active Twitter account but not the former President of the United States?,” Representative Madison Cawthorn (Republican for North Carolina) tweeted Sunday. “Who’s side is the AMERICA BASED Big-Tech companies on?”

TAIWAN - China carried out assault drills near Taiwan on Tuesday, with warships and fighter jets exercising off the southwest and southeast of the island in what the country's armed forces said was a response to "external interference" and "provocations". Taiwan, which Beijing claims as Chinese territory, has complained of repeated People's Liberation Army (PLA) drills in its vicinity in the past two years or so, part of a pressure campaign to force the island to accept China's sovereignty. In a brief statement, the PLA's Eastern Theatre Command said warships, anti-submarine aircraft and fighter jets had been dispatched close to Taiwan to carry out "joint fire assault and other drills using actual troops". Taiwan believes China is trying to gather electronic signals from US and Japanese aircraft so that they can "paralyse reinforcing aircraft including F-35s in a war", the source said, referring to the US-operated stealth fighter.

AFGHANISTAN - It was a scene that once seemed unthinkable: a dour-looking Taliban fighter, his AK-47 on the desk before him, his comrades by his side in the ornate office formerly occupied by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who had fled the country hours before. For the Taliban, those images from Sunday night, when the group’s fighters advanced from the provinces and breached the presidential palace in Kabul, culminated in a lightning takeover of the country after two decades of grinding combat against the US and its allies. For other jihadi groups, it was nothing less than an inspiration. Whether it’s Al Qaeda affiliates in Mali and Somalia, extremist factions operating in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, or so-called keyboard warriors cheering on from their homes in the West, the Taliban’s victory over Afghanistan’s Western-created government “is the most significant boost to the global jihadist movement since September 11,” said Rita Katz, the founder of SITE Intelligence, an extremist monitoring group.

USA - A senior US senator, also a member of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on his social media revealed that the US has 30,000 soldiers stationed in China's Taiwan island. Chinese experts said if this is true, it is a military invasion and occupation of China's Taiwan and equivalent to the US declaring war on China. If the tweet is correct, China could immediately activate Anti-Secession Law to destroy and expel US troops in Taiwan and reunify Taiwan militarily, experts noted. Now, the US and the Taiwan authorities must explain. If it is true that the US has 30,000, or less than that number, soldiers stationed on the Taiwan island, Chinese military forces will immediately launch a war to eliminate and expel the US soldiers.

[Warning: This news story is currently uncorroborated and could be fake but could have big implications if true.]

USA - US officials declared the first-ever federal water shortage on Monday, from a river that serves 40 million people in the West, triggering cuts to some Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico farmers next year amid a gripping drought. Water levels at the largest reservoir on the Colorado River - Lake Mead - have fallen to record lows. Lake Mead supplies water to millions of people in Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico. Arizona will be hardest hit and lose 18 percent of its share from the river next year, or 512,000 acre-feet of water. That's around eight percent of the state's total water use. Nevada will lose about seven percent of its allocation... Mexico will see a reduction of roughly five percent. However, federal officials said Monday's declaration makes it clear that conditions have intensified faster than scientists predicted in 2019, when some states in the Colorado River basin agreed to give up shares of water to maintain levels at Lake Mead.

MEXICO - A lot of people didn’t think that it would ever come to this. Many simply assumed that conditions would return to “normal” eventually and that everything would work out just fine somehow. But here in the middle of 2021, everything is definitely not fine. In fact, cows are literally dropping dead from starvation in northern Mexico in very large numbers. This isn’t the sort of thing that is supposed to happen in North America. If you don’t think that this will affect us here in the United States, you are wrong. Each year, the US usually imports about 500 million pounds of beef from Mexico. So get ready to pay much more for beef at the grocery store. Sadly, NBC News is telling us that the drought in Mexico “looks set to worsen in coming weeks“… Meanwhile, we are dealing with a historic drought of our own in the western third of the nation.

USA - At this moment, every square inch of California is in a state of drought, and that is a huge problem because it produces about a third of our vegetables and about two-thirds of our fruits and nuts. The USDA has released some new numbers that are absolutely staggering. The following are exact quotes that come directly from that document…

GERMANY - The head of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU party has called the withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan the "biggest NATO debacle" since the founding of the US-led military alliance. “With the Taliban sweeping to power after NATO troops withdrew, it is evident that this engagement of the international community was not successful,” Armin Laschet said at a closed-door meeting of Germany’s Christian Democrat party on Monday. “It is the biggest debacle that NATO has suffered since its founding, and we're standing before an epochal change." Merkel, for her part, told party colleagues that Germany must urgently evacuate up to 10,000 people from Afghanistan for whom it has responsibility, warning that the fallout from the conflict will last for a very long time.

AFGHANISTAN - A Taliban prisoner who was released from the Guantanamo Bay prison in 2014 by former US president Barack Obama, is emerging as the key figure who reunited the insurgents and helped them capture the power in Afghanistan. Khairullah Khairkhwa was released along with four others in exchange for captured US Army soldier, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. The 'Gitmo Five' were labelled "hardest of the hardcore" by US intelligence officials who urged Obama to reconsider his decision. However, those warnings were ignored, with assurance that these five terrorists will be kept in Qatar, so that they are not able to indulge in active politics in Afghanistan. But now, a report the New York Post has claimed that Khairkhwa and the four others released along with him made contact with active Taliban terrorists and vowed to drive American troops out of the country which they ruled 20 years ago. Khairkhwa played a key role in formation of a Taliban regime in exile and became official negotiator for peace talks, the Post report said.

ISRAEL - The Taliban victory against the US today and the Soviet Union before it should be a wake-up call to the Israeli security establishment to start thinking outside of the box and ensure that images of Islamist militants parading in victory are not replicated in Ramallah. It was only two days ago that the now-ousted Afghan President Ashraf Ghani assured his country and the world that everything was under control. His assurances followed those of US President Joe Biden, who said that "300,000 national troops are well equipped to stand up to 75,000 Taliban militants," with intelligence agencies not predicting any imminent collapse. The only surprise was not that Afghanistan fell to the Islamist terror group, but how rapidly it happened.

AFGHANISTAN - The drama playing out in Afghanistan right now has enormous implications for the entire planet, because it represents a colossal defeat for western globalists. Ever since the end of World War II, western elitists have been tirelessly working to establish “liberal democracies” all over the globe, and the idea was that all of the “liberal democracies” could be increasingly integrated into an emerging one world system. Of course China, Russia, Iran and their allies were never going to fully go along with this plan, and that is one of the reasons why they are endlessly demonized by media outlets in the western world.

AFGHANISTAN - Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban leader freed from a Pakistani jail on the request of the US less than three years ago, has emerged as an undisputed victor of the 20-year war. While Haibatullah Akhundzada is the Taliban’s overall leader, Baradar is its political chief and its most public face. He was said to be on his way from his office in Doha to Kabul on Sunday evening. In a televised statement on the fall of Kabul, he said the Taliban’s real test was only just beginning and that they had to serve the nation. Baradar’s return to power embodies Afghanistan’s inability to escape the bloody shackles of its past.

CHINA - Amid all of this regional angst, China is quietly attempting to secure its interests in post-US Afghanistan. Beijing has reportedly been actively engaging with Kabul on construction of the Peshawar-Kabul motorway, which would connect Pakistan to Afghanistan and make Kabul a participant in China’s massive infrastructure and investment plan, the Belt and Road Initiative. Up until now, Kabul has resisted participation in the initiative to avoid getting on the wrong side of Washington. Beijing is also building a major road through the Wakhan Corridor—a slim strip of mountainous territory connecting China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang to Afghanistan—and onward to Pakistan and Central Asia, complementing its existing road network through the region. Once completed, these new thoroughfares should enable Beijing to pursue its goals of increased trade with the region and natural resource extraction in Afghanistan. According to a 2014 report, Afghanistan may possess nearly a trillion dollars’ worth of extractable rare-earth metals locked within its mountains.