USA - Sometimes it feels like America is going crazy. Arbitrary and confusing public health restrictions, political polarization, lurid media, and escalating culture war create a pervasive sense of disorientation verging on madness. The riot at the Capitol on January 6 was only the most vivid example of our collective freakout. Not just the horrified viewers on television but the participants themselves seemed unable to believe what was happening. Several causes of this condition are contingent — not least the pandemic that put many aspects of normal life on hold. But there are deeper sources of our present freakout. In his 1981 study American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, political scientist Samuel Huntington argued that American history is characterized by nervous breakdowns that recur approximately every 60 years. If our last bout was in the 1960s, we're right on schedule for another outbreak.

ISRAEL - Yair Lapid, the centrist leader of the Israeli opposition, was asked on Wednesday to try to form a coalition government after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to do so by a Tuesday deadline. Mr Netanyahu remains caretaker prime minister and if Mr Lapid cannot cobble together a government, the country could face another election this summer, its fifth general election in a little more than two years. Mr Lapid has 28 days to persuade a majority of the 120-seat Parliament to support him after the president, Reuven Rivlin, gave him the mandate to begin coalition negotiations. Right-wing parties hold a majority in Parliament, but have been unable to form a functional government over the past two years because they are divided between those who support Mr Netanyahu, and those who believe he should resign to focus on his corruption trial. That split has redrawn the Israeli political map — as political ideology has become defined more by perceptions of Mr Netanyahu than by economic policy or approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

ISRAEL - A number of flashpoint events and the cancellation of Palestinian elections may lead to even more violence in the West Bank in the coming weeks. With tensions boiling in the West Bank, the IDF has beefed up its forces following a terrorist attack and in anticipation of a month in which several flashpoint events are set to take place.

VATICAN - Pope Francis warned of the dangers of unregulated markets Tuesday, calling for “rigid regulation” of financial speculation. In a video message, the pope made known his prayer intention for the month of May: “We pray that financial managers will collaborate with governments to regulate financial markets and protect citizens from their dangers. Finance, if it is not regulated, becomes pure speculation animated by monetary politics,” the pope said in Tuesday’s message. “This situation is untenable. It’s dangerous. How far away is the world of big finance from the lives of most people! In order to prevent the poor from once again paying the consequences, financial speculation must be rigidly regulated,” Francis insisted. “Let finance be an instrument of service, a tool to serve people and to take care of the common home!” he said. “We still have time to start a process of global change to put into practice a different, fairer, more inclusive, sustainable economy that leaves no one behind,” he declared.

UK - The professor of environmental medicine explains how chemicals in plastics are causing our fertility to decline – and what we can do about it. Q - “You’ve spent more than 20 years examining the effects of hormone disrupting chemicals on reproductive health. Are you now sounding the alarm?” A - “I am directly speaking to this hidden problem people don’t like to talk about, which is their sub-fertility or reproductive problems, and how that is tied to the environment. People are recognising we have a reproductive health crisis, but they say it’s because of delayed childbearing, choice or lifestyle – it can’t be chemical. I want people to recognise it can. I am not saying other factors aren’t involved. But I am saying chemicals play a major causal role.”

AFGHANISTAN - Afghan security forces fought back a huge Taliban offensive just two days after United States forces handed control of a local base back to the country's army. The Taliban launched a massive offensive in Afghanistan's Helmand province on Monday while fighting continued the next day, officials and residents claimed on Tuesday. Afghan security forces fought back against the offensive just two days after a handover ceremony, which saw US forces give control of Antonik camp in Helmand to the Afghan National Army (ANA). The offensive comes after militants launched assaults around the country following a missed US deadline to withdraw troops from the country, as agreed in talks with the Taliban last year.

CHINA - Chinese leader Xi Jinping personally directed the country’s communist regime to focus its efforts to control the global internet, displacing the influential role of the United States, according to internal government documents recently obtained by The Epoch Times. In a January 2017 speech, Xi said the “power to control the internet” had become the “new focal point of [China’s] national strategic contest,” and singled out the United States as a “rival force” standing in the way of the regime’s ambitions. The ultimate goal was for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to control all content on the global internet so that the regime could wield what Xi described as “discourse power” over communications and discussions on the world stage.

USA - The world’s over-population propaganda is pure Technocrat fiction. Aging populations are soaring throughout the world along with infertility that has resulted in dramatically fewer births. The United States is now below replacement rate. ⁃ TN Editor

NIGERIA - Armed gunmen raided a Sunday morning service last week at Haske Baptist Church in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, killing one and kidnapping at least four others, the Barnabas Fund reported Tuesday. The April 25 attack took place in Manini Tasha village, in Kaduna State, where Fulani raiders have carried out ongoing targeted attacks on the Christian population.

USA - If you are too young to have been alive during the 1970s, you might want to read up on that decade, because current economic conditions are starting to become eerily similar to what we experienced back then. In the 1970s, an energy crisis caused tremendously long lines at gas stations all over the country. In 2021, we don’t have a shortage of gasoline, but shortages of other key products are starting to cause very serious problems. In fact even the Biden administration is publicly admitting that there will be “supply chain disruptions” in the months ahead. The 1970s also featured extremely painful inflation, and I certainly don’t need to tell you that prices have been rising very aggressively lately. In fact, Bloomberg is using the term “skyrocketing” to describe the “upward trajectory” of commodity prices…

GERMANY - When the ruling class in Germany prepares an offensive for war and rearmament it can rely on the Green Party. That was the case in 1998, when then Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer organised Germany’s first post-war international military intervention, sending the German army (Bundeswehr) off to war against Serbia, and so it is again today. ...Since Annalena Baerbock was appointed the Green Party’s choice as potential chancellor, the warmongering of the Greens has taken on outright hysterical forms. ...One asks: has she lost her senses? Has she ever considered what this means? ...Accepting Ukraine into NATO would be tantamount to a declaration of war against Russia and would immediately set off alarm bells in Moscow. It would raise the prospect of an armed conflict with the world’s second-largest nuclear power, a conflict which could cause millions of deaths in Europe and threaten all of humanity.

USA - Speaking with the USS Arizona Memorial and the Battleship Missouri Memorial in the background, Austin cautioned that the US military cannot be satisfied with believing it is the strongest and most capability military in the world today — “not at a time when our potential adversaries are very deliberately working to blunt our edge.” He appeared to be referring to China, which other officials say has accelerated its military modernization and sped up its construction of a wide range of sophisticated weaponry while the US was focused for two decades on combating extremist groups like al-Qaida in Afghanistan and, more recently, the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria. ...Austin said US defense will continue to rest on maintaining deterrence, which he described as “fixing a basic truth within the minds of our potential foes: The costs and risks of aggression are out of line with any conceivable benefit.”

RUSSIA - In terms of global trends, modern shipbuilders aim for increased maneuverability and efficiency at a decreased displacement. Present-day analysts agree that aircraft carriers are useful only if you don’t plan on invading a nation any stronger than a banana republic. In a naval standoff between equal powers, they’d be taken out first because they’re easy targets for guided missiles. It’s really hard to imagine this type of ship making a safe approach to the Russian shores under any circumstances. Both nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines and attack submarines, in general, however, are set to stay with us for the foreseeable future.

USA - Sarah Margon has been nominated for the post of assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. She has been a "conflict policy adviser" for Oxfam, a bitter critic of Israel, a major funder of Palestinian groups and a promoter of boycotts of Israeli settlements. She was also a foreign-policy adviser for the Open Society Foundations. As NGO Monitor has documented, Open Society's funding fuels the conflict in myriad ways and does its best to undermine and attack Israel.

NORTH KOREA - The Foreign Ministry of North Korea responded on Sunday, nearly a week later, to a passing reference President Joe Biden made to the country in his first speech to Congress as president, calling his words “intolerable.” North Korea’s government-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) published remarks by senior American relations diplomat Kwon Jong-gun in which he described Biden’s words as a “blunder” and a “slip of the tongue.” Given that Biden had allegedly threatened Pyongyang, Kwon argued, North Korea would have to retaliate and place the US in a “very grave situation.” North Korea and the United States have technically been at war since 1950, when the Korean War began. While active hostilities ended in 1953, no side ever signed a peace treaty.