UK - Piled high with pizza, bulging with burgers and fit to burst with doughnuts, sweets and crisps, it sounds like a fast-food fantasy. Yet the cupboard in Leyla Kandemir's kitchen is anything but appetising. For every single item in her collection — fondly dubbed 'Mum's Museum' by her two children and husband Murat — is at least 12 months old. Comprising burgers and chips from McDonald's, Greggs sausage rolls, Domino's pizza, and pastries, bread and buns from her local Tesco, some of these 'Frankenfoods' date back to April 2019 and are part of a groundbreaking experiment. Not only do they look like they have failed to decay, despite being stored in a simple kitchen cupboard, they all appear almost identical to the day she bought them. Her unorthodox experiment started in April 2019 when she was cleaning her son's bedroom and found the remnants of a three-day-old pizza under his bed. 'I couldn't believe it hadn't gone off over the weekend, so I decided to keep a few slices and see what would happen,' she says. Two years and four months later, the original pizza slices are still there, apparently unchanged.

USA - 750,000 divorces happen, on average, every year in the US. While some call that a shame, others see it as a total addressable market. Take, for example, online divorce startup Hello Divorce. They have just raised $2 million to help couples streamline to the inevitable: splitting up. The company provides a combination of software and legal services that start at $99 and average at about $2,000. The total cost of divorce is, on average, between $8,400 and $17,500. The industry as a whole is valued around $50 billion per annum, the report notes. The company was started in 2018 by family law attorney Erin Levine, who called billable hours for divorce an "antiquated process”. It currently is available in just four states: California, Colorado, Texas and Utah. The company says that most people spend 2 to 5 years thinking about divorce and that 80% of them won't have access to counsel.

UK - The UK is set to be hit with yet another supermarket crisis as driver shortages could lead to shelves in shops being empty for months. Empty shelves in supermarkets are likely to continue for many months unless the Government does more to tackle the worker shortages hitting haulage firms, suppliers have warned. Several logistic organisations have said that August is a pinch point in the labour crisis as employees take summer breaks. On top of that, firms offering bonuses and sign-on fees to recruit drivers make matters worse. The situation has also been worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. And now wholesalers are unable to get goods to shops. On Friday, a major dairy producer Arla said it could not get milk to a quarter of the supermarkets it supplies. Ms Hunnisett also urged consumers to be patient and not overbuy. She said: “There is plenty of stock in the supply chain, in all the warehouses. And plenty of fresh homegrown produce.”

USA - The mood of the nation has dramatically changed. Survey after survey has shown that Americans are much less optimistic than they were during the first half of 2021, and that could have enormous implications for the economy as we roll through the second half of this calendar year. When consumers are pessimistic about the future, they tend to hold on to their money more tightly, and they also tend to allocate money to different priorities. Earlier this year, so many pundits were telling us that a new golden era of prosperity was ahead because the worst of the pandemic was behind us and Joe Biden was now in the White House. But now the Delta variant is causing another wave of mass panic, and an increasing number of Americans are losing faith in the Biden administration. Needless to say, the honeymoon is over, and Americans are not pleased with what they see as they peer into a very bleak future. I know that most Americans just want life to “return to normal”, but the truth is that the past couple of years have changed the US and nations all over the globe on a permanent basis.

USA - Dr Shiva discovered that Twitter built a special portal offered to certain governmental entities so that government officials can flag and delete content they dislike for any reason, as part of what they call their “Twitter Partner Status.” Dr Shiva Ayyadurai, the man who invented email, ran for US Senate in Massachusetts as a Republican and made allegations of voter fraud on Twitter. These tweets were then deleted by the far-left tech giant. Later it was discovered that they were deleted at the direction of government employees of the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office.

USA - For years, Americans have largely ignored corporate social media surveillance. But all of that is about to change, thanks to President Biden. No one has taken the White House’s plan to turn Big Tech into a quasi-Five Eyes censorship program seriously despite repeated warnings from journalists and news websites.Journalist Caitlin Johnstone warned, the White House is pushing for Facebook and Microsoft to censor any social media stories the Feds don’t like. “After Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted on Thursday that the administration has given Facebook a list of accounts to ban for spreading misinformation about the Covid vaccine, she has now doubled down saying that people who circulate such materials online should be banned from not just one but all social media platforms.” The Feds want Big Tech to ban stories and people they do not approve of from social media.

AUSTRALIA - As YouTube’s fascist suspension of Sky News Australia continues, we advise readers to follow the skynews.com.au website. Sky News host Alan Jones said the challenge to free speech “is real” and “we don’t seem to have a leader anywhere to defend it. Now the good news, you can find all our material, and tell your friends, on the skynews.com.au website.” “We live in a time when smart people are being silenced so that stupid people won’t be offended.”

CHINA - Russian troops have arrived in China as the two nations plan on holding strategic military drills for the first time next week. The exercises are said to safeguard regional security and stability as well as securing the good relationship between Beijing and Moscow. The drills are planned to run for five days, taking place from August 9 to 13. The military exercises will reportedly involve 10,000 troops along with various weaponry and equipment. Senior Colonel Wu Qian, spokesperson for China's Ministry of National Defence, has said the drills are to increase regional security and stability and "improving the joint anti-terrorism capabilities of the troops". The drills come amid growing tensions in the South China Sea with many Western allies showing presence in the disputed waters.

USA - A battle is brewing between two professors at Harvard University over whether male and female biological sex is rooted in science or merely a “social construct” like “gender identity” or “non-binary.” Carol Hooven, lecturer and co-director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, was attacked by Lauren Simone Lewis for an interview on Fox News where she said teaching science requires telling students the facts about male and female biological sexes. Teaching students scientific facts conflicts with the academic narrative that people can choose their gender and that using terms related to biological sex such as “pregnant woman” is offensive.

USA - More than 80% of children who think they’re gender dysphoric revert by the time they hit puberty – so why are parents allowing toddlers to ‘become’ trans and later take hormone blockers? Watchful waiting is much better practice. Maddie’s mother decided that she had a transgender child [when they were aged 2]. Now aged 14, the child is on medication to prevent normal development during puberty. According to reports, a hormone blocker was implanted in 2019.

The world is getting ever more reliant on rare earth metals as it eyes a more environmentally friendly future. And this is a problem, because we don’t have enough of them and they are massively polluting to process. You may not be aware of the significance of rare-earth metals (or rare-earth elements) but you should be. They are a specific set of 17 extremely similar heavy metals, and are integral to modern electric and electronic technology, specifically renewable energy, computers, lasers, glass, magnets and various industrial processes. But they do not come without problems. Their extraction, processing and refining are having major geo-political repercussions, and there is also their slow depletion, combined with careless, wasteful disposal (in our era of planned obsolescence) to consider. Nevertheless, our usage of rare-earth metals continues to rise, even as their sourcing grows more dubious, creating an environmental catastrophe of horrific proportions.

USA - Now that we’re more than a year into the pandemic, it’s crystal clear that the panic that ensued was unnecessary and the draconian measures put into place for public health were unwarranted and harmful. John Tierney, a contributing science columnist for The New York Times, looked back over the pandemic, providing a timeline of the media-induced viral panic that led to censorship and suppression of scientific research on an unprecedented scale. In his article for City Journal, he explained that the “moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions” during the pandemic was far more catastrophic than the viral pandemic itself.

IRAN - Western powers continue to blame Iran for stalled negotiations to revive the nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA. In comments reported by Germany’s Der Spiegel on Friday, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Iran was “delaying” the JCPOA talks that have been held in Vienna. “I am seeing with growing unease that Iran is delaying the resumption of the Vienna nuclear talks on the one hand, and on the other hand it is simultaneously moving further and further away from core elements of the agreement,” Maas said. Throughout the years, Iran has been clear that it can reverse its nuclear activity to the limits set by the JCPOA if the US lifts sanctions. But since the Biden administration has refused to lift all Trump-era sanctions, the process to revive the deal has been dragged out.

USA - The temperature reality is that there is no trend from 1911-2020 in very hot (ie 99F+) days in the Pacific Northwest. That’s according to Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington and no one’s idea of a “climate denier.” It’s out-of-control wildfire season again, which is being fueled by ongoing drought. Climate alarmists, of course, expect the public to believe that the drought is caused by global warming. But the natural history of the West over the past 1,100 years shows that megadroughts lasting as long as 200 years are the norm rather than the exception.

USA - It is the beginning of August, and a day of reckoning has finally arrived for renters all over the nation. Since last September, a moratorium that was issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been protecting millions of renters that have been unable or unwilling to make their monthly rent payments. But now that moratorium is officially over, and all of that back rent is due. For some renters, that will mean that nearly a full year of rent will need to be paid. The millions of Americans that cannot or will not pay what is owed can now be legally evicted. This is a major national disaster that has been building up for many months, and now it is finally here. Welcome to the biggest eviction horror show in American history.