USA - California firefighters aided by aircraft battled a wind-driven wildfire that began Saturday and continued burning early Sunday morning in an area straddling the San Francisco Bay Area and central California, authorities said. The Corral Fire began Saturday afternoon near the city of Tracy, 60 miles (96km ) east of San Francisco, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the city of Livermore, according to the California department of forestry and fire protection, or Cal Fire. On Sunday morning, Cal Fire announced that the fire had spanned 12,500 acres and was 15% contained. “Strong winds and dry grass have made it difficult to contain,” it added.

USA - A weather phenomenon is heading into Texas and California on Tuesday, putting millions of Americans in the path of a scorching heat wave. A heat dome, which is a phenomenon caused by hot air being trapped in one region by a high pressure air system, killed dozens of people in Mexico last month and is now expected to bring record-breaking temperatures to the southwestern US. California could see temperatures 20 degrees Fahrenheit above the average for at least a week, while parts of Texas near the border could see up to 114 degrees. The national weather service has warned that the rest of the nation, from the Midwest to Northeast, is also expected to see increased temperatures due to the southwestern heat dome.

INDONESIA - Indonesia’s Mount Ibu - the nation’s second-most active volcano, located in the notorious Ring of Fire - has erupted again, belching thick, gray ash 7,000 metres (16,000 feet) into the air. The volcano, located on an island in the eastern North Maluku province, erupted for more than six minutes last night, according to Muhammad Wafid, chief of Indonesia’s Geology Agency. A column of ash could be seen rising high into the sky. It spewed out material including volcanic ash and sand. Indonesia, an archipelago of 270 million people, has 120 active volcanoes. It is prone to volcanic activity because it sits along the Ring, a horseshoe-shaped series of seismic fault lines around the Pacific Ocean.

HAWAII - Kilauea, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, began erupting early on Monday in a remote area that last erupted a half-century ago, the US Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said. The eruption is about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of the Kilauea caldera, in an area within Hawaii Volcanoes national park that last erupted in December 1974. The area surrounding the caldera has been closed to the public since 2008 because of other hazards, including ground cracking, instability in the crater wall and rockfalls.

RUSSIA - A state of emergency has been declared in eastern Russia after huge fires continue to rip through forests in Siberia. Emergency services have been struggling for weeks to contain an outbreak of fires in the regional territories of Buryatia and Transbaikal. During May, the situation deteriorated significantly with emergency services reporting 291 fires covering an area of almost 198,000 hectares. A huge task force consisting of over one-and-a-half thousand firefighters is trying to bring the fires under control. Authorities are throwing every resource at their disposal at the fires. Some 1,462 people and 105 pieces of equipment have been deployed.

ISRAEL - Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terror group in southern Lebanon, are near a war footing as Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets and projectiles at Israel over the weekend, causing widespread fires near Israel’s northern borders. Israel had retaliated for a round of earlier attacks by targeting dozens of terrorist sites in southern Lebanon. Unlike Hezbollah, Israel targets military targets and not civilians; Hezbollah has targeted both since early October. Hezbollah is violating United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, the resolution that ended the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and prohibited Hezbollah from locating military installations south of the Litani River. Neither the Lebanese military nor the United Nations has been willing or able to enforce the resolution. President Joe Biden’s warning to Hezbollah and Iran in October — “don’t!” — has been ineffective in deterring the terrorist group.

SOUTH KOREA - The president of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, signed a “Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA)” alongside South Korean counterpart Yoon Suk-yeol in Seoul on Wednesday, dramatically expanding trade between the two countries. The CEPA is South Korea’s first free trade deal with a Middle Eastern country, the South Korean news service Yonhap observed. The two countries hashed out most of the details of the agreement in October but finalized and signed the deal on Wednesday... "Under the agreement, the two countries will lift tariffs on more than 90 percent of goods traded over the next 10 years,” Yonhap reported. “The UAE will especially lift tariffs on South Korea’s major export goods, including cars, auto parts, defense items, fruits and instant noodles."

USA - Once upon a time, America was a Christian nation. I know that many on the left cringe when they read a statement like that, but it is true. For most of our history, the population of the United States was overwhelmingly Christian, and the values that governed our society were primarily Christian values. But of course everything has changed in recent decades. When Barack Obama boldly declared that “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation” in 2009, he was speaking the truth. We are no longer a Christian nation and we haven’t been for a very long time. So if we aren’t a Christian nation at this point, what exactly are we?

USA - Is it time to stop worrying about the war on cash and begin paying with your face? Over the past decade, the movement toward a cashless society has been gaining steam. In a climate hyping all things artificial intelligence, this world could be coming close to being realized. In March, JPMorgan Chase announced that it signed an agreement with PopID to help create a biometric payment system in 2025 by using its commercial identification infrastructure. Many US retailers have experimented with this technology, using face authentication, fingerprints, and palms. Some big brands have been utilizing these tools for a while: Amazon maintains a pay-by-palm mechanism at its brick-and-mortar locations, while Apple Pay allows users to pay with a face scan.

USA - Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in a New York court on Thursday. The judge gave some cartoon-like jury instructions, and many are saying that this fact alone will be grounds for reversing these convictions. How long will this take? Will there be an emergency appeal to the US Supreme Court? Will they jail Trump? Will they get desperate enough to kill him? Is this the kind of thing the Democrats feel they must do if Joe Biden’s areal approval rating is just under 8%? (Yes, this is the real number, according to Martin Armstrong and another confidential source I know personally.)

USA - Back in August of 2023, precious metals expert and financial writer Bill Holter predicted there was a long list of financial trouble coming to America. “We have an election coming up, and I still believe there is less than a 40% chance that we even have an election. From a financial standpoint, you have commercial real estate that is imploding. You have bank deposits that have fled the banking system. You have the financial system really on the rocks. Somebody had better start cutting rates because just in the past six months, China’s debt growth has turned negative, and so has their money supply. That is a recipe for complete disaster in an over-leveraged system. It’s not just China, it’s the whole world. The whole system is over-levered. Somebody had better cut rates to inflate; otherwise, Richard Russell’s ‘Inflate or Die’ comes into play. This is an election year, and I think the next six months are going to be completely insane."

EUROPE - The EU’s “ill-advised” response to the Ukraine conflict has seriously damaged the bloc’s economy, and Brussels’ insistence on restricting trade with China could make the situation even worse, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said. Europe is “facing serious economic difficulties, and its economy is quickly deteriorating,” Szijjarto said at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Thursday. “The situation,” he added in remarks reported by Hungarian media, “has been deteriorating since the outbreak of the war. Hungary has paid a high price for the war in the form of €10 billion more in energy bills,” he continued, explaining that “inflation in Hungary increased not because our economic strategy was flawed or because we made bad decisions, but because of the war and the sanctions response to it.”

ISRAEL - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that Israel would not accept a ceasefire deal that prevented it from destroying Hamas, after US President Joe Biden presented a so-called Israeli “proposal” that allowed Hamas to survive. On Friday, Biden presented a proposal, which he claimed was made by Israel, for a ceasefire. The terms do not even mention Hamas, much less its disarmament, while they require Israel to withdraw and stop fighting. Biden repeatedly claimed that the proposal came from Israel — though former President Barack Obama weighed in, stating that the proposal had been Biden’s (and implying, to some observers, that it had actually been Obama’s).

CHINA - Chinese dictator Xi Jinping used a speech to Arab leaders on Thursday to demand the establishment of a state of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and pledged $3 million in funding to a Hamas-affiliated UN agency.

USA - Donald Trump becomes the first ever former President of the United States to be convicted of a crime. A unanimous New York jury found him guilty on all 34 counts of illegally trying to cover up a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to stifle a sex scandal that he feared would derail his 2016 presidential campaign only days before America went to the polls. Paying the hush money was not in itself illegal but the prosecution successfully argued that it was designed to influence the outcome of the election — a violation of election laws and, argued the prosecutors, the underlying crime. This is highly contentious territory — especially since the trial heard next to nothing about campaign law violations — which is why the guilty verdict will be immediately appealed.