The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the primary incentive for increased defence spending. The conflict has raised European tensions. The exposed weaknesses in the West’s defence-industrial capacity and drained extant stocks of arms and ammunition. Italy still maintains a sizeable military. It comprises a combat jet fleet of over 200, and a potent navy with undersea warfare capabilities. Major European defence contractors such as Leonardo and Fincantieri are based in Italy.

But more ferocious than all of this power and wealth are the parents (and often the teachers) of the children diagnosed. They want the child’s problems to have a medical cause, rather than to be linked to modern child-rearing techniques or schooling. And, of course, the sufferers are glad to be relieved of any personal responsibility for their behaviour.

And what is this behaviour? The NHS website provides a list. Here is part of it: having a short attention span and being easily distracted; making careless mistakes — for example, in schoolwork; appearing forgetful or losing things; being unable to stick to tasks that are tedious or time-consuming; appearing to be unable to listen to or carry out instruction; being unable to sit still, especially in calm or quiet surroundings; constantly fidgeting; excessive talking; being unable to wait their turn; acting without thinking; interrupting conversation.

First, who has not behaved in this way? Next, notice how many of these supposed symptoms are not really experienced by the alleged sufferer, but by the adults in charge of them. One of the problems with the diagnosis of ‘ADHD’ is that it covers such an extraordinarily broad range of behaviours, including children who may actually suffer from birth trauma or brain damage, and children who are merely wilful and obstinate, or are driven to distraction by dull schools and bad teachers.

Worse, it closes the subject. If all these millions truly are suffering from a treatable physical disorder, then we need not worry about our debased family life, dominated by screens and junk food, and short on sleep and outdoor activity and our uninspiring schools.

The Bilderberg Group, a notoriously shadowy organization with a membership roster that includes some of the world’s most powerful and influential people, are convening their annual meetings this weekend in Lisbon, Portugal. The Bilderberg meetings have been a regular occurrence since the mid 1950s, with the inaugural meeting in 1954 at the Bilderberg Hotel in the Netherlands.

Although it is significantly staffed by publicly elected officials, the discussions that happen during Bilderberg conferences remain a closely guarded secret. Unsurprisingly, this has led many to suspect that the powerful globalist ideologues who attend these closed-door wargaming discussions are up to no good. Organizers defend the secretive nature of the conference by claiming that it allows attendees to speak informally among peers.

Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), will also attend. As noted in a congressional hearing last week, CISA played a key role as a source of government pressure in the Big Tech censorship regime that harmed President Trump’s chances in the 2020 election.

The corporate legacy media also has a presence at this year’s Bilderberg, with notable members including Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum, the CEO of Axel Springer (a key force behind last year’s failed effort to create a media cartel in the US), and representatives of other establishment media companies including the Economist and the Financial Times. Other notable attendees include the CEO of Pfizer, the president and COO of Goldman Sachs, and failed Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.

“Now, I don't know a single country out there that could survive when the majority of people within the country don't know the country's origins, how it came about and the role of government.” Giordano argues that while we have people come from different places that come together, we don’t have 2,000 years of scarred history, culture and traditions together.

Behind the scenes is China’s reluctance to forgive debt and its extreme secrecy about how much money it has loaned and on what terms, which has kept other major lenders from stepping in to help. On top of that is the recent discovery that borrowers have been required to put cash in hidden escrow accounts that push China to the front of the line of creditors to be paid.

Countries in AP’s analysis had as much as 50% of their foreign loans from China and most were devoting more than a third of government revenue to paying off foreign debt. Two of them, Zambia and Sri Lanka, have already gone into default, unable to make even interest payments on loans financing the construction of ports, mines and power plants. In Pakistan, millions of textile workers have been laid off because the country has too much foreign debt and can’t afford to keep the electricity on and machines running.

In the UK, Generation Z had the biggest proportion of atheists at 31 per cent - but the figures have been rising steadily across age groups. Despite the general drift away from religion, belief in life after death has remained fairly solid - at 46 per cent in the most recent survey. And Brits rank highly for tolerance of other faiths, with 82 per cent saying they are happy to trust people from a different religion. The analysis comes from the respected World Values Survey (WVS), which has ben running since 1981.

Ahead of the G7 summit in Japan, the signatories called on the five nuclear powers on the UN Security Council – Russia, the US, China, France, and the UK – to “ensure that nuclear arms control will not be made yet another victim of geopolitical competition.” The collapse of the New START, the only surviving nuclear arms control treaty between the US and Russia, would “threaten a destabilizing arms race” and make it more difficult to bring China, France, and the UK into a multilateral arrangement, according to the signatories.

The letter was published ahead of the G7 summit in Japan, scheduled to start on Friday. PM Fumio Kishida reportedly plans to have his guests visit his hometown of Hiroshima, which was destroyed in 1945 by a US atomic bomb. It is not clear what any of that has to do with Russia, however, which was expelled from the group in 2014, after Washington accused Moscow of “invading” Ukraine following the US-backed coup in Kiev.

“Hungary is a big player in this and so are Poland and Germany, and they are working to get Zelensky to come around,” the unnamed official claimed. Those countries have made it clear that “Zelensky can keep what he’s got if he works up a peace deal even if he’s got to be paid off, if it’s the only way to get a deal.” By “keep what he’s got,” the source was referring to the Ukrainian president’s villa in Italy and interests in an offshore bank, Hersh clarified.

However, Zelensky has so far rejected the proposal, while other major European players – France and the UK – “are too beholden” to the Biden administration, which is continuing to back the Ukrainian leader, the official said. One of the main reasons why Poland and the others want the conflict to end is because the burden of accommodating Ukrainian refugees has become too much for them, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist wrote.

The problem for those countries “is how to get the US to stop supporting Zelensky,” Hersh’s source suggested. He claimed that US intelligence is well aware that “Ukraine is running out of money and… that the next four or five months are critical. And Eastern Europeans are talking about a deal.”

“What have we learned from the Durham Report? That the New York Times and Washington Post were given a Pulitzer Prize for writing a bunch of politically motivated crap,” Graham said on Tuesday in a Fox News interview. “When it comes to reporting on Donald Trump, the mainstream media is dead.”

Graham, a South Carolina Republican, argued that the media outlets should give back their awards because the entire Russiagate episode was based on falsehoods and an anti-Trump political agenda. The 300-page report released on Monday by US special counsel John Durham found that the FBI didn’t have adequate evidence to justify its so-called ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation and didn’t bother to corroborate suspect information provided by Trump’s political enemies.

Graham said Durham’s findings were “devastating and damning to the rule of law in America,” but legacy media outlets and Democratic Party leaders have declined to take it seriously. He called on US Attorney General and FBI director Christopher Wray to apologize to the people whose lives were ruined by Crossfire Hurricane. “Someone needs to be held accountable for using the law as a political weapon and ruining innocent peoples’ lives.”

While targeted genetic engineering is indeed possible, and modern technology lowers the likelihood of unintentional additions or deletions, this precision does not guarantee there won’t be adverse effects. One of the reasons for this is because many genes are multifunctional and can have multiple downstream effects.

By altering a single gene, you can inadvertently affect the expression of hundreds of others. What’s more, the multifunctionality of genes is rarely intuitive. So, while it may seem convenient to genetically engineer cows without horns to prevent injury to other cows and farmhands, as suggested by Lurie and Ellikidis, there’s no telling what that tweak might do to internal organs or biological pathways.

In turn, there’s no guarantee that cascading effects will not alter the nutrition of the meat or dairy that comes from that cow. Maybe it’ll be fine, maybe it won’t. The problem is that, oftentimes with genetically engineered foods, safety testing is minimal or absent.

Desperate families - including young children and the elderly - were forced to clamber on to their roofs in the tourist hotspot as they waited anxiously for rescuers to reach them in helicopters. At least eight people have been killed in the region and there are fears the death toll will rise further as several people are missing amid the carnage.

'The city is on its knees, devastated and in pain,' said Gian Luca Zattini, the mayor of Forli, a city near Bologna where three people were confirmed dead today. 'It's the end of the world.' In the city of Cesena locals were forced to swim through the submerged streets, past sunken cars and floating furniture, to reach higher ground, as the mayor said the situation there is 'critical'. The deadly floods in the popular tourist hotspot have meant this weekend's Italian Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix in Imola has been cancelled.

The extreme weather has extended to the Balkans. In Bosnia and Croatia, residents have watched in horror as their homes were submerged by the floods. 'We have an apocalypse,' Amin Halitovic, the mayor of the Bosnian town of Bosanska Krupa said. 'We can no longer count the flooded buildings. It's never been like this.' The deputy chief of the civil protection agency, Titti Postiglione, noted that the affected flood zone covered a broad swath of four provinces which, until the heavy rains, had been parched by a prolonged drought.

Rising water levels have forced the closure of several critical facilities, including government offices and the main hospital, as doctors fear a cholera epidemic and a malaria outbreak. Residents have told RT that “schools are all shut down and no learning is taking place.” Locals who say they have been displaced from their homes and camps are pleading with humanitarian organizations to assist them.

“What Brexit has proved, I’m afraid, is that our politicians are about as useless as the commissioners in Brussels. We’ve mismanaged this totally,” Farage said when presented with data which suggests that the exit from one of the world’s most powerful trading blocs has had a negative impact on the UK’s economic health. “Brexit has failed. We’ve not delivered on Brexit and the Tories [Conservative Party] have let us down very, very badly,” Farage continued.