GERMANY - Price explosions: German supermarkets attach anti-theft devices to staple foods. Food items have been secured with anti-theft devices based on the Anglo-Saxon multicultural model as the first German citizens seem to be driven to acts of desperation in view of the price explosions. This does not affect high-priced items such as champagne, but staple foods. Are these now becoming luxuries? Inflation is causing food prices to skyrocket, and further price increases are forecast for the next three months. This was the result of a survey by the ifo Institute, as reported by ARD. More and more people can no longer afford these horrendous prices and are driven to desperate acts with the number of thefts increasing. Supermarkets have been taking countermeasures – with anti-theft devices. A supermarket in Berlin-Weißensee has now attached security markings to some types of meat – yellow stickers with the inscription “Secured article”. How could things have gotten so bad in Germany, which is said to be so rich, that people are forced to steal the food they need because they can no longer pay for it?

UK - Households should pack 'grab bags' containing mobile phones, insurance documents and emergency cash the Met Office has said, as an 'incredible deluge' will see three million homes at risk of flooding this week. Britain was hammered by heavy rain and storms yesterday – bringing a turbulent end to one of the driest heatwaves on record. Families braced themselves for traffic chaos and power cuts as forecasters warned of dangerous flash floods. And local authorities told people to prepare an emergency bag of vital belongings in case their homes are damaged by deluges. However experts warned that the drought is far from over as the country needs weeks of rainfall to replenish supplies. It comes after the country's driest July on record and the driest first half of the year since 1976.

USA - Two people are dead after heavy rain poured into Las Vegas casinos and flooded streets Thursday night in the wettest monsoon season in a decade, according to Clark County officials. Officers with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and Clark County Fire Department firefighters located and then removed a man in a flood channel on Thursday night. He was taken in an ambulance to the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada where he later died, according to Clark County Deputy Fire Chief Billy Samuels. In Nevada, the "exceptional drought" area dropped to 4% from nearly 30% over the prior week - its lowest point in nearly two years, the report said. Conditions worsened in California's Central Valley but improved some in the eastern deserts after the notable rains brought flooding last week to Death Valley.

USA - Multiple mainstream media outlets have been caught reading from the same script and advancing an identical propaganda narrative following the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago. Numerous media outlets read from the exact same script, repeating a similar talking point following the raid, saying “sources say there’s been a strong reaction to the raid on extremist and Q-Anon-related forums.”

USA - In an era of hacks, leaks, whistle-blowers, and media organizations that appear to have become information launderers for Russian intelligence agencies, it is important to understand what a state secret really is. It is equally important to recognize that this definition transcends political affiliation. One’s concern about classified data should remain consistent whether that information is stored on a private server or shared with an adversarial foreign power in the confines of the Oval Office. Secret is an objective term, and US code helpfully defines the various levels of classification as follows:

CHINA - As with all of China’s military, the submarine force is undergoing rapid expansion and upgrade. But Beijing is putting particular emphasis on smaller, diesel-electric designs most suited to operating in the shallower waters of the East and South China Seas. According to a recent Brookings Institution think-tank report, that fits with one possible future conflict scenario – a blockade of Taiwan’s ports. Beijing may hope to starve the independent island democracy into submission, and force it to accept Communist Party rule. China has the world’s largest fleet of diesel-electric submarines. Many are fitted with air-independent chemical packages that allow the diesel engines to run for a time while still deep under water. Whether the new 79-metre-long submarine utilises these bulky systems or relies on the much-improved capacity of modern lithium-ion batteries (or both) remains unknown.

CHINA - Chinese Premier Xi Jinping is facing a fresh crisis as an entire region in China has been forced to shut down over a power supply shortage. Due to tight power supplies and high demand, all industrial users in the Sichuan region in China have been forced to shutdown for a week. The factories producing metals, chemicals and other industrial goods in the country's southwestern province were asked to shut down or curb their output in a bid to ration power consumption and prevent blackouts among residential populations. According to a notice issued by the Department of Economy and Information Technology of Sichuan, industrial users across 19 out of 21 cities in the province have been ordered to suspend production from August 15 until August 21, in order to prioritise residential power supply. The entire province spans 485,000 square kilometres, which is nearly twice as big as the UK.

UK - Joe Biden could be put on the backfoot under a Liz Truss leadership, according to a former aide to Margaret Thatcher, who suggested it was time for the Brexit-bashing White House to "back off". Liz Truss has been urged to stand up to Joe Biden following his "awful" treatment of Britain over its decision to leave the EU. Nile Gardiner, a former aide to Margaret Thatcher, told GB News that "it was time for Biden to back off" as Brexit Britain begins to take shape. This comes as a huge number of American businesses and entrepreneurs ditch President Biden's America for Brexit Britain. Huge companies such as Meta, which has 4,000 employees in the UK, are bringing operations to the UK. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, which is also a part of Meta, is heading across to London.

UK - The UK is hurtling towards a "cataclysmic collapse" which could be "worse than 2008", a think tank has warned. The Bow Group, the world’s oldest conservative think tank, has now warned a crash worse than that suffered in the early 2000s could be around the corner. Chairman Ben Harris-Quinney said the Government cannot escape blame for this and, instead, lies at the centre of the problem. He told Express.co.uk: “The Bow Group has long warned that the Government has been ignoring a very simple economic truth – that you cannot bring, borrow and spend to excess without eventually facing dire economic consequences. “Since the Conservatives came in in 2010 they have tripled the national debt, their policies have been the opposite of fiscal conservatism and responsible economic management. “The cost of merely paying the interest on the debt is now one of the largest areas of government expenditure.”

USA - The growing rental crisis in the US has shown no signs of stopping. That was the topic of a new Bloomberg report this week that highlighted the stories of numerous Americans struggling to meet their rental obligations. The cost of rent in the US is moving higher at the highest pace in three decades, the report notes, blowing past a median of $2,000 per month for the first time ever. Rents are now above where they were prior to the pandemic in most major cities. Areas just outside cities, which saw a large influx of new renters during the pandemic, have seen their rents rise disproportionately higher. People returning to large cities, post-pandemic, have also not helped prices cool off. Additionally, rising interest rates have now deterred some would-be buyers, who are now becoming renters. Tight inventory continues to lead to bidding wars, even in the rental market, the report says.

UK - Welcome to modern Britain where nothing works, everything is expensive and we’re all too busy arguing about the causes of our woes to figure out any solutions. One of the starkest images of dysfunctionality in recent days has been water companies imposing hosepipe bans while burst mains flood the streets of North London. Simultaneously, we are being told cold weather over the winter combined with gas shortages could result in several days of blackouts under the Government’s own “reasonable worst case scenario”.

UK - Although the future of our species may yet be long, it may instead be fleeting. Of the many developments that have occurred since this magazine’s first issue a century ago, the most profound is humanity’s ability to end itself. From climate change to nuclear war, engineered pandemics, uncontrolled artificial intelligence (AI), and other destructive technologies not yet foreseen, a worrying number of risks conspire to threaten the end of humanity.

USA - About 18% of Americans now own a video doorbell. That means a significant and growing slice of American neighborhoods are under a form of intermittent surveillance. If the surveillance video and associated data were the exclusive property of individual homeowners, it might not be of much concern. However, that's not the case. For example, Ring, the company behind the top-selling brand, maintains a vast database on its users and their cameras. Ring is an Amazon subsidiary, thanks to the tech giant's 2018 purchase of the company for over $1 billion. Ring says it doesn't sell its customers data, but sometimes it gives it away for free - to the police. In the first half of 2022 alone, Ring fielded more than 3,500 requests from law enforcement agencies.

USA - Thursday, during an interview with FBN host Maria Bartiromo, Representative Michael Waltz (Republican for Florida) warned if China were to successfully gain control of the waters around Taiwan, they would control the shipping routes for Japan, South Korea and partially Australia, which he estimated to be about 50% of the globe’s gross domestic product. “And what they’re betting on is if they have to use military force to take Taiwan, yes, they are developing the military capability to take out our planes and ships and the United States’ ability to intervene, but they also are betting that if they turn off our pharmaceuticals, our food supply, the solar panels, and the wind turbines, that the left are demanding that we buy, if they turn that off from Americans, then they’ll demand that we don’t get in the way. And they’ll essentially do what Sun Tzu, the famous military — Chinese military philosopher, always said, which is, subdue your enemy without firing a shot. So this is about an economic war way before it becomes any type of military conflict."

WALES, UK - Sab Samuel remembers looking in the mirror as a child and saying to himself: "Please don't be gay." The 27-year-old tours the UK as the role model he wished he had when he was growing up. His Drag Queen Story Hour events see him perform as Aida H Dee, reading stories to children in libraries. These events bring warmth and laughter — but recently many have been hijacked by small groups of demonstrators gathering outside the libraries and shouting homophobic slurs. The reading at Cardiff Central Library on Friday morning is no exception. Around a dozen people yell offensive words about drag queens, but they are dwarfed by a 50-strong counter-protest on the other side of a line of police officers. The counter-protesters wear colourful outfits, hold Pride flags and chant: "Say it loud, say it clear, drag queens are welcome here." As a child Sab was rarely shown gay role models, which meant he looked up to the strong women in his life. "The school nurse was someone I related to. Some of my nice English teachers were women I related to because I felt safe around them. Drag is also about celebrating these strong female roles."