United States

Challenge accepted.

If Trump thought that his bluff would be sufficient to finally shut up North Korea, and put an end to Kim's provocative behavior, well... bluff called because North Korea's state-run KCNA news agency reported moments ago that not only did N.Korea escalate the tensions up another notch, but explicitly warned that it could carry out a "pre-emptive operation once the US shows signs of provocation", and that it is "seriously considering a strategy to strike Guam with mid-to-long range missiles."

Once Janet Yellen's favorite indicator (until it started to turn down, and became just "experimental"), The Fed's Labor Market Conditions Index (a 19-factor smoothed model that has historically correlated extremely well to recession) has been abandoned because The Fed "believes it no longer provides a good summary of changes in the US labor market."

The Fed writes...

As of August 3, 2017, updates to the labor market conditions index (LMCI) have been discontinued.

 

In Russia Sanctions And The Coming Crackdown On Americans we exposed a new project called "Hamilton 68" which claims to monitor 600 twitter accounts in real time, looking for what its creators consider to be overt, covert, as well as "second tier" Russian propaganda. The list of suspected "pro-Russian" twitter accounts is not provided, nor is any rationale given for how an account gets put on the list.

Gallup & Pew Polls Try To Downplay The Fact That The US Is Regarded As The Main Threat To Peace

The world–including Washington’s vassals–regards the US as the worst danger the world faces.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/08/07/polls-us-greatest-threat-to-peace-world-today.html

The post Gallup & Pew Polls Try To Downplay The Fact That The US Is Regarded As The Main Threat To Peace appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org.

One day after Kim Jong Un's regime balked at this weekend's UN sanctions, promising retaliation and threatening to attack the US with a nuclear weapon, Japan's government has released a new 500-page report in which it warns that the threat from North Korean nuclear weapons has reached a “new stage” and that Pyongyang’s weapons program had “advanced considerably,” to the point where it was possible that the regime had acquired the ability to miniaturize nuclear warheads.