United States

With just two days to go until North Korea's "Day of the Sun" celebrations, when as reported yesterday it may conduct its 6th nuclear test at the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site, NBC reports citing multiple senior U.S. intelligence officials that in the latest stepwise escalation, the U.S. is prepared to launch a preemptive strike with conventional weapons against North Korea should officials become convinced that Kim Jong-Un's nation North Korea is about to follow through with a nuclear weapons test.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo blasted Wikileaks during an event held by the Center for Strategic & International Studies today, despite having promoted the publisher's leaks in 2016 to attack political opponents during the U.S. Presidential elections.

Roughly a month ago, during the height of the mainstream media mania over Trump's alleged collusion with Russia, Judge Andrew Napolitano appeared on Fox and Friends with a startling new revelation, namely that President Obama circumvented U.S.

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

Potential earthquakes and black swans are right ahead of us. What else is new?

On April 16, Turkey has a referendum to decide whether Erdogan will become de facto supreme ruler. What happens if he loses the referendum is completely unclear, undiscussed even, but it’s obvious a loss would have the country shake on its already shaky foundations.

As we noted last night, Venezuela's state-owned oil company PDVSA made principal and interest payments of $2.2 billion today, avoiding default yet again despite what Vice President Tareck El Aissami called a "ruthless economic war" being waged against the Maduro government.

That's the good news, the bad news is that PDVSA has $62 billion more in principal and interest due over the next few years...