UK - The Royal Navy is to turn its back on the Middle East as its last remaining ship in the region sails home. HMS Middleton is Britain’s sole vessel in the region following the decommissioning of frigate HMS Lancaster late last year. However, the minehunter, which is almost 42 years old, is expected to return to the UK this year, potentially as early as March. There are no plans to replace the ship, which is based in Bahrain, leaving Britain without a fighting presence in the Gulf for the first time since 1980. The move has been branded a “terrible error” by a former head of the Navy, while defence analysts warned it signalled an end to Britain as a “global” naval force. “The idea of global Britain is all but over. On the size of the Navy we have got, it is simply not doable.” That end of Britain’s Gulf presence could have far-reaching diplomatic and operational consequences.

Germany Is Finally Rearming Against Russia. Can It Go Fast Enough?https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/07/germany-is-finally-rearming-against-russia-can-it-go-fast-e/GERMANY - Germany is rearming – and fast. It is a sentence that would have been impossible to imagine a decade ago. And one that, a few decades ago, might have sent shivers down your spine. But today, we live in a different world. A world where Russia’s war machine is up and running and poses a threat to all of Europe. When Olaf Scholz, the then-chancellor, made a speech in February 2022, just a few days after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he acknowledged: “We are living through a watershed era… And that means that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before.” It became known as his “zeitenwende” or “turning point” speech. Ulrike Franke, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told The Telegraph’s Battle Lines podcast: “I think it really is important to note how much of an earthquake this zeitenwende speech was. It rang in a new era in terms of how Germany even discusses military and the armed forces and all of that.”

Fix Your Country, Trump Tells Starmerhttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/01/20/europe-hits-back-at-hungry-caterpillar-trump/USA - Donald Trump told Sir Keir Starmer to straighten out the UK as the rift between the two leaders over Greenland and the Chagos Islands deal deepened. The US president suggested on Tuesday night that Sir Keir and France’s Emmanuel Macron were two-faced. Mr Trump said: “[They] treat me well. They get a little bit rough when I’m not around, but when I’m around, they treat me very nicely.” The US president said “London is having a lot of problems”, when asked how he would characterise his relationship with the Prime Minister. “They’ve [Starmer and Macron] got to straighten out their countries." Earlier on Tuesday, European leaders hit back at Mr Trump, warning against bullying on the world stage and calling for appeasement of the US president to end. The French president, one of the driving forces behind Europe’s push to be strategically independent of Washington, warned that “imperial ambitions” were resurfacing among major powers.

UK - One of feminism’s nefarious fallacies, and there are lots to pick from, is the calling out and shaming of so-called “mansplaining”. This is the trend, which unfortunately seems to have persuaded large sections of the population, to paint men – especially older white men – as bores and zealous pedants prone to unnecessarily interfering in people’s business. The irony is that, nowadays, those actually guilty of being hectoring bores are the women who insist on pontificating over “injustices”, “toxic masculinity” and the infallibility of “my body, my choice”.

USA - One of the great lies of modern globalism is the idea that cultural differences are shallow, cosmetic, and easily blended if everyone just tries hard enough. They aren’t. Our differences run really deep, and when you ignore them, systems break, hate gets hotter, and division widens. We’ve already learned this the hard way, from “diversity is our strength” to the Bush nation-building nightmare, mixing cultures is a recipe for disaster. When Western leaders tried to import Western values through nation-building in the Middle East, it caused massive backlash, resentment, and even more conflict. Why? Because Western values don’t work in the Middle East. They have no business being there. The same mistake is now being repeated at home, under the lie that our cultural and religious differences don’t really matter. Globalists tell us that people are psychologically interchangeable, and that blending everyone together is just fine. It’s not. It’s made everything louder, angrier, and more unstable.

EUROPE - The European Union and the Mercosur bloc of South American countries formally signed a long-sought free trade agreement on Saturday, strengthening commercial ties in the face of rising protectionism and trade tensions around the world. The signing ceremony in Paraguay’s capital, Asuncion, caps more than a quarter-century of torturous negotiations. It marks a major geopolitical victory for the EU in an age of American tariffs and surging Chinese exports, expanding the bloc’s foothold in a resource-rich region increasingly contested by Washington and Beijing. Mercosur consists of the region’s two biggest economies, Argentina and Brazil, as well as Paraguay and Uruguay. Bolivia, the bloc’s newest member, is not included in the trade deal but could join in the coming years. Venezuela has been suspended from the bloc and isn’t included in the agreement.

USA - A chores list for an 8-year-old boy from the early 1990s demonstrates how far our society has degenerated since then. One of the keys to being successful in life is a strong work ethic. No matter where you find yourself, if you are willing to work hard you are more likely to get ahead. This is something that I have studied for many years. Tom Brady, Michael Jordan and Jerry Rice were all born with physical gifts, but so were countless others. The primary reason why Tom Brady, Michael Jordan and Jerry Rice are now considered to be some of the greatest athletes of all-time is because they simply worked harder than everyone else. Have you noticed that a lot of young people today don’t want to work hard?

FRANCE - In a democracy, the government in office cannot ban an opposing candidate from running on the grounds that the candidate would win and take the place of the current government. But that is what President Macron has done to Marine Le Pen. Le Pen heads the largest political party in France. She has been banned by a French court from holding office for five years. This prevents her from competing in the 2027 presidential election, where she has long been considered to be the leading candidate. The excuse used by the French government to frustrate the popular will is that Le Pen was convicted of “misappropriating EU funds.” She was convicted of using money intended for her European Union staff for her French staff. Money, of course, is fungible, and the orchestrated charge succeeded only because the establishment presstitutes hyped it over and over. Marine Le Pen is a controversial figure with the French establishment because she represents ethnic French nationalism, not the globalism of open borders and multiculturalism, that is, she stands for France, not for a Tower of Babel.

USA - Jihadist leaders — led by the Muslim Brotherhood and aligned Islamist movements operating both overseas and inside the United States — have long treated mass migration, now weaponized through the exploitation of modern immigration systems, not as a humanitarian phenomenon but as a deliberate strategy of conquest meant to penetrate, subvert, and ultimately remake the United States from within. Hijrah, Schweizer explains, was never merely about movement. Migration is “critically important” for da’wah — the effort to spread Islam by inviting others to understand and adopt it — and equally important in establishing an Islamic state or durable political power base inside a host society.

USA - Citing recent events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland, three cardinals said their statement was inspired by Pope Leo. The three highest-ranking Roman Catholic clerics who lead archdioceses in the United States said in a strongly worded statement on Monday that America’s “moral role in confronting evil around the world” is in question for the first time in decades. Their critique of the Trump administration’s principles — while not mentioning President Trump by name — escalates the American Catholic Church’s denunciations of the country’s top leaders. Citing recent events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland as having raised fundamental questions about the use of military force, the cardinals call for a “genuinely moral foreign policy” in which “military action must be seen only as a last resort in extreme situations, not a normal instrument of national policy.” The three cardinals lead dioceses that together include almost four million Catholics, more than 550 parishes and hundreds of Catholic schools.