CHINA - The Chinese Communist Party (CPC) Congress this week has largely focused on the development of Chinese “exceptionalism,” the development of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” and the imposition of uniform identity through a sense of cultural and national superiority.

GERMANY – Frank-Walter Steinmeier has met with President Vladimir Putin during his first visit to Russia as Germany's president. Having pointed out the historical ties between the two nations, Steinmeier said he considers improving relations with Moscow as his personal obligation to the European people.

Russia and Germany "are connected by over a thousand years of collective history," the German politician told journalists in Moscow after talks with the Russian president. Steinmeier pointed out that history could not be viewed in black-or-white categories, and that he sees it as "very important" to establish dialogue with Moscow, in contrast to the cooling of relations over the past years. The German president said he would "personally contribute" to such a process.

USA - In fiscal 2017, real Social Security Administration spending topped $1 trillion for the first time, according to data published in the Monthly Treasury Statement. The Social Security Administration spent a total of $1,000,812,000,000 in fiscal year 2017, according to the Treasury. That was about 37 times as much as the Department of State spent during the year ($27,061,000,000), 32 times as much as the Department of Justice ($30,977,000,000), and 20 times as much as the Department of Homeland Security ($50,502,000,000). The $1,000,812,000,000 spent by the Social Security Administration in fiscal year 2017 was also about 76 percent more than the federal government spent on Department of Defense and Military Programs ($568,905,000,000) during the year.

USA - As reported by CBS Miami, nitrogen fertilizers and sewage sludge runoff from factory farms are responsible for creating an enormous dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. As fertilizer runs off farms in agricultural states like Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri and others, it enters the Mississippi River, leading to an overabundance of nutrients, including nitrogen and phosphorus, in the water. This, in turn, leads to the development of algal blooms, which alter the food chain and deplete oxygen, resulting in dead zones. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is the largest recorded dead zone in the world, beginning at the Mississippi River delta and spanning more than 8,700 square miles — about the size of New Jersey.

USA - It wouldn’t happen overnight. But it could happen. A new report to the US Congress warns one or two nuclear weapons detonated high in the atmosphere above the country would — within a few months and years — lead to the death of 90 per cent of the country’s population. It’s a worst-case post-apocalyptic nightmare scenario common to computer games and movies. Nothing would work anymore.

EUROPE - It is of course impossible to guess what the end of the year will precisely look like. Nevertheless, we wish to draw our readers' attention to the fact that the whole planet is currently in a general and simultaneous repositioning phase. The United States gives the final blow to an international system (WTO, UN, Unesco, etc) which it no longer controls. Military expenditures are exploding all around in a race for technological primacy (multipolar arms race). Governments are swinging one by one towards a hard right-wing, which soon will no longer be called the far-right (Austria, Italy, Spain, USA, Russia, India, Turkey, Israel, Brazil, etc). The parties belonging to the institutional left have been blown out of the water, whilst the radical movements of the left-wing (called "the populists", see 5-star movement) fill in large rooms.

USA - The government ministers were facing a new infectious disease outbreak. The mysterious virus was sickening and killing people with alarming speed. Some patients had to be placed on ventilators to help them breathe. The new virus seemed resistant to antiviral medicine. Within a week, officials had closed a major hospital and schools and quarantined thousands of people. Fear and panic spread quickly as people in neighboring countries became infected and died.

GERMANY - All eyes will be on the 92 lawmakers representing Alternative for Germany (AfD), the first far-right party to enter the country's parliament in almost 60 years. The anti-immigration, anti-Islam AfD became the third largest party in the Bundestag after winning 12.6% of the vote, a result described by leading party figures as a "political earthquake." The party's leaders put immigration front and center in their election campaign, naming it as one of the AfD's top priorities in parliament. "First and foremost we must end the migration chaos," says Karsten Hilse, 53, one of the AfD's three directly-elected members of parliament. The former police officer won 33% of the votes in his constituency near Dresden in eastern Germany, pushing Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU into second place.

USA - The public university’s Center for Student Involvement created and circulated the poster on Twitter last week. It was designed to promote an event on free speech issues as part of Kent State’s KENTTalks, which are intended to “provide a safe place for discussions and transformational experiences for our student body” and promote “civil discourse.” Silhouetted activists on the posters hold a range of placards with messages, overlaid with the rhetorical question “free speech or hate speech?” Alongside provocative expressions including “No More Gays,” “Women Need To Serve Their Man” and “Build a Wall,” the fourth placard bears a nonviolent, basic expression of the Christian faith: “You need Jesus.”

CANADA - For starters, how come birds don’t land, nor perch, on tops of microwave, cell, mast and GWEN towers? Microwaves, if you don’t know, are NOT Nature-produced frequencies; they are man-made. The human body is an electromagnetic being, which functions on what is known as the Schumann resonance or approximately 7.83 Hertz (Hz). Microwaves operate between 300 Megahertz (MHz) and 300 Gigahertz (GHz), which are between 300,000,000 Hertz (Hz) and 300,000,000,000 Hertz (Hz) per second! Some researchers think the Schumann frequency is now around 15 to 25 Hz with even higher spikes. If that truly is the case, can it be that man-made electromagnetics are now impacting Nature? 

GERMANY - When the German parliament meets for the first time on Tuesday after last month’s general election, it will be bigger than ever. It is likely to be more bad-tempered and dysfunctional too. A failure to reform Germany’s electoral system, which adds extra seats so the final total reflects parties’ overall share of the vote, means the assembly has a record 709 members. That makes it the biggest elected national parliament in the Western world.

GERMANY - A member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party said their conservative CDU needs “new party leadership,” accusing Merkel of shifting the party further to the left. Alexander Mitsch, who leads a right-leaning group within the CDU, in an interview on Monday criticized the party’s immigration policies in recent years as well as the loss of voters’ support in September’s national election. “Now after this election debacle, in which the CDU had the worst result since 1949 … the party leadership is obviously not ready to correct anything,” he told broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, referencing the CDU’s drop to 26.8 percent in the election, compared to 34.1 percent in the prior 2013 election. “That brings us then to the realization that we need new party leadership.”

QATAR - Qatar is just as dangerous to world stability as North Korea, the US President’s former strategist has said. Steve Bannon claimed Qatar is the single most important thing happening in the world and people should be paying a great deal of attention to it. The Saudi-Arabia led isolation of Qatar is the most worrying confrontation in the world at the moment, the former strategist for Donald Trump added.

USA - Don’t look now, but it’s becoming a real possibility that the government will shut down in December. Congress has until midnight on December 15 to pass a spending bill or the federal government will run out of money. The tricky thing is that Republicans need at least eight Democrats in the Senate to meet the 60-vote threshold needed to pass a bill, which means they will need to make some serious compromises to get a spending bill through.

CHINA - For the last weeks the world’s geopolitical situation has been deteriorating because of the tensions around North Korea and renewed talks about re-imposing sanctions against Iran. The sanctions imposed against Kim Jong Un’s regime do not affect Europe or the United States, but are unacceptable for China, which is North Korea’s almost exclusive supplier of goods. We did not need to wait long for the response: China introduced oil futures contracts, payable in the yuan, which could be exchanged for gold on stock exchanges in Shanghai and Hong Kong. By using these contracts the United States dollar as well as the economic sanctions against Russia and Iran can be bypassed.