“Hollowing out the economy is not benefiting the German people, nor is it helping climate change,” Diana Furtchtgott-Roth, Director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It is not reducing emissions, because manufacturing is being shifted to other nations, like China and India, that use dirtier energy. The German economy is going down, and their people do not have the jobs and economic opportunities that they used to.”

The meagre economic outlook and energy crisis is also shaking up German politics. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), the country’s leading right-wing populist party, has seen its popularity more than double since the Russian invasion commenced, according to polling data aggregated by Politico. About 80% of the German population is unsatisfied with the performance of the current coalition, and more than half of the country wants elections to occur before 2025, their currently scheduled date, according to Bloomberg News.

The federal government has done everything to prevent Texas from stopping the surge of migrants and neither side will cave. “The recent actions by the State of Texas have impeded operations of the Border Patrol. Those actions conflict with the authority and duties of Border Patrol under federal law and are pre-empted under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.Texas’s actions also improperly seek to regulate the federal government,” the DHS said in a letter to Texas AG Ken Paxton.

Texas responded by saying it will “not surrender to Biden’s destructive open-border policies.” Numerous Republican governors in other states, especially the south, are sending resources to Texas immediately.

The far-left told migrants to come to America where the American dream would await them. The American Dream of the 1950s is DEAD. Even hard-working Americans can no longer obtain the lifestyle that was once promised and provided to legal immigrants. These migrants today are unable to work and expect the taxpaying citizens of this nation to pay for their new lives. The future of our nation depends on stopping the deliberate invasion of America.

And while these two conflicts have dominated the news cycle, others have also been wreaking havoc in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caucuses. Meanwhile, there are mounting fears that the war in Gaza could spillover into the Middle East, and that China could invade Taiwan in the coming years - a conflict that has the potential to plunge the world into a third global war. What's more, Thursday saw NATO admiral Rob Bauer warn that the military alliance is bracing itself for an attack by Russia within the next 20 years.

If it feels like the world is seeing a spike in deadly conflicts, the data is there to back up that notion. Figures compiled by the Peace Research Institute Oslo show more battle-related deaths from state conflicts in 2022 than in any year since 1984. The data shows that Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the war between the Government of Ethiopia and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) accounted for the majority of the more than 204,000 recorded war-related deaths last year. It was also the first year that fighting in Europe accounted for more than 25,000 of the world's deaths from state-based violence since the Second World War.

The Tigray War saw tens of thousands of people killed across northern Ethiopia between November 2020 to November 2022 while an on-going civil war in Sudan, which began in April 2023, has also caused widespread death and destruction.

Africa has also seen a series of successful military coups. Governments have been overthrown in countries including Burkina Faso, Guinea, Chad, Mali, Gabon and Niger, and the Democratic Republic of Congo is also facing an on-going humanitarian crisis - the roots of which date back to the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Another coup happened in 2021, this time in Myanmar, when the military overthrew the democratically elected government of Win Myint and Aung San Suu Kyi, plunging the country into a crisis. Rebels continue to fight back. In recent months, we have seen Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels attacking ships passing through the Red Sea, between Asia and Europe - disrupting global trade. In response, the US and UK have hit targets in Yemen with missiles, but have so far failed to deter further Houthi attacks. The vital shipping route remains disrupted.

“It is in danger because those who are supposed to defend the values of the West have been co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and, consequently, to poverty,” he added. He lambasted Western leaders for abandoning the principles of freedom and succumbing to various forms of collectivism, including state interventionism, radical feminism, abortion, social justice movements, and population control.

“The leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism. Collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world rather they are the root cause.”

US identity politics has been coming under heavy scrutiny of late, following a highly publicized scandal involving three female presidents of leading US universities – Dr Claudine Gay of Harvard, Liz Magill of UPenn, and Dr Sally Kornbluth of MIT. The issue at hand was their refusal to say, amid the hostilities between Hamas and Israel, that calling for genocide on their campuses violated college rules and encouraged harassment.

Following their testimony before Congress, the presidents quickly fell under the laser focus of the internet and it was Harvard’s Claudine Gay, the first non-white person to serve as president of the private university, who attracted the most criticism. And not without cause. It was discovered that Gay had plagiarized dozens of passages in her dissertation work, a serious offense that put the spotlight on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) hires and on whether Gay had been awarded her lofty position not due to her academic credentials but rather due to the color of her skin, and to her sex.

Only weeks after a lengthy debate on whether Gay was qualified to preside over America’s most prestigious university did she tender her resignation – although returning to her position as a member of the faculty while keeping her whopping $900,000 yearly salary.

But Paracelsus Recovery, which is based in Zurich and London, warned it had seen a 150 per cent increase in the number of people being treated for porn addiction between 2019 and 2023. Its chief executive Jan Gerber said: 'It is clear from our research that porn addiction is significantly more common than official numbers suggest.'

One 27-year-old British man treated by Paracelsus Recovery said he became addicted to pornography after he started watching it from the age of 12. He said: 'I had lost all control over my behaviour. I was sitting in my room smoking weed and watching porn videos from morning to night. I had no friends, it had messed up my education, and I felt hopeless.'

After stating, “The answer is in your mirror,” Townhall columnist Phil Hollaway questioned why Weingarten turned off comments. ”Are you afraid of the answers you’ll get? You and the teacher unions with help from [former CDC director Rochelle Walensky] sent public schools into a death spiral from which they may never recover.” Another poster responded: “A person touted as the country’s top teacher asks a question then turns off replies to keep people from answering it. That sums up pedagogy in public schools right now.”

In the past, various prominent politicians have been dubbed “Gun Salesman of the Year” after involving themselves in gun-control legislation. The same sentiment can be applied to the upper echelons of public education officials, who cannot seem to grasp the concept that parents want their children educated, not indoctrinated. When public schools were closed during COVID, millions of parents learned they could educate better at home, and never looked back. Schools are now being dubbed “knowledge-free zones.”

First, we must understand the febrile landscape of faraway Balochistan, where the conflict is taking place. This remote landscape, covering the southeast of Iran and areas in the west of Pakistan, has a population of 10 million and has long sought independence. You might think both countries would be united against the Balochi separatists, but it's not so simple.

The border region is a safe haven for Balochi rebels, as well as Sunni Islamists waging guerrilla war on the Shi'ite regime in Iran, and drug cartels shipping heroin to the West. The disputed and dangerous region is yet another flashpoint, then, in the Middle East - one that has just ignited. You might think of Iran as a global pariah. But if its war with Pakistan were to escalate, Tehran would have qualified support from three regional superpowers – Russia, India and China.

RT reports: Israel claims Iran was involved in plotting the October 7 attacks, when around 1,200 people were killed and scores taken hostage in the surprise Hamas raid near Gaza. Israel retaliated by launching an intense military bombardment of the Palestinian enclave, so far leaving about 24,000 dead, according to local health officials. The operation is aimed at wiping out the militant group, West Jerusalem says.

Israel has previously openly accused Iran of aiding Hamas “with money, training and weapons and technological know-how” and intelligence. “Iran is standing behind it. We are in conflict with Iran. Imagine not what Iran can do to us, to destroy us,” Netanyahu said, claiming he will only agree to a deal that grants West Jerusalem security control over all of Gaza. Netanyahu added that “Iran is the head of the octopus and you see its tentacles all around from the Houthis to Hezbollah to Hamas.”

The stage is set for a societal implosion of epic proportions, and many Americans are feverishly preparing for a coming collapse that they believe is inevitable. For a long time, many people had faith that the government would be able to keep society stable, but now that has changed. In fact, one recent survey discovered that a whopping 71.2 percent of all Americans “have no faith in the US government to save them or prevent a doomsday event”…

If you actually believe that the government will be there to rescue you when things really start hitting the fan, you are just being delusional. If it was equally divided up among the entire population, the emergency supplies that the government has on hand would last less than a day. Evil is literally growing all around us, and the inmates are taking over the asylum. And I am entirely convinced that 2024 is going to be a historic turning point. Are you ready for the tremendous chaos that is coming?

At this moment, the wintry beginning of 2024, German farmers are staging large-scale and escalating protests and forcing the ruling coalition into concessions, the trains are not running on time due to a strike, the country’s wholesale sector has dropped to pandemic-level pessimism, “dampening hopes of a rapid rebound in Europe’s largest economy,” as reported by Bloomberg, residential property prices are in record decline, and the office real estate market “has collapsed,” according to leading German news magazine Der Spiegel.

The Economist finds Germany to be “down” politically as well – in fact, self-relegated – from its status as leader of Europe (or, at least, the EU) to less than second fiddle (that would be France, perhaps): while “Angela Merkel was the continent’s undoubted leader, Olaf Scholz, has not taken on her mantle.”

For her enemies, there is an irony waiting to catch them: They may hope that accusing Wagenknecht of being too friendly toward Russia will weaken her appeal. Yet that ship has sailed. The days of making hay with unbridled neo-McCarthyism are ending. It is more likely, fortunately, that the BSW’s reasonable approach to foreign policy will only get it more sympathy and voters. As it should. Because remember: At this point, Germany is so dependent on the US that it is treated not only like a vassal, but like a vassal whose wishes and interests do not count. Even Germans who distrust Russia will come to understand that this is fundamentally unsound. In its own national interest, Germany must re-establish some balance by rebuilding its relationship with Russia.

Earlier, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said there was “no way” to solve Israel’s long-term security challenges in the region and the short-term challenges of rebuilding Gaza without the establishment of a Palestinian state. International pressure for advancing the two-state solution has intensified in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

“Without the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital on the borders of 1967, there will be no security and stability in the region,” Palestinian state news agency Wafa quoted Abbas’s spokesperson Nabil Abu Rdeineh as saying Thursday. The Palestinians seek Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem — which were captured by Israel in 1967 — for their state.