CHILE - Leftist former student leader Gabriel Boric will be sworn in Friday as Chile's youngest-ever president, with plans to turn the country that for decades has served as a neoliberal laboratory into a greener, more egalitarian "welfare state." Aged 36, Boric takes over the reins of a country clamoring for change following mass protests in 2019, which he supported, against deep-rooted inequality in income, healthcare, education and pensions. The revolt, which left dozens dead and hundreds injured, was the catalyst for a process now under way to rewrite Chile's dictatorship-era constitution.

GERMANY - Something dramatic, even historic, happened in the Reichstag building in Berlin on February 27th. Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, announced a plan to spend an additional €100 billion ($111 billion) on defence; to support imposing sanctions on Russia (including ones related to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and SWIFT); to commit to two LNG terminals; to export weapons to Ukraine and to consider acquiring the American-made F-35 as the next generation of nuclear-capable German aircraft. This was a massive and almost complete policy turnaround, with a number of German foreign policy’s sacred cows slaughtered. Having prided themselves on continuity as a central element of German foreign policy for decades, German political elites were stunned. It became apparent that Mr Scholz was not only enjoying the support of his Ampelkoalition, traffic-light coalition, but also that of Germany’s new opposition leader, Friedrich Merz.

GERMANY - Nowhere has the change in policy been so stark as in Germany, where decades of policy have been cast aside virtually overnight. War has firmly united the transatlantic alliance. Germany’s decision to prioritize energy security over climate goals speaks volumes. Russia has awakened Germany from its slumber. Berlin is finally taking steps to assume a role within NATO commensurate with its economic and political clout.

VATICAN - The Vatican has long experience in mediating conflicts. Francis has helped to normalise relations between the United States and Cuba, smoothed the path to elections in the Central African Republic and brought together the warring leaders of South Sudan. Much of this work happens behind the scenes. On Ash Wednesday – the day the Pope had asked Christians to offer their fasting and prayer for peace in Ukraine – I sat down with Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, the papal ambassador to Britain, to find out how the Holy See is working to try to broker peace in Ukraine. How, I asked him, could Pope Francis make a difference? “There were many attempts by the Holy See to try to avoid this war,” he tells me as we talk in the living room of the apostolic nunciature in Wimbledon, south-west London. “Sometimes it was successful, sometimes it was not. But the very fact that they [Russia] accept the Holy See, and the Pope in particular, as an interlocutor is already something very special because what happens in these wars is that nobody is looking for an interlocutor. Everybody is looking for an enemy.”

USA - The pandemic is far from over, the WHO's leader insisted Wednesday, two years after he first used the term to wake the world up to the emerging threat of Covid-19. The World Health Organization's director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus first described Covid-19 as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Two years on, he lamented how the virus was still evolving and surging in some parts of the world. The WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern -- the highest level of alarm in the UN health agency's regulations -- on January 30, 2020, when, outside of China, fewer than 100 cases and no deaths had been reported. But it was only the use of the word pandemic six weeks on that seemed to shake many countries into action.

USA - On top of everything else, now a highly pathogenic avian influenza pandemic is ripping across the United States, and it has already resulted in the deaths of almost 2.8 million birds. Most of the birds that have died have been chickens or turkeys. And since this was just in the very first month of the pandemic, there is no telling how bad it could eventually become. What will the eventual death toll look like? Will it be in the tens of millions? That is definitely a possibility. At this point, this pandemic is not just limited to one geographic area. There have been lots of cases on the east coast, and there have been cases as far west as Nebraska and South Dakota. Basically, the area that has been affected already covers about half the nation, and we are just one month into this new plague. Let us hope that it stays just in birds, because if it jumps to humans we are going to have a real disaster on our hands. Since 1997, bird flu has had about a 50 percent death rate in humans. The global food crisis that we have been warned about is already here, and so this new plague has come at a really, really bad time.

USA - An alarming trend is popping up in school districts around America, removing the parents from the equation of the child. What does this mean? As conservative parents fight back against Critical Race Theory and canceling historic figures, schools are upping the anti by dismissing the parent's right to know about their children. The most recent wokeness is troubling, an entire school district is defending staff training, which instructed them to hide information regarding students’ sexual or gender identity from their parents. The instructions were part of professional training for staff in Eau Claire Area School District in western Wisconsin on February 25. “Parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities,” a slide from the presentation, obtained by the organization Empower Wisconsin, reads. “That knowledge must be earned.”

USA - A convergence of horrifying events have set into a motion an irreversible collapse of food production and crop harvests that will lead to global famine all the way through 2024. These events cannot be stopped for the simple reason that plants take time to grow. You can’t create crops instantly, and if they don’t get planted (or they get destroyed), there’s no instant replacement.

USA - Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is affecting more than just gas prices. The global food supply is being damaged by the war, one CEO warned, and the cost of food is going to rise around the world. Svein Tore Holsether of Yara International, a Norwegian chemical company that produces fertilizers, described the Ukraine conflict as “a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe,” The National in the United Arab Emirates reported Tuesday.

USA - The new global economic crisis that we have entered into is starting to hit home with hard working American families in a major way. I have been hearing from so many people that are absolutely horrified by how rapidly the price of gasoline is rising. Especially for those that have to drive a lot, this is going to cause a tremendous amount of pain. Food prices continue to surge as well, and this is particularly true when it comes to meat. Unless you are a vegan or a vegetarian, you are probably accustomed to eating quite a bit of meat on a regular basis.

UKRAINE - Experts had expected the invaders to use their planes to pick off Ukraine’s forces at will. Yet in the first two weeks of combat, Russia’s air force has played a minimal role. It is clear, though, that the Russian air force has held back its full capabilities. “Fast jets have conducted only limited sorties in Ukrainian airspace, in singles or pairs, always at low altitudes and mostly at night,” notes Justin Bronk of the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank in London. When hostilities began, Russia sent a volley of cruise and ballistic missiles towards Ukraine’s air bases in an attempt to ground its planes and air-defence systems, and to hobble its radars and anti-aircraft missiles. That effort failed. Ukraine had wisely dispersed its air-defence systems, making them harder to find. American defence officials say that Ukrainian air and missile defences consequently “remain effective and in use”—a claim that can be corroborated with open-source intelligence. Russia has lost substantial numbers of aircraft. These currently run to 11 fixed-wing aircraft, 11 helicopters and two drones.

UK - Britain is trying to purge the London property market of unsavory owners. Whether or not it succeeds, Russian oligarchs will need new places to launder dirty money. This week, UK politicians agreed to set up a register of overseas companies with title to property in Britain. The idea was first raised six years ago during a wave of outrage against corrupt money, but fell by the wayside as Brexit and the pandemic dominated public debate. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has bumped the clampdown back up the agenda.

USA - The Pentagon on Tuesday evening shot down a Polish proposal to transfer their MiG-29 fighter aircraft to Ukraine and receive replacement aircraft from the United States. The Pentagon said in a statement that the plan was not “tenable.” The Pentagon statement came after the Polish government announced earlier in the day that it was ready to transfer 28 MiG-29 fighter planes to a US base in Germany to hand over to Ukraine, which is in the midst of a war with Russia. The Biden administration has been so far leery of direct US military involvement in the war, including through NATO, of which Poland is a member. The involvement of any NATO member in the war could involve the entire alliance.

GERMANY - Annalena Baerbock, the former co-leader of the environmentalist Greens and now the first woman to serve as Germany's top diplomat, marks three months in office on International Women's Day (March 8).She has emerged as one of the countryˈs most popular politicians, winning overwhelming praise also from conservative quarters for her clarity and steadiness in a time of great upheaval across Europe and major changes in German foreign policy. Across the board, German news outlets, such as the weeklies Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, have been applauding the foreign minister for "speaking plainly" about the crisis and also talking directly to the Kremlin. When she went to Moscow in the days before the invasion, she seemed unflustered by her surroundings. In her speech last week at the United Nations, Baerbock looked straight at her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, and said: "You are abusing your power as a permanent member of the Security Council... You can deceive yourself, but you do not deceive us."

UKRAINE - While Russian-Ukrainian war is ongoing, let's take a look at the composition of the Ukrainian government: The core decision-making inner circle of Ukrainian President Zelensky is actually based on his circle of friends when he was an actor.