EL SALVADOR - El Salvador is a sovereign country and not a colony of Washington, which has no right to meddle in its decision to adopt Bitcoin, President Nayib Bukele said on Wednesday in response to a bill proposed by several US senators alarmed at the prospect. “OK boomers,” Bukele tweeted on Wednesday evening. “We are not your colony, your back yard or your front yard. Stay out of our internal affairs. Don’t try to control something you can’t control.” He added that the US has “zero jurisdiction” in El Salvador, a sovereign and independent nation. Bukele, elected in 2019, once described himself as “the world’s coolest dictator” in his Twitter biography, but now styles himself as the “CEO of El Salvador.” He was responding to a statement by three US senators – two Republicans and a Democrat – who are concerned about the country’s adoption of Bitcoin and the “potential risks to the US financial system” that it might represent.

IRAN - The facility in Natanz is built deep under a massive mountain, making it extremely difficult for the IDF to ever bomb it. Iran is developing a new nuclear threat that could be a game-changer – and which will continue to proceed regardless of whether there is a nuclear deal or not. The new enormous nuclear threat is a new underground facility Iran is digging and building in the Natanz area which goes so deep under a mountain so large that it will leave the Fordow facility in the dust in terms of how difficult it would be for the IDF to strike it. Why no one is talking about it – other than Albright – is probably a mix of it being an issue that may not fully mature until 2023 and that there are few good options for addressing.

USA - Elections to the San Francisco Board of Education are not normally national bellwethers. The city is a proud symbol of liberalism, not a swing district, and school-board elections — as Thomas Fuller, The Times’s San Francisco bureau chief, notes — “have for decades been obscure sideshows to the more high-profile political contests.” But the recall election this week that ousted three board members wasn’t about only local politics. It also reflected a trend: Many Americans, even in liberal places, seem frustrated by what they consider a leftward lurch from parts of the Democratic Party and its allies. This frustration spans several issues, including education, crime and Covid-19.

EUROPE - Poland and Hungary are now well and truly at the mercy of the unelected Eurocrats. Both are accused of flouting European Union law, and on Wednesday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) rejected their legal challenge against the mechanism that allows Brussels to withhold funds from member states. Poland is alleged to be breaking the EU’s rule-of-law because of the lack of independence of its judiciary, and Hungary is claimed to be in breach on the grounds of corruption. The ECJ judgement stated that “the Court dismisses the actions brought by Hungary and Poland in their entirety,” and when it comes to democratic principles “the European Union must be able to defend those values, within the limits of its powers.” As a result, billions of euros of Covid recovery funds can now be withheld from Warsaw and Budapest.

USA - The number of adult Americans who identify as something other than heterosexual has risen to a record 7.1%, a new Gallup phone survey revealed on Thursday. The metric has more than doubled since 2012, the first year the company started tracking such data. Then, 3.5% of respondents who volunteered their sexual orientation and/or gender identity said they were part of the LGBTQ community. The increase reflects a wider relevance of such identities among younger generations, the polling agency said. Among GenZs, or people born between 1997 and 2003, 20.8% of people identified as LGBTQ. For comparison, only 2.6% of Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, responded that way.

RUSSIA - Russia's military alliance with China is a "turning point in security" and the West is sitting by and doing nothing, according to a senior MP. Speaking from the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Thursday, Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood told Sky News the West may have left it "too late" to intervene in Ukraine as Russia have reached out to China in bolstering its aggression on the world stage. In a chilling warning, he warned how Ukraine is part of a "bigger picture" of the balance of world power and stressed Britain must realise the significance of a potential invasion and the fight against authoritarianism. Mr Ellwood told Sky News: "The penny is dropping, Ukraine is at the epicentre of the clash between western liberalism and authoritarianism. There is a much bigger picture at play, which I think the West is now beginning to appreciate, and if we blink where could this take us?" He added: “It is too late to bring in a NATO division, but the west needs to ask themselves what more can we do?”

USA - Washington derives its global power through its control of the US dollar, also known as the world’s reserve currency. This special status enables Washington to amass obscene deficits that do not in any way reflect America’s true productive capacity. The US dollar has been utterly dominant as the currency used for international trade since it replaced sterling in the 1920s. Commodities such as oil, gold, base metals and agricultural products are priced in, and paid for, in dollars. This created large worldwide demand for the greenback, adding massive value to its worth, and created strong demand for US Treasuries. All this enables the American federal government to print dollars by the trillions, borrow without limit, and spend with abandon.

USA - What in the world is happening to our country? Once upon a time, the streets of our major cities were so civilized, but today our politicians seem to have no answers as crime rates spiral out of control. The number of drug overdose deaths in the United States keeps hitting new all-time highs, and of course the drug crisis is fueling an unbelievably bad homelessness crisis.

CANADA - Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in the country’s history to crack down on protests against his vaccine mandate — just days after the Biden administration urged him to use “federal powers.” Last Thursday, several Biden administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, spoke to their counterparts in Canada as protesters closed the Ambassador Bridge. The protests are part of nationwide demonstrations against the government’s imposition of vaccine mandates on truckers — a year after Trudeau called mandates “extreme measures that could have real divisive impacts on community and country.” The Ambassador Bridge connects Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Canada, and carries 25% of US-Canada trade. Protesters closed down commercial traffic from the US to Canada for several days, impacting production in several industries.

USA - Organ trafficking, a lucrative global illicit trade, is often a lesser discussed form of human trafficking among anti-human trafficking stakeholders due to its intricate and often stealthy nature. Trafficking sex and/or labor are the more commonly thought of forms of human trafficking among public policy leaders and general awareness campaigns. However, organ trafficking holds a critical place with transnational organized crime groups due to high demand and relatively low rates of law enforcement.

GERMANY - The head of a major leftist party in Germany has called for former Chancellor Angela Merkel to return to international politics in order to help negotiate a solution to the Russia-Ukraine crisis. According to a report by Die Welt, Bartsch called on Merkel to be brought back as a key mediator for the west regarding the conflict, citing her connections with both sides of the conflict, as well as her prior experience at the negotiating table. “She has the authority on both parties to the conflict that is necessary to calm the situation,” Bartsch is reported to have told a number of German publications. “I would wish that the woman who until a few weeks ago was chancellor, who has excellent connections to Vladimir Putin, who speaks the language, would perhaps be appointed to an intermediary role by Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron,” the Die Linke leader also reportedly said in a separate interview. The chairwoman of the defence committee, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, spoke against the measure, saying that the ex-Chancellor should not get involved in the current crisis.

CANADA - Canada used to be such a nice place. I have been up to Canada many times, and every time I visited I was always impressed by how polite everyone was. I always wondered why Americans couldn’t be more like Canadians, because they certainly possessed certain positive qualities that many of us lacked. But over the past two years Canada has been transformed into a much different place. Under Justin Trudeau, the government of Canada has taken a very hard turn toward authoritarianism, and now a nation that was once so united is now more divided than ever. When he invoked the Emergencies Act, he crossed a line that will never be able to be uncrossed. His move was immediately condemned by leaders all across Canada and all over the globe, and he is now being compared to some of the most horrible despots throughout history.

RUSSIA - The Russian government claimed on Tuesday that several military units have completed “scheduled drills” along border with Ukraine and will now return to their permanent bases, bringing their armor and artillery with them. Russian officials taunted the Biden administration by claiming the redeployment “humiliated” Western war hysterics, while Ukrainian and NATO military officials said they did not see any immediate sign of Russian forces actually pulling back from the border. Russia’s state-run Tass news agency quoted Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov’s claim that Russian troops were packing their gear and preparing to depart on Wednesday morning. “15 February, 2022, will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed,” Zakharova declared.

USA - How is it possible that we are suddenly on the precipice of global war? During the Cold War days, we could always count on the fact that there were competent foreign policy professionals in the United States and in Europe that could simultaneously look out for our interests but also prevent a nuclear war with Russia from happening. Because if a nuclear war were to erupt, nobody wins. Unfortunately, the landscape is completely different here in 2022. Instead of competent foreign policy professionals running the show, we have got a bunch of clueless hacks that seem to have absolutely no idea what they are doing. I wish that I could be more optimistic that a diplomatic way out of this crisis will be found, but I can’t.

USA - The news that US inflation has reached its highest level for 40 years, at 7.5% in January, is the most explicit indicator of serious problems in its economy. The monetary tightening that will be used to attempt to bring this under control will both slow the US economy and inevitably spill over into major effects on the world economy. This very high inflation is particularly significant when compared to 1.5% inflation in China, its main economic competitor, in the same month. US inflation is five times higher than China’s.