EUROPE - Yanis Varoufakis, Greece's former Finance Minister, said it was only a matter of time before the EU's eurozone bubble "bursts", throwing member states into economic hardship. The coronavirus pandemic has forced countries around the world to take unprecedented economic measures. Perhaps the most significant came last year when the EU agreed to a COVID-19 recovery fund, which was given the green-light to roll out last month. The package means that the 27-member states will now share collective debt. The EU and its predecessor, the European Economic Community (EEC), was founded on the promise of financial restraint, with shared debt against the rules. A health crisis has been enough to break down that barrier, however, with the package appearing to work in favour of leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron who are keen for further EU integration among member countries.

EUROPE - The EU failure to successfully manage the distribution of the coronavirus vaccine sparked a brutal backlash across member states, with Italy now being advised to follow in Britain's footsteps and reconsider its membership. In an editorial for his Libero newspaper, Mr Feltri said: "Let me point out to Draghi that, if we are up to our necks with Covid, we owe it to the fact that we have entrusted the Union with the task of purchasing and distributing vaccines. Unfortunately, they do not come to us except in bits and pieces, that is, in an irrelevant number or insufficient to cover the needs It is proof that the highly praised EU, in reality, is a bureaucratic wreck not even able to look after the health of peoples." He continued: "England, thanks to Brexit, has arranged for itself to procure the vaunted jabs, and is set to solve the problem of the terrible disease."

NATO - NATO’s willingness to underwrite US military deployment in Europe and expand its reach to include the Pacific demonstrates that its current purpose is more about propping up America than securing peace. The recently concluded virtual meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) defense ministers has been billed as President Joe Biden’s first opportunity to act on his promise of repairing the damage done to the military alliance by the contentious policies of his predecessor, Donald Trump. While a great deal of attention has been paid to the optics of unifying NATO under new, more inclusive American leadership, the harsh realities of the policy priorities pushed by Lloyd Austin, Biden’s secretary of defense, and their underlying economics, point to a weakened US looking to further exploit a European military alliance for the purposes of propping up an America in decline.

USA - Sometime last year, a shadowy group of hackers — now thought to be Russians working for that country’s foreign intelligence service — broke into digital systems run by Solar Winds, an American tech firm, and inserted malware into the code. When the company then sent out its next regular software update, it inadvertently spread the virus to its clients — more than 18,000 of them, including huge corporations, the Pentagon, the State Department, Homeland Security, the Treasury and other government agencies.

USA - Up to 15 million Texans remain without heat and electricity as temperatures across the state are well below freezing. Another round of winter weather is battering parts of the state Wednesday morning, as many Texans have been without electricity since Sunday are desperately scrambling to find shelters. Weather related deaths have already been reported as one of the nation's wealthiest states can barely supply electricity to its residents. The unprecedented polar vortex split, dumping Arctic air down to the Gulf of Mexico, resulted in frozen wellheads that impeded the flow of natgas to power stations, triggering electric shortages as demand overwhelmed the grid. Still on Wednesday, the power grid operator warned 40% of generation capacity remains offline. The cascading effect of blackouts and controlled power outages has resulted in some critical infrastructure such as cellular networks and water treatment plants going offline. The speed at which one of the nation's wealthiest states transforms into a third-world country is simply stunning.

USA - “Never Mistake My Quiet for Inaction” – Sidney Powell Speaks Out After SCOTUS [Supreme Court of the United States] meetings Friday on election fraud — Expects Orders and Opinions Next Week. Attorney Sidney Powell, who was silent all day on Friday, posted updates on her Telegram page on Friday night. Sidney Powell told her subscribers on Telegram that she expects orders to come out on Monday of next week. Sidney Powell expects opinions to be announced on Thursday. The US Supreme Court was set to consider President Trump’s voter fraud cases in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan on Friday.

USA - The Washington Post has published an unexpected op-ed criticizing Joe Biden for not taking Catholic teaching on abortion seriously. Thursday’s essay, written by Ramesh Ponnuru and Robert P. George, asserts that abortion is not wrong because the Church says it is wrong, but because taking the life of a human being is fundamentally unjust.

ISRAEL - The key to understanding Biden administration policy on virtually any issue is to see what its predecessor did and then assume the administration will do the precise opposite. In the weeks since President Joe Biden took the oath of office, that has seemed to be the case in just about every domestic and foreign policy decision that has come up. But if Biden is going to keep his word to have Israel's back in international forums, he's going to have to reverse that trend and do exactly as his predecessor did with respect to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

GERMANY - The German Chancellor will be stepping down later this year and has always made a great ado about deep appreciation of the United States. Given that, it is all the more surprising that, now that the Trump era is finally over, she has pulled a unilateral move à la Trump. There is no other way to interpret why she pushed the EU very hard to coddle up to Xi Jinping’s China by concluding the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) deal with China just now. The most charitable interpretation is that Mrs Merkel is repeating the double mistake which Bill Clinton made in the context of China’s WTO accession — hyper-optimism and taking the Chinese at their word. The less charitable interpretation, based on background briefings by the German government, is that she and her team saw it as a gleeful moment to stick it to the Americans.

EUROPE - Europe is now trading more goods with China than the United States, a sign of how the pandemic is transforming the global economy. Data released this week by the European Union's statistics service attributed the shift to a 5.6% increase in imports from China in 2020 and a 2.2% increase in exports. Meanwhile, there was a "significant drop" in trade with the United States, with imports plunging 13.2% and exports falling 8.2%. The overall value of EU-China goods trade last year was €586 billion ($706 billion), about €31 billion ($37 billion) more than between the European Union and the United States. China's economy expanded 2.3% last year as it raced to recover from the pandemic, while the United States saw output shrink 3.5%. That allowed China, the world's second largest economy, to increase its clout.

USA - The Biden Administration has decided to bring the US back into the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), first as an observer until the end of the year, and presumably as a member beginning in 2022. Secretary of State Blinken explained: "The best way to improve the Council, so it can achieve its potential, is through robust and principled US leadership."

IRAN - Iran’s Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi warned in a television interview on February 10, 2021, that Iran might be drawn into a military nuclear program. “Iran’s nuclear program is for peaceful purposes … and considers it a prohibited weapon. But I must make it clear that if a cat is pushed into the corner, it may behave differently from a cat that walks freely. If Iran is pushed into a corner, it will not be its fault [implying the production of nuclear weapons] but rather the fault of those pushing it.” Tasnim news agency, affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard, wrote that the minister had made “a major blunder” and his comments “are very wrong in itself, do not reflect the policies of the Islamic Republic, contradict the declarations of the Supreme Leader of the Revolution, and may have serious consequences for the state.” The remarks made by the Iranian Intelligence Minister reflect internal power struggles within the Iranian security and intelligence apparatuses after a series of assassinations of Iranian scientists and the sabotage of sensitive nuclear facilities in Iran.

ISRAEL - The Israel Lands Authority last month awarded contracts to several building companies to begin marketing 1,257 new housing units in Jerusalem's southern neighborhood of Givat Hamatos. It's the first stage of a 2,600-unit subsidized housing project targeting young families to encourage them to remain in the Israeli capital, where there is a housing shortage and high prices. At the same time, the master plan calls for the construction of 700 units for the nearby Arab area of Beit Safafa. Givat Hamatos is bordered by several of Jerusalem's largest neighborhoods, including Gilo to the south and Har Homa to the east. The EU has dubbed the project an "illegal settlement." Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem Fleur Hassan-Nahoum responded, "Givat Hamatos doesn't change anything; it simply supplies demands of building and growth. The fact that the EU doesn't accept the reality that Jerusalem is the undivided capital of Israel shows that they are living in an alternative universe."

GERMANY - The coronavirus pandemic can only be considered beaten once everyone in the world has been immunized against Covid-19, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel said, after she'd met with the G7 leaders at a virtual summit on Friday. Speaking to reporters, Merkel said she had stressed in her remarks to the group that the "pandemic is not over until all people in the world have been vaccinated," adding: "Everyone must participate." "The [coronavirus] pandemic in particular has shown how much we are diverging from one another, worldwide." On Friday the head of the EU's executive body, Ursula von der Leyen, said that the bloc would put up €100 million ($121 million) to fund the Covid-19 vaccine rollout in Africa. The current global divide over access to jabs means that some poorer countries are still without Covid-19 vaccines, while others, including Canada, the UK, US, Australia and those in the EU have ordered more doses than they technically require.

USA - The United States is approaching a grim milestone — the impending moment when half a million Americans will have lost their lives to the coronavirus. It’s a staggering number that’s painful to think about, and even harder to picture. Research into our evolution shows that the human brain is not inherently wired to make sense of large numbers; other studies show that people also have become adept at suppressing trauma to cope with grief. In 2020, the US saw a more than 15 percent increase in deaths over the prior year, the highest year-on-year rise in deaths across the US since 1918, which experienced both a global flu epidemic and the First World War. The colossal death toll forces us to confront a distressing, ever growing number that has affected some groups more than others. Most of the dead have been Americans 65 and over. People of color are also dying at disproportionate rates: Deaths among Black Americans are 1.9 times higher than among non-Hispanic whites, Hispanics and Latinos 2.3 times higher, and Native Americans 2.4 times higher. The deadly sum of it all is hard to fathom.