USA - If this prosecution moves forward, it will mark the watershed of criminalized free speech in America. The government decides what is harmful speech, not based on breaking actual laws, and the FBI shows up at your door to arrest you. This madness must stop. We have all shared this unsettling premonition that the attack on free speech is not just coming from Big Tech with the threat of censorship, but from the government backed by criminal prosecution.

GERMANY - German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping that the European Union should not try to take sides between China and the United States, in comments made during the World Economic Forum (WEF) Davos virtual summit. The German leader — who has been champion of the proposed investment pact between the EU and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — said on Tuesday that the world should embark upon increased “multilateralism” as opposed to taking a tougher stance on the regime in Beijing.

USA - Presidents like to say that their predecessors left them a mess. Yet in Middle East policy, President Donald Trump left his successor an extraordinary gift of peace and stability. Peace agreements were emerging almost weekly between Israel and her Arab neighbors. Iran, struggling under the burden of US sanctions, was isolated, broke, and wracked by internal turmoil. In Afghanistan, a tentative deal with the Taliban meant that US troops could look forward to coming home. Trump left the US in a position of historic strategic advantage. But like President Barack Obama, who squandered the gains of the Iraq “surge” and withdrew before the country was stable enough to prevent the rise of the terrorist “Islamic State,” Biden is throwing away many of the gains Trump achieved in the region. If he simply stays on the course Trump charted, Biden can maximize his leverage on Iran and entice Saudi Arabia to make peace with Israel. Those prospects are dimming. As a result, instead of peace, Biden may be putting the region back on a path to war.

SWITZERLAND - The buzzword "stakeholder capitalism" isn't new. Klaus Schwab has been pushing it for five decades. But it's hitting the mainstream now and it's the economic side of plans for "The Great Reset." COVID-19 presented globalists like Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, a unique opportunity to press their plans for “The Great Reset” forward at an amazing speed. The motto of the Neo-Marxist plan was even adopted by the Biden campaign with his “Build Back Better” gobbledygook. Biden didn’t come up with that himself. Within weeks after pandemic lockdowns started ravaging economies across the globe, the World Economic Forum published articles claiming The Great Reset was the path to building back better.

UK - Nicky Campbell has slapped down the chief of a religious charity who claimed the Gospels were written by men who were witnesses to Jesus's life. Nicky Campbell started a discussion on this morning’s The Big Questions based on: “If Jesus wasn't the son of God, would we take more notice of what He said?" Introducing the question, Mr Campbell said: “2021 is a census year here in the UK and it’s planned to still go ahead online on March 21."

SWITZERLAND - The World Economic Forum (WEF) rehashed its talking points for the Great Reset in a promo video released during its 2021 Summit, admitting that people think they are “masking some nefarious plan for world domination,” before proceeding to treat you, the listener, like a 6-year-old by spouting clear lies and contradictions. The overwhelmingly negative response to the video only drives home their admission that the Great Reset, which is touted as a positive, if radical, economic and social transformation of our societies, is deeply unpopular. And the level of backlash to this video alone demonstrates why they cannot ignore the uproar.

USA - President Joe Biden, widely praised for his inaugural call to unity, was asked about the forthcoming, highly divisive Senate trial of former President Donald Trump. “I think it has to happen,” he responded. But this process shouldn’t be confused with impeachment under Article 1, Section 3, and Article 2, Section 4 of the US Constitution. The appropriate term for what we’re watching play out in our nation’s capital is a show trial, the mock judicial proceedings carried out by tyrants such as Joseph Stalin after they took power.

USA - The US has temporarily frozen some pending arms sales to allied states while the Biden administration reviews weapons deals agreed under President Donald Trump, according to officials at the State Department. The move affects precision-guided missiles sold to Saudi Arabia and F-35 fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), among other deals not identified by the State Department. American arms manufacturers Raytheon Technologies and Lockheed Martin both have contracts with the two Arab nations. Just last week, the US inked a deal with the UAE to supply it with up to 50 F-35 jets and as many as 18 armed drones, as part of a $23-billion weapons consignment, the Emirati embassy in Washington said. The deal had been announced in November under the Trump administration, and a Senate effort to block it the following month failed to secure majority backing. In December, the US State Department also gave the go-ahead for the sale of 3,000 precision-guided GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs to Saudi Arabia, in a deal worth $290 million.

CHINA - China toughened its language towards Taiwan on Thursday, warning after recent stepped up military activities near the island that “independence means war” and that its armed forces Taiwan, claimed by China as its own territory, reported multiple Chinese fighter jets and bombers entering its southwestern air defence identification zone last weekend, prompting Washington to urge Beijing to stop pressuring Taiwan. China believes that Taiwan’s democratically-elected government is moving the island towards a declaration of formal independence, though Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has repeatedly said it is already an independent country called the Republic of China, its formal name. Asked at a monthly news briefing about the air force’s recent activities, Chinese Defence Ministry spokesman Wu Qian said Taiwan is an inseparable part of China and they were acting in response to provocation and foreign interference.

USA - The US Department of Homeland Security declared a nationwide terrorism alert Wednesday, citing the potential threat from domestic anti-government extremists opposed to Joe Biden as president. "Information suggests that some ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence," the department said. The National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin said a heightened threat of attack "will persist in the weeks following the successful presidential inauguration," which took place on January 20. "DHS does not have any information to indicate a specific, credible plot," it said.

ISRAEL - Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi said on Tuesday that he ordered the military to draw up new plans to attack Iran’s nuclear program. He also warned the new Biden administration against reviving the Iran nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA. “I have ordered the IDF to prepare a number of operational plans, in addition to the existing ones,” Kohavi said. “We are studying these plans and we will develop them over the next year.” Kohavi’s comments are just the latest threatening comments towards Iran from Israeli officials. Earlier this month, an Israeli minister from the Likud party said Israel will have to attack Iran if the Biden administration returns to the JCPOA.

USA - State Representative Kyle Biedermann, a Republican, filed House Bill 1359, likewise recognized as the Texas Independence Referendum Act. Voters would vote in a referendum on November 2, 2021, on whether the state should leave the United States and “establish an independent republic,” the act states. The Texas Nationalist Movement noted the filing, explaining it “would give Texans an opportunity to head to the polls in November of 2021 and start the process of reasserting our status as an independent nation.” Texas withdrew from the United States in 1861, entering the Confederacy. Texas rejoined the United States after the Civil War.

USA - Retail investors have banded together to turn over the tables on Wall Street, and it has created a wild frenzy that is making headlines all over the globe. Unprecedented short squeezes have pushed the share prices of GameStop, AMC, Macy’s and BlackBerry to insane heights, and prominent voices in the financial world are complaining that trading in those stocks has become completely divorced from the fundamentals. In fact, these young retail investors are actually being accused of turning the market into “a video game”. Infamous investor Michael Burry, who made crazy amounts of money betting against the housing market during the last financial crisis, even had the gall to claim that recent trading in GameStop was “unnatural, insane, and dangerous”. Of course Burry is right, but the truth is that the entire market has been transformed into a giant casino and has been “unnatural, insane, and dangerous” for a very long time. If the entire market fell 50 percent tomorrow, stock prices would still be overpriced.

USA - ‘This time, activists intend to DESTROY the system from within’. The raging battle between Wall Street hedge funds and retail traders organized on Reddit over companies such as GameStop and AMC has stolen the spotlight this week. RT’s Max Keiser explains what’s it all about. “The fraud on Wall Street that’s been building for many years got so incredibly out of hand, and it got so obvious, that it caught the attention of social media day-traders, who pounced on a hedge fund’s vulnerability – from engaging in too much fraud – and they killed it,” Keiser says.

USA - Short-selling investors lost a staggering $70.8 billion this month, according to financial data analytics firm Ortex. Their losses were partly driven by small traders pumping money into stocks like GameStop. To put the loss in perspective, $70.87 billion is half a billion dollars more than the GDP of Slovenia, according to CIA statistics.