USA - European security officials are worried that outgoing president Donald Trump will trigger a military conflict with Iran in order to tie President-Elect Joe Biden's hands, sources tell Insider. They also fear that Israel and Saudi Arabia may see the departure of Trump as a ticking clock they need to beat. "Both countries are run by immature leaders who have been screaming about the need for war with Iran for so long it's possible they really believe that a Biden administration will be followed by an Iranian nuclear attack," one source told Insider. Trump has elevated hardliners on Iran inside the Pentagon.


UK - Public sector debt has reached a new record high of £2.08 billion as Government borrowing soars in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Borrowing is estimated to have been a whopping £22.3 billion in October, the sixth-highest borrowing in any month since records began in 1993. In addition, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said borrowing for the first seven months of the financial year is now estimated at £214.9 billion - the highest in any April to October period. It means that the UK's overall debt has reached around 100.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), a level not seen for many decades. This takes net public sector debt to £2.076 trillion by the end of October. The scaling public debt comes as the Government has invested billions of pounds in supporting the economy through the coronavirus pandemic.

UK - Britain has announced an extra £24.1 billion ($31.8 billion) in military spending, as part of the country’s biggest investment in defence since the cold war that ended 30 years ago in 1991. The spending will be over the next four years, Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the House of Commons on Thursday. This is £16.5 billion ($21.7 billion) more than was pledged in the government’s 2019 manifesto, exceeding the amount of the country’s NATO pledge and raising defence spending, Johnson said, to at least 2.2 percent of GDP. Of Britain’s NATO allies the overall £190 billion ($251 billion) investment is second only to that of the United States, Johnson said.

USA - It is put up or shut up time. More than two weeks have passed since November 3rd, and the Trump legal team only has a very limited amount of time left to stop Joe Biden from being elected president. The Electoral College votes on December 14th, but the real deadline is December 8th because the selection of electors must be completed by that date. Of course it is possible that the US Supreme Court could push back that deadline, but it has never happened before in all of US history.

USA - We are about to witness the most high stakes court battle in the history of the United States. Yes, the outcome will determine whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden wins the presidency, but even more importantly the integrity of America’s elections is about to be put on trial. If fraud can be proven, extremely expensive voting machines will have to be destroyed all over the nation and the way that we run our elections will need to be completely reconfigured. But if fraud is not proven, our elections will continue to be run the same way and nobody will ever dare challenge them again. Literally, this is the moment when we determine if there will be fair elections in the United States for the foreseeable future. So to say that the stakes are very high is actually quite an understatement. In the end, we will see what can be proven in court and what can’t be proven. Apparently some big legal moves are about to be made, and I wouldn’t bet against Sidney Powell. If Powell can pull this off, it will be the most shocking legal victory in the history of US politics, and it will turn our country completely upside down.

UK - Do you feel lucky? The number 21 is connected with luck, risk, taking chances and rolling the dice. It’s the number of spots on a standard die, and the number of shillings in a guinea, the currency of wagers and horse-racing. It’s the minimum age at which you can enter a casino in America, and the name of a family of card games, including blackjack, that are popular with gamblers. All of which seems strangely appropriate for a year of unusual uncertainty. The great prize on offer is the chance of bringing the coronavirus pandemic under control. But in the meantime risks abound, to health, economic vitality and social stability. As 2021 approaches, here are ten trends to watch in the year ahead.

EUROPE - Europe’s push for more ‘autonomy’ won’t do any good if it promotes the idea that the continent can defend itself without the US and NATO, Germany’s defense minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer has said. In a speech to students at a military college in Hamburg, Kramp-Karrenbauer noted how the US still provides the bulk of NATO’s ballistic missile defenses, satellite communication, reconnaissance aircraft and helicopters, while around 76,000 American soldiers are stationed in Europe. Replacing all that would take “decades” and require far greater defense budgets than European nations can now afford, she explained. Germany and Europe cannot protect themselves without America’s nuclear and conventional capabilities. These are plain facts.

EUROPE - The socio-economic gap between the rich North and the impoverishing South of the Eurozone will continue to grow, according to a recent study by the business-oriented Cologne Institute for Economic Research (IW). The gap within the eurozone had already significantly grown between 2009 and 2018, with the economy of the North having grown by 37.2 percent, while by only 14.6 percent in the South. This development will continue over the next 25 years, the IW predicts. The IW notes a certain catch-up effect in Eastern Europe, which, however, will not lead to their catching up to the West, due to the desolate starting point following the deindustrialization of the 1990s. The region's basically unaltered function as an extended workbench, particularly for the German export industry, does not provide for a perspective of independent growth. Observers expect that the corona crisis will additionally widen the gap between the North and the South. German trade surplus and Berlin's austerity dictates are the real reasons for this inequality.

USA - Globalist Klaus Schwab made it clear that transhumanism is an integral part of “The Great Reset” when he said that the fourth industrial revolution would “lead to a fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity,” which in his book he clarifies is implantable microchips that can read your thoughts. As we highlighted earlier, “The Great Reset” is attracting a deluge of fresh attention in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, which Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said was an “opportunity for a reset.” So in other words, the “fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity” relates to the transhumanist singularity and a future where people have their every movement tracked and every thought read by an implantable microchip. It isn’t a “conspiracy theory” when they’re openly telling you what they want to do.

CHINA - China berates Australia: Bow down to Beijing’s might and ignore the US. The new defense pact between Australia and Japan signed Tuesday in Tokyo has been dismissed as “dangerous” by Chinese state-owned media, which warns any resistance to Beijing is futile and will come at a heavy cost.

UK - No10's scientific advisers relied on dubious data from Wikipedia to help steer Britain through the spring coronavirus crisis and wrongly predicted the peak of the first wave by two months, an explosive new documentary has claimed. Members of the Government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) admitted early virus modelling was based on unverified figures from the online encyclopedia, which can be edited and managed by members of the public.

USA - Even though the votes are still being counted, Joe Biden declared that he is the President-Elect, a shadow government office invented by Obama and invested with a pseudo-government seal, and he has been holding fake briefings and taking phone calls with foreign leaders. The United States only has one president at a time. Maintaining a fake shadow presidency undermines the sitting administration to the American people and to foreign governments. It’s illegal and inappropriate. So the Democrats are doing it anyway. It’s still early in November. The media conveniently forgot the time its party blocked a presidential transition for over 4 weeks, not just through November, but into December. Democrat claims of election fraud must be heard, but Republican claims are “disinformation”. As long as a presidential election is being contested, there’s no transition. That’s not only the law, it’s the rules that Democrats made. Now they have to live by them.

USA - President Trump asked senior advisers in an Oval Office meeting on Thursday whether he had options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks. The meeting occurred a day after international inspectors reported a significant increase in the country’s stockpile of nuclear material, four current and former US officials said on Monday. Pompeo warned President Trump against a strike on Iran and described the potential risks of military escalation.

USA - Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said the incoming Biden administration should move quickly to restore lines of communication with China that frayed during the Trump years or risk a crisis that could escalate into military conflict. “Unless there is some basis for some cooperative action, the world will slide into a catastrophe comparable to World War I,” Kissinger said during the opening session of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum. He said military technologies available today would make such a crisis “even more difficult to control” than those of earlier eras. “America and China are now drifting increasingly toward confrontation, and they’re conducting their diplomacy in a confrontational way,” the 97-year-old Kissinger said in an interview with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait. “The danger is that some crisis will occur that will go beyond rhetoric into actual military conflict.”

CHINA - Fears of open conflict between the United States and China surged following reports Beijing is preparing for a "final act of madness" from Donald Trump. Speaking to the Global Times, a state controlled Chinese tabloid, an international relations expert warned Mr Trump could try and intensify his conflict with Beijing during his final months in office. The claim was made by Shen Yi, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. Mr Biden won’t be inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States until January 20, until which Mr Trump has full presidential powers. Ms Yi claimed: “Trump is actually setting a trap or planting a landmine for the Biden administration.” She suggested Mr Trump could use his presidential executive powers to hit China’s technology industry in the United States or punish Beijing over its treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority. The Global Times argues this would force Mr Biden to continue a hard-line policy towards China unless he wants to be seen as a “panda hugger”.