EUROPE - One of Germany’s most experienced diplomats had to wait three months this year before Warsaw would approve his appointment as Berlin’s ambassador to Poland. However, it isn’t just relations between Berlin and Warsaw that are being affected by war memories, or what Germans see as their weaponization. Beneath the surface, war-tied resentments are bubbling in other parts of Europe, too, with possible important ramifications for the consolidation of the EU, a bloc founded partly to ensure European nations would cease squabbling and to avert the chance of any future conflict emerging among them. Pollsters have noted a rise in anti-German sentiment in the southern European states of Italy and Spain, and in Greece, where the country’s post-2008 debt crisis and Germany’s handling of it still grates. In Hungary and elsewhere in Central Europe, as well as Italy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is blamed for encouraging the 2015 migrant influx into Europe with her open-door policy for asylum-seekers.

USA - Fauci was asked in the interview on Friday about the president’s most recent comments on the virus, in which he also said: “We’re rounding the final turn, and a lot of good things are happening.” Fauci said: “I’m sorry, but I have to disagree with that, because if you look at the thing that you just mentioned, the statistics, Andrea, they’re disturbing. We’re plateauing at around 40,000 [new] cases a day and the deaths are around 1,000.” Fauci was speaking with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell a day after the president told a White House press briefing: “I really do believe we’re rounding the corner.” The US has a world record 6.3 million cases of Covid-19 and almost 200,000 people have died, according to Johns Hopkins data.

USA - Hundreds of firefighters battled two large wildfires Friday that threatened to merge near the most populated part of Oregon, including the suburbs of Portland, and the governor said dozens of people are missing in other parts of the state. The state’s emergency management director, Andrew Phelps, said officials are “preparing for a mass fatality event” and that thousands of structures have been destroyed. Governor Kate Brown said more than 40,000 Oregonians have been evacuated and about 500,000 are in different levels of evacuation zones, either having been told to leave or to prepare to do so. Dozens of people are missing in Jackson County in the south and Marion County, where a fire continues to burn east of Salem, Brown told a news conference Friday. Also Friday, authorities announced that a man had been arrested on two counts of arson for allegedly starting a fire in southern Oregon on Tuesday.

USA - 2020 has been an incredibly difficult year for the US as a whole, but no part of the country has been hit harder than the states along the west coast. It has just been one thing after another all year long, and now unprecedented wildfires have turned the skies bright orange and blood red over vast stretches of California and Oregon. Many are using the word “apocalyptic” to describe what is happening, and others have said that the skies look like something out of a science fiction movie. And even though hundreds of thousands of acres have already burned in Oregon and Washington, and even though more than two million acres have already burned in California, officials are warning that conditions will get even worse as we head into “the teeth of the wildfire season”.

USA - Four people have now been arrested on the West Coast for deliberately starting blazes as wildfires rage. Cops detained two men in Washington, man in Oregon and woman in California as the desperate battle to contain the fires continues. So far 24 people have been killed though the authorities in Oregon have told residents to brace themselves for a “mass fatality incident”. Photos show the towns of Phoenix and Talent reduced to ashes after the Almeda fire tore through. It has killed two people, destroyed a thousand homes and laid waste to 5700 acres.

USA - Emergency responders in the Pacific Northwest are fighting misinformation along with raging wildfires as people spread unsubstantiated social media posts blaming coordinated groups of arsonists from both the far left and far right for setting the blazes. The FBI said Friday that it’s investigated several claims and found them to be untrue, while officials in Oregon and Washington state have turned to Facebook to knock down the competing narratives — some posts blamed far-left antifa activists and others claimed the far-right group the Proud Boys was responsible for the fires scorching wide swaths of the region.

USA - A storm surge warning has been issued from Port Fourchon Louisiana to Mississippi/Alabama border.

A hurricane warning has been issued from Grand Isle Louisiana northeast to Ocean Springs Mississippi...including New Orleans...Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas.

A hurricane watch has been issued from east of Morgan City Louisiana to west of Grand Isle.

A tropical storm warning has been issued from east of Ocean Springs Mississippi to Indian Pass Florida.

USA - President Trump has spoken of how supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which has grown online in the US, appear to like him very much. Mr Trump told journalists that he didn't know much about the movement, but added that he'd heard that "these were people who love our country." So what is QAnon and who believes in it? At its heart, QAnon is a wide-ranging, unfounded conspiracy theory that says that President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media. QAnon believers have speculated that this fight will lead to a day of reckoning where prominent people such as former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will be arrested and executed. That's the basic story, but there are so many offshoots, detours and internal debates that the total list of QAnon claims is enormous - and often contradictory. Adherents draw in news events, historical facts and numerology to develop their own far-fetched conclusions.

EUROPE - The politicization of the central banks. The new Fed strategy is the strongest sign that the central banks are taking on more and more tasks for which politicians are responsible, such as fighting unemployment. The ECB, which intends to present its new strategy in 2021, will follow in the Fed's footsteps. We are witnessing the end of independent central banks. Eurozone member states are growing at radically different speeds. Germany could tolerate inflation rates of 3 to 4 percent, if only to reduce its export surplus. But that would practically be the death knell for Italian competitiveness. The eurozone does not have a finance minister or an economics minister because there is no political union. This is the birth defect of monetary union.

USA - The United States military on Wednesday announced that it would be reducing its presence in Iraq from 5,200 to 3,000 troops this month, formalizing a move that had been long expected. Last month, Reuters reported that the United States was expected to reduce the troop presence in Iraq by about a third. The United States has around 5,200 troops that were deployed in Iraq to fight the Islamic State militant group. Officials in the US-led coalition say Iraqi forces are now mostly able to handle the remnants of Islamic State on their own.

AFRICA - The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the pinnacle of funding for global vaccination programs, including polio vaccines in Africa. It has been finally admitted that the polio vaccine itself has sparked a new polio outbreak. Countries affected include Angola, Congo, Nigeria and Zambia, among others. Thirty-eight countries have suspended the vaccine. This is the same Bill Gates who is desperately pushing for mandated coronavirus vaccines in the United States as well as around the world. However, there has never been a successful virus vaccine and even Dr Anthony Fauci says it may only be 40% effective when it arrives.

UK - Global animal, bird and fish populations have plummeted more than two-thirds in less than 50 years due to rampant over-consumption, experts said Thursday in a stark warning to save nature in order to save ourselves. Human activity has severely degraded three quarters of all land and 40 percent of Earth's oceans, and our quickening destruction of nature is likely to have untold consequences on our health and livelihoods. The Living Planet Index, which tracks more than 4,000 species of vertebrates, warned that increasing deforestation and agricultural expansion were the key drivers behind a 68 percent average decline in populations between 1970 and 2016. It warned that continued natural habitat loss increased the risk of future pandemics as humans expand their presence into ever closer contact with wild animals.

USA - An ammo shortage is being witnessed nationwide as Americans react to civil unrest by buying up firearms and the ammunition needed to use them for self-defense. Gun store shelves in Arizona, long covered with box upon box of ammunition for sale, now host but a smattering of ammunition, and at a much higher price because of the product’s scarcity. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports the same shortage is evident throughout Minnesota. Oakdale gun store owner David Bean said, “Manufacturers can’t keep up with the demand anymore. The industry’s never been hit this hard before.” And Stock & Barrel Gun Club executive vice president Kevin Vick observed, “[People] have seen firsthand that law enforcement is not always going to be there to protect them.”

ISRAEL - For more than 50 years, diplomatic geniuses kept telling the world that "the key to peace in the Middle East is to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." The convenient corollary was that the solution was in Israel's hands, which kept the Jewish state constantly on the receiving end of global condemnation. This camouflaged the plain truth that the deepest ills of the region have absolutely nothing to do with Israel or the Palestinian conflict. The decision of the UAE to go public with its open relationship with Israel represents a paradigm shift as the dreaded Zionist enemy was publicly legitimized and validated by a powerful Arab nation. The Zionist state is suddenly turning into a source for solutions and hope rather than hatred. How can anti-Zionist groups like the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement continue to undermine Israel if Arab countries announce that it's good for the health of their societies to do business with the Zionist state?

USA - The extreme weather that has hammered California with runaway wildfires and hit Louisiana with its most powerful hurricane in 160 years may be about to get even worse. La Nina -- a phenomenon that occurs when the surface of the Pacific Ocean cools -- has officially formed, the US Climate Prediction Center said Thursday. It triggers an atmospheric chain reaction that stands to roil weather around the globe, often turning the western US into a tinder box, fueling more powerful hurricanes in the Atlantic and flooding parts of Australia and South America.