USA - The United States will cut its troop presence in Germany by more than 25 percent, former American officials said on Friday, as the Trump administration sends a frosty message to a major NATO ally and shrinks a military footprint long resented by the Kremlin. The new cap, approved by President Trump and Defense Secretary Mark T Esper, will limit American troops in Germany to 25,000, said a former senior official with knowledge of the decision. That would mean a reduction of 9,500, or more than one quarter, from current levels. The move — which blindsided German officials and many American military leaders in Europe — is in keeping with Mr Trump’s “America First” vision of limited US deployments overseas, and with his insistence that allies must shoulder more of the burden for their own defense.

GERMANY - President Donald Trump’s directive to pull 9,500 troops from Germany hits home hard for friends of America like Edgar Knobloch, whose Bavarian town has been home to US service members for seven decades. Like Chancellor Angela Merkel, the mayor of Grafenwoehr was caught off guard. It’s the latest sign of the US’s deterioration of ties with a loyal ally, one that not only hosts most of its troops in Europe but also has seen them fuel the local economy.

ITALY - Seventh-day Adventists, Roman Catholics and Evangelicals Signed a Historic ‘Ecumenical Charter’ that Affirms Faith in ‘One, Holy, Catholic Apostolic Church’. On Saturday, January 25, 2020 a historical “Ecumenical Charter” was signed by Seventh-day Adventists, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Evangelicals and Methodists. The signing ceremony took place in the San Paolo Maggiore Roman Catholic Church in Bologna, Italy. The document that was signed is a pledge of commitment to each other. Adventists pledged a commitment to Rome, and Rome reciprocated that commitment. Make no mistake. The churches that signed this document promised to uphold the principles of the Ecumenical Charter which includes affirming an allegiance to each other. The Ecumenical Charter declares that the church is “one, holy, catholic and apostolic” and therefore the “inescapable ecumenical task consists in making visible this unity.”

PAKISTAN - A devastating invasion of crop-eating locusts has put large parts of Asia on the brink of a humanitarian crisis. Tens of millions of people are set to face food shortages on the continent after a plague of locusts embarked on a path of destruction across India and Pakistan. In Pakistan, a national emergency has been declared after an outbreak of locusts, on a biblical scale, wreaked havoc across farmland in the eastern Punjab, southern Sindh and southwestern Baluchistan provinces.

TAIWAN - The USS Russell, an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Thursday, the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. It was the seventh US Navy transit of the strait in 2020, and the second such passage in the past three weeks. Taiwanese defense forces closely monitored the passage of the Russell and described it as an “ordinary mission,” according to the Defense Ministry. The US Navy has also been active in the South China Sea to counter Chinese aggression, prompting the Chinese government to issue an angry statement that America is “not a party to disputes” in the region, and is only looking to “stir up trouble” by sending warships there.

USA - This summer, for the first time, genetically modified mosquitoes could be released in the US. On May 1, 2020, the company Oxitec received an experimental use permit from the US Environmental Protection Agency to release millions of GM mosquitoes (labeled by Oxitec as OX5034) every week over the next two years in Florida and Texas. Females of this mosquito species, Aedes aegypti, transmit dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever and Zika viruses. When these lab-bred GM males are released and mate with wild females, their female offspring die. Continual, large-scale releases of these OX5034 GM males should eventually cause the temporary collapse of a wild population. However, as vector biologists, geneticists, policy experts and bioethicists, we are concerned that current government oversight and scientific evaluation of GM mosquitoes do not ensure their responsible deployment.

USA - Left-wing Wikipedia editors are using articles about the police-involved death of George Floyd and subsequent protests to attack President Donald Trump, including creating individual articles attacking his statements and actions to get them on Wikipedia’s front page. Editors have unduly favored comments criticizing Trump or America, even uncritically repeating attacks from authoritarian governments such as China and Iran, and emphasized police violence over violence from protestors, including Antifa. Such efforts have extended to pushing claims of “far-right” involvement.

A “BlackLivesMatter” group was formed by left-wing Wikipedia editors to coordinate work on articles about police violence and race relations. Others have tried rallying editors to remove or minimize mentions of violence from Antifa’s Wikipedia page after Trump and Attorney General Barr labeled the group domestic terrorists. Despite criticism of this bias, the site continues to be relied on widely by Big Tech as an “arbiter of truth” in the era of hysteria over “fake news” online.

GERMANY - Germany wanted to tackle the eurozone debt crisis by creating a European super-state with spending and tax plans set in Brussels in 2011, unearthed reports suggest. The plan is, nonetheless, a huge turn-around move for normally fiscally cautious Germany, whose Chancellor has opposed similar proposals for years.

USA - Authoritarian regimes throughout the world are pushing narratives that appear to gloat over and celebrate that chaos unfolding in the United States. On Monday, Iran’s media pushed stories that highlighted the “collapse,” while quoting Russian sources portraying that the US is flailing about as its world order comes crashing down.

USA - The Department of Justice has announced that it is attempting to determine if there is a “coordinated command and control” behind the violent riots that have erupted all over the United States. In recent days, officials all over the country have used words such as “organized” and “organizers” to describe the orchestration that they have been witnessing in their respective cities. And all over the US, law enforcement officials have reported finding huge piles of rocks and bricks pre-staged at protest locations in advance, and scouts have often been used to direct rioters to locations where police are not present.

In addition, something that we have been hearing over and over again is that many of the people that are involved in the violence are not known by any of the locals. At this point, the evidence appears to be so overwhelming that some sort of national coordination is taking place that the Department of Justice has decided to launch a formal investigation…

USA - After a massive uprising in Minneapolis, Minnesota that subsequently spread to nearly every state in the country, significant change appears to be on the horizon. Several city council members in Minneapolis are reportedly in talks to disband the Minneapolis Police Department. This would be a revolutionary move to affect positive change and allow the city to start over with a police force designed around public safety instead of predation and extortion.

“Several of us on the council are working on finding out, what it would take to disband the MPD,” says Steve Fletcher, a member of the 13-person assembly that serves as the legislative branch of Minneapolis government, according to Alpha News Minnesota. The talks over disbanding the police department come just days after one of the most chaotic weeks in American history that left many parts of Minneapolis and other cities burned to the ground and heavily damaged. All of the chaos stemmed from a single flash point when officer Derek Chauvin put his knee on the neck of George Floyd and kept it there until he died.

USA - This wasn’t supposed to happen. Once states started to “reopen” their economies, the tsunami of unemployment was supposed to end. But instead, we continue to see Americans lose jobs at a pace that is far beyond anything we have ever seen before in all of US history. All the way back in 1982, there was a week when 695,000 Americans filed initial claims for unemployment benefits, and that all-time record was never broken until this year. Of course we have seen monster number after monster number here in 2020, and we just learned that last week another 1.877 million Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits.

Overall, a grand total of 42.6 million Americans have now lost their jobs since the pandemic began, and that makes this the largest spike in unemployment in all of US history by a very wide margin. An “economic recovery” was supposed to have started by now, but that isn’t happening. And now the horrifying riots that have erupted all over the nation are going to make things even worse.

GERMANY - Germany’s federal government and mainstream media are engaged in damage control after a report that challenges the established Corona narrative leaked from the interior ministry.

USA - Can 2020 get crazier? You bet. We’re just getting started.If you wrote a screenplay of what’s happened so far in 2020 and gave it to Hollywood producers, they’d laugh you right out of the room. “So, your movie,” they’d say, “has the president of the United States being impeached, a pandemic killing more than 100,000 Americans and 375,000 worldwide, race riots and looting in dozens of US cities, a billion animals killed in Australian wildfires, Brexit, royals abdicating, drone strikes whacking terrorists — and a wave of killer hornets to boot? Get out!” Still to come, more riots, more craziness, then the most contentious presidential election in history. Is there any way we can all just go back to bed and wake up in 2021?

USA - Moscow agrees with Donald Trump’s criticism of G7 as a “very outdated” institution that does not represent “what’s going on in the world,” but cannot see how it can be improved without China’s participation. The US president lashed out at the group of seven major industrialized nations last week as he canceled a planned G7 summit in the US. The event was scheduled for June, but Trump said he wanted an extended meeting in September, and wanted Russia to attend.