USA - Call it a colossal victory for a Pentagon that hasn’t won a war in this century, but not for the rest of us. Congress only recently passed and the president approved one of the largest Pentagon budgets ever. It will surpass spending at the peaks of both the Korean and Vietnam wars. As last year ended, as if to highlight the strangeness of all this, the Washington Post broke a story about a “confidential trove of government documents” — interviews with key figures involved in the Afghan War by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction — revealing the degree to which senior Pentagon leaders and military commanders understood that the war was failing. Yet, year after year, they provided “rosy pronouncements they knew to be false,” while “hiding unmistakable evidence that the war had become unwinnable.”

USA - This is already becoming the worst public health scare that we have seen in many years, and experts are warning that we are still in the very early chapters of this crisis. Officials are fairly certain that the spread of this mysterious new coronavirus began in the Chinese city of Wuhan, and as you will see below, measures are now being implemented to try to isolate that city from the rest of China.

USA - In the wake of the Virginia gun rights rally on Monday, Democrats in the Capitol are not slowing down their push for tyranny. They are moving a bill through the legislature that would effectively criminalize dissent against Governor Blackface Northam and other state government officials. House Bill 1627 was introduced by Delegate Jeffrey M Bourne last week. “If any person, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, or harass any person, shall use a computer or computer network to communicate obscene, vulgar, profane, lewd, lascivious, or indecent language, or make any suggestion or proposal of an obscene nature, or threaten any illegal or immoral act, he is guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor,” the legislation reads… which means this legislation effectively criminalizes dissent against public officials.

MEXICO - Women in Mexico were paid $1400 to be hyperstimulated so their ovaries released bountiful eggs instead of one during their cycle. They then underwent artificial insemination, resulting in early pregnancy with multiple embryos, which were then flushed out of their bodies for study.

CHINA - Researchers are racing to find out more about the epidemiology and genetic sequence of the coronavirus spreading in Asia and beyond. Health authorities around the world are worried about an outbreak of a mysterious virus that originated in Wuhan, China, last month. Officials there have confirmed more than 500 cases of the infection, which causes a respiratory illness, and 17 deaths. Several cases have been spotted elsewhere in Asia and one in the United States. Efforts to understand the outbreak are especially crucial, because mass travel from Friday for the Chinese New Year holiday could spread the virus farther and faster.

GERMANY - With its new raw materials strategy, the Federal Government is focusing on supporting modern environmental technologies and securing resources for German industry in the escalating global power struggles. The background is that large amounts of raw materials such as cobalt, lithium and rare earths are required for the expansion of electric mobility and for the production of wind turbines and solar systems; There has been fierce competition for them on the world market. The situation is exacerbated by global economic wars; Last year, for example, observers did not rule out restricting the supply of rare earths from China to the United States in order to avert US aggression. To secure the needs of German industry, the new raw materials strategy not only takes into account conventional means of economic development, but also direct government intervention.

GERMANY - - With the establishment of a "German Raw Materials Agency", the Federal Government is pushing ahead with its struggle for cost-effective access by German companies to industrial resources all over the world. The aim is to further improve the competitive position of German industry. In its efforts to facilitate access to raw materials, the Federal Government is primarily targeting China and Africa. African resource states are to be pushed into so-called raw material partnerships and make their natural resources available exclusively to German-European companies. Because strategically important, but very rare, resources can be found primarily in China, Berlin and Brussels are now also putting pressure on Beijing to facilitate access to these raw materials. Sharper conflicts about this cannot be ruled out.

LIBYA - New indications of a military escalation are being reported from Libya. With a blockade of Libya's eastern oil shipping ports, already on Friday, Haftar's LNA - with around 80 percent of Libya's oil deposits under its control - had throttled the country's oil production from 1.3 million barrels down to 500,000 barrels per day. Yesterday, his troops, shut down an oil pipeline, which meant approximately another 400,000 barrels of production per day going offline. Signs of renewed military escalations are also being reported. A relaxation of tensions is nowhere on the horizon.

USA - US President Donald Trump’s special adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner will travel to Israel Wednesday to attend the World Holocaust Forum and likely meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Blue and White leader Benny Gantz. Kushner’s trip, first reported by Axios, comes as Trump’s Senate impeachment trial is about to ramp up, with the Democratic House managers and White House lawyers making oral arguments before senators throughout the week. It also comes as Israel heads into its third election in less than a year.

ISRAEL - Poland's leader President Andrzej Duda has said he will not attend this week's Holocaust remembrance ceremony at Yad Vashem, the official memorial centre in Jerusalem. His decision has threatened to overshadow the event which will bristle with world leaders and bring parts of Jerusalem to a standstill. It marks the 75th anniversary of the Soviet liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. More than a million people, mostly Jews, were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz.

SWITZERLAND - Donald Trump urged world leaders at Davos to 'reject the environmental prophets of doom' during his keynote address to the World Economic Forum on Tuesday. The US President branded climate activists 'the heirs of yesterday's foolish fortune tellers' while rattling off a list of projections that he said failed to come true, including overpopulation in the 1960s and the 'end of oil' in the 1990s.

USA - According to a recent report, K-12 schools around the country are having to treat students for separation anxiety after implementing policies that require students to hand over their smartphones. One school’s solution was to buy locking pouches for smartphones, which students were invited to decorate. The Wall Street Journal reports that schools across the United States are dealing with an unexpected result of forcing students to hand over their phones — separation anxiety. Schools are being forced to develop coping mechanisms for the students who display signs of severe agitation and anxiety when away from their mobile devices.

EUROPE - Protests have erupted in Germany and Ireland in the last 48 hours amid fury at restrictive EU regulations on the environment and agriculture - prompting farmers to blockade main roads with tractors in both EU member-states. Berlin and Dublin were ground to a halt in the past 48 hours amid growing outrage at EU regulations.

SWITZERLAND - A super-rich one percent of the world’s population has accumulated twice as much wealth as the remaining 90 percent, global charity Oxfam said in a newly-released report. The gap between the obscenely rich and the rest of humanity has reached grotesque proportions, according to the annual report by Oxfam, published on Monday on the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos. The new report, ‘Time to Care’, which focuses on the largely unpaid care work many women and girls take upon themselves, says that the world’s top 22 richest men now have more wealth than all the women in Africa. There are only 2,153 billionaires in the world, according to the report, but their wealth matches that of more than 4.6 billion people, or about 62 percent of the world’s population, estimated to stand at 7.7 billion.

UK - Laurence Fox savagely attacked "woke culture" and insisted it is majorly damaging and unhelpful in today’s society. While on TalkRadio with Julia Hartley-Brewer Mr Fox went into greater detail on why he would not date a “woke” person and his overall views on "wokeness", saying he wants a partner who is living in the real world. He said: “I don’t think anybody, man or women, is going to be a great partner if they see themselves as the victim before the relationship has even started. People who hold the view that they are the victim of some tyrannical patriarchal oppression. You need to be with someone who has lived a real-life, suffered hard and got back up on their feet again." Ms Hartley Brewer agreed and replied: “We have now got a situation where women are automatically victims, ethnic minorities are victims. Essentially anyone who is not a white male is a victim."