USA - Winter Storm Gage has left more than 30,000 people without power in the Midwest and forced a Massachusetts town to declare an emergency due to randomly falling trees. The National Weather Service (NWS) said Tuesday that widespread light to moderate snow will impact all of southeast Michigan throughout the morning. The snow in Detroit and other areas is expected to end by late afternoon. The storm dropped nearly 8 inches of snow along the Lake Michigan shore and most of Michigan's upper peninsula will see between 6 to 12 inches, with isolated areas seeing more than 18 inches. According to poweroutage.us, the state of Michigan alone has reported more than 30,000 outages. On Monday, the storm left more than 85,000 without power in Ohio.

UK - Microscopic pieces of plastic have been discovered in the most remote locations, from the depths of the ocean to Arctic ice. But these microplastics are also entering our bodies, from the plastic-infused water that we drink and the marine life that we consume as food. The study combined data from over 50 studies on the ingestion of microplastics – defined as plastic particles under five millimetres in size. Humans eat 250 grams of plastic every year - the equivalent of a heaped dinner plate’s worth of shredded plastic. Every week, we're consuming nearly 2,000 tiny pieces of plastic. This equates to 5 grams, the same as a credit card, and about the same weight as a plastic bottle cap. In a month we're consuming 21 grams of plastic, about the same weight as five casino dice and enough shredded plastic to fill a rice bowl halfway. Plastic does not biodegrade, but instead breaks down into smaller pieces, and ultimately ends up everywhere, including in the food chain.

GERMANY - So far, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has not been particularly ambitious with regard to EU affairs. But next year provides ample opportunity to make real progress. 2020 will be a big year for Germany when it comes to European affairs. Berlin will take over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union in July, but even before then German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has come out to push for a "strong and sovereign Europe." To make Europe a bigger player on the world stage, Maas called for a European Security Council to tackle foreign affairs and security issues — such a council could even include the post-Brexit United Kingdom.

GERMANY - 2019 has been a year of transition. It hasn’t brought a change of government. But it will be seen as the year that Angela Merkel virtually disappeared. ‘Where is the chancellor?’, the press asked in autumn, as her public interventions had become even rarer than usual. Merkel’s silence came at a time of economic insecurity, with much talk of a pending recession. (A recession seems to have been avoided, but the economy only grew by a meagre 1.5 per cent over the year).

IRAQ - After US fighter jets bombed five facilities controlled by the Kataib Hezbollah militia group in Iraq and Syria on Sunday, killing at least 24 people and injuring at least 50 in response to the killing of a US civilian contractor in a rocket attack on an Iraqi military base, Iraqi militias are warning a "strong response" is coming.

GERMANY - A report by the Swedish Defense Research Agency found that Russia has threatened to cut energy supplies to Central and Eastern Europe more than 50 times. Even after some of those states joined the European Union, Russian threats continued. Not surprisingly, Germany's current Social Democratic Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, has criticized the US sanctions as foreign interference. "Decisions on European energy policy are made in Europe, not the USA," he tweeted on December 12. "We fundamentally reject foreign interventions and sanctions with extraterritorial effects."

USA - The world's three biggest exporters, Germany, China and the United States, are the biggest beneficiaries of membership of the World Trade Organization, a new study by the Bertelsmann Foundation published on Monday revealed. The countries have achieved the biggest income gains as a result of the rules-based global trading system, the report found. The US benefited by $87 billion (€77.7 billion) in 2016, China by $86 billion while Germany reaped some $66 billion in financial rewards. A group of scientists calculated the wealth effects of WTO membership on 180 countries, including all 164 WTO members. Both internal and external trade flows were included.

GERMANY - The political and economic identity crisis seen in the UK during its torturous Brexit process could shift across the continent to Europe’s largest economy Germany in 2020, according to economists and market watchers. Germany’s political system is going through a period of instability with the governing “grand coalition” of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) under increasing strain over the last year. Tensions came to a head earlier in December when the CDU party leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, rejected calls from the SPD’s new leftwing leadership team to renegotiate the terms of the governing alliance, putting the coalition’s survival into 2020 in doubt. The instability comes amid a wider picture of polarization in German politics with rising support for the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Green Party.

UK - A vegan who has claimed he was sacked because of his ‘ethical beliefs’ has demanded a court recognises veganism as a protected category like religion in a landmark legal case. The animal rights campaigner is fighting a legal battle to get ethical veganism added to a list of beliefs which should be protected under the Equality Act 2010. His lawyers are expected to compare veganism to religious evangelism and will show the court receipts for vegan shoes and aftershave to prove it is more than a diet for the campaigner. Jordi Casamitjana said: “I am an ethical vegan. This involves much more than just not eating food with animal ingredients, it’s a philosophy and a belief system which encompasses most aspects of my life.”

AUSTRALIA - Scores of fires are burning out of control across Australia amid a heatwave that has seen temperatures exceed 40C (104F) in every state. The most dangerous fires on Monday were in the state of Victoria. About 30,000 residents and tourists were urged to flee East Gippsland - a popular holiday region - but evacuations were later deemed too risky as fires encroached on major roads. A volunteer firefighter died battling a blaze in the state of New South Wales. In total, 10 people have died in the nation's bushfire crisis since September. Meteorologists say a climate system in the Indian Ocean, known as the dipole, is the main driver behind the extreme heat in Australia. Officials said the fire in Bundoora, some 16km (10 miles) north of Melbourne city centre, was "threatening homes and lives". He said the huge blazes had produced their own weather systems from smoke columns "punching into the atmosphere 14km high". "There's lightning coming out of these columns. It is unpredictable and it's dangerous out there," he said.

AUSTRALIA - Australia has been at the wrath of wildfires in recent weeks, which have taken 12 lives. As the blaze races towards beaches in Victoria, is it safe for travellers to visit the country? Tourists and local residents in Victoria were left fearing for their lives as they camped out on a beach in the early hours of December 31. The blazes rapidly spread to Mallacoota, with locals describing the incident as a “terrifying experience”. Thousands camped out on the sands, or hid beneath wharves and boats, as the sky above turned red from the flames. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has added a further warning urging travellers to reconsider trips to affected areas. A Fire Danger Rating system operates across Australia indicating the possible consequences of a fire, if one were to start. The highest rating of ‘Catastrophic’ has been issued in several locations.

MEXICO - Actor Sebastian Ferrat, beloved in his native Mexico, has died after a long and horrifying struggle with an infection he reportedly contracted from contaminated pork. Is 2020 the year to give up bacon? Fans are in deep sorrow as Sebastian Ferrat, 41, died on Sunday after a long battle with a grave illness that local media identified as cysticercosis, a parasitic infection that attacks the brain, muscles, or other tissues. According to reports, the actor, best-known for his roles in various television dramas, contracted the deadly infection after eating spoiled pork. He reportedly languished in a coma for several months in hospital before finally succumbing to the infection.

UNITED NATIONS - The United Nations wants to hand power to dictatorial regimes like China to control the Internet, prompting fears of a massive new free speech purge. The General Assembly has approved a resolution sponsored by China and Russia to set up a committee of “international experts” whose role would be to stop “the use of information and communications technologies for criminal purposes.” However, many caution that the move is merely a back door for authoritarian regimes to further censor dissent.

USA - Russian and Chinese warships joined Iran’s Navy and Revolutionary Guards vessels on Friday for four days’ worth of maritime exercises in the Gulf of Oman and the northern Indian Ocean, simulating search and rescue, anti-piracy and shooting drills. The US Navy is concerned that the recent lull in hostilities with Iran following this summer’s string of escalatory actions in the form of tanker sabotage attacks, ship seizures and drone shootdowns may be repeated, Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly has said. “I think they’re going to continue to perform provocative actions over there,” Modly said, speaking to Reuters on Friday. “And I think they’ll look at every opportunity they can to do that,” he added, without offering any more details. “There’s nothing that suggests to me, short of a regime change there, that you have a different tone set from the leadership, that would suggest to me that they’re going to stop doing what they’ve been doing,” Modly explained.

USA - WikiLeaks has published yet another set of leaked internal documents from within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) adding even more material to the mountain of evidence that we’ve been lied to about an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria last year which resulted in airstrikes upon that nation from the US, UK and France.