EUROPE - France kicks off a week of World War I commemorations from Sunday November 3, with some 80 leaders from around the globe preparing to fly in for a ceremony marking a century since the guns fell silent. French President Emmanuel Macron is gearing up for a busy week of diplomacy that will see him play host to leaders including US President Donald Trump and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. He will also be criss-crossing northern France, visiting the battlefields where hundreds of thousands of men lost their lives in the trenches.

UK - No deal appears to be unacceptable to Parliament; it therefore cannot happen except by accident. Chequers, or some watered down version of it, may equally be unacceptable to a majority in Parliament; Labour will presumably vote against anything the Government proposes, and together with Tory rebels, who regard Chequers as a sell-out, could therefore defeat it. It may also be unacceptable to Brussels if no way around the Irish border issue can be found. So does that leave the Norway option as the only practical way through this constitutional and political minefield? ‘Norway for now’ won’t work… but soon there will be no EU left to quit...

EUROPE - Brussels might learn from Russia's disastrous experiment in top-down political rule. When great empires and political systems fail, they tend to do so at frightening speed. Thus it was with the Soviet Union, which in the early 1970s was at its apogee, a global superpower which some commentators still expected to surpass and even render irrelevant its supposedly degenerate Western counterparts. But less than twenty years later, it was gone, like Shelley’s Ozymandias, King of Kings, a mere ruin amid the desert sands. Its epitaph might read the same: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

GERMANY - Germany’s Christian Democratic Union needs a “style change” at the top in the wake of heavy electoral defeats, according to Jens Spahn, the country’s health minister and a leading contender to replace Angela Merkel. “I quickly realized that things could not go on like this,” Spahn said in an interview with Die Welt published Sunday, days after Merkel’s announcement that she plans to step down as party chair at a congress in December. “We lost more than 10 percentage points each in [regional elections in] Hesse and Bavaria … Our goal as a people’s party must be [to win at least] 40 percent,” said Spahn. “For this we need a renewal of personnel and content.”

USA - One of Justice Brett M Kavanaugh’s accusers admitted this week that she made up her lurid tale of a backseat car rape, saying it “was a tactic” to try to derail the judge’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. Senator Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee revealed the fraud in a letter to the FBI and Justice Department Friday, asking them to prosecute Judy Munro-Leighton for lying to and obstructing Congress. Mr Grassley said Ms Munro-Leighton is a left-wing activist who hijacked another “Jane Doe” anonymous report about a backseat rape and claimed it as her own story, calling it a “vicious assault.” President Trump seized on the report Saturday, calling her “a vicious accuser.” “What about the others? Where are the Dems on this?” he demanded via Twitter.

FRANCE - If you’ve ever doubted whether organic food is worth the higher price tag, a study that was recently published in JAMA Internal Medicine should put your concerns to rest. In the study, French researchers showed that people who consume organic food have a 25% lower risk of cancer.

UK - BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg warned that MPs will have to wait until Christmas eve for a vote on the Brexit deal should an agreement be secured in December. EU leaders warned at the last Brussels summit that the November summit would be pushed back until “decisive progress” has been made. BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg claimed a Brexit deal will be voted on by MPs on December 21, or even Christmas Eve.

VATICAN - Nations do not build themselves, they “are built by migrants, just as migrants built Europe,” Pope Francis told a group of missionaries this week. “Europe was not just born like that,” the pope told a delegation of Scalabrini missionaries in off-the-cuff remarks in the Vatican Monday. “Europe was made by many waves of migrants over the centuries.”

USA - The migrant caravan heading north to the US from Central America is further evidence that the old world is dying and the new struggles to be born. There is much the ancient world can teach us; and one of its most salient lessons is that mass migration – the product of conflict, societal collapse and/or extreme poverty – is capable of destroying the most powerful of empires. Consider Rome, whose legions bestrode the ancient world like a colossus for a thousand years, and whose great and cruel, and most illustrious names – Caesar, Pompey, Augustus, Nero, Hadrian, Vespasian, Constantine, et al – still induce awe and wonder despite the passage of millennia. At its height, it would have been the very acme of insanity to claim that an empire that stretched from the Italian peninsula all the way across Western Europe and down into North Africa and the Middle East, could possibly be erased from the pages of history.

ITALY - Italy could be preparing to "volcanically" threaten the European Union and trigger a new Eurozone crisis should its Eurosceptic Government opt-out of the bloc, British businessman Jim Mellon claimed. The British businessman also suggested the European Union is exploiting the Brexit negotiations to avoid having to address the "volcanic" threat Italy poses to the bloc.

USA - The $13 billion Gerald R Ford aircraft carrier, the US Navy’s costliest warship, was delivered last year without elevators needed to lift bombs from below deck magazines for loading on fighter jets. Previously undisclosed problems with the 11 elevators for the ship built by Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc add to long-standing reliability and technical problems with two other core systems - the electromagnetic system to launch planes and the arresting gear to catch them when they land. While progress was being made on the carrier’s other flawed systems, the elevator is “our Achilles heel,” Navy Secretary Richard Spencer told reporters in August without providing details.

USA - A series of large earthquakes has rattled California over the last 24 hours, and scientists are telling us that the shaking was the result of “movement along the San Andreas Fault system”.  In recent months there has been an alarming amount of seismic activity all along “the Ring of Fire”, and there have been times when the number of global earthquakes has been way above normal.  Could it be possible that all of this unusual seismic activity is leading up to something?  Experts are telling us that we are overdue for the “Big One” to hit California.  And when it does eventually strike, it could be far worse than most people would dare to imagine. We have been witnessing unusual seismic activity all over the world, and it has become very clear that our planet is becoming increasingly unstable.

USA - It is the beginning of the San Andreas fault, where experts fear 'The Big One' could begin. But a small, bubbling pool of mud that stinks of rotting eggs near the Salton Sea is causing concern. Dubbed 'the slow one', experts studying the phenomenon say it is similar to a 'moving sinkhole' - and is speeding up, destroying everything in its path. Imperial County officials studying the muddy spring say it has been increasing in speed through - first 60 feet over a few months, and then 60 feet in a single day.

RUSSIA - The World Jewish Congress co-organized this week the Second Moscow International Conference on Combating Antisemitism, Xenophobia, and Racism, under the leadership of the Russian Jewish Congress, with 600 delegates from more than 35 countries, including government representatives and law enforcement officials, as well as international experts in the field. Conference participants released on Tuesday an official declaration emphasizing that it is “our duty to develop an effective system of measures to combat any and all manifestations of racial, ethnic, and religious intolerance. There is only one short step from appeals inciting interethnic and sectarian strife to murder and pogroms. A shattering example of this is the horrible Pittsburgh shooting," reads the declaration.

USA - CNN's Don Lemon doubled down Wednesday on his comment earlier this week that the "biggest terror threat in this country are white men." Lemon said Wednesday that the "evidence is overwhelming" that the statement is true. The CNN anchor's comments have been condemned on the right, a fact Lemon noted during his Wednesday show.