GERMANY - Merz is learning that it’s hard to resist an idea whose time has come: Remigration. Failing German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is for some reason emboldened by his ‘heroic’ 44-hour German mission in Greenland. But as 2026 kicks is, Merz is forced to pay some attention to his own country, since many regional elections will be held this year. So, his priority is to counter the surging poll numbers of the rightwing Alternative for Germany (AfD), especially in the eastern German region where it is strongest. “The effort comes in a crowded year of elections — a Superwahljahr, or ‘super election year’, as Germans are calling it — that includes five state races and numerous local contests seen as key tests of the national mood, particularly as the AfD overtakes Merz’s governing conservatives in many polls.

USA - The organization is at risk of "imminent financial collapse," with Guterres citing unpaid fees and a budget rule that forces the global body to return unspent money. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has repeatedly spoken about the organization's worsening liquidity crisis, but this is his starkest warning yet, and it comes as its main contributor, the United States, is retreating from multilateralism on numerous fronts. "The crisis is deepening, threatening program delivery and risking financial collapse. And the situation will deteriorate further in the near future," Guterres wrote in a letter to ambassadors dated January 28. The US has slashed voluntary funding to UN agencies and refused to make mandatory payments to its regular and peacekeeping budgets.

EUROPE - When Donald Trump was in Davos last week, NATO’s military committee, its highest military decision-making body, was in session in Brussels accelerating the delivery of military capabilities and looking afresh at Arctic security. NATO multinational battlegroups on the eastern flank are being bolstered to brigade level, with some allies now transitioning to being permanently based there. For the first time since the Cold War, specific national forces are now pre-assigned to defend specific geographic regions. Reassuringly, the recently released US National Defense Strategy makes clear that Washington would still aim to provide critical support to Europe, albeit more limited. Moscow’s prize objective has been consistent: to break the transatlantic alliance and separate the US from Europe, leaving Russia to deal piecemeal with the Continent.

USA - NATO, from the day of its birth, was an American project. US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt conducted the American pursuit of total victory in World War II under the assumption of a new world order arising at the war’s end. The United Nations was FDR’s brainchild and was to become the world institution to oversee the coming order. President Harry S Truman might have lacked FDR’s worldly mystique, but he possessed common sense and the ability to read people (Stalin in particular) and see the world exactly as it was. And the reality on the ground in Europe, and everywhere else across the world, did not suggest the new world order was anything but a pipe dream. Many contemporary observers fail to appreciate the real nature of NATO. It was not, as it is fashionable to claim today, a force to augment the institutional supremacy of the United Nations. It was a force to replace the UN when reality required action.

IRAN - Over the past few days, an extraordinary amount of American military hardware has been moved to within striking distance of Iran. Advanced aircraft, including F-35 stealth fighters, C-17 transport planes and aerial refuelling tankers, have been repositioned. Assets have been deployed to Diego Garcia, the remote Indian Ocean base long associated with US power projection in the Middle East. The scale and speed of this movement are unmistakable: it is meant to be seen. To most commentators, Tehran has a hard decision to make: negotiate or capitulate. But Trump, too, faces the same dilemma. The US has the ability to launch a major attack, but what is less clear is whether it wants to, what it hopes to achieve by doing so — and what terms it might settle for if it did not. Military build-up creates leverage for Trump, but it also narrows his room for manoeuvre. The immediate problem, therefore, is whether there exists any solution that allows Iran to save face and avoid the appearance that its sovereignty has been compromised.

USA - On one thing at least, Donald Trump is allowed to boast. The US economy is indeed going through something of a boom, and yes, his own policies – which combine extreme fiscal loosening with sweeping deregulation – are part of the explanation. “Growth is exploding, productivity is surging, investment is soaring, incomes are rising, inflation has been defeated, the United States is in the midst of the fastest and most dramatic economic turnaround in our country’s history,” he told global elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month. Barring a black swan event, this is likely to continue, at least until after the midterms in November. Sadly, nothing is forever, and for every boom there is inevitably a coming bust. The main elements of the approaching storm are already clearly visible. In no particular order, the four horsemen of the apocalypse take the form of partially interconnected bubbles in private credit and artificial intelligence, the explosive growth in sovereign debt, and the soaring price of gold, the latter of which is a symptom of financial and geopolitical uncertainty rather than a cause of it.

USA - Why has the dollar fallen of late? What is Donald Trump’s attitude towards the US currency? And how does that affect Britain? The dollar lost around 2 percent during January against a basket of major currencies, as measured by the DXY index. At the time of writing, the DXY is close to a four-year low of 96.79 – a staggering 10.7 percent lower than this time last year. This significant weakening of the dollar has been driven by US policy shifts, tariff uncertainties and geopolitical tensions. It also, to a lesser extent, reflects global efforts to “de-dollarise”, led by China and other large emerging markets. While the related dollar weakening has aggravated US inflation, a cheaper currency helps US exporters, not least “rust belt” manufacturers that are a priority among Trump’s MAGA movement.

UK - Scientists are drawing up an application for a bright purple tomato to be sold in England as a test case to change the rules blocking genetically modified food. The purple tomato was developed by adding two genes from the Antirrhinum, or snapdragon plant, responsible for the bright pigment in the petals of the popular garden flower. The colouring is caused by an antioxidant called anthocyanin which is also thought to have significant health benefits. By inserting the genes into tomato plants, Martin created a crop so high in anthocyanin levels that its flesh and skin turned purple to the core as it ripened. Martin and her colleague Professor Jonathan Jones, a geneticist at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, plan to apply to the Food Standards Agency for the tomato to go on sale in England. They believe a change of attitudes over plant technology, together with a change in plant science laws after Brexit, could help their case. If successful, it could pave the way for a host of other GM crops.

USA - When the economy and the financial system are both greatly shaken at the same time, the consequences can be extremely painful. It is actually rare for a major economic crisis and a major financial crisis to occur simultaneously like we witnessed during the Great Recession and the Great Depression. Unfortunately, it appears that this is precisely the type of scenario that we are now facing.

UK - The stately quadrille of today’s ceremony that confirmed Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury seems a long way from parish life. This past Sunday found me – as it probably did many other churchwardens – gloomily wondering whether we could afford to refill the oil tank again this winter, and whether the diocese would even soon order us to tear it out in pursuit of Net Zero.

USA - A “perfect storm” is the most obvious way to describe the improbable series of political tidal waves that have crashed through the state of Minnesota during the past few weeks. Multi-billion dollar welfare fraud scandal – check! Minority immigrant group caught at its centre – check! Lame-duck governor trapped by the legacy of a losing vice-presidential run and an apparent indifference to his state’s decline – check! A hard-Left run metropolitan centre emerging as the locus of president Trump’s ICE crackdown – with mass protests and a rising body count as consequences. Check, check, check!

USA - ‘You don’t move that much junk into theatre unless you’re going to play’. You can always get an insight into the thinking in the White House and the Pentagon by looking at where the US aircraft carriers are: and today the USS Abraham Lincoln and her strike group have just arrived in the vicinity of Iran. Quite apart from the Lincoln’s air wing, US warships in the area count 500 vertical launch cells among them, many of which will contain Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs) capable of striking targets ashore over a thousand miles from the launching ship.

IRAN - It appears that an apocalyptic war is about to begin in the Middle East, and yet most people living in the western world don’t seem alarmed by this at all. But they should be, because once the missiles start flying, the death and destruction that we will witness will deeply shock the entire globe. The nuts that are running Iran fully understand that the goal this time around will be to bring their regime to an end, and they will throw everything that they have got at us in a desperate attempt to survive. Anyone that believes that there is any limit to what they might do is not being rational. They figure that if they are going to go down, they might as well go down swinging.

USA - The price of gold plunged by more than 5 percent on Thursday, erasing almost all its gains from earlier in the day. The bullion fell to $5,184 in the late afternoon in London, having previously risen above $5,500 for the first time. Gold still remains 3 percent higher than yesterday’s closing price, although the sudden drop highlights the volatility across the commodity market. Silver also fell to $110 an ounce on Thursday afternoon, having risen to a high of $121 previously in the session. Gold has soared by almost 100 percent in the past year, while silver has rocketed by 285 percent over the same period.

USA - The Facebook owner reported that revenue rose 22 per cent to $201 billion this year while profit dipped 3 per cent to $60.5 billion. Meta Platforms forecast on Wednesday that its annual capital expenditure will rise sharply as the world’s largest social media group builds artificial intelligence infrastructure in the pursuit of superintelligence, a theoretical milestone where machines could surpass human performance.