EUROPE - Europe's woke policies, mass migration and liberal leaders, sparking fury in Brussels - and fears it could be the END of the European Union. A new US National Security Strategy (NSS) has accused Europe of economic, political and cultural deterioration, sending shockwaves through Brussels but delighting the continent's populist parties. The controversial strategy, signed by US President Donald Trump, warns that Europe is on the brink of 'civilisational erasure' due to decades of decline, and condemns its practice of 'censorship' and 'mass migration' that will render the continent 'unrecognisable in 20 years or less'. The report crystallises in stark terms the growing fracture between the EU and its most important ally, the United States, threatening to torpedo a relationship that has defined global politics since the Second World War.

USA - Donald Trump’s peace plan is on the brink of collapsing after Volodymyr Zelensky insisted Ukraine had no obligation to cede territory to Russia. Kyiv is set to send the US president a Europe-backed counter proposal on Tuesday following an emergency Downing Street summit. The revised plan was intended to balance out a previous draft, presented by the US, seen as widely favourable to Russia. But the Ukrainian leader’s rejection of Russia’s demand to give up the entire eastern Donbas region of Donetsk and Luhansk, which Kyiv still controls parts of, is unlikely to appease Moscow. Mr Trump will remain unsuccessful in his efforts if he cannot get both sides to agree to terms, plunging his latest plan into uncertainty. Ceding land is a huge sticking point.

EUROPE - The president of the European Council has warned Donald Trump not to meddle in Europe’s politics after the White House threatened to use populist parties to cultivate “resistance” to Brussels. António Costa said the EU needed to remain “sovereign” despite US pressure to go softer on what he called American “techno oligarchs”. Washington had criticised the EU over its immigration policies and regulation of US tech companies, including Elon Musk’s X, which was fined £105 million by the European Commission (EC) on Friday for breaking transparency rules. Mr Costa criticised the White House’s national security strategy, which was published on Friday and claimed Europe was facing “civilisational erasure” from uncontrolled migration. The report said the Trump administration would be “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” by working with “patriotic European parties”.

EUROPE - The world has changed more in five years than in the previous thirty. How should Europe work with Trump? European leaders have slipped into a dangerous playbook on how to “manage” the volatile and unpredictable President. Stroke the ego, flatter the man, praise his leadership – and hopefully avoid vilification and an avalanche of tariffs. Reality check: it’s not working. The more we bow to Trump, the more we are taken for granted and the more he wields American power to divide us. Yet so normalised has our behaviour become, state visits to the Oval Office now resemble scenes from The Godfather. Leaders shuffling in, offering praise, taking a knee, desperately hoping any live press questions don’t send the President off-script. By indulging one man’s impulses, we’ve allowed our collective voice to shrink, our strategic clarity to fade, and Western resolve to erode.

CHINA - I don’t want China to be the world’s most dominant economic superpower. I am an American, and so I want the United States to be the world’s most dominant economic superpower. We consume far more than we produce, and we go into colossal amounts of debt in order to make that possible. Somehow we have convinced ourselves that this makes us an economic superpower. Meanwhile, the Chinese produce far more than they consume, and as a result they have far more money coming in than they do going out. This allows them to loan vast amounts of money to nations all over the planet, and that gives them tremendous economic leverage.

SCOTLAND - Students at the University of Glasgow are also being warned about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and The Treasure Seekers by Edith Nesbit. A host of classic books for children and young people, including the first in the Harry Potter series, have been marked with trigger warnings at one of the country’s leading universities. Students at the University of Glasgow have been cautioned that Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone contains “outdated attitudes, abuse and language”. Dame Margaret Drabble, the novelist, said: “Poor, poor students! Exposing themselves at their age to Lewis Carroll and Edith Nesbit and all those ghastly outdated stories glorifying public school. How they must suffer. They will need counselling from all the children who have survived these terrible tales and enjoyed them so much.”

CHINA - The primary reason why China sells so much stuff to the rest of the world is because they are able to make things very inexpensively… For a long time, cheap human labor was China’s main competitive edge. But now Chinese factories are replacing human workers with ultra-efficient robots. In fact, today there are more robots working in China than the rest of the world combined. If you can believe it, Chinese factories added almost 10 times as many robots last year as US factories did… According to the International Federation of Robotics, China, which is home to nearly a third of all global manufacturing capacity, installed 295,000 industrial robots, the highest annual total on record. Of course the Chinese are not just using more robots than anyone else. They are also producing more robots than the rest of the planet combined…

USA - Immigration has a way of importing more than just people. It brings new ways of life – and in the United States today, that includes some of the kleptocratic ways of life characteristic of nations like Somalia. Minnesota is a pleasant if rather cold midwestern US state that bills itself as the land of 10,000 lakes. It’s also now a land of more than 80,000 Somalis, the largest concentration anywhere in America.

EUROPE - European civilization is dying. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy makes this clear. It has squandered its post-WWII economic and military assistance from the United States by investing in centralized, socialist bureaucracies and expansive welfare States. By chasing the “climate change” con as a means for European governments to justify total control over the drivers of economic growth, European nations have forsaken cheap energy exploration, private entrepreneurship, and technological innovation. By depending upon the United States to defend its territorial interests, European nations have destroyed their military capabilities.

UK - Paganism might be the obvious choice of religion for post-Covid Britain, where not only places of worship but also in-person voluntary groups of all kinds are suffering from a crisis of commitment and participation. This doesn’t mean that people no longer have an interest in religion. Rather, cultures of religiosity in an increasingly online world are steadily shifting away from the Victorian model of bums on pews; church attendance, for instance, has yet to return to its pre-pandemic level. Understandably, people who select their own communities are drawn to “unorganised religion” — wholly unregulated, self-initiated ways of connecting with the divine. This may be one reason why Paganism is reportedly the most popular religious choice for Britons leaving Christianity behind...

JAPAN - A huge 7.6-magnitude earthquake has struck off the northern coast of Japan, sparking an urgent tsunami alert. The quake occurred at 7.45 pm local time off the coast of Hokkaido, near the coastal city of Aomori, with an epicenter about 50 kilometers (about 30 miles) below the sea surface. The Japanese Meteorological Agency has issued an alert in the region for a tsunami of up to three meters (up to 10 feet). Nuclear power plants in the region were conducting safety checks, public broadcaster NHK reported.

USA - Donald Trump has warned European nations that they are under threat of 'civilisational erasure' and will be 'unrecognisable' in the next 20 years. The US president brutally criticised long-established allies as he unveiled his long-awaited national security strategy that sharply changes US priorities in line with his 'America First' worldview. In extraordinary language, the strategy called for 'cultivating resistance' within Europe and said the US wanted to restore 'Western identity'. It also backed hard-right claims that the continent faces 'civilisational erasure' due to migration. 'It is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European,' it said.

USA - The United States wants Europe to take over the majority of NATO's defense capabilities by 2027, Pentagon officials told diplomats in Washington this week. The message, recounted by five sources familiar with the discussion, including a US official, was conveyed at a meeting in Washington this week of Pentagon staff overseeing NATO policy and several European delegations. The shifting of this burden from the US to European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation would dramatically change how the United States, a founding member of the post-war alliance, works with its most important military partners. In the meeting, Pentagon officials indicated that Washington was not yet satisfied with the strides Europe has made to boost its defense capabilities since Russia began its war on Ukraine in 2022.

USA - Elon Musk has called for the EU to be “abolished” after the bloc fined his social media platform X €120 million (£105 million). In a series of posts on the site, the billionaire lashed out at the officials who handed out the punishment for transparency breaches and threatened to pursue each country individually. “The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people,” he wrote. Hours later, Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, wrote on X: “Dear American friends, Europe is your closest ally, not your problem. And we have common enemies. At least that’s how it has been in the last 80 years. We need to stick to this; this is the only reasonable strategy for our common security. Unless something has changed.” His response comes amid growing frustration within the White House about the direction of the European Union.

UKRAINE - Volodymyr Zelensky said just hours before the strike that Ukraine and US delegates had carried out "constructive" peace talks. Russia launched yet another deadly attack on Ukraine in the early hours of Sunday - hours after Ukraine met with US delegates to find peace terms Kyiv could agree to. The shameless Kremlin launched yet another strike on civil infrastructure, causing power and water outages in the city of Kremenchuk. Vitalii Maltskyi, the mayor of Kremenchuk, a major industrial hub in central Ukraine, said the city had been repeatedly struck in a "massive" attack. Residents in the city, which is home to one of Ukraine's biggest oil refineries, reported hearing explosions and the mayor said water, electricity and heat had been cut off for some.