SWITZERLAND - The annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos is not known as a hotbed of anti-imperialist resistance, let alone anti-US rhetoric. Yet this was unmistakably the tone of many speeches delivered in 2026. The most striking and widely discussed intervention came from Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister. Carney openly declared the so-called “rules-based international order” dead and even questioned whether it had ever truly existed. This bargain, Carney argued, has collapsed now that the United States has turned its coercive tools against Western allies themselves.

USA - Former World Bank Director, Erik Bethel, breaks down a US dollar collapse scenario. “How are they buying it? Well,they buy it by printing money. The artificial demand for dollars around the world is largely due to the fact that 60% of central banks have the dollar sitting in reserves. If the dollar isn’t there because nobody wants to use the dollar, we’re screwed. All that artificial demand for dollars disappears and we crater. We’re not going to be able to pay Medicare. And we’re adding $1 trillion of debt every hundred days. You know our government is paying more in interest on our debt, like over $1 trillion in interest alone. We’re paying more in interest, just in interest, to service the debt than we are paying for the Defense Department. People start losing faith in the dollar. We see huge amounts of inflation, perhaps hyperinflation.”

MIDDLE EAST - The US military warned Iran it will not tolerate "any unsafe and unprofessional behavior" surrounding US forces in the Middle East as Tehran gears up for live-fire naval drills in the Strait of Hormuz. The declaration comes as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is set to begin a two-day exercise starting Sunday, according to the US Central Command. President Donald Trump announced this week that a "massive Armada is heading to Iran," led by the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier. "US forces acknowledge Iran’s right to operate professionally in international airspace and waters. Any unsafe and unprofessional behavior near US forces, regional partners or commercial vessels increases risks of collision, escalation, and destabilization," CENTCOM said in a statement. CENTCOM described the Strait of Hormuz as "an international sea passage and an essential trade corridor that supports regional economic prosperity."

IRAN - US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed on Wednesday that Washington is monitoring what he characterized as a massive exodus of capital by Iran's ruling class, as anxieties mount over the potential downfall of the Islamic Republic amid widespread unrest and looming threats of American military action. "As Treasury, who carries out the sanctions, what we can see is we are now seeing the rats fleeing the ship because we can see millions, tens of millions of dollars being wired out of the country, snuck out of the country by the Iranian leadership," Bessent stated during a Newsmax interview. "So they are abandoning ship, and we are seeing it come into banks and financial institutions all over the world," the Treasury Secretary continued.

MIDDLE EAST - As President Donald Trump weighs his options on a possible military strike on Iran, a senior Gulf official told Fox News that Saudi Arabia will not allow the US to use its airspace or bases for such an attack. A high-ranking government figure from a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) state told Fox News that the "US hasn’t shared objectives or plans" regarding Iran with Gulf allies despite recent high-level Saudi meetings in Washington aimed at gaining clarity. "We said this as friends, [we] want to make sure they understand our position and our assessment in general. And we want to understand the US assessment with as much clarity as possible," the senior official said. "I’d like to get full clarity, and we did not get there." Regarding US military movements for a strike on Iran, the official said, "The plan is something other than using Saudi airspace."

GERMANY - Ulrich Siegmund is tall, slim, telegenic. His graying hair is slicked back; the edges of his three-day beard are precisely trimmed. He wears a tailored navy suit, white shirt and pocket square. When he speaks, even when he attacks, a faint smile flutters on his face. In recent months, this 35-year-old regional politician has turned into a new leading figure on Germany’s far right, now one of the two largest parties in the national parliament, the Bundestag, neck-and-neck with the Christian Democrats, known as the CDU, and its sister party, the CSU.

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 in, 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.