UK - Buckingham Palace has announced that Prince Andrew’s “military affiliations and Royal patronages” have been returned to Queen Elizabeth as he faces a civil lawsuit in the US linked to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The announcement was made by the palace in a brief statement on Thursday. “With The Queen’s approval and agreement, The Duke of York’s military affiliations and Royal patronages have been returned to The Queen,” the statement reads. “The Duke of York will continue not to undertake any public duties and is defending this case as a private citizen.” Earlier on Thursday, more than 150 military veterans petitioned the Queen to ask her to strip her son of his honorary military roles, and floated the idea of having him dishonorably discharged as well. “We are particularly upset and angry that Prince Andrew remains a member of the armed forces and continues to hold military titles, positions, and ranks, including that of Vice Admiral of the Royal Navy,” the veterans said in an open letter.

USA - Six-time New York Times bestselling investigative author Peter Schweizer’s past books have sparked an FBI investigation and exposed congressional insider trading. But Wednesday the nonpartisan investigator said the bombshell revelations contained in his upcoming book Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win (HarperCollins) are the “scariest” in his quarter-century career. The book, which is slated for a January 25 release, was announced exclusively Wednesday by Politico Playbook and will reportedly “expose bad actors on both ends of the political spectrum and their willingness to do China’s bidding.” Schweizer’s statement that Red-Handed contains the “scariest” revelations of his career is eye-opening. His 2015 investigative blockbuster Clinton Cash launched an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Schweizer’s last two #1 New York Times bestsellers, Profile in Corruption and Secret Empires, exposed systemic corruption among the Washington elite.

NORWAY - One of the two cables in Norway’s remote, but vital, Svalbard Undersea Cable System suffered a ‘power outage’ last week. Operations at a crucial Arctic undersea fiber-optic cable providing a data link to polar-orbiting satellites have been disrupted since Friday, after its Norwegian owners identified a mysterious “fault in the power supply.” The affected cable is part of the remote Svalbard Undersea Cable System that connects the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Circle to mainland Norway. The two-cable system serves SvalSat park, the largest commercial ground station of its kind, with more than 100 satellite antennas.

GERMANY - Since the September election, two important announcements were made regarding future German activity in the region. In November, the chief of the German Navy, Vice-Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach, said he would send vessels into the Indo-Pacific every two years with the intention of increasing cooperation with Japan, Australia and the US, and to advocate for peace, free navigation and maintenance of the rules-based international order in the South China Sea. The announcement came during a visit to Tokyo by the German frigate Bayern on its seven-month voyage through the region.

MIDDLE EAST - One of Beijing’s priorities for 2022 is to secure a free trade agreement with the Gulf states looking to diversify their interests beyond oil – sending a firm message to the US that its influence over these countries is waning. Earlier this week, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain, and the secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) arrived in Beijing for a four-day visit aimed at strengthening economic ties with China. Top of the agenda is a proposed free trade agreement (FTA) between the Gulf states and Beijing. Talks on this actually got under way back in 2004, but have stagnated. It’s now hoped they will find new momentum in a visit described by the Global Times as “unprecedented.” It comes just weeks after the United Arab Emirates dumped a deal to buy F-35 fighter jets from the United States following Washington’s attempt to make dropping use of Chinese telecommunications provider Huawei a condition of purchase.

USA - New Yorkers Raise Hell Over COVID Segregation In Nike Store, Whole Foods: “This is the same thing they did in Nazi Germany, everybody was ‘just doing their job’ until the holocaust happened”. The mainstream media and tyrannical government would have you believe that Americans are taking the COVID mandates lying down, but millions of patriots across the country are fighting back. In New York City, those who refused to comply with the mandate to receive two doses of a Covid vaccine were fired from their jobs and are barred from entering nearly every indoor venue. For many, standing up for freedom is worth more than their careers and navigating through financial uncertainty. In New York, 85 percent of the state, or 16,552,607 people, has received at least one dose and 72 percent of New York’s population, or 14,066,003 people, has been fully vaccinated, according to USA Facts. Many suspect the figures are inflated in an effort to persuade more people to cave in and vaccinate.

USA - As farmers furiously try to price and source fertilizer ahead of the spring rush, a new report from the Texas A&M Agricultural and Food Policy Center (AFPC) shows supply chain disruptions are wreaking havoc on nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous prices, costing feedgrain farms the most. Under FAPRI’s August 2021 baseline outlook, nitrogen prices were expected to increase about 10% in 2022. Based on current spot market prices, it appears as though fertilizer prices will increase in excess of 80% for the 2022 planting season (relative to 2021). A 50% surge in fertilizer prices adds $128,000 in on-farm costs for 2022, finds Texas A&M Study. Texas A&M economists found heading into spring planting, fertilizer prices are up 80% compared to 2021, and in some cases, farmers are seeing certain fertilizer prices more than double what they saw last year.

NORTH KOREA - After watching the successful test-firing of a hypersonic missile, Kim Jong-un called on North Korean scientists to step up work toward beefing up the “country’s strategic military muscle.” On Tuesday, South Korean and Japanese radars detected a rocket blasting off from a launching pad in North Korea which turned out to be Pyongyang’s hypersonic missile. The country’s Rodong Sinmun newspaper featured photos of leader Kim Jong-un attending the launch on its front page the next day. Western experts have construed this as a message to the world and America in particular, indicating that the North Korean leadership sees the hypersonic missile program as one of its top priorities, and will likely ignore Western gripes. Pyongyang’s mouthpiece, the Korean Central News Agency, said Kim was urging military scientists to “further accelerate the efforts to steadily build up the country's strategic military muscle both in quality and quantity and further modernize the army.”

USA - Howard Koch, who has been involved in the production of more than 60 movies, including such classics as “Chinatown” and “Marathon Man,” and is the former president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, said: “I’m all for LGBT and Native Americans, blacks, females, whatever minorities that have not been served correctly in the making of content, whether it’s television or movies or whatever, but I think it’s gone too far. I know a lot of very talented people that can’t get work because they’re not black, Native American, female or LGBTQ.” It is, said Sam Wasson, the author of “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood,” not so different from the McCarthy era, when everyone in Hollywood professed to believe something that they thought everyone outside Hollywood — the country, their audience — believed. “Hollywood was never anti-Communist,” Wasson said. “It just pretended to be. In fact, Hollywood was never anti- or pro- anything. It was show business. There’s no morality here.”

IRAN - Major General Hossein Salami, the commander of Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), said Tehran’s revenge for the US killing of his fellow military leader Qassem Soleimani was not over. “We have taken part of the harsh revenge, and another part of it still remains. Everybody is definitely aware of this. The US officials must bear in mind that it is impossible to take an act of aggression on a nation and evade reciprocal revenge,” Major General Salami said, as quoted by Iranian media. In 2020, the Al Asad Airbase was bombarded by over a dozen Iranian missiles. Iranian officials stated that the drones involved in the assassination of Soleimani were launched from the facility. US troops stationed at the base received an early warning about the imminent attack and took cover in shelters, but dozens reportedly suffered brain damage from powerful explosions outside.

USA - How can a nation survive if there is absolutely nothing that binds the people together? In the early days, the United States was bound together by a common culture, the Christian faith and the values enshrined in the US Constitution. But today that is no longer true. The left has a totally different culture than the right does, and both sides of the political spectrum have pretty much abandoned the values that were once held so dear by our founders. Without anything to unite us, how can “the Divided States Of America” continue to exist as a cohesive political entity? If you ask most Republicans to name the number one threat to our country, most of them will tell you that it is the Democrats. And if you ask most Democrats to name the number one threat to our country, most of them will tell you that it is the Republicans. We have gotten to a point where both sides of the political spectrum deeply, deeply hate one another, and that is a very dangerous place to be. What we are witnessing is the beginning of the end for our once great political system.

USA - “Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution. Despotism has become our new normal. Digital tyranny, surveillance. Intolerance, cancel culture, censorship. Lockdowns, mandates, government overreach. Supply chain shortages, inflation. Police brutality, home invasions, martial law. The loss of bodily integrity, privacy, autonomy. These acts of tyranny by an authoritarian government have long since ceased to alarm or unnerve us. We have become desensitized to government brutality, accustomed to government corruption, and unfazed by the government’s assaults on our freedoms. This present trajectory is unsustainable.

USA - In advance of the January 10 meeting, Secretary of State Blinken and NATO functionary Stoltenberg stupidly reduced Russia’s Options to Two: Surrender or Use Force. If these idiotic accusations were not enough, Blinken accused Putin of intending to restore the Soviet Union. It is impossible to understand how a person this stupid was confirmed by the US Senate as Secretary of State. The last thing the Kremlin wants is all the problems of all of these countries. All the Kremlin wants is that they be independent countries, not US puppet states armed against Russia. I think the Russians have come to the conclusion that the West will not take them seriously until the Kremlin demonstrates forceful action. The Russians are just giving diplomacy one last chance before they destroy the military installations that the US has built in Ukraine. As I have reported on occasion, the Russians have had their fill of Washington and are not going to take any more. I don’t know if the Kremlin is capable of imagining a government as lunatic as the American one. If the Kremlin does not understand that they are dealing with lunatics, the situation could quickly get out of hand.

USA - According to US Census Bureau data, 2020 New Orleans is 59 percent black and 30 percent white. It’s a well established fact almost all murders are intra-racial (meaning black on black or white on white), so when we look at 2021 homicide data for New Orleans, it shouldn’t be a shock to see the city being one of the most violent in America. Not just that, but 92 percent of homicide victims are black. Meaning, we can logically deduce 92-95 percent of suspects in the homicides will be black as well. New Orleans ends 2021 with 218 murders. For two years in a row, New Orleans has had a rise in murders. So after a racial revolution in 2020, we should be seeing the fruits of the planting of Black Live Matter all across America, right? Especially in New Orleans. Instead, we see the opposite…

GERMANY - Europe is falling into the trap of green energy policy, an expert says. Germany is shutting down three nuclear power plants on Friday, in a move to halve the country’s remaining nuclear capacity. The measure comes despite the worst ever energy crisis the European region has experienced. The closures, which come as a result of the decision to completely phase out atomic energy, taken by Angela Merkel after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, is expected to tighten the current squeeze on gas and energy prices. According to Mukhin, the country’s authorities fell into a trap that had been set by Berlin. The expert expressed bewilderment over the dogged attempts by the EU at pushing green energy policies forward amid the worst energy crunch that is most markedly straining the wallet of the European citizens.