UK - The journalist was researching his new book, Trust No One, which explores the cunning and terrifying tricks that could see an innocent person appear in porn or commit a crime. Deepfakes have spiralled out of control after first emerging in 2017 and as technology continues to advance, things will likely only get worse. Last week, a video supposedly showing actress Addison Rae having sex resurfaced online - despite being debunked as the work of high-grade editing tools last year. And she’s not alone. Across the internet, there are fake videos ‘showing’ Hollywood stars in an orgy, Chinese President Xi Jinping declaring nuclear war... and Tom Cruise playing golf.

VATICAN - Pope Francis said Monday there are plans for a possible second meeting with the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, after their historic 2016 encounter in Cuba became a landmark in mending relations severed by the 1,000-year-old schism that divided Christianity. Speaking to reporters as he traveled home from Greece, Francis said he planned to meet next week with the Russian church’s foreign envoy “to agree on a possible meeting” with Patriarch Kirill. He noted that Kirill is due to travel in the coming weeks but also said he was “ready to go to Moscow” even if diplomatic protocols weren’t yet in place. “Because talking with a brother, there are no protocols,” Francis said. “We are brothers. We say things to each other’s face like brothers.” The two churches split during the Great Schism of 1054 and have remained estranged over a host of issues, including the primacy of the pope and Russian Orthodox accusations that the Catholic Church is poaching converts in former Soviet lands.

JAPAN - Tokyo is looking for ways to boost its defense posture, including getting the ability to strike “enemy bases,” the country’s PM has said, signaling a potential formal shift from the nation’s post-WWII pacifist stance. The hawkish remarks were delivered by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Monday, as he addressed parliament during the opening of an extraordinary session, convened to debate additional spending to tackle the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. “In order to safeguard the people's lives and livelihood, we'll examine all the options including capability to attack enemy bases ... and strengthen our defense posture fundamentally with a sense of speed,” Kishida said.

USA - The Biden administration quietly waived sanctions on Iran to allow the hardline regime to sell electricity to Iraq, according to a non-public notification obtained by the Washington Free Beacon that was provided to Congress just as nuclear talks between the United States and Tehran resumed this week. The more concessions you make to terrorists, the harder they push. That’s been the defining dynamic of the Iran negotiations, the PLO negotiations, and all the negotiations with Islamic terrorists. The Biden administration is living up to that dynamic… Iran is repaying the concessions in exactly the way you would expect a terror regime to do. The warning came a day after Washington hit out at Iran, saying talks with world powers on a return to the 2015 nuclear accord had stalled because Tehran “does not seem to be serious.”

GERMANY - AP Moller-Maersk A/S, the world’s largest shipping company, announced Wednesday it would pay $1,000 bonuses to each of its 80,000 employees after projecting a record $17 billion in profits for 2021. Those soaring profits were due, in no small part, to the skyrocketing costs of shipping from this year’s massive supply disruptions. “In a massive team effort our colleagues across the globe have risen beyond the call of duty to respond to our customers’ needs. And this has not been easy given the unknowns and disruptions that we had to deal with, the impacted supply chains, congestions, and capacity shortages,” CEO Soren Skou said in the memo. Bloomberg recalled Maersk paying a similar bonus to most of its staff in 2020, when the company emerged from several years of losses to post a $2.9 billion profit. The company just posted the best third quarter in its 117-year history.

USA - General David Thompson, vice chief of space operations for the US Space Force, said Saturday China is developing its space capabilities at "twice the rate" of the US. On a panel of US space experts and leaders speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in a panel moderated by CNN's Kristin Fisher, General Thompson warned China could overtake the US in space capabilities by the end of the decade. "The fact, that in essence, on average, they are building and fielding and updating their space capabilities at twice the rate we are means that very soon, if we don't start accelerating our development and delivery capabilities, they will exceed us," General Thompson said, adding, "2030 is not an unreasonable estimate."

GERMANY - Donald Trump famously demanded America’s NATO allies contribute their fair share to their NATO defense, announcing he would pull US troops out of Germany, which still refuses to fulfill its NATO commitments. The Biden Regime has gone back on Trump’s threats, agreeing to leave troops in Germany. As German media become increasingly infiltrated by Islamist agents, however, the United States needs to take a long hard look at how reliable its purported “allies” in Germany and Europe can still be considered.

INDONESIA - At least 14 people are dead and hundreds are displaced after Mount Semeru, a volcano in Indonesia's East Java province, erupted on Saturday, authorities said. Indonesia's National Board for Disaster Management (BNPB) said in a statement Sunday the eruption had wounded 56 others, with 35 people in serious condition, after it covered villages with ash and left people to run from billowing clouds of debris. Five of the victims have yet to be identified and nine people are still missing, the BNPB said. Some 1,300 people have been displaced by the eruption and reached evacuation centers, it added. Hundreds of houses have been totally destroyed and 33 schools have been damaged by the eruption, according to the BNPB. Officials say the situation at Mount Semeru remains dangerous due to the risk of pyroclastic flows -- a mix of ash, rock and volcanic gases that can be much more dangerous than lava.

USA - Representative Devin Nunes (Republican for California) warned of a possible increase in abusive control and censorship from Big Tech in an interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on Friday’s edition of the Breitbart News Daily podcast. “I still worry about the censorship that occurs,” Nunes remarked. “What happens if these companies just decide next year, ‘Well, Republicans, they’re all insurrectionists. Let’s shut off all their credit cards and banking so they just can’t raise any money.’ They could do that, all these woke corporations. ”He added, “That’s a real threat to this country. It’s the most important threat, actually, that’s out there is … what Big Tech control of the Internet is doing to this country, and what they could do to be even more tyrannical than what we’ve even seen.” Nunes emphasized that the erosion of freedom of speech and expression across the Internet is a primary threat to America’s well-being. He said, “Between Fakebook and Twitter and what Google’s doing and Wikipedia and everything else, we’re just getting overwhelmed by the censorship...”

UK - Apparently mankind is incapable of internalizing the warnings of much of Western civilization’s science fiction. For a couple of years now, folks have given the side-eye to the robotic dog that can surveil, get around obstacles, and carry a sniper rifle. But that fake K-9 is nothing compared to what Engineered Arts has put out. Despite the warnings the world received in "I,Robot" and the "Terminator" movies, the British tech company has decided to give the world Ameca, which the company calls "The Future Face of Robotics." The really good news? These lifelike robots are set to be the platform for artificial intelligence and machine learning. What could possibly go wrong?

MIDDLE EAST - Syrian state television reported on Sunday that multiple explosions had been heard inside a US base in the Al-Tanf region near the Iraqi border. The garrison is located in a strategic area near Syria's Tanf border crossing with Iraq at the crossroad of a main Baghdad-Damascus highway, Tehran's main arms supply route by land to Syria and Lebanon's powerful Hezbollah militia. Several drones attacked the outskirts of the base last October but there were no American casualties, according to US officials. While it is not common for attacks on the US troops at the outpost, Iranian-backed forces have frequently attacked American troops with drones and rockets in eastern Syria and Iraq.

ISRAEL - Israeli officials have rebuked the United States' handling of the Iran nuclear talks, with one saying Washington was “confused” in their expectation that Tehran would not harden its position on returning to compliance with the terms of the 2015 agreement. Despite this, a senior US State Department official stressed that US-Israel coordination regarding the deal remains strong. "I think we may have some differences – well, that’s natural, and we understand that we are situated differently, we have different ways sometimes of approaching it," the official said, adding "but our goal remains the same, and our goal is absolutely resolute that we will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, and that is something where we are fully aligned with Israel."

USA - The number of US homes with a married couple and kids fell to a record low, according to new government data, as the pandemic further delayed weddings and more adults don’t plan to have kids at all. The share of the US’s 130 million households headed by married parents with children under age 18 fell to 17.8% in 2021 from 18.6% last year, according to the Census Bureau. That’s down from more than 40% in 1970. By absolute numbers, there are just 23.1 million homes with nuclear families, the fewest since 1959, the data show.

EUROPE - Yesterday's meeting of NATO’s foreign ministers in Latvia's capital Riga ended with new threats against Russia. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Moscow to immediately withdraw its troops from the Ukrainian border. His outgoing German counterpart Heiko Maas praised the fact that a "common" language was found regarding "Russian troop movements." The grounds, on which NATO ministers claim authority to prohibit Moscow from deploying its own troops in a particular area of its own territory, remain unclear. At the same time, several NATO countries are positioning new forces against Russia. The UK will base tanks and combat vehicles in Germany to be able to move them more quickly toward the Russian border, in the event of an escalation. Russian President Vladimir Putin urgently warns NATO states not to cross Moscow's red lines and demands that NATO ends its "further eastward expansion," while insisting on agreements with "security guarantees” to halt the escalation of conflicts.

ISRAEL - Israeli officials have regularly called for a ‘credible military threat’ against Tehran’s nuclear facilities, but less discussed is the major conflict that’s almost sure to follow. The strike itself against Iran’s nuclear facilities, an operation that would indeed be far, far more complicated and difficult than any other the IDF has conducted. Iran does not have one nuclear facility that one group of planes could take out in a single strike, but many that are spread throughout the country, which would therefore require extraordinary levels of coordination to ensure that all of the sites were hit at the same time. Making this more difficult is the fact that many of the facilities are buried deep underground, making them all but impenetrable to attacks from the air, particularly the Fordo reactor, where Iran recently began enriching uranium to 20 percent levels of purity with advanced centrifuges, in the latest breach of the 2015 nuclear deal. ...The propensity of Israeli officials to discuss the technical aspects of an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities belies the true calculus at play in deciding whether to carry it out: it’s not about the strike, but the war that follows.