MIDDLE EAST - A busy week lies ahead for the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayed. On Wednesday he’s scheduled to land in Turkey for his first meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This new alliance came about after many years of deep hostility. This month Turkey, Iran and the UAE signed an important economic cooperation agreement under which goods will be sent from the UAE to Iran and then on to Turkey overland.

GERMANY - What with Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko weaponizing migrants against Poland, Russia massing troops at Ukraine’s border, and China engaged in a massive nuclear arms build-up, it is small wonder that Germany’s allies are looking anxiously for news of the next government coalition in Berlin. [This post originally appeared in the Financial Times.]

AFRICA - When the coronavirus first emerged last year, health officials feared the pandemic would sweep across Africa, killing millions and destroying the continent’s fragile health systems. But there is something “mysterious” going on in Africa that is puzzling scientists, said Wafaa El-Sadr, chair of global health at Columbia University. “Africa doesn’t have the vaccines and the resources to fight COVID-19 that they have in Europe and the US, but somehow they seem to be doing better,” she said. Fewer than 6% of people in Africa are vaccinated. For months, the WHO has described Africa as “one of the least affected regions in the world” in its weekly pandemic reports. African authorities, while acknowledging that there could be gaps, are not reporting huge numbers of unexpected fatalities that might be COVID-related. WHO data show that deaths in Africa make up just 3% of the global total. In comparison, deaths in the Americas and Europe account for 46% and 29%. In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, the government has recorded nearly 3,000 deaths so far among its 200 million population. The US records that many deaths every two or three days.

CANADA - A once in 500 years storm in British Columbia leaves behind collapsed bridges, 2,000 dead cows and record flooding as government grapples with food shortages and supermarket shelves picked clean by panic buying. Record rainfall and flooding has left a trail of destruction behind including collapsed bridges, submerged roads, and thousands of dead cattle - as officials grapple with emergency evacuations and food shortages. The Canadian Pacific coast province of British Columbia declared a state of emergency Wednesday following floods and mudslides caused by extremely heavy rainfall, and officials said they expected to find more dead. After the massive rainfall between Saturday and Monday brought a month's worth of rain in two days, farmers desperately tried to save their dairy cows using boats and jet skis, while authorities pledged with residents not to panic-buy groceries. A trade expert said the loss of major transportation routes will hurt the movement of goods both in and out Canada's largest port in Vancouver.

USA - No society that has a disdain for life is going to thrive for long. For decades, our young people have been trained to view children as a “burden” and marriage as something that should be put off for as long as possible. If you doubt this, just spend some time watching the movies and television shows that they are watching. Being single and “free” is glorified, having a “career” is portrayed as a much more important priority than having a family, and sexual content is everywhere.

GERMANY - Now Germany bans unvaccinated people from restaurants as continent goes on 'red alert' for Christmas lockdowns, French protest against further restrictions and Belgians are ordered to work from home. Germany is following Austria's example in locking-down unvaccinated people in regions where hospitals are becoming 'dangerously full' of Covid patients. Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday announced that the move is 'necessary' to tackle a 'very worrying' fourth wave of the pandemic that is overwhelming hospitals, and blamed the unvaccinated for driving the surge.

HOLLAND - Police arrested seven rioters in The Hague on Saturday night after youths set fires in the streets and threw fireworks at officers. The unrest came a day after police opened fire on protesters in Rotterdam amid what the port city’s mayor called “an orgy of violence” that broke out at a protest against coronavirus restrictions.

SLOVAKIA - Slovakia has become the latest European country to implement lockdown restrictions on people who haven't had the Covid vaccine, as it seeks to prevent a resurgence in infections and hospital admissions over the winter. Slovakian Prime Minister Eduard Heger announced the new measures in a press conference on Thursday, declaring a “lockdown for the unvaccinated” after the country reported a record number of new cases. The new restrictions in Slovakia, which come into effect on Monday, will require people to have been vaccinated or have recovered from Covid in the past six months to enter restaurants, non-essential shops, or public events. In the past few days, the European nation has seen record numbers of new infections, including over 8,000 on Tuesday, with hospitals running out of space to treat Covid patients.

SLOVENIA - Slovenia's regulation forbidding people without 'COVID certificates' from pumping fuel shows governments are getting increasingly creative in their coercion. Unfortunately, it appears the story is not a Twitter hoax. TV N1 Zagreb offers these details. “Most petrol suppliers, including the Ljubljana-based Petrol, which operates the largest number of petrol stations in the country, are rigorously applying the new restrictions, adopted on Saturday, activating fuel dispensers only after a driver presents a certificate showing that they have recovered from COVID-19, have been vaccinated, or have tested negative,” the news network reports. TV N1 Zagreb reports that the new rule will not impact drivers making international trips.

AUSTRIA - Days after Austria imposed a lockdown on the unvaccinated, it has announced a full national Covid-19 lockdown starting on Monday. Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said it would last a maximum of 20 days and there would be a legal requirement to get vaccinated from 1 February 2022. He was responding to record case numbers and one of the lowest vaccination levels in Western Europe. Many other European countries are imposing restrictions as cases rise.

ISRAEL - The world's largest state-sponsor of terror, sworn to destroy Israel, is approaching the nuclear threshold. It's not an existential threat for the US. It is for Israel. Later this month, representatives of the world powers and Iran will meet in Vienna to discuss reviving the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Cooperation – the Iran nuclear deal. In the runup to the talks, the United States and Israel have reiterated their determination to prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons. Both have stated their preference for a diplomatic means of achieving that goal. But there the symmetry ends. While the United States can live with an Iran that has the ability to make a bomb but doesn’t do so, Israel simply cannot.

USA - When President Joe Biden appointed Saule Omarova to the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, it was not hard to discover that the Cornell academic held positions that were far from the American mainstream and would reset the US economy under a command-and-control model. That’s because the evidence has all been published, quite recently, in academic journals or appeared in videos accessible on YouTube. She has argued for the abolition of private sector banking, has urged that all corporate charters should be conditioned on pledges to serve bureaucrat approved purposes, and said that the bankruptcy of oil and gas companies would be welcomed.

EUROPE - The EU must quickly seal its external borders to stem the flow of migrants who are no longer welcome in the 27-member bloc, according to Slovenia’s interior minister, whose country currently holds the presidency of the EU Council. Speaking at the ‘Sarajevo Migration Dialogue’ on Thursday, Interior Minister Ales Hojs said EU countries were preoccupied recently with the coronavirus pandemic, the fall of the government in Afghanistan, and now a migrant crisis on the Poland-Belarus border, which he said was a hybrid war waged by Minsk against the EU. The Slovenian minister said the current situation was similar to the 2015 influx of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, when the EU admitted over one million people across its borders. This time the situation is different, Hojs said, warning that “there is no more ‘refugees welcome.’”

USA - Wait times at LA Port: Normal times = 0. Currently 17 days and grasping towards chaos. 83 vessels in the queue. More arriving everyday means wait time for them is easily going to hit 21 maybe even 28 days. This Is Very Very Very Bad.

MIDDLE EAST - Over the past 15 years, Israel has worked intensively on an alliance of Arab Gulf states against Iran. The current reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Iran could finally herald the end of this diplomacy. The proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran, whether in Lebanon or Yemen, could come to an end in the face of a possible reconciliation between the two rival states. This would have far-reaching positive consequences for the entire region, one which is usually more likely to make headlines with war. But this won’t be thanks to the UN, the US, or the EU, despite their multiple special envoys to the Middle East. It is the regional powers that are taking matters into their own hands, with their latest meeting having taken place in Baghdad in late September. While the US has to say goodbye to the region after twenty years and deal with many foreign policy debacles such as in Afghanistan, the regional powers are gaining self-confidence and an increased sphere of influence. What has transpired so far in official reports gives cause for hope.