USA - The Biden unity train leaves on Wednesday at noon. The theme is unity and coming together. Unfortunately, the Biden team is planning to bring us together by tearing us apart.

GUATEMALA - A group of US-bound Central American migrants has been met with truncheons and tear gas in Guatemala, where security forces blocked their path. Thousands of people were intercepted on a road near the border with Honduras on Sunday. The government said it would not accept "illegal mass movements". An estimated 7,000 migrants, mostly from Honduras, have entered in recent days, fleeing poverty and violence. They hope to travel on to Mexico, and then the US border. Every year, tens of thousands of Central American migrants attempt this perilous journey to try and reach the US, often on foot, in groups known as "caravans". President-elect Joe Biden, a Democrat, has vowed to end the strict immigration policies of his predecessor, Donald Trump, a Republican. But the Biden administration, which will take office on Wednesday, has warned migrants not to make the journey, as immigration policies will not change overnight.

USA - For years I have been warning that Christian persecution was rising all over the globe, but we have never seen anything like the past year. Christians are being slaughtered all across Africa, they are being taken to concentration camps in North Korea, thousands of churches have been brutally shut down under a new wave of persecution in China, and millions of believers throughout the Middle East must live knowing that each new day may be their last. Of course most Americans have never heard about any of this because the mainstream media won’t cover it. Thankfully, there are organizations that do keep track of what is happening to Christians around the globe, and one of them is Open Doors USA. According to the group, the number of Christians that were killed for their faith was 60 percent higher in 2020 than it was in 2019… A 6 percent rise in a single year would be bad. A 60 percent increase is a nightmare.

INDONESIA - At least 42 people have been killed and more than 600 injured after a magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck and toppled buildings in Indonesia’s Sulawesi island in the early hours of Friday. The epicentre of the quake was six kilometres (3.73 miles) northeast of the city of Majene, at a depth of 10 kilometres (6.2 miles). At least 15,000 people have been displaced following the quake. North of Majene, more than a dozen patients and staff are trapped beneath the rubble of a hospital that was flattened by the quake. Some roads and bridges were also damaged slowing down the rescue operation. Al Jazeera’s Jessica Washington, reporting from Jakarta, said the situation was still developing in the area. “There is potential for a tsunami from subsequent aftershocks … Don’t wait for a tsunami first because they can happen very quickly,” she added. Hours earlier, a 5.9 magnitude earthquake struck in the same district, damaging several houses.

USA - The Pentagon is putting 20,000 National Guard on the streets of DC in the wake of the assault on the US Capitol to support Metropolitan Police Department and the US Capitol Police for the inauguration on January 20 of President-elect Joe Biden. That is in addition to the more than 6,000 officers who are part of the US Capitol Police and who are officers with the DC Metropolitan Police Department. The more than 25,000 members of law enforcement personnel that are being deployed is five times the number of United States military deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Security measures in the capital include dozens of roads and other closures, including the National Mall, until the day after the inauguration.

GERMANY - Germany's Christian Democratic Union, the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, on Saturday elected Armin Laschet, the premier of North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany's most populous state) as its new leader. He'll replace former chair Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who had succeeded Merkel in 2018 only to resign following a lack of success in February 2020. Laschet is considered a centrist and a close Merkel ally, though he reportedly angered her last spring by advocating for loosening the country's COVID-19 restrictions. To secure leadership, he defeated one of her intra-party rivals, Friedrich Merz, whom The Guardian describes as a "conservative hardliner," by a count of 521 to 466 votes. Per BBC, Laschet is in good position to emerge as the party's candidate for chancellor when Merkel steps down in September, but there's no guarantee he'll be the choice, as there are a few other popular options within the party.

ISRAEL - The Israeli Defense Force is drawing up plans for an attack on Iran’s nuclear program, the Israel Hayom daily reported Thursday in a front-page article. The newspaper said that IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi has asked for three alternate proposals to derail Tehran’s program, without elaborating on them. It only indicated one of the proposals is a military strike, noting that such a plan would require a significant budgetary boost for the Israeli military. Iran resumed enriching uranium to 20 percent last week, well in excess of the threshold set out in its landmark 2015 nuclear deal with world powers and a short technical jump from the 90% level of enrichment needed to produce weapons. “If the United States government rejoins the nuclear deal — and that seems to be the stated policy as of now — the practical result will be that Israel will again be alone against Iran, which by the end of the deal will have received a green light from the world, including the United States, to continue with its nuclear weapons program”...

USA - Foreign leaders are now condemning US Regime for brutal censorship of American citizens.

EUROPE - Dutch government resigns over child benefits scandal. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said the government would continue to lead the country’s COVID-19 response team until elections already scheduled for March. Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s government stepped down on Friday after it emerged that officials had wrongly pursued thousands of people over welfare fraud.

USA - Thousands of migrants from Central America are on their way to the United States, and a migrant activist group representing the caravan is calling for the Biden administration to honor its "commitment." The migrants are fleeing political corruption, violence, and extreme poverty in Honduras, which was exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and two devastating Category 4 hurricanes that battered the country within a two-week span in November. "We have nothing to feed to our children, and thousands of us were left sleeping on the streets," mother-of-four Maria Jesus Paz, who lost her home in the hurricanes, said. "This is why we make this decision, even though we know that the journey could cost us our lives." The mass migration by Hondurans is happening a week before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. The migrants are expecting that Biden will have a much more welcoming immigration policy compared to President Donald Trump.

RUSSIA - "The city on the hill has lost its shine," said Konstantin Kosachev at Rossiyskaya Gazeta (Russia). The political system that is supposedly the envy of the world was stripped of "its sacredness" last week when a mob of Trump supporters assaulted the US Capitol, killing a police officer and endangering lawmakers as they certified Joe Biden's election win. American politicians and pundits decried the violent protest as a horror, even though they routinely praise such displays in other countries as valid outpourings of anger against undemocratic regimes. Now US voters are crying fraud and injustice and besieging government buildings.

GERMANY - Angela Merkel's successor as Chancellor of Germany could be an outsider according to one political expert who has identified a rogue candidate capable of beating the current frontrunners. Political author Matthew Qvortrup believes the internal party elections in Germany to replace Angela Merkel could see an outsider draw ahead in the race to become the next Chancellor. Mr Qvortrup suggested the Chancellor's Health Minister Jens Spahn could emerge as a contender despite being written off as a favourite in the race. There are currently three leading candidates to replace Ms Merkel but political scientist believes Mr Spahn could yet emerge from the pack. He described Mr Spahn as the "most popular politician in Germany." Mr Qvortrup also tipped Markus Söder to do well in the race, describing him as a "hardman" who used to be "completely written off" but is now a "possible contender" for the post.

GERMANY - Politicians and the media fear that the ongoing far-right conspiracy ahead of the inauguration of President-elect Joseph Biden on 20 January could plunge the country into deeper crisis — with far-reaching domestic and foreign policy consequences for the stability of the capitalist system in the US and internationally. In the process, all the establishment parties are stepping up their offensive for a more independent German-European foreign and great power policy, which will also further strengthen the extreme right-wing elements in the military and state apparatus here. After 1945, the Germans had “instinctively concluded: never again! Never again [conducting] world politics, never again [harbouring] fantasies of world domination, never again [pursuing a] military foreign policy.” ...Trump's... January 6 coup attempt expresses “a comprehensive breakdown of American capitalist society.” ...The “political antidote to fascism is the development of a mass political movement of the working class for socialism.”

USA - Donald Trump's reign over America will soon come to an end - but not before pro-Trump fanatics make bizarre claims the President should further attempt to block the handover of power to the Democrats. There is a matter of days until Donald Trump leaves the White House following a disastrous single term in office. The American President has lost all remaining credibility following the attempted insurrection on the Capitol in Washington DC by his Far Right supporters, which he did little to quell. Now, pro-Trump lawyers are calling for the President to make a last-minute attempt to overthrow the handover of power to President-Elect Joe Biden. Some of the President’s more deranged supporters have been calling for the President to invoke the Insurrection Act. Pro-Trump fanatics like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, two prominent pro-Trump attorneys leading efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and even one North Carolina state lawmaker have come forward to say the President should invoke the Insurrection Act so he can stay in office.

USA - The Insurrection Act allows the President to deploy military and National Guard troops to tackle rebellions. Historically, the act has only been used in moments of extreme national discord; rioting following the death of Martin Luther King Jr, the Civil War, violence surrounding desegregation and the Klu Klux Klan. It has only been used once in the wake of an election when a literal militia attempted to seize the Louisiana government on behalf of John McEnery, a former Confederate officer who had lost the 1872 governor’s race. The Insurrection Act has also been used dozens of other times across the country, and the last time it was used was in 1992 after Los Angeles police officers beat a black man, Rodney King, which resulted in rioting. Other notable examples of the act being used include President Dwight D Eisenhower invoking the Insurrection Act to protect the Little Rock Nine in 1957, and President Lyndon B Johnson using the law during the 1968 Civil Rights riots. It has never been imposed in the USA on a nationwide basis since it was originally passed in 1807.