LIBYA - New indications of a military escalation are being reported from Libya. With a blockade of Libya's eastern oil shipping ports, already on Friday, Haftar's LNA - with around 80 percent of Libya's oil deposits under its control - had throttled the country's oil production from 1.3 million barrels down to 500,000 barrels per day. Yesterday, his troops, shut down an oil pipeline, which meant approximately another 400,000 barrels of production per day going offline. Signs of renewed military escalations are also being reported. A relaxation of tensions is nowhere on the horizon.

USA - US President Donald Trump’s special adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner will travel to Israel Wednesday to attend the World Holocaust Forum and likely meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Blue and White leader Benny Gantz. Kushner’s trip, first reported by Axios, comes as Trump’s Senate impeachment trial is about to ramp up, with the Democratic House managers and White House lawyers making oral arguments before senators throughout the week. It also comes as Israel heads into its third election in less than a year.

ISRAEL - Poland's leader President Andrzej Duda has said he will not attend this week's Holocaust remembrance ceremony at Yad Vashem, the official memorial centre in Jerusalem. His decision has threatened to overshadow the event which will bristle with world leaders and bring parts of Jerusalem to a standstill. It marks the 75th anniversary of the Soviet liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. More than a million people, mostly Jews, were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz.

SWITZERLAND - Donald Trump urged world leaders at Davos to 'reject the environmental prophets of doom' during his keynote address to the World Economic Forum on Tuesday. The US President branded climate activists 'the heirs of yesterday's foolish fortune tellers' while rattling off a list of projections that he said failed to come true, including overpopulation in the 1960s and the 'end of oil' in the 1990s.

USA - According to a recent report, K-12 schools around the country are having to treat students for separation anxiety after implementing policies that require students to hand over their smartphones. One school’s solution was to buy locking pouches for smartphones, which students were invited to decorate. The Wall Street Journal reports that schools across the United States are dealing with an unexpected result of forcing students to hand over their phones — separation anxiety. Schools are being forced to develop coping mechanisms for the students who display signs of severe agitation and anxiety when away from their mobile devices.

EUROPE - Protests have erupted in Germany and Ireland in the last 48 hours amid fury at restrictive EU regulations on the environment and agriculture - prompting farmers to blockade main roads with tractors in both EU member-states. Berlin and Dublin were ground to a halt in the past 48 hours amid growing outrage at EU regulations.

SWITZERLAND - A super-rich one percent of the world’s population has accumulated twice as much wealth as the remaining 90 percent, global charity Oxfam said in a newly-released report. The gap between the obscenely rich and the rest of humanity has reached grotesque proportions, according to the annual report by Oxfam, published on Monday on the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos. The new report, ‘Time to Care’, which focuses on the largely unpaid care work many women and girls take upon themselves, says that the world’s top 22 richest men now have more wealth than all the women in Africa. There are only 2,153 billionaires in the world, according to the report, but their wealth matches that of more than 4.6 billion people, or about 62 percent of the world’s population, estimated to stand at 7.7 billion.

UK - Laurence Fox savagely attacked "woke culture" and insisted it is majorly damaging and unhelpful in today’s society. While on TalkRadio with Julia Hartley-Brewer Mr Fox went into greater detail on why he would not date a “woke” person and his overall views on "wokeness", saying he wants a partner who is living in the real world. He said: “I don’t think anybody, man or women, is going to be a great partner if they see themselves as the victim before the relationship has even started. People who hold the view that they are the victim of some tyrannical patriarchal oppression. You need to be with someone who has lived a real-life, suffered hard and got back up on their feet again." Ms Hartley Brewer agreed and replied: “We have now got a situation where women are automatically victims, ethnic minorities are victims. Essentially anyone who is not a white male is a victim."

AUSTRALIA - An apocalyptic dust storm has been filmed engulfing a farm in Australia in the latest extreme weather to hit the country. Following months of devastating bushfires, the barren country was finally given a reprieve with rain sweeping across the country. Gigantic hailstorms were then spotted battering parts of the country and now footage has emerged of a terrifyingly huge dust storm engulfing a region. The first clip – taken by Jason Herbig from his farm in New South Wales – shows the wall of dust stretching out as far as the eye can see on the horizon. It then seems to completely block out the sun and Jason is even forced to turn on his car’s headlights to see – despite it being the middle of the day.

CHINA - The mysterious new virus that is starting to spread very rapidly in China has global health officials extremely concerned. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization will convene an emergency meeting to discuss whether this outbreak should be “declared a global health crisis”, and screeners are being put in place at airports all over the world. But to a certain extent it may already be too late, because we know that this virus has already spread via airplane to at least three other countries. And since the early symptoms of this disease are so similar to what one would expect after coming down with a common cold, there could potentially be countless numbers of victims that have not even gone to the hospital because they don’t think that anything is seriously wrong

LIBYA - Libya consists almost entirely of desert. Temperatures often climb above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) and some parts of the country haven't seen rain in decades. In total, only 1 percent of the land is fertile enough to cultivate. What's more, it has never really had a government, not even under the dictator Moammar Gadhafi. In Libya, tribes, elders and militias have always ruled. And yet, major world powers are currently fighting over it. A civil war has been raging here for years, one that has grown into a proxy war involving almost a dozen powers: Russia, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Italy and France. Libya, that inhospitable corner of North Africa, is particularly important for Europe - indeed, there's a lot more at stake here than just a bit of desert.

CANADA - Canadians who cannot afford regular meals are more likely to die early, according to a study released on Monday, showing that people are dying from hunger even in wealthy countries. The study of more than half a million Canadian adults found that hunger was linked to raised mortality from all causes of death except cancer. But infectious diseases, unintentional injuries and suicide were twice as likely to kill those who faced severe problems finding enough food as those who do not, said the paper, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. "It's like we found third-world causes in a first-world country," lead author Fei Men, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. More than 4 million people in Canada struggle to get enough to eat, official data show, a problem that ranges from running out of food or skipping meals to compromising on quantity and quality.

USA - Over the past several months, we have witnessed one of the greatest stock market rallies in American history. The S&P 500 has gone 70 days in a row without a 1 percent loss, and most weeks we have seen one daily surge after another. If stock prices were exploding because the underlying US economy was performing extremely well, we would have reason to celebrate. Unfortunately, that is not the case at all. In fact, last week I shared 12 signs that the economy is actually slowing down substantially.

USA - As various pro-gun rights groups prepare to gather at Virginia's state capitol in Richmond on Monday in what's expected to be one of the largest pro-gun rallies in recent memory, Democratic Governor Ralph Northam has declared a state of emergency, police are busy setting up barricades and temporary holding pens - and one lawmaker has even arranged to spend most of the day in a safe house, according to the Washington Examiner.

LEBANON - Police in Lebanon tackled protesters with water cannons and tear gas, while demonstrators hurled stones and debris back at law enforcement, as unrest on the streets of Beirut escalated into violence on Sunday. Footage from the scene shows protesters and police clashing with each other on smoke-filled streets in downtown Beirut. Some of the protesters reportedly tried to force their way into the parliament, with police attempting to force them to disperse by using water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets. Graphic images purportedly showing injuries from rubber bullets have been shared online. The Lebanese Red Cross tweeted that a dozen of its teams were responding to the protests, adding that “30 people have been transported, until now, to nearby hospitals and 40 have been treated at the scene.” "We're not scared. This is all for our future and our children," shoemaker Bassam Taleb told Reuters at the protest. "The country is frozen. The state is not doing a thing, they're a bunch of thieves. And if you have money in the bank, you can't even get a hundred dollars out."