Donald Trump has won the US election and will make a historic return to the White House.

• The Republican told jubilant crowds in Florida: "America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate".


• Of the seven crucial swing states, Trump won North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and is ahead in Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona.


• Kamala Harris is yet to concede or address supporters - dejected crowds left her watch party well before the final result came in.


• Republicans have also taken the Senate back from Democrats after flipping a string of seats.

USA - The election pitting Donald Trump against Kamala Harris was the costliest in American history. The Democrats and Republicans spent a record-breaking $15.9 billion (£12.2 billion), according to data from OpenSecrets, a non-profit organisation that monitors campaign expenditures, surpassing the 2020 race’s $15.1 billion and 2016’s $5.7 billion. The figures reveal it was driven largely by a small number of so-called mega-donors hoping to influence the result, raising concerns from political advocacy groups that the money was “drowning out the voices and concerns of ordinary Americans”.

GERMANY - Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government is at loggerheads over its economic policy and the fate of next year’s federal budget, state broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) reported on Monday. Disagreements within the three-party coalition are reportedly so profound that they risk undermining its stability, the media outlet claimed, warning of a descent “into crisis mode.” The German parliament must pass the 2025 budget by the end of this month. The legislature’s Budget Committee is scheduled to review the final draft on November 14. However, the government's draft budget still has a deficit of “several billion euros” and the coalition partners are struggling to agree on how to overcome this shortfall, according to DW.

GERMANY - German trade union IG Metall on Tuesday launched strikes in the nation’s metal and electrical industries in an attempt to win higher wages, German media has reported. The action comes amid growing concern about the health of the EU’s largest manufacturing economy. According to the tabloid Bild, employees began walking off the job during the night shift, including at Volkswagen’s plant in the city of Osnabruck, where workers worry the plant may be closed. Elsewhere, around 200 employees of the battery manufacturer Clarios went on strike in Hanover, Lower Saxony, carrying torches and union flags, the outlet wrote.

ISRAEL - The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has fired his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, a figure widely considered by Israel’s international allies to be a brake on the far-right elements of the country’s coalition government, prompting protests around Israel. Netanyahu said in a video statement late on Tuesday that “significant gaps on handling the battle” in Gaza had emerged. “At the height of a war, complete trust is needed between the prime minister and the defence minister… In recent months, that trust between me and the defence minister was damaged,” he said. The move prompted protests across the country.

USA - The harmful impact of mass illegal migration is felt in every state and at every level of society, from the national to the most local. Rather than attempting to solve or at least acknowledge the problem, pro-open-borders officials prefer to silence criticism. Parents in Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County saw a demonstration of this reality earlier in October. The county school board chose to shut down public discussion about an alleged illegal alien MS-13 gang member in the county’s school system. For mass-illegal-migration apologists on the school board, the real problem is not that illegal immigration is bringing gangs and crime into our classrooms, but that Americans notice it and dare speak out against it.

USA - The US has deployed additional warships and B52 bombers as threats from Iran continue to mount against Israel. Despite being urged by the US to de-escalate tensions in the Middle East, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) has authorised a new military strike against Israel. The decision comes days after Ayatollah Ali Khameini, Iran’s supreme leader, warned of “a crushing” retaliation to Israel’s recent air assault on Iran last week, breaking down huge swathes of the Islamic Republic’s air defences. Amid the war of attrition between the two regional enemies, Esmail Kowsari, a member of Iran’s parliament and a former general of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said that the response would be much harsher than the October 1 attack that saw Iran launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at targets in Israel. All members of the SNSC have agreed on a military response by Iran to Israel. It is believed that Iran’s retaliatory attacks will be launched imminently from multiple fronts including by its proxies in Iraq and Yemen in a bid to overwhelm Israel’s defence systems.

YEMEN - Iran still has a strong and largely intact ally in the Middle East that could yet pose serious security threats to the West if left to their own devices. A former senior British Army officer has warned Western leaders that Yemen's Houthi rebels could now pose a greater terrorist and security threat than either Hamas or Hezbollah. His warning comes as a new UN report says the Iran-backed militia is transforming itself into a "powerful military organisation". Iran has been rocked by Israel's brutal assault on its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, which have suffered devastating losses. The Israelis have succeeded in eliminating many of their top commanders and political leaders, leaving them temporarily rudderless.

USA - “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today,” said Admiral Beatty during the Battle of Jutland in 1916, as he watched the battlecruisers HMS Indefatigable and HMS Queen Mary blow up. If he were alive today and looking down on the collective Nato and Five-Eyes navies, I reckon he’d say something similar. Everyone with a decent navy is discovering that the budgets and processes they had in place to run, build, sustain and crew their navies during the post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’ are now insufficient. If we needed proof that even the mighty US Navy is suffering from the same problems, yesterday Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro approved a plan to keep 12 Arleigh Burke class destroyers in service for longer than their originally intended 35-year life span.

USA - It is that time of the year again. The Social Security Administration has finally released the final wage statistics for 2023, and they are quite sobering. According to the report, last year the “median wage” in this country was just $43,222.81. In other words, half of all American workers made less than $43,222.81, and half of all American workers made more than $43,222.81. That is terrible news, because the cost of living has been rising much faster than paychecks have. More people are being squeezed out of the middle class with each passing day, but most Americans don’t even realize that this is happening because the media isn’t really talking about it. Poverty, homelessness and hunger are all growing all around us, and if we stay on the path that we are on the middle class will continue to be systematically eviscerated. Once upon a time, the vast majority of the country could afford to live a middle class lifestyle. But now those days are long gone.

SPAIN - Barcelona was given a new red alert warning of “extreme danger” on Monday, with the city being hit by rainstorms and floods, causing chaos for road, train and air traffic. Catalonia’s regional government warned of “continuous and torrential” rain across the Barcelona metropolitan area and surrounding areas six days after flash floods devastated the Valencia region, killing more than 200 people.

GERMANY - Dysfunctional German Coalition has put forward three different plans to reboot ailing economy – unpopular Chancellor Scholz trying to keep government from imploding. If you have a three-party coalition and one economic plan, you have at least the semblance of a working government. But if you have a three-way coalition and THREE economic plans, what you have is Germany. ‘The sick man of Europe’ is on an economic slope since it abdicated from cheap Russian oil and began relying on much more expensive alternatives. Chancellor Olaf Scholz leads an ideologically disparate coalition that can never agree on policy measures to ‘drive growth, protect industrial jobs, and reinforce Germany’s position as a global industrial hub.’ If one of the parties exits the coalition, a parliamentary confidence vote takes place, after which the president can trigger elections.

USA - Critical infrastructure in the US is being threatened by the Communist Chinese government and many Americans are both oblivious and underprepared. Check Points Software Technologies recently reported “a 75 percent increase in global cyber-attacks during the third quarter [of 2024], with a 15 percent rise from the previous quarter.” And in the US, Industrial Cyber points out alarmingly that “cyberattacks have risen by 56 percent year-over-year, with a weekly average of 1,300 attacks per organization, 10 percent higher than the previous quarter.” The area with the most attacks was the education and research sector.

USA - A security expert who could advise Donald Trump if he wins the US election has called on Europe to pull its weight on defence. A senior Republican figure in the US has called for the country to "withhold" American forces from Europe to focus on the growing threat from China. The comments were made by Elbridge Colby, a senior Pentagon official in the last Donald Trump administration, according to the BBC. Mr Colby has been vocal about the threat of China and has also been tipped to serve a prominent role in Donald Trump's administration should he win the US election this month. He told Politico earlier this year that China poses an even bigger threat than Russia.

USA - The US military is set to deploy additional forces to the Middle East, including a number of nuclear-capable B-52H strategic bombers, the Pentagon has announced. The deployment was reportedly ordered by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to compensate for the scheduled departure of the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group from the region, Pentagon spokesman Major General Pat Ryder has said in a statement. The announcement comes as tensions continue to soar in the Middle East, with Iran and Israel remaining locked in a spiral of violence.