SWITZERLAND - Donald Trump's quest to gain control of Greenland appeared to have taken a leap forward at a high-stakes showdown with America's European allies in Davos. And it was the result of a familiar Trump negotiation strategy. Before his appearance at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort on Wednesday, Trump started by setting out a maximalist position that would cause widespread outrage. The president suggested he might invade the icy wasteland, which would constitute an attack on NATO ally Denmark, of which Greenland is an autonomous territory.

SWITZERLAND - NATO secretary general Mark Rutte has delivered a reality check to Donald Trump, telling him that one NATO soldier died for every two Americans in Afghanistan after the US President doubted the Western alliance. Speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland yesterday, Trump said, 'I'm not sure that they'd be there for us if we gave them the call', as he tried to rally momentum for his now-abandoned plan to acquire Greenland from Denmark. 'I know them all very well. I’m not sure that they’d be there. I know we’d be there for them. I don’t know that they would be there for us,' the US President said.

GREENLAND - Greenland’s importance has not changed, even if the recent spotlight makes it feel that way. The island sits astride the shortest route between North America and Eurasia. That means that any long-range missile, bomber, or hypersonic system launched between the US and Russia would need to pass near or directly over Greenland. From Washington’s point of view, it’s a strategic necessity rather than a diplomatic provocation, and the island plays a key role in the defence of North America. Greenland is also part of the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) gap, a North Atlantic corridor that’s long been used to track Russian submarine movements from the Arctic into the Atlantic. During the Cold War, this choke point was critical for tracking Soviet naval assets – and it’s becoming so again.

SWITZERLAND - BlackRock Chief Executive Larry Fink - the new "mayor of Davos" after founder Klaus Schwab resigned last April - used the opening of the World Economic Forum this week to deliver an unusually stark warning to the global elite: Artificial intelligence, if left on its current trajectory, risks deepening inequality, hollowing out the professional class and becoming the next great failure of modern capitalism. “Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more wealth has been created than in any time prior in human history, but in advanced economies, that wealth has accrued to a far narrower share of people than any healthy society can ultimately sustain,” Mr Fink said, adding "Most of the people affected by what we talk about here will never come to this conference. That’s the central tension of this forum: Davos is an elite gathering trying to shape a world that belongs to everyone."

USA - New York Times bestselling author and Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer details in his new book how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is “using our openness and generosity against us” by sending thousands of future military pilots posing as civilians to the United States to learn how to fly. Schweizer’s latest exposé, The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon, delves into the little-known concern of Chinese pilots being sent to the US for training with “virtually no oversight” before returning and serving in their own country’s military. “The People’s Republic of China has a pilot problem,” the investigative journalist writes in The Invisible Coup. “Beijing needs five thousand pilot cadets every year to meet the demand for both military and civilian pilots. Because the Chinese military tightly controls the country’s airspace, it can domestically produce only about 1,200 pilots a year. So, Beijing quietly erected a system to train three thousand of them a year in the United States.”

USA - With many Americans still recovering from multiple blasts of snow and unrelenting freezing temperatures in the nation’s northern tier, a new storm is set to emerge this weekend that could coat roads, trees and power lines with devastating ice across a wide expanse of the South. The storm arriving late this week and into the weekend is shaping up to be a “widespread potentially catastrophic event from Texas to the Carolinas,” said Ryan Maue, a former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It is likely to expand as far south as Texas and into the East. The storm has been named Winter Storm Fern by The Weather Channel. According to The Weather Company forecasters, Fern could affect over 180 million in the US with snow and/or ice, over half the nation’s estimated population.

USA - A “devastating pest” known as the New World screwworm is dangerously close to the United States, American health officials warn. The parasitic screwworm has been found in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, which is just across the border from Texas. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health alert Tuesday advising health departments stay ready to identify the screwworm and treat cases if they see them. The New World screwworm flies lay their eggs in animals’ wounds, noses, ears, eyes or mouths. Their eggs develop into parasitic larvae, or maggots, that feed on the surrounding flesh as they burrow deeper. The CDC says the screwworm primarily impacts livestock animals, but the flies can lay eggs on any warm-blooded animals, including people and pets.

UK - The Royal Navy is to turn its back on the Middle East as its last remaining ship in the region sails home. HMS Middleton is Britain’s sole vessel in the region following the decommissioning of frigate HMS Lancaster late last year. However, the minehunter, which is almost 42 years old, is expected to return to the UK this year, potentially as early as March. There are no plans to replace the ship, which is based in Bahrain, leaving Britain without a fighting presence in the Gulf for the first time since 1980. The move has been branded a “terrible error” by a former head of the Navy, while defence analysts warned it signalled an end to Britain as a “global” naval force. “The idea of global Britain is all but over. On the size of the Navy we have got, it is simply not doable.” That end of Britain’s Gulf presence could have far-reaching diplomatic and operational consequences.

GERMANY - Germany is rearming – and fast. It is a sentence that would have been impossible to imagine a decade ago. And one that, a few decades ago, might have sent shivers down your spine. But today, we live in a different world. A world where Russia’s war machine is up and running and poses a threat to all of Europe. When Olaf Scholz, the then-chancellor, made a speech in February 2022, just a few days after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he acknowledged: “We are living through a watershed era… And that means that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before.” It became known as his “zeitenwende” or “turning point” speech. Ulrike Franke, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told The Telegraph’s Battle Lines podcast: “I think it really is important to note how much of an earthquake this zeitenwende speech was. It rang in a new era in terms of how Germany even discusses military and the armed forces and all of that.”

UK - The Royal Navy has nine nuclear-powered submarines. Four of them are the Vanguard class, tasked with providing the nation’s strategic deterrent and armed with Trident nuclear ballistic missiles for this purpose. They are entirely taken up by that task. The other five subs are the Astute class, conventionally armed, nuclear-powered attack boats: the only other submarines that we have. Just one of the Astute boats, HMS Anson, is believed to be fit for sea at the moment. She departed Faslane naval base in Scotland on January 10 and she has just arrived for a port call in Gibraltar. Soon she will depart, headed for Perth in Australia, to join the Submarine Rotational Force (West) as part of the trilateral Australia, UK and US (Aukus) submarine agreement.

USA - America has lost its credibility. The only thing that can stop the president is the bond market. Donald Trump’s abuses of decency have been hitting America and the world on so many fronts at once that it is hard to keep a clear focus on what he is doing and how dangerous he has become. Is clarity at last emerging with his demands for the “complete and total control of Greenland”, today by means of economic warfare against eight Nato allies, or tomorrow the “hard way” by means of military attack if resisted? The only constraint on Trump Unleashed is the global bond market.

USA - Donald Trump told Sir Keir Starmer to straighten out the UK as the rift between the two leaders over Greenland and the Chagos Islands deal deepened. The US president suggested on Tuesday night that Sir Keir and France’s Emmanuel Macron were two-faced. Mr Trump said: “[They] treat me well. They get a little bit rough when I’m not around, but when I’m around, they treat me very nicely.” The US president said “London is having a lot of problems”, when asked how he would characterise his relationship with the Prime Minister. “They’ve [Starmer and Macron] got to straighten out their countries." Earlier on Tuesday, European leaders hit back at Mr Trump, warning against bullying on the world stage and calling for appeasement of the US president to end. The French president, one of the driving forces behind Europe’s push to be strategically independent of Washington, warned that “imperial ambitions” were resurfacing among major powers.

USA - Donald Trump has Europe’s leaders exactly where he wants them: scrambling and divided over how to react to his vow to seize Greenland and impose tariffs on anyone who resists. The US president threw more chaos into the mix on Tuesday morning with a string of Truth Social posts lambasting his so-called allies and AI images depicting the Danish territory as belonging to the United States. It is a classic example of his mastery of “flooding the field” and “escalation dominance”, the use of superior power to ratchet up conflicts at will.

UK - One of feminism’s nefarious fallacies, and there are lots to pick from, is the calling out and shaming of so-called “mansplaining”. This is the trend, which unfortunately seems to have persuaded large sections of the population, to paint men – especially older white men – as bores and zealous pedants prone to unnecessarily interfering in people’s business. The irony is that, nowadays, those actually guilty of being hectoring bores are the women who insist on pontificating over “injustices”, “toxic masculinity” and the infallibility of “my body, my choice”.

USA - One of the great lies of modern globalism is the idea that cultural differences are shallow, cosmetic, and easily blended if everyone just tries hard enough. They aren’t. Our differences run really deep, and when you ignore them, systems break, hate gets hotter, and division widens. We’ve already learned this the hard way, from “diversity is our strength” to the Bush nation-building nightmare, mixing cultures is a recipe for disaster. When Western leaders tried to import Western values through nation-building in the Middle East, it caused massive backlash, resentment, and even more conflict. Why? Because Western values don’t work in the Middle East. They have no business being there. The same mistake is now being repeated at home, under the lie that our cultural and religious differences don’t really matter. Globalists tell us that people are psychologically interchangeable, and that blending everyone together is just fine. It’s not. It’s made everything louder, angrier, and more unstable.