USA - Billionaire Elon Musk is known for his futuristic ideas and his latest suggestion might just save us from being irrelevant as artificial intelligence (AI) grows more prominent. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said on Monday that humans need to merge with machines to become a sort of cyborg. "Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence," Musk told an audience at the World Government Summit in Dubai, where he also launched Tesla in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). "It's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output."

JAPAN - Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has stressed the importance of dialogue between Russia and the US in resolving global challenges such as Syria, Iran, and Ukraine during his talks with US President Donald Trump. In an interview with the NHK news channel after his return to Japan on Monday, the PM said Trump is a leader who is open to hearing new ideas. “Surprisingly, President Trump is a good listener. He is open to turning his ears to others, and he is friendly and open,” Abe told NHK, as cited by the Associated Press. “I was able to discuss frankly where Japan is headed to.” During the talks with Trump, Abe outlined Japan’s plans and secured the US leader’s “understanding” of the importance of dialogue to resolve the territorial dispute with Russia.

USA - Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J Chaput told a radio talk show host Monday that he believes fewer than 25 percent of those working in the “mainstream … elite” media have religious faith, and expressed surprise at what he termed was media hostility to President Trump. “It’s just amazing to me how hostile the press is to everything the president does,” Chaput told the California-based Hugh Hewitt, a Catholic conservative. “I don’t want to be partisan in my comments here, but it seems to me if we are really serious about our common responsibilities, we support the president. The elite, of course, kind of pooh-pooh religious faith ... very deliberately,” Chaput said. “It is important to us not to desire to be a part of that with the elite, to the point that we give up our faith.”

USA - A new recession is coming, and Donald Trump needs it to begin sooner rather than later.  As I explained last week, most American voters tend to care about their pocketbooks more than anything else.  If the next recession were to officially start during the first quarter of 2017, it would be very easy for Trump to blame it on Obama, and then he could portray himself as the one that pulled the US economy out of recession in time for the 2020 election.  But if the next recession does not begin until 2018 or 2019, everybody is going to blame it on Trump even if it is not his fault.  In politics, who gets the blame for whatever goes wrong is often the most important thing, and if Trump wants to avoid blame for the next recession he needs for it to start as quickly as possible.

USA - Evacuation orders for nearly 200,000 people living below the tallest dam in the United States remained in place early on Monday after residents were abruptly told to flee when a spillway appeared in danger of collapse.

USA - Lately, there’s been a lot of rhetoric comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. The concern is that a Nazi-type regime may be rising in America.  That process, however, began a long time ago.  In fact, following the second World War, the US government recruited Hitler’s employees, adopted his protocols, embraced his mindset about law and order, implemented his tactics in incremental steps, and began to lay the foundations for the rise of the Fourth Reich. Sounds far-fetched? Read on. It’s all documented.

USA - Why are so many US senators more responsive to the FBI’s desire for Gestapo police power than they are to the civil liberties embodied in the US Constitution? FBI Director James Comey got Hillary off the hook but wants to put you on it. He is pushing hard for warrantless access to all of your Internet activity. Comey, who would have fit in perfectly with Hitler’s Gestapo, tells Congress that the United States is not safe unless the FBI knows when every American goes online, to whom they are sending emails and from whom they are receiving emails, and knows every website visited by every American. In other words, Comey wants to render null and void the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution and completely destroy your privacy rights.

JAPAN - In the age of Trump, America’s biggest foreign creditors are suddenly having second thoughts about financing the US Government. In Japan, the largest holder of Treasuries, investors culled their stakes in December by the most in almost four years, the Ministry of Finance’s most recent figures show.

GERMANY - Hardline German minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has warned the only way Greece's loans can be written off is through the country leaving the eurozone, as the debt crisis once again blows up. Angela Merkel's finance chief ruled out cutting the amount of money owed by the struggling Mediterranean state in an interview on German television. He insisted creditors must keep the pressure on Greece to meet the strict terms of its bailout programme or kick it out of the single currency. Markets reacted with alarm after the minister raised the prospect of a Grexit. Germany is Greece's biggest eurozone creditor and wants to claw back all the money it lent to stop Athens collapsing into bankruptcy amid the financial crisis. But fellow creditor the International Monetary Fund (IMF) this week admitted Athens' debt load is unsustainable.

EUROPE - European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said he fears Britain will divide the European Union's 27 remaining members by making different promises to each country during its Brexit negotiations. "The other EU 27 don't know it yet, but the Brits know very well how they can tackle this," Juncker told Deutschlandfunk radio. "They could promise country A this, country B that and country C something else and the end game is that there is not a united European front." Mr Juncker also reportedly said he would not seek a second term as European Commission president when his five-year term expires in 2019.

GERMANY - The country's central bank has completed a transfer of gold bars worth $13 billion from New York to Frankfurt, part of a plan to repatriate roughly half the reserves it keeps abroad. Germany has been bringing gold home from New York and Paris since 2013. So far, 642 tons has been transferred. With the latest transfer, the central bank has shifted a total of 330 tons of gold that had been stored with the New York Federal Reserve, deep in a subterranean vault that rests on the bedrock of Manhattan Island. The bank won't say how it moves the gold. The plan will be completed when a final 100 tons is returned from Paris. The central bank says it is bringing the gold home to help build public "trust and confidence."

GERMANY - Chancellor Angela Merkel is setting aside €90 million (£76 million) in taxpayers’ money to create a fund which will pay migrants to withdraw their asylum applications and leave Germany voluntarily. The handouts will form part of a 16-point plan to speed up the removal of rejected asylum seekers, after Tunisian migrant Anis Amri murdered a Polish lorry driver, hijacked his vehicle and drove it into a Christmas market in Berlin while awaiting deportation. US president Donald Trump told The Times that Merkel made a “catastrophic mistake” when she opened the doors to an unlimited number of migrants in 2015. Her vice-chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, later admitted that his superior had underestimated how difficult it would be to integrate migrants on such a grand scale, and that Germany had been plunged into a kulturkampf, or “cultural war”, as a result.

USA - The movement first made its presence felt in California more than two decades ago, then built its forces amid the protests against the Iraq war. Out of the sea of largely peaceful antiwar demonstrators marching in San Francisco’s Financial District in 2003, a more militant subgroup emerged. Its members wore black masks, black jackets, black hoods and helmets. They smashed windows and looted military recruitment offices. Since then, the so-called black bloc protesters have become a force in the Bay Area and beyond. Scorned by critics on both the left and right and hunted by police, the black bloc is bringing its radical tactics to the massive protest movement sparked by the presidency of Donald Trump.

ISRAEL - The era of the two-state solution is over, after the Knesset approved a law legitimising settlement blocs, Israeli Minister of Culture and Sport, Miri Regev, said. The minister told Public Radio Israel yesterday that “the era of the two-state solution has ended.” The official from the Likud party, headed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said: “We will impose the law on Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] in the event that this is rejected by the Supreme Court.” Right-wing party, the Jewish Home, headed by Education Minister Naftali Bennett, had said that the law was approved following its support. This law legitimises thousands of residential settlement units, 53 settlement blocs, and legalises the confiscation of 2,100 acres of Palestinian land in the West Bank. The Palestinians have said that the implementation of this law would mean the end of the two-state solution.

USA - It is pretty amazing that a circuit court, with judges that stand unelected by Americans, get to mandate what happens for the entire country. Must be nice! Why didn’t the courts do this while Obama was actually passing completely unconstitutional executive orders? It’s almost like liberals want a terrorist attack to happen.