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.

USA - Lesson number one: never take a knife to a gun fight. Lesson number two is that every Trump initiative on immigration will be a gunfight, not a walk in the park. And, unfortunately, lesson number three is that there are a large number of “so-called judges” who will be strapped and ready to bushwhack the president at every turn. The federal courts are a battleground, not a playground, and the 9th Circuit is the most left-wing battleground of all. District Court Judge Robart was especially incompetent in his ruling and deserved to be ridiculed for his embarrassing performance, but judicial sabotage of constitutional government is nothing new.

USA - Fake news is 'killing people's minds' and a vast campaign is needed to combat the phenomenon, Apple boss Tim Cook has said. The chief executive of one of the world's largest companies said governments should wage information wars against phoney reports while businesses must create the tools to root out propaganda. False stories have thrived on social media in recent highly-divisive political campaigns, in particular the US presidential election. “All of us technology companies need to create some tools that help diminish the volume of fake news.” Fake news, which presents falsehoods as being truthful, is often housed on websites masquerading as media outlets.

VATICAN - In an address to the Anti-Defamation League Thursday, Pope Francis denounced the “widespread” anti-Semitism in the world today, while recommitting the Catholic Church to “repel anti-Semitic tendencies.” Speaking in the Hall of Popes in the Vatican, Francis recalled his visit last year to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. “There are no adequate words or thoughts in the face of such horrors of cruelty and sin,” the Pope said. “There is prayer, that God may have mercy and that such tragedies may never happen again.”

EUROPE - In the shadow of Donald Trump’s spree of controversial actions, the European commission has quietly launched the next offensive in the war on cash. These unelected bureaucrats have boldly asserted their intention to crack down on paper transactions across the EU and solidify a trend that has been gaining momentum for years.

EUROPE - The EU leadership is really trying to make Great Britain pay dearly for voting to exit the Community. Like the socialists in America, it’s our way or no way. The left may call the right the “deplorables” but the left are the “intolerables” who refuse to ever consider they might be wrong. The EU think that they can make it so bad for Britain, nobody else will leave. They refuse to examine why there is rising discontent within Europe. They refuse to let go of this dream of a federalized Europe to eradicate national identities along with sovereign rights. The dream of the EU is dead. It should have remained just a trade union – that was it.

USA - Democrats should be very, very careful what they wish for. Just as Hillary Clinton and all her rotten operatives at the highest levels of the Democratic Party smugly prayed that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee, those same Democrats now take gleeful joy watching President Trump’s so-called travel ban picked apart by federal judges on the Left Coast.

USA - The organizations spouting civil-war rhetoric are following a playbook taken from the writings of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Communist Party. It is a rhetoric that demonizes all enemies as ‘capitalist exploiters’ (in America, where there still is a latent affinity to capitalism, the word ‘Fascism’ is preferred) and calls for an overthrow of the government. Followers are not supposed to think about what would replace it but, for those who are curious, the answer is a ‘socialist’ government responsive, not to big business, but to the people.

ICELAND - Scientists and authorities in Iceland are on high alert, as at least 30 of the major volcanic systems in the country have all been unusually active. All of the volcano systems are under continuous observation by geophysicists, who have noted that the crust in the systems has been expanding, along with increasing geothermal and seismic activity. Major volcanic eruptions can be cataclysmic events which, in the most extreme cases, affect global weather patterns. The eruption of an estimated 14-trillion liters of lava from Lakagígar in 1783 killed some 10,000 people in Iceland (a quarter of the island’s population), caused a sulphurous haze in Europe, a famine in northern Africa, and an extremely long and cold winter in North America. 

AUSTRALIA - A band of hot air more than 2,000 kilometres wide is expected to sweep across South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, bringing heatwave temperatures – sometimes over 45 degrees C– [110 degrees F] for vast areas in those states over the next few days.

GERMANY - The German government has been forced to deny it is interested in acquiring nuclear weapons amid calls for it to lead a European “nuclear superpower”. “There are no plans for nuclear armament in Europe involving the federal government,” a spokesman for Angela Merkel said.