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.

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.