USA - Hell-bent on arming opposition forces in Syria — despite strong evidence that they’re run by Islamic terrorists — John McCain displayed behavior unbecoming of a United States Senator during a recent meeting with Syrian Christian leaders touring Capitol Hill. The delegation of Syrian clergy came to Washington to raise awareness among lawmakers of the growing crisis among the region’s minority Christian community. Christians make up about 10% of the Syrian population and they are being targeted and ruthlessly murdered by radical elements of the rebel forces, according to the visiting church officials. But Senator McCain, an Arizona Republican, evidently doesn’t want to hear negative stories about the rebels he’s working to arm. So he stormed out of a closed-door meeting with the Syrian clergy officials last week.

EUROPE - Everything that we warned about in "There May Be Only Painful Ways Out Of The Crisis" back in September of 2011, and everything that the depositors and citizens of Cyprus had to live through, seems on the verge of going continental. In a nutshell, and in Reuters' own words, "the savings of the European Union's 500 million citizens could be used to fund long-term investments to boost the economy and help plug the gap left by banks since the financial crisis, an EU document says." What is left unsaid is that the "usage" will be on a purely involuntary basis, at the discretion of the "union", and can thus best be described as confiscation.

USA - The biggest news story in the United States right now is the "historic ice storm" that is hammering the South. Travel will be a nightmare, schools and businesses will be closed, and hundreds of thousands of people will lose power. In fact, it is being projected that some people could be without power for up to a week. But at the end of the day, the truth is that this ice storm is just an inconvenience. Yes, the lives of millions of Americans will be disrupted for a few days, but soon the ice will melt and life will be back to normal. Unfortunately, it doesn't take much for people to start behaving like crazed lunatics. The winter weather is causing average Americans to ransack grocery stores, fight over food items and even pull guns on one another. If this is how people will behave during a temporary weather emergency, how will they behave when we are facing a real disaster?

GERMANY - The current debt crisis in Europe evokes painful memories of the German hyperinflation. Price increases began with the start of World War I in 1914 and ended in disaster in 1923. The event still influences sentiment about monetary policy in the country today.

GERMANY - All of a sudden, Germany says it wants to be a grown-up. “There are people who use Germany’s guilt in the past as an excuse for withdrawal and laziness,” President Joachim Gauck said at the opening of the 50th Munich Security Conference late last month. “This restraint can lead to a notion of being privileged, and if this is the case, I will always criticize it.”

LUXEMBOURG - For opponents of the EU − who complain that it is too big, too grandiose and too costly − the European Court of Justice in Luxemborg encapsulates all that is wrong. It is a modern day Tower of Babel. Stretching 24 storeys into the air, the twin golden skyscrapers − the tallest in Luxembourg − were built to house more than 1,000 translators and interpreters.

MYANMAR - With his current visit to Myanmar [formerly known as Burma], German President Gauck is bolstering the Western geostrategic standing in its power struggle with China. Gauck, who arrived for talks on Sunday, will officially inaugurate the Goethe Institute and a German business field office.

USA - After leaving more than half a million customers without power across the Southeast, Winter Storm Pax is finally moving away from the Deep South. "The ice storm was as bad as we expected," said weather.com senior meteorologist Jon Erdman. "One inch or more of ice accumulation was reported in at least seven South Carolina counties, as well as Richmond County, Georgia" In North Carolina, snowfall led to a disastrous commute Wednesday afternoon in Raleigh and Charlotte. Cars slid off roads and heavy traffic led to gridlock, forcing some drivers to sit in hours of slow commutes or abandon their cars. Other states dealt with heavy freezing rain that felled trees and power lines, creating a scary scene in a heavily wooded region.

USA - Lake Superior hasn’t completely frozen over in two decades. But an expert on Great Lakes ice says there’s a “very high likelihood” that the three-quadrillion-gallon lake will soon be totally covered with ice thanks to this winter’s record-breaking cold. The ice cover on the largest freshwater lake in the world hit a 20-year record of 91 percent on February 5, 1994. Jay Austin, associate professor at the Large Lakes Observatory in Duluth, Minnesota, told CNSNews.com that he expects that record will be broken this winter when the most northern of the Great Lakes becomes totally shrouded in ice.

USA - Conventional wisdom holds that the past decade-plus of combat has forged a group of Army leaders as good as any our country has ever produced. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates went further in 2010, calling today’s Army “the most professional, the best educated, the most capable force this country has ever sent into battle.” Can this be true? Or is it hubris? In fact, the military conditions under which we’ve operated for the past two decades have been historically atypical. They have allowed too many in uniform to believe the hype. What happens when men whose whole professional life has known only success meet real challenges and the threat of defeat?

UK - A flood-hit village in Berkshire is pleading for help from the Army after looters began targeting homes of residents evacuated from the rising waters. Colin Rayner, 56, a Conservative councillor for Horton and Wraysbury, said the village had experienced looting and urged the police and Army to help. The farmer said he was told by the Environment Agency on Sunday that the flooding in Wraysbury was going to be worse than in 2003, and that he was to tell the residents of the village that anybody who was in a house that was flooded in 2003 was to evacuate. He said those houses would have no gas, electricity, sewerage or water for seven days.

SYRIA - British Muslims have carried out acts of torture and possibly executions in Syria, according to new video footage posted on social network sites. Evidence of atrocities committed by British fighters with extreme Islamist groups emerged as another round of peace talks between the regime and the mainstream opposition opened in Geneva on Monday. The two sides spent the day arguing about the agenda, and no progress has been made. The United Nations hopes to broker another ceasefire in the city of Homs to allow the delivery of aid and the evacuation of civilians from areas besieged by government forces.

PUERTO RICO - Moody’s Investors Service on Friday became the second rating agency this week to cut Puerto Rico’s credit rating to junk, citing concern about Puerto Rico’s weak economy and its deteriorating ability to borrow. Moody’s said it now rates the commonwealth’s general obligation bonds at Ba2, two notches below investment grade and one step deeper into junk territory than Standard & Poor’s. PR [Puerto Rico] has some $70 billion of debt outstanding - nearly four times the $18 billion owed by bankrupt Detroit. If markets push rates too high on PR debt, making it prohibitive for PR to raise money in the markets, the US territory will have to either be bailed out by the US or restructure its debt, that is, go in bankruptcy.

CANADA - Vancouver is the home to Canada's first-ever crackpipe vending machines, which were installed in the city’s troubled Downtown Eastside in a bid to curb the spread of disease among drug users. Portland Hotel Society's Drug Users Resource Centre operates two of the machines. They dispense Pyrex crackpipes for just 25 cents. "For us, this was about increasing access to safer inhalation supplies in the Downtown Eastside,” Kailin See, director of the DURC, told CTV Vancouver. She said the pipes are very durable and less likely to chip and cut drug users' mouths, which helps stop the spread communicable diseases including HIV and hepatitis C.

USA - The federal government pays for a $15 million 'wool trust fund,' runs a $170 million program to protect catfish growers from overseas competition, sets aside $3 million to promote Christmas trees, funds another $2 million to help farmers sell more sheep, and plunks down $100 million researching how to get Americans to buy more maple syrup. And that spending is just three one-hundredths of one per cent of the Farm Bill that President Barack Obama signed Friday in Michigan. Liberal and conservative watchdogs alike are hopping mad at what they say are pork-barrel projects included in the five-year agriculture spending law as home-state perks to lawmakers that are unneeded or redundant.