ISRAEL - US President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on the phone at length today to discuss the ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza and efforts to release the remaining hostages held by terrorists in the enclave. Channel 12 reports the call lasted about 45 minutes. It was the first conversation between the two leaders since Biden said Israel’s Gaza response was “over the top.” The conversation focused on three issues, according to the report: Israel’s planned offensive in Rafah, the last Hamas stronghold in Gaza, increasing the delivery of humanitarian aid to civilians, and stalled hostage talks that could also include a pause in fighting.

UK - Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had a mini-meltdown after being exposed during the Tucker Carlson-Vladimir Putin interview for sabotaging the Ukrainian peace deal. During the interview, Putin confirmed reporting that first emerged last year about Johnson’s role in prolonging the war. David Arahamiya, the leader of Ukraine’s ruling party, revealed that Johnson had scuppered a peace deal that would have put an end to hostilities just a few months after the Russian invasion.

SYRIA - Damascus is fully prepared to defend its territory in a potential military conflict with Israel, Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad said on Sunday as the regional crisis continues.Mekdad was speaking at a meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in Damascus, where they discussed joint support for Palestinians during Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza. Mekdad said that Syria “has been resisting” Israel since 1948, when the first full-blown war broke out between several Arab nations and the newly established Jewish state.

USA - Parts of California were hit by more than a dozen earthquakes overnight, with 13 shaking the state during a span of just 25 minutes. “Good morning Southern California! Did you feel the magnitude 4.8 earthquake about two miles north-west of El Centro at 12.36am? El Centro is a city in the Imperial Valley in the southern California border region. The rattling continued until 1.01am, when the 13th quake of the series that began less than a half hour earlier was recorded. “Several small earthquakes have occurred in El Centro in the past 15 minutes. A couple of them were felt at our office. As of 12.53 am there have been 13!” Officials said the USGS’s Shake Alert system estimated at least one of the earthquakes registered a magnitude above 5.0, triggering alerts to cell phones. The rapid cluster of earthquakes came two days after a 4.6 magnitude earthquake hit several miles north-west of Malibu on Friday.

USA - The Biden Administration has admitted to surveilling the private financial transactions of Americans for words including 'MAGA', 'Trump' and 'Kamala' following the January 6 riots. Federal investigators in the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) instructed banks to comb through records to look for 'extremists'. A letter from the Treasury Department, seen by Fox News, was sent to Senator Tim Scott on Friday which states 'Exchange events' began 'shortly after January 6 under the prior Administration'. It said it 'included terms such as "antifa," "MAGA," "Trump," "Biden," "Kamala," "Schumer," and "Pelosi."' Further, officials warned banks of 'extremism' indicators like the purchase of a bus or plane ticket 'for travel to areas with no apparent purpose' or the purchase of a religious text, like a Bible, according to documents.

UK - A host of aspiring TV stars are to lose their virginity on television with the help of sex experts, according to reports. Virgin Island, which is set to air on Channel 4 later this year, will see people jet off to a tropical island with one sole purpose. They will be joined in the idyllic location by a camera crew and producers who hope the cast will lose their virginity in front of the lens. However, if they struggle and get stage fright, they will have specialists known as 'sex surrogates' on hand to guide them. A TV insider told The Sun: 'There’s never been a TV show that pushes the boundaries quite like this — and probably never will be again.'

USA - The federal government is expected to have to spend more servicing the country’s massive national debt this year than it will spend on defense or Medicare as interest payments skyrocket, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).The US federal government is projected to spend $870 billion toward servicing its debt in fiscal year 2024. The US is projected to spend $822 billion on defense in financial year 2024 and $940 on Medicare in financial year 2025.

GERMANY - A German navy frigate set sail for the Red Sea on Thursday with the aim of protecting commercial ships from attacks by Yemeni rebels, as part of a planned European Union mission. The deployment marked “the most serious engagement of a unit of the German navy in many decades,” navy chief Jan Christian Kaack told reporters in Berlin. Yemen’s Iran-backed Huthi rebels have launched a series of attacks on ships crossing the Red Sea since November, saying their campaign was in solidarity with Palestinians in the war between Israel and Hamas. The frigate’s mission still needs to be confirmed by the German parliament and the European Union, however. The EU is currently considering a naval mission to improve security for merchant ships in the Red Sea.

EUROPE - Farmers in Italy, Spain and Poland demonstrated Friday as part of ongoing protests against European Union farming policies and to demand measures to combat production cost hikes, reduced profits and unfair competition from non-EU countries. Similar protests have taken place across the bloc in recent weeks. Farmers complain that the 27-nation EU’s policies on the environment and other matters are a financial burden and make their products more expensive than non-EU imports. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, has made some concessions over the last few weeks, including shelving plans to halve the use of pesticides and other dangerous substances. Nonetheless, the protests have spread.

USA - Much of today’s high tech, for computer, automobile, communications and military applications, requires ingredients called rare earth minerals. They are not widely available and China, with an estimated 44 million metric tons of resources, has been the source for some 95% of those components used around the world. That makes the US dependent on an unfriendly Communist regime for significant advances in its technology. Already confirmed are minerals like neodymium, praseodymium, samarium, dysprosium and terbium. Such are used in smartphones, hybrid vehicles, military applications and more.

RUSSIA - Tucker Carlson on Thursday released his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which found the two discussing the war in Ukraine, NATO expansion and Russia's relationship with the United States. The interview — recorded on Tuesday and first released exclusively online via the Tucker Carlson Network — runs for over two hours, during which Putin also shared his thoughts on topics such as AI (international regulations may someday be needed) and on the next president of the US. When Carlson asked if he thought Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky still "has the freedom to negotiate a settlement to this conflict," Putin answered that he believes so.

USA - This week, the biggest news story in the entire world is Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin. I give Tucker Carlson a ton of credit for going to Russia and sitting down with Putin. I think that the real reason he did this is because he wanted to see for himself if there is any hope of avoiding a cataclysmic conflict between our two nations. Every day we get even closer to the unthinkable, and so it would make sense for both sides to pursue a peaceful way out of this mess. But at this point the western elite are not interested in peace, and they don’t want any talk of peace in the media. So they are going to great lengths to discredit Tucker Carlson’s interview with Putin, because they don’t want their carefully crafted narratives to be disrupted.

MIDDLE EAST - On December 25, an Israeli airstrike killed a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard official, Sayyed Razi Mousavi, in the Shiite-controlled Sayyida Zaynab neighborhood of Damascus. On January 2, Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy head of Hamas and a founder of its military wing, was assassinated in an Israeli drone attack in south Beirut, a stronghold of the militant Shiite group Hezbollah. Hezbollah and Israel have exchanged fire almost daily since October 7, and Israel has assassinated several senior Hezbollah figures. In the Red Sea, the Houthis, who are adherents of a variant of Shiism, have relentlessly attacked commercial shipping, provoking the United States and the United Kingdom to strike Houthi targets in Yemen. There is a real danger that this back-and-forth could lead to a direct US military conflict with Iran.

MIDDLE EAST - A senior Hamas terrorist told a Lebanese news outlet, which the allied jihadist group Hezbollah operates, on Thursday that his group would offer “no compromise” on the destruction of Israel, describing the Jewish state as having “no future in the region.” Osama Hamdan, the top Hamas representative in Lebanon, threatened all who support the existence of Israel, telling Hezbollah’s al-Manar news, “Whoever counts on it or attaches their future to it will lose.” Hamdan’s comments echo the ideological provisions of the Hamas terrorist charter and statements made since 2023 by officials in Iran, the world’s premier state sponsor of terrorism and a top Hamas financier. The allied government of Iran, which celebrated the mass killings on October 7 by holding a street party in Tehran, has also repeatedly asserted that it had no interest in a “two-state solution” because Iran did not support Israel’s right to exist.

USA - US intelligence officials briefed members of Congress this week on Israel's war effort against Hamas in Gaza, according to a New York Times report. The officials reportedly said that while Israel had significantly degraded Hamas’ military capabilities, it was not close to eliminating Hamas. The US Biden administration is becoming increasingly critical of Israel as the war extends into its fourth month. With the latest hostage negotiations allegedly deadlocked over what Netanyahu called Hamas’ “delusional” terms, the Israeli War Cabinet is pushing ahead with military operations in the southern Gaza Strip. “I would like to emphasize again – there is no other solution than total victory,” Netanyahu said, claiming that failure to defeat Hamas would mean that “it is only a matter of time until the next massacre.”