UK - A school has been forced to apologise to parents after a teacher falsely told her class that Father Christmas was not real. The stand-in teacher at Hill View Primary School in Bournemouth, Dorset made the blunder while her class of 10 and 11-year-olds were making Christmas cards on Wednesday. The festive faux pas is said to have caused quite the scene as the Year Six pupils left the school quizzing their parents to see if what she said was true. The school later that day emailed a letter to parents 'apologising profusely' for the upset caused to the children by the Santa slur. One parent, who did not want to be named, said: 'Christmas is a stressful time of the year as it is, the last thing we need is the school ruining it by taking away the magic. It's really not on.”

MIDDLE EAST - A US warship shot down 14 suspected attack drones over the Red Sea on Saturday, and a Royal Navy destroyer downed another drone that was targeting commercial ships, the British and American militaries said. Houthi rebels in Yemen have launched a series of attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping routes, and have launched drones and missiles targeting Israel, as the Israel-Hamas war threatens to spread.

GERMANY - Military chief Boris Pistorius has said Europeans have five to eight years to arm up before US focus shifts to the Asia-Pacific. European nations have less than a decade left to ramp up their military capabilities so that they can fend for themselves in case of conflict, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has estimated. He also predicted that the US, regardless of which candidate comes out on top in next year’s election, will become less involved in European security down the road.

ISRAEL - Ambassador Gilad Erdan told the United Nations General Assembly that Israel had protected the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a holy site for Muslims in Jerusalem, from Hamas. Sharing his speech on X on Saturday evening, Erdan wrote, “Israel is defending Al-Aqsa Mosque from Hamas missiles!! Just as ISIS destroyed mosques, Hamas-ISIS is willing to blow up Al-Aqsa. For Hamas, murdering Israelis is more important than Islamic holy sites. This is what I said today in the UN General Assembly as I showed the Iron Dome interception of a Hamas missile fired towards the Temple Mount. These are the terrorists that the UN has chosen to protect. Unbelievable!!'

MALI - The Bundeswehr mission in Mali has come to an end. Tuesday 12 December 2023, the last 142 German soldiers withdrew from their former base in Gao in northern Mali. They are making their way back to Germany, where they are expected to arrive on Friday. German soldiers were stationed in the country for ten years, most of that time alongside French combat troops as part of an EU and a UN mission – EUTM Mali and MINUSMA respectively.

USA - The United States is set to enter 2024 with its smallest military in more than eight decades and faces one of its 'greatest challenges' as it tries to boost recruiting from Gen Z, Pentagon officials said. Under the $886 billion annual defense bill passed by Congress this week total active-duty troop numbers will fall to 1,284,500 next year. That is the lowest total since before the US entered the Second World War in 1941 and officials said there should be a 'national call to service'. Recent recruitment targets were missed in the Army, Navy and Air Force, although the Marine Corps and the newly established Space Force reached their goals. This week Ashish Vazirani, the Pentagon’s acting undersecretary for personnel and readiness, told the House Armed Services Committee that the individual services missed their recruitment goals in 2023 by a combined 41,000 personnel.

USA - On the night of her election as Boston's first Asian mayor, Michelle Wu proclaimed defiantly: 'We are ready to become a Boston for everyone. We're ready to become a Boston that doesn't push people out, but welcomes all who call our city home.' It was a rallying cry for unity and inclusion from a young, idealistic politician who was determined the capital city of New England should shed its conservative image and embrace its increasing ethnic diversity. But two years later, Wu is in the extraordinary position of herself being accused of racism after hosting a Christmas party on Wednesday night exclusively for 'non-white' members of the city council. Her decision has stoked a nationwide row over 'reverse racism' and exposed once again a deeply polarised American electorate that once put Donald Trump in the White House because they shared his contempt for wokeness, and may well do so again.

USA - Just about every aspect of American life is under a new threat from unimaginable debt. There is record credit card debt, an implosion in commercial real estate, millions are delinquent on mortgage payments and car payments and, to top it all off, hundreds of trillions in unpayable derivative debt that Warren Buffett called “weapons of mass destruction” is coming due. It’s all coming to a head in a so-called debt reset we have heard about for years.

EUROPE - EU agrees on law to secure strategic raw materials to reduce vulnerabilities in the West’s economic war against China. China responds to sanctions and restricts exports of important resources. Beijing, which has always been a reliable supplier, is currently beginning to defend itself against the West’s economic war, in which it is coming under increasing attacks with punitive tariffs and sanctions. It is resorting to restrictions on its exports of strategically essential natural resources – including gallium, germanium and soon also graphite. If the West persists in its economic warfare, it will face material shortages in the foreseeable future, for example, in regards to the production of semiconductors and climate change technologies.

ISRAEL - The Palestinian Authority (PA), like Hamas, seeks the utter demise of the State of Israel, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who asserted that the difference between the two groups is only a matter of methodology, as he vowed to never have the “hostile” PA control a post-Hamas Gaza. The Israeli premier compared the supposedly “moderate” Palestinian Authority (PA) to the US-designated terrorist organization Hamas, claiming both actively seek the destruction of the Jewish state, as reported by Hebrew media based on leaks from the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting Monday.

ARGENTINA - Argentina devalued the peso by 54%, overhauled its crawling peg and announced massive spending cuts to eliminate its primary fiscal deficit next year as the first steps in President Javier Milei’s shock-therapy program. The newly inaugurated administration weakened the official exchange rate to 800 pesos per dollar, Economy Minister Luis Caputo said in a televised address after the close of local markets on Tuesday. It was 366.5 per dollar before the address. The central bank will henceforth target a monthly devaluation of 2%.

USA - Our kids can’t really read very well. And it turns out that they aren’t very good at math either. But those running our system of education continue to tell us that they are doing a wonderful job. If they just had more funding, they insist, our test scores would go way up. Of course that is complete and utter nonsense. Our system of public eduction was a failure back when I was in school many years ago, and it is much worse now. At this point, only about one-third of all US students in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades are proficient in reading…

UK - Whether it's eating less meat or cycling instead of driving, humans can do many things to help prevent climate change. Unfortunately, breathing less isn't one of them. That might be a problem, as a new study claims the gases in air exhaled from human lungs is fueling global warming. Methane and nitrous oxide in the air we exhale makes up to 0.1 per cent of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions, scientists say. And that's not even accounting for the gas we release from burps and farts, or emissions that come from our skin without us noticing. The new study was led by Dr Nicholas Cowan, an atmospheric physicist at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh.

UK - Parents should think very carefully before allowing children to use Facebook as it is no longer safe, the National Crime Agency (NCA) says. NCA bosses have sounded the alarm over Meta's platforms after it decided to automatically encrypt all Facebook and Messenger chats. The head of the NCA has likened this to 'consciously turning a blind eye to child abuse'. The NCA arrests about 800 suspected paedophiles and safeguards 1,200 children a month – largely as a result of information from Meta about abusers on its platforms.

ISRAEL - The State of Israel is fighting the Palestinian Hamas terror organization in Gaza, but that is just one front in an ongoing war against terror groups and their sponsors. In fact, Israel currently faces at least five enemies on five fronts.