EUROPE - The European Union may redirect tens of billions of euros earmarked for supporting its poorer member states to defense, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing EU officials. The potential policy shift follows the election of Donald Trump as the next US president and calls for NATO members in the EU to boost their own defense spending as the Ukraine conflict continues. The money would come from the so-called Cohesion Fund, which is aimed at reducing economic inequality between EU countries. The fund provides support to member states with a gross national income per capita below 90% of the bloc’s average, namely Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Croatia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Only around 5% of some €392 billion ($416.5 billion) allocated for the fund in the bloc’s 2021-2027 budget has been spent to date, according to the FT.

UK - Britain is preparing to import more electricity from the European Union's power grids amid concerns over 'anticyclonic gloom' hitting wind farms in recent weeks. The new underwater connections will sit alongside other interconnectors giving the UK access to nuclear power from France and hydroelectric stations in Norway. It comes amid a long recent spell of gloomy weather for the UK with little wind, rain or sunshine, which has seen renewable power generation fall significantly. The amount of wind and solar energy generated has plunged in the past two weeks due to high pressure weather systems in a phenomenon called 'anticyclonic gloom' or 'Dunkelflaute' in German, which roughly translates as 'darkness' and 'weak wind'.

GERMANY - Olaf Scholz, the most unpopular German Chancellor in recorded history, has lost the battle to extend his ailing minority government for another few months. It is now expected that a confidence vote will take place in the Bundestag on December 16, following the collapse of the three-party ‘traffic light’ coalition last week. But it will take months for the election to take place and for a coalition to take shape, leaving Germany adrift in a rapidly changing world. The press is purposefully steering clear of the chances of the rising rightwing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is now polling in second place nationally.

SWITZERLAND - Last year, Switzerland imprisoned 9,297 people, with 67 percent of them foreigners, according to the Swiss Federal Statistical Office. The number of foreigners in the prison population has tripled since the 1980s. Men still account for the vast majority of offenders, accounting for 90.6 percent of all prisoners, while 9.4 percent of all prisoners are women. In 2020, the greatest share of foreigners in Swiss prisons were Algerians. In second place were Romanians. In Germany, over half of the prison population is made up of foreigners, and they are costing German taxpayers nearly €2 billion per year.

USA - Robert F Kennedy Jr indicated over the weekend that he would fire 600 employees at the National Institutes of Health, replacing them with a new cohort of workers as he seeks to dramatically reshape America's health agencies, ABC News reports. RFK Jr. knows where the problems are at NIH, and he’s ready to fire 600 of them. “We need to act fast, and we want to have those people in place on January 20, so that on January 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH and 600 people are going to leave,” Kennedy said. The Democrat-turned-Trump supporter knows how out of control the pharmaceutical industry is. They are corrupt bureaucrats.

USA - The truck, tested under real-world conditions, traveled 2,900 kilometers on a single fill. It was developed through a collaborative effort between Accelera by Cummins and four US government agencies. Accelera, a division of the US-based Cummins, has set a new Guinness World Record for the longest distance traveled by a hydrogen fuel cell electric (FCEV) heavy-duty truck without refueling. The record was achieved with the company’s H2Rescue truck, a Kenworth T370 prototype designed specifically for emergency response missions. The truck completed an impressive 1,806 miles (2,900 kilometers), roughly the distance from Berlin, Germany, to Porto, Portugal. During the journey, it consumed 168 kilograms of hydrogen from an initial 175-kilogram fill, producing zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. By comparison, a diesel-powered truck would have emitted an estimated 664 pounds (300 kilograms) of CO2 over the same distance.

USA - MAGA is on a roll. The Establishment is having a collective meltdown. And those those who love America are loving it. From the first announcements, including Susie Wiles, the first ever female White House Chief of Staff - (oh the misogyny!) - to Tom Homan, President Trump’s bulldog of a Border Czar who has vowed to deport the millions of illegals Kamala Harris let into the country since 2021, this is not your regular gaggle of swamp creature bureaucrats. Then yesterday, on the one week anniversary of President Trump’s historic double-mandate victory, a new fusillade of 100% America First appointments were fired from Mar a Lago. The slew of nominations has left the Establishment and their complicit lapdog media reeling. When we were in the White House I called this “moving at the speed of Trump.”

USA - Protecting democracy was a catch phrase that Democrats have used for years to explain their hatred of now President-elect Donald Trump. He was, after all, they said, a “Hitler.” He would be a dictator. He would use the military against his political opponents, jailing them and worse. The only salvation for America’s “democracy” would be to keep Democrats, in this election Kamala Harris, in power, they said. Now they’ve flip-flopped, and are openly advocating for the downfall of democracy, according to new analyses.

USA - The owner of the Los Angeles Times has fired his entire editorial board as he seeks to return the paper to its journalistic roots. Posting on the X platform, the paper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, said he was proud to have posted a letter opposing attacks on white women for voting for Donald Trump and that the paper would be undergoing some major changes moving forward: "I will work towards making our paper and media fair and balanced so that all voices are heard and we can respectfully exchange every American’s view from left to right to the center. Coming soon. A new Editorial Board. Trust in media is critical for a strong democracy."

USA - Mass deportations are coming. Which feels about right given we’re a democracy and nearly 60% of Americans want mass deportation of illegal immigrants. Who are, after all, breaking the law by trespassing on our republic. The current record-holder is Franklin D Roosevelt, who deported 2 million aliens, overwhelmingly Mexican. I mentioned in a recent video how FDR’s deportations included citizen children of illegal immigrants, so that is perfectly legal — they will pretend it’s not. The active deportations will start with criminals and will essentially be arrests. But the real magic happens in the background, the self-deportations. I mentioned in a recent video how up to 90% of FDR’s deportations actually self-deported to avoid forced deportation. Today, we’d be looking at 15 million self-deportations if the message is clear.

USA - In a bold move, the incoming US President is set to shake up the Oval Office decor, hinting at a significant shift in international relations and cultural values. Incoming US President Donald Trump is set to wage a war on woke… with a little help from Sir Winston Churchill. The first thing the new Commander-in-Chief will do after his inauguration on January 20, according to sources close to the transition, is rearrange the furniture in the Oval Office - replacing a bust of union leader César Chávez with one of Britain’s fabled wartime leader. But Trump, who romped to victory at the November 5 poll, will make redecorating the most famous office in the world a priority and ensure the bronze bust of the British statesman, military officer, and writer who was Britain’s Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945, is dusted off and becomes the centrepiece of his nerve centre.

UKRAINE - Ukraine could develop a rudimentary nuclear bomb within months if Donald Trump withdraws US military assistance, according to a briefing paper prepared for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence. The country would quickly be able to build a basic device from plutonium with a similar technology to the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, the report states. “Creating a simple atomic bomb, as the United States did within the framework of the Manhattan Project, would not be a difficult task 80 years later,” the document reads. With no time to build and run the large facilities required to enrich uranium, wartime Ukraine would have to rely instead on using plutonium extracted from spent fuel rods taken from Ukraine’s nuclear reactors. Ukraine still controls nine operational reactors and has significant nuclear expertise despite having given up the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal in 1996. The report says: “The weight of reactor plutonium available to Ukraine can be estimated at seven tons…"

SPAIN - Heavy rain has caused widespread flooding in Malaga only two weeks after storms led to Spain’s worst natural disaster in decades. The southern port city remained on the highest weather alert on Wednesday night after flood waters closed off main roads and its high-speed rail link with Madrid. The Spanish state weather forecaster, AEMET, issued red alerts on Wednesday morning for the eastern Tarragona and southern Malaga provinces, saying it expected them to receive as much as 180 mm (7.1 inches) of rain within 12 hours that could cause rivers to overflow and generate flash floods. The new floods came as authorities confirmed a total of 223 people had died and 17 were still missing following flash flooding in the Valencia region two weeks ago.

EUROPE - President-Elect Donald Trump had made peace in Europe a key campaign pledge, but several NATO member states are dedicated to total Ukrainian victory and will discuss how to “thwart” him and keep Kyiv in the war even if Washington withdraws support. London, Paris, and Warsaw are to form the nucleus of a European effort to keep Ukraine’s defensive war against Russia going even if the Trump Presidency from January 2025 tries to bring an end to the Ukraine war. Exactly how he will achieve this campaign pledge has not been publicly articulated to date. However, a ‘land swap’ between Kyiv and Moscow or a Korean-style demilitarised zone has been discussed as options open to Trump, neither of which aligns with Ukraine’s official ambition of total victory.

GERMANY - Date agreed after the chancellor’s three-party coalition fell to pieces less than 24 hours after the US election last week, after talks over the economy broke down. A vote of confidence is set to take place in the Bundestag on December 16, paving the way for President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to dissolve parliament on December 27, German media reported separately. Steinmeier gave his preliminary backing for the timeline on Tuesday evening. Scholz was under pressure from all sides to bring a swift resolution to the country’s political crisis after his government collapsed as Europe struggled to muster a coherent response to the imminent presidency of Donald Trump in the United States.