RUSSIA - Natan Sharansky, the world's leading anti-Soviet, dissident Zionist, and pro-democracy voice, was born in Donetsk in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In an interview, Sharansky said: Putin "has said over many years that the biggest tragedy of the 20th century was the destruction of the Soviet Union. So his mission is to bring back that unique Russian superpower." "Russia today is something like 3% of the world economy and NATO represents something closer to 50%. And here it is very important to understand Putin's psychology. From my time among criminals in prison, I know very well that the one who's the ringleader in the cell is not the one who is physically strongest, but the one who is ready to use his knife. Everybody has a knife, but not everybody is prepared to use it. Putin believes that he is willing to use his knife and the West isn't, that the West can only talk, even if it is physically stronger."

RUSSIA - The Western powers’ attempts to isolate Russia worldwide because of its attack on Ukraine, have proven unsuccessful. Last week, at the UN General Assembly, Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called on all nations of the world, to “now take sides,” regarding Russia’s war of aggression. Although the General Assembly has condemned the war by a clear majority, most of those countries – unlike the west and its closest allies – are still continuing their cooperation with Russia.

EUROPE - The European Union has been sent a huge warning by former European Parliament Brexit Coordinator Guy Verhofstadt. 'We need stronger Europe!' EU sent huge warning by Verhofstadt to 'defend our interests'. The former Belgian Prime Minister was speaking after attending the Conference on the Future of Europe in Strasbourg where Ukrainian citizens spoke about the recent Russian invasion. “We need a stronger, more sovereign, more united Europe to defend our values and interests.”

IRAN - The Iran nuclear deal may become collateral damage in the Ukraine war. In a phone call with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian on Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated that Russia wants the revival of the nuclear deal to be accompanied by US guarantees that sanctions imposed by the West in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine won't apply to Russian trade or investment with Iran. The demand has rocked the negotiations underway in Vienna. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken indicated Sunday that the US would not be prepared to bargain over the sanctions imposed on Russia for the sake of the nuclear deal.

GERMANY - They are in worse shape than the 2008/9 crash. Cracks beginning to show? I do believe they are doing almost all they can to prop this all up as 2023 approaches and 2024 shortly thereafter, as it seems like the market is weaponized should things not go their way, yet it has to crash anyway. Why prolong the inevitable to make things worse? Deutsche Bank closed at $16.50 on the New York Stock Exchange on February 10 of this year. It closed at $10.23 yesterday – a decline of 38 percent in a month’s time. That’s a big problem because Deutsche Bank is heavily interconnected to Wall Street banks via derivatives. According to Deutsche Bank’s most recent annual report, as of December 31, 2020, it held $35.4 trillion in notional derivatives. In June 2016, The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a report with a finding that Deutsche Bank posed the greatest threat to global financial stability than any other bank because of its interconnections to Wall Street mega banks and large banks in Europe. The largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, was shown as one of the banks with the largest amount of exposure.

CHILE - Leftist former student leader Gabriel Boric will be sworn in Friday as Chile's youngest-ever president, with plans to turn the country that for decades has served as a neoliberal laboratory into a greener, more egalitarian "welfare state." Aged 36, Boric takes over the reins of a country clamoring for change following mass protests in 2019, which he supported, against deep-rooted inequality in income, healthcare, education and pensions. The revolt, which left dozens dead and hundreds injured, was the catalyst for a process now under way to rewrite Chile's dictatorship-era constitution.

GERMANY - Something dramatic, even historic, happened in the Reichstag building in Berlin on February 27th. Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, announced a plan to spend an additional €100 billion ($111 billion) on defence; to support imposing sanctions on Russia (including ones related to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and SWIFT); to commit to two LNG terminals; to export weapons to Ukraine and to consider acquiring the American-made F-35 as the next generation of nuclear-capable German aircraft. This was a massive and almost complete policy turnaround, with a number of German foreign policy’s sacred cows slaughtered. Having prided themselves on continuity as a central element of German foreign policy for decades, German political elites were stunned. It became apparent that Mr Scholz was not only enjoying the support of his Ampelkoalition, traffic-light coalition, but also that of Germany’s new opposition leader, Friedrich Merz.

GERMANY - Nowhere has the change in policy been so stark as in Germany, where decades of policy have been cast aside virtually overnight. War has firmly united the transatlantic alliance. Germany’s decision to prioritize energy security over climate goals speaks volumes. Russia has awakened Germany from its slumber. Berlin is finally taking steps to assume a role within NATO commensurate with its economic and political clout.

VATICAN - The Vatican has long experience in mediating conflicts. Francis has helped to normalise relations between the United States and Cuba, smoothed the path to elections in the Central African Republic and brought together the warring leaders of South Sudan. Much of this work happens behind the scenes. On Ash Wednesday – the day the Pope had asked Christians to offer their fasting and prayer for peace in Ukraine – I sat down with Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, the papal ambassador to Britain, to find out how the Holy See is working to try to broker peace in Ukraine. How, I asked him, could Pope Francis make a difference? “There were many attempts by the Holy See to try to avoid this war,” he tells me as we talk in the living room of the apostolic nunciature in Wimbledon, south-west London. “Sometimes it was successful, sometimes it was not. But the very fact that they [Russia] accept the Holy See, and the Pope in particular, as an interlocutor is already something very special because what happens in these wars is that nobody is looking for an interlocutor. Everybody is looking for an enemy.”

USA - The pandemic is far from over, the WHO's leader insisted Wednesday, two years after he first used the term to wake the world up to the emerging threat of Covid-19. The World Health Organization's director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus first described Covid-19 as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Two years on, he lamented how the virus was still evolving and surging in some parts of the world. The WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern -- the highest level of alarm in the UN health agency's regulations -- on January 30, 2020, when, outside of China, fewer than 100 cases and no deaths had been reported. But it was only the use of the word pandemic six weeks on that seemed to shake many countries into action.

USA - On top of everything else, now a highly pathogenic avian influenza pandemic is ripping across the United States, and it has already resulted in the deaths of almost 2.8 million birds. Most of the birds that have died have been chickens or turkeys. And since this was just in the very first month of the pandemic, there is no telling how bad it could eventually become. What will the eventual death toll look like? Will it be in the tens of millions? That is definitely a possibility. At this point, this pandemic is not just limited to one geographic area. There have been lots of cases on the east coast, and there have been cases as far west as Nebraska and South Dakota. Basically, the area that has been affected already covers about half the nation, and we are just one month into this new plague. Let us hope that it stays just in birds, because if it jumps to humans we are going to have a real disaster on our hands. Since 1997, bird flu has had about a 50 percent death rate in humans. The global food crisis that we have been warned about is already here, and so this new plague has come at a really, really bad time.

USA - An alarming trend is popping up in school districts around America, removing the parents from the equation of the child. What does this mean? As conservative parents fight back against Critical Race Theory and canceling historic figures, schools are upping the anti by dismissing the parent's right to know about their children. The most recent wokeness is troubling, an entire school district is defending staff training, which instructed them to hide information regarding students’ sexual or gender identity from their parents. The instructions were part of professional training for staff in Eau Claire Area School District in western Wisconsin on February 25. “Parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities,” a slide from the presentation, obtained by the organization Empower Wisconsin, reads. “That knowledge must be earned.”

USA - A convergence of horrifying events have set into a motion an irreversible collapse of food production and crop harvests that will lead to global famine all the way through 2024. These events cannot be stopped for the simple reason that plants take time to grow. You can’t create crops instantly, and if they don’t get planted (or they get destroyed), there’s no instant replacement.

USA - Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is affecting more than just gas prices. The global food supply is being damaged by the war, one CEO warned, and the cost of food is going to rise around the world. Svein Tore Holsether of Yara International, a Norwegian chemical company that produces fertilizers, described the Ukraine conflict as “a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe,” The National in the United Arab Emirates reported Tuesday.

USA - The new global economic crisis that we have entered into is starting to hit home with hard working American families in a major way. I have been hearing from so many people that are absolutely horrified by how rapidly the price of gasoline is rising. Especially for those that have to drive a lot, this is going to cause a tremendous amount of pain. Food prices continue to surge as well, and this is particularly true when it comes to meat. Unless you are a vegan or a vegetarian, you are probably accustomed to eating quite a bit of meat on a regular basis.