AUSTRIA - Austria will impose new curbs on the unvaccinated starting from Monday. The measure aims to ease pressure on hospitals and ICUs. The lockdown will come into effect at midnight and will apply to people aged 12 and older who have not been vaccinated and have not recently recovered from Covid-19. “This step was not easy to take, but it is necessary,” Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said. “The risk for the unvaccinated people is much higher. Therefore, we are forced to take this difficult step to reduce the number of contacts.” Interior Minister Karl Nehammer earlier said lockdown violators would face hefty fines. Customers may be punished with a fine of up to €500 ($573) for flouting restrictions while businesses may be slapped with a penalty of up to €30,000 ($34,354).

VATICAN - Pope Francis took time over the weekend to praise the “mission” of journalists, and thank them for exposing the church’s sex scandals and helping to keep them from being “swept under the carpet.” During a Saturday ceremony honoring two correspondents who have long covered the Vatican, the Pope directly approached the Catholic Church’s history with clerical sexual abuse scandals. He thanked the journalists for “what you tell us about what is wrong in the church” and for the “voice” given to abuse victims. Sexual abuse scandals within the church were first exposed on a widescale level by The Boston Globe in a series of stories in 2002, detailing alleged acts of sexual abuse as well as efforts to conceal those acts from the public.

EUROPE - Fears are growing of an imminent conflict in eastern Europe as Russia and Belarus carry out snap military drills close to where a migrant crisis is playing out on Poland's border, while Washington warns Putin is preparing to invade eastern Ukraine. The incursion comes with Europe at battle stations: Vladimir Putin is backing a 'hybrid war' using migrants to sow chaos at Poland's border while sending tens of thousands of troops to the frontier with Ukraine for a possible invasion. Russian nuclear bombers were also flying over Belarus for a third day running as Putin remained firmly behind Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko who is accused of 'weaponising migrants' by the West.

ISRAEL - Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) unveiled a family of new electronic warfare (EW) systems on Thursday which can combat a range of threats, including UAVs, ships, missiles and radar systems.The Scorpius family of systems scans the entire surrounding area for targets and deploys narrowly focused beams to interfere with multiple threats across the electromagnetic spectrum. The system effectively disrupts the operation of electromagnetic systems, including radar, electronic sensors, navigation and data communications. Scorpius has unprecedented receiver sensitivity and transmission power, allowing it to detect and address multiple threats of different kinds simultaneously from much farther distances than it was able to do in the past. The system can be installed on fighter and mission aircraft for escort and stand-off jamming missions or on military transport aircraft. It operates automatically and can provide protection against all types of Air-to-Air and Surface-to-Air threats.

EUROPE - The draft of the “Strategic Compass” document presented by Borrell to the commissioners: a rapid intervention force (Eu Rapid Deployment Capacity) able to face even “hybrid threats” such as the wave of migrants from Belarus. It is the first embryo of a future European army, not in competition with the US and NATO but which begins to satisfy the autonomous defense needs of the European continent.

USA - As the world’s economy emerges from the crisis caused by the pandemic, global elites have called for a “Great Reset.” One aspect of this globalist reset is a move to transition us into a “cashless” society. Brownstone Research founder Jeff Brown spoke with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow about what is motivating this latest push and how Brownstone Research’s personalized “Great Reset Protection Plan” gives ordinary investors the tools to survive and thrive in this cashless future.

USA - The Biden administration could be at the point where they might want to consider calling in the National Guard, or at least via a proxy, having governors deploy Guardsmen to address the mounting supply chain crisis at ports. President Biden’s directive last month to stomp out logjams at Southern California ports is failing miserably as a record number of container ships are now anchored offshore. According to a tweet from Marine Exchange, 111 container ships are anchored outside the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, a new record high. This breaks the prior record of 108 on October 21.

USA - With inflation running hot in October, American consumers paid slightly more for most goods and services compared to the previous month, and far more compared to a year ago.

• Gasoline: 49.6 percent year-over-year
• Electricity: 6.5 percent year-over-year
• Utility (piped) gas service: 28.1 percent year-over-year
• Propane, kerosene, and firewood: 34.7 percent year-over-year
• Food: 5.3 percent year-over-year
• Meats, poultry, fish, and eggs: 11.9 percent year-over-year
• Uncooked beef steaks: 24.2 percent year-over-year
• New cars and trucks: 9.8 percent year-over-year

The Labor Department’s consumer price data release followed a separate government report a day prior showing that producer prices rose in the 12 months through October at 8.6 percent, matching the September rate, which was the highest since 2008.

UK - UK papers are hyping the revival of a Cold War-era US artillery unit in Germany, supposed to be armed with ‘Dark Eagle’ hypersonic missiles that will be able reach Moscow in mere minutes, once they are developed. ‘Dark Eagle has landed’ proclaimed The Sun on Wednesday, originally reporting that the new US missiles could “blitz Russia” in just six minutes – before revising that to “21 minutes and 30 seconds” – along with a graphic showing Moscow being vaporized in a mushroom cloud. The US did in fact reactivate the 56th Artillery Command at a ceremony in Germany earlier this week. The unit had been inactive since 1991. However, the fine print in The Sun article, as well as other British papers, notes that the command may have hypersonic missile capability when this technology is “fully developed and deployed,” supposedly sometime in 2023, according to the Pentagon.

EUROPE - Russia is carrying out snap military drills in Belarus just a few miles from the Polish border today, as fears grow that Vladimir Putin is preparing for an invasion in eastern Europe. Russia's defence ministry said the unannounced drill involved paratroopers from both countries dropping at the Gozhsky range, just 20 miles from where thousands of migrants are gathered at the Polish border, where they practiced capturing bridges as well as hunting down and destroying enemy patrols. Ukraine warns there are now some 90,000 Russian soldiers near its border, where it has been fighting a years-long insurgency in its eastern regions by Russian-backed separatists.

EUROPE - The European Union's foreign policy chief warned the bloc on Wednesday that it must agree an ambitious doctrine as the basis for joint military action abroad, including with a deployable crisis force. Josep Borrell told reporters his first draft of the "Strategic Compass" - the closest thing the EU could have to a military doctrine and akin to NATO's "Strategic Concept" that sets out alliance goals - was crucial to security.

EUROPE - Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko opened another potential front against Europe on Thursday, threatening to choke off gas supplies amid a deepening crisis that has brought migrants surging to EU borders and Western leaders planning to retaliate with more sanctions. Lukashenko’s warning jolted energy markets and further suggested his authoritarian regime still had the backing of its key ally Russia, whose natural gas pipelines — including one crossing Belarus — are critical for European supplies.

UK - Alarming reports of the extent of the influence of LGBTQ+ group Stonewall at government departments – seemingly without the knowledge of ministers – beg the question: Who’s actually running the British state? Is it ineptitude or cowardice that has led to a situation where the UK government has lost control over a civil service that is quietly getting on with the project of turning the British state into a woke cultural institution? The LGBTQ+ lobby group Stonewall is as woke as it gets. And yet despite its illiberal reputation for advocating the policing of language and demanding the usage of pronouns, it is busy re-engineering the culture of the civil service. Back in June, the then-foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, did not have a clue that his senior officials had opted to sign up to Stonewall’s training programme. It seems that the officials responsible for importing the group’s insidious training schemes are a law unto themselves.

CHILE - The South American nation of Chile is known worldwide for its incredible mountain ranges, with a whopping 22 mountains peaking at over 20,000 ft. But there is one mountain located in the Atacama desert which is different from the rest. The driest desert in the world is home to a mountain of discarded clothing, containing everything from Christmas sweaters to ski boots, as the pollution from the industry of fast fashion continues to grow. Chile has long been a hub of secondhand and unsold clothing, made in China or Bangladesh and passing through Europe, Asia or the United States before arriving in Chile, where it is resold around Latin America. Some 59,000 tons of clothing arrive each year at the Iquique port in the Alto Hospice free zone in northern Chile, where it is bought by clothing merchants or smuggled across the border to other Latin American nations. But at least 39,000 tons that cannot be sold end up in rubbish dumps in the desert.

USA - One of the world's leading computer engineers believes the metaverse, the idea that caused Mark Zuckerberg to rebrand his whole company, could one day make reality disappear. In a recent op-ed, Louis Rosenberg, a computer scientist known for developing the first functional augmented reality system at Air Force Research Laboratory and founding virtual reality company Immersion Corporation, believes that by integrating virtual reality and augmented reality and having people interact in the digital realm for a significant portion of their day, it could 'alter our sense of reality' and distort 'how we interpret our direct daily experiences.' 'Our surroundings will become filled with persons, places, objects, and activities that don’t actually exist, and yet they will seem deeply authentic to us,' Rosenberg penned in the piece, published by Big Think.