SWITZERLAND - The World Economic Forum (WEF) rehashed its talking points for the Great Reset in a promo video released during its 2021 Summit, admitting that people think they are “masking some nefarious plan for world domination,” before proceeding to treat you, the listener, like a 6-year-old by spouting clear lies and contradictions. The overwhelmingly negative response to the video only drives home their admission that the Great Reset, which is touted as a positive, if radical, economic and social transformation of our societies, is deeply unpopular. And the level of backlash to this video alone demonstrates why they cannot ignore the uproar.

USA - President Joe Biden, widely praised for his inaugural call to unity, was asked about the forthcoming, highly divisive Senate trial of former President Donald Trump. “I think it has to happen,” he responded. But this process shouldn’t be confused with impeachment under Article 1, Section 3, and Article 2, Section 4 of the US Constitution. The appropriate term for what we’re watching play out in our nation’s capital is a show trial, the mock judicial proceedings carried out by tyrants such as Joseph Stalin after they took power.

USA - The US has temporarily frozen some pending arms sales to allied states while the Biden administration reviews weapons deals agreed under President Donald Trump, according to officials at the State Department. The move affects precision-guided missiles sold to Saudi Arabia and F-35 fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), among other deals not identified by the State Department. American arms manufacturers Raytheon Technologies and Lockheed Martin both have contracts with the two Arab nations. Just last week, the US inked a deal with the UAE to supply it with up to 50 F-35 jets and as many as 18 armed drones, as part of a $23-billion weapons consignment, the Emirati embassy in Washington said. The deal had been announced in November under the Trump administration, and a Senate effort to block it the following month failed to secure majority backing. In December, the US State Department also gave the go-ahead for the sale of 3,000 precision-guided GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs to Saudi Arabia, in a deal worth $290 million.

CHINA - China toughened its language towards Taiwan on Thursday, warning after recent stepped up military activities near the island that “independence means war” and that its armed forces Taiwan, claimed by China as its own territory, reported multiple Chinese fighter jets and bombers entering its southwestern air defence identification zone last weekend, prompting Washington to urge Beijing to stop pressuring Taiwan. China believes that Taiwan’s democratically-elected government is moving the island towards a declaration of formal independence, though Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has repeatedly said it is already an independent country called the Republic of China, its formal name. Asked at a monthly news briefing about the air force’s recent activities, Chinese Defence Ministry spokesman Wu Qian said Taiwan is an inseparable part of China and they were acting in response to provocation and foreign interference.

USA - The US Department of Homeland Security declared a nationwide terrorism alert Wednesday, citing the potential threat from domestic anti-government extremists opposed to Joe Biden as president. "Information suggests that some ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence," the department said. The National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin said a heightened threat of attack "will persist in the weeks following the successful presidential inauguration," which took place on January 20. "DHS does not have any information to indicate a specific, credible plot," it said.

ISRAEL - Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi said on Tuesday that he ordered the military to draw up new plans to attack Iran’s nuclear program. He also warned the new Biden administration against reviving the Iran nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA. “I have ordered the IDF to prepare a number of operational plans, in addition to the existing ones,” Kohavi said. “We are studying these plans and we will develop them over the next year.” Kohavi’s comments are just the latest threatening comments towards Iran from Israeli officials. Earlier this month, an Israeli minister from the Likud party said Israel will have to attack Iran if the Biden administration returns to the JCPOA.

USA - State Representative Kyle Biedermann, a Republican, filed House Bill 1359, likewise recognized as the Texas Independence Referendum Act. Voters would vote in a referendum on November 2, 2021, on whether the state should leave the United States and “establish an independent republic,” the act states. The Texas Nationalist Movement noted the filing, explaining it “would give Texans an opportunity to head to the polls in November of 2021 and start the process of reasserting our status as an independent nation.” Texas withdrew from the United States in 1861, entering the Confederacy. Texas rejoined the United States after the Civil War.

USA - Retail investors have banded together to turn over the tables on Wall Street, and it has created a wild frenzy that is making headlines all over the globe. Unprecedented short squeezes have pushed the share prices of GameStop, AMC, Macy’s and BlackBerry to insane heights, and prominent voices in the financial world are complaining that trading in those stocks has become completely divorced from the fundamentals. In fact, these young retail investors are actually being accused of turning the market into “a video game”. Infamous investor Michael Burry, who made crazy amounts of money betting against the housing market during the last financial crisis, even had the gall to claim that recent trading in GameStop was “unnatural, insane, and dangerous”. Of course Burry is right, but the truth is that the entire market has been transformed into a giant casino and has been “unnatural, insane, and dangerous” for a very long time. If the entire market fell 50 percent tomorrow, stock prices would still be overpriced.

USA - ‘This time, activists intend to DESTROY the system from within’. The raging battle between Wall Street hedge funds and retail traders organized on Reddit over companies such as GameStop and AMC has stolen the spotlight this week. RT’s Max Keiser explains what’s it all about. “The fraud on Wall Street that’s been building for many years got so incredibly out of hand, and it got so obvious, that it caught the attention of social media day-traders, who pounced on a hedge fund’s vulnerability – from engaging in too much fraud – and they killed it,” Keiser says.

USA - Short-selling investors lost a staggering $70.8 billion this month, according to financial data analytics firm Ortex. Their losses were partly driven by small traders pumping money into stocks like GameStop. To put the loss in perspective, $70.87 billion is half a billion dollars more than the GDP of Slovenia, according to CIA statistics.

USA - If capitulating to the trans lobby is the best Joe Biden can do in his first week in power, ailing America is truly doomed. The Democrats are incapable of dealing with the real issues facing the US. Welcome to the brave new transgender world, where mothers are ‘gestational carriers’ and males identifying as females win all the ‘women’s’ sports events. In America and Australia, both ailing and faltering liberal democracies, it has been an eventful week for transgender activists and their cohorts, small in number though they are. President Biden in his first week in office has fervently embraced the transgender cause.

ISRAEL - New US President Joe Biden supports a two-state solution in an attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the acting US Ambassador to the UN, Richard Mills, told the Security Council on Tuesday. "Under the new administration, the policy of the US will be to support a mutually agreed two-state solution in which Israel lives in peace and security alongside a viable Palestinian state," Mills said. The acting UN envoy added that US policy remains the "best way" to ensure Israel's future as a democratic and Jewish state, while guaranteeing peace and security for Palestine, although success is dependent on the engagement of both sides. Mills pledged that the US would call on the two nations to halt tactics such as the annexation of territory, settlement activities and the incitement of violence.

USA - Joe Biden seems keen to reassert the US’s role as ‘global policeman’. But this doesn’t reflect the way the world has evolved, and a position that doesn’t assume American primacy would help in avoiding unnecessary conflicts. In 1991, US President George H W Bush proclaimed a “new world order” on the eve of the Gulf War. The speech marked a turning point in history. The Soviet Union was on its last legs, and Ba’athist Iraq under Saddam Hussein was about to feel the brunt of America’s now undisputed global dominance, having occupied Kuwait. For the senior President Bush, the arrival of US unipolarity and the dawn of a “new American century” would give his country an open canvas to implement its vision across the entire world, and thus establish its position as the ‘global policeman’. Thirty years have since passed. The world has changed, but America’s sense of self-perception has not. But we no longer live in a world of unending American primacy...

USA - Reform UK leader Nigel Farage accused President Joe Biden of being “in complete denial” about violence committed by far-left movements like Black Lives Matter and Antifa. The Brexit leader said that Biden’s calls for unity will ring hollow if the president fails to acknowledge the left-wing violence that has plagued America over the past year and fails to face the problem. Farage said that “Joe Biden is completely in denial about Antifa,” pointing to Biden’s claim in the presidential debate that Antifa is just an “idea“. “He better get out of denial pretty quickly,” Mr Farage warned, saying: “He better recognize that there is wrong on both sides of this… but the storming of the Capitol is just one very bad example compared to dozens that have been committed by Antifa and others.”

GERMANY - The German Green Party foundation published an appeal calling for a "substantial increase" in the German military budget and for maintaining US nuclear weapons in Germany. "Nuclear-sharing is a core element of the strategic connection" between the USA and Germany, according to the appeal, published on the webpage of the Green Party's Heinrich-Böll-Foundation on the occasion of US President Biden's inauguration. The "authors and signatories" include the chairwoman of the Green Foundation as well as a retired Bundeswehr lieutenant general, who, in 2014, as a high-ranking NATO functionary was in charge of NATO's realignment against Russia. The Greens, who are still reputed to be able to integrate and politically neutralize certain factions formerly involved in the peace movement, have for some time been increasingly reaching out to the Bundeswehr. For years they have been particularly popular among those in the top income bracket. Spearheading the defense of western hegemony in the global power struggle, the Greens have positioned themselves as adversaries of Russia and China.