IRAN - Iran's supreme leader today hit back at the US and warned his country would not hesitate to strike after Donald Trump said Tehran would pay a 'big price' for Hezbollah's assault on the American embassy in Baghdad. 'I and the government and the nation of Iran strongly condemn this American crime,' Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said of US strikes which killed 25 members of Kataeb Hezbollah in Iraq on Sunday night.

VATICAN - Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, the Vatican’s former doctrinal czar, warned against Catholics who long for a “meta-religion” of world unity in a January 1 homily in Phoenix. Some Catholics want the Church to modernize, abandoning its doctrines for the sake of building a “new religion of world unity,” Müller warned thousands of Catholics gathered in Phoenix for the 2020 Student Leadership Summit hosted by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS). “In order to be admitted to this meta-religion, the only price the Church would have to pay is giving up her truth claim,” the cardinal told the students. “No big deal, it seems, as the relativism dominant in our world anyway rejects the idea that we could actually know the truth and presents itself as guarantor of peace between all world views and world religions.” The post-Christian world welcomes these efforts to remake the Church “as a convenient civil religion,” Müller said.

USA - Sarah Hurwitz, a former speechwriter for Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Michelle Obama, described the “original version[s] of the Constitution” and the Old Testament as “evil” and “an abomination” in an interview with David Axelrod, chief strategist of Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns and a senior advisor to the president during the first term of the Obama administration.

HURWITZ: “The Torah, which is the first five books of what Christians call the Old Testament, it’s 2,500 year old. News flash, it’s really old. Constitution, more than 200 years old. If we lived by the original version of the Constitution, that would be evil. It would be an abomination."

MIDDLE EAST - It doesn't take a crystal ball to see that the Middle East's 2020 will be tumultuous. Libya's civil war has taken a dangerous turn, with Russian mercenaries and Turkish forces joining the fray as General Khalifa Hifter's forces push into the capital. Yemen's still ravaged by economic blockade and war, despite recent efforts on all sides to de-escalate the conflict. Syria's civil war continues to metastasize, with a massive new wave of refugees fleeing violence in Idlib. Large-scale popular protests are challenging Iraq's government, which is bracing for fallout from the growing confrontation between the United States and Iran. Israel and the Palestinian territories could dramatically change their relationship, as the prospects of a two-state solution dissolve. And protest movements throughout the region could shake up half a dozen regimes.

IRAN - After the events that we witnessed on Tuesday, there will be no going back to the way things used to be. A cataclysmic war in the Middle East is not going to benefit anyone, but at this point it is difficult to see how one will be avoided. By directly attacking the US embassy in Baghdad, the Iranians and their allies crossed all the red lines. The US embassy is considered to be US soil, and if President Trump does not respond militarily to this brazen attack on our sovereignty he is going to look like a total wimp to the rest of the world. But then of course Iran and their allies will respond to the attack that Trump launches, and the US will be forced to escalate the conflict even more.

PERU - Hundreds of people queued to be 'cleansed' by guinea pigs in a bizarre ritual ahead of New Year's Eve. Spiritual well-wishers in Lima, Peru, lined the streets as they waited to meet shaman Maria Ramos in a bid to cure and prevent diseases ahead of 2020. Locals attended the Feria de los Deseos, also known as the 'Fare of Wishes', on Monday. Huge crowds of residents patiently waited to be greeted by Maria, who uses rare guinea pigs during the ceremony. She said: "A cleansing with the black guinea pig to take out the bad energies, the bad vibes, has always been done by our ancestors."

USA - America’s cities are being bought up, bit by bit, by anonymous shell companies using piles of cash. Modest single-family homes, owned for generations by families, now are held by corporate vehicles with names that appear to be little more than jumbles of letters and punctuation – such as SC-TUSCA LLC, CNS1975 LLC – registered to law offices and post office boxes miles away. New glittering towers filled with owned but empty condos look down over our cities, as residents below struggle to find any available housing.

USA - Rabbi Jeffrey Myers is condemning violence against people of the Jewish faith following an attack over the weekend at a Chanukah celebration in New York. The knife ambush happened Saturday night at the home where more than 100 Orthodox Jews were gathered, reports CBS News’ Tom Hanson. Witnesses said a man stormed in with a weapon and his face covered. Five people were stabbed, including a rabbi’s son and an elderly man who is now in critical condition. Over the weekend, New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo called the attack an act of “domestic terrorism.” Now, the leader of the Tree of Life congregation in Pittsburgh says we “cannot allow terror to win.”

IRAQ - Dozens of Iraqi Shiite militiamen and their supporters broke into the US Embassy compound in Baghdad on Tuesday, smashing a main door and setting fire to a reception area, prompting tear gas and sounds of gunfire, angered over deadly US airstrikes targeting the Iran-backed militia.

AUSTRALIA - The bushfires in Australia are now so big that they are generating their own weather, in the form of giant thunderstorms that start more fires, according to the Bureau of Meteorology in Victoria. "Pyro-cumulonimbus clouds have developed to altitudes over 16km in East #Gippsland this afternoon. These fire-induced storms can spread fires through lightning, lofting of embers and generation of severe wind outflows," the bureau tweeted on Monday. Satellite photography shows the intense smoke generating atmospheric clouds.

UK - Boris Johnson is being urged to overhaul Britain’s £14.6 billion foreign aid programme after it emerged tens of millions were being pumped into the massive economies of China and India which are both wealthy enough to run their own nuclear and space operations. Both China and India boast economies significantly bigger than Britain’s causing many to question why UK tax-payers’ money is sent to the Governments in Beijing and New Delhi. China’s is the second most powerful financial nation on the planet with an economy almost four times bigger than the UK economy. Beijing’s military spending is also almost four times higher than Britain’s defence budget. Eyebrows were raised when it emerged more than £151 million went to projects in China and India last year.

USA - Winter Storm Gage has left more than 30,000 people without power in the Midwest and forced a Massachusetts town to declare an emergency due to randomly falling trees. The National Weather Service (NWS) said Tuesday that widespread light to moderate snow will impact all of southeast Michigan throughout the morning. The snow in Detroit and other areas is expected to end by late afternoon. The storm dropped nearly 8 inches of snow along the Lake Michigan shore and most of Michigan's upper peninsula will see between 6 to 12 inches, with isolated areas seeing more than 18 inches. According to poweroutage.us, the state of Michigan alone has reported more than 30,000 outages. On Monday, the storm left more than 85,000 without power in Ohio.

UK - Microscopic pieces of plastic have been discovered in the most remote locations, from the depths of the ocean to Arctic ice. But these microplastics are also entering our bodies, from the plastic-infused water that we drink and the marine life that we consume as food. The study combined data from over 50 studies on the ingestion of microplastics – defined as plastic particles under five millimetres in size. Humans eat 250 grams of plastic every year - the equivalent of a heaped dinner plate’s worth of shredded plastic. Every week, we're consuming nearly 2,000 tiny pieces of plastic. This equates to 5 grams, the same as a credit card, and about the same weight as a plastic bottle cap. In a month we're consuming 21 grams of plastic, about the same weight as five casino dice and enough shredded plastic to fill a rice bowl halfway. Plastic does not biodegrade, but instead breaks down into smaller pieces, and ultimately ends up everywhere, including in the food chain.

GERMANY - So far, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has not been particularly ambitious with regard to EU affairs. But next year provides ample opportunity to make real progress. 2020 will be a big year for Germany when it comes to European affairs. Berlin will take over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union in July, but even before then German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has come out to push for a "strong and sovereign Europe." To make Europe a bigger player on the world stage, Maas called for a European Security Council to tackle foreign affairs and security issues — such a council could even include the post-Brexit United Kingdom.

GERMANY - 2019 has been a year of transition. It hasn’t brought a change of government. But it will be seen as the year that Angela Merkel virtually disappeared. ‘Where is the chancellor?’, the press asked in autumn, as her public interventions had become even rarer than usual. Merkel’s silence came at a time of economic insecurity, with much talk of a pending recession. (A recession seems to have been avoided, but the economy only grew by a meagre 1.5 per cent over the year).