USA - The Social Security system just took a massive hit — thanks to DOGE uncovering what could be one of the largest frauds in American history. With over 395 million Social Security numbers on file, you’d think there was some sort of miracle happening. But the US population? Around 334 million. That’s a discrepancy you can’t just ignore. This isn’t a technical glitch — this is fraud.

USA - The Treasury Department sent $4.7 trillion dollars of payments without an identification code that links a Treasury payment to a budget line item, DOGE announced Monday, making the payments “almost impossible” to trace. DOGE said the identification payment code, called TAS for Treasury Access Symbol, is now required — as of Saturday — to increase the “insight into where money is actually going. Thanks to @USTreasury for the great work,” DOGE posted on X:

JAPAN - The cracks in Japan’s banking sector just split wide open. Norinchukin Bank, Japan’s second-largest, is teetering on the edge of liquidation, sending shockwaves through the financial world. The collapse of this massive institution could spell disaster not just for Japan but for global markets. Norinchukin has been bleeding money at an alarming rate. In the last quarter alone, the bank posted a staggering net loss of 500 billion yen. Total losses for this fiscal year? A jaw-dropping 1.4 trillion yen — about $9.2 billion. The culprit? A crumbling securities portfolio that’s shrunk from 38 trillion yen to 35.6 trillion yen in just months. The numbers paint a grim picture, but the reality might be even worse. Investors are watching closely, knowing that when major financial institutions start falling, panic can spread fast.

USA - ABC News is making the wrong kind of headlines. “BREAKING: Hamas will release the bodies of four deceased hostages on Thursday and six living hostages on Saturday, Hamas and Israel confirmed,” the post said. “Four more dead hostages will be released next week, according to Israel.” In a responding post, Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, slammed the deliberately cloudy language. “Do you mean ‘murdered,’ @ABC?” he wrote. “Civilian hostages, little children, murdered by the evil, brutal scum of Hamas.”

GERMANY - The vice-president’s speech in Munich was a devastating indictment of the Davos-smooching class – and made Keir Starmer look inept. The assembled Eurocrats were braced for a telling off from their American sugar daddy (for spending shamefully little on defence and way too much on welfare), but the vice-president had come to deliver an altogether more painful lecture. A car driven by an asylum seeker had just mown down a crowd of innocent Germans, including a two-year-old child. It was a terrible story, as Vance acknowledged, but one which was all too familiar and, tragically, stupidly, self-inflicted. The greatest threat to Europe’s security, he warned, came “from within” as Western values were abandoned.

SAUDI ARABIA - US secretary of state Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz and special envoy Steve Witkoff left their meeting with the Russian delegation in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Tuesday mildly pleased with how the discussions went. Witkoff, who has fast become one of president Donald Trump’s most trusted emissaries, called the session “positive, upbeat, constructive”. Washington and Moscow agreed to establish a mechanism through which long-term disputes between the two countries – of which there are many – can be worked on. Ending the war in Ukraine is first and foremost.

RUSSIA - Russia's foreign minister has blasted Keir Starmer's peacekeeping plans and says troops from Nato nations can never patrol in Ukraine 'under some other flag'. Sergey Lavrov said it was 'completely unacceptable' for peacekeepers to patrol the Russia-Ukraine border under any deal. 'Any appearance by armed forces under some other flag does not change anything. It is of course completely unacceptable,' he said. And his deputy Alexander Grushko added: 'Under whatever guise they appear there, this is a step towards escalation.' Moscow issued the chilling warning after the PM said he was prepared to deploy British troops to Ukraine to help police any ceasefire deal.

VATICAN - Pope Francis has been diagnosed with bilateral pneumonia, the Vatican said. The pope, 88, was admitted to Rome’s Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic hospital on Friday after experiencing symptoms of bronchitis for several days. The Vatican has now said new scans show the pope has ‘the onset of bilateral pneumonia’, but added that he ‘remains in good spirits’. It comes as the pope is reportedly rushing to tie up loose ends and secure his legacy ahead of the race to succeed him. Francis is said to have been experiencing severe pain during his current hospital stay and has confided to those closest to him that he will not make it this time, according to a Politico report.

ISRAEL - Let’s wait one more day before the inevitable headlines blare out with the bad news. We can’t bring ourselves to acknowledge that the unfathomable may have arrived. So we won’t… for as long as we can. Reports from the media were alight with headlines about the details of the planned return of dead hostages on Thursday, as declared by Hamas on Tuesday. Thursday will come soon enough, and we’ll know. But for now, we can still look at those faces, and hold a crumb of hope that the reports prove to be wrong.

MIDDLE EAST - The Kan public broadcaster reports that Hamas has submitted an offer to Israel to release all hostages at once in phase two, rather than spreading out the releases as the sides agreed to do during phase one. The offer is made as Hamas is seeking to prevent an Israeli return to the war and is prioritizing its own survival over the issue of security prisoners who would also be released in phase two, Kan says. Fifty-nine Israelis will remain in captivity after the completion of phase one of the deal, 24 of whom are believed to be alive. The other 35 have been confirmed dead by Israeli authorities.

UK - Millions spent on ‘inclusivity’ projects to save seas — including in landlocked nations. Despite targeting plastic pollution in seas and oceans, some countries that received cash — Zimbabwe and Uganda — are landlocked. Another target country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country of close to a million square miles, has a maritime coastline of about 35 miles. Joanna Marchong, investigations campaign manager of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “Taxpayers will think the scale of pointless projects funded by the government is a complete joke. Waste seems to run through every corner of the public sector, and hard-working Brits are only just seeing the tip of the iceberg. Ministers need to get serious, stop wasting cash on vanity projects and focus spending on fruitful change.”

RUSSIA - Just a week ago Russia was a pariah state, ostracised (by the West at least) and subject to strict sanctions on its economy and the movements of its leaders. Now, courtesy of Donald Trump, it is back at the table of big power politics, just where Vladimir Putin has always wanted to sit as an entitlement, not a favour. The implications of what has happened in the space of a few days can hardly be overstated. It has plunged Europe into a crisis that it should have foreseen and prepared for, but didn’t. Leaders looked at Trump’s first presidency and calculated that all the talk about leaving Nato and letting Europe sort out its own problems was bluster.

GERMANY - Germany’s economy is in the doldrums. Before Sunday’s federal elections, it’s become a truism to note the three underpinnings of the country’s economic might that have eroded in recent years: the end of the era of cheap Russian energy; the decline of Chinese demand for German wares; and the interruption to the low interest rates and undervalued currency that buttressed its export-led dominance.

UK - A yoga studio has opened on a quiet street near my house that used to host both a Post Office and convenience store. The new studio offers classes in all the usual stretching and modish contortion as well as breathwork and “sound healing”. That might seem rarefied, but it is coming to a high street near you too. Where my in-laws live in Essex, a tarot shop that took over one of many empty lots in the city centre appears to be thriving. What used to be called “woo woo” is not only a growth industry, it looks set to become mainstream.

UK - Kemi Badenoch has said the chicken nugget immigration case shows how migrants are weaponising the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to avoided deportation. The Conservative leader told the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London that Western civilisation had been “hacked” in recent decades because of “loopholes in liberalism”, including in the ECHR. Her comments came after The Telegraph exposed multiple cases of illegal migrants or convicted foreign criminals using human rights laws to remain in the UK or halt their deportations.