USA - President Trump said the United States will never become a socialist country in his 2019 State of the Union address. "We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom — and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair," Trump said Tuesday night. "Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country," the president said. "America was founded on liberty and independence - not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free."

VATICAN - Pope Francis said today that the Vatican would be willing to mediate in the Venezuela crisis, but only if both sides asked for help. The pontiff said preliminary steps to try to bring the warring factions closer together should be taken before mediation from the head of the Catholic church was used. Francis has acknowledged receiving a request from the embattled Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro to help relaunch talks to end the country's political crisis, but is ruling out any involvement unless opposition leader Juan Guaido also requests it. Today the pontiff said he had not read Maduro's letter, which he said arrived via diplomatic pouch.

GERMANY - German factory orders unexpectedly dropped for a second month in December, adding to signs that Europe’s largest economy is facing a more protracted loss in momentum. The 1.6 percent decline, the steepest in six months, may feed speculation that Germany, once Europe’s major growth engine, contracted in the final quarter of 2018. Since the statistics office predicted a “slight” increase in gross domestic product, data have painted a more downbeat picture, and Deutsche Bank argued on Tuesday that the German economy was drifting toward recession amid deteriorating business sentiment.

GERMANY - Germany’s cabinet has approved a revision to the country’s controversial, Nazi-era abortion law, a move that – pending parliamentary approval – would allow doctors and medical associations to provide women with more information about where and how to seek abortions.

USA - Is it okay for the US government to pay for scientific experiments involving bizarre mouse/human hybrid creatures that were created by grafting aborted baby parts on to mice?  Needless to say, the answer to that question is self-evident.  Our tax dollars are being used to fund experiments that are so sickening that it is difficult to find words to describe how evil they are. 

UK - UK cabinet ministers have secretly held talks on plans to delay Brexit by eight weeks, the Telegraph newspaper reported late on Tuesday. The delay would postpone Brexit to May 24. Currently, Britain is due to leave the European Union on March 29. Ministers are hoping the EU will agree to a two-month “grace period” after March 29 in case Prime Minister Theresa May’s deal passes through parliament to provide the additional time for necessary legislation, the report said. May will travel to Brussels on Thursday to tell EU leaders they must accept legally binding changes to the Irish border arrangements of Britain’s divorce deal or face the prospect of a disorderly no-deal Brexit.

UK - The EU attacked Britain’s local government structure and went about seizing control over several areas including the environment and health and safety regulations, an investigative author claimed in a throwback documentary.

EUROPE - The EU laid bare its diminishing clout on the world stage after it failed to respond to three global crises in one day because of infighting among member states. Brussels chiefs have long been battling for sweeping reforms to bind the bloc into an ever closer union in the face of rising populism across the continent and Brexit. But in just 24 jours the European superstate displayed its failure to unite amid squabbling and disagreements among the EU27, which resulted in complete inaction to respond to global crises.

USA - Is the United States about to be dragged into another pointless war that will drag on for years?  Have we learned nothing from the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq?  When Juan Guaido boldly declared himself the new leader of Venezuela during an opposition rally on January 23rd, everybody realized that something was up.  There is no way that he ever would have done that unless he knew in advance that the United States was going to publicly back him. 

USA - The US national debt is wildly out of control, and nobody in Washington seems to care.  According to the US Treasury, the federal government is currently $21,933,491,166,604.77 in debt.  In just a few days, that figure will cross the 22 trillion dollar mark.  Over the last 10 years, we have added more than 11 trillion dollars to the national debt, and that means that it has been growing at a pace of more than a trillion dollars a year.  To call this a major national crisis would be a massive understatement, and yet there is absolutely no urgency in Washington to address this absolutely critical issue.  We are literally destroying the financial future of this nation, but most Americans don’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation that we are facing. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the national debt and interest on that debt will both explode at an exponential rate in future years if we stay on the path that we are currently on. 

USA - “Trump wants to make America great again and I’m all for it and I’m behind him,” Robertson assured listeners. He then laid out his own message: “I’m trying to get people to see that America is never going to be great again until they become at least godly again, that’s my point.” The first lie Robertson debunks in the new book is the claim “God is dead.” Robertson pointed radio listeners to biblical text here paraphrased saying there will be terrible times in the last days, that “people will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love.” 

USA - President Donald Trump called upon Congress to pass legislation that would prohibit late-term abortion past the time when science has shown an unborn baby can feel pain. “Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life,” the president said during his State of the Union Address Tuesday evening. “And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth: all children — born and unborn — are made in the holy image of God.” Trump contrasted the “beautiful image of a mother holding her infant child” with the “chilling displays” of New York legislators after Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law a bill that denies “personhood” to unborn babies and makes abortion on demand a fundamental right. A recent Marist poll found 75 percent of Americans want substantial restrictions on abortion, including 60 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of those who identify as “pro-choice.”

VATICAN - Pope Francis on Tuesday publicly acknowledged the scandal of priests and bishops sexually abusing nuns and vowed to do more to fight the problem, the latest sign that there is no end in sight to the Catholic Church’s abuse crisis — and that it now has a reckoning from the #MeToo movement. Francis admitted to the problem for the first time in public during a news conference while returning to Rome from the United Arab Emirates. The acknowledgment comes just two weeks before he hosts an unprecedented gathering of bishops to craft a global response to the scandal of priestly predators who target children and the superiors who covered up the crimes.

EUROPE - Led by an appallingly incompetent German management, the European Union will most probably come out terminally fractured after next May’s parliamentary elections. The political forces already at work in a number of countries will go back to nation states and a free-trading area, abandoning the pipe dream of a European statehood and sovereignty. That may not scuttle the euro because such a free-trading area needs a common currency to be a genuine customs union and a homogeneous single market. Britain's idea of a united Europe has never been more than a free-trading area. London has in effect restated the fundamental question of what is a European project: A Europe of sovereign nation states, or a federal European super-state.

GERMANY - In Tokyo today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will conclude a statement of principles on intelligence service cooperation with Japan more closely linking Germany to espionage structures directed against China. According to reports, the agreement will initially regulate the exchange of intelligence information, along the lines of similar agreements Japan has concluded also with the USA, Australia, India, and NATO. Berlin and Tokyo are thereby drawing closer to the US-led "Five Eyes" intelligence network, which launched an international campaign against Beijing last summer. As the Western campaign against China gains momentum, the German government, together with Japan, is also seeking to make a stand against the USA, staking its claim to an independent global policy. Therefore, Berlin is taking joint action, not only with Japan, but with Beijing as well against the Trump administration's punitive tariffs, as Norbert Röttgen, CDU foreign policy maker explained.