USA - “Have you ever been depressed as a physician?” I asked 220 doctors. Ninety percent stated yes. Yet few seek professional help. Here’s what depressed doctors do (when nobody’s looking). Some drink alcohol, exercise obsessively, even steal psychiatric meds. Still more shocking - I discovered that 75% of med students (and new doctors) are now on psychiatric medications. “I was told by the psychologist at my med school’s campus assistance program, that 75% of the class of 175 people were on antidepressants,” shares psychiatrist Dr Jaya V Nair. “He wasn’t joking. How broken is the system, that doctors have to be pushed into illness in order to be trained to do their job?”

USA - More people died from abortions in 2018 than any other cause of death in the world. According to LifeNews, data compiled by Worldometers reveal that approximately 42 million abortions occurred around the world last year, making it the leading cause of death. Deaths from abortion exceeded those from cancer, HIV/Aids, suicide, and car accidents. Those 42 million abortion deaths are not included in the total death count worldwide, which was 59 million. Therefore, the correct total number of deaths worldwide in 2018 is approximately 101 million. In the United States, abortion rates have been declining for several years but it is still one of the leading causes of death in the US. An estimated 1 million babies are aborted each year in the US.

EUROPE - Civil unrest has broken out in France as a global economic downturn is just getting underway. The significance of this warning sign should not be underestimated. The Yellow Vest Protests in France (les gilets jaunes) were never about a fuel tax. This was made clear when Macron caved in to their initial demands and cancelled it. Nor is this merely an expression of Macron’s unpopularity (though a 25% approval rating certainly doesn’t help).

EUROPE - Right-wing populist parties in Europe have been gaining strength for years. Now, they hope to use European Parliament elections in May as a springboard for gaining greater influence in the EU. Surveys indicate they may be successful.

UK - A group of Remainer MPs will attempt to stop a no deal Brexit by starving the Treasury of funds which could lead to “total paralysis” of the Government. The MPs are set to vote on two amendments to the Finance Bill, which grants funds to the Treasury to spend on implementing no deal arrangements, on Tuesday. Labour’s Yvette Cooper MP, who leads the group that includes former Tory ministers Nicky Morgan, Oliver Letwin, and Nick Boles, said, “Our amendment would block some of the Treasury’s no-deal powers unless parliament has explicitly voted for no deal or unless the government has requested an extension of article 50.” Tory MP Peter Bone told Sky News, “There was no question, that I remember, on the referendum about a ‘deal’ or not; it was ‘leave’ or ‘remain.’ And the way you leave is to come out on the 29th of March.”

USA - President Donald Trump gave a long-overdue lesson to the White House press corps about the Constitution’s limits on executive power — limits the media largely ignored under President Barack Obama, because they agreed with Obama’s policies and wished to see him succeed politically.

AFRICA - Back in 1885, to much fanfare, the General Act of the Berlin Conference launched the Scramble for Africa which saw the partition of the continent, formerly a loose aggregation of various tribes, into the countries that currently make up the southern continent, by the dominant superpowers (all of them European) of the day. Subsequently Africa was pillaged, plundered, and in most places, left for dead. And so the continent languished…  until 2012 when what we then dubbed as the "Beijing Conference" quietly took place, and to which only Goldman Sachs, which too has been quietly but very aggressively expanding in Africa, was invited.

MIDDLE EAST - For far too long, Arab nations and Iran have not been called to account for their role in forcing hundreds of thousands of Jews to flee their homes in Arab countries, mostly without enough time to take their possessions or sell their property, following the founding of the Jewish state in 1948.

USA - The new Congress that was sworn in Thursday afternoon is significantly more religious and Christian than the nation it represents, according to an analysis of religions claimed by House and Senate members. Protestants and Catholics are tops, and the 116th Congress includes the first two Muslim women ever to serve in the House. According to Pew, Christians are “overrepresented in Congress,” at 88.2 percent. Overall, 71 percent of all US adults are Christian. There are 34 of the Jewish faith in the House and Senate, or 6.4 percent. In the US, just 2 percent are Jewish.

USA - Long thought to be divorced from the brain, the immune system turns out to be intimately involved in its functioning. For decades anatomy textbooks taught that the two most complicated systems in the body - the brain and the immune system - existed in almost complete isolation from each other. By all accounts, the brain focused on the business of operating the body, and the immune system focused on defending it. In healthy individuals, the twain never met. Only in certain cases of disease or trauma did cells from the immune system enter the brain, and when they did so, it was to attack.

UK - Prime Minister Theresa May’s “worst deal in history” with the European Union has suffered another blow as polling reveals her party membership would prefer to leave the bloc with no deal at all. The deal Mrs May has negotiated with the EU, which would involve a lengthy “transition” period in which Britain would essentially become a non-voting member-state, possibly followed by a “backstop” relationship in which the EU would be allowed to effectively control its customs and external trade arrangements, regulatory rulebook, and more, has found little favour in Parliament, which must ratify it for it to take effect.

USA - Just after reclaiming the gavel in the House, Nancy Pelosi (Democrat for California) has stoked anti-Russian sentiment and so-far unvindicated claims of collusion, calling the US president's contacts with Russian leader Vladimir Putin "dangerous." "I think that the president's relationship with thugs all over the world is appalling," Pelosi responded, receiving a thunderous round of applause from the audience that muffled her next words. “Vladimir Putin, really? Really? I think it's dangerous.” Democrats and even some hardline Republicans picked on Trump for cozying up to Putin, calling his behavior "nothing short of treasonous." Mainstream media, incensed over the fact that neither Putin nor Trump attacked each other during the final press conference, branded the US leader's performance "disgraceful" and "a political victory for the Kremlin."

USA - For four decades, Germany has sent pilots to the United States for training. On May 1, 1996, this bilateral military cooperation took an important step forward when Defense Secretary Perry and German Defense Minister Rühe activated the German Air Force Tactical Training Center (TTC) at Holloman Air Force Base (AFB) in New Mexico. There are several important reasons for Germany's decision to invest in the TTC.

GERMANY - German army admits most of its newly acquired military hardware is faulty and unfit for service. Germany’s Armed Forces are most likely to stay underequipped for the next decade or so, the German Defense Chief has admitted. Meanwhile, the units are stuck with sharing gear and vehicles. At least nine brigades in the German Armed Forces, known as Bundeswehr, lack the necessary equipment and arms, the military Inspector General Eberhard Zorn said, adding that they are expected to be “fully equipped” no sooner than in 13 years – by 2031. The lack of spare parts for the military equipment also remains one of the major concerns. At the same time, he was pretty confident that Germany would be able to maintain its status of one of the NATO leading military forces through all these years by redistributing the existing equipment between its units.

GERMANY - The German government has mounted an aggressive campaign to encourage illegal migrants to leave - bribing them with free rent for a year in their home countries. "Your country. Your future. Now!” read billboards in seven languages, plastered in nearly 2,500 locations across 80 German cities, reports the National Post. As rejected asylum claims pile up - and arrivals have normalized since a flood of 700,000 migrants three years ago, the billboard campaign is aimed at the roughly 235,000 people who are still required to leave the country according to the interior ministry. Of more than 20,000 scheduled airport repatriations in 2018, just half of them appeared to take flights back home.