TURKEY - The deputy chairman of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party says the US is working to prolong the Ukraine war for “its own benefit”. Despite its nominal status as an ally of the United States and European countries like Greece, which it regularly threatens, through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) alliance, Turkey has largely side-stepped the Western sanctions war with Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, and even taken advantage of the situation to bolster its economic relationship with Moscow.

GERMANY - The West should do its best to prevent an escalation between Russia and NATO, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Saturday, while stressing his belief that it is necessary to continue providing Ukraine with arms to fight Russia. Speaking at a conference of the Social Democratic Party in the southern German city of Friedrichshafen, Scholz claimed that many people “are scared, and have reasons for it.” While pledging to continue supporting Ukraine militarily, he noted that Western countries should “be concerned that there is no escalation that could lead to a war between Russia and NATO.”

GERMANY - The president of the German Bishops’ Conference said Friday that he will continue blessing gay couples and will allow his priests to do so as well. Bishop Georg Bätzing’s public rejection of the Vatican ban on such blessings was all the more remarkable since it was issued at a press conference in Rome shortly after a meeting between Pope Francis and the German bishops.

USA - Disney ousted chief executive Bob Chapek on Sunday and announced that it had brought back former CEO Bob Iger to once again take the reins. The change, a dramatic turn of events for one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, was effective immediately, Disney said in a statement. Chapek spent two years as CEO, a period that saw Wall Street concerned about rising expenses at the company. Disney’s stock has fallen 41 percent this year. Iger, who previously served as Disney’s CEO for 15 years, increasing the company’s market capitalization five-fold during that period, has pledged to return as CEO for at least two years, the statement said.

USA - Despite what the documentaries tell you, a plant-based lifestyle isn't better for your health and it certainly won't save the planet. In recent years, we’ve been told by Netflix documentaries, vegan activists and companies selling plant-based products that going vegan is the single best thing you can do to improve your own health, the planet’s and the wellbeing of the animals we share it with.

UK - Vulnerable children fighting eating disorders and psychological problems which make them hate themselves, their bodies and their lives are being targeted by 'coaches' online who teach them how to starve themselves and 'inspire' them with mean abuse. The coaches use a technique called “meanspo” – mean inspiration - calling children disgusting and fat to get them to lose weight they don't need to lose.

VATICAN - In his 2016 letter on marriage and the family, Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), Francis said that young people should be taught “respect and appreciation” for sexual differences, as a way of overcoming self-absorption. Especially when experiencing difficulties with gender identity, “the young need to be helped to accept their own body as it was created,” he insisted. Thinking that we enjoy “absolute power over our own bodies,” Francis warned, leads to the delusion that “we enjoy absolute power over creation.”

USA - Six-time, best-selling financial author James Rickards says the upcoming book “Sold Out” lays out the case why a huge crash is already a certainty sometime in 2023. In a nutshell, broken supply chains have already caused big inflation, and the Fed is raising rates to tamp it back down. On top of the perfect storm of inflation and prolonged supply problems, we have the recent meltdown of the FTX crypto currency exchange. Rickards says, “It is definitely going to cause sequential collapses in the crypto world, but will it jump the fence into the broader financial world? My expectation is it will, but it can take six months or more to play out… We probably have an acute global financial crisis coming anyway. If FTX never existed, I would say we are staring at a worse financial crisis than 2008. Throw FTX on top of that, and it’s like throwing gasoline on a fire. It will accelerate the fire. So, we’re probably going to have problems anyway, but the FTX implosion just makes it worse.”

QATAR - The Qatari royal family are pressuring Fifa for a complete ban on selling alcohol at all World Cup stadiums, just two days before the controversial tournament kicks off. The host nation - where alcohol sales are typically restricted to foreigners drinking in licenced hotels and restaurants, or non-Muslim residents with special permits in their homes - has put significant pressure on Fifa to stop selling beer at the eight World Cup stadiums.

FRANCE - The French Church is haunted and hamstrung by its latest clerical sexual abuse scandal, both by the shocking admissions of misdeeds by a cardinal and a bishop and confusion about what local Church authorities could reveal about the secrets they know, our Paris-based correspondent Tom Heneghan writes in our lead foreign news story this week.

INDONESIA - On November 15–16, 2022, the Group of Twenty (G20) met in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia, for their seventeenth annual summit, under the theme ‘Recover Together, Recover Stronger.’ The G20 is a summit of the world’s major economies. Its members are responsible for more than 80% of the world’s gross domestic product, 75% of global trade, and 60% of the world’s total population.

USA - We’re entering the final days of COP27, the UN’s annual climate summit, and it’s safe to say that this year’s edition was disappointing — to say the least. It was widely panned by climate experts and activists and drew intense criticism for being sponsored by the likes of Coca-Cola, the world's leading plastic polluter.

GERMANY - Once upon a time, the highly advanced nations of western Europe were the peak of human civilization. Sadly, that hasn’t been true for a very long time, and now major cities all over the European continent are becoming rotting, decaying hellholes. Everywhere you look, there is human degradation, but one country is worse than them all. Ironically, it is actually the European nation with the largest and strongest economy. Germany has openly embraced just about every form of evil that you can possibly imagine, but in this article I want to focus on what they are doing to young women. Legalized prostitution is practiced on an industrial scale by the Germans, and this has earned them the title “the Bordello of Europe”… It is a hard-won title. With more than 3,000 brothels across the country, and 500 in Berlin alone, its sex trade is worth more than £11 billion per year.

UK - British MI5 Director General Ken McCallum delivered a sober annual threat assessment in London Wednesday, underscoring a broad variety of national security threats from Russia's Ukraine invasion to China's growing power, Iranian instability and transnational terrorism. McCallum said in a speech that the British intelligence service MI5 is making "the biggest shifts in a generation" in dealing with complex threats posed by nation-states. "The West is in a contest in which our security, values and democratic institutions are at stake... because of the actions of authoritarian regimes, not because of the people living under those regimes."

ISRAEL - The new Netanyahu government's 64-seat majority assures it the kind of stability that the country hasn’t seen in years. That is the good news, despite the sour feelings among almost half of all Israelis over Netanyahu’s return to power. President Isaac Herzog said in his speech to the Knesset, “The citizens of Israel today are proud of their country, which this year will celebrate 75 years of independence, and they believe in the righteousness of its cause, but at the same time, to tell you the truth, they are exhausted from the internal strife and its fallout."