Michael Rainsborough: The End of the World Order as We Know It – Nice of You to Notice

For the past week the global commentariat has been behaving like someone who suddenly realises, halfway through his morning espresso, that his house burned down sometime last Tuesday and everyone else has been politely stepping around the ashes ever since.

Donald Trump announces, quite openly, that the United States wants to take Greenland, one way or another. Washington sharpens the tariff knife. NATO’s obituary is proclaimed yet again. The United States, we are solemnly informed, can no longer be trusted as an ally and that it is even a predatory state. The West is finished.

Cue panic. Cue Davos. Cue the anguished cries of people who have not had to think seriously about power since the mid-1980s.

Mike Butler: Climate, resources, wealth, control

A master plan by the world’s uber-wealthy elite to profit by controlling all resources, radically change the food we eat, transform the supply of electricity and dictate how we use it, and replace currency with a system of credits, is circulating and not taken seriously.

Agenda – their vision of the future 2025, a feature-length independent documentary written and produced by Mark Sharman, former United Kingdom broadcasting executive at ITV and Sky, provides more evidence.

Ele Ludemann: “Socialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon”

A few months after our second son died we got a phone call asking us if we would be interested in hosting an AFS student.

We were and a few months later a young Argentinean came to live with us for a year.

There is a huge element of luck in these relationships. We hit the jackpot, his family is now ours, they have all been to visit us and we have been to Argentina 11 times.

Barry Brill: For billionaires, climate lobbying is hot

There was once a time when climate change was about science. No longer.

It is now about money and politics. Not just some of it. All of it.

The peak event of the worldwide money-politics intersection is the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. The 2023 “Global Risks” meeting is being held this week – with a dominant theme (again) being the campaign to eliminate the use of fossil fuels.

Like COP meetings, the Davos meeting is the very epitome of hypocrisy.

More than a thousand private jet aeroplanes serviced last year’s meeting. As Greenpeace says: “The rich and powerful flock to Davos in ultra-polluting, socially inequitable private jets to discuss climate and inequality behind closed doors”.