The US president has kicked off his new term with another 'peace initiative' that is really just a gift for Israel.

Once again, US President Donald Trump has waded into the Palestinian issue, proposing radical solutions from a staunchly pro-Israel stance. The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, which came into effect on January 19, is set to last 42 days, during which both sides have committed to negotiating further steps towards a resolution. However, the US president expressed skepticism about its longevity, noting the scale of destruction in Gaza.

According to Trump, Gaza has been so thoroughly devastated that it needs to be rebuilt in an entirely different manner. He suggested that Arab nations such as Egypt and Jordan should take in more Palestinian refugees to help bring order to the region. During discussions with Jordan's King Abdullah II, Trump conveyed his desire for the kingdom to accommodate more people, describing the situation in Gaza as "a complete mess." He also intends to raise the issue with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Trump views the relocation of Gaza's residents to Arab countries as a temporary or even long-term solution. He believes it could offer Palestinians a "fresh start" and contribute to regional stability. However, official Jordanian sources, when commenting on his statement, did not mention the refugee issue - an omission that reflects the reception of Trump's proposals in the Arab world.

The Canadian PM has confirmed the suspension of duties for at least 30 days following a similar agreement between Mexico and the US.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced that the US will postpone the imposition of 25% tariffs on Canadian imports for at least 30 days, following discussions with US President Donald Trump.

The agreement was reached after a phone call between the two leaders on Monday, during which Canada committed to strengthening border security. The announcement follows Trump's decision on Saturday to sign executive orders imposing tariffs - 25% on imports from Mexico and Canada and 10% on imports from China - citing concerns over illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

"Proposed tariffs will be paused for at least 30 days while we work together," Trudeau said in a post on X. "Canada is implementing our $1.3 billion border plan - reinforcing the border with new choppers, technology, and personnel, enhanced coordination with our American partners, and increased resources to stop the flow of fentanyl."

Five years may seem insignificant in historical terms, yet January 2020 already feels like the distant past. The Covid-19 pandemic reshaped not only our daily lives but also the global socio-political landscape, marking the end of one era and the start of another.

The last Days of Peace

The 50th Anniversary Forum in Davos in January 2020 offered a snapshot of a world on the verge of transformation. Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, then at the height of her fame, dominated the spotlight as a symbol of left-leaning environmental activism. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump, the quintessential anti-globalist, stood in stark contrast, delivering his "America First" message to a room of cautious listeners. European elites clung to the hope that Trump's presidency would soon be overturned by a Democratic victory in the upcoming election.

Behind closed doors, however, the discussions revealed a different picture. Influential figures in politics, business, and culture privately admitted that global processes were increasingly slipping out of their control. Yet they still hoped that with collective effort and ingenuity, the course could be corrected.

Amid these musings, a growing shadow loomed - a new infection spreading in China. Few at Davos grasped the gravity of the situation, and most viewed the virus solely through the lens of its potential impact on China's economy, which the world relied on.

Looking back, it was the last "peaceful" Davos. In the years that followed, the agenda was dominated first by the pandemic, then by a series of escalating armed conflicts, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East.

Staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) were informed that its headquarters in Washington was closed Monday as tech billionaire Elon Musk said he was in the process of shutting down the agency that oversees foreign aid.

Musk claimed on social media in the dead of night that he'd run the extraordinary move by President Donald Trump and had his full backing.

"Agency personnel normally assigned to work at USAID headquarters will work remotely ... with the exception of personnel with essential on-site and building maintenance functions individually contacted by senior leadership," reads an early morning email, obtained by USA TODAY, notifying USAID staff of the closed office.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking to reporters in El Salvador, said he is the new acting director of USAID and has delegated the day-to-day responsibilities to another State Department official. He said many USAID functions will continue but it must be aligned with U.S. foreign policy and interests.

"USAID has sort of a history of just ignoring that and deciding that somehow they're a global charity separate from the national interests," Rubio said.

"To [Omidyar] it's about... integrating things together to give technocrats, business executives and government officials a God's-eye view of the world - to manage and control society more efficiently."

¬ Yasha Levine, author of Surveillance Valley: The Military History of the Internet

As we have seen in part one of this investigation, billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar has partnered closely with many of the U.S.-funded outfits that fulfill the role the CIA used to play during the Cold War in backing opposition media and civil society in countries targeted for regime change. However, Omidyar has also sought state-of-the-art design solutions from a shady U.S. government national security consulting firm with a myriad of ties to the hawkish D.C. foreign policy establishment.

In February of last year, USAID's Global Development Lab published a series of reports furnished for it by a small, Arlington, Virginia-based company focused on design solutions for national security problems, with a mere 10 employees listed on its website and eight on its LinkedIn page. Those reports caught the attention of journalist Michael Igoe at Devex on Tuesday.

The company, Frontier Design Group, analyzed the feasibility of essentially militarizing USAID. The report proposals like "Rapid Expeditionary Development" (RED) teams. Those teams would be embedded with U.S. Special Forces, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration outside of typical USAID areas of operation.

A recent USAID audit report found that some of its humanitarian programs for war-torn Syria and Iraq might have assisted terrorist groups. The assistance in question amounts to nearly $700 million.

The agency in charge of foreign aid provided by Washington has done a poor job to mitigate risks for its projects to end up in wrong hands, Official USAID Office of Inspector General (OIG) found. The paper, highlighting the risk of terrorists benefiting from US foreign assistance among other vulnerabilities, was published on September 25.

To provide help, USAID gives awards to public international organizations (PIOs) which then deal with the troubled areas. However, the way the organizations use the funds might have some flaws and does not fully comply with the 2008 State Department's guidance. The latter is aimed to secure the money from assistance programs doesn't land in the wrong hands helping terrorist groups, according to the report.

Revealed in an Associated Press (AP) investigation, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had for two years attempted to create and exploit a social network within Cuba for the purpose of sparking unrest and overthrowing the Cuban government. The program was an abject failure, primarily because the Cuban government took the necessary measures to investigate, interrogate, and otherwise disrupt what was foreign-backed sedition.

AP would reveal in its report titled, "US co-opted Cuba's hip-hop scene to spark change," that:

The program is laid out in documents involving Creative Associates International, a Washington, D.C., contractor paid millions of dollars to undermine Cuba's communist government. The thousands of pages include contracts, emails, preserved chats, budgets, expense reports, power points, photographs and passports.

The work included the creation of a "Cuban Twitter" social network and the dispatch of inexperienced Latin American youth to recruit activists, operations that were the focus of previous AP stories.

Far from the first time USAID and other US organizations claiming to be aiding in development but in fact engaged in political subversion, the Cuban program itself was based on another US-backed program used to topple the government of Serbia in 2000, AP would reveal.

The USAID operation involved money covertly funneled into Cuba through front companies and offshore banks. USAID, despite the evidence, has wholly denied the operation, as has other US organizations caught in blatant political subversion.

Regarding USAID's denial, AP would report:

"Any assertions that our work is secret or covert are simply false," USAID said in a statement Wednesday. Its programs were aimed at strengthening civil society "often in places where civic engagement is suppressed and where people are harassed, arrested, subjected to physical harm or worse."

If by "civil society," USAID means networks of political subversion operating in the interests of Wall Street and Washington, then that is precisely what USAID was doing in Cuba, and does elsewhere around the world. However, USAID's insistence that none of its work was "secret or covert" is simply a lie.

Allegations that the US government's leading aid provider is in fact a 'trojan horse' for regime change have circulated for years but were always strenuously denied. Now though, Washington appears to have confirmed it in writing.

On April 16, the oversight division of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) quietly published a review of the organization's activities in Venezuela from January-April 2019. Its seismic findings were almost universally ignored by the mainstream media, although the Grayzone certainly took notice.

During that chaotic period, Juan Guaido declared himself the country's acting and rightful leader, challenging the legitimacy of elected President Nicolas Maduro, leading to fiery upheaval engulfing the streets of Caracas. In a widely publicized incident on February 23, trucks carrying USAID "humanitarian commodities" from Colombia into Venezuela were stopped at border crossings and set ablaze.

Western news outlets and politicians were quick to blame the arson on government forces, framing the action as a dastardly attempt to prevent vital supplies reaching citizens desperately in need.

However, journalist Max Blumenthal was actually on the ground in Venezuela at the time, and compiled compelling evidence the fires were started by anti-Maduro activists. Two weeks later, the New York Times published video evidence proving this was in fact the case, without acknowledging Blumenthal had already busted the ploy wide open.

USAID has just awarded $160 million to the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) for a cooperative agreement to regulate the pharmaceutical landscape in Africa. U.S. taxpayers are now funding a U.S. State Department approved plan developed so our government can help big pharma pimps. Here's a look inside USP and this latest USAID plan.

Pharma Pimps

If you scan the Board of Trustees of the NGO USP you will immediately run into BIG BUSINESS shining like the sleazy glow from some red-light district brothel in Paris or New Orleans. Aventis, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, India's Laurus Labs, Eli Lilly & Company, Pfizer, Pharmacia, Upjohn, France's Sanofi, and all the likely suspects are proudly listed in plain sight. The agri-giants are there too, smiling out at you like comic book villains from DC or Marvel. There's FSG consulting executives proud to have been solving the world's problems since the Soviet Union fell. FDA Chief Scientists are listed, and so are Washington regulatory specialists (and lobbyists) representing firms like Greenleaf Health Inc.

Ronald T. Piervincenzi, Ph.D., the CEO of USP could serve as the poster boy for big pharma and big Agra businesses. Ronald's major in college way biomedical engineering. Ronald now sets the standards for most every medication sold in the United States. He got his start at Hofstra University on Long Island and from visits to the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He went to Duke University and got a "magical" full-time position with McKinsey & Company. You can read the rest of "Ron Piervincenzi: A Series of Fortunate Events" here.

The world cannot continue for long in its current state; the division of wealth is much too unfair.
At the end of January, representatives of the global and financial elite usually gather in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss the most pressing issues of our time, including the rise of artificial intelligence, extreme weather conditions, misinformation, as well as 'social polarisation'. This euphemism hides glaring inequality and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, which has reached truly preposterous proportions.

OXFAM, an organisation that evaluates global inequality, pointed out in its latest report that the number of people living in poverty has hardly changed since 1990, but the wealth of billionaires increased by $2 trillion last year compared to 2023 and it grew three times faster than in the previous year. The number of billionaires increased by 204, reaching 2,769 people. Last year, at least 4 new billionaires 'appeared' every week and three fifths of their wealth comes from inheritance, monopoly power or 'clan connections'. In 1820 the income of the 10 richest people in the world was 18 time bigger than the income of 50% of the poorest, but in 2020 it was already 38 times bigger. Around 3.6 billion people (44% of the world's population) live on less than $6.85 a day, a figure that has almost not changed since 1990.

OXFAM estimates that low- and middle-income countries spend almost half of their budgets on debt repayment, with an average of 48%. From 1970 to 2023, the countries of the Global South paid $3.3 trillion in interest to creditors from the states of the Global North. Even a generally prosperous African country like Angola spends 58% of government revenue on debt servicing. The ever-widening gap between rich and poor, according to some political scientists, is a disgrace to the modern world and a constant source of acute tension. Life expectancy in Africa is just under 64 years, compared with 79+ in Europe. Per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa has declined by more than 10% from $1,936 in 2014 to $1,700 in 2023.