United States

Women around the globe have been taking to the streets today in protest against the new US president Donald Trump. In Washington DC, half a million people have been turning out to stand up for gender equality, healthcare for women and other issues thought to be threatened under Trump’s presidency. In London, thousands marched from the US embassy on Grosvenor Square to Trafalgar Square in a stand united against Trump. Demonstrators have even be marching against him in Antarctica. BREAKING: Antarctica announces #womensmarch, expanding the movement to 7 continents!

Some observations on recent negative trends in productivity, employment mismatch, and labor training and education from the increasingly more bearish David Rosenberg, who notes that the Trump's proposed policies may end up helping growth on the margins, but fail to focus on what is really important, making tens of millions of US workers competitive and qualified for today's jobs market.

From Breakast with Rosie, via Gluskin Sheff

A secret 1983 CIA intelligence report suggested that the US should encourage Saddam Hussein to attack Syria to secure Iraq’s oil pipeline Hafez al-Assad had closed Iraq’s oil pipeline and as a result had a ‘hammerlock’ on US interests in both Lebanon and in the Gulf The report by ex- CIA official Graham Fuller, said that America should consider ‘urging Iraq to take the war to Syria’, noting that Saddam was ‘fighting for his life’ in the Iran-Iraq war.

While the rest of the developed world woke up in a cold sweat on the first official morning of the Trump presidency, the Kremlin said that Russia's Vladimir Putin was ready to meet President Trump but preparations for the possible meeting may take months, not weeks, according to Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Alibaba — the Chinese company that surpassed Wal-Mart as the world’s largest retailer in 2016 — said the United States wasted $14 trillion dollars wasted on warfare in the last 30 years, money that should have been spent on domestic infrastructure and programs for the people instead. During an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Ma about his thoughts on the American economy and how it relates to China. President Trump’s stance has been anti-China — accusing the Asian superpower of siphoning U.S.