“It is clear that Muslims have as their ultimate goal conquest and power over the world,” the American cardinal said. “Islam, through sharia, their law, will rule the world and permit violence against infidels, such as Christians. But we find it hard to recognise this reality and to respond by defending the Christian faith.”

“Many people do not understand what Islam really is,” he added. “They create these slogans: we all believe in the same God, we are all united by love and so on. It’s not true.” Cardinal Burke, who is regarded as a leading traditionalist within the Catholic Church, went on to say that Islam poses a threat to the Western order because it makes no distinction between religion and the state.

“The problem is that Muslims aim for expansion,” he added. “The whole history of the Islamic presence in Europe is an attempt to conquer it. Rather than through arms, that expansion will come through immigration and high birth rate. Several times I have heard Islamists explaining: ‘What we failed to do with weapons in the past, we are doing today with birth rate and immigration.’ The population is changing. If this keeps up, in countries like Italy, the majority will be Muslim.”

However, the blame for all this lies squarely on the decline of Western society. “All this happens through the corruption of the West. There are not enough families. We supinely accept practices that are contrary to the natural law, such as abortion or so-called ‘marriage’ between persons of the same sex. It is proof that we are not strong enough in faith, and easy prey for conquest.”

Speaking at the International Institute of Finance he said Britain's departure “made the chances of the eurozone not surviving in the next decade five times higher,” reported the Financial Times. Fears over the eurozone's stability have jumped following Brexit, added James Gorman, chief executive of Morgan Stanley.

He said: “Brexit is all about the survival of the union. It’s been a phenomenal social, economic and military success. But somewhere that has been lost in this discussion. And that discussion exists in Spain, Italy and across the union." Negative fallout has already been felt across the bloc, with confidence and and manufacturing and services output plunging.

Scientists such as Professor Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, and Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Moderey, California, have regularly forecast the loss of ice by 2016, which has been widely reported by the BBC and other media outlets. Professor Wadhams, a leading expert on Arctic sea ice loss, has recently published a book entitled A Farewell To Ice in which he repeats the assertion that the polar region would free of ice in the middle of this decade.

As late as this summer, he was still predicting an ice-free September. Yet, when figures were released for the yearly minimum on September 10, they showed that there was still 1.6 million square miles of sea ice (4.14 square kilometres), which was 21 per cent more than the lowest point in 2012.

While EU defense ministers openly discuss with NATO chiefs how to create an EU army, many might think the haste for the EU to go ahead with such a grandiose plan stems from its own credibility being at an all-time low in the wake of Brexit.

For EU federalists in Brussels, there is indeed some truth in this. But Brussels is also worried about being left behind or dwarfed by Germany’s own plans which would leave the EU in a weak position to negotiate who gets to call the shots in an official EU army, when it is finally created. And the EU has good reason to worry. Germany is impatient and is looking to position itself as the military leader of a coalition of EU countries which would no longer take orders from NATO, but also would not necessarily even be part of an official EU army.

Few journalists want to report in Brussels that there is a race between the EU getting a formal army together and Germany getting its own renegade pan-European army, which could ultimately present itself to the European Commission as already up and running. According to one respected military expert, Germany is positioning itself to be the country which would be the dominant force in a new EU army, regardless of its structure.

“Britain stands together with Germany to face the same challenges, including the threat from Daesh [Islamic State], and shares the same values of liberty, tolerance and justice,” Fallon said at a meeting with his counterpart Ursula von der Leyen at the German Embassy Friday. “While the UK is leaving the European Union, our commitment to European security remains steadfast, and [will] continue as a leading member of NATO, the cornerstone of our defense.”

The move comes 70 years after the two countries fought a world war and Fallon was attending an event to mark 26 years since Germany was reunified. The two countries have paired up in a multinational force before: to defeat Napoleon’s French army at Waterloo in 1815.

The current reorientation also seems set to see military relations between Germany and France thaw to the extent that German aircrews will be stationed in France for the first time since the end of WWII. The move would also see pilots from the two nations share an airbase at Orleans.

For his part, Fallon remains an opponent of an integrated EU Army, the concept of which became one of the most high profile arguments used by Euroskeptics in the build-up to the Brexit vote. German defense figures, however, have warned that the UK must drop opposition to an integrated EU force if it expects the best treatment once it leaves the union.

"Let's hope it is an opening bid," Dijsselbloem said on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank annual meetings in Washington. "These kinds of fines are completely oversized, and they are damaging to financial stability." Deutsche Bank has been struggling to overhaul its business model that is built around trading activities that have become much less lucrative under new regulation enacted since the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

"Here is a financial institution which needs to be restructured and strengthened and needs to bring in new capital and we cannot then have an even bigger amount of capital being pulled out by the American authorities. That is really counterproductive to put it mildly," Dijsselbloem said.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble earlier said that a new financial crisis could not be ruled out and that the IMF is backing up his longstanding warnings about the risks to the banking system from "ultra-loose" monetary policy.

Speaking at a news conference to discuss Germany's leadership of the G20 major economy meetings in 2017, Schaeuble declined to answer direct questions about Deutsche Bank's health. But he repeated his sharp criticism of "ultra-loose monetary policy," which includes the negative interest rates and other unconventional strategies of the European Central Bank aimed at jolting Europe out of extremely weak growth.

A swarm of seismic activity at the Salton Sea that began a week ago prompted scientists to say there was an elevated risk for a big San Andreas fault earthquake. By Tuesday, that risk had lessened, and the California governor’s Office of Emergency Service said that the earthquake advisory period was over.

But the impact of that warning was still being felt. For some, it meant checking quake safety lists. Others looked at preparing for the Big One, such as bolting bookshelves to walls, installing safety latches on kitchen cabinets and strapping down televisions. San Bernardino, which is on the San Andreas Fault, took the unprecedented step of closing down City Hall through Tuesday over concerns about how the structure would fare in the big quake.

“We haven’t had an alert like this,” Mark Scott, San Bernardino’s city manager, said. “We’re not trying to suggest that the alert is an impending catastrophe. We’re just trying to use an abundance of caution. We care about the safety of the public and our employees.”