Babies made without mothers could come sooner than we think, leading biologists claim. Late last year, a team at the University of Bath discovered that sperm and skin cells – or any other kind of non-egg cell – might be all you need for conception. At the time, they said the scenario of men conceiving with men was ‘speculative and fanciful’.

But in a new report published today, the top embryologists at Harvard and Brown Universities urge nations to begin contemplating the legal minefield that would surround mother-less babies. ‘With science and medicine hurtling forward at breakneck speed, the rapid transformation of reproductive and regenerative medicine may surprise us,’ they write.

‘Before the inevitable, society will be well advised to strike and maintain a vigorous public conversation on the ethical challenges of IVG [in vitro gametogenesis].’

He said: “In 10 years we will all be Muslims because of our stupidity. Italy and Europe live in a pagan and atheist way, they make laws that go against God and they have traditions that are proper of paganism. All of this moral and religious decadence favours Islam.”

He added: “We have a weak Christian faith. The Church nowadays does not work well and seminaries are empty. Parishes are the only thing still standing. We need a true Christian life. All this paves the way to Islam. In addition to this, they have children and we do not. We are in full decline.”

He added: “We help without delay those coming from outside and we forget many poor and old Italians who are eating from the trash. We need policies that take care of Italians first: our young people and the unemployed. I am a protester. If I were not a priest, I’d be out there demonstrating in the squares. What is the point of so many migrants that instead of thanking for the food we give them, they just throw it, spend hours with their cell phones and even organise riots?”

A faction of right-wing parties in the European Parliament is organizing the January 21 meeting, which will include members of France's Front National, Italy's Northern League, the Party for Freedom of the Netherlands and the Alternative for Germany (AfD). The German anti-immigration party has risen to third place in public opinion polls ahead of the country's general election, which is expected in about nine months.

The meeting will feature National Front leader Marine Le Pen and the Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders, as well as AfD co-leader Frauke Petry and the party's European lawmaker Marcus Pretzell. Ludovic de Danne, an advisor to Petry, was quoted by the Paris newspaper "Le Figaro" as describing the meeting as a "European counter-summit." It will mark Petry's first sit-down with National Front head Le Pen, with both women expected to discuss the overlap in their parties' policies, de Danne said.

A host of other highly regarded German news organizations were also being blocked from the event, including the "Handelsblatt" business daily, the weekly "Der Spiegel" and the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" newspaper, according to Pretzell.

Former Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn, a regular attendee in the past, told the group he would skip 2017 after being named in December to head the National Economic Council, said people familiar with the conference. Other top Trump appointees will also pass up the forum.

A senior member of Trump’s transition team said the president-elect thought it would betray his populist-fueled movement to have a presence at the high-powered annual gathering in the Swiss Alps. The gathering of millionaires, billionaires, political leaders and celebrities represents the power structure that fueled the populist anger that helped Trump win the election, said the person, who asked for anonymity to discuss the matter. 

While the Trump team stays away, Xi Jinping is set to become the first Chinese president to attend the forum, bringing with him a contingent of China’s wealthiest executives. China is casting itself as an advocate of globalization, in contrast to Trump’s “America First” platform critical of free-trade deals.

But one of the things that has people the most concerned is his endless provoking of Russia.  Every few days it seems like Obama is doing something else to aggravate Russia, and if he wasn’t leaving office in about a week I am sure that the mainstream media would be full of speculation about a possible war.

Lame duck presidents are not supposed to make risky moves like this once a new president has been elected.  On Thursday, we learned that US troops have been permanently deployed to Poland for the very first time. Poland was once a key member of the Warsaw Pact alliance, and the Russians are quite alarmed that US troops will now be stationed so close to the Russian heartland.

And it has also been announced that NATO troops will arrive in Lithuania in late January.  If you will remember, Lithuania was actually part of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. All of a sudden, Russia has become enemy number one.  Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say that Russia is to blame for Clinton’s election loss, and so at the end of December Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats from the country.

That is the sort of thing that you do before a war starts.

As The Washington Post reports, Major General Errol R Schwartz’s departure will come in the midst of the presidential ceremony, classified as a national special security event — and while thousands of his troops are deployed to help protect the nation’s capital during an inauguration he has spent months helping to plan.

Unlike in states, where the governor appoints the National Guard commander, in the District that duty falls to the president. Schwartz said that he has not been told why he was asked to step down. “I’m a soldier,” he said, noting that he was following orders and has no regrets. “I’m a presidential appointee, therefore the president has the power to remove me.”

Is this just another part of Obama's "smooth" transition? Or is something even more sinister at work here, since we already know that anti-Trump activists are planning "the biggest protest in US history" on the day of the inauguration?

“We don’t need everybody to eat insects,” said Robert Nathan Allen, founder and director of Little Herds, an educational nonprofit in Austin, Texas, that promotes the use of insects for human food and animal feed. “The point we really like to highlight with the education is that if only a small percent of people add this to their diet, there’s a huge environmental impact.”

Cricket fans say if only 1 percent of the US population substituted even just 1 percent of their meat consumption with insects, millions of gallons of water in drinking and irrigation would be saved, along with thousands of metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions from machinery and animals.

At least one study finds the claims overstated that crickets are a viable protein source to supplement or replace meat, but bottom line, it generally takes fewer resources to raise and harvest crickets than, say, cattle.

That may seem silly now, and it was definitely a minority view then, but a lot of us understood it. Was a reunited Germany to be feared?

Was there something belligerent and dangerous in the German DNA?

Did they have to be “kept down”?

You know the remark of Lord Ismay — General Hastings “Pug” Ismay, the first secretary-general of NATO: “The purpose of the alliance was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

It has now been about 65 years since he made that remark. And Germany is being called on to rise, militarily, including by the United States. The German public is not objecting. This is a momentous question, or a potentially momentous one… I quote an expert who says, “There is a general sense that there’s a tsunami heading Europe’s way” — and that Germany will have a heavy responsibility to deal with it.

Most of us remember movies such as “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon” that attempted to depict what such a crisis would look like, but up until fairly recently the US government has never seemed to take this kind of threat very seriously. So what has changed? Of all the things that the White House could be focusing on, why this?

And this new report is just the latest in a series of measures that the government has taken over the past couple of years to help prepare us for incoming meteors and asteroids. NASA continues to assure us that no threat is imminent, so why spend so much time, energy and resources on a non-existent crisis?

Early Monday morning, while the US East Coast was pouring coffee, dropping kids off at school, and cursing in traffic, a space rock as big as a 10-storey building slipped past Earth. The asteroid, dubbed 2017 AG13, was discovered only Saturday by the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey, according to an email from Slooh, a company that broadcasts live views of space.

We were very fortunate this time, but the truth is that our planet crosses paths with other giant space rocks on a very regular basis.