The 46-year-old's name carries greater weight in Brussels than that of any other EU official, his reputation forged through ruthless back-room tactics and allegations of bullying. Some former colleagues refer to him as the "monster in the Berlaymont" - the Commission's headquarters - while others praise him as a master manipulator with a diabolical intellect honed through his previous career as a lawyer.

His enemies and allies agree on one thing, however: the chief of staff is utterly committed to the European project and will do whatever is necessary to ensure its survival.

Trump said on October 13 he would not certify Iran is complying with an agreement on curtailing its nuclear program, signed by his predecessor, Barack Obama, opening a 60-day window for Congress to act to reimpose sanctions. “If international efforts led these days by US President Trump don’t help stop Iran attaining nuclear capabilities, Israel will act militarily by itself,” Katz said in an interview in Tokyo. “There are changes that can be made (to the agreement) to ensure that they will never have the ability to have a nuclear weapon.”

Israel has taken unilateral action in the past without the consent of its major ally, the United States, including air strikes on a suspected nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007 and in Iraq in 1981. A strike against Iran, however, would be a risky venture with the potential to provoke a counter strike and roil financial markets.

An Israeli threat of military strikes could, nonetheless, galvanize support in the United States for toughening up the nuclear agreement but it could also backfire by encouraging hardliners in Iran and widening a rift between Washington and European allies.

So far, none of the other signatories to the deal — Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, Iran and the European Union — has cited serious concerns, leaving the United States isolated.

Haredi lawmakers reacted with fury to the ruling, vowing to introduce legislation that will override the ruling and even give the Knesset the ability to overide High Court rulings more broadly, as has also been proposed of late by the Bayit Yehudi party. Korach and the association argue that by opening on Shabbat when other businesses seek to take advantage of their day of rest, large chains are unfairly taking business away from smaller independent outlets. 

“They are stealing the income of grocery stores that observe the law,” he said, referring to the Law for Hours of Work and Rest, which prohibits requiring an employee to work on the Sabbath.

Far from the scope of free religious expression is “Xi Jinping Thought,” the colloquial name for the ideology the Chinese president has now formally enshrined into the CPC’s constitution. At the congress this week, the head of the umbrella agency that supervises religion insisted that “socialist core values” must be at the heart of any religious faith active in China.

Zhang Yijiong, the head of the United Front Work Department (UFWD), explained on Friday that the Communist Party had a long way to go to “sinicize religion” — make it more Chinese. This required, Zhang argued, harsh measures to prevent anyone from “taking advantage of religion to harm national security,” “promoting extremism for terrorist activities,” and “endangering national unity,” according to the Diplomat.

Society would collapse. The rule of the gun will replace the rule of law. And it’s exactly what North Korea has been threatening. The lights would go out and computers would die — and so would every piece of medical equipment in a line-of-sight of the nuclear fireball, high in the sky. Then there would be the fires. Gas pipelines feeding cities and industry could ignite from fried control systems, unleashing widespread firestorms. How many would die in the first day is anyone’s guess.

But that would just be the beginning of the end. All it would take, he says, is for something like a timer, a GPS receiver or an altimeter to be paired with a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile. Once the warhead reached an altitude of 300km, its pulse could fry the electrical grid of all 48 mainland US states.

“The US can sustain a population of 320 million people only because of modern technology,” Dr Pry told Forbes. “An EMP that blacks-out the electric grid for a year would remove the critical infrastructure necessary to support such a large population.”

By day three, the United States would still be at a standstill. Few would know what was going on. But the population would begin to panic. Government would have already devolved to local councils and sheriff’s offices. The National Guard — and private militias — would be milling aimlessly about in the streets. The only people with power would be those with generators that survived the pulse.

The water supply would be drying up everywhere from country towns to the most major cities. There’d be nothing to pump it through the system. The fresh food in grocery stores — if it hadn’t already been eaten — would have begun to go off. No replacements stocks would be being trucked in. The vehicles wouldn’t be working, and even if they did, none of the computer and communications systems for distributing and paying for it would be active. In just a few more days, nuclear reactors — their control and safety systems dead — would begin to melt down.

YEAR ONE

Dr Pry says the simple scale of such a disaster would overwhelm the world’s ability to respond. Within a year, 90 per cent of the 300 million people living in the 48 adjoining US states could be dead, he warns. Small pockets of survivors would be scattered across the country. Disease would be rampant. There would not have been enough living to bury the dead.

Water supplies would be contaminated. Most livestock would be dead through a lack of care — and poaching. The only food would be what can be grown, and hunted, by survivors. There would be little fuel. Little communication. The only hope would come from international relief efforts.

Dr Pry insists there is ample evidence the alarming apocalyptic scenario painted above is a very real possibility. “A protracted blackout endangering millions will be the inevitable result of the EMP attack described by the North Koreans,” he says. Kim Jong-un certainly appears to believe so. His state-controlled news agencies have repeatedly referenced EMP in its threats to the United States.

That scenario was part of a pandemic simulation held during the World Bank’s annual meeting in Washington this month. It’s not the kind of event that people would typically associate with the World Bank. But it’s the fourth such exercise the bank has helped organize in the past year, reflecting what experts say is the growing awareness outside the traditional global health sector of the increasing threat and economic disruption posed by a global pandemic.

The chaotic and “horrendously inefficient” early response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa that killed more than 11,000 people was the catalyst for the simulations, said Tim Evans, senior director for health, nutrition and population at the World Bank.

“We realized that people were just making it up as they were going along, including us,” Evans said, referring to the Ebola response. The bank wanted to “move from a history of panic and neglect to one where we’re going to start to prepare much more systematically to be ready for the 100 percent probability we will be dealing with this again,” he said. “Probably sooner than we expect.” Discussions during the 90-minute session were off the record.

And the arrival of MPs from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) — which came third in last month’s election — will fundamentally change the tone of debates. “The question at stake is what will this do to the discourse,” said Sophie Schönberger, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Konstanz. “What are the limits of what can be said inside a parliament?”

The bloated size of the Bundestag will significantly complicate day-to-day work, as “the more diverse and the larger a parliament is, the more difficult it is to control the government and to do parliamentary work,” Schönberger cautioned.

The Bundestag will also have a new man in charge — outgoing Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble will be elected its president. The parliament’s longest serving member (he was first elected in 1972), Schäuble has been hand-picked by Chancellor Angela Merkel to manage the unwieldy assembly and keep the AfD in line.

But with 92 members of parliament, the populists known for their anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric are determined to make their mark. “Of course, we will change the topics of the debates,” said a high-ranking AfD member of the Bundestag, speaking on the condition of anonymity.