Amid the cacophony of police sirens, low-flying helicopters and rifle fire, there was another sound during the attempt to overthrow president Recep Tayyip Erdogan: The wailing of Turkey’s imams. From the nations’s 85,000 mosques, their amplified voices were heard calling upon the faithful to take to the streets and defy the plotters. The people listened.

For others the night presented different opportunities as hardline Muslim Sunnis, whipped up to a frenzy, targeted Turkey’s Christian community. In Matalya, a sprawling city in Anatolia, once the heartland of Christianity in the East, they targeted a Protestant church. Nor was Matalya alone. In the Black Sea city of Trabzon others attacked the Santa Maria church, smashing windows and using hammers to break down its door.

Turkey, which once boasted two million Christians, has barely 120,000 now, fewer even than Iran. But what shocked people most about July 15’s attacks was how much hatred still remains after almost 10 years. Though it is nominally a secular republic there can be little doubt that the government and Turkey’s 117,000 Sunni imams work together.

Since the night of the failed coup, imams have been chanting the Selah prayer, usually reserved to announce a death, on a daily basis as a rally call. “The reality is that Turkey is neither a democracy nor a secular republic,” said Yuce Kabakci, a pastor in Istanbul. “There is no division between government affairs and religious affairs.”

The uninhabitable areas are known as the Zone Rouge (French for “Red Zone”). They remain pock-marked and scarred by the intense fighting at places like Verdun and the Somme, the two bloodiest battles of the conflict. During the Battle of Verdun, which lasted over 300 days in 1916, more than 60 million artillery shells were fired by both sides – many containing poisonous gases. These massive bombardments and the brutal fighting inflicted horrifying casualties, over 600,000 at Verdun and over 1 million at the Somme. But the most dangerous remnants of these battles are the unexploded ordnance littering the battlefield.

To deal with the massive cleanup and unexploded ordnance issues, the French government created the Département du Déminage (Department of Demining) after World War II. To date, 630 minesweepers died while demining the zones. An estimated 720 million shells were fired during the Great War, with approximately 12 million failing to detonate. At places like Verdun, the artillery barrages were so overwhelming, 150 shells hit every square meter of the battlefield. Concentrated barrages and driving rains turned the battlefield into a quagmire that swallowed soldiers and shells alike.

Further complicating the cleanup is the soil contamination caused by the remains of humans and animals. The grounds are also saturated with lead, mercury, and zinc from millions of rounds of ammunition from small arms and artillery fired in combat. In some places, the soil contains such high levels of arsenic that nothing can grow there, leaving haunting, desolate spaces.

Though the Zone Rouge started at some 460 square miles in size, cleanup efforts reduced it to around 65 square miles. With such massive amounts of explosives left in the ground, the French government estimates the current rate of removal will clear the battlefields between 300 and 900 years from now.

On Monday, US oil was down almost four percent, and for a brief time it actually fell below 40 dollars a barrel. Overall, the price of oil has fallen a staggering 21 percent since June 8th. In less than two months, the “oil rally” that so many were pinning their hopes on has been totally wiped out, and if the price of oil continues to stay this low it is going to have very serious implications for our economy moving forward.

One of the big reasons why the price of oil has been declining is because the OPEC nations continue to pump oil at very high levels. These countries don’t know if or when the price of oil will eventually rebound, but what they do know is that they desperately need cash in order to keep their sputtering economies going. Many of these nations are already experiencing significant economic downturns, and substantially reducing oil revenues at this time would definitely not help things.

Here in North America, oil production costs tend to be higher, and so when the price of oil crashes we tend to see companies shut down rigs. But when rigs get shut down, that means that good paying jobs are lost. To me, about the only thing that could push the price of oil back to where US oil companies need it to be in the short-term would be a major war in the Middle East. And of course that is definitely always a possibility considering who is running things in Washington. But absent that, it is hard to see the price of oil getting back to 70 or 80 dollars a barrel any time soon.

So that means that we are likely to see more job losses, more debt delinquencies and debt defaults, and more financial institutions getting into trouble due to their reckless exposure to the energy industry.

The selling frenzy triggered a temporary trading freeze before leaving the firm's share price nursing losses of five per cent. Italy's oldest bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS) came out as the weakest firm in the European stress tests, which are designed to show how banks would weather a severe economic crash. Saddled with billions of pounds worth of bad loans, the lender is now relying on a €5 billion bailout to save it and stop a crisis that threatens to blow up Europe's financial system.

The eurozone is already reeling from a weaker economic outlook after Britain's decision to leave the European Union (EU). Now experts are downgrading Italy's long term outlook and say there is a growing risk the country's anti-establishment Five Star party could become a reality. It comes ahead of a referendum in October or November that may end up with Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's resignation - plunging the country into chaos amid a change in government. The Five Star party is calling for a referendum over the euro among over measures.

Mujtaba Rahman, practice head of Europe at Eurasia group, said: "Regardless of the referendum outcome and whether early elections are held, Italy’s medium-term political outlook is seriously deteriorating as the likelihood of a Five Star win in the next election is now significant. All the issues that have plagued Renzi’s government thus far – a stagnant economy, corruption scandals, banks – are likely to continue to do so.

"Stalling reforms would also expose Renzi to accusations of inaction; while progress on remaining items would alienate critical constituencies." Prime Minister Renzi's future arguably hinges on the rescue of MPS. If the bailout fails, ordinary Italians are set to lose their lifetime savings - which would see the leader's popularity plunge. But experts already fear the bailout plan won't succeed after investors have been stung by previous failed rescues.

While in Poland, Francis made an unscheduled stop at a church in Krakow to implore God to protect people from the "devastating wave" of terrorism in many parts of the world. When asked why he didn't describe the priest's murder and other attacks as Islamic terrorism, Francis replied he won't do that because "it's not right to identify Islam with violence. It's not right and it's not true. I believe that in every religion there is always a little fundamentalist group."

"I don't like to talk of Islamic violence because every day, when I go through the newspapers, I see violence, this man who kills his girlfriend, another who kills his mother-in-law," Francis said, in apparent reference to crime news in predominantly Catholic Italy. "And these are baptized Catholics. If I speak of Islamic violence, then I have to speak of Catholic violence."

"In Islam, not all are violent, not all the Catholics are violent. It's like a fruit salad, everything's in there." Noting he has spoken with imams, he concluded: "I know how they think, they are looking for peace." As for ISIS, he said, the Islamic State group "presents itself with a violent identity card, but that's not Islam."

And western women are slammed in their new 15th edition manual for not being shy and acting like "Maidens." When explaining why they dislike emancipated women they say: "They need not be a mother, a wife, or a maiden, but rather, she should work like man, rule like man, and have intercourse like an animal, without being conscious of her Lord watching both her and her heinous partner in crime."

The group also targets English naturalist and geologist, Charles Darwin, philosopher Karl Marx, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, French sociologist David Durkheim, German sociologist Max Weber and Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud for criticism.

The rambling editorial also goes on to make reference to the Orlando shootings. It says: "Shortly following the blessed attack on a sodomite, Crusader nightclub by the Mujahid Omar Mateen, American politicians were quick to jump into the spotlight and denounce the shooting, declaring it a hate crime, an act of terrorism, and an act of senseless violence. A hate crime? Yes. Muslims undoubtedly hate liberalist sodomites."

A case in point is the recent presence in Malta of Johannes Hahn, EU Commissioner for Enlargement whose visit was covered in the Press for the wrong reasons. The press reported mainly what Hahn stated about Malta’s readiness for the EU Presidency. However even if Malta were not prepared (which is not the case here), no diplomat in his right senses would say so in public.

Nonetheless, the most interesting aspect of this event was not the official speeches by Hahn and Vella but their off-the-cuff replies to the questions. It was at this point that inadvertently Hahn's true purpose for being here came out; it had nothing to do with Brexit or its repercussions on Malta or the Southern Neighbourhood Policy as such. Behind the diplomatic talk about the need for a European Neighbourhood Policy for the Mediterranean, there is now a new approach to rely on military strength to resolve what is perceived as a Mediterranean problem.

In simple words, Hahn came here to pave the way for Malta's eventual participation in the new EU Army that Brussels intends creating in response to its internal existential crisis. Judging from the way he talked, the EU wants the setting up of an army to be the main assignment of Maltese presidency. Hahn confirmed that creating a European Military force has become top priority for Brussels.

This is the lacerating verdict of the IMF’s top watchdog on the fund’s tangled political role in the eurozone debt crisis, the most damaging episode in the history of the Bretton Woods institutions. It describes a “culture of complacency”, prone to “superficial and mechanistic” analysis, and traces a shocking breakdown in the governance of the IMF, leaving it unclear who is ultimately in charge of this extremely powerful organisation.

The report by the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) goes above the head of the managing director, Christine Lagarde. It answers solely to the board of executive directors, and those from Asia and Latin America are clearly incensed at the way European Union insiders used the fund to rescue their own rich currency union and banking system.

The three main bailouts for Greece, Portugal and Ireland were unprecedented in scale and character. The trio were each allowed to borrow over 2,000 percent of their allocated quota – more than three times the normal limit – and accounted for 80 percent of all lending by the fund between 2011 and 2014.

“The Jewish right to the Temple Mount was established in the Bible, and should therefore be recognized by Christianity and Islam,” wrote the Sanhedrin. “In fact, the Jewish claim to Jerusalem is as essential to those religions as it is to Judaism. This Biblical connection between the Jews and Jerusalem led to the building of the First Temple by King Solomon, which strengthened our claim to Jerusalem even more.”

“A plethora of archaeological evidence in and around Jerusalem is undeniable proof of Jewish settlement in Biblical times. Islam did not exist, in Israel or anywhere else, until the year 636 CE, more than 500 years after the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple,” reasoned the Sanhedrin’s statement. Rabbi Weiss affirmed their statement saying, “The Temple was intended to be the place where all the nations came together to serve God, in peace. By enabling the Muslims to turn the Temple Mount into the antithesis of this idea, UNESCO is doing the opposite of their stated mission of uniting the nations.”

“The Muslims have turned the Temple Mount into a place of violence and lies, a battleground where Islam establishes exclusive domain, claiming supremacy over the other nations, where their violent ways have usurped the domain of peace,” said Rabbi Weiss. “By allowing the Muslims exclusive access to prayer on the Temple Mount, the world has chosen ‘priests’ of war and terror. The world must allow the Jews, the real lovers of peace, to be the priests representing all the nations on the Temple Mount,” he concluded.