Italian PM Matteo Renzi said it would be a "flagrant breach of European rule" and the policy is "utterly removed from reality." Tensions in Europe are at boiling point after Austria outlined plans earlier this week to install a 370 metre-long fence at the Brenner Pass, which is the busiest route through the Alps for heavy goods vehicles.

It comes just weeks after the country announced large fences are also to be built at the Moschendorf, Heiligenbrunn, Heiligenkreuz and Nickelsdorf border crossing points throughout the Burgenland region, before migrants travelling by foot arrive.

The move has incensed Italian politicians. Italian interior minister Angelino Alfano criticised the plans as the numbers of migrants passing from Italy to Austria were at their lowest levels for years. Mr Alfano said: “The logic of raising barriers is unacceptable. I will tell him very clearly that unilateral decisions go against European rules.” There are also concerns any toughening of border controls at the Brenner Pass would slow traffic on an important route from Italy to Germany, Italy's top trading partner.

After close to 50 years of control over the Golan Heights, this should not have been much of a shock. But the Arab world immediately went into an uproar, and the UN Security Council has taken action. In a unanimous decision, the UN Security Council has announced that Israel’s claims to the Golan Heights are “null and void and without international legal effect.”

Asking Israel to give the Golan Heights back to Syria is kind of like asking the United States to give Texas back to Mexico. It just isn’t going to happen. But thanks in large part to pressure from the Islamic world, the UN Security Council remains bound and determined to take that strategically important sliver of land away from Israel.

Meanwhile, top rabbis over in Israel are convinced that the arrival of the Messiah is imminent. Two extremely prominent figures in the Jewish faith recently got together for a very important conversation, and this made headlines all over the world… Much of their conversation centered on expectations regarding the coming of the Messiah.

Rabbi Kanievsky said that troubles were to be expected. “It is the days before Messiah,” he explained. Rabbi Kanievsky answered that the Messiah should be arriving in the very near future. He quoted the Talmud (Megillah 17b) again, saying, “In the year after shmittah the Son of David will come.” The year after the Shemitah on the Jewish calendar ends this October, so until then messianic expectations will be running high in Israel.

But at the same time, a geopolitical drama is playing out on the world stage which may eventually result in a great war coming to the land. If the UN Security Council does decide to pass a resolution permanently dividing the land, that is going to cause tensions in the region to go through the roof.

As a reminder, the reason for the electrical rationing was the water content of Venezuela's Guri Dam, which supplies more than two-thirds of the country’s electricity. As The Latin American Herald Tribune wrote a month ago, the dam “is less than four meters from reaching the level where power generation will be impossible. Water levels at the hydroelectric dam are 3.56 meters from the start of a ‘collapse’ of the national electric system. Guri water levels are at their lowest levels since 2003.

Alas, since this plan was doomed to fail as the Venezuela economy would produce even less output as a result of the extended weekend, things went from comical to farcical overnight when the Venezuelan gift kept on giving, and the nation expanded the three-day weekend to five days, declaring a two-day work week for government workers, adding it was seeking international help to save its power grid amid a drought that threatens the capital’s main source of electricity.

Marcus Pretzell is waiting. He's a member of the European Parliament with the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and he's sitting on the podium at the Yalta International Economic Forum, an event hosted by the Russian government at a resort on the occupied Crimean Peninsula. Pretzell has been seated directly next to the moderator.

The panel host then finally asks Pretzell to speak. "We at Alternative for Germany represent not only a threat to the Ukrainian government, but also to the German government," he proudly announces. The audience applauds. He then goes on to say that good economic relations with Russia "are in the interest of the German people" and that sanctions should be lifted immediately. The applause grows. In Russia, the moderator adds, people have the impression that the German people are of the same opinion as Pretzell. "Marcus, you have made 140 million new friends today."

Russia also has many friends in the AfD. Leading party officials are pursuing a clearly pro-Russian path and are trying to establish tight relations with people in President Vladimir Putin's circle. The right-wing populists are undeterred by the Kremlin's anti-liberal, anti-American and homophobic ideology. On the contrary: For large parts of the AfD party base, those factors appear to make Russia an attractive partner. At the same time, the AfD, with its critical stance toward the EU and NATO, also appears to be a natural partner for Putin.

Now, though, the relationship is advancing past the stage of discussions and conferences: The youth wing of the AfD is forming more formal ties with the youth organization of Putin's United Russia party.

On Sunday, a group of Muslims were removed from the Temple Mount by police for chanting “Allahu Akbar” at nearly 1,000 Jewish and Christian visitors who had ascended the site during the Passover holiday. Prior to that incident, 13 Jews were removed from the Temple Mount for illegally praying at the holy site.

Following Sunday’s incident, Jordanian Media Affairs Minister Mohammad al-Momani released a statement slamming the “Israeli settlers and police” for storming the “Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount).” Al-Momani said Israel’s actions at the site were “a violation of international laws and conventions” and could lead to “serious consequences.”

“Within five years of the advent of our democracy, our country decided to spend $10 billion on weapons that we didn’t need, that we barely used, and the primary reason for that was that $300 millions in bribes were paid. And it had a profound effect of South Africa’s democracy. I tried to investigate the deal… but was stopped by my own political party — which itself had benefited from the bribes…”

“At a time when South Africa had six million people living with HIV or AIDS, our president at the time, Thabo Mbeki, said that we didn’t have the finances to provide these people with antiretroviral medication.” This story reveals the other side of the arms trade — how it can kill without even firing a shot: by using up precious resources that should have been devoted to controlling lethal diseases and other problems the world faces.

The proportion of young people who are willing to go on a date with a robot is significantly higher than the overall proportion of British adults - only 17% of whom were willing.

"Our bodies, our identities and our senses are enhancing thanks to technology and societal shifts," said Ghislaine Boddington, co-founder and creative director of East London design unit body>data>space.

"Indeed, intimacy as we know it is expanding its boundaries - enabling us to experience love and affection beyond the physical and into the virtual."

As it marched through the region, waterhemp began to develop resistance to the most commonly used herbicides of the day. A relatively new type of resistance to a class of herbicides called HPPD-inhibitors was discovered in waterhemp populations in Illinois and Iowa in 2009. Now, thanks to a new University of Illinois study, we know that some of those populations are also resistant to alternative herbicides, making them even harder to kill.

University of Illinois weed scientist Aaron Hager explains, "Ultimately, we know how to win the battle," Hager says. "If we attack waterhemp at the most vulnerable stage in its life cycle - the seed - we could beat this thing in five to seven years." Hager recommends that farmers let seeds germinate, then mechanically work the soil before planting the crop. "You've just reduced your seedbank by millions, maybe hundreds of millions, and it didn't cost you a dime," Hager notes.

According to Hager, no new herbicides are being developed that are likely to work on waterhemp long-term. "We've got to get people off this idea that we've got a chemical solution for waterhemp, because in some cases, we don't," Hager adds.

Scientists from the University of Leicester discovered there were a staggering 12 massive eruptions over the course of four million years, beginning 12 million years ago. The massive eruptions helped to form the 100 kilometre-wide Snake River Basin, with one of the most powerful eruptions occurring 8.1 million years ago. The eruption's volume exceeded 1,900 km3 and created a 1.3km thick caldera.

Furthermore, the Snake River Plain is situated on the Yellowstone Hotspot track, a region which spans from Nevada, through Oregon and Idaho and then to Wyoming where Yellowstone Volcano is located.

"The size and magnitude of this newly defined eruption is as large, if not larger, than better known eruptions at Yellowstone, and it is just the first in an emerging record of newly discovered super-eruptions during a period of intense magmatic activity between eight and 12 million years ago."

This catastrophic scenario is depicted in a 300-page book on earthquake preparedness published by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. The book, which includes tips on how to make fly traps to rid evacuation centers of the pests, begins with a weighty warning: Experts say there’s a 70 percent chance of a quake directly hitting the greater Tokyo area, home to 36 million people, within the next three decades.

“It’s a race between us and the earthquake. And if we don’t win it we won’t be able to protect the capital,” said Professor Satoshi Fujii of Kyoto University, a special adviser on disaster preparation to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet. Preparations for the Big One in Tokyo have taken on more urgency this month after two devastating temblors struck in southern Japan, exposing weaknesses in the nation’s readiness for such disasters.

Lying on the so-called “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines crisscrossing the Pacific Basin, Japan is a nation of quakes, up to 2,000 per year, with densely populated cities. This combination puts thousands of people at risk of losing their lives in a major calamity that could strike at any time.

This was the fifth time that Roman Catholic Pope Francis and Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew were meeting together and the second joint pilgrimage that they have realized together since the pope’s election in 2013. On most of these occasions — Rome (March 2013), Jerusalem (May 2014), Rome (June 2014), Istanbul (November 2014), and now Lesbos (2016) — they have declared their solidarity with people suffering from war and persecution, poverty and hunger, as well as ecological repercussions of social injustice.

Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew have, from the very outset of their relations, demonstrated that they understand the role of the church. They know what matters, or at least what should matter, in the church; and they understand what the responsibility, priority, and ministry of the church should be in the contemporary world.

However, this time, the meeting between Francis and Bartholomew was different. Theological dialogues and ecumenical relations are often carried out in order to GAIN something — whether to achieve clarity or advance toward unity. The visit by Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, accompanied by the local Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens and All Greece, aimed at GIVING something: hope to the hundreds of detainees, thanks to the already beleaguered people of Greece, and caution to politicians to examine their hearts.

“It was remarkable,” said Professor Teresa Woodruff, one of the study’s two senior authors and an expert in ovarian biology at Northwestern. “We discovered the zinc spark just five years ago in the mouse, and to see the zinc radiate out in a burst from each human egg was breathtaking.”

“This means if you can look at the zinc spark at the time of fertilization, you will know immediately which eggs are the good ones to transfer in in vitro fertilization. It’s a way of sorting egg quality in a way we’ve never been able to assess before. All of biology starts at the time of fertilization, yet we know next to nothing about the events that occur in the human.”

"We regard the so-called 'freedom of navigation' operations as the violent means by which the US promotes its unilateral claims,” Hua Chunying, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said as cited by CCTV.

According to Beijing, the actions of the American military reveal “the hegemonic logic of the US towards international maritime order. We hope the US can respect the sovereignty and security of other countries and contribute more to safeguard international maritime order and regional peace and stability," Hua Chunying said.

The US Defense Department carried out multiple ‘freedom of navigation’ operations against 13 countries between October 1, 2014 and September 30, 2015, according to an annual report released by the Pentagon on Monday. Besides China, American targets included India, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Malaysia, the Maldives, Oman, the Philippines and Vietnam.

The Chinese yuan and Russia ruble are not true reserve currencies. The only feasible benchmarks for a new system are the IMF’s world money, called special drawing rights, and gold.

Critics claim there is not enough gold to support the financial system. That’s nonsense. There is always enough gold, it’s just a matter of price. Based on the M1 money supplies of China, the eurozone, and the US, and with 40 percent gold backing, the implied non-deflationary price of gold is $10,000 per ounce.

At that price, a stable gold-backed monetary system could be sustained. When it comes to monetary elites, watch what they do, not what they say. While elites disparage gold at every opportunity, they are buying it, hoarding it, and preparing for the day when one’s gold determines one’s seat at the table of systemic reform. It’s past time to claim your seat with an asset allocation to physical gold.