Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen does not completely understand the recent uproar in Germany over the proposal to deploy Bundeswehr troops within the country. The constitution clearly allows for such action, she said during a visit to the Berlin-based "Command Center for Territorial Missions." Under the umbrella of "mutual assistance," German police can request assistance from the military for reasons including "large-scale terrorism."

More specifically, for "large-scale terrorism of catastrophic proportions," said von der Leyen, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). That is how it is described in the Bundeswehr's new "White Paper," she said, adding that in such cases there is no question that it is the police who take the lead role.

A German newspaper has quizzed various departments on how much taxpayers’ money they expect to spend on the excess of a million migrants who arrived in the country last year. Integration will be the government’s biggest outlay, accounting for two thirds of the total €30 billion figure. Teachers, day care centres, schools, language courses, and housing all come under this umbrella.

The Federation of German Towns and Municipalities estimate that the cost of providing these services to migrants will cost taxpayers €20 billion a year. It warned that by 2018 there would also be €2.6 billion additional costs for accommodation.

Israeli investigators arrested an alleged Hamas operative who they said infiltrated the charity and rose to become its director in Gaza, only to use his position to funnel £5.3 million a year to the militant group.

Around 60 per cent of the funds meant to ease suffering in the Gaza Strip were instead diverted to paying Hamas salaries and readying the group for war with Israel, according to the Shin Bet, the Israeli equivalent of MI5.

World Vision denied the allegations but the case casts a harsh spotlight on one of the world’s biggest charities. The group has an annual budget of more than £2 billion and a roster of celebrity backers that includes Bill Clinton, Scarlett Johansson and Justin Bieber.

For the first time, the agency obtained a series of temperatures from the base of the sheet - the second biggest in the world after that in the Antarctic - and found it was up to tens of degrees warmer at the base than the surface. The Greenland ice sheet is around 1,500 miles north to south and up to 680 miles across.

Scientists found alarmingly high areas of ice at the base of the sheet had melted and come free from the bedrock below. But they also said it was heat coming out of the bedrock itself which was causing the melting. In July 2012 a large ice sheet twice the size of Manhattan (46 square miles) broke free from the Petermann glacier in northern Greenland.

The devices, dubbed "neural dust", could be used to continually monitor organs like the heart in real time and, if they can be made even smaller, implanted into the brain to control robotic devices like prosthetic arms or legs. It is believed they could help treat conditions like epilepsy by stimulating nerves and muscles, help people with incontinence control their bladder and even suppress appetite. They could also potentially either be used to prompt the immune system into action or reduce inflammation.

One of the inventors, Professor Michel Maharbiz, of University of California, Berkeley, said: “I think the long-term prospects for neural dust are not only within nerves and the brain, but much broader. Ultrasound vibrations, which can penetrate almost every part of the body, are used to power the sensors, which are about a millimetre across. They contain a special crystal that converts ultrasound into electricity to power a tiny transistor.”

“If there is a voltage spike in a nerve or muscle fibre this alters the vibration of the crystal, changing the way the sound echoes back to an ultrasound receiver. So far, experiments have been carried out on muscles and the peripheral nervous system of rats, but the researchers believe the dust could also work in the central nervous system and brain to control prosthetics.”

Experts at the University of Washington have revealed how hackers could insert images into dodgy apps and record our brain's unintentional reaction using brain-computer interfaces. These cyberthieves can find out what political party you affiliate with, religious beliefs or sexual orientation – things that could one day be used to damage your reputation.

'Broadly speaking, the problem with brain-computer interfaces is that, with most of the devices these days, when you're picking up electric signals to control an application… the application is not only getting access to the useful piece of EEG needed to control that app; it's also getting access to the whole EEG,' explained Engineer Tamara Bonaci. 'And that whole EEG signal contains rich information about us as persons.'

Electrical Engineer Howard Chizeck also explained that it isn't the invisible hackers that reap the benefits of this technology, police officers and government agencies could also gather information about someone in order to convict them or use as a 'remote lie detector', he said.

The National Institute of Health is proposing a new policy to permit scientists to get federal money to make embryos, known as chimeras, under certain carefully monitored conditions. The NIH imposed a moratorium on funding these experiments in September because they could raise ethical concerns.

One issue is that scientists might inadvertently create animals that have partly human brains, endowing them with some semblance of human consciousness or human thinking abilities. Another is that they could develop into animals with human sperm and eggs and breed, producing human embryos or fetuses inside animals or hybrid creatures. But scientists have argued that they could take steps to prevent those outcomes and that the embryos provide invaluable tools for medical research.

Industry chiefs said they expect other institutions to follow their lead shortly, raising the spectre of tens of millions of Germans being forced to dip into their own pockets to pay for the EU's failures. The stricken bank, whose shares plunged to record lows today, said it had been severely weakened by the European Central Bank (ECB) setting negative interest rates.

It had already performed poorly in a stress test of Eurozone financial institutions last week alongside compatriot Deutsche Bank, raising fears about the strength of the German economy post-Brexit. With anti-EU sentiment on the rise in Germany and the growth of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AFD) party, the very real impact banking fees will have on average families will provide a major headache for Angela Merkel.

The German leader is already under huge pressure over her refusal to budge on her controversial open door immigration policy, and will have to face voters in a General Election next year. Customers of Commerzbank - Germany's second largest bank - in future will have to pay higher fees for credit cards and making deposits. They will also be charged for over-the-counter transfers in branches, according to respected German newspaper Die Welt.

Commerzbank has lost more than 35 per cent of its value since May whilst shares in Deutsche Bank - the country's biggest financial institution - have plunged by 60 per cent in the same period. They have been dragged down in part by the shocking state of the banking sector across the Eurozone as a whole, with Italian banks in particular struggling to keep their heads above water.

“At the end of summer at the conference of interior Ministers of the Federal States, we will decide which scenarios of the Bundeswehr we need to train,” said Tore Von Leyen. According to her, in case of emergency all responsibilities should be allocated clearly and there should be enough staff to perform the tasks. In addition, the Minister announced command and staff exercises, “which will test the interaction between the Federal level and police range land.”

Adding that three Federal lands already expressed interest. “In urgent situations, the police decide the needs to deal with the terrorist situation. However, in principle, the constitutional court of Germany explained that in an emergency case you can use the military,” said Tore Von Leyen.

Peru — a top cocaine-producing nation — joined the ranks of world governments that have added commercial spyware to their arsenals. The purchase from Israeli-American company Verint Systems, chronicled in documents obtained by The Associated Press, offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look into how easy it is for a country to purchase and install off-the-shelf surveillance equipment. The software allows governments to intercept voice calls, text messages and emails.

Except for blacklisted nations like Syria and North Korea, there is little to stop governments that routinely violate basic rights from obtaining the same so-called “lawful intercept” tools that have been sold to Western police and spy agencies. People tracked by the technology have been beaten, jailed and tortured, according to human rights groups.

Targets identified by the AP include a blogger in the repressive Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan, opposition activists in the war-ravaged African nation of South Sudan, and politicians and reporters in oil-rich Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. “The status quo is completely unacceptable,” said Marietje Schaake, a European Union lawmaker pushing for greater oversight. “The fact that this market is almost completely unregulated is very disturbing.”

Reflecting on the idea of gender identity freedom that is being promulgated across the globe, the 79-year-old pontiff termed such approaches an “annihilation of man as an image of God.” Francis’ remarks were voiced during a closed-door session with the bishops last week during his trip to Poland. The Vatican released the transcript of the remarks on Tuesday.

He specifically focused on the criticism of educational systems that tolerate and advocate gender choice. “Today, in schools they are teaching this to children – to children! – that everyone can choose their gender,” Francis said, calling such policies “ideological colonizing” supported and funded by “very influential countries.”

Calling such approach “terrible,” Francis also said that he had discussed the issue with his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI, who called it a sin against God. “Speaking with Pope Benedict, who is well, and has a clear mind, he was telling me: 'Holiness, this is the epoch of sin against God the Creator.’ He's intelligent! God created man and woman, God created the world this way, this way, this way, and we are doing the opposite,” Francis told the Polish bishops. “We must think about what Pope Benedict said – ‘It's the epoch of sin against God the Creator.’”

The warning comes a day after China launched a massive naval drill which is set to prepare China for a "sudden, cruel and short" war. Chang was speaking during an inspection of national defence work in coastal regions of east China's Zhejiang Province. He called for recognition of the seriousness of the national security situation, especially the threat from the sea.

Chang said the military, police and people should prepare for mobilization to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity. He also asked to promote national defense education among the public. This latest escalation in war rhetoric comes amid unprecedented tensions over the disputed islands in the South China Sea, where Beijing has been building airstrips and military installations on reclaimed reefs and islands in waters also claimed by a number of other Asian states.

The study also found steeply rising malnutrition among the young, suggesting that more children will be at risk in the coming years. The results of the survey will appear on Friday in The Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Association.

That was over 20 years ago. Today, including sanctions and the Bush/Blair attack of Iraq, landmark research proves that the US-led ‘war on terror’ has killed much higher numbers than previously reported. Counting in Afghanistan and the sanctions prior to the so-called War-on-Terror the horrifying number of fatalities is concluded at somewhere over six million.

Right now the Bank is doing everything it can to stimulate spending; one way of doing that is to cut interest rates and make it less and less attractive for people to leave their money in their bank accounts (lower rates mean less reward for leaving it to sit there in the vaults). The problem is, even when people have taken their money out of the banks, there is no way of getting them to spend.

They might just as well withdraw the cash and hoard it, putting it in safe deposit boxes, in vaults, or under mattresses rather than spending it in the shops. To some extent, that is thought to be happening in some of the economies around the world where negative interest rates have now been imposed.

In Japan, orders of safes have jumped sharply. In Switzerland, there has been some evidence of households and businesses sitting on their money. Now there is some evidence that something similar may be happening in the UK.