And in news likely to shock Brussels officials, almost half of Italians (48 per cent) and four in ten Frenchmen and Swedes (41 per cent and 39 per cent respectively) said they would vote to leave the EU if they were given the chance. By contrast, just one in five (22 per cent) Poles would vote for their country to leave the EU if an in/out referendum was held.

The results of the Ipsos-MORI poll come as a major snub to EU bosses on Europe Day, with today supposed to be a celebration of EU integration and unity. EU staff are given today off as part of the annual celebration, with many EU buildings open to the public. But the Ipsos-MORI survey of nine big EU countries - including Britain and representing around three-quarters of the EU population and approximately 80 per cent of its GDP - suggests growing euroscepticism across the continent.

People in India, Italy, Poland, South Africa and the US even think leaving the EU would have a net positive impact on Britain’s economy, although only those asked in India and the US believe it would boost Britain’s standing in the world. Surprisingly, Britons were more pessimistic over the chances of Brexit than other EU citizens.

The group have targeted the ad campaign to raise money for victims of the Syrian Civil War during the holy month of Ramadan in June, when Muslims traditionally fast and give to charity. But the campaign has caused anger among some Christian groups after an advert featuring the Lord's Prayer was banned from UK cinemas in the run up to Christmas.

The advert, which featured the Archbishop of Canterbury along with a variety of parishioners reciting the Lord’s Prayer, was banned from Odeon, Cineworld and Vue cinemas. Former Tory MP Ann Widdecombe said: “If other religions are allowed to put their religious banners up, then so should Christians.”

Most of the time I use this column to recommend policy changes that I believe would make the world a better place. This time I am saluting a policy change I believe will have significant benefits — one that carries with it important lessons. The decision of the European Central Bank last week to stop producing €500 notes permanently is a triumph of reasonable judgment over shameless fearmongering… High quality global journalism requires investment.

First, the world should demand that Switzerland stops issuing SFr1,000 franc notes. After Europe’s bold step, these notes will stand out as the hard-currency world’s highest denomination note by a wide margin. Switzerland has a long and unfortunate history with illicit finance. It would be tragic if it were to profit from criminal currency substitution. Second, the question of the facilitation of criminal activity should be placed prominently on the agenda of the Group of 20 leading nations.

It gets worse:

There would be a strong case for stopping the production of notes with value greater than, perhaps, $50… The political criminal states that his reason for calling for the elimination of high denomination notes is to prevent non-political crime and, well, no one needs to use large amounts of cash anyway: There is little if any legitimate use for €500 notes. Carrying out a transaction with 20 €50 notes hardly seems burdensome — and this would represent more than $1,000 in purchasing power. Meanwhile, 20 €200 notes would represent close to $5,000 in purchasing power. Who in today’s world needs cash for a legitimate $5,000 transaction?

A cashless society is a very bad idea. It would mean a society where the government would be able to track all our transactions - and thus control activities, Summers' aggressive advocacy that is moving the world toward a cashless society makes him one of the most evil economists living today.

"We as a company are neutral - we have not and will not use our products in a way that attempts to influence how people vote." That is a quote from a Facebook spokesperson given in response to a leaked internal poll which asked what responsibility Facebook had in preventing Donald Trump from becoming the next president. In light of the fact that a former employee is now admitting Facebook routinely suppresses conservative news stories from its trending news section, we're curious if that same response will be used.

An individual who worked on the project told Gizmodo that Facebook prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the trending news section. Additionally, several former Facebook "news curators" as they are known internally, told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially "inject" stories into the news flow, even though they weren't popular enough to be included.

As Gizmodo reports, Facebook's "news" team is just a group of young journalists educated at Ivy League or other private East Coast universities injecting their liberal views into a news stream that 167 million in the US alone are reading at any given moment.

The Middle East, North Africa and Asia-Pacific regions will also experience a persistent rise in conflicts. This increasing trend in instability promises billions of dollars of profits for global defence firms, concludes the report, published last month by Infiniti Research Ltd, a market intelligence firm whose clients include Fortune 500 companies.

“Protests, riots, and demonstrations are major issues faced by the law enforcement agencies across the world,” said Abhay Singh, a leading defence technology analyst at the firm. “In addition the increase in incidents of civil wars in countries such as Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt along with an increase in the global defence budget will generate demand for riot control systems.”

Trevor Maynard, Lloyds head of exposure management and reinsurance, said: “The report suggests that instances of political violence contagion are becoming more frequent and the contagion effect ever more rapid and powerful.”

Scientists suggest moralising religions - Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism - emerged due to growing differences between wealthy elites and poorer general populations. By setting out a moral framework for people to live by, these religions helped to level the evolutionary playing field as people's lifestyles changed.

According to evolutionary psychologist Dr Nicolas Baumard, at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, affluence causes humans to switch to a slower lifestyle where they have babies later and fewer children. Around 2,500 years ago it was just the elite members of the Egyptian and Sumerian civilisations that emerged in the eastern Mediterranean who adopted this lifestyle.

The rest of the population, however, continued to live fast and die young, which left the wealthier people at a competitive disadvantage from an evolutionary perspective, explained Dr Baumard. As a result the elite promoted moralising gods as a way to ensure the more sexually active and aggressive general populous did not usurp them. But now, as affluence becomes more ubiquitous around the world, this could ultimately lead to the downfall of moralising religions too, Dr Baumard wrote in New Scientist.

He said: 'As more and more people become affluent and adopt a slow strategy, the need to morally condemn fast strategies decreases, and with it the benefit of holding religious beliefs that justify doing so. If this is true, and our environment continues to improve, then like the Greco-Roman religions before them, Christianity and other moralising religions could eventually vanish.'

Seventy percent of those sampled by the ‘German Infratest dimap pollster’ for the public broadcaster ARD said the TTIP deal would be disadvantageous for Germany, with only 17 percent having a favorable opinion of the deal. The same poll revealed on Wednesday that 79 percent of the German public feared the pact would weaken consumer protections. Eighty-three percent of respondents said that talks on the secretive deal should be conducted in the open.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said last week that she hoped the negotiations on the agreement to expedite trade in goods and services across the Atlantic would be wrapped up soon, possibly by the end of 2016.

"We won't sacrifice our high food safety standards in a barter trade for approval of European car blinkers," he said. While both amber and red car blinkers are allowed in the US, the exact specific color of "amber" differs slightly between the markets. This can be viewed as an illustration of the extent of "concessions" proposed in TTIP.

This trade agreement has been backed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel who claimed she "will do anything to conclude negotiations" before the end of this year. Such support was called "really striking" by Austrian politics expert Stefan Haderer.

Earlier, French politicians joined hands in their struggle against the agreement, with French President Francois Hollande going as far as threatening to reject the agreement in its current form, because it promotes "unregulated free trade". According to French environmentalists, should France sign the agreement, it will "sacrifice French agriculture to get access to the US procurement market."

Mr Cameron today highlighted the UK’s role in bringing peace to Europe as he hit the referendum campaign trail - just hours before a rival speech by Boris Johnson. In a key speech at the British Museum in London, the PM told pro-EU campaigners: "Can we be so sure peace and stability on our continent are assured beyond any shadow of doubt? Is that a risk worth taking? I would never be so rash to make that assumption."

And he said: "What happens in our neighbourhood matters to Britain. That was true in 1914, 1940, 1989… and it is true in 2016." Both the Prime Minister and his Brexit -backing Tory rival were making speeches this morning in the countdown to the June 23 vote.

Debt relief demanded by the International Monetary Fund will also be on the agenda at the talks, which come after Greece was this weekend forced to stomach a sudden three-day general strike in protest against plans to increase taxes and revamp pensions. Greece’s next hard deadline looms in July, when it is due to repay €300 million to the IMF and €2.3 billion to the European Central Bank.

Finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos this weekend warned that “another Greek crisis” could be on the horizon if his economic programme was not approved. In a letter, he wrote: “Nobody should believe that another Greek crisis, leading perhaps to another failed state in the region, could be beneficial to anyone.”

It comes after analysts warned that the EU will be desperate to keep quiet any suggestion of another Greek crisis ahead of the Brexit referendum in the UK. David Owen, a Jefferies economist, said the fear of Brexit would give “the rest of Europe and the IMF far more to worry about than whether Greece stays in the euro area.”

Erdogan is now free to push for a change in the constitution that would transfer more power to himself. But this act also highlights his growing political isolation, which many believe will spell the end of his career — an outcome of great concern to the US and its European allies.

Western leaders desperately need Turkey to remain stable. As a key NATO ally in a volatile region — NATO’s second-largest army, in fact — and the country that is supposed to protect Europe from another flood of refugees, a lot is riding on Turkey’s stability. But the oppressed half of the country does not share the same sentiments, and talk of a possible coup against Erdogan is growing louder. Put simply, Erdogan may be turning into more of a liability for the West than a solid defender of NATO’s eastern flank that he was once touted to be.

Internationally, he stands accused of supporting Islamist extremists (possibly all the way up to colluding with ISIS), helping Iran avoid international sanctions, trying to maneuver NATO into a conflict with Russia, and extorting European leaders over the refugee deal. More recently, he has even tried to persecute critics in Germany and elsewhere.

Newsweek unleashed a political storm in Turkey when it republished the analysis of a former Pentagon official who concluded that, should elements in the Turkish military stage a coup, they would “get away with it.” The mere utterance of the word coup in a country that has a long history of them sent shockwaves through the Turkish establishment.

The country’s military, its memories fresh of the time Erdogan jailed the equivalent of an entire army college of top officers for allegedly plotting against him, issued an uncharacteristic denial. Nevertheless, just days ago, the top appeals court released all 275 suspects in that affair, possibly elevating the army’s political fortunes once again.

“As the credit cycle ages, following years of record-setting bond issuance, there are growing concerns about signs of stress in corporate balance sheets,” said the Institute of International Finance in Washington. The body flagged a double threat: a five-fold rise in company debt to $25 trillion in emerging markets over the past decade; and record junk bond issuance in US and Europe, along with shockingly irresponsible levels of US borrowing to buy back shares and pay dividends.

The warning came as the Hong Kong Monetary Authority aired its own grim concerns that the global system is dangerously over-stretched after years of easy money, with Asia’s entire financial edifice potentially in danger. “We are far from out of the woods, given new risks and headwinds on multiple fronts,” said Howard Lee, the body’s executive director. "There is the threat of a disorderly pullback in capital out of the region."

The US billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller warned this week that China has stoked an “extremely rare and quite dangerous” debt boom all too like the US subprime mania in character, but greater in scale. “They do not need more debt or more houses. They already have way too much of each,” he said at the Sohn investment forum.

The IIF estimates that China’s total debt has reached 295 percent of GDP, and is still rising fast. This is unprecedented for a developing economy that lacks deep capital markets or layers of accumulated wealth, and that now has a shrinking workforce as well.