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.

Unfortunately for all of us, Wilson makes a convincing argument that those self-correcting mechanisms are broken. For starters, there's a "replication crisis" in science. This is particularly true in the field of experimental psychology, where far too many prestigious psychology studies simply can't be reliably replicated. But it's not just psychology. In 2011, the pharmaceutical company Bayer looked at 67 blockbuster drug discovery research findings published in prestigious journals, and found that three-fourths of them weren't right.

Another study of cancer research found that only 11 percent of preclinical cancer research could be reproduced. Even in physics, supposedly the hardest and most reliable of all sciences, Wilson points out that "two of the most vaunted physics results of the past few years — the announced discovery of both cosmic inflation and gravitational waves at the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica, and the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border — have now been retracted, with far less fanfare than when they were first published."

What explains this? In some cases, human error. Then there is outright fraud. In a 2011 survey of 2,000 research psychologists, over half admitted to selectively reporting those experiments that gave the result they were after. Then there's everything in between human error and outright fraud: rounding out numbers the way that looks better, checking a result less thoroughly when it comes out the way you like, and so forth.

The disclosure came as law enforcement authorities in Bangladesh and elsewhere investigated the February cyber theft of $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank account at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. SWIFT has acknowledged that the scheme involved altering SWIFT software on Bangladesh Bank's computers to hide evidence of fraudulent transfers.

Monday's statement from SWIFT marked the first acknowledgement that the Bangladesh Bank attack was not an isolated incident but one of several recent criminal schemes that aimed to take advantage of the global messaging platform used by some 11,000 financial institutions.

But Chris Grayling, the leader of the Commons, pointed to a document signed last September in Rome by the speakers of the national parliaments in Germany, France, Italy and Luxembourg. It says that 'concrete proposals' to deepen EU integration towards a 'federal union of states' will be drawn up at a meeting in Luxembourg next month.

The joint declaration states: 'We are convinced that new impetus must be given to European integration. We believe that more, not less, Europe is needed to respond to the challenges we face.' Ominously, it says that deeper integration 'should not be limited to the field of economic and fiscal matters, or to the internal market and to agricultural policy'.

It added: 'It should include all matters pertaining to the European ideal social and cultural affairs as well as foreign, security and defence policy.' The paper goes on: 'The current moment offers an opportunity to move forward with European political integration, which could lead to a federal union of States.'

More than 5,000 activists descended on the Capitol from across the country, including hundreds who had marched there from Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy. It was a campaign that recalled the non-violent civil rights protests of the 1960s. Media Gives Event… 29 Seconds

On April 12, largely unnoticed by the corporate media, they began a weeklong series of rallies protesting money in politics and calling for a restoration of the sanctity of the election process. In a show of civil disobedience designed to raise awareness of the devastating influence of money in politics, more than 1,400 people got themselves arrested outside the Capitol.

Notwithstanding the timeliness of the event — and its direct relevance to the presidential race — coverage has been miniscule. An analysis by the advocacy group Media Matters has found that the major news networks between April 11 and April 18 devoted to the protests a grand total of … 29 seconds, and only on PBS.

But perhaps even more ominous is the internal societal meltdown that we see happening all around us. According to Real Clear Politics, recent surveys show that 67 percent of Americans believe that the country is on the wrong track, and only 26 percent of Americans believe that it is headed in the right direction. So even though we are tremendously divided as to what the solutions are, the vast majority of us can see that something is deeply, deeply wrong with America.

But does that mean that we are on the verge of collapsing as a nation? Just like during the days of the Roman Empire, most Americans cannot even conceive of a time when America will be no more. And yet we can all see that the foundations are being constantly chipped away at.

Will we be able to survive once our foundations are totally gone?