In its latest quarterly report, watched closely by investors, the BIS – which is known as the central bank of central banks – also warned that investors were concerned governments around the world were running out of policy options.

BIS chief Claudio Borio said the “uneasy calm” of previous months has given way to turbulence and a “gathering storm”. “The tension between the markets’ tranquillity and the underlying economic vulnerabilities has to be resolved at some point. In the recent quarter, we may have been witnessing the beginning of its resolution,” he added. “We may not be seeing isolated bolts from the blue, but the signs of a gathering storm that has been building for a long time,” he warned.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal.

“We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of — and headline player in — the imminent end of the world. The Islamic State awaits the army of ‘Rome,’ whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse.

“When it comes to the big stuff the decisions are made by two, and increasingly one country” Mr Gunnlaugsson told The Telegraph. “Others are called to meetings to approve of what has been decided, if not in the afternoon then during the middle of the night.

“This seems to have become the standard way of doing things in Brussels”, he said. His comments come in a week where German chancellor Angela Merkel has been accused of bouncing fellow member states into accepting a controversial refugee swap scheme with Turkey.

Nationals from at least 51 countries, including the UK, had to give up their most personal information as they joined the terror organisation. Only when the 23-question form was filled in were they inducted into IS. The man who stole it was a former Free Syrian Army convert to Islamic State who calls himself Abu Hamed.

Disillusioned with the Islamic State leadership, he says it has now been taken over by former soldiers from the Iraqi Baath party of Saddam Hussein. He claims the Islamic rules he believed have totally collapsed inside the organisation, prompting him to quit.

I met him in a secret location in Turkey, and he said IS was giving up on its headquarters in Raqqa and moving into the central deserts of Syria and ultimately Iraq, the group's birthplace. He also claimed that in reality Islamic State, the Kurdish YPG and the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad, are working together against the moderate Syrian opposition. Asked if the IS files could bring the network down he nodded and said simply: "God willing".

Trump views US wars of intervention and occupation around the world, all in countries that pose no threat to American citizens, a waste of taxpayer money. He is the only candidate in either party who will question the cost and legitimacy of our commitment to Cold War relics like NATO and continuing to station troops in South Korea; our country’s involvement in religious civil wars in the Middle East and overthrowing and killing secular dictators there it doesn’t like (Hussein and Kaddafi); and our threatening Russia by encouraging its neighboring states of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, and Georgia to join NATO and giving them weapons and military guarantees to defend them.

US exploits are leading America to the brink of war with Russia — and possibly, given its actions in the South China Sea, to war with China as well. Putin has said, “The US wants to subdue Russia, to solve US problems at Russia’s expense. No one in history ever managed to do this to Russia and no one ever will.” More ominously, in a speech delivered at the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi, he states, “Russia does not wish for chaos to spread, does not want war, and has no intention of starting one. However, today Russia sees the outbreak of war as almost inevitable, is prepared for it, and is continuing to prepare for it…” Is World War III inevitable?

“The preachers of hatred” was how the news weekly Der Spiegel characterized the new German right on its cover last month, emblazoned with a portrait of the petite Ms Petry. But this brisk, garrulous 40-year-old is more than Ms Merkel’s foil. She is a disruptive, new force on the German political scene.

She and her party, the Alternative for Germany, have ridden a wave of discontent over the chancellor’s embrace of more than one million refugees to their strongest poll ratings ever. They are now roiling Germany’s placid, consensus-driven politics and threatening to alter its political landscape as insurgent parties have done in less stable or prosperous countries around Europe.

Not unlike Donald J Trump in the United States, she is also breaking open a political dialogue and liberating a new and impolitic — critics say racist — language in the mainstream. “The power of the established parties is crumbling,” a jubilant Ms Petry told supporters after her party took 13.2 percent of the vote in normally sleepy local elections in the central state of Hesse last Sunday.

Under a USD-3-billion contract between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and DynCorp, mercenaries from the company are to be deployed to Yemen, where UAE forces are fighting against the Yemeni army and Popular Committees on Saudi orders, Khabar News Agency quoted an official with Yemeni Defense Ministry as saying.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the first group of the mercenaries recently arrived in the port city of Aden to replace those of Blackwater, a notorious American group now renamed Academi.

He added that the new militants included special naval forces, who entered the port of Ras Omran southwest of Aden. DynCorp is a rival of Blackwater, which hires mercenaries and sends them to fight in foreign countries on paid missions.

At this point, Italian banking stocks have declined a whopping 28 percent since the beginning of 2016, and when you look at some of the biggest Italian banks the numbers become even more frightening. On Monday, shares of Monte dei Paschi were down 4.7 percent, and they have now plummeted 56 percent since the start of the year. Shares of Carige were down 8 percent, and they have now plunged a total of 58 percent since the start of the year. This is what a financial crisis looks like, and just like we are seeing in South America, the problems in Italy appear to be significantly accelerating.

So what makes Italy so important?

Well, we all saw how difficult it was for the rest of Europe to come up with a plan to rescue Greece. But Greece is relatively small – they only have the 44th largest economy in the world. The Italian economy is far larger. Italy has the 8th largest economy in the world, and their government debt to GDP ratio is currently sitting at about 132 percent. There is no way that Europe has the resources or the ability to handle a full meltdown of the Italian financial system. Unfortunately, that is precisely what is happening.

Now a team of scientists has demonstrated that a computer can outperform human judges in predicting who will commit a violent crime. In a paper published last month, they described how they built a system that started with people already arrested for domestic violence, then figured out which of them would be most likely to commit the same crime again.

The technology could potentially spare victims from being injured, or even killed. It could also keep the least dangerous offenders from going to jail unnecessarily. And yet, there’s something unnerving about using machines to decide what should happen to people. If targeted advertising misfires, nobody’s liberty is at stake.

Iran’s most recent ballistic missile test, which violates current UN Security Council resolutions, comes a day after the international community’s nuclear watchdog organization disclosed that it is prohibited by the nuclear agreement from publicly reporting on potential violations by Iran. Iranian leaders now say that they are poised to walk away from the deal if the United States and other global powers fail to advance the Islamic Republic’s “national interests.”

“If our interests are not met under the nuclear deal, there will be no reason for us to continue,” Abbas Araqchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, warned during remarks delivered to a group of Iranian officials in Tehran. “If other parties decide, they could easily violate the deal,” Araqchi was quoted as saying by Iran’s state-controlled media. “However, they know this will come with costs.”

Araqchi appeared to allude to the United States possibly leveling new economic sanctions as a result of the missile test. The Obama administration moved forward with new sanctions earlier this year as a result of the country’s previous missile tests. Iran’s latest missile test drew outrage from longtime regime critics on Capitol Hill.

The new missile firings were the latest in a series of tests in recent days, aimed at demonstrating that Iran will push ahead with its ballistic program after scaling backing its nuclear program under the deal reached last year with the US and other world powers. Israel, long an opponent of Iran, offered no comment on the test, though Biden issued a strong warning over any possible violation of the nuclear deal.

"A nuclear-armed Iran is an absolutely unacceptable threat to Israel, to the region and the United States. And I want to reiterate which I know people still doubt here. If in fact they break the deal, we will act," he said. Biden's comments came after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who strongly opposed the nuclear deal. The tests, however, don't violate the accord. The landmark deal, which led to Iran dramatically scaling back its nuclear program, does not include provisions against missile launches.

“This is one of several things we were very worried about,” South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard, who is also a biological sciences professor at Florida International University, told the Miami New Times. “You would have to work hard to find a worse place to put a nuclear plant, right between two national parks and subject to hurricanes and storm surge.”

Turkey Point came online in the early 1970s; it supplies power to more than one million homes in South Florida. The new study blames the leaks on the reactor’s cooling canals, which were recently found to have caused a massive underground saltwater plume to migrate west, threatening a wellfield that supplies drinking water to the Florida Keys.

Turkey Point is not the sole leaky plant in America. Last month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo acknowledged that the state’s Indian Point Nuclear facility was leaking tritium into groundwater. Meanwhile, The Vermont Department of Health has noted ongoing investigations into leaks at Vermont Yankee since 2010, while New York’s FitzPatrick Plant has been “plagued by water leaks” in 2014, Gizmodo notes.