For the first time in almost two decades, reformists and centrists overcame every obstacle placed in their path to achieve significant advances in two elections, one for the Majles, or parliament, and another for the Assembly of Experts, a powerful representative body.

Some of Iran's most notorious hardliners were cast into the political wilderness, including Ayatollah Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, the spiritual mentor of the former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who lost his place in the Assembly of Experts and came near the bottom of the poll.

The emerging outcome is largely what Hassan Rouhani, the moderate president, will have wished for. The "Coalition of Hope", which supports last year's nuclear agreement and backs Mr Rouhani's efforts to ease tensions with the West, has won a significant presence in parliament, while the ranks of the hardliners who bitterly oppose Mr Rouhani have been thinned out. Mr Rouhani said the moment had arrived to "open a new chapter in Iran's economic development based on domestic abilities and international opportunities".

Brussels bureaucrats are railroading through contentious plans to vastly expand the European Union’s military scope which could ultimately end with the British army being subsumed into a vast continental force. The UK military could also be forced to share highly sensitive weapons technology - which we have spent millions of pounds of taxpayers' money developing - with the rest of Europe under an agreement to boost military cooperation between member states.

Britain would also be expected to contribute around £375 million to the scheme - enough to rehire all of the 20,000 soldiers the Government sacked in its last defence spending review. Last night critics branded the plans "scandalous" and said only a vote for Brexit in the upcoming referendum can guarantee the future of the 356-year-old British army.

One former servicewoman, who asked not to be named, told Express.co.uk the proposals would require the military to change the centuries old Oath of Allegiance for new soldiers, because they would no longer be "bearing true allegiance" to the Queen. She raged: "It'll be like ashes in the mouths of service personnel.”

The plans have been unveiled by bureaucrats who are preparing to revive proposals to draw up a legally binding "white book" which would vastly expand the military role of the EU. Britain has by far the biggest and best equipped army in Europe and is to plough some £2.2 billion into developing new weapons this year alone. But under the new EU plans we could in future be blocked from researching new military technology which would benefit the British Army, instead being forced to plough money into projects for the wider benefit of the whole EU project.

Put simply, business views are far more divided than many people may think. Our most recent survey of business leaders was conducted last month. With knowledge of the Prime Minister’s renegotiation proposals, but before agreement of the final deal, 60 percent of them said that they would vote to remain part of the European Union, while 30 percent would elect to leave. One-in-10 had not yet decided how they would cast their vote.

There are clear distinctions, too, that emerge when looking at business size and where companies’ export interests lie. Perhaps unsurprisingly, business leaders representing large firms are significantly more likely to vote “Remain” than those in small and micro-businesses; and it is smaller businesses that make up the bulk of our economy.

Those businesses who export only to the EU are overwhelmingly in favour of staying, while those who export only to the rest of the world are much more likely to cast their vote in favour of a Brexit. Whatever the UK public decides, we will be in uncharted waters.

The British Chambers of Commerce will not campaign for either side. But, in the meantime, we will continue to demand more information and facts from both sides of the debate, so that business people have the tools to make an informed choice: the toughest political choice that many may ever make.

But despite that strong competition, the winner of the Project Fear Scare Story of the Week has to be the fears drummed up about security in a letter from former military leaders. As soon as it was published, it began to crumble – Lord Bramall said he felt pressured into signing by a Downing Street “fait accompli”, General Sir Mike Jackson said he was not “happy entirely” with the thrust of the letter (though he was “content” to sign) and General Sir Michael Rose revealed that he had never agreed to sign it at all.

General Rose, understandably annoyed at the use of his name without his permission, went public to argue that “sovereignty and security are intrinsically linked and in recent years we’ve seen the EU erode our sovereignty”. In playing fast and loose with whose support they claimed, the pro-EU campaign appear to have given a boost to the Leave side. Other former senior officers are reportedly furious that they had to fight to avoid their names being automatically added.

When asked how mad they were, more than half of Americans said they were “Mad As Hell” and not going to take it any more. Now that the South Carolina primaries are over, this is what they had to say:

“Right now we are looking at a situation where we are paying as much for refugees and immigrants in this country as we are paying for our veteran’s care right now, $168 billion per year.

“Our health care is going straight down the toilet, we can’t convince our doctors to see patients, our military is not being supported and our borders are open.”

“It’s not fair, people losing jobs, people losing money; I can’t afford health care anymore.”

“What bothers me the most in this country is that you can’t even speak the truth anymore.”

“I could never have imagined in eight years in my country that I could have seen such a huge cultural change. It’s an overwhelming umbrella over everything; how we treat our veterans, how we treat our older people, how we’re educating our children, or not educating them, and how we treat one another.”

“How many, if you could, would throw every member of Congress out, every incumbent, and start over?” That is just about all of you. If you’re watching in Washington you’re in big, big trouble.

Boris Johnson and Michael Howard are ancient liberal Europhiles, who have learned how to seduce the Tory Party with speeches that sound Right-wing but aren’t really. It is painful to see this cynical seduction technique at work, and watch the old ladies fall for it.

Neither is what he seems. Lord Howard led a Left-liberal putsch against the genuine EU opponent Iain Duncan Smith in 2003. Mr Johnson is an act, not a politician. He is a keen Europhile, and to conceal it from his fans he will do so many U-turns between now and referendum day that they will look like a series of S-bends. Both men’s weird declarations of support for Brexit were cunningly hedged.

And the London Mayor was careful to state: ‘I will be advocating vote “leave”... because I want a better deal for the people of this country to save them money and to take back control.’ Read this carefully (as you always should) and you will realise there’s no clear declaration that he wants our national independence back. But there is a desire for a ‘deal’. Likewise his supposed reversal last Saturday wasn’t really as clear as it looked. Be assured. If there is a majority to leave there will be a second poll and a search for a new deal.

What sort of deal? Lord Howard was more specific. In an article which was lazily reported as a ‘blow for David Cameron’, he explicitly said that he saw a vote to leave as a way of restarting negotiations on how to stay in: ‘There is only one thing that just might shake Europe’s leaders out of their complacency: the shock of a vote by the British people to leave.’

Barack Obama can continue huffing and puffing about how well the middle class is doing all he wants, but the truth is that the cold, hard numbers that retailers are reporting tell an entirely different story. Earlier today, Sears Chairman Eddie Lampert released a letter to shareholders that was filled with all kinds of bad news. In this letter, he blamed the horrible results that Sears has been experiencing lately on “tectonic shifts” in consumer spending…

We have an economy that is in the process of failing. We can see it in the explosion of subprime auto loans that are going bad, we can see it in the hundreds of retail stores that are shutting down, and we can see it in the tens of thousands of good paying energy jobs that are being lost. During the Obama years, interest rates have been pushed to the floor, the Federal Reserve has created trillions of dollars out of thin air, and the size of our national debt is getting close to doubling. Despite all of those desperate measures, our economy continues to crumble.

We stole from the future to try to paper over our failures and it didn’t work. Now an economic downturn that will ultimately turn out to be even worse than the “Great Recession” of 2008 and 2009 has begun and our leaders have absolutely no idea how to fix things. I wish I had better news to report, but I don’t. Get prepared now, because very rough times are ahead.

“Another crisis is certain, and the failure… to tackle the disequilibrium in the world economy makes it likely that it will come sooner rather than later,” Lord King says in his new book, the exclusive serialisation of which starts in The Telegraph this weekend. Since the last crisis, “governments and regulators have been hyperactive at the national and international level” but “bankers and regulators have colluded in a self-defeating spiral of complexity”, he claims.

“A major failing before 2007 was that the monetary policy framework designed to deal with good times and the lender of last resort framework for bad times were not properly integrated. In the crisis, massive support was extended not to save the banks but in order to save the economy from the banks,” Lord King says.

The crisis was not a failure of individual policymakers or bankers Lord King argues but of “a system, and the ideas that underpinned it... There was a general misunderstanding of how the world economy worked”.

The announcement that Russia is sending a new set of fighter jets and combat helicopters to an air base only 25 miles from the Turkish border is just the latest example of this alliance. The two countries’ economic and military ties run deep, bolstered by economic and security agreements and two military bases — including one just outside the Armenian capital. Most significant, Armenia is the only country in the region that shares a border with Turkey and has Russian troops permanently stationed.

Although Armenia has welcomed thousands of Russian troops and advanced weaponry, these developments seemed to have escaped the notice of US officials, who were settling in for the holidays while Russia and Armenia signed a sweeping air defense agreement two days before Christmas. It’s time for Washington to assess who our real allies in the region are.

Renewed inflation of the volcano was detected by HVO’s GPS network and also with Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) in 2014. Based on the elevated rates of earthquakes and persistent inflation, the Volcano Alert Level for Mauna Loa was elevated from Normal to Advisory on September 15, 2015.

According to the USGS Alert-Notification System for Volcanic Activity, an Advisory level indicates that the volcano is showing signs of unrest above known background levels, but does not mean that an eruption is certain. Another period of Mauna Loa unrest in 2004–2005 included inflation and anomalous seismicity, but did not result in an eruption. Mauna Loa, the largest active volcano in the world, has erupted 33 times since 1843.

On the website, policelink.monster.com, an article by John E Reid, who claims to be “the world leader in providing training programs on investigative interviewing and interrogation techniques, as well as seminars on specialized techniques for the investigation of street crimes,” begins: “During the course of an investigation an investigator often must rely on duplicity and pretence in an effort to develop evidence against the guilty suspect.”

Reid goes on to write:

“An interesting application… is the permissibility of lying to a suspect about the purpose for an interview. As an example, consider that Frank is suspected of engaging in illegal gambling activity and investigators wish to talk to him about that. For fear that Frank will destroy evidence if told the true purpose for the interview, investigators lie and tell him that they would like to question him about a recent hit and run accident.

Once Frank voluntarily presents himself to the interview room he is told the true purpose for the interview and subsequently confesses to illegal gambling activity. Lying to a non-custodial suspect about the purpose for an interview may be considered permissible if the investigator can establish a reasonable purpose for the deception and that the interview was voluntary.”

The unprecedented meeting of the head of the Church, Patriarch Kirill, with his Roman Catholic counterpart Pope Francis in Havana on February 12 is going to have “far-reaching consequences,” the head of the Department for External Church Relations, Metropolitan Hilarion, told TASS in an exclusive interview. “The word of the pope and the patriarch is addressed to men of all conditions, including political leaders the future of humankind depends upon,” the metropolitan said.

The first-ever face-to-face talk between two of the major leaders of the Christian world does not mean that the dialogue has just started, Metropolitan Hilarion stressed. “It means the dialogue has entered a new stage of augmented intensity.” Despite all the existing theological disagreements, there is a clear understanding on both sides that “the situation in the world urges immediate collaborative action,” as it was put in the final joint declaration of the heads of churches.

“The meeting was necessary to coordinate our actions in the first place.” It was important that the leaders of the world’s two largest Christian churches spoke with a single voice. “So they did,” Metropolitan Hilarion said. After the rupture between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches in 1054 that is known as the Great Schism, a great deal of differences accumulated, yet the “Christian conscience forces us to seek ways to overcome the discord,” he said, stressing that “This is going to be a long haul.”

UK, Chinese and American officials and the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, have been discussing key issues to the global economy during a G20 summit in Shanghai since Friday. The chancellor told the BBC: "The financial leaders of the world's biggest countries have given their unanimous verdict and they say that a British exit from the EU would be a shock to the world economy - and if it's a shock to the world economy imagine what it would do to Britain."

Meanwhile, London Mayor Boris Johnson has clarified his position on the idea that a vote to leave the EU could force Brussels to give Britain a better deal and trigger a second referendum. Mr Johnson had previously suggested that only by voting to leave would the UK "get the change we need". But in The Times, Mr Johnson stated categorically: "Out is out".

The prime minister emerged from the talks with an agreement that, among other things, allows the UK to cut benefits received by migrant EU workers. While British Eurosceptics, including six of Cameron’s senior ministers, saw the deal as more form than substance, their Continental neighbors understood the significance of granting these special privileges to a member country. Some fear it to be a “kiss of death” for the European experiment.

Now, Cameron has set a June date for a referendum on his country’s membership in the EU, given the concessions — or lack thereof, depending your point of view — he obtained. The prime minister will campaign for Britain to remain in the Union, while Boris Johnson, the popular mayor of London (and potential Cameron successor), will urge his compatriots to leave.

The fundamental issue at hand, which the UK’s status within Europe obscures, is that monetary union without political integration generates tension and instability. Just consider the havoc wreaked by Europe’s equivocal approach to unification. Countries like Greece are stuck with an overvalued currency that makes them uncompetitive, while richer nations like Germany are made ultracompetitive by a de facto undervalued currency. The situation creates tremendous pressure on the system, with no meaningful ways to resolve imbalances except through counterproductive austerity measures.

Europe is broken and needs to be fixed. Sometimes, a doctor has to break a damaged bone to let it heal correctly. The same logic may apply here. It’s time to fix Europe — even if it means breaking it.

Bohuslav Sobotka said that a “Czexit” may take place. The Czech Republic only joined the EU in 2004 and has been the beneficiary of billions in development funds, but has some of the most hostile public opinion.

A Brussels decision to force the country to take in a quota of migrants caused fury. Three-fifths of Czechs said they were unhappy with EU membership and 62 percent said they would vote against it in a referendum, according to an October 2015 poll by the STEM agency.

"If Britain leaves the EU, we can expect debates about leaving the EU in a few years too," said Mr Sobotka, who led eastern European states in opposition to David Cameron’s plans to curb benefits. "The impact may be really huge," he said, adding that a "Czexit" could trigger an economic and security downturn and a return to the Russian sphere of influence.