Mr Cantlie, whose fellow journalist hostages have all either been released or beheaded, has appeared in the group’s propaganda videos and written previous pieces. In his latest work, presumed to be written under pressure but in his hall-mark style combining hyperbole, metaphor and sarcasm, he says that President Obama’s policies for containing Isil have demonstrably failed and increased the risk to America.

He raises a “hypothetical” possibility under which Isil operatives in Pakistan bribe an official to provide them with a nuclear device which is smuggled into America via Libya, Nigeria, South America and Mexico. “Perhaps such a scenario is far-fetched but it’s the sum of all fears for Western intelligence agencies and it’s infinitely more possible today than it was just one year ago,” he writes.

“And if not a nuke, what about a few thousand tons of ammonium nitrate explosive? That’s easy enough to make.” He says it is no secret that Isil is planning to attack America on a large scale.

His remarks came as Greece's finance minister Yanis Varoufakis cautioned that the entire euro project could unravel if Athens crashed out of the single currency. Greece is due to hand over the money in four instalments in June as part of its settlement for the bail-out in 2011.

But Mr Voutsis said the government was determined to fight the lenders' strategy of 'asphyxiation', warning: 'This money will not be given and is not there to be given.' Greece could be forced to leave the euro and revert to the drachma if it fails to pay its creditors. It is struggling to pay wages and pensions while meeting its debt obligations.

But Mr Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister, told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show that if a deal was not made, it could also spell the end for the euro project.

As you can imagine, that means that Greek government accounts are just about bone dry. The new Greek government continues to insist that it will never “violate its anti-austerity mandate”, but the screws are tightening. Right now the unemployment rate in Greece is over 25 percent and the banking system is on the verge of collapse. It isn’t going to take much to set off a panic, and when it does happen there are already rumors that the EU plans to confiscate money from private bank accounts just like they did in Cyprus.

Throughout this entire multi-year crisis, things have never been this dire for the Greek government. In fact, Greece came this close to defaulting on a loan payment to the IMF back on May 12th. And with essentially no money remaining at all, the Greek government is supposed to make several large payments in the weeks ahead…

The Germans believe that at some point the economic and financial pain will become so immense that it will force the new Greek government to give in to their demands. The Greeks believe that the threat of a full blown European financial crisis will cause the Germans to back down at the last moment. So what if they are both wrong? What if both sides are fully prepared to stand their ground and take us over the cliff and into disaster?

According to Al-Khatib, the pronouncements by Netanyahu's ministers – such as the statement last week by new Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people – were simply reflective of the feelings of most Israelis. Such statements, he said “merely highlight the religious nature of the dispute,” as opposed to the proclamations by Israeli leaders that the dispute is “political,” and that in the end, Jews and Muslims would end up in a conflict over the Land.

In 2013, Al-Khatib warned of a possible internal conflict with "the Israeli occupation" and threatened a "huge eruption" if Israel intervened on the Temple Mount ("Al Aqsa") and continued, according to him, to bother the Muslims praying there. Khatib called on Muslims to come to the aid of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, calling for it to be a place of Muslims alone, and claiming that all statements of the Jews regarding the construction of the Third Temple are nothing but "tales of the imagination."

"The protection of the Al-Aqsa mosque is not solely a task for the inhabitants of Jerusalem, residents who have been occupied since 1948 (referring to the State of Israel) and the Palestinian people themselves. It is the task of the entire Muslim and Arab world,” he said.

These environmental advocates - who work with bishops, religious orders, Catholic universities and lay movements - have been preparing for months to help maximize the effect of the statement, hoping for a transformative impact in the fight against global warming.

“This is such a powerful moment,” said Patrick Carolan, executive director of Franciscan Action Network, a Washington-based advocacy group formed by Franciscan religious orders. “We're asking ourselves, ‘What would be the best way for us to support the faith community in getting this out and using it as a call to action?’”

Francis is issuing the encyclical by the end of June with an eye toward the end-of-year UN climate change conference in Paris. “People are really putting a lot of weight on this,” said Nancy Tuchman, director of the Institute of Environmental Sustainability at Loyola University Chicago.

So Bofinger told the German magazine Der Spiegel in an interview that cash should be done away with. In Denmark, a new law was proposed that would allow shops to refuse cash payments. Officially, it’s to reduce the “administrative and financial burdens” of handling cash. Since it’s up to the shop to decide, the law sounds innocuous. But it would be another step to making money a purely electronic entity that can be seamlessly tracked anywhere. It would also be another step in granting the central bank the absolute power to inflict confiscatory monetary policies on any entity or person with money in the bank.

This law would come in handy. Denmark’s Nationalbank has imposed a negative deposit rate of -0.75%, with the intent of flogging savers and confiscating their money until their mood improves and limiting the appreciation of the krone against the sagging euro. But to evade the wrath of negative deposit rates, savers can pull cash out of the bank and store it under their mattress. And this must be stopped – by making cash useless.

But support is not unanimous on the German Council of Economic Experts. Lars Feld, one of the other “Five Sages on the Economy,” shot him down in the Frankfurter Allgemeine with a nod to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous quote, “Money is coined freedom.” Feld put it this way: “Cash is coined freedom.” Feld also criticized Bofinger for having “apparently neglected the constitutional aspects of this proposal.” Not that they couldn’t be ruled away by the courts, but for now, the constitution – and not only in Germany – would still be a roadblock.

Athens is now warning openly that the "moment of truth" will come on June 5, when the country faces default on a €300 million payment to the International Monetary Fund, unless the EU authorities hand over the next tranche of bail-out cash. It would be hazardous to bet the integrity of monetary union on the assumption that this is just a bluff.

For the past four months the creditor bloc has been dictating terms, mechanically repeating the same demand that Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza rebels deliver on an austerity contract that they vowed to repudiate and which the previous conservative government was unable to implement. EMU leaders have never at any moment acknowledged that the extra loans imposed on a bankrupt Greek state in 2010 were chiefly designed to save the euro and stem a European-wide banking crisis at a time when the eurozone had no defences against contagion.

They have yielded slightly on Greece's primary budget surplus but are still insisting on fiscal targets that can only trap Greece in a vicious circle of low growth and under-investment. Such a regime would leave the country just as bankrupt in the early 2020s as it was when the traumatic ordeal began, with nothing to show for so many cuts and a decade of depression.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the Commission's chief, admitted poignantly to Die Welt that the whole project is in dire trouble. "Europe has lost a huge amount of prestige. Nobody takes us seriously in foreign policy anymore," he said. "A Greek exit from the eurozone would do irreparable damage to the European Union's reputation in the whole world." The EMU creditors have Mr Tsipras by the scruff of the neck. He has a knife to their throats.

Putin stated bluntly that in his view the West would only be content in having a Russia weak, suffering and begging from the West, something clearly the Russian character is not disposed to. Then a short way into his remarks, the Russian President stated for the first time publicly something that Russian intelligence has known for almost two decades but kept silent until now, most probably in hopes of an era of better normalized Russia-US relations.

Putin stated that the terror in Chechnya and in the Russian Caucasus in the early 1990’s was actively backed by the CIA and western Intelligence services to deliberately weaken Russia. He noted that the Russian FSB foreign intelligence had documentation of the US covert role without giving details.

What Putin, an intelligence professional of the highest order, only hinted at in his remarks, I have documented in detail from non-Russian sources. The report has enormous implications to reveal to the world the long-standing hidden agenda of influential circles in Washington to destroy Russia as a functioning sovereign state, an agenda which includes the neo-nazi coup d’etat in Ukraine and severe financial sanction warfare against Moscow.

I have to admit I was surprised by the verdict. For me, the case was not simply one of straightforward homophobia. Refusing to write a message fundamentally at odds with one’s beliefs is different from, say, refusing a couple a bed in a B&B: it is to involve people in an argument rather than simply request that they act as disinterested providers. If Ashers had simply refused to sell any cake at all to Mr Lee or any other LGBT person, then that would be an obvious act of discrimination.

The case is complicated further by the fact that equal marriage is not just a religious issue in Northern Ireland: it is a live political issue. Less than a month ago, the Northern Ireland Assembly voted against the legalisation of equal marriage. We are now in the strange situation where the Equality Commission and the court have both decided that refusing to write an equal marriage slogan on a cake is against equality, while equal marriage itself is illegal.