Indeed she did not. Objections also came from the far right as well as the left. Willy Wimmer, a member of the Bundestag for more than 30 years and once defense spokesman for Merkel’s own Christian Democratic Union party, but also noted for his anti-American and pro-Russian views, warned that the warheads gave “new attack options against Russia” and constituted “a conscious provocation of our Russian neighbors.”

Why, at a time when Germans are paying painfully high energy bills to rid themselves of civilian nuclear power plants, would Merkel make such a controversial move? Not only did she approve the new B61-12 deployment, but her government has also announced that it will retain the Tornado fighter jet — also based at Büchel, where it routinely practices missions with dummy B61s — in its inventories until at least 2024.

To be sure, it would take a giant change in German domestic political attitudes to even begin to talk about a home-grown nuclear force. But perhaps, with the outside world changing so rapidly and so violently, it is foolish to think that Europeans won’t change their attitudes toward security and the need for military power as well.

Germany this year dropped below Japan to have the lowest birth rate in the world. For every 1,000 people in the European country, just 8.2 babies are born a year. This is a huge problem because the 1950s and 1960s baby boomers are starting to enter retirement. Germany has one of the highest basic state pensions in the world and it needs a lot of people in employment and paying tax to keep it going.

However, the population is quickly becoming extremely top heavy, with fewer and fewer young workers to support the increasing older population. This could lead to a huge financial crisis for the country and subsequently the whole of Europe, according to Harry Dent, a top American economic forecaster and analyst.

It's thought that the ageing population is part of the reason why Germany has been so keen to welcome in more than a million migrants from Syria - to help plug the gap in the young section of the population. Mr Dent added: "It would take 11 or 12 million refugees who stay there and eventually learn German to address this."

Normally mild-mannered individuals caught up in the throes of this disease have been transformed into belligerent zealots, while others inclined to pacifism have taken to stockpiling weapons and practicing defensive drills.

This plague on our nation — one that has been spreading like wildfire — is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live. Everywhere you turn, those on both the left- and right-wing are fomenting distrust and division. You can’t escape it.

We’re being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of Muslims, fear of extremists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government. The list goes on and on.

The strategy is simple yet effective: the best way to control a populace is through fear and discord. Fear makes people stupid. Fear has been a critical tool in past fascistic regimes, and it now operates in our contemporary world — all of which raises fundamental questions about us as human beings and what we will give up in order to perpetuate the illusions of safety and security.

After delivering the facts, Metropolitan Hilarion asked Putin to make protection and defense of Christianity around the globe a major part of his foreign policy. And, as reported by Interfax, Putin replied, “You needn’t have any doubt that that’s the way it will be,” assuring Hilarion that Russian foreign policy would defend Christians from persecution abroad.

Putin has spoken openly of his faith, noting that most of Europe is rooted in Christianity, and that a denial of this is embarking on a path of “renouncing” their roots. Putin believes that Russia is the new leader in supporting Christian values and morals. Now my cold war upbringing makes me cynical and even today our media paints this man as a thug, however I must confess, even if it is propaganda, I wish I would see this type of propaganda coming out of our own American leaders.

During a meeting in the Kremlin, Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told the President that Kalibr cruise missiles had been fired by the submerged Rostov-on-Don submarine from the Mediterranean Sea for the first time. He said TU-22 bombers also took part in the latest raids and that "significant damage" had been done to a munitions depot, a factory manufacturing mortar rounds and oil facilities. Two major targets in Raqqa, the defacto capital of Isis, had been hit, said Mr Shoigu.

President Putin said the new cruise missiles could also be equipped with nuclear warheads - but that he hoped they would never need them. He said: "With regard to strikes from a submarine. We certainly need to analyse everything that is happening on the battlefield, how the weapons work. Both the [Kalibr] missiles and the Kh-101 rockets are generally showing very good results. We now see that these are new, modern and highly effective high-precision weapons that can be equipped either with conventional or special nuclear warheads."

However, recent signs suggest that the dollar’s rally may be coming to an end. Among them, is the fact that China and Japan, the world’s two largest holders of US Treasury Debt, have just dumped a ton of dollars.

November marked a record month for China in terms of the pace of its liquidation of foreign exchange reserves. The People’s Bank of China reported on Monday, December 7 that foreign exchange reserves, which mostly consist of US Treasury debt, dwindled by another $87 billion in November. This constitutes a stunning 2.5% drop in one month.

Right behind the largest US Treasury holder is the second largest, Japan. Japan’s Ministry of Finance also reported a sharp drop in its own foreign exchange reserves in November, likewise also mostly US Treasuries. Japan’s stockpile is now $1.233 trillion, down from $1.244 trillion last month for a drop of 1%.

While the percentages are small, the dollar amounts appear much larger than previous treasury dumps. This suggests that there is a growing urgency to ditch the dollar. And earlier today, the value of the dollar reached its lowest level since early November. That may not sound like much, but when you see the charts, it’s obvious that the dollar’s value isn’t just falling. Its descent is rapidly accelerating.

Emerging markets have already endured a dollar shock. The currency has risen 20 percent since July 2014 in expectation of this moment, based on the Fed's trade-weighted "broad" dollar index. The tightening of dollar liquidity is what caused a global manufacturing recession and an emerging market crash earlier this year, made worse by China's fiscal cliff in January and its erratic, stop-start, efforts to wind down a $26 trillion credit boom. The shake-out has been painful: hopefully the dollar effect is largely behind us.

The central bank governors of India and Mexico, among others, have been urging the Fed to stop dithering and get on with it. Presumably they have thought long and hard about the consequences for their own economies. The greater risk for the world over coming months is that China stops trying to hold the line against devaluation, and sends a wave of corrosive deflation through the global economy.

It is currently being reported that two “screened and vetted” Afghani trainees have disappeared from Moody Air Force base in Georgia where they have been training alongside American servicemen since February.

The two trainees failed to show up to training on Monday. Georgia police and the Air Force are both searching for the two men whom the Pentagon says “do not pose any apparent threat”. Key word: “apparent”.

The Air Force released this statement:

“The students have trained alongside American counterparts for the entirety of 2015 and do not pose any apparent threat. There is a well-coordinated process among federal agencies to locate the individuals as quickly as possible and return them accordingly to the proper authorities to manage their present situation.”

And we can all trust the Pentagon! After all, they are the ones who “carefully vetted” the moderate Syrian rebels, training and arming them, before they all joined ISIS! Even if they later find these guys, that isn’t the point. Maybe they just had the flu together. Whatever. The point is they have driven this country into a potential hysteria over ISIS and fear over potential terrorist attacks. This story is scaring sleeping people who have now been poised to expect a terror attack here in America.

Many other political leaders all over the world are asserting authoritarian powers and cracking down on freedoms and legal protections.

Why is fascism on the march? Highly-regarded journalist John Pilger thinks that the liberal democracies of the West have become fascist. The West is certainly largely dictating Japanese policy … and backing Japan as a counter-balance to China’s rising power. Similarly, NATO – the western military alliance – backs Turkey as a counter-weight to Russia’s growing assertiveness. So the West is enabling the rising authoritarianism in these two countries.

Another theory is that corruption starts at the top (a “fish rots from the head”). When the world’s strongest country (America) committed the ultimate war crime – an aggressive war on Iraq – it amounted to a virtual declaration of open season on lawlessness for the rest of the world. But is this really new? After all, the US and the West have long backed authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere because it is politically expedient (they’ve got lots of oil).

Indeed, we have frequently backed strongmen – such as Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega and Muammar Gaddafi – until they get too “uppity” … at which point we bump them off. True, the brazenness of the Iraq war lies – along with the concomitant crimes of torture, etc – maybe on a whole new level.

But I would argue that what’s really different now is that – for the first time since the end of WWII – US imperial power is waning. Wanna-be dictators such as Erdogan, Abe and others in the gallery of rogues are therefore jumping into the void and trying to enlarge their power … These are the exact type of scoundrels who dream and scheme of resurrecting the glory of empires gone by … whether the Ottoman, imperial Japanese, or other.

The fact that most of the nations of the world use our dollars to trade with one another creates a tremendous amount of artificial demand for our currency. In other words, the US dollar is valued much higher than it otherwise would be just because it is the de facto reserve currency of the planet. As a result, we can import massive amounts of products at super cheap prices. When we go to Wal-Mart or the dollar store, we can fill up our carts with lots and lots of ridiculously inexpensive stuff. Our standard of living is way higher than it actually should be.

And because the US dollar is used so widely in global trade, major exporting nations end up with giant piles of our currency which they have been willing to lend back to us at ultra-low interest rates. This has made it possible to fund our massively bloated federal government and to go 18 trillion dollars in debt. If the rest of the world stops using our dollars and stops playing our game, we will be in a tremendous amount of trouble. The cost of imported products would absolutely skyrocket and our standard of living would go way down.

In addition, the federal government (along with state and local governments) would have to pay much more to borrow money which would rapidly create a gigantic debt crisis. So Russia knows where they could really hurt us. Most of the “power” that America currently projects around the world is based on having the de facto reserve currency of the planet. If you take our financial power away, we would be far, far less imposing on the global stage. Sadly, the truth is that the US military is rapidly shrinking and has largely been defanged by the Obama administration.

A lot of people that will read this article will not understand this, but it is very, very important to keep an eye on this emerging Russian/Chinese alliance. I believe that it is going to play a critical role in world events during the years ahead.

The schematic for the new world order, according to the admissions of the internationalists, cannot possibly include the continued existence of US geopolitical and economic dominance. The plan, in fact, requires the destabilization and reformation of America into a shell of its former glory. The most important element of this plan demands the removal of the US dollar as the de facto world reserve currency, a change that would devastate our current financial structure.

I outlined with undeniable evidence the reality that major governments, including the BRICS governments of the East, are fully on board with the globalist agenda. There is no way around it; the BRICS, including Russia and China, have openly called for a global monetary system centralized and dictated by the IMF using the SDR basket. This same plan was outlined decades ago in the Rothschild-owned magazine The Economist. We are witnessing that plan being implemented in front of our very eyes today.

The Work and Pensions Secretary said that “behind closed doors” ministers across the Continent agree with the UK that migrants should not be allowed access to the benefits system immediately. He dismissed Donald Tusk’s claim that there is “no consensus” on Britain’s demand to lock EU migrants out of in-work benefits for four years and said the letter did not reveal “very much”.

In a hardening of rhetoric, Mr Duncan Smith demanded that if Mr Tusk is looking for an alternative to the plans he should simply “agree” with Britain and stop challenging the proposal. “When I talk to ministers in Germany and France et cetera I have yet to come across one person … that doesn’t actually agree that there is something fundamentally wrong with this system that means people can arrive in a different country and be eligible for benefits that they have never contributed towards or been involved in,” Mr Duncan Smith said. “And I think you’ll find if you talk to the Dutch ministers and the Danish ministers that I’ve talked to and Germans they are all actually in agreement.”

Serving officers in terrorist hotspots including London and Birmingham said that forces are becoming increasingly nervy over the rising threat of Islamic State (ISIS) inspired attacks, with some telling staff not to wear their uniforms in their OWN patrol cars. One officer in London said the firebrand presidential hopeful was “pointing out something plainly obvious” whilst another in Lancashire said the police have to ask local Muslim leaders for permission before sending patrols into their communities.

Their shocking testimonies are in stark contrast to the official responses from politicians and the Metropolitan Police, who have rounded on Mr Trump’s controversial claims. The Republican frontrunner provoked fury across the globe on Monday when he said that all Muslims should be banned from entering America to combat terrorism. During a tub thumping speech to party activists he also took a swipe at Britain, saying: “We have places in London and other places that are so radicalised that police are afraid for their own lives.”

His comments were widely derided by British politicians including David Cameron, who called them “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong”. The Metropolitan Police also issued a withering statement saying Mr Trump “could not be more wrong” whilst London Mayor Boris Johnson said his claims were “utter nonsense”. But they have today been fatally undermined by members of the rank and file, who have said that fear of Islamist extremism within Britain’s police is widespread despite the protestations of the authorities. One serving officer in west London said: “Islamification has and is occurring. You have to have extra vigilance in certain parts when you are working."

The planned visit follows Trump’s call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” in light of what he said was “great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population.” A security source said Trump would probably not be allowed to visit the Temple Mount, the Post’s sister publication Ma’ariv reported.

The source said that when the current wave of terrorism began, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu banned all politicians from visiting the site. The source added that Trump’s visit is meant to be a provocation, so security forces are likely to bar him from ascending the mount.

Netanyahu on Wednesday rejected Trump’s remarks regarding Muslims, but officials suggested his December 28 meeting with Trump would go ahead as planned. “The State of Israel respects all religions and protects stringently the rights of all its citizens,” a statement released by the Prime Minister’s Office said. “At the same time, Israel is struggling with extremist Islam that is attacking Muslims, Christians and Jews as one and is threatening the entire world.”