The American government issued an unusually stark warning of the horrors that face Iraq if the dam gives way, describing a "tsunami-like wave" that would crush nearly a third of the country. Iraq's power grid could be entirely knocked out and parts of major cities would be underwater for weeks like areas of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the US said. The Iraqi government would be unable to direct an evacuation because Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) still controls much of the territory near the dam and so people need to prepare to evacuate on their own, the US said.

The dam was built in 1984 but has fallen into severe disrepair over decades of dictatorship, war and instability in Iraq. The government has struggled to convince foreign companies to take up a contract to maintain the dam while fighting with Isil rages nearby. The US embassy in Baghdad said long-running deterioration meant the danger was now at an "unprecedented" level. While there was "no specific information that indicates when a breach might occur", the US said Iraq's government should begin setting up an emergency notification system to warn the roughly 1.5 million people in the flood path.

But it’s only the beginning, explains Auryn Resources executive chairman Ivan Bebek in an interview with SGT Report, as nation states and large investors are trying to get their hands on gold as fast as they can. We know for a fact that the smart money including major global players like George Soros and Carl Icahn are gobbling up all the gold they can get their hands on. When the rush for the exit in global equities starts – and you better believe it will – there will be an equally panicked rush into safe haven assets.

And while there is most certainly big money moving into gold ahead of negative interest rates, a potential ban on high denomination cash bills and the global calamity to come, Bebek highlights the fact that retail investors haven’t yet begun to get involved on any meaningful scale. Many remain committed to the view of mainstream financial pundits and entrenched analysts talking their books, so they’re going to hold on to their more traditional investments until such time that they see everyone else panic. And when that inevitable rush to the exit door comes they’ll be looking to shift their capital into safe haven assets, along with the rest of the herd.

But just as there will be only one exit door for the mob trying to sell, there will also be a small entrance way for those looking to protect themselves with gold.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is the largest of the Oriental Orthodox Churches, which rejected the definitions of the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451. In his address, Pope Francis told Pope Matthias I “what unites us is greater than what divides us,” and added that “shared sufferings have enabled Christians, otherwise divided in so many ways, to grow closer to one another.”

“Just as in the early Church the shedding of the blood of martyrs became the seed of new Christians, so today the blood of the many martyrs of all the Churches has become the seed of Christian unity,” Pope Francis said. “The ecumenism of the martyrs is a summons to us, here and now, to advance on the path to ever greater unity.”

Felix Ngole, a 38-year-old father of four, expressed support for Kim Davis, the county clerk from Kentucky in the US who was jailed for refusing to issue marriage licences after the introduction of same-sex unions in September last year. He argued that homosexual activity is against the teaching of the Bible, quoting a verse from Leviticus describing it as an "abomination". The post, from his private Facebook account, was part of a discussion thread in which other users voiced their opinions on all sides of the debate.

It was not until two months later that he was summoned to a disciplinary hearing at Sheffield University after a fellow student complained about his post. He said he was initially not even told what he was accused of doing. He was eventually told that it involved breaching social work guidelines on "personal conduct" and "bringing the profession into disrepute".

At a further hearing, a university "fitness to practise" panel concluded that he was entitled to his opinion on the issue of gay marriage but that there was a danger he "may have caused offence to some individuals" by voicing it. They concluded that, even though he was not yet even qualified as a social worker, his comment on the Facebook thread would affect his ability to operate in the profession.

Andrea Williams, chief executive of the Christian Legal Centre, said: “What is absolutely shocking is that we have got a student who expresses a view on his own private Facebook page and is removed from a university course and effectively barred from professional vocational training for voicing opinions which are held by millions of people around the world. This is just the latest step in a long line of cases in which professions have been closed off to Christians. But now we are seeing it at the university stage – the very place where we are supposed to be able to discuss different opinions.”

However, the personal information and opinions that we put out on social media doesn’t just provide commercial opportunities for advertisers. It’s a veritable goldmine for governments as well. Everything that people used to keep to themselves in previous generations is now willingly shouted into the internet abyss for all to hear. Social media users often feel free to share their most controversial, subversive, and inflammatory thoughts on a platform that could reach millions of people. It’s kind of crazy when you think about it, but it’s the world we live in today.

Governments of course, love this. People say things on the internet that in years past would require a warrant to discover. Law enforcement would have to get permission from a judge to tap someone’s phone, or search their house for diaries and letters that would give them a damning insight into that person’s psychology and intentions. Now we just give it away for free.

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.