The gap between the rhetoric of climate summits and the reality is laughable. Ever since the Rio summit of 1992 it has always been “the last chance” to save the world from dangerous climate change. Meanwhile, the world is nearly as reliant on fossil fuels as it was when the theory of man-made global warming first entered the public consciousness. In 1973 oil, coal and gas accounted for 87 per cent of energy. In 2012 they accounted for 81 per cent. For all the wind and solar farms which now disfigure the English countryside, these two forms of energy even now account for no more than one per cent of global energy consumption.

Much to the annoyance of the climate activists who protested in London and Paris at the weekend, world leaders have failed to commit to a mass switch to renewable energy because they have a careful balancing act to perform. They would love it if their economies could be made to run entirely on renewable energy – as would almost everyone – but they know that if they tried to do so they would not have much of an economy left.

Yet the climate has stubbornly refused to play along. It is now quarter of a century since the IPCC first tried to predict the rise in global temperatures as a result of carbon emissions, which it put at between 0.2C and 0.5C per decade. Since 1998, the rise has been at a rate of just 0.05C per decade. Meanwhile, apocalyptic predictions of drought and tempest have also failed to materialise. Remember how, after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, we were told to expect ever more destructive storms?

Hurricanes have declined since, with not one category 5 storm measured in the Caribbean this decade. Climate predictions are made by mathematical models which try to recreate a computerised version of the Earth’s atmosphere. Trouble is that the atmosphere remains poorly understood and is chaotic in nature. The models tend to reflect the prejudices of the scientists who build them. We know from the leaked emails that climate science operates rather like 15th-century Catholicism, with no tolerance of heretics.

Interior Minister Silvan Shalom and Jordanian Water Minister Hazim Nasser on Monday announced the release of the $800 million tender, which will be formally published Tuesday. The two nations, which made peace in 1994, are seeking a company to construct the canal and operate it for 25 years.

“Today we took an additional historic step to save the Dead Sea,” said Shalom, who served as water minister in the last government, on a trip to Jordan on Monday. “The joint international tender to be published tomorrow is proof of the cooperation between Israel and Jordan, and a response to those who cast doubt on whether the canal project would ever go ahead. This is an exceptional environmental and diplomatic achievement that testifies more than anything to the fertile cooperation between the [two] countries.”

The pipeline will take some four or five years to complete. It will be 180 kilometers long and will pass through Jordanian territory, carrying around 200 million cubic meters of seawater from the Red Sea — at the very southern tip of Israel — per annum.

The remarkable case — which could have repercussions throughout the German legal system, based as it is on the principle of precedent — was reported briefly in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. According to that report, a 43-year-old Serbian national had been arrested after being caught smuggling a large number of people into Germany in his vehicle.

Usually, people smugglers are sentenced to imprisonment of several years in Germany, but in this case the accused was warned, given a two-year suspended sentence, and allowed to walk out of the court building a free man.

His defense — with which the court agreed — was that the crime with which he had been charged was actually the official policy of the Federal German government.

Boyalife Group and its partners are building the giant plant in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, where it is due to go into production within the next seven months and aims for an output of one million cloned cows a year by 2020. But cattle are only the beginning of chief executive Xu Xiaochun's ambitions. In the factory pipeline are also thoroughbred racehorses, as well as pet and police dogs, specialised in searching and sniffing.

Boyalife is already working with its South Korean partner Sooam and the Chinese Academy of Sciences to improve primate cloning capacity to create better test animals for disease research. And it is a short biological step from monkeys to humans - potentially raising a host of moral and ethical controversies.

The hospital’s new program found that “vaccination rates improved when agents visited homes.” They used “education” tactics on the un-vaccinated. They found vaccination rates increased in the community 15%. How insane is this? As insane as you might think it to be. This reeks of a CDC outreach program using the hospital as a front. This program directly takes advantage of the impoverished, less educated sectors who are easier to convince and intimidate.

A recent study showed that rich, white, educated people were the least vaccinated, but the CDC and hospitals haven’t attempted this program on them (yet). This is irrefutable proof that they are starting with a demographic they see as the weakest, most easily influenced.

This is the bad side of the slippery slope. The CDC is likely using this demographic as a test market to see how this invasive, discriminatory and blatant violation of rights to privacy can pan out. A 15% profit margin to pharmaceutical companies is rather large. Remember, you never have to answer any questions about your health to Government agents (or anyone for that matter). No one should be asking you about, or requesting documentation about your children’s vaccination statuses. Don’t allow Government agents to intimidate you, you have rights!

The sources were quoted by the London-based Arabic Asharq Al-Awsat as saying they aren't sure how a civilian plane simulator, and apparently a fighter jet one as well, got into the jihadists' hands in Sirte, the birthplace of Libya's former dictator Muammar Gaddafi who was deposed in 2011. "It's a modern simulator, which apparently arrived from abroad," the sources were cited as saying, noting that it was roughly the size of a small car.

A senior Libyan military officer confirmed the information to the paper in an interview held in Cairo. He noted that the ISIS group, which includes former officers in the Libyan army and neighboring armies, succeeded in acquiring a civilian flight simulator in October. The officer said security forces received information in the last two weeks indicating that the ISIS fighters also obtained a fighter jet simulator of an unspecified type.

ISIS has in the past captured fighter jets in Iraq and Syria, leaving open the potential that terrorist pilots would head from Libya back to those countries in order to launch an ISIS air force of sorts. Another potential risk is that the terrorists could hijack planes and crash them into sensitive sites, as was done by Al Qaeda terrorists in the infamous September 11, 2001 attacks.

The incidents were among a half-dozen previously undisclosed security breaches since 2013 that were detailed in an extensive, bipartisan congressional investigation of the inner workings of the Secret Service.

In a critical report to be released publicly Thursday, House investigators describe the once-elite force as an “agency in crisis” that has failed to fix many of the deeply ingrained problems exposed last year amid a string of humiliating security lapses, according to a copy of the report obtained by The Washington Post.

Relations between Moscow and Tokyo have been strained for decades because of the status of the four southernmost islands in the Kuril chain, known as the Northern Territories in Japan. Some 19,000 Russians live on the remote rocky islands, occupied by Soviet troops in the dying days of World War II.

The two countries have never officially struck a peace treaty and the lingering tensions over the issue have hampered trade ties for decades. The Russian ministry said the new military buildings would help "raise the combat readiness of troops on the eastern frontiers of Russia."

The lawsuit claims the banks “have been able to extract billions of dollars in monopoly rents, year after year, from the class members in this case.” The suit alleged that the banks “have jointly threatened, boycotted, coerced, and otherwise eliminated any entity or practice that had the potential to bring exchange trading to buyside investors,” since at least 2007.

“Defendants did this for one simple reason: to preserve an extraordinary profit center,” the lawsuit said. The lawsuit goes on to claim that the banks masked their collusion by using code-names for joint projects such as “Lily, Fusion, and Valkyrie.”

The scale of alleged theft is almost unimaginable. If you want to understand who/what controls governments, you have found the industry that stands above all others in its ability to bend the will of states and from which all other industries bow at the altar of; the true ‘Masters of the Universe.’

Targeting oil fields is intended to disrupt the source of the revenue which ISIS needs to fund its military operations as well as the running of its self-styled 'state' which straddles the borders of Syria and Iraq. In last night's mission, RAF Tornado GR4s, supported by a Voyager air refuelling tanker and a Reaper drone carried out airstrikes against the Omar oilfield, 35 miles inside Syria's eastern border with Iraq.

The MoD said: 'The Omar oilfield is one of the largest and most important to Daesh's financial operations, and represents over 10 per cent of their potential income from oil. Carefully selected elements of the oilfield infrastructure were targeted, ensuring the strikes will have a significant impact on Daesh's ability to extract the oil to fund their terrorism.'

The Ministry of Defence said in a statement that the strike would target 'the mainstay of Daesh's financial income', adding that RAF pilots ensured there were no civilians present when they launched their attacks. 'Following the vote in the House of Commons last night, Royal Air Force Tornado GR4 aircraft flew their first offensive operation against Daesh terrorist targets inside Syria,' the MoD said.

'The mainstay of Daesh's financial income is derived from exploitation of a number of oilfields that they hold. These are overwhelmingly located in Daesh's heartlands in eastern Syria. Several of these oilfields have already been effectively targeted by other coalition partners - RAF aircraft and precision weaponry are well suited to attacking, with low collateral risk, this type of target. Carefully selected elements of the oilfield infrastructure were targeted, ensuring the strikes will have a significant impact on Daesh's ability to extract the oil to fund their terrorism.'

ISIS's control of oil fields in north-east Syria has provided them with £320 million of revenue which they use to fund their terror activities in the Middle East. The jihadist group is believed to work together with the Assad government - nominally its bitter enemy in the Syrian civil war - to maximise the profits it makes from its industrial operations.

“Today, we are presenting only some of the facts that confirm that a whole team of bandits and Turkish elites stealing oil from their neighbors is operating in the region,” Antonov said, adding that this oil “in large quantities” enters the territory of Turkey via “live oil pipelines,” consisting of thousands of oil trucks. Antonov added that Turkey is the main buyer of smuggled oil coming from Iraq and Syria. “According to our data, the top political leadership of the country - President Erdogan and his family – is involved in this criminal business.”

However, since the start of Russia’s anti-terrorist operation in Syria on September 30, the income of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) militants from illegal oil smuggling has been significantly reduced, the ministry said. “The income of this terrorist organization was about $3 million per day. After two months of Russian airstrikes their income was about $1.5 million a day,” Lieutenant-General Sergey Rudskoy said.

For the past two months, Russia’s airstrikes hit 32 oil complexes, 11 refineries, 23 oil pumping stations, Rudskoy said, adding that the Russian military had also destroyed 1,080 trucks carrying oil products. “These [airstrikes] helped reduce the trade of the oil illegally extracted on the Syrian territory by almost 50 percent.” Up to 2,000 fighters, 120 tons of ammunition and 250 vehicles have been delivered to Islamic State and Al-Nusra militants from Turkish territory, chief of National Centre for State Defense Control Lieutenant General Mikhail Mizintsev said.

“According to reliable intelligence reports, the Turkish side has been taking such actions for a long time and on a regular basis. And most importantly, it is not planning to stop them. One thing is clear. The role that Turkey is playing in this area is in many ways destructive and it’s affecting the European security, it’s affecting its neighbors. Ultimately it’s affecting its own society,” Uzi Arad, former head of research at Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency told RT.

Following Russian accusations, the US has again defended Turkey, denying any ties between Ankara and Islamic State. “We flatly reject any notion that the Turks are somehow working with ISIL. Preposterous. And really very, kind of ridiculous,” Steve Warren, Pentagon spokesman, said. He called Turkey “a great partner” to Washington in fighting against IS terrorists in Syrian and Iraq. “They’re hosting our aircraft. They’re conducting strikes. They’re supporting the moderate Syrian opposition,” Warren explained.

First of all, how involved is the Turkish government in all of this? There is no way in the world that an endless parade of trucks carrying ISIS oil could have marched through Turkish border checkpoints without the cooperation of the central government. Secondly, what did Obama know and when did he know it? The US military has far better surveillance capabilities than the Russians do, and so it seems absolutely absurd to suggest that Obama didn’t know what was going on.

As an American, I am utterly embarrassed that our “leaders” would continue to try to deny what Turkey is doing after everything that has come out. By flat out lying to the world, we are losing any credibility that we had left. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stolen oil has been smuggled into Turkey, and our government still has the audacity to try to tell us not to look behind the curtain?

No wonder why most people over in Iraq are convinced that the US is actually on the same side as ISIS. They don’t trust anything that we have to say anymore.

‘The Teflon Chancellor’? ‘Mummy Merkel’? Germany’s very own Iron Lady: the most powerful woman in the world? The unflappable leader who steered the European Union back to calmer waters, while keeping her own economy strong? What on earth is going on? Just a few months ago, it seemed Angela Merkel could do no wrong. She was the cherished Chancellor – in the top job since 2005 and beloved back home in Germany, while seemingly bossing around the boked of the European Union on an international stage. But, suddenly, her shine is beginning to tarnish.

You don’t have to look hard to find the reason why. Mrs Merkel’s decision to throw Germany’s doors open to refugees was the political equivalent of betting all your chips on red. It was always going to be a risky and potentially divisive move. The German Chancellor is known for her cool, calm political calculation and strategy. Her policy on refugees, however, didn't seem to come from the head but the heart.

Mrs Merkel has so far refused to back-down from her policy or impose a limit on the number of asylum seekers the country will take. Some 950,000 are believed to have entered Germany this year – considerably more than the official government forecast of 800,000. The numbers, inevitably, will keep growing. In November alone a record 192,827 asylum seekers crossed into the country, according to border police figures.

But it’s important to emphasise that it’s not all disaster for the German Chancellor. There’s no obvious challenger waiting in the wings, and her party is comfortably ahead in the polls. The Christian Democrats are on 38 per cent compared to their nearest rival, the Social Democrats, on 25 per cent. So she’s safe… for now. But if this year of crisis has taught us anything, it’s that politics is a volatile and fickle business.

Most European states believe that Greece has badly mishandled its responsibilities on border control, and following refusal to accept wider European help in tackling the crisis, the EU is now threatening Greece with expulsion from Schengen. Such action would essentially divorce Greece from the main body of the EU. As with Britain, which is not a member of Schengen, border controls would have to be established to patrol passage from Greece to the rest of the EU.

The EU is able to threaten expulsion because Greece is reluctant to accept limited offers of help, including humanitarian aid and a special mission from Frontex, Europe’s hopelessly inadequate version of a federal borders agency. This refusal is not because Greece believes it needs no aid; it is because it thinks the offer grossly deficient. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is.

Exactly the same thing happened over Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. Limited relief was offered by the EU, but on terms and conditions which Greece found unacceptable. In the end, it was forced to capitulate, the alternative being expulsion from the Euro, which even Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, found unconscionable. That will very likely be the outcome of the Schengen fiasco too.