New figures released disclosed the scale of the violence in the city on New Year's Eve, which showed 30 more sexual assaults than were previously reported. Cologne Police said that 379 offences were committed on that night, of which 150 were sexual assaults.

"Those in focus of criminal police investigations are mostly people from North African countries," police said in a statement. "The majority of them are asylum-seekers and people who are in Germany illegally." Questions are being asked about why it took more than a week for the authorities to acknowledge that asylum-seekers are among the suspects in the attacks, amid claims of a cover-up.

And asylum-seekers are still flooding into Europe. The German interior ministry believes another 1 million will attempt to cross Turkey to Europe this year, according to Spiegel.

The expert said that many heads of state and government of the EU states considered Merkel’s handling of the migrant crisis to be erroneous. "In all probability, she will either have to change her policy or step down as the chancellor," the expert added. According to him, the scandalous New Year attacks in Cologne have taken the already hard situation in the European Union almost to a deadlock.

"What’s happened can mark the beginning of the end to the career of Angela Merkel who used to have such a great influence in Europe," Bernd Rigert said. "The attacks on women in Cologne are strengthening the positions of politicians who are opposed to the policy of receiving refugees. It is a hard time for the chancellor," Rigert emphasized. Even prior to the Cologne attacks, it was clear the European Union was unlikely to work out a common migrant policy.

Angela Merkel has also come under serious internal political pressure. It is obvious that Merkel will be unable to live up to her promise given to the Christian Social Union party to decrease the number of migrants in the country. "She can no longer rely on the European solidarity," the Deutsche Welle expert stressed.

In the United States momentum is gaining in the presidential race where the primary topics of discussion are issues of foreign policy. However, all applicants' attention is focused on Russia, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and Europe has very little emphasis. In this regard, European countries are beginning to rethink the transatlantic partnership and common purpose.

Also, in recent years more doubt in the world has been caused by the US leadership. EG notes that the current crisis in relations between the US and Europe is of a very serious and systemic nature. So to overcome this it will be very difficult, and given that Americans today are busy with other things, it is almost impossible.

Moreover, the relations between the US and Europe are not only staggered, but also relations within the European Union itself. The migration crisis has shown how easily European leaders are ready to abandon the main principle of the EU - open borders. And while the borders between European countries remain open, the question of restrictions is being discussed at the highest level.

Despite protests from Washington, the UK joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which was created by the Chinese to compete with the American-Japanese Asian Development Bank. The British, venturing in the conflict with the United States, are trying by all means to maintain London as the leading global financial centre. And without good relations with China, this would be extremely difficult in the foreseeable future to achieve.

The experts believe that in 2016 the contradictions between European countries and the USA will affect the position of the West on the Ukrainian crisis, including the anti-Russian sanctions. But transatlantic relations will no longer be a priority both for Europe and for America.

A standoff between the rival Koreas has deepened since last week's test, the North's fourth. Seoul on Monday continued anti-Pyongyang propaganda broadcasts across the border and announced that it will further limit the entry of South Koreans to a jointly run factory park in North Korea.

Outside North Korea, Kim faces widespread condemnation and threats of heavy sanctions over the North's disputed claim of a hydrogen bomb test. Internally, however, Kim's massive propaganda apparatus has looked to link the test to Kim's leadership so as to glorify him and portray the test as necessary to combat a US-led attempt to topple the North's authoritarian system.

"If the enemy provokes, retaliate speedily and accurately without hesitation," Han told commanders of the Army's Missile Command during his field inspection on Saturday, according to the ministry. The visit was made as part of a series of military counteractions South Korea took after the North claimed to have successfully conducted a hydrogen bomb test on Wednesday.

Two days after the test, South Korea resumed its loudspeaker broadcasts critical of North Korea along the inter-Korean border in psychological warfare designed to agitate front-line North Korean soldiers. In response, North Korea began its own such broadcasts, but also began deploying troops toward the border with South Korea. A lot of troops.

A 4.7-magnitude tremor was followed 30 seconds later by another 4.8-magnitude quake centered in a sparsely populated area about 20 miles northwest of Fairview, Oklahoma, about 97 miles northwest of Oklahoma City. The quakes struck at depths of 2.1 and 3.7 miles below the surface. The twin earthquakes occurred at 10:27 pm CST Wednesday night and were felt from central Kansas to southern Oklahoma and the eastern Texas panhandle, including in Wichita, Kansas, and the Oklahoma City metropolitan area. Two others were reported in the far northern Oklahoma City metropolitan area east-northeast of Edmond, and a third occurred around midday Thursday near Perry in north-central Oklahoma.

This was one of 30 separate earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 or greater reported in Oklahoma within a 19-hour span from Wednesday evening through early Thursday afternoon. Twenty-seven of those, including the two strongest quakes mentioned above, were clustered in southern Woods County.

The move comes as China reported its biggest annual drop in foreign exchange reserves on record in 2015, while the central bank has allowed a sharp slide in the Yuan currency to multi-year lows, raising fears of more capital flight. All banks in certain trading hubs, including Shenzhen, received the order recently, the people added. They declined to be identified because they are not allowed to speak to the media.

While three sources for this story claim they were told that this is an effort to stem the outflow of capital, a different source says something altogether different is taking place: the belief in China is that the US Dollar is now worthless and will soon totally collapse as a currency, leaving everyone who holds dollars, broke. That's why China is doing everything it can to shed US Dollar currency. The way it's being done, however, is a "useful guise" for the Chinese to prevent the collapse from taking place too early and leaving them stuck with trillions in useless US dollars.

Here’s the most dramatic statistic: 450 of 452 suicide terror attacks in 2015 were perpetrated by Muslim extremists. One of the remaining two attacks was carried out by the Kurdish underground. The other was perpetrated by a woman supporter of a leftist group in Turkey.

Even the attack in Turkey initially attributed to a “leftist group” may actually also have been carried out by a Muslim. According to media reports, police were investigating if the perpetrator was a Russian woman “radicalized by Wahhabi ideology.” If that turns out to be the case, that would mean 451 of the 452 attacks were perpetrated by Muslim extremists.

“Unlike what people usually think, last year was not exceptionally ‘wild’ as regards suicide attacks. There were far fewer attacks than in 2014, although the number of fatalities remained almost the same — 4,370 people killed in 2015 as compared with 4,400 people the year before.” Which means, “to put it another way, the terror attacks are more deadly.”

In a draft policy statement jointly issued by the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Education, federal bureaucrats have — on their own initiative — subordinated parents to a secondary role in the rearing of their children.

While the draft is neither finalized nor binding (yet), it serves as a clear shot across the bow of every freedom-loving parent who naively believes that his parenting principles, priorities and practices will be protected and respected by government.

The entire purpose of the 18-page statement is to explain, promote and bureaucratically implement what the departments call “family engagement.” This term sounds like something every good parent would inherently want, but here’s how the government defines it: “the systematic inclusion of families as partners in children’s development, learning and wellness.”

That’s right: the government is going to include you, the parent, as a partner in rearing your child. Are we supposed to thank it for this privilege?

But an investigation by researchers from the University of Wisconsin has uncovered that, despite years of denial, the FDA has known since at least the 1970s that nitrites cause cancer, and yet continues to pander to the meat industry in allowing their use.

Meat curing has been around forever, with the historical record showing that this process allowed ancient cultures to preserve meats for extended periods of time, especially during periods of food scarcity. People didn’t have refrigerators back then, remember, so they had to come up with novel ways of food preservation that would get them through harsh weather conditions and other volatile environmental factors.

The fact that people have been curing meats since time immemorial isn’t necessarily a problem. Salt, after all, is a natural curing agent that, in and of itself, isn’t harmful. It’s when salt is transformed through synthetic chemical alterations – in this case, as nitrites – that it becomes harmful. And these same nitrites, according to independent scientists, have been the subject of intense debate over the years concerning their safety.

The sell-off came as weakening of the yuan led to worries that China's economy was slowing more than expected. The rest of Asia also recovered some losses after the dramatic plunge in Chinese shares had triggered a global sell-off. Markets in Europe and the US made steep losses overnight after trading in the world's second largest economy was closed within the first 30 minutes in the previous session, making it China's shortest trading day on record.

Regulators suspended the "circuit breaker" rule late on Thursday. Analysts said it was creating more panic selling instead of calming sentiment. "The fall in markets looks to have been exaggerated and driven more by fears and regulatory issues around the share market and currency rather than a renewed deterioration in economic indicators," said Shane Oliver, investment strategist at AMP Capital.

Investors were worried that China's moves to weaken the yuan would spark a currency war in the region as other countries tried to remain competitive.

Cameron is on a visit to Germany, where he met with chancellor Angela Merkel in Bavaria on Wednesday and will outline his reform ideas on Thursday at the annual conference of the sister party of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, the Christian Social Union. The UK prime minister campaigned in the EU’s largest economy to enlist its support for his reform proposals ahead of an EU leaders’ meeting next month in Brussels.

If a deal is reached in February, Cameron could call for a referendum in June. In an article appearing in Germany’s biggest-selling newspaper, Bild, Cameron argued support for the UK’s membership has declined and the changes will help address the concerns of the British people. "But these changes will benefit the EU too, and Germany can help deliver them," he wrote.

"The problems in the EU that what we are trying to fix are problems for Germany and other European partners too," he argued. Cameron wants to cut EU bureaucracy and shift powers from Brussels to national capitals.

In August, Beijing decided to tweak its exchange rate peg with the dollar, making the renminbi float in a wider band against the greenback. This sparked immediate market panic that China was entering into the world's currency wars. But the devaluation in itself was small. Allaying fears further, the Chinese began to immediately intervene to prop up the RMB to stop it falling too fast by drawing down their reserves.

But devaluation fears are returning. The country's export performance has stuttered, while the dollar has rocketed on the back of a stronger US economy. Overall, the RMB has weakened by around 10 percent against the dollar over the last two years. "Over half of the weakness has come in the last four months," says Sean Yokota at SEB.

The Communist party has responded to mass capital outflows by using the full force of the state to punish those it accuses of "illegal cash transfers" out of the country. Some claim that the Chinese are beginning to lose control over their exchange rate and their economic policy. China's exchange rate policy, it could be said, has put the country in a bind.