"We're still in a position where our message is... that the next move in interest rates is going to be up," Mr Carney said during a panel discussion at a Bundesbank conference in Frankfurt. Mr Haldane surprised investors last week when he said a recent sharp slowdown in inflation meant the bank was as likely as not to cut rates - a view that had been previously rejected by Mr Carney. Several other top policymakers at the BoE have left Mr Haldane looking isolated in recent days.

During the exercises, which will take place over the summer, Special Forces from various branches of the military will work with local law-enforcement in scenarios that, to critics at least, sound suspiciously like they are aimed at subduing rebellious American civilians and states amid a civil war or large-scale unrest. The federal government issued a response dismissing the concerns and saying that the training is to help US forces prepare for overseas missions, but not everyone is convinced.

Citing other recently leaked U.S military documents such as “FM 3-39.40 Internment and Resettlement Operations” about interning American civilians in camps, using “psyops” (psychological operations) on those detainees to affect their views, and more, David Hodges with the Common Sense Show said the drill is “undoubtedly the most frightening thing to occur on American soil since the Civil War.” In a widely re-published article about the training program, he said it could be “conclusively stated” that the drill was really about “preparing for a Red, White and Blue invasion.”

“This is a massive rehearsal for martial law implementation as well as implementing the proverbial and much rumored Red and Blue List and the “snatch and grab” extractions of key resistance figures from the Independent Media as well as uncooperative political figures,” Hodges added. “The various provisions of Jade Helm make it clear just how dangerous this drill truly is.”

Jade Helm drill may well just be nothing more than training US forces for “overseas missions,” as officials claim. However, considering the known details of the exercise and the accelerating anti-constitutional lawlessness of the federal government, it is hardly unreasonable to express concerns. In fact, anybody who is not concerned by the current state of US affairs is simply not paying attention.

The boyish rookie politician was regaled with the carpet treatment from his host Angela Merkel. Mr Tsipras strode alongside his counterpart inspecting an austere guard of honour lined outside Berlin's Federal chancellery building, in a ceremony laced with more than a hint of the military past of Europe's once mighty nation.

It was an abrupt change of scene for the 40-year-old, who flew into the German capital in standard class seating on a commercial plane from Athens. But the military honours did nothing to cow Mr Tsipras from repeating a demand that has catalysed the breakdown in trust between the debtor state and Europe's largest creditor: that Germany revisits the episode of its former might and compensate his country for crimes committed by the Third Reich.

In front of the world's media, the Greek premier stood by Ms Merkel and maintained his government would pursue the "moral" question of Second World War reparations. Ms Merkel however was categorical in her refusal to re-open old wounds. It is an issue which has fanned the flames of a protracted and increasingly ugly series of threats and counter-threats that have dogged talks between the two sides.

Greece's paymasters are demanding the fast implementation of legislation to release the bail-out cash. They have yet to see much in the way of action. To add insult to perceived injury, the only concrete measures to have been put before the Greek parliament are a raft of "anti-poverty" programmes designed to tackle the country's humanitarian crisis. Steps towards privatising key national assets, revamping labour laws, and cutting generous state pensions have remained conspicuously absent. The hiatus has exasperated Greece's creditors.

"The new government has gambled away a lot of trust," was the verdict of Germany's hawkish Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann. Ireland's premier, Enda Kenny was equally as damning ahead of an EU summit earlier this month: "They need to face up to their responsibilities". The spectre of an "accidental" Greek exit - or "Grexident" - now looms over the eurozone.

“Caring for the marginalized and the poor; advancing economic opportunity for all; serving as good stewards of the environment; protecting religious minorities and promoting religious freedom around the world; and welcoming and integrating immigrants and refugees into our communities,” are on the agenda, according to the White House.

The announcement comes at a time when Obama is facing political opposition in most of those arenas. His signature healthcare legislation, the Affordable Care Act, is awaiting a potential death-knell from the Supreme Court. Obama’s executive immigration actions are also being tested in the courts, after legislators tried to reverse them earlier this year.

Though Francis might not be able to help in the courts (most of those cases will occur in the next few months), he might be able to give the president some strength on the environment. Obama recently retreated from a fight on fracking, but is aiming for a far-reaching global climate deal at the UN in December. The deal, if reached, could cement the president’s environmental legacy, which has been under fire from activists.

“There are many of them. They refuse to deny Jesus and they endure insult and injury with dignity," he said. Francis has at times expressed alarm over the rise of Islamic State militants and the plight of Christians in the Middle East. He has said that the international community would be justified in using military force as a last resort to stop "unjust aggression" but that it should not be up to a single nation to decide how to intervene in the conflict.

“Shut out from labor markets, plied with generous social welfare payments and allowed to cultivate beliefs and cultural practices inimical to democracy, many of these immigrants despise their new homes, and find the religious commitment and certainty of radical Islam an attractive alternative,” writes Bruce Thornton of the Hoover Institution. “Some turn to terrorism,” like the French-Algerian brothers who carried out the slaughter at the magazine Charlie Hebdo.

“Such violence,” adds Thornton, “along with cultural practices like honor killings, forced marriages and polygamy… are stoking a political backlash against Muslims.” Populist parties are surging — the UK Independence Party in Britain, the National Front in France and now the “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident,” PEGIDA, in Germany. These parties will soon be strong enough to enter governments, impose restrictions on immigration and demand assimilation. Then the cultural conflicts may turn violent.

Christianity gave Europe its faith, identity, purpose and will to conquer and convert the world. Christianity created Europe. And the death of Christianity leaves the continent with no unifying principle save a watery commitment to democracy and la dolce vita. From Marine Le Pen’s France to Putin’s Russia, nationalism and patriotism are surging across Europe because peoples, deprived of or disbelieving in the old faith, want a new faith to give meaning, purpose, vitality to their lives, something to live for, fight for, die for.

Countless millions of Muslims have found in their old faith their new faith. And the descendants of fallen-away European Christians of the 19th and 20th centuries are finding their new faith in old tribal and national identities. Less and less does multiculturalism look like the wave of the future.

Tech firms should consider the impact sophisticated encryption software has on law enforcement, he said. A spokesman for TechUK, the UK's technology trade association, said: "With the right resources and cooperation between the security agencies and technology companies, alongside a clear legal framework for that cooperation, we can ensure both national security and economic security are upheld."

Mr Wainwright said that in most current investigations the use of encrypted communications was found to be central to the way terrorists operated. "It's become perhaps the biggest problem for the police and the security service authorities in dealing with the threats from terrorism," he explained.

"It's changed the very nature of counter-terrorist work from one that has been traditionally reliant on having good monitoring capability of communications to one that essentially doesn't provide that anymore." Mr Wainwright, whose organisation supports police forces in Europe, said terrorists were exploiting the "dark net", where users can go online anonymously, away from the gaze of police and security services.

The Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO) said that while the bloc was likely to stay together in the medium term, with Greece remaining in the eurozone, the single currency could not survive if countries did not move closer together. Persistently weak growth in the eurozone had led to voter unrest and the rise of populist parties such as Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and Front National in France, said PIMCO managing directors Andrew Bosomworth and Mike Amey.

"The lesson from history is that the status quo we have now is not a tenable structure," said Mr Bosomworth. "There's no historical precedent that this sort of structure, which is centralised monetary policy, decentralised fiscal policy, can last over multiple decades." PIMCO said the rise of populist parties demonstrated how uneasy some people had become about the euro. "Persistently low growth manifests itself in a lack of support in the common currency, so then it leads to the rise to power of political parties that want to end it," said Mr Bosomworth.

US negotiators are said to have given up ground on demands that Iran be forced to disclose the full range of its nuclear activities at the outset of a nuclear deal, a concession experts say would gut the verification the Obama administration has vowed would stand as the crux of a deal with Iran. Until recently, the Obama administration had maintained that it would guarantee oversight on Tehran’s program well into the future, and that it would take the necessary steps to ensure that oversight would be effective. The issue has now emerged as a key sticking point in the talks.

Concern from sources familiar with US concessions in the talks comes amid reports that Iran could be permitted to continue running nuclear centrifuges at an underground site once suspected of housing illicit activities. This type of concession would allow Iran to continue work related to its nuclear weapons program, even under the eye of international inspectors. If Iran removes inspectors — as it has in the past — it would be left with a nuclear infrastructure immune from a strike by Western forces.

“Once again, in the face of Iran’s intransigence, the US is leading an effort to cave even more toward Iran — this time by whitewashing Tehran’s decades of lying about nuclear weapons work and current lack of cooperation with the [International Atomic Energy Agency],” said one Western source briefed on the talks but who was not permitted to speak on record. With the White House pressing to finalize a deal, US diplomats have moved further away from their demands that Iran be subjected to oversight over its nuclear infrastructure.

“Instead of ensuring that Iran answers all the outstanding questions about the past and current military dimensions of their nuclear work in order to obtain sanctions relief, the US is now revising down what they need to do,” said the source. “That is a terrible mistake — if we don’t have a baseline to judge their past work, we can’t tell if they are cheating in the future, and if they won’t answer now, before getting rewarded, why would they come clean in the future?” On the diplomatic front, greater concessions are fueling fears among US allies that Iran will emerge from the negations as a stronger regional power.

The negotiations, in progress for nearly 18 months, aim to hammer out an accord whereby Iran halts sensitive nuclear work in exchange for the lifting of sanctions, with the ultimate aim of reducing the risk of a war in the Middle East. US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif have been in Lausanne for days to try to reach a preliminary deal by a self-imposed deadline of March 31, and they held several rounds of talks on Saturday.

But close as they have come to the outline of an agreement, the two sides still have deep disagreements that could wreck a deal. Zarif says the six powers - the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China - are now the ones who must compromise. "In negotiations, both sides must show flexibility ," Zarif said on Twitter. "We have, and are ready to make a good deal for all. We await our counterparts' readiness."

Western officials close to the talks said it was up to Iran to compromise on the remaining sticking points, which include Tehran's ambitions concerning nuclear research and development and the immediate removal of UN sanctions. "The serious but difficult work continues," a senior US State Department official said. "We expect the pace to intensify as we assess if an understanding is possible." French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters upon arrival in Lausanne that he hoped for "a robust agreement".

"Iran has the right to civil nuclear power, but with regard to the atomic bomb, it's 'no'," he said.

In exchange for the lifting of crippling economic sanctions, Iran will agree to curtail its nuclear enrichment activities for at least 10 years and to allow UN inspectors access to the country to make sure there’s no cheating. It all sounds so reassuringly simple, particularly to war-weary Western publics that – as Bashar al Assad discovered when he gassed his own people – have no appetite for firefighting what is fast becoming a sectarian inferno in the Middle East. And yet that public apathy is exactly what the Obama administration is counting on when it comes to selling a nuclear deal that is already being presented as a binary choice between embracing peace or re-embarking on the road to war.

Those who would even question the merits of this deal are dismissed by administration aides as “warmongers”, a charge that regrettably sticks more easily thanks to ill-judged Republican attempts to publicly undermine Mr Obama instead of tackling the arguments on their merits. This is too vital a debate to be consumed by knockabout Washington politics. It should be about challenging a concerted attempt by Mr Obama to gloss over the third option when it comes to negotiating a deal with Iran – staying tough, and driving a hard bargain.

Western officials soothingly say there is no need to get hung up on the details, just focus on the one-year “breakout time” that keeps Tehran at least 12 months away from being able to make a bomb and trust to the inspections regime that will alert the world long before that happens. “Distrust and verify” says Mr Obama and yet scratch the surface of these negotiations and it is clear that there are plenty of reasons to question whether Iran will ever actually submit to the effective scrutiny on which the credibility of this deal ultimately rests.

Only this week the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed that Iran has replied to just one of the 12 questions UN inspectors want answered about its nuclear past, while an IAEA report last month voiced concerns about “undisclosed nuclear related activities” including the “development of a nuclear payload for a missile.” Again, officials close to the talks also say it is “unnecessary and unrealistic” to expect Iran to reveal details of its past illegal nuclear activities, and yet without such details most experts agree it is impossible to police future Iranian cheating, since there will be no baseline from which to work.

Pressed later on the subject he said: “This is not something that I can comment on, nor would I comment on.” The ambassador’s reticence to rule out a military nuclear programme may reignite concerns that the autocratic monarchy has its eye on a nuclear arsenal.

Western intelligence agencies believe that the Saudi monarchy paid for up to 60% of Pakistan’s nuclear programme in return for the ability to buy warheads for itself at short notice, the Guardian newspaper reported in 2010. The two countries maintain close relations and are sometimes said to have a special relationship; they currently have close military ties and conduct joint exercises.

The Saudi Arabian regime also already possesses medium-range ballistic missiles in the form of the Royal Saudi Strategic Missile Force. In addition it has significant nuclear expertise in the form of a civilian nuclear programme of the kind Iran says it wants to develop. In 2012 the Saudi Arabian government threatened to acquire nuclear weapons were neighbouring regional power Iran ever to do so. “Politically, it would be completely unacceptable to have Iran with a nuclear capability and not the kingdom,” a senior Saudi source told The Times newspaper at the time.

With negotiators chasing a Tuesday deadline for the framework of a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program, it seems unlikely that Iran would immediately respond militarily to this week’s Saudi airstrikes in Yemen, analysts say. But the confrontation has added a new layer of unpredictability — and confusion — to the many, multidimensional conflicts that have turned large swaths of the Middle East into war zones over the past four years, analysts say.

The United States is aligned alongside Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and against them in Yemen. Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, who have joined in the Saudi offensive in Yemen, are bombing factions in Libya backed by Turkey and Qatar, who also support the Saudi offensive in Yemen. The Syrian conflict has been fueled by competition among all regional powers to outmaneuver one another on battlefields far from home.

Not since the 1960s — and perhaps going back even further — has there been a time when so many Arab states and factions were engaged in so many wars, in quite such confusing configurations, said Frederic Wehrey of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It’s so dangerous,” he said.

The “story” of Yemen appears simple. Houthi rebels, who are Shia Muslims, have captured the capital of Sanaa with the help – so say the Saudis – of the Iranians. The legitimate President – Abed Rabou Mansour Hadi – has fled to the Saudi capital of Riyadh from his bolthole in the old southern Yemeni capital of Aden. The Saudis will not permit an Iranian proxy state to be set up on their border – always forgetting that they already have an Iranian-proxy state called Iraq on their northern border, courtesy of the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

The real “story” is more important. Perhaps half of the Saudi army is of Yemeni tribal origin. Saudi soldiers are intimately – through their own families – involved in Yemen, and the Yemen revolution is a stab in the guts of the Saudi royal family. No wonder King Salman of Saudi Arabia – if he indeed rules his nation – wishes to bring this crisis to an end. But are his bombing raids on Sanaa going to crush a Shia Muslim rebellion?

Unprecedented in modern Arab history, a Sunni Muslim coalition of 10 nations – including non-Arab Pakistan – has attacked another Arab nation. The Sunnis and the Shia of the Middle East are now at war with each other in Iraq, in Syria and Yemen. Pakistan is a nuclear power. The armies of Bahrain and the Gulf states include Pakistani soldiers. Pakistanis were among the dead in the first great battle against Iraqi troops in the 1991 Gulf War.

The Americans do not know what to do. They cannot give the Saudis direct military assistance – their nuclear talks with Iran are more important – and so their soft verbal support for King Salman is supposed to mollify their Sunni allies and avoid antagonising the Iranians. But the closer a nuclear deal comes between the US and Iran, the more forcefully their partners in the Arab world will push their cards. What provoked the Saudis into their extraordinary adventure in Yemen was not the approach of Houthis towards Aden but the approach of a US-Iranian agreement at Lausanne.

The gunmen captured Gwoza nine months ago and turned the town into the headquarters of their movement and a crucial operating base. Shielded by the Mandara Mountains near the border with Cameroon, Gwoza had been the capital of Boko Haram’s self-proclaimed “Caliphate”. The area’s inhabitants are from the same Kanuri tribe as Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, and most of his fighters.

But a Nigerian army statement said: “Troops this morning captured Gwoza, destroying the headquarters of the terrorists’ self-styled Caliphate.” The army added that “mopping up” operations were continuing in the Gwoza area, which has a population of about 300,000. Until this month, Boko Haram controlled about 20,000 square miles of northern Nigeria, ruling a domain the size of Belgium with about 1.8 million inhabitants. Most of that territory has now been recaptured with the help of the army of neighbouring Chad.

But Nigeria’s army is riddled with corruption and incompetence. Whether its forces can hold their gains remains open to question. President Goodluck Jonathan, who faces re-election tomorrow, had been under intense domestic and international pressure to deal with the Islamist insurgency.