“I believe that Saudi Arabia and Turkey are the two greatest dangers to world peace,” Senator Black told RT. “It is Saudi Arabia, through the Wahhabist doctrine, that is spreading terrorism across the globe. It’s not Iran, it’s not Syria or any other country.”

Saudi Arabia’s state-sponsored teachings of Wahhabism promote an ultra-conservative, austere version of Sunni Islam. Meanwhile, Black told RT that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan intends to impose an absolute dictatorship.

“Erdogan has a dream of becoming a new Ottoman Empire,” Black said. “He’s a very calculating, very vicious individual and, I think, a great danger. Erdogan won an absolute majority of the Turkish parliament, which will enable him to rewrite the constitution. Once he had that total power to impose an absolute dictatorship – which he intends to do – and he publicly said that his model is that of Adolph Hitler.”

No, Frans Timmermans says, unfortunately he still hasn't received an answer. The deputy head of the European Commission has written to the government in Warsaw twice in recent weeks to express his concern over the rule of law in Poland. Instead of the requested letter, all he got was gloating on the part of new Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszcykowski. Any EU official "who came to office via political connections" is "not a legitimate partner" for a government elected by the people, Waszcykowski scoffed.

In less than two months, the country's new nationalist-conservative government has succeeded in disempowering the constitutional court, passing a law establishing government control over public broadcasting and installing party-aligned political appointees at the head of its intelligence services. "We want to cure our country of a few illnesses," Foreign Minister Waszcykowski told Germany's tabloid Bild earlier this month.

It's a choice of words most often associated with autocrats and has alarmed the European Commission. On Wednesday, the EU executive is expected to discuss whether or not it will open the so-called "rule of law mechanism." Should it do so, it would mark the first time a member state has been subjected to that level of scrutiny for violating the fundamental values of the European Union.

The procedures were established in 2014 as a kind of early-warning system to counter anti-democratic developments. If invoked, it stipulates that governments must account to the EU for changes to legal and constitutional changes - and ultimately to repeal those laws that run afoul of EU policy.

“The scientists and technicians of the DPRK are in high spirit to detonate H-bombs … capable of wiping out the whole territory of the US all at once,” North Korean KCNA news agency said. Along with the ‘wiping-out-US’ comments, Pyongyang added that the test “was neither to ‘threaten’ anyone nor to ‘provoke’ someone for a certain purpose.”

“It was a process indispensable for carrying out the WPK's line on simultaneously carrying out the economic construction and the building of nuclear force to cope with the US ever-more undisguised hostile policy toward the DPRK,” the agency said. North Korea has recently made the headlines after it claimed to have carried out a hydrogen bomb test. The announcement raised concerns over the security of the region.

It’s an everyday occurrence for more than 100,000 middle and high school students across the city. On this morning, as on every school day, senior Justin Feldeo prepares to be pulled aside for separate screening by a hand wand. Feldeo is studying to be a firefighter and the boots he wears for class trigger the metal detectors.

Fifteen minutes after the formal start of the school day, students are still pouring in, even later for having to go through the machines. Almost as many New York City students run the gauntlet of x-ray machines each day as pass through the scanners at busy Miami International Airport. And the procedure is numbingly similar. Students must remove belts, shoes, and sometimes bobby pins as the wait stretches as long as an hour.

"At checkpoints where 20 soldiers should be present, there are only eight or 10," Atal told the Associated Press. "It's because some people are getting paid a salary but not doing the job because they are related to someone important, like a local warlord." In other cases, dead soldiers and police remain listed among active participants, while senior police or army officials pocket the salaries of the deceased, said Attal, who estimates that some 40% of the registered forces do not exist, the AP reported.

Helmand's former deputy police chief, Pacha Gul Bakhtiar, said the province has 31,000 police officers on its registers, "but in reality it is nowhere near that." Afghanistan's government is ignoring the problem, Afghan lawmaker Ghulam Hussain Nasir told the AP.

"When we say we have 100 soldiers on the battlefield, in reality it is just 30 or 40. And this creates the potential for huge catastrophes when the enemy attacks," he said. Afghanistan's security forces are entirely funded by the international community, at a cost of some $5 billion a year, most of which comes from the United States.

The bank’s credit team said markets are flashing stress alerts akin to the turbulent months before the Lehman crisis in 2008.

Andrew Roberts, the bank’s research chief for European economics and rates, said that global trade and loans are contracting, a nasty cocktail for corporate balance sheets and equity earnings. This is particularly ominous given that global debt ratios have reached record highs.

“China has set off a major correction and it is going to snowball. Equities and credit have become very dangerous, and we have hardly even begun to retrace the 'Goldilocks love-in' of the last two years,” he said.

Mr Roberts expects Wall Street and European stocks to fall by 10 percent to 20 percent, with even an deeper slide for the FTSE 100 given its high weighting of energy and commodities companies. “London is vulnerable to a negative shock. All these people who are ‘long’ oil and mining companies thinking that the dividends are safe are going to discover that they’re not at all safe,” he said.

The risk is that this market storm drags on long enough to hit investment, regardless of what the economic data should imply. At the end of the day, market psychology can itself become an economic "fundamental". Pessimists warn that unless there is a batch of irrefutably good data from China over the next two or three months, the sell-off could become self-fulfilling and quickly metamorphose into the next global crisis.

Much of modern geopolitics is driven by hydrocarbons ie oil and gas. Is this true of the Sunnis-Shia war? Yes, the US and its allies are backing the Sunnis against the Shias … in order to wage war for oil. And it turns out that the lion’s share of oil in the Middle East happens to be located in Shia countries … and in the Shia-minority sections of Sunni-majority countries.

Almost all the Persian Gulf’s fossil fuels are located underneath Shiites. This is true even in Sunni Saudi Arabia, where the major oil fields are in the Eastern Province, which has a majority Shiite population.

As a result, one of the Saudi royal family’s deepest fears is that one day Saudi Shiites will secede, with their oil, and ally with Shiite Iran. This fear has only grown since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq overturned Saddam Hussein’s minority Sunni regime, and empowered the pro-Iranian Shiite majority. Nimr himself said in 2009 that Saudi Shiites would call for secession if the Saudi government didn’t improve its treatment of them.

So the Sunni Gulf monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait are single-mindedly going after Iran and the Shia world – because the Shias are sitting on the oil and gas resources – and doing everything they can to start a Sunni-Shia war across the entire MENA area (Middle East and North Africa) in order to “justify” a resource grab.

Things have gotten so bad that some people are now making up entirely new words to describe what is going on. Steve Quayle has labeled this crisis “rapeageddon“, and I think that fits. Things are particularly bad in Germany, which has welcomed more refugees than any other European country in recent years. If you can believe it, Germany opened the doors for 1.1 million “asylum seekers” last year. That is an astounding number, and it is starting to have dramatic consequences for German society.

As the United States and Canada import thousands of these “refugees”, it is only a matter of time before similar things start happening here. In fact, there was quite a chilling incident that happened in Calgary just the other day. 31-year-old Mohamed Elmi and 29-year-old Mohamed Salad have been charged with attempted murder for firing shots into a very busy Calgary nightclub.

So why didn’t we hear about this attack by two Islamic gunmen on the news? Could it be possible that just like the European media, the mainstream media in Canada does not want to make Islamic immigrants look bad? It has gotten to the point where the extreme political correctness that exists in our society is actually endangering our safety.

We need to see the world the way that it really is, and not the way that we wish that it would be. There is a price to be paid for importing vast numbers of violent Islamic immigrants that do not have any respect for us or for our way of life. This is something that Germany and Sweden have already discovered, and if we are not very careful our women will soon be paying the price as well.

The effort to incubate organs in farm animals is ethically charged because it involves adding human cells to animal embryos in ways that could blur the line between species.

Last September, in a reversal of earlier policy, the National Institute of Health announced it would not support studies involving such “human-animal chimeras” until it had reviewed the scientific and social implications more closely. The agency, in a statement, said it was worried about the chance that animals’ “cognitive state” could be altered if they ended up with human brain cells.

The studies at University of California began only after a review by three different ethics committees and even then, the university decided to be cautious and limit the time the animals would be allowed to develop to just 28 days (a pig is born in 114 days). By then, the embryonic pig is only half an inch long, though that’s developed enough to check if human cells are contributing to its rudimentary organs.

“We don’t want to grow them to stages we don’t need to, since that would be more controversial,” says Ross. “My view is that the contribution of human cells is going to be minimal, maybe 3 percent, maybe 5 percent. But what if they contributed to 100 percent of the brain? What if the embryo that develops is mostly human? It’s something that we don’t expect, but no one has done this experiment, so we can’t rule it out.”

The Dag Hammarskjöld library in New York announced the news on Twitter, prompting speculation about why UN staff and international delegates to the UN were borrowing a title which explores “international law relating to immunity of heads of state and other state officials in the context of crimes pursuant to international law”.

“What was our most popular book of 2015? Find it in our library catalogue!” tweeted @UNLibrary blithely, later responding to a torrent of questions: “This is an academic book concerning international laws on immunity.”

Politics and policy website Vox wrote: “The UN is full of delegates representing awful dictatorships, and the 2015 book that it says got checked out the most from the UN library was about … how to be immune from war crimes prosecution. That does not seem like a good thing.”

The US Navy is considering “long-term” deployments in the Mediterranean in addition to the ongoing use of four guided missile destroyers stationed in Rota, Spain, the senior Navy official told Sputnik on Tuesday.

“You could say it’s because of the migrant issue and the tax that that has put on European navies, and then certainly because of the increased Russian naval presence and capability,” he added. Washington is also in touch with its NATO allies to see what amount of naval capacities the Europeans are able to stand up. “The reason for those discussions… at the top of that list, again, is the increased Russian presence and what it means,” the official reiterated.

The Shiveluch volcano released ash plumes throughout 2015, at times releasing enough ash to carpet nearby towns. The new eruption led the Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team (KVERT) to issue an orange warning, meaning that while a major eruption is not imminent, it is nevertheless a danger to aircraft.