The gold monetization scheme aims to unlock about 20,000 tons of gold worth over $800 billion lying idle in homes and temples. Under the plan, banks will collect gold for up to 15 years and pay 2.25-2.50 percent interest per year. This is higher than previous rates of around one percent. The government hopes that higher interest rates will help in mobilizing the gold as previous attempts have been unsuccessful.

"Gold is a security, it gives you earnings and now on it is going to be a part of our nation building," Modi said. By launching sovereign gold bonds with 2.75 percent interest, Indian authorities hope to cut the physical buying of the precious metal.

There is nothing wrong with the food he's using - it's all good, fresh stuff - but it has been rejected by supermarkets. These ingredients - including quality fruit, veg and meat - haven't even made it to the shelves. They've been turned away before they get to the stores because there simply isn't space for them. Overproduction, it turns out, is the very cornerstone of our whole food retail system. And it comes with a massive side-order of waste. What's more, these big retailers are so big they can afford to sell only a proportion of "units" and discard the rest. Waste - hundreds of thousands of tonnes of it - is built into the system.

If you try to find out what supermarkets do with the rest of their spare stock, you will come across much talk of "anaerobic digestion". This is an industrial process that uses micro-organisms to break down organic matter, producing a methane-rich gas which can be burnt to produce electricity. Sounds very neat and eco-friendly, doesn't it?

But anaerobic digestion (AD) is a red herring. Proponents say it's better than dumping waste in landfill. That may be so, but if that "waste" is edible food, it ain't saying much. AD is a reasonable option for food that really is beyond being eaten - plate waste from the catering industry, for example. But making gas from good food is a very poor alternative to giving it to hungry people.

To most of us, that's obvious. Even if you look at it from a cold, hard economical viewpoint, it makes zero sense - AD recovers only a fraction of the energy available from food. If you or I eat it, we get all of it.

Locals say there are no jobs for the migrants in their sleepy hamlet, meaning they will all end up pocketing 500 euros a month from the German government in benefits. But astonishingly one ungrateful migrant - who claimed to have fled the Syrian capital Damascus - moaned that his new home was "boring", adding: "There's no PlayStation."

Meanwhile residents are devastated that their community has already changed forever, and railed against Angela Merkel's government who gave them "no say" over how many new arrivals they could accept.

Merkel's 'open doors' policy that precipitated one of the greatest mass exoduses in modern times has led to a serious rift between her CDU party, its sister organization, the CSU — led by Horst Seehofer, and Minister-President of Bavaria and their coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) led by Sigmar Gabriel.

Merkel, Seehofer and Gabriel failed to find agreement over her handling of the refugee crisis in talks on Sunday, with the Bavarian leader threatening "consequences" if Merkel did not take serious action over the crisis and agree to put a cap on the number of refugees Germany is prepared to take in. Gabriel, meanwhile, is threatening to pull ministers out of the coalition which would plunge the German Government into chaos.

If Merkel fails to find agreement this week, the strong woman of Europe and her powerbase will be seriously threatened and could lead to the demise of the European Union. Several countries in Eastern Europe are against her refugee policy and Europe is deeply divided on her calls for refugees to be allocated to each country on a quota basis.

Referencing the bloody conflicts in the former state of Yugoslavia, she said: "I do not want military conflicts to become necessary there again." The German leader, giving a speech in Darmstadt, southern Germany, said barbed wire fences along the borders of Hungary and Serbia "will build up fault lines" and threatens to provoke new tensions.

Ms Merkel has stressed the need for European solidarity on the migrant crisis. "I want people in Germany to be able to say in a few years 'they did it well, and we were able to manage it'," she said. Finland is also facing increasing tensions between ethnic Finns and asylum-seekers.

Interior minister Petteri Orpo said migration posed the biggest security threat to the Nordic country.

He said there was a "growing risk" of violent attacks against asylum-seekers and among asylum-seekers, saying some have been refused refuge because of their participation in terror-linked organisations.

But damning statistics released today show that, if anything, the flaky accord has only served to further highlight the cavernous divisions emerging within the 28-nation bloc. An astonishing dossier reveals how, in the six weeks since the controversial migrant quotas were agreed, just 116 refugees have been relocated from Greece and Italy to two other member states.

Even more worryingly for Europhiles it also shows how some of the continent's biggest players - most notably France and Germany - have effectively reneged on the agreement already. As part of the September accord, European nations agreed to relocate 120,000 migrants over the next two years.

Britain has opted out of the controversial quota scheme, which was fiercely opposed by frontline member states including Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania. Critics had already argued that the relocation plan was wildly insufficient, given that 770,000 migrants have already lodged asylum claims across the EU this year.

The man currently running a distant second for the Democratic presidential nomination, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, is a self-declared socialist, and most of his party’s voters now have a positive view of socialism. They are almost evenly divided as to whether they like capitalism or socialism more.

Socialism, Communism, Maoism, and National Socialism (eg the Nazi Party) are all offshoots of Marxism. They are all branches of the same defective tree. Marxism has failed in literally every venue it has been tried, despite progressives’ laughable efforts to claim certain countries have implemented it successfully. No country has and no country ever will.

El Nino is still growing rapidly with a peak forecast around Christmas and latest data suggests it will match the two strongest El Ninos ever recorded in 1997/98 and 1982/83 threatening serious consequences for the UK. El Nino, which sees ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific rise due to a change in wind direction, has been linked to colder than average winters in northern Europe.

However the almost unprecedented strength of the event now threatens to throw a spanner in the works next summer. Scientists warn that rather than recovering to normal values after El Nino peaks this winter, ocean temperatures will make a dramatic swing in the other direction. The so-called La Nina phenomenon will trigger a reversal of oceanographic conditions leading to a major cool down of the eastern Pacific.

Like its brother El Nino, La Nina - which means The Girl - can have major impacts on climatic conditions around the world. In the tropics La Nina is linked to wetter than average conditions while in the United States the southeast and central plains are drier than normal with the northwest unusually cold.

In the UK, a particularly strong La Nina threatens to quash any hopes of a decent summer with cold and wet weather associated with the pattern. Scientists say the exceptional strength of the current El Nino will trigger a ‘pendulum effect’ with an equally strong La Nina possible.

National Grid used a new emergency scheme to pay large businesses to cut their electricity usage, resulting in dozens of large office buildings powering down their air conditioning and ventilation systems between 5pm and 6pm. The scheme, which is paid for through levies on consumer energy bills, was introduced last year but had never been called upon before. National Grid blamed the power crunch on “multiple plant break downs”.

Several ageing coal-fired power plants had unexpected maintenance issues and temporarily shut down, experts said, reducing available supplies. The problem was compounded by low wind speeds meaning most of Britain’s 6,500 onshore and offshore wind turbines were barely generating any power just as demand hit its highest.

UK wind farms have a theoretical maximum capacity of more than 13,000 megawatts, but produced less than 400 megawatts of power for much of the peak demand period – meeting less than one per cent of the UK’s electricity needs, published data suggests. Britain's 8,000 megawatts of solar panel capacity would also have produced no power during the peak, because it was dark at the time.

Militant students stormed the compound and took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The two countries have had no diplomatic relations since then. However, current President Hassan Rouhani has made efforts to improve relations, including a landmark nuclear agreement reached with world powers this past summer.

Khamenei says the "aim of the slogan is not death to American people. The slogan means death to US policies and arrogance." The slogan has "strong support" In Iran, he said. Khamenei and hard-liners in the Iranian government remain deeply suspicious of the United States and view its policies as a threat to the country.

Meanwhile, people are leaving our churches in droves and church attendance is way down. This is especially true of younger Americans. According to an incredible new report that was just released by the Pew Research Center, only 27 percent of all Millennials (US adults born since 1990) attend religious services on a weekly basis.

When you go into many churches in America on Sunday mornings, all you see are “the greys”, and I am not talking about space aliens. But instead of focusing on fixing what has gone wrong, many Christians (including a number of very prominent ministers) spend most of their energy savagely attacking their brothers and sisters in Christ. This is absolutely disgraceful and it needs to stop.

America is on the exact same path to secularization that Europe has already gone down. The Pew Research Center discovered that the percentage of Americans who are “absolutely certain” that God exists declined from 71 percent in 2007 to 63 percent in 2014. Meanwhile, the percentage of those that are “religiously unaffiliated” rose from 16 percent in 2007 to 23 percent today.

Atheism, agnosticism and other religions are on the rise in America, and Christianity is in decline. And as I noted above, this is particularly true among our young people.

“This invasion is driven, on the one hand, by people smugglers, and on the other by those (human rights) activists who support everything that weakens the nation-state,” Mr Orban said. “This Western mindset and this activist network is perhaps best represented by George Soros.”

Mr Soros has now issued an email statement to Bloomberg Business, claiming his foundations help “uphold European values”, while Mr Orban’s actions in strengthening the Hungarian border and stopping a huge migrant influx “undermine those values.” “His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle,” Mr Soros added. “Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.”

Mr Orban said in an interview last month that immigration and multiculturalism are endangering Europe’s “Christian roots” and creating “parallel societies”. Europeans, he said, should “stick to our Christian values” and “Europe can be saved,” but only if they “take seriously the traditions, the Christian roots and all the values that are the basis of the civilisation of Europe.”

From providing early funding to hard left news outlets such as Salon.com to bankrolling many of the leftist activist groups that descended on Ferguson in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting all the way to literally paying Black Lives Matter to continue to stir up racial anger, Soros seems to have his hands (and money) in everything.

While some commentators have noted the ties between the ongoing European refugee crisis and the Soros run Open Society Foundation, the mainstream media as a whole has largely downplayed this connection, instead opting to shame the people of Europe and the United States into supporting what amounts to the literal destruction of their society.

Now, as multiple European countries have begun to fight back against this wholesale assault on their countries’ very foundations, Soros and his groups have come under attack and their response to these attacks has revealed why exactly he is funding various groups helping to facilitate the introduction of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Muslim “refugees”.

In the midst of most European countries being guilted by the media into accepting an untold number of refugees, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been a lone voice of sanity, refusing to allow the destruction of his country despite widespread pressure from the media and various international organizations and governing bodies.

In a report published by Bloomberg Business, Orban, who for months has been under attack by Soros funded activists over his stance on the refugee crisis, completely exposed the real intent of Soros and his allies. “His name is perhaps the strongest example of those who support anything that weakens nation states, they support everything that changes the traditional European lifestyle,” Orban said in an interview on public radio Kossuth, according to Bloomberg Business.

There are more displaced people and refugees now than at any other time in recorded history — 60 million in all — and they are on the march in numbers not seen since World War II. They are coming not just from Syria, but from an array of countries and regions, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, even Haiti, as well as any of a dozen or so nations in sub-Saharan and North Africa. They are unofficial ambassadors of failed states, unending wars, intractable conflicts.

The most striking thing about the current migration crisis, however, is how much bigger it could still get. What if Islamic State militants are not beaten back but continue to extend their brutal writ across Iraq and Syria? What if the Taliban continue to increase their territorial gains in Afghanistan, prompting even more people to flee? A quarter of Afghans told a Gallup Poll that they want to leave, and more than 100,000 are expected to try to flee to Europe this year.

Many of the migrants are fleeing persecution, poverty, ethnic and religious strife and war, but these afflictions are often symptoms of more profound changes. In the Middle East and Africa, borders drawn by Ottoman dynasts and European colonialists are breaking down as the autocratic Arab states that enforced a grim peace for generations continue to implode. As traditional lines of authority break down, militant groups like the Islamic State and Boko Haram, in Nigeria, seek to fill the vacuum while minority sects and ethnic groups suffer unspeakable treatment at their hands.

Those stresses pose a challenge for the future, experts say, because the flow is unlikely to ebb anytime soon. “I don’t think this wave can stop,” said Sonja Licht of the International Center for Democratic Transition. “It can maybe from time to time be somewhat less intensive, we simply have to prepare. The global north must be prepared that the global south is on the move, the entire global south. This is not just a problem for Europe but for the whole world.”