Therefore, the German government's efforts to intensify the German-Russian student exchange program must be supported. Already at the beginning of the Petersburg Dialogue, which has restarted, following a year's interruption, Chancellor Merkel explained that Germany is "interested in a reliable partnership with Russia."

Business functionaries are concluding that willingness to cooperate, which had waned due to the Ukraine conflict, is again growing "on both sides." Wolfgang Ischinger, Chairman of the Munich Security Conference, foresees a "diplomatic process" under Berlin's leadership that will lead to a further rapprochement during Germany's OSCE chair - beginning January 1, 2016. Ischinger explicitly points to similarities to the cold war's so-called détente policy, from which the West emerged the winner.

Speakers from her conservative Christian Democratic Union condemned her “open door” refugee policy in the harshest terms. “You don’t know who is coming,” said one delegate in front of 1,000 local party faithful. “You don’t know how many are coming. You don’t know how many are already here.”

Some even challenged Ms Merkel’s leadership, with one delegate declaring: “More and more citizens say to me, ‘This is no longer my chancellor’.” Others applauded when she pledged to stick to her “refugees welcome” approach, saying: “This is the biggest task I’ve faced in my life as chancellor. I know it’s a hard situation but I will not give up.” But the lasting image from Schkeuditz was a placard reading: “Stop the refugee chaos — depose Merkel”.

Migrants are also being provided with accommodation at luxury ski resorts and hotels while Europeans living in social housing are being given eviction notices to make way for the “refugees”. These are just two more examples which illustrate why some commentators assert that Europe is committing cultural suicide in order to accommodate the migrants, the vast majority of whom aren’t even Syrian and are not fleeing war.

Earlier this week we also highlighted how German security experts are warning that the middle class in Germany is becoming “radicalized” in response to the migrant influx and that domestic unrest may occur as a result.

“I think it’s a scandal to throw tenants out of their apartments,” the 56-year-old Ms Keller told SWR television. “I can’t see the sense of it.” Towns and cities across Germany are struggling to find accommodation for the tens of thousands of refugees streaming into the country. Ms Keller’s case follows that of Bettina Halbey, a nurse who is being evicted from her home of 16 years in the town of Nieheim, hundreds of miles to the north.

The municipality says it has offered to help Ms Keller find new accommodation, a claim she denies. She has hired a lawyer and vowed to fight the eviction.

If Finance Minister Bjarni Benediktsson has his way — and he likely will — Icelanders will be paid kr 30,000 [approx $4400] after the government takes over ownership of the bank. Íslandsbanki would be second of the three largest banks under State proprietorship. “I am saying that the government take [sic] some decided portion, 5%, and simply hand it over to the people of this country,” he stated.

Because Icelanders took control of their government, they effectively own the banks. Benediktsson believes this will bring foreign capital into the country and ultimately fuel the economy — which, incidentally, remains the only European nation to recover fully from the 2008 crisis. Iceland even managed to pay its outstanding debt to the IMF in full — in advance of the due date.

Iceland recently jailed its 26th banker — with 74 years of prison time amongst them — for causing the financial chaos. Meanwhile, US banking criminals were rewarded for their fraud and market manipulation with an enormous bailout at the taxpayer’s expense.

He also publicly admitted for the first time that MI5 had to carry out computer hacking attacks against terror networks to crack their communications. Delivering the Lord Mayor of London’s annual defence and security lecture, he said the current level of threat was the highest he had seen in a career spanning 32-years. In the past 12 months his agency has thwarted six terror plots in the UK and another seven abroad.

Mr Parker said four fifths of the 4,000-strong agency’s resources were directed at stopping terrorist attacks, with an increasing proportion of them linked to Syria and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

The climate treaty under negotiation is like a vampire from a bad old horror film. Every time you think it’s dead, it rises from the grave. This vampire is not sucking blood, but money and resources from taxpayers and needy people around the world. It’s time to put a stake through its heart and cut off the head of this climate-treaty monstrosity once and for all.

Congressional Republicans are working to do just that. Politico reports that Neil Chatterjee, a top aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has been making the rounds at foreign embassies alerting the countries’ diplomats that Republicans intend to fight President Barack Obama’s climate agenda until the end of his term and beyond.

In meetings with ambassadors representing both developed and developing countries, Chatterjee has reiterated McConnell’s message: “Proceed with caution before entering into a binding, unattainable deal” with Obama. McConnell has pointed out that two-thirds of the US federal government — Congress and the Supreme Court — have not signed off on Obama’s plans.

At the center of the controversy is a study that concluded there has not been a 15-year “pause” in global warming. Some NOAA scientists contributed to the report. Skeptics of climate change, including Smith, have cited the pause to insist that increased greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from burning fossil fuels, are not heating up the globe.

Smith, the chairman of the House Science Committee, vehemently disagreed with the study’s findings. He issued a subpoena for communications among the scientists and some data, leading to charges from Democrats that he was trying to intimidate the researchers. Late Tuesday, NOAA provided Smith with some more information about its methods and data but refused to give Smith everything he wanted.

“It was inconvenient for this administration that climate data has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades,” he said in a statement. “The American people have every right to be suspicious when NOAA alters data to get the politically correct results they want and then refuses to reveal how those decisions were made.”

The reborn success of demonic possession in popular culture owes something to the zombie, werewolf and vampire surge of the past decade. Horror movies used to play in theaters to a passionate but finite audience, mostly teens. They’d show up on opening weekends, then move on to the next offering.

The new wave of possession films could take scary movies even more into the mainstream. Possession is more personal than vampires and zombies — the threat comes from within. Teenagers especially relate to the notion of one’s body and mind being taken over by an uncontrollable force they can’t understand.

Sadly, our military has a very long history of wasting money like this. Back in the 1980s, the “six hundred dollar toilet seat” became quite famous. Average Americans were absolutely outraged that the government was wasting so much of our hard-earned money, and promises were made that things would change. Here is more on what transpired back then from Wikipedia…

Beginning in 1981, President Ronald Reagan began an expansion in the size and capabilities of the United States armed forces, which entailed major new expenditures on weapons procurement. By the mid-1980s, this spending became a scandal when the Project On Government Oversight reported that the Pentagon had vastly overpaid for a wide variety of items, most notoriously paying $435 for a hammer, $600 for a toilet seat, and $7,000 for a coffee pot.

What our politicians are attempting to do now is to keep borrowing money and extending the game for as long as they possibly can. If that sounds like a really bad plan to you, that is because it is a really bad plan. What our leaders have done to future generations of Americans is beyond criminal. But the American people have come to accept this as “normal”, and only a very small percentage of us are still complaining about it. So the jokers in Washington will just keep on doing what they are doing until it all comes tumbling down all around them. By then, it will be far too late to do anything about it.

Shot 'Borat’-style, and starring Oliver Masucci, it follows the Fuhrer as he wakes up in present-day Berlin, with no memory of the events after 1945. No one believes that he is the real Hitler, but his rants on YouTube soon develop a following, and he becomes a 'media sensation’, landing his own TV show.

Speaking to The Guardian, director David Wnendt said: “Germans should be able to laugh at Hitler, rather than viewing him as a monster, because that relieves him of responsibility for his deeds and diverts attention from his guilt for the Holocaust. But it should be the type of laugh that catches in your throat and you’re almost ashamed when you realise what you’re doing.”

But he added that the movie is also highlighting the more worrying trend of a resurgence of fascism in Europe. “We’re highlighting that the danger of a resurgence is very much alive,” he said. The book was a roaring success, and had sold 14 million copies around the world.

Does any other topic actually exist in the EU besides refugees? For years the Union held its breath over the national debt crises, the fate of Europe apparently in the balance. The topic is still very much on the agenda, as shown by recent reports that the creditors are delaying the payment of further funds to Greece because the country is dragging its feet over the implemention of reforms. Consideration of Greece, however, also highlights something else: Within just a few weeks, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's standing in Europe has dramatically decreased.

During the debt crisis, Merkel earned herself considerable authority. She stood for abiding by the rules, for solidarity – and also for working to ensure European cohesion. Where necessary, she was ready to compromise in order to achieve this. Her politics of stability weren't to everyone's liking. But even many of her critics accepted that the medicine dispensed by "Mother Merkel" was good.

Until late this summer, that is, when Merkel reacted to the incoming flow of refugees with two disastrous sentences: "There is no upper limit" and "We can cope." She still stands by these assertions. They were accompanied by selfies with refugees, and a unilateral decision to stop abiding by the Dublin regulation. In Merkel's eyes, building fences to keep refugees out is not only futile but reprehensible. She accepted the state's loss of control over its borders with a mere shrug of the shoulders. And as if all that weren't enough, she stood up in front of all the other Europeans and declared her personal view of things to be the only one that was morally right.

However much the Chancellor believes she's morally in the right, on European refugee policy she is isolated. She was able, for the most part, to push through her views on economic policy because it was a policy the majority of Europeans believed in, even though it was painful. But not only are the majority in Germany opposed to her ideas about accepting an unlimited number of refugees, a considerable majority also oppose her in Europe, and have done for some time. Ultimately, there is no policy that will help with this. Merkel's personal tragedy is that she is in the process of gambling away the significant authority she had built up for herself in Europe.

“All countries that say ‘anyone who gets here can stay here’ are now in peril, given the scale of the population movements that are starting to be seen,” Mr Abbott, a conservative, said on Tuesday during a lecture honoring the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

Mr Abbott backed an aggressive policy on migration during his two years in office. The Australian authorities turned away boats and refused to accept asylum seekers intercepted at sea, instead sending them to offshore camps. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who replaced Mr Abbott in September in a party coup, has announced no change to those policies.

In his London speech, Mr Abbott argued that the people arriving in Europe should be considered economic migrants, not refugees, even if they were fleeing war in Syria or elsewhere, because they were no longer in immediate danger.

“In Europe, as with Australia, people claiming asylum invariably have crossed not one border but many, and are no longer fleeing in fear but are contracting in hope with people smugglers,” he said. “However desperate, almost by definition they are economic migrants because they had already escaped persecution when they decided to move again.”

Mr Cameron has made an effective opt-out from ever-closer union a central aim of his renegotiation, saying: “It is not right for Britain, and we must ensure we are no longer subject to it.” Frans Timmermans, the First Vice President of the European Commission and Jean-Claude Juncker’s right hand man, insisted the European Commission has no “strong views” on the declaration.

He suggested it had been misunderstood by Britain as representing ever-increasing levels of political integration, whereas other states regard it as representing peace and co-operation between people. For some in Brussels, the phrase has an importance akin to ‘We, the People,’ the opening words of the US Constitution. It forms the first line of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which laid the basis for the EU: “DETERMINED to lay the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe.”

As such, the chances of leaders agreeing to rewrite the treaty text, or creating a full-blown opt-out for certain countries, are remote. However, it does look like Britain will get some form of statement that says the principle does not oblige countries to take part in political integration if they do not wish.

Anibal Cavaco Silva, Portugal’s constitutional president, has refused to appoint a Left-wing coalition government even though it secured an absolute majority in the Portuguese parliament and won a mandate to smash the austerity regime bequeathed by the EU-IMF Troika.

He deemed it too risky to let the Left Bloc or the Communists come close to power, insisting that conservatives should soldier on as a minority in order to satisfy Brussels and appease foreign financial markets. Democracy must take second place to the higher imperative of euro rules and membership. Mr Cavaco Silva argued that the great majority of the Portuguese people did not vote for parties that want a return to the escudo or that advocate a traumatic showdown with Brussels.

This is true, but he skipped over the other core message from the elections held three weeks ago: that they also voted for an end to wage cuts and Troika austerity. The combined parties of the Left won 50.7 percent of the vote. Led by the Socialists, they control the Assembleia.

Greece’s Syriza movement, Europe’s first radical-Left government in Europe since the Second World War, was crushed into submission for daring to confront eurozone ideology. Now the Portuguese Left is running into a variant of the same meat-grinder. Europe’s socialists face a dilemma. They are at last waking up to the unpleasant truth that monetary union is an authoritarian Right-wing enterprise that has slipped its democratic leash, yet if they act on this insight in any way they risk being prevented from taking power. Brussels really has created a monster.