At a time when the country’s internal politics are under more scrutiny than at any time for decades, close advisers to the new King Salman and his powerful son have taken the unprecedented step of outlining a detailed programme of its future government to The Telegraph.

It obliquely acknowledges that radical changes in the royal family since the king acceded to the throne in January, including the sidelining of a generation of older princes and the former heir to the throne, have met with opposition. There have been claims outside the country that disgruntled princes are attempting to mount a coup to replace the king with one of his brothers.

But the statement of principles shown to the Telegraph says that the way the country has been run since its founding a century ago must give way to “youth”. “These resolute and decisive changes may have annoyed some people but it does not amount to a crisis,” it says. “The media is talking about a crisis within the royal family but they forget to talk to the Saudi people who are thirsty for change and economic reform.

“People want a ‘remake’ of the Kingdom on new foundations that will make it a major economic power, and this will not happen without a shake-up.” It also makes a rare acknowledgement that the Saudi authorities are themselves in part to blame for the country’s poor international image, particularly over the issue of women’s rights.

The Pope’s visit to Florence comes amid an internal scandal at the Vatican caused by leaks of confidential documents exposing the backlash by the Italian-dominated Vatican’s bureaucracy against Francis’ pushes for reform. The papers shed light on the mismanagement of assets and the resistance to change from the Holy See’s old guard.

His attempted reforms at the Vatican include an effort to bring more financial transparency to the Institute for the Works of Religion, better known as the Vatican Bank. There have been long-standing allegations of money laundering and improper handling of financial assets. In 2013 a senior Italian cleric was arrested under the suspicion of trying to move €20 million ($21.4 million) illegally.

Nuzzi made his name when Paolo Gabriele, the butler of the previous Pontiff, Pope Benedict, leaked inside information direct from the Holy Father’s desk three years ago. Material for his new book was taken from detailed info apparently sourced from COSEA, a panel Pope Francis called to tackle corruption and mismanagement – a task that appears to have been hamstrung not only by poor practices, but resistance from vengeful beneficiaries of Vatican largesse.

Two leading members of COSEA were arrested by Vatican police at the weekend on charges of leaking confidential information. COSEA uncovered a sprawling property empire worth €2.7 billion, though its book values had been listed at seven times lower. It discovered that a multitude of properties had been rented out by the Vatican to officials of various statures at below-market rates, losing the church over €13 billion a year – money that could have gone to charity. Another €30 million was wasted, as valuable buildings went unused.

The opaque system produced a battle between Catholic officials seeking to grab the best apartments for the lowest possible cost – with top Curia, or Vatican government, officials living in palatial homes of over 400 square meters. Nuzzi details a particular story involving Bishop Guiseppe Sciacca, who apparently used the hospital stay of an elderly priest next door as an opportunity to order workmen to break down a wall into his room to expand his already magnificent lodgings. Sciacca, formerly a highly-placed Curia official, is currently one of the most senior figures in the Catholic Church’s judicial system.

A Vatican department, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, owns hundreds of exclusive properties in central Rome, was also singled out in the document. It claimed that Vatican officials were allowing buildings to be leased out at peppercorn rents as favours to powerful colleagues. The document also alleged that they would allow dodgy property deals that would see addresses being used as brothels and illicit saunas, it was reported by The Independent.

The claims come two years after the Church was embarrassed by revelations that several priests shared an apartment block with Europe's largest homosexual sauna. It was reported that the Holy See owned 19 apartments in the block in Rome after buying a £21million share of the building in 2008. Several of the flats house priests, notably Cardinal Ivan Dias, the so-called 'prince of the church' whose 12-room apartment at 2 Via Carducci is located just yards from the Europa Multiclub.

The facility, billed as 'Italy's best-known gay sauna', boasts a Turkish bath, Finnish sauna, whirlpools and massages. The purchase was apparently the brainchild of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Pope Benedict's much-disliked right-hand man who held the Vatican's purse strings during the last pontificate. The latest Vatileaks claims emerged as Pope Francis insisted the Church shun all temptations of power, prestige and money as he pressed his reform agenda amid a new scandal at the Vatican.

After Larry Jackson, Junior, of Austin, Texas, was killed by a policeman in 2013, a local prosecutor indicted the policeman on manslaughter charges. Jackson’s family claimed that he had been executed by the policeman but a federal judge granted immunity from prosecution because the policeman “was acting in his capacity as a federal officer.” The ruling in the Austin case could extend federal immunity from prosecution for shootings to “hundreds, if not thousands, of state and local police officers who participate in federal task forces,” the Washington Post noted.

Federal officers have been involved in 33 killings so far this year. The Justice Department almost never prosecutes federal agents for shootings in the line of duty, and the feds have invoked the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution to block state and local prosecutions of federal agents in recent decades.

The plan has been in the pipeline for 18 months and approved by the Conservative government, which flipped-flopped just a week ahead of the general election making it a campaign issue. New Environment Minister Catherine McKenna put it back on track, adding some provisions for emergency response plans and an upgrade to the city's water quality monitoring.

“I wish there were a magic bullet here, I wish there were other options,” McKenna said in a conference call from Paris, where she is preparing for the upcoming UN conference on climate change. “This release is far from ideal, but it is needed for the city of Montreal to perform critical maintenance on their infrastructure before winter. If we do not allow this to go ahead and there was an unplanned discharge, the long-term impact to flora and fauna could be significantly more,” the Globe and Mail cited her as saying.

The St Lawrence River flows from Lake Ontario northeast into the Gulf of Lawrence and borders the US for over 180km in New York state. The river lies entirely in Canada downstream of Montreal, but Senator Schumer insisted it must be treated as a single ecosystem. The US EPA said it had no legal authority in the case.

A human rights watchdog group funded by the German interior ministry produced a study called 'Nationalist Settlers in Rural Areas'. Researchers concluded they believe wholeheartedly in the whole Nazi racist superman claptrap and are worming their way into local positions of power as councillors, volunteer firemen, teachers and festival organisers.

Anne Schmidt, author of the study for the Amadeu Antonio Foundation said: "This is a very scary movement to observe. These extremely nationalist right wing people are settling specifically in little-populated areas, far away from cities to live and raise their children in a backward ideology."

This new charge has many in the EU worried, as there are likely thousands of people who have microwaved their IDs to protect their privacy. Edward Snowden Square creator Markwart Faussner explained in an interview with WorldViews in June that German people are traditionally skeptical of government surveillance because they have experienced so much of it in their history.

“Much of this can be explained historically, Germans have experienced observation throughout the 20th century. After the Nazi era, the Stasi intelligence service in the former East Germany monitored most of the country’s citizens. When the Berlin Wall fell, East Germans suddenly found out from official government files that their friends or even family members had spied on them for years or decades. Hence, there is still a deeply rooted suspicion of state authorities in Germany,” Faussner said.

According to the Washington Post, a 2014 survey found that nearly 40 percent of Germans said they considered increasing digitalization and the role of intelligence services to be a threat.

Demographic forecasts tend to be among the most reliable, partly because we already have a lot of information that will not change: we know how many 36-year-olds there should be in 2050 because they were all born last year. Furthermore, changes in birth rates normally take place fairly slowly, allowing reasonable projections to be made.

The numbers that emerge are stark. The increase in Africa’s population alone is set to be 1.3 billion by 2050, about two-and-a-half times the entire population of the EU today. Put another way, the number of people in Africa and western Asia is expected to increase by over 110,000 every single day for decades to come.

Such figures put into perspective a crisis caused by the arrival of several thousand migrants a day. What we have seen in recent months is only a hint of what might happen next, mere gusts of wind before the approach of a hurricane.

Berlin's Council of Economic Experts - known as the country's five "wise men" - said the ECB must consider tapering its bond-buying measures early to avoid dangerous imbalances from building up in the bloc. The Council's annual report delivered a scathing verdict on the ECB's recent measures, warning of the perils of record low interest rates.

"Monetary policy is leading to a build-up of risks to financial stability which could pave the way for a new financial crisis," they said. "Persistently low interest rates erode the earnings of banks and life insurance companies, and raise the appetite for taking risks. It is important to avoid delaying an exit from the low interest rate environment for too long."

Instead, they called on the ECB to announce "a timely end to monetary policy accommodation which could effectively prevent the further build-up of risks in the financial system." The warning comes as eurozone policymakers are set to cut interest rates and expand their €1.1 trillion stimulus measures when the governing council meets in December.

When the manipulation of City benchmarks was revealed, "it turned out we didn't have the laws on the statute book to deal with that scandal", he said. "Some criminal charges have been brought, but not as many as would have been the case if the laws were better." Mr Osborne compared the scandals that have plagued the financial services industry since the crisis to other forms of law breaking. "If you go and shoplift at the local WH Smiths you go to prison," he said.

"But if you’re the market trader on the trading floor of a big investment bank, and you rip off people to the tunes of millions of pounds, there are no criminal offences to deal with you." The Chancellor said that "there was a lot of totally understandable anger" at bankers, as they were in part responsible for "the biggest single economic crash of our lifetimes".

Algeria's former energy minister, Nordine Aït-Laoussine, says the time has come to consider suspending his country's Opec membership if the cartel is unwilling to defend oil prices and merely serves as the tool of a Saudi regime pursuing its own self-interest. "Why remain in an organisation that no longer serves any purpose?" he asked.

Saudi Arabia can, of course, do whatever it wants at the Opec summit in Vienna on December 4. As the cartel hegemon, it can continue to flood the global market with crude oil and hold prices below $50.

It can ignore desperate pleas from Venezuela, Ecuador and Algeria, among others, for concerted cuts in output in order to soak the world glut of 2 million barrels a day, and lift prices to around $75. But to do so is to violate the Opec charter safeguarding the welfare of all member states.

"Saudi Arabia is acting directly against the interests of half the cartel and is running Opec over a cliff. There could be a total blow-out in Vienna," said Helima Croft, a former oil analyst at the US Central Intelligence Agency and now at RBC Capital Markets.

Krzysztof Charamsa was still employed at one of the Holy See’s most powerful offices, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. But after decades of hiding, the 43-year-old gay Polish priest wanted to come out with a flourish. He was no longer afraid to confront a church he saw as intrinsically “homophobic” and proposed a symbolic news conference outside the headquarters of the Congregation — the very institution charged with defending and disseminating Catholic teachings around the globe.

But Emilio Sturla, a public relations consultant who worked closely with gay Catholic groups and was helping Charamsa, strongly suggested he reconsider, both men recalled. The public and the church, Sturla insisted, would see such a move as too incendiary. “But that’s what he wanted,” Sturla said. “To be provocative.” And that’s what he did. Charamsa’s move brought the expected denunciations from the church and religious conservatives, who pointed out that he had violated his vow of chastity and the church’s teachings on homosexuality. More surprisingly, his actions have also sparked a split among gay Catholics.

The church officially teaches that homosexual desires are not sinful unless acted upon and calls on gays and lesbians to live lives of chastity. It teaches that gays are deserving of human dignity. But it also describes homosexual acts as a sin that is “intrinsically disordered” and a “grave depravity.”

If you are not familiar with the Ring of Fire, it is an area roughly shaped like a horseshoe that runs along the outer perimeter of the Pacific Ocean. Approximately 90 percent of all earthquakes and approximately 75 percent of all volcanic eruptions occur along the Ring of Fire. Recently, we have witnessed a 4.4, a 5.4 and a 5.7 earthquake in Alaska, a 6.8 earthquake in Chile and 20 earthquakes in Indonesia of at least magnitude 4.3. This violent shaking along the Ring of Fire seems to continue a progression of major disasters that began back during the month of September.

For whatever reason, our planet suddenly seems to be waking up. Unfortunately, the west coast of the United States is one of the areas where this is being felt the most. The little city of San Ramon, California, is about 45 miles east of San Francisco, and over the past several weeks it has experienced a record-breaking 583 earthquakes: Could this be a prelude to a major seismic event in California? So why aren't more Americans alarmed that these records are being broken? We shall see what happens.