Subsequently, I took a rather childish pleasure in continually referring to the European “project”, whatever its current nomenclature, as the “Holy Roman Empire”. Now, suddenly, I find myself in agreement with Will Hutton who also sees the EU as the successor to the HRE! There the agreement ends, because he apparently finds this laudable.

Is this really the best we can do? For centuries, there has been a fixation with some mythic ideal of the Roman Empire – its codes of laws, “Pax Romana” and so on, and the HRE was just one of the futile efforts to turn back the clock. Of course there are all manner of national and international problems that need co-operation and resolution, but over 200 years since Napoleon did us all a favour by getting rid of the thing, is bringing it back the most forward-thinking idea that the third millennium has to offer?

Does this mean we are facing another intifada? Shikaki, ever the cautious academic, refused to speculate. However, he told us about a poll he had conducted in the summer of 2000. This was immediately after the failure of the talks in Camp David and the unilateral Israeli pullout from Lebanon. For the Palestinians, these events signified that the political-diplomatic avenue was leading nowhere: for them, it was Hezbollah’s armed struggle that had kicked Israel off Arab land. It took Ariel Sharon’s trip to Temple Mount to spark the Second Intifada.

Shikaki reminded us that two equivalent prerequisites are in place today: the collapse of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace efforts and the war in Gaza, perceived by the Palestinians as a Hamas victory. According to Shikaki’s recent polls, more than 80 percent of Palestinians believe that Israel aims to harm the Muslim sites on Temple Mount and that this “extreme worry about Israel’s agenda for al Haram al Sharif drives greater support for violence.”

Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all. Yet the Nasa press release failed to mention this, as well as the fact that the alleged ‘record’ amounted to an increase over 2010, the previous ‘warmest year’, of just two-hundredths of a degree – or 0.02C. The margin of error is said by scientists to be approximately 0.1C – several times as much. As a result, GISS’s director Gavin Schmidt has now admitted Nasa thinks the likelihood that 2014 was the warmest year since 1880 is just 38 per cent.

Its report said: ‘Numerically, our best estimate for the global temperature of 2014 puts it slightly above (by 0.01C) that of the next warmest year (2010) but by much less than the margin of uncertainty. Therefore it is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year… the Earth’s average temperature for the past decade has changed very little.’

It might be unsurprising then, that when Dimon was quizzed this week about the prospect of his banking empire being broken up, he pulled out all the stops. Taking JPMorgan apart, he countered, would be nothing short of un-American. “Someone is going to be serving the global multinationals around the world,” Dimon said. “As a matter of public policy, I wouldn’t want to see the next JPMorgan Chase be a Chinese company.

“America has been the leader in global capital markets for the last 50, 100 years. It’s part of the reason the country is so strong.” It wasn’t the first time the bank faced questions about slimming down – almost every major financial institution has been dealing with such suggestions since the crisis – but Dimon was particularly ready to respond to such queries last week, as JPMorgan recorded a 7 percent fall in profits.

A few days earlier, analysts at Goldman Sachs had caused a stir on Wall Street with their argument that Goldman’s major rival could be worth significantly less than the sum of its parts. Among the European banks Mr Chappell has identified as ripe for a break-up are Barclays, Credit Suisse and Santander. Citigroup and Bank of America, as well as JPMorgan, have been touted as candidates to split apart in the US.

Whether Dimon and his peers eventually bow to the wishes of regulators remains to be seen, but 2015 has certainly begun with the topic on the agenda. With authorities only likely to increase the pressure, investors may start to wonder in significant numbers whether a bank, rather than being too big to fail, is too big to succeed.

All the evidence shows that the message of this 40-year-old populist is striking home. Every opinion poll for the past two months has put Syriza in first place with a consistent lead of between three and five percentage points. The latest survey showed the party widening its advantage, reaching 34.5 per cent compared with 29 per cent for New Democracy. Unless there is a shock of earthquake proportions, Syriza is set to win this election – and Mr Tsipras will then become prime minister of Greece and one of the youngest national leaders in the world.

He may fall short of an overall majority in the 300-seat parliament, but the electoral system awards an extra 50 seats to whichever party comes first in the popular vote, with the remaining 250 being handed out on a proportional basis. If the pundits are right and Syriza tops the poll, Mr Tsipras will hold the whip-hand in any coalition government. Already, eurozone finance ministers have agreed in principle to reward Greece with slightly better terms when it achieves a primary budget surplus – as it did last year.

But Mr Tsipras has one vital card to play. Although he has promised to keep Greece in the euro, the prospect of the country leaving could be sufficiently worrying to make the “troika” pay a bigger price. If the choice becomes as stark as cancelling some Greek debt, or allowing the euro to fracture, then some in Syriza believe the EU will be the one to blink. If Mr Tsipras gives way, however, the ultra-Left activists who cheer his every speech today will cry betrayal tomorrow. The next big protests in Syntagma Square could be directed at him.

So terrorists want to exaggerate how much damage they’ve actually inflicted. Likewise, the type of counter-terror experts who frequently appear on the mainstream news are motivated to hype the terror threat, because it drums up business for them. The more scared of terrorism people are, the more books they’ll sell on terrorism, the more people will pay them to give talks on terrorism, and the more they’ll be asked to appear on mainstream news. So they don’t want you to know the real statistics on terror, either.

And the government has also exaggerated the threat of terrorism for political purposes (literally seeing a terrorist under every bush). For example, FBI agents and CIA intelligence officials, a top constitutional and military law expert, Time magazine, the Washington Post and others have all said that US government officials “were trying to create an atmosphere of fear in which the American people would give them more power”.

Indeed, the former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge admitted that he was pressured to raise terror alerts to help Bush win re-election. The threat from Islamic terrorists – while real – has been greatly exaggerated. Former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski – also a top foreign policy advisor to President Obama – told the Senate that the war on terror is a “a mythical historical narrative”.

Indeed, the government justifies its geopolitical goals – including seizing more power at home, and overthrowing Syria in 1949, Iran in 1953, Iraq twice, Afghanistan twice, Turkey, Libya, and other oil-rich countries – by hyping the terror menace. So the government wants you to be scared out of your pants by the risk of terrorism.

Postscript: While terrorists, counter-terror “experts” and governments are trying to scare the pants off you, the truth is that – if we refuse to be terrorized – we win and the terrorists lose.

Meziane was a close associate of Djamel Beghal, a convicted terrorist who mentored two of the Paris attackers while they were in jail together. The pair lived close to each other in Leicester and Meziane, 49, once supplied Beghal with a false passport allowing him to travel to an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.

The Home Office has attempted to remove Meziane, a father of two children born in the UK, for almost six years following his release from jail in 2009. However, it has been thwarted by Meziane’s claim that his deportation would breach his human right to a family life and that he might face torture if sent home.

The doctor, who represents specialists working in public health, said the current NHS crisis could not be solved without radical changes in the lifestyles of most Britons - starting at birth - to encourage healthier habits. He said he was particularly concerned about the psychological pressures on children, facing "information overload" from the internet and video games, and levels of serious distress and self-harm among teens. In an interview with The Telegraph, he called for the creation of parenting programmes and telephone helplines to help those bringing up young families and those with teens "going off the rails".

He also said schools should introduce daily meditation sessions, in a bid to give children "a moment of stillness" and respite from increasingly chaotic lives. The Faculty is the standard-setting authority for UK specialist doctors working to prevent diseases linked to lifestyle factors like obesity, smoking and alcohol. Professor Ashton made the demands as the body called on the major political parties to promise a series of changes - including a sugar tax and minimum price of 50 pence per alcohol unit - in their manifestos.

According to the Department for Work and Pensions, 2,290 children under 16 received Disability Living Allowance for metabolic diseases in 2013/14. The total included 630 under-fives and 50 who were officially recorded as obese, it revealed in response to a freedom of information request. Metabolic diseases are a range of conditions which involve problems with the way the body breaks down food. The best known is diabetes.

Weight could be a factor in why children listed as having a metabolic disease require the benefit, as many of the conditions are linked to or aggravated by obesity. Some, however, are caused by genetic factors. Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum, said it was 'astounding' any young child was classed as obese enough to need disability benefits. 'What does this say about our health services and society that we should let a five-year-old become so obese that they qualify for DLA?' he added.

In many ways the situation here is a mirror image of what happened with Britain’s ERM fiasco in 1992, when we stopped locking the pound to a basket of European currencies. The Swiss have spent the past three years trying desperately to stop a tide of money pouring into the country, mostly from investors desperate to avoid or ditch the euro: the influx was causing the franc to inflate and make their famous exports – chocolates, watches, pharmaceuticals – too expensive, especially for the Euro market that accounts for half of Switzerland’s trade.

They even began charging negative interest in their world famous banks – effectively upending the basic rule of banking by forcing depositors to pay – but still the cash flowed in. Finally, last week, rumours swept the money markets that the European Central Bank was about to print more money – so-called quantitative easing – to bail it out of its latest crisis; this time, brought on by concerns Greece will tumble out of the eurozone after an election later this month.

The pressures between the strong franc and weak euro became intolerable, and the Swiss threw in the towel. The cap had to be lifted, and the franc instantly jumped 39 per cent against the floundering euro – the biggest single-day move for a rich nation’s currency in four decades. It ended the day ‘just’ 17 per cent up in a market that considers a two per cent move dramatic.

But while many Swiss shares slumped, the bigger problem is faced by the euro. It has lost a key pillar of support and, as one London analyst said so rightly last week, ‘can’t find a friend for love nor money’. Even now, after such a long time and damaging episode, the eurozone and its pathetic panjandrums have not resolved the internal contradictions of a costly experiment that has caused economic carnage around the Continent. Now even Germany, the Continent’s economic powerhouse, is struggling to bear the cost of this flawed attempt to align diverse economies without resolving core structural issues.

While Muslims in Jerusalem protested by burning the French flag on the Temple Mount, their brethren in Asia, Africa and Europe set fire to churches and raided shops run by Christians in Niger, attacked police in Algiers and Jordan, and burned the French flag in Pakistan. It no longer is the “occupation” and the “Zionist enemy” that are the targets of angry Muslims. The burning of the French flag on the holy site of the Temple Mount, as a response to the attack on Charlie Hebdo journalists, has exposed, once again, that a large number of Israeli and Palestinian Authority Muslims act in the name of religion and not for a Palestinian Authority state.

The protesters on Friday screamed: “Burn it! burn it! … in the cause of God. Allah the greatest. Prophet Mohammed is our leader forever.” God. Allah. The Prophet Mohammed. Everything is in the name of God, but President Barack Obama and his counterpart in France don’t see it that way.

President Barack Obama was careful not use the “M” word when he denounced the attacks in France and said: “The fact that this was an attack on journalists, attack on our free press, also underscores the degree to which these terrorists fear freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But the one thing that I’m very confident about is that the values that we share with the French people, a belief — a universal belief in the freedom of expression, is something that can’t be silenced because of the senseless violence of the few.”

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained that radical Islam was not mentioned because “these terrorists are individuals who would like to cloak themselves in the veil of a particular religion.” Obama’s position suggests that if a Muslim kills anyone in a terrorist attack, he is not acting as a Muslim. And does the president think that any Muslim who burns the French flag in the name of Allah is not acting as a Muslim?

"In the terrible hours, during which Paris and the French suffered between Wednesday afternoon and Friday afternoon last week, the subject was two of the great evils of our time, which not always, but often go hand in hand: murderous Islamist terrorism and anti-Semitism - the hatred of Jews. We remember here today in the Bundestag the 17 people killed in these attacks," Merkel said. Merkel's speech on Thursday also came in light of recent expressions of xenophobic sentiment in Germany, propagated mainly by the anti-Islamization group PEGIDA, mainly in the eastern German state of Saxony. Dresden is its capital.

"Many people would find it difficult to say that Islam belongs to Germany," Merkel said on Thursday. "People ask me, which Islam do I mean?" "They want to know why terrorists have so little value for human life and why they always link their deeds to their faith," she said, calling on the urgent need for the Islamic clergy to clarify these issues. Elsewhere in Germany, demonstrations by the so-called "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West" have been predominantly outnumbered by counter demonstrations.

Merkel also said that as chancellor she would protect Germany's Muslim community. "Every exclusion of Muslims in Germany, every general suspicion is forbidden," Merkel said, emphasizing that the free practice of religion, including Islam, was protected under the German Constitution. "We will not let ourselves be divided," the Chancellor added.

Speaking at a businessmen's meeting in the capital Ankara, Erdogan said Charlie Hebdo was known for its provocative publications. "We are following with great concern the attacks against Islam hidden behind the attack on the satirical magazine in France," said Erdogan, who has become an increasingly vocal critic of what he sees as mounting Islamaphobia in the West. "Despite all our efforts to prevent it, the clash of civilizations thesis is being brought to life."

A kulliye is traditionally a complex including schools, kitchens, guest houses and bath houses which surrounds a mosque and is managed by the mosque. Erdogan, a pious Muslim who has dominated Turkish politics for over a decade, has been accused by opponents of imposing a creeping Islamisation on Turkey’s officially secular society. Some of Ottoman Turkey’s greatest imperial mosques in Istanbul and elsewhere have hugely impressive kulliyes and it is this tradition that Erdogan appears to be harking back to.

Erdogan opened his hugely controversial new presidential palace on the outskirts of Ankara in October. It has 1,150 rooms and was built at a cost of around 490 million euros ($615 million). He says that the palace is a symbol of a resurgent Turkey which he is building. But opponents decry it as an extravagance in an increasingly authoritarian state.