Previously, the EU military force was seriously mulled over during the build-up to the illegal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 when Germany, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg met to discuss it as an alternative to US-dominated NATO. The idea has been resurrected again under similar circumstances. In 2003, the friction was over the US-led invasion of Iraq. In 2015, it is because of the mounting friction between Germany and the US over the crisis in Ukraine.

Chancellor Merkel was explicit in her response when she told Senator Corker that the simmering crisis in Ukraine could not be resolved by military means and the US approach would go nowhere and make the situation in Ukraine much worse. When Merkel was pressed on militarizing the conflict in Ukraine by the British MP Malcolm Rifkind, the chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee of the British Parliament, she said that sending more arms to Kiev was useless and unrealistic. Merkel told the British MP “to look reality in the eye.” The German Chancellor also pointed out that there cannot be security in Europe without Russia.

It is in the context of divisions between the EU and Washington that the calls for an EU military force are being made by both the European Commission and Germany. The EU and Germans realize there is not much they can do to hamper Washington as long as it has a say in EU and European security. Both Berlin and a cross-section of the EU have been resentful of how Washington is using NATO to advance its interests and to influence the events inside Europe.

If not a form of pressure in behind the door negotiations with Washington, the calls for an EU military are designed to reduce Washington’s influence in Europe and possibly make NATO defunct. An EU army that would cancel out NATO would have a heavy strategic cost for the US. In this context, Washington would lose its western perch in Eurasia. It “would automatically spell the end of America’s participation in the game on the Eurasian chessboard,” in the words of former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

In fact, it is 10 years since Juncker’s predecessor Romano Prodi made a similar call, famously adding: “If you don’t want to call it a European Army, you can call it Margaret, you can call it Mary-Ann.” But at least that was in the time when the EU’s members were apparently gung-ho for creating a “European Rapid Reaction Force”, with each nation making its own contribution to the whole – Britain’s being the two giant aircraft carriers we are building without any aircraft to fly off them.

But such integrationist dreams have long since faded, with the French now re-equipping their own army to fight in the desert sands of West Africa, to defend their former colonies against the advancing Islamist hordes.

Curiously it is also 60 years since Jean Monnet, the father of European integration, first came up with a proposal for a European army, which was roundly rejected by the French Assembly (and ridiculed by Winston Churchill). With our own Government having apparently lost any interest in defence, it might be more sensible for Mr Juncker to focus on sorting out all the disasters the EU has already made for itself – including its ludicrously ill-judged policy towards Russia – without creating another one for the future.

In an essay, “The EU Experiment Has Failed,” Bruce Thornton of Hoover Institution makes the case that the verdict is in, the dream is dead, the EU is unraveling, One Europe is finished. Europeans may wail over German-imposed “austerity,” but the government share of Europe’s GDP has gone from 45 percent in 2008 to 49 percent today. In Greece, it is 59 percent.

Most critical is the demographic crisis. For a nation to survive, its women must produce on average 2.1 children. Europe has not seen that high a fertility rate in 40 years. Today, it is down to 1.6 children. Europeans are an aging, shrinking, disappearing, dying race. And the places of Europe’s unborn are being filled by growing “concentrations of unassimilated and disaffected Muslim immigrants, segregated in neighborhoods like the banlieues of Paris or the satellite ‘dish cities’ of Amsterdam.”

“Some turn to terrorism,” like the French-Algerian brothers who carried out the slaughter at the magazine Charlie Hebdo. “Such violence,” writes Thornton, “along with cultural practices like honor killings, forced marriages and polygamy … are stoking a political backlash against Muslims.”

Populist parties are surging – the UK Independence Party in Britain, the National Front in France, and now the “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident,” PEGIDA, in Germany. These parties will soon be strong enough to enter governments, impose restrictions on immigration and demand assimilation. Then the cultural conflicts may turn violent.

A spokesman for the Greek Foreign Ministry, Constantinos Koutras, confirmed that a complaint was made to the German Foreign Ministry on Tuesday night concerning the alleged remarks. "As a minister of a country that is our friend and our ally, he cannot personally insult a colleague," Koutras said, but did not go into further detail.

On Wednesday Varoufakis told Greek television that he and Schäuble didn't see things the same way. "Mr Schäuble has told me I have lost the trust of the German people. I have told him that I never had it. I have the trust of the Greek people," he said.

“Of course if you can do it in 2016 nobody would be more glad than me, but I expect it will take longer because there are quite a lot of moving parts,” he said. He acknowledged that some Tory MPs would “vote to leave altogether” whatever deal he was able to strike, but insisted that the party would unite in the aftermath of the referendum, saying: “I think there can be a coming together after that.”

Mr Cameron suggested the toughest challenge he faces in negotiations with fellow EU leaders was to bring in tougher rules on foreign welfare claimants – which would need a treaty change. But he added that “legal advice in the European Union is a strange beast” and was often surprisingly flexible. Mr Cameron has set out seven changes he wants to make to the EU to stop Britain being “sucked into a United States of Europe”. They include tougher rules to ensure migrants come to Britain to work, not as tourists planning to cash in on “free benefits”.

He also wants to see a power for national parliaments to work together to block unwanted European legislation, to free business of EU red tape and for British police and courts to be liberated from “unnecessary interference” from the European Court of Human Rights. He has vowed to campaign for Britain to stay in the EU in the referendum if Brussels agrees to his terms but he is under mounting pressure from senior Tories.

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond has said that if nothing was on offer from the EU “we [have] to leave”. Former Tory Chancellor Lord Lawson has warned that renegotiation efforts will fail, forcing Mr Cameron to campaign to leave the EU.

But as the erstwhile Jorge Bergoglio prepares to celebrate on Friday the second anniversary of his election, he will be keenly aware that a crunch is looming over the question of how to reconcile Catholic thinking on the family with the realities of how many believers live their lives in the early 21st century. The Argentine pontiff set the bar high on the issue by scheduling two major synods - gatherings of bishops - on the theme of the family early in his term.

The risks involved were underlined when the first one, in October, saw riled conservative bishops mobilise to block the approval of language heralding an unprecedented opening to the gay community and greater flexibility on the treatment of divorced Catholics. The outcome was seen as a setback for Francis at the hands of a body in which conservatives continue to hold the whip hand ahead of the second synod this October.

"What the synod confirmed is that there is now an open conflict within the Vatican over very serious questions," said Marco Politi, a Vatican expert who has recently published an essay entitled "Francis among the wolves." "The pope himself is worried," Politi told AFP. "Before Christmas he told a Latin American friend 'the only thing I ask of the Lord is that the changes for which I am making so many personal sacrifices will not be like a light that goes out.'"

Politi believes the historic decision of Benedict to retire rather than die in office - and 78-year-old Francis's own hints he could do likewise - have been game-changers inside the Holy See. "This is a pontificate with a limited timeframe," he said. "That means opponents can watch the clock and tell themselves, 'we only have to wait four, five years and it will be over.' That's new and it strengthens them."

The pair had been summoned to courts in Manchester and Birmingham to answer allegations laid by Aisling Hubert, a pro-life campaigner from Brighton, and supported by the Christian Legal Centre, in what would have been a landmark prosecution. But the CPS has announced that it is to use its powers to quash the case. It said that, although there is potentially enough evidence to bring a successful prosecution, it had concluded it would not be in the “public interest” to pursue the case.

It is the second time in two years that the CPS has blocked a prosecution against the pair despite acknowledging that the evidence could lead to a successful prosecution. In 2003 it told Scotland Yard, which had investigated the pair following the disclosures in the Telegraph, not to charge them, again citing “public interest” considerations. The decision throws the law on gender abortion in the UK further into doubt. Minsters have repeatedly said that sex-selective terminations are illegal in Britain as gender is not specified as a legal ground under the 1967 Abortion Act, which applies in mainland Britain.

You may, quite reasonably, think that economic fundamentals, such as GDP growth and cross-border trade flows, still drive exchange rates. Unfortunately, though, you’d be wrong. For we live in the age of “extraordinary monetary measures” and “central bank diktat”. That may sound like a remote, jargon-laced statement, the musings of a nerdy economist. I’d say, in response, that the recent actions of Western central bankers are provoking not only heightened market volatility, but also increasing international conflict and the looming prospect of another Lehman-style systemic lurch.

The dangers, sadly, are very real. Currency dealers, and the ubiquitous computerised trading robots, are influenced far less these days by growth or inflation forecasts than by the market’s view on the origin of the next splurge of quantitative easing. Why did the euro fall to almost $1.05 last week, a 12-year low, having dropped some 12 percent against the greenback since the start of the year? The main reason is the ECB’s long-awaited programme of virtual money-printing, which launched last Monday. Under euro-QE, the eurozone will be flooded with at least €1,100 billion (£825 billion) of newly created money over the next year and a half, as the Frankfurt-based central bank buys government and corporate bonds at the rate of around €60 billion a month.

Like some kind of economic horse-whisperer, Draghi then commented that the eurozone economy is “now pointing in the right direction”, apparently raising the prospect of even-faster ECB money-creation, so depreciating the euro even more. As such, at the time of writing, the single currency has dropped over 6 percent in six days, a pace of decline seen only once since the euro was launched in 1999 – and that was just after the 2008 Lehman Brothers collapse.

The reality, of course, is that the Fed’s successive doses of QE since late 2008 have been designed to keep the lid on the dollar, deliberately reining in the greenback in a bid to boost US competitiveness and limit the value of the vast debts America now owes its foreign creditors – not least China. As such, the world’s leading economies have reduced themselves to blatantly competing less on the quality of what they produce, than on the speed with which they can depreciate their currencies against one another.

The lessons of history are that such situations are prone to escalate into rancour and, ultimately, conflict. That’s the unfortunate truth.

According to Societe Generale analyst Andrew Lapthorne, there was an S&P 500 bull market run of more than 200 percent over a six year time period that ended in 1929. We all know what happened that year. And there was another S&P 500 bull market run of more than 200 percent over a six year time period that ended in 1999. In the end, all of those gains were wiped out when the dotcom bubble burst.

And as I keep reminding people, so many of the exact same patterns that we witnessed just prior to the last great stock market collapse are happening once again. For example, just yesterday I explained that there has been only one other time over the past decade when we have seen the US dollar surge in value in such a short period of time. That was in 2008, just prior to the last financial crisis.

Another example is what has happened to the price of oil. Since the middle of last year, the price of oil has fallen by more than 50 dollars a barrel. In all of history, that has happened only one other time. That was in 2008, just prior to the last financial crisis. But you know what? Despite all of the warning signs there are still people out there that are eagerly pouring money into the stock market.

The warning signs are clear. Soon the time for warning will be over and the crisis will be here. I hope that you are getting ready.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has also run out of patience with the new anti-austerity government in Athens, reports suggested. Their comments represent a tectonic shift from the previous undiluted support Germany offered Greece - a country whose financial mismanagement is loathed by EU lawmakers.

And in recent days tensions between Berlin and Athens have spiked even further. The new Tsipras government first threatened to seize German businesses and assets if Germany did not provide billions of pounds of compensation for damages caused during the Nazi occupation during World War II. Greece also made a threat to send refugees - terrorist suspects among them - from its shores to Germany if Berlin did not support it in ongoing debt crisis talks.

A Greek exit would plunge Germany's financial institutions into crisis and the impact on other countries - including the UK - could be severe. There would almost certainly be a 'flight to safety' as depositors pull euros out of other potentially vulnerable eurozone members such as Portugal, Spain and Italy to avoid taking a hit. European company share prices would also fall sharply.

Experts say Britain would be hit extremely hard. Almost half of British trade is with Europe and a continental slump would translate into lost orders and jobs while the financial chaos would also hit the City.

"If one country leaves this (monetary) union, the markets will immediately ask which country is next, and that could be the beginning of the end," the former French finance minister told Der Spiegel magazine. Mr Moscovici's comments come after days of fractious exchanges between Greece and its international creditors.

In the latest round of hostile words from Europe's largest debtor country, Germany's Wolfgang Schaeuble warned Athens' brinkmanship over implementing economic reforms could result in a "Grexident". "To the extent that Greece is solely responsible and decides what is to happen, and we don't know exactly what Greek leaders are doing, we can't exclude it," said Mr Schaeuble.

Data from NASA satellites show that the total amount of water stored in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins — that is, all of the snow, river and reservoir water, water in soils and groundwater combined — was 34 million acre-feet below normal in 2014. That loss is nearly 1.5 times the capacity of Lake Mead, America's largest reservoir.

Statewide, we've been dropping more than 12 million acre-feet of total water yearly since 2011. Roughly two-thirds of these losses are attributable to groundwater pumping for agricultural irrigation in the Central Valley. Farmers have little choice but to pump more groundwater during droughts, especially when their surface water allocations have been slashed 80% to 100%. But these pumping rates are excessive and unsustainable. Wells are running dry. In some areas of the Central Valley, the land is sinking by one foot or more per year.

As difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought. NASA data reveal that total water storage in California has been in steady decline since at least 2002, when satellite-based monitoring began, although groundwater depletion has been going on since the early 20th century.

Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain. In short, we have no paddle to navigate this crisis.

“The EU and Iceland have discussed the country’s position on the status of its bid to join the European Union,” the statement reads. “The government does not intend to resume preparing for EU membership.” Prime Minister Sigmundur Davið Gunnlaugsson talked of formally withdrawing the bid in January.

“Participating in EU talks isn’t really valid anymore,” PM Gunnlaugsson told Reykjavík Grapevine at the time. “Both due to changes in the European Union and because it’s not in line with the policies of the ruling government to accept everything that the last government was willing to accept. Because of that, we’re back at square one.”

One of the major issues stalling an agreement was fish catch quotas insisted on by Brussels, something the Icelandic Fishing industry would never have agreed to. The small island nation, with a population of 325,000, is and will still be a member of the European Economic Area (EEA), the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), the Schengen area and is an EU partner promoting cooperation in northern Europe – meaning it gets many of the advantages of being a full member without many of the negative aspects of centralized EU laws and planning.

Brennan’s statement marks a change from the narrative the Obama administration has been pushing on the success of the fight against ISIS. “Left unchecked, the group would pose a serious danger not only to Syria and Iraq, but to the wider region and beyond, including the threat of attacks in the homelands of the United States and our partners,” Brennan told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

He added that ISIS takes advantage of new technology to “coordinate operations, attract new recruits, disseminate propaganda and inspire sympathizers across the globe to act in their name.” The CIA director said that the terror group has ballooned in size to about 20,000 members, and points to the recent pledge of allegiance to ISIS by Nigeria-based Boko Haram. “This will be a long-term struggle,” he said. “If there is one thing we have learned over the years, it is that success against terrorism requires patience and determination.”

Brennan’s comments about ISIS’ staying power differs from claims made by top Obama administration officials as recently as last month assessing the progress against the terror organization. Secretary of State John Kerry and retired General John Allen have both made public statements about ISIS in the past. In February, Allen said that half of the group’s leaders in Iraq had been killed. Kerry took it a step further and extended the claim to Syria as well. Experts, though, say the claims of success are overinflated.

Others, like Princeton University scholar of Near Eastern Studies Cole Bunzel, told Bloomberg claims of killing half of ISIS leadership is difficult to make because the terror organization’s “leadership” is subjective. He added that he was “very skeptical” that 50 percent of the group’s leaders were killed because ISIS has publicly announced when senior members had been killed in the past but has not made such an announcement about someone in its core leadership being killed in the past five years.