One hundred years later, the world is nervously keeping its eyes peeled for misguided chauffeurs and asking itself whether history could repeat. The great powers are at peace, and trade and cultural ties between nations seem closer than ever before, yet the international scene is in many ways surprisingly brittle. In particular, a rising naval power is challenging an established hegemon, and a “powder keg” region replete with ethnic and religious quarrels looks less stable by the day.

In 1914, Germany was the rising power, the UK the weary hegemon and the Balkans was the powder keg. In 2014, China is rising, the United States is staggering under the burden of world leadership and the Middle East is the powder keg.

Only a few years ago, most western observers believed that the age of geopolitical rivalry and great power war was over. Today, with Russian forces in Ukraine, religious wars exploding across the Middle East, and territorial disputes leading to one crisis after another in the East and South China seas, the outlook is darker. Serious people now ask whether we have moved from a post-war into a pre-war world. Could some incident somewhere in the world spark another global war?

In May, 16 EU member states, which consume three-quarters of the continent’s electricity, approved a unified system for trading electricity with one another and setting the wholesale price for power for the participants. This is possible thanks to a computer program called the Pan-European Hybrid Electricity Market Integration Algorithm, more succinctly, and mercifully, known as Euphemia.

Euphemia analyzes every bid to buy and sell electricity in the EU power markets, distributes the rights to international electricity transmission and sets the price for each market for the next day. The goal is to make sure EU countries increase their use of the most efficient power supplies in order to keep prices as low as possible for consumers.

Among the members of this EU electricity club is the UK, whose National Grid joined the project thanks in part to Mark Bartholomew, an energy specialist at the British law firm SGH Martineau. Bartholomew explains that the point of the exercise is to ensure full use of electrical transmission between any two given EU member countries to equalize any price differences between them. Euphemia began in 2011, based on a year-old power-sharing plan linking Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The broader venture included features that would accommodate more EU countries, including Scandinavian nations as well as Britain and Spain.

German media reported on Thursday that the temporary halt in Berlin’s intelligence collaboration with Washington applies across the spectrum, with the exception of areas directly affecting tactical security concerns for Germany, such as the protection of its troops in Afghanistan, or defending against immediate terrorist threats. Sources in the German capital claimed that the removal of the CIA station chief was technically a “recommendation for his departure”, and did not constitute an official diplomatic expulsion.

However, German observers described the incident as a “diplomatic earthquake”, which would have been unthinkable as a policy option for the German government, barring actions against “pariah states like North Korea or Iran”. This is not the first time an American intelligence officer has been asked to leave Germany. Berlin expelled another CIA officer in the 1990s, after it emerged that the American intelligence Agency had tried to recruit a German official at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs.

However, unlike the current imbroglio, the previous spy affair was handled discretely and with almost no media fanfare, as is customary among allies. The decision to recommend the CIA station chief’s removal was reportedly made at a senior governmental level, following a “fruitless” telephone exchange between CIA Director John Brennan and Klaus-Dieter Fritsche, the coordinator between the German Chancellery and the BND. According to German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, Brennan offered Fritsche no apology and had “nothing to contribute other than clichés about transatlantic ties”, as well as his expressed irritation about the way the media were handling the incident.

The Paris riot began with a demonstration by pro-Palestinian activists not far from a synagogue in which many Jews had gathered Sunday. “They decided to advance in large numbers toward the synagogue, and that was where they met our youths who volunteer to protect Jewish places, and then the police.” Ben Haim stressed that the pro-Palestinians were armed, unlike the Jewish youths. “The Palestinians had rocks, glass, axes, knives... they were armed and I made sure that no one would leave the synagogue in order to protect the lives of our people.”

Police lost control over the pro-Palestinian riot, he added. “The event lasted over three hours. Security forces accompanied the pro-Palestinian's demonstration; they thought they had things under control, but the groups there dispersed and one of them got away and reached the synagogue. They started to bring [police] forces from all directions but that did not prevent the initial contact [between pro-Palestinians and Jews].”

"On our side there are five lightly injured, three of them from being struck by the French police,” he summed up. “We skirted a true catastrophe yesterday. Today is not yesterday. We must analyze what happened – there are some very red lights going off lately.”

“Markets seem to be considering only a very narrow spectrum of potential outcomes. They have become convinced that monetary conditions will remain easy for a very long time, and may be taking more assurance than central banks wish to give,” he told The Telegraph. Mr Caruana said the international system is in many ways more fragile than it was in the build-up to the Lehman crisis. Debt ratios in the developed economies have risen by 20 percentage points to 275 percent of GDP since then.

Credit spreads have fallen to wafer-thin levels. Companies are borrowing heavily to buy back their own shares. The BIS said 40 percent of syndicated loans are to sub-investment grade borrowers, a higher ratio than in 2007, with ever fewer protection covenants for creditors.

“If it felt cold, that’s because it was, breaking that record is pretty phenomenal for Brisbane,” Bass said. “The average for this time of year is 12C, so Brisbane was about 9C below average, it is pretty impressive really, to have the coldest morning in 103 years is a big record.” The coldest place across the state was Oakey which got down to -6.1C, which was the coldest temperature for the town since 2011.

Meanwhile, the cold snap is predicted to send vegetable prices soaring up to three times normal prices. The combination of an unusually late start to winter plus a sudden plummet to near-record lows has confused the growing cycles of just about every plant.

The BBC's David Willey in Rome says there is often a studied ambiguity in Pope Francis' off-the-cuff statements. He wants to show a more compassionate attitude towards Church teaching than his predecessors, but this can sometimes cause consternation among his media advisers, our correspondent adds.

In the interview, Pope Francis was quoted as saying that the 2% estimate came from advisers. It would represent around 8,000 priests out of a global number of about 414,000. "Among the 2% who are paedophiles are priests, bishops and cardinals. Others, more numerous, know but keep quiet. They punish without giving the reason," Pope Francis was quoted as saying. Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi denied that Pope Francis had said that there were cardinals who were paedophiles.

Asked in the same La Repubblica interview about the celibacy rule for priests, Pope Francis recalled that it was adopted 900 years after the death of Jesus Christ and pointed out that the Eastern Catholic Church allows its priests to marry. "The problem certainly exists but it is not on a large scale. It will need time but the solutions are there and I will find them." Father Lombardi also denied that these were the Pope's exact words.

This delusion, which began several years ago, and was abandoned for all practical purposes, reached climax again last January, at the Munich Security Conference during which, in an obviously concerted action, two German ministers and the country’s federal president argued that Germany, as the foreign minister Frank Walter Steinmeier put it, “must be ready for earlier, more decisive and more substantive engagement in the foreign and security policy sphere.”

Mind the word “security”. The federal president Joachim Gauck said practically the same: Germany “could – building on its experience in safeguarding human rights and the rule of law – take more resolute steps to preserve and help shape the order based on the European Union, (the military North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) NATO and the United Nations,” Gauck declared. He added: “At the same time, Germany must also be ready to do more to guarantee the security that others have provided it with for decades.”

In plain language: Germany must be ready to wage war all over the world in the name of human rights, peace, and … security.

German policymakers and journalists are up in arms, with US diplomats struggling to contain the political damage. In a recent poll, only 35% of Germans said the United States can be trusted. This is a stunning vote of no confidence amid continued public uproar about the NSA's tapping of Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone.

The United States has very few friends in Berlin these days. Even traditionally pro-American policy and opinion makers keep a low profile, and almost no one is prepared to publicly defend the United States. Many say they are fed up with America's explanations and excuses, and it is hard to blame them.

Germans are very sensitive about data protection. This is rooted in Stalinist and Nazi traditions of comprehensive surveillance and terror.

This is the modern miracle of fractional reserve banking. When you make a deposit, your bank only holds a tiny percentage of that cash. The rest of it gets loaned out or invested in securities that pay a much higher rate of return than the pitiful amount you receive in interest. Needless to say, the less money banks hold in reserve, the more money they’re able to invest… and the more profit they make. This puts their incentives and our incentives at odds. Because as depositors, it’s better for us if the bank holds most (if not all) of our funds.

In typical form, though, governments stepped in to settle this dispute. And a century ago, they sided with the banks. Because of this, it’s perfectly legal for banks to hold a tiny percentage of customer deposits. So now, anytime there’s the slightest spook (as happened in Bulgaria), it creates a panic. Naturally that’s when politicians step in to calm nerves. In the case of Bulgaria, the EU Commission soothingly announced that “the Bulgarian banking system is well-capitalized and has high levels of liquidity compared to its peers in other member states.”

Are these geniuses really saying that the country experiencing a bank run due to its LACK of liquidity is MORE liquid than the rest of Europe?? Yes, that is exactly what they’re saying. So it begs the question – if Bulgarian banks with their “high levels of liquidity” can suffer such shocks, what can happen to other European banks which are worse off?

I think the lesson here is clear: The people in charge of regulating the system and making these proclamations about bank safety are totally CLUELESS.

Yields on Portugal’s 10-year debt surged 20 basis points on Thursday to 3.95 percent, with contagion spreading to Greek, Spanish and Italian debt. Capital Economics said the ructions in the bond markets confirm fears that Europe's tentative banking union has failed to stabilise the system. “Policymakers have done little to weaken the 'doom loop' between banks and sovereigns in the eurozone’s periphery,” it said.

Portugal’s stock market fell 4 percent in a seventh day of declines on fears that a nexus of interlinked companies would be drawn into the squall.