According to US Energy Information Administration (EIA) figures, oil and gas shipments accounted for 68 percent of Russia's total $527 billion of gross exports in 2013, when Brent crude - comparable to Russian Urals - traded at an average of $108 per barrel.

Should the current price of Brent, at around $60 per barrel, be sustained over the next 12 months, that would result in Russia's export income from crude dropping to $95 billion, from $174 billion in 2013. However, these losses will be amplified by the total loss of revenue accrued from lower prices for refined petroleum products and domestic sales of crude, which totalled $122 billion in 2013, according to the EIA.

Comments made over the weekend by Saudi Arabia's powerful oil minister Ali Naimi that the kingdom would not cut production even if prices fell to a level of $20 per barrel will have sent a cold chill through the corridors of the Kremlin where preparations are already being made to cope with a deep economic recession. Russia is being squeezed hard by a combination of tough trade and financial sanctions and plummeting oil prices, which are eroding its main source of hard foreign currency earnings.

A former German politician, Juergen Todenhoefer is the only outsider to have travelled deep into IS territory and back. And, considering that several Westerners have recently been beheaded, he did so at terrifying risk. Mr Todenhoefer said he was struck by their brutal zeal, and the scale of their ambition to carry out "religious cleansing" and to expand their territory. "There is an enthusiasm that I've never seen before in warzones," he said.

"They are so confident, so sure of themselves. At the beginning of this year, few people knew of IS. But now they have conquered an area the size of the UK. This is a one per cent movement with the power of a nuclear bomb or a tsunami." Filmed by his son - with a permit guaranteeing their safety - his material gives the impression of a group busy entrenching their bureaucracy, relatively unperturbed by the threat of coalition air strikes.

"I had the impression that they want to show that the Islamic State is working," Mr Todenhoefer said. The jihadists now have their own justice system - with IS flags hanging in courtrooms - and their own police enforcing strict Islamic law, although the local police chief told him that he no longer needed to administer violent punishments. Fear, said Mr Todenhoefer, appeared to be an extremely powerful deterrent.

Safely back in Munich, Mr Todenhoefer told us: "They are the most brutal and most dangerous enemy I have ever seen in my life." "I don't see anyone who has a real chance to stop them," he said. "Only Arabs can stop IS. I came back very pessimistic."

Russia needs a land bridge to Crimea if its new province is to be economically sustainable. But Merkel said in November that if Putin attacks the Ukrainian city of Mariupol - the Crimea bridge - more EU sanctions are “unavoidable”. She said in December the existing sanctions can be rolled back only if he gives up conquered territories.

The EU measures and low oil prices cost Russia $140 billion in lost revenue in 2014 (6% of the state budget). Capital flight cost another $100 billion and the rouble has plunged to all-time lows. But Putin, in his state-of-the-nation speech on 4 December, didn’t blink. He told Russian people to expect more economic hardship and described Crimea as Russia’s “Holy Land”.

Whether he intended to stop at Mariupol, or Kiev, or to go to Tallinn when the 16 armoured vehicles left their base in Crimea on 21 February is not known. But if political and market forces cause a Russian economic crisis, it might make him even more unpredictable.

The Oslo Accords, signed on the White House lawn between Israel and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, called for mutual recognition, something that is totally lacking from Hamas, the leading political body of Palestinian Arabs, or from the rejectionist Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority. The notion of “two states for two peoples” has been rejected by the Palestinians.

Europeans need to be asked: If Hamas is not a terrorist organization, what is? As European parliaments fall, one by one, to a “Palestine” vote, and its court cannot understand what constitutes a terrorist organization if it is cloaked in Palestinian clothing, no other issue has unified the Israeli parliament like the European court’s decision. Wall to wall condemnation was heard across Israel’s divergent political parties against the European court, whose decision demonstrates the loss of a moral path, in the words of Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett.

Former justice minister Tzipi Livni reminded Europe that Hamas is “an extreme Islamic religious terrorist organization that must be fought with all force.” Clearly, Europe does not have the stomach, or the political will, to fight Islamic terrorism with all its force, if at all. As Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein said, the European Union “must have lost its mind!” This is clearly the case. The question is whether the winds of political change will arrive in Europe in time to save it and Israel from the damaging tsunami of current political moves.

For the Jews, the arch is not so much a commemoration as it is an open wound. Jews traditionally would not walk through the arch because of its boastful depiction of the plundering of the holy treasures of the Temple, most central of which is the relief of the seven branched menorah being carried by Jewish captives to Rome. The relief became a symbol of exile and oppression for the Jewish people, while rumor has it that the menorah and other holy vessels of the Temple are hidden in the Vatican.

When the state of Israel was declared in 1948, Roman Jews gathered at the Arch spontaneously and walked joyfully backwards through it. The Knesset chose the menorah, copied from the arch, as the emblem of the State of Israel.

And now, in a step further along the path returning to Zion of old, Giulio Meotti, Arutz Sheva's intrepid op-ed columnist, writer at il Giorno and author of the books A New Shoah and The Vatican Against Israel, lit a menorah at the Arch of Titus on the sixth night of the holiday, the start of the new month of Tevet.

Unesco didn’t inspect the irremediable damage caused by the digs the Waqf perpetrated on the Temple Mount. But the UN’s cultural agency challenged Israel’s re-construction of a pedestrian bridge. Where was Unesco when the Muslim “authorities” damaged the historic archeological remains of Solomon’s Stables beneath the Temple Mount? No one, not certainly Unesco, listened to Israel’s plea against that desecration.

Since then, after this physical desecration, the Temple Mount has been at the center of a religious war against the Jewish people. Shouldn’t Unesco be vigilant about the Jews’ religious freedom? Shouldn’t Unesco safeguard the rights of non-Muslim prayer on the holy mountain? History, culture and education should be Unesco’s goals, while in fact what is going on over the Temple Mount is a war whose goal is to erase Jewish history. The same thing that is happening in Iraq under the Islamic State.

These days, Unesco is seeking to save Jewish sites from ISIS' destruction, such as the tombs of the Biblical prophets, Ezekiel, Daniel and Nahum. Why Unesco doesn't raise its voice against the Islamic totalitarianism and physical and spiritual terrorism on the Temple Mount?

US Cyber Command was officially stood up in 2010, based at Fort Meade in the Maryland suburbs of the nation’s capital, consolidating intelligence and cyber warfare capabilities of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines under one house. Soon, billions of dollars were being invested in the concept that cyber attackers targeting America should be prepared to sustain their own damage.

Little has been discussed in public about US Cyber Command’s specific capabilities since, though budget documents detail a growing commitment to this form of warfare. The Pentagon’s cyber warfare budget has grown from $3.9 billion in 2013 to $4.7 billion in 2014 and an estimated $5.1 billion in 2015.

The good news is that it’s cheaper to fill up your car at the pumps, but what does it mean for Britain’s national security? The most pressing issue for Britain is the fate of the North Sea basin, where costs are rising as oil and gas fields are depleting and exploration becomes more difficult. ‘It’s almost impossible to make money at these prices — it’s a huge crisis,’ the chairman of the independent oil explorers’ association said last week.

That is bleak news for the tens of thousands of workers employed in our offshore industry and their families. But it is even worse news for the Scottish Nationalists. Their dreams of an independent Scotland were balanced precariously — ludicrously, some said — on the idea that oil and gas revenues would pay for the lavish socialist spending and bloated bureaucracy they hold dear. Now, their sums simply no longer add up.

The good news is that, even as high-cost oil producers are being squeezed by falling prices, it is a different story for consumers. A $40 fall in the oil price shifts some $1.3 trillion from producers to consumers each year, largely through tumbling prices at the petrol pumps. The RAC believes that petrol could fall to below £1 per litre — a price not seen since May 2009. That will keep millions of pounds in motorists’ pockets.

But they should not spend it on champagne — at least, not yet.

Oil production still rests on some of the most ill-run and fragile states in the world. Iraq produces 3.4 million barrels a day, and Libya another million. That is half of the total produced by America. But both countries are precariously balanced on the edge of collapse. Libya is no longer a functioning state, riven by a bloody struggle between parliamentary forces and Islamist militias. Iraq has already come perilously close to succumbing to the fanatical fighters of the so-called Islamic State.

The big picture is that the world is changing for the better: a number of despotic regimes — notably Russia’s — that depend on looting their country’s natural resources are facing a well-deserved comeuppance. The question is whether they accept their fate, or whether the power of black gold to spark violent upheaval will see us all sucked into conflicts that could shake the world.

1) Feeling immortal, immune or indispensable. "A Curia that doesn't criticize itself, that doesn't update itself, that doesn't seek to improve itself is a sick body."

2) Working too hard. "Rest for those who have done their work is necessary, good and should be taken seriously."

3) Becoming spiritually and mentally hardened. "It's dangerous to lose that human sensibility that lets you cry with those who are crying, and celebrate those who are joyful."

4) Planning too much. "Preparing things well is necessary, but don't fall into the temptation of trying to close or direct the freedom of the Holy Spirit, which is bigger and more generous than any human plan."

5) Working without coordination, like an orchestra that produces noise. "When the foot tells the hand, 'I don't need you' or the hand tells the head 'I'm in charge.'"

6) Having 'spiritual Alzheimer's.' "We see it in the people who have forgotten their encounter with the Lord … in those who depend completely on their here and now, on their passions, whims and manias, in those who build walls around themselves and become enslaved to the idols that they have built with their own hands."

7) Being rivals or boastful. "When one's appearance, the color of one's vestments or honorific titles become the primary objective of life."

8) Suffering from 'existential schizophrenia.' "It's the sickness of those who live a double life, fruit of hypocrisy that is typical of mediocre and progressive spiritual emptiness that academic degrees cannot fill. It's a sickness that often affects those who, abandoning pastoral service, limit themselves to bureaucratic work, losing contact with reality and concrete people."

9) Committing the 'terrorism of gossip.' "It's the sickness of cowardly people who, not having the courage to speak directly, talk behind people's backs."

10) Glorifying one's bosses. "It's the sickness of those who court their superiors, hoping for their benevolence. They are victims of careerism and opportunism, they honor people who aren't God."

11) Being indifferent to others. "When, out of jealousy or cunning, one finds joy in seeing another fall rather than helping him up and encouraging him."

12) Having a 'funereal face.' "In reality, theatrical severity and sterile pessimism are often symptoms of fear and insecurity. The apostle must be polite, serene, enthusiastic and happy and transmit joy wherever he goes."

13) Wanting more. "When the apostle tries to fill an existential emptiness in his heart by accumulating material goods, not because he needs them but because he'll feel more secure."

14) Forming 'closed circles' that seek to be stronger than the whole. "This sickness always starts with good intentions but as time goes by, it enslaves its members by becoming a cancer that threatens the harmony of the body and causes so much bad — scandals — especially to our younger brothers."

15) Seeking worldly profit and showing off. "It's the sickness of those who insatiably try to multiply their powers and to do so are capable of calumny, defamation and discrediting others, even in newspapers and magazines, naturally to show themselves as being more capable than others."

President Petro Poroshenko had vowed to put Ukraine under Western military protection after winning an election called in the wake of the February ouster in Kiev of a Moscow-backed president. "Ukraine's fight for its independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty has turned into a decisive factor in our relations with the world," Poroshenko told foreign ambassadors in Kiev on Monday night.

Ukraine assumed neutrality under strong Russian pressure in 2010. It had sought Nato membership in the early post-Soviet era but – its once-mighty army in ruins and riven by corruption – was never viewed as a serious candidate. Last winter's revolution in Kiev upset Russian President Vladimir Putin's plans to enlist Ukraine in a new, Kremlin-led bloc that could rival both Nato and the European Union.

"Whether it goes down to $20, $40, $50, $60, it is irrelevant," he said in an interview with Middle East Economic Survey (Mees). Mr Naimi’s remarks sent oil prices back into reverse after finishing last week firmer. Brent crude fell over 2.3 percent to trade below the $60 per barrel range.

The minister – who is the most powerful voice with the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) – said that the cartel had changed its strategy from defending a certain price to focusing on retaining its market share.