The plan to send Borei-class submarines, designed to carry 16 long-range nuclear missiles, to the southern hemisphere follows President Vladimir Putin’s decision in March to deploy a naval unit in the Mediterranean Sea on a permanent basis starting this year. “The revival of nuclear submarine patrols will allow us to fulfill the tasks of strategic deterrence not only across the North Pole but also the South Pole,” state-run Itar-Tass cited an unnamed official in the military General Staff as saying.

The official said the patrols would be phased in over several years. The Yuri Dolgoruky, the first of eight Borei-class submarines that Russia hopes to launch by 2020, entered service this year.

Fears of a nuclear confrontation between Russia and the United States has eased in recent years, and the Cold War-era foes signed a landmark treaty in 2010 setting lower limits on the size of their long-range nuclear arsenals. But the limited numbers of warheads and delivery vehicles such as submarines that they committed to under the New START treaty are still enough to devastate the world.

Putin has made clear Russia will continue to upgrade its arsenal.

Foreign bank loans fell by $472 billion (£311 billion) in rich countries in the fourth quarter of last year, contracting at an 8 percent annual rate. The retrenchment was led by a collapse of interbank loans in the eurozone, where lenders in the creditor states continue to pull back from periphery countries. Volumes fell by $284 billion across the eurozone, a 20 percent rate of contraction. Belt-tightening by banks is a key reason why the region remains stuck in recession for the seventh quarter in a row.

The BIS said in its quarterly report that the markets are “under the spell of monetary easing”, convinced that central banks will keep the asset boom going despite signs of “broad deceleration” in the US economy and fatigue in China.

Jaime Caruana, the BIS’s managing director, said last month that the authorities should refrain from further stimulus to keep growth alive, warning that excessive liquidity is distorting the financial system without achieving much. “If a medicine does not work as expected, it’s not necessarily because the dosage was too low,” he said.

The BIS was the only major watchdog to warn of a bubble before the Lehman crisis, and it has once again begun to fret over junk bonds and frothy asset prices.

After a miserably long winter followed by a cold, rain-drenched spring, the start of summer has brought severe flooding in Germany and neighboring Austria and the Czech Republic, killing at least nine people so far and awakening unhappy memories of the disastrous deluge of August 2002. There's no respite in sight, with Germany's weather center warning of further heavy rainfall on Monday in the worst-affected regions of southern and eastern Germany.

Thousands of people have been evacuated from low-lying areas, historic town centers are under water, schools are closed and high-school exams have been postponed, all to the grim soundtrack of emergency sirens and the merciless rushing of water. Five people are reported to have been killed in the Czech Republic, including two men on a river rafting tour. Two people have died in Austria and two in Germany. Several more are missing.

Perhaps the most extended research, however, comes from the Gallup poll. Since 1957, Gallup has asked Americans this simple question: Is religion increasing its influence? The poll is not a measure of religious or spiritual beliefs but rather a perception of religion’s role in society. The latest poll, released Wednesday, shows the most negative public opinion toward the impact of religion since 1970.

The last time a majority of Americans saw religion as increasing in influence was just after the 9/11 attacks. Today, in sharp contrast, 77 percent believe it is losing influence. That’s about the same percentage as during the late 1960s.

Another poll, done for the Christian group LifeWay Research, also finds Americans more open to religion during time of tragedy. Nearly 6 in 10 agree with the poll’s statement, “When a natural disaster occurs, my interest in God increases.” It is difficult to reconcile these polls with a rising disinterest in institutional religion. A Pew poll last year found 15 percent of American adults say they have no religious affiliation (the “nones,” as they are dubbed). That is about double from four decades ago.

These numbers, however, probably reflect a growing distrust in almost all institutions, not just established denominations, as well as a rising interest in individual spirituality more than group worship or faith-impelled social action.

In this futuristic hell, as soon as a woman gave birth, a support worker would come and live in her house, both to help the parents with the difficult child and to protect the child from the potentially abusive parents. There was no longer an expectation, or even an understanding of privacy, intimacy, trust, or even a relationship with and between parent and child. Rather, relationships were mediated through your own personal support worker.

Unfortunately, this dystopian future has arrived a little faster than I imagined, as last week the Scottish Government’s plan to give every child a state guardian from birth was launched. This state-appointed overseer will be a specific, named individual, and every child will have one, from birth. The responsibility for creating this named guardian will fall on the heads of the health boards for the first five years of a child’s life, before being transferred to councils. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this development is that it clearly comes in large part as a mechanism to target and prevent child abuse.

In my dystopian future, the hero Michael, who was an outsider to this (not so brave) New World, started off as a self-confident, well-adjusted, strong character. By the end of the story he had become a nervous, obsessively self-conscious, fragile, distrusting and yet conformist individual. Accepting the need to abandon privacy, engaged with the idea of risk – especially in relationships – Michael’s life soon became empty of true bonds or friendships. This loveless and bloodless existence led to… but that would spoil the end. But then, who needs a sci-fi novel when we have our very own “state guardians”.

Welcome to my world!

Not only did the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia largely create, sponsor and fund Al Qaeda, but also two other groups fighting on the side of the Syrian rebels: Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is a proxy war.

As we’ve documented in detail, the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and their allies back the Sunni jihadists against Shia Muslims. Indeed, the US is involved in a religious war – between the two factions of Islam (and is actually backing the most violent elements) – as part of a geopolitical strategy to exert control over the natural gas market.

Syria’s conflict is often described as a “civil war,” but that is only true insofar as it has yet to spill over into another country on a large scale or draw in too many different forces. But it is the quintessential proxy war, with the Alawite (an offshoot of Shia Islam) Assad regime backed up by Shia allies Hezbollah and Iran, as well as Russia and China.

The Sunni rebels are supported by the Islamist rulers of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, as well as the US, France, Britain and others.

The dollar is not dying. However, the reason it is rising in value has nothing to do with some inherent goodness in the US economy or the color green. Rather, it has to do with currency wars where other nations are trying to devalue their own currencies at the expense of the dollar. They go down, we go up. All of the Fed’s efforts to drive the dollar down have failed, primarily because the Fed is not greater than the combined dozens of nations who desperately want to devalue.

A large part of the global elite’s paranoia stems from their fear of global and uncontrolled war. Along the lines of Schumpeter’s theory of Creative Destruction, regional and local conflicts are controllable – and thus profitable – but unrestrained war ends up destroying the means of production.

Few, if any, Americans would wish for war, but we should realize that if currency wars are not contained, physical conflict will follow. While it may appear that we are lined with the global elite on currency wars, our motives could not be further apart. We seek freedom and liberty: They seek global domination.

In the beginning was the word. More specifically, in the beginning was a speech. "The speech" refers to a handful of thoughts expressed out loud last October by a former member of the Kuwaiti parliament. Too loudly, perhaps. The politician, Musallam al-Barrak, was sentenced in April to five years in prison. In response, several thousand Kuwaitis gathered in front of a prison at the edge of the city to protest. There were warning shots, tear gas and injuries. Barrak has been out on bail since.

One sentence in particular especially unsettled Sheikh Sabah, the emir of Kuwait, although al-Barrak uttered it in a deferential manner: "We will not allow you, your highness, to take Kuwait into the abyss of autocracy." These are words every Kuwaiti now knows. They are spread by smartphone or called out spontaneously in parks. Sometimes at night, a car can be heard honking its horn to the rhythm of the sentence: We will not allow you, we will not allow you.

Many groups have connections throughout the region, and nowhere is there as high a density of Twitter users as in Saudi Arabia, which attempts to keep its bloggers under control with the threat of draconian punishments, so far to no avail. In Bahrain, demonstrators are arrested almost daily, and the government has hired international PR companies to turn attention away from its full jail cells and torture chambers. In Oman, around 50 bloggers were first convicted of slander against the sultan, then pardoned.

In Abu Dhabi, 94 intellectuals, dignitaries, teachers, doctors, housewives and even a sheikh from the ruling family have been on trial since March. They are charged with Muslim Brotherhood sympathies and a conspiracy to overthrow the government. The state claims the group has distorted the image of the United Arab Emirates. The accused, on the other hand, protest their patriotism, report the state-run media. A sense of civic engagement, once awakened, is hard to put back to sleep. And a word once spoken is hard to forget.