“Every night I ask myself why all countries have to base their trade on the dollar. Why can’t we do trade based on our own currencies?” he said. “Who was it that decided that the dollar was the currency after the disappearance of the gold standard?”

The leftist leader went on to lament that “everyone depends on just one currency,” referring to the dollar, and proposed “a currency to finance trade relations between Brazil and China, between Brazil and other countries.” “The advantage is to avoid the straitjacket imposed by necessarily having trade operations settled in a currency of a country not involved in the transaction,” he said.

Videos show the doomsday scene after an outpouring from Shiveluch volcano in the Kamchatka region which turned the snow black. Ash rose 12 miles into the sky, said reports, with a red warning to aviation from the plume, the highest category.

An area of 41,700 square miles was blanketed in darkness, an area larger than Scotland and Wales combined. "The ash cloud extends 500 kilometres northwest of Shiveluch and is still growing," said Alexey Ozerov, director of the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Some 57,000 people live in the volcano's hazard zone, which is spread across parts of six provinces, according to Colombia's Geological Service (CGS). The volcano's eruption in 1985 killed more than 25,000 people, the fourth-deadliest volcanic eruption in human history, leaving people buried under avalanches of earth and rock fragments.

The Nevado del Ruiz straddles the border between Colombia's Tolima and Caldas provinces. The volcano, which formed about 150,000 years ago, reaches an elevation of 17,717 feet and sits about 80 miles west of the capital city Bogotá.

The crypto market will go into a tailspin alongside stocks, the economist warned, predicting that Bitcoin will tumble 95-96% from its November 2021 high. “Bitcoin will fall from $69,000 to about three to four thousand,” he said, adding that “It’s exactly what Amazon and the dot-coms did.”

Dent points to what he sees as overlapping crises as the reason for his pessimism. The pandemic shattered the global economy in many ways, leading to job losses and reducing consumer spending. Additionally, unprecedented inflation in most wealthy countries and supply-chain disruptions have sparked serious concerns among investors and economists, forcing them to realize that “this is not a big correction — it is a major crash, one that you have not seen … in your lifetime, and the one that even the millennials will not see a bigger crash than this,” Dent added.

“I do believe that a stagflationary crisis is going to emerge this year,” he said, pointing out that the debt ratio in advanced economies was only 100% of GDP in the 1970s while currently it is 420% of GDP, in private and public debt. “So, in this case, if we have those shocks to, say, oil prices, not only do you get inflation, not only do you get recession and stagflation, but you get what I call a great stagflationary debt crisis, because with interest rates so high, then that [debt] ratio has become unsustainable,” he explained.

Dubbed ‘Doctor Doom’ by Wall Street for his dire economic predictions, Roubini suggested that all of this would force the US Federal Reserve and other central banks to keep hiking interest rates until their economies fell into recession. “I think that the Fed funds rate will have to be certainly above 6% to achieve a 2% inflation target,” he said. “But if you raise interest rates to 6% then you’re going to have a real hard landing.”

“This is a perfect analogy for where equity investors find themselves today, and quite frankly, where they've been many times over the past decade,” he added. The metaphor indicates the excessive levels that stock prices have climbed to since the start of this year. Wilson suggested the S&P 500 could tumble to 3,000 points within months, down about 26% from current levels, saying that “it’s time to head back to base camp before the next guide down in earnings.”

The grim forecast follows what many analysts have called the worst year for the stock market since the 2008 financial crisis. All three indexes tumbled in 2022 with the Dow Jones Industrial Average ending the year down 8.8% while the S&P 500 sank 19.4% and the Nasdaq Composite plunged 33.1%. The strategist has repeatedly warned that the market rally won’t last as he expects inflation to prove stickier than many other economists forecast, forcing the US Federal Reserve to hike rates in order to bring soaring prices under control.

On Friday, the UK’s five-year bonds plummeted by the most since 1992 after the government rolled out a massive tax-cut plan. Two-year US Treasuries are in the middle of the longest losing streak since at least 1976, falling for 12 straight days.

“Bottom line, all those years of central bank interest-rate suppression - poof, gone,” Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at Bleakley Advisory Group told the media outlet. “These bonds are trading like emerging market bonds, and the biggest financial bubble in the history of bubbles, that of sovereign bonds, continues to deflate,” he explained.

The Federal Reserve Board has pursued an aggressive rate-increasing campaign to try and tame inflation, but one of the risks was always that this would further exacerbate the nation’s fiscal problems by adding to the cost of interest payments on the debt. And there is now evidence this is exactly what’s happening. In February, CBO projected that by the end of the decade, the federal government would spend more on interest payments than on defense.

“That amount of borrowing outside of a national emergency is plainly unacceptable,” MacGuineas said. “Budgeting requires tradeoffs – often painful ones that politicians don’t want to grapple with. However, that is what they were elected to do, and they should consider the needs of both current and future Americans in upcoming fiscal negotiations. We simply cannot afford to ignore our unsustainable borrowing any longer.”

“Church sources say the monarch has been told that his desire for a ‘diverse’ ceremony, including participation by non-Christians, risks clashing with centuries- old canon law, which bars Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and other faith leaders from reading out prayers during the service.”

Charles has long held the desire to be a ‘Defender of all Faiths’, and wants to make a statement about it on his Coronation, but Church leaders resist him, ‘given that it is an Anglican ceremony, as well as a constitutional event’.

“In a joint message last month, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who will officiate at the ceremony, and Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell said the Coronation ‘at its centre is a Christian service… rooted in long-standing tradition and Christian symbolism’.”

Pre-Christian pagan traditions and superstitions, particularly those related to nature and tree worship, were still influential in the early Middle Ages. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the Green Man seems to appear most often in places where there are stretches of ancient woodland, for example in Devon and Somerset and on the edges of the forest areas of Yorkshire and the Midlands.

Perhaps then, the Green Man appears on our medieval churches as a symbol of rebirth and resurrection, tying together the old ancient pagan symbols associated with spring with the Christian faith.

Or perhaps the medieval stonemasons were just hedging their bets and incorporating the Green Man into the fabric of the religious buildings as a safety measure, to make doubly sure of the coming of spring and a plentiful harvest!

In one break with tradition, Charles and Camilla, the queen consort, will roll out of Buckingham Palace in the horse-drawn gilded black Diamond Jubilee State Coach built for Elizabeth’s 60th anniversary. It has heat, air conditioning, power windows and a suspension system that will provide a comfier ride than his mother’s accommodations for her enthronement.

The 1.3-mile (2-kilometer) route is a bit shorter than the one Elizabeth took to the royal church. The procession will go through Admiralty Arch; past Trafalgar Square and a statue of Charles I, the monarch beheaded in 1649; and by the houses of Parliament before arriving for the 11 am religious service.

And the two countries that are spearheading the uniting of these Middle Eastern countries, are China and Russia. This was a historic week of new meetings between countries in the Middle East, many of which have been bitter enemies with each other, sometimes for hundreds, if not thousands of years. “The era of the United States’ involvement in this region is over… The regional countries are capable of preserving security and stability in the Middle East without Washington’s interference,” another Iranian official said.