British forces have been based in Germany since 1945. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1993, the number of soldiers there was cut from 53,000 to 25,000. But in 2010, the Government ruled that all forces would be removed from Germany by 2020. It said: “There is no longer any operational requirement for UK forces to be based there, and the current arrangements impose financial costs on the UK, disruption on personnel and their families and opportunity costs in terms of wider Army coherence.”

The move means that, with the exception of 250 staff who will stay in Germany, the British Army will be wholly based in the UK for the first time in decades. An MoD spokesman said it had “invested nearly £2 billion” to support the move, “building over 1,000 new homes and providing new catering, accommodation and sports facilities”.

Friday’s power cuts, far from being a freak event, are merely a taste of worse to come. That’s because brownouts and blackouts aren’t a bug of electricity systems heavily dependent on renewable energy. They’re a feature. And it’s not as though wiser heads haven’t been saying this for years.

Christopher Booker, for example, writing in 2009, described successive governments’ embrace of wind energy as “the maddest thing that has happened in our lifetime.” He wrote: “Let us be clear: Britain is facing an unprecedented crisis. Before long, we will lose 40 per cent of our generating capacity. And unless we come up quickly with an alternative, the lights WILL go out.” Well on Friday the lights did go out. And the big question now is: will the government try to paper over the cracks or will it turn a crisis into an opportunity?

Even though most of us are working, 59 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck, and almost 50 million Americans are living in poverty. In a desperate attempt to continue their middle class lifestyles, many Americans have been piling up mountains of debt, and it has gotten to the point where we have a major crisis on our hands. According to the New York Post, the total amount of debt that US households have accumulated is about to cross the 14 trillion dollar mark for the first time ever… Americans are spending heavily, again — and often recklessly, say analysts.

This is the exact opposite of what US consumers should be doing.  We can see signs of a fresh economic slowdown all around us, and consumers should be feverishly trying to get out of debt as fast as they can. But instead, debt levels just keep setting record after record.  In fact, total student loan debt just hit a brand new record high of 1.605 trillion dollars, and auto loan debt just hit a brand new record high of 1.174 trillion dollars.

It would be one thing if we could handle all of this debt, but that isn’t the case.  Bankruptcies have been steadily rising, and according to the latest figures the number of bankruptcy filings shot up another 5 percent in the month of July… And as we plunge into this new economic downturn, things are only going to get worse. The middle class is absolutely drowning in debt, and even a mild recession would be enough to financially wipe out millions of American families.

It appears that no one had anything against these particular staffers … except for the color of their skin. Although roughly half the committee’s full-time staff (13 of 27) were nonwhite, this was not enough for some Democratic members of Congress. They complained DCCC Chairwoman Cheri Bustos of Illinois had brought in too many white staffers when she won the position. And they put enough pressure on her that she sacrificed her loyal staffers to the god of diversity. Even if all these staffers ended up with cushy lobbying jobs as a reward for their loyalty, this is still a lot more shocking than people perhaps realize.

There are two possible interpretations of this mass-purge at the DCCC. Either a few Democrats are making a racial issue out of a patronage question, once again knifing each other under the cover of intersectionality, or Democrats are genuinely angry that half the staff at the DCCC are white. As often happens with the Democratic Left, it is difficult to tell just where the insincerity ends and the fanaticism begins. But either interpretation implies that this is not a party fit to govern.

In the US shellfish allergies have gone up 40 per cent in just the last 15 years. And nut allergies have quadrupled. In the UK, hospital admissions for allergies have gone up 500 per cent since 1990, with British children also undergoing a five-fold increase in rates of peanut allergies. So what’s going on? Why are the Amish happily chugging milk and breathing pollen while the rest of us can’t so much as look at a plate of pad thai?

For one thing, we haven’t been parenting our kids right. For a long time, the advice was to not expose your kids to potentially harmful allergens until they were older. Parents were told not to feed their kids peanuts until age three, for instance. Now, it turns out that this was all wrong: By denying children early exposure to allergens, it was actually causing them to become allergic.

One particularly illuminating study looked at the peanut allergy rates among Jewish children in Israel and Jewish children in the UK. They’re both Jewish, so allergy rates should be about the same, right? Wrong. The British kids had a rate of peanut allergy 10 times higher than the Israeli kids. The reason? Israelis were chowing down on peanuts as babies, whereas Brits weren’t getting peanuts until they were toddlers. The result was that by the time many Brits got their first taste of peanut, their bodies couldn’t handle it.

It turns out there’s a brief window of time after you’re born in which your body is super receptive to unfamiliar foods and won’t react to them. Miss that window and, boom, you’re allergic. That’s why groups like the United States’ National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases are now advising parents to load up their kids with potentially allergenic food, including peanut butter, before the age of six months.

Another explanation for our now-spiking allergy rates is called the “hygiene hypothesis.” The gist is that by living super-sanitized HEPA filter, Purel-soaked lives, we are becoming increasingly fragile people unable to stomach even our own food. Some of the most compelling evidence is that farm children are consistently less allergenic than children living in cities. Allergies are caused by your immune system mistaking harmless things for pathogens and shifting into high gear to battle it. The hygiene hypothesis holds that those of us in the West aren’t giving our immune systems a proper workout, so it’s essentially shorting out and treating everything like a threat.

You’re never going to completely get rid of allergies. Even Amish kids, Israeli babies and Mumbaikars have some allergies among them, but there’s obviously a reason that allergy rates everywhere else are skyrocketing. The evidence so far seems to indicate that grandpa was right — a little dirt is good for you. Eat dirt off the floor, let the dog give you kisses and let your baby inhale some dust. We might be too clean for our own good.

“Never forget that ‘the whole is greater than the parts.’ Globalization, unity, should not be conceived as a sphere, but as a polyhedron: each people retains its identity in unity with others,” he said. “In the European Union, we must talk to each other, confront each other and get to know each other. Yet sometimes we see only compromise monologues. No: we also need to listen,” he said. The pontiff made no attempt to conceal his contempt for the policies of Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini, whose motto has been “Italians first.” Francis even went so far as to compare Salvini’s speeches to those of Adolph Hitler.

In his interview, the pope also seemed to embrace popular notions that Europe and the European Union (EU) are virtually the same thing, so that to weaken the EU is to weaken Europe. “Europe cannot and must not break apart. It is a historical, cultural as well as a geographical unity,” Francis said. “The dream of the Founding Fathers had substance because it was an implementation of this unity. Now, we must not lose this heritage.”

This year, those looking around in August for ill omens for the global economy are spoilt for choice. There’s the fact that in the United States the president is at loggerheads with the man running the central bank. There’s the possibility of a general election in Italy that will produce an extreme hard-right government that will shake the foundations of the eurozone. There is, of course, the risk of a no-deal Brexit.

And then there’s China, which, at the sharp end of Donald Trump’s protectionist trade policy, is also struggling to cope with the escalating political unrest in Hong Kong and suffering from a more rapid slowdown than official figures would suggest. Trump’s tweets claiming that companies and capital are leaving the world’s second biggest economy tend to be dismissed as mere White House bombast. But a look under the bonnet of the Chinese economy suggest there is some truth in what the US president is saying.

Two recent developments are of note. The first is the decision in late May by the People’s Bank of China to take over Baoshang Bank. Although the central bank’s deposit guarantee avoided a bank run, the bailout did not prevent serious tensions in the interbank market – rekindling memories of how the unwillingness of western banks to lend to one another was a key feature of the global financial crisis of 2008.

The precise trigger for the airport's closure was not clear, since protesters occupying the arrivals hall for four days have been peaceful. Most of them had left shortly after midnight, but around 50 remained, discussing their next move. "This is about our freedom," a 24-year-old protester wearing a mask, who gave his name only as Yu, told Reuters during the evening. "Why should we leave?"

Some Hong Kong legal experts say official descriptions of some protesters' actions as terrorism could lead to the use of extensive anti-terror laws and powers against them. The increasingly violent demonstrations have plunged the Chinese-ruled territory into its most serious crisis in decades, presenting Chinese leader Xi Jinping with one of his biggest challenges since he came to power in 2012.