New Year: champagne in the glasses and celebration of the new year with its promises and hopes. But there is not much hope and optimism in the Danish media. The New Year started with the introduction of ID-control on the Danish-Swedish border. Not since 1954 has it been necessary to show identification between the two Scandinavian countries. For more than 60 years you could travel freely between them. This is extremely indicative of the situation at the dawn of 2016.

Global markets gave fallen 7.1% since January 1^st, their worst start since 1970. George Soros, the renowned business magnate, says the situation developing in China reminds him of the period prior to the banking crisis of 2008. Former US treasury secretary Larry Summers has said, “The global risk to domestic performance in the US, Europe and many emerging markets is as great as any time I can remember.”

Today we begin the serialisation of a new work by Alan Woods, which provides a comprehensive explanation of the Marxist method of analysing history. This first article establishes the scientific basis of historical materialism. The ultimate cause of all social change is to be found, not in the human brain, but in changes in the mode of production.

With just a few weeks in office, the Socialist Party (PS) government of Portugal has orchestrated yet another scandal in its history, with the main protagonist being the bankrupt bank “Banco Internacional do Funchal SA” (Banif).

Thursday 7th of January 2016, will be remembered in Morocco as "Black Thursday".

Less than a quarter of an hour after opening, the Chinese stock market was closed by an automatic shutdown. This was triggered twice last week by rapid falls of more than 7%. This "circuit-breaker" mechanism was imposed by the government only 5 months ago after equally dramatic losses. The government has now suspended this measure, not from new-found confidence, but as a further turn of panic.