"At one point he left to go to Afghanistan, and two years ago he came back, popped up out of nowhere and he was real religious," friend Flee Jones, 27, said of suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami. "And it was shocking. I'm trying to understand what's going on. I've never seen him like this."

Police this morning released a photo of Rahami, an Afghan immigrant and US citizen, wanted for questioning in the bombings that rocked a Manhattan neighborhood and a New Jersey shore town. Rahami was taken into custody after a gunfight in nearby Linden today at 11:20 am.

In addition to the blast in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood on Saturday that injured dozens, a pipe bomb exploded in a New Jersey shore town before a charity 5K race and an unexploded pressure cooker device was found blocks away from the explosion site in Chelsea. Yesterday, five explosive devices were discovered at an Elizabeth train station.

The CDU also managed to hold off Alternative for Germany (AfD). Thus the CDU's traumatic experience of being overtaken by the rightwing populists in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania did not repeat itself. Nevertheless it was the worst-ever showing of the CDU in Berlin. By capturing only about 18 percent of the vote the party will not be able to continue its ruling coalition with the SPD, as they failed to maintain enough of a majority for their grand coalition.

Both major parties suffered serious vote losses, with the SPD down by 6.7 percentage points, and the CDU by 5.8 percent. Just as the CDU's downward trend was maintained, the populist AfD continued to ride its wave of electoral success. The rightwing group will take its place in Berlin's parliament for the first time after winning 14 percent of the vote.

AfD Co-Chairman Jörg Meuthen said the reason for his party's success was the fact that it addresses the "burning issues that occupy the people" such as the refugee crisis and domestic security. Meuthen said he considered the AfD has established itself in both the east and the west of Germany and now also in the cities. The AfD is represented in 10 of 16 state parliaments. Meuthen is also confident that the AfD will win a double-digit percentage of the vote in next September's federal parliamentary election and take seats in the Bundestag.

These comments represent perhaps the strongest statements that any UN Secretary-General has ever made against Israel, and they come at a very ominous time. As I detailed just a few days ago, there is a major push to try to get some sort of UN Security Council resolution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before Barack Obama leaves office. As you will see below, this is something that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon obviously endorses.

Those that are hoping for a “two state solution” know that fresh negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians are not likely to happen any time in the near future. So if the “peace process” is going to move forward, it is going to have to happen at the United Nations. Ban Ki-moon is among those that are desperate to try to save the “two state solution”, and as the UN begins a new annual session this week he is urging imminent action.

And as the drama in the Middle East continues to unfold, support for Israel is going to become a major, major political issue in this nation. But the very next thing that we are watching for is a UN Security Council resolution formally establishing a Palestinian state and granting them East Jerusalem as their capital.

Now that a new UN annual session has started, we are officially in the danger zone, and we will remain in the danger zone until the next president is inaugurated on January 20th, 2017. Let us hope that nothing happens between now and then, because such a resolution would be one of the worst things that Barack Obama could possibly do.

The Bank for International Settlements warned in its quarterly report that China’s "credit to GDP gap" has reached 30.1, the highest to date and in a different league altogether from any other major country tracked by the institution. It is also significantly higher than the scores in East Asia's speculative boom on 1997 or in the US subprime bubble before the Lehman crisis.

Studies of earlier banking crises around the world over the last sixty years suggest that any score above ten requires careful monitoring. Outstanding loans have reached $28 trillion, as much as the commercial banking systems of the US and Japan combined. The scale is enough to threaten a worldwide shock if China ever loses control.

That’s a very different thing from owning physical cash stuffed under your mattress. Yet, 99.9% of people conflate the two. Cash deposited into the bank technically makes you a creditor of the bank. You’re liable to get burned should the bank make a bad bet and get into trouble. The risk is not insignificant. Most banks gamble with their customer deposits on risky investment fads like mortgage-backed securities.

Government deposit insurance schemes are a false sense of security. With their current reserves, they could only cover less than half a penny for every dollar they supposedly insure. People in Cyprus had to find all this out the hard way a few years ago. People awoke on an otherwise normal Saturday morning to the horror that the cash in their bank accounts had vanished. It was perhaps the most potent, recent example of the risk of being totally dependent on a single country that suddenly found itself in financial trouble. It also shows why I am such a fan of owning hard assets outside the immediate reach of your government.

This brings up an uncomfortable truth for North Americans and Europeans. The way the political and economic winds are blowing, things are about to get much worse. Central banks around the globe have created the biggest financial bubble the world has ever seen. Interest rates are the lowest they’ve ever been in 5,000 years of recorded history. In some parts of the world, they’re even negative. We’re living in a financial Alice in Wonderland.

I think the social and political implications of this bubble bursting are even more dangerous than the financial consequences. An economic depression and currency inflation (perhaps hyperinflation) are very much on the cards. These things rarely lead to anything but bigger government, less freedom, and shrinking prosperity. Sometimes, they lead to much worse. We’re already getting a small preview of what is to come…

It seems like each week, there’s a new attack or mass shooting. Racial tensions are on the rise. Europe is experiencing a migrant crisis that’s tearing the continent apart. There’s no doubt the world has become a crazier place in the past couple of years. Unfortunately, I think it is only going to get worse…

On the economic front, the US is headed toward stagflation - a combination of weak demand and elevated inflation, according to Greenspan. “Politically, I haven’t a clue how this comes out. We’re not in a stable equilibrium,” he said. “I hope we can all find a way out because this is too great a country to be undermined, by how should I say it, crazies.”

Greenspan, who served from 1974-1977 in the Republican presidential administration of the late Gerald Ford, declined to comment on Wednesday when asked whom he was referring to. Greenspan repeated his concern on Tuesday that increased government spending on social security and healthcare are crowding out private investment and leading to slower economic growth. He bemoaned the fact that neither presidential candidate was talking about reining in those expenditures.

“Nobody wants to discuss it” for fear of a political backlash, he said.

The US national debt is 25x larger than all global oil exports in 2015. Yes, countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Russia make a killing off of selling their oil around the world. However, the numbers behind these exports are paltry in comparison to the debt. For example, you’d need the Saudis to donate the next 146 years of revenue from their oil exports to fully pay down the debt.

The national debt is larger than all of the world’s physical currency, gold, silver, and bitcoin combined. That’s right, if you rounded up every single dollar, euro, yen, pound, yuan, and any other global physical currency note or coin in existence, it only amounts to a measly $5 trillion. Adding the world’s physical gold ($7.7 trillion), silver ($20 billion), and cryptocurrencies ($11 billion) on top of that, you get to a total of $12.73 trillion. That’s equal to about 65% of the US national debt.

In a passionate defense of freedom, Roberts also blasted privately owned central banks and the incestuous relationship between global mega-banks and Big Government. The tide is already turning. Roberts said the historic Brexit vote, in which British voters decided to secede from the European Union, should be seen as a model worldwide as nations work to reclaim their sovereignty from globalist institutions.

The Australian lawmaker, who represents the state of Queensland, joined a growing chorus of anti-UN voices stretching from the halls of the US Congress to the Presidential Palace of the Philippines. “Australia’s values and way of life are also at risk from insidious institutions such as the unelected swill that is the United Nations,” Roberts, who belongs to a pro-sovereignty, pro-borders political party, said on the floor of the legislature in his maiden speech.

He also blasted the increasingly totalitarian EU and other controversial institutions of what globalists call “global governance,” and celebrated the growing uprising against transnational government. “The people of the United Kingdom recently spoke, and I have great admiration for the way they broke free of that socialist, monolithic monster, the European Union,” he said.

“The EU is a template for total socialist domination of Europe through unelected bodies, such as the IMF, forcing their frightening agenda on the people,” Roberts continued, referring to the radical International Monetary Fund currently being groomed to take a lead role in the global monetary regime. “It is also the UN’s template, and Australia must leave the UN.”

“The four-year-old is reportedly being supported throughout the transition by the education department, and is part of the Safe Schools program.” Yes, the Safe Schools program. Safe for whom? Deputy Secretary of School Operations Gregory Prior made this announcement at a budget hearing, which presumably means the four-year-old child is receiving public funds for the sex change.

No mention of how the parents of the four-year old came to their decision. No mention of the “discussion” with the child that led to this decision. The New South Wales government doesn’t just stand aside; it supports this madness. A four-year old. He/she comes up with this idea out of the blue? He/she expresses it in what terms? He/she is supposed to understand the medical procedures and the consequences? The doctors go along with this?

This whole social program has gained so much steam that many people are paralyzed — they refuse to express outrage. They refuse to point out the obvious. They knuckle under. The criminally delusional parents who go along with the program for their own children consider themselves enlightened. They’re in a trance, and they feel good about the trance. “Yes, our four-year old is undergoing gender transition and we think it’s wonderful.” What coaching did these parents engage in with their very young child to push along this insanity?

A boy put on his mother’s dress one day, and then the parents sat down with him and engaged in a deep conversation? A four-year old is now the ruler of his/her own fate. This is legalized mutilation and torture, undertaken as a “proper medical procedure.” The doctors should have licenses stripped, and they should be sent to prison. They should share their cells with the government officials who support this crime.

The conflict in Syria is not a war in the conventional sense of the word. It is a regime change operation, just like Libya and Iraq were regime change operations. The main driver of the conflict is the country that’s toppled more than 50 sovereign governments since the end of World War 2. We’re talking about the United States of course.

Washington is the hands-down regime change champion; no one else even comes close. That being the case, one might assume that the American people would notice the pattern of intervention, see through the propaganda and assign blame accordingly. But that never seems to happen and it probably won’t happen here either. No matter how compelling the evidence may be, the brainwashed American people always believe their government is doing the right thing.

But the United States is not doing the right thing in Syria. Arming, training and funding Islamic extremists — that have killed half a million people, displaced 7 million more and turned the country into an uninhabitable wastelands – is not the right thing. It is the wrong thing, the immoral thing. And the US is involved in this conflict for all the wrong reasons, the foremost of which is gas.

The US wants to install a puppet regime in Damascus so it can secure pipeline corridors in the East, oversee the transport of vital energy reserves from Qatar to the EU, and make sure that those reserves continue to be denominated in US Dollars that are recycled into US Treasuries and US financial assets. This is the basic recipe for maintaining US dominance in the Middle East and for extending America’s imperial grip on global power into the future.