"Donald Trump makes clear with his tweet that he views Germany as a political opponent," Thomas Oppermann, head of the Social Democrats' (SPD) parliamentary group, told reporters on Tuesday. Meanwhile Social Democrat party leader, Martin Schulz reportedly called Trump a "destroyer of Western values." The tweet echoed language Trump reportedly used last Thursday in a meeting with European Union officials in Brussels in which he said, "The Germans are bad, very bad."

Trump made the comments to EU Commissioner Jean-Claude Juncker and European Council president Donald Tusk, according to German news magazine Der Spiegel. On Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel charged that Europe could no longer rely on its traditional allies in a swipe at the US following difficult G7 and NATO summits.

Merkel did not mention by name the US President, who criticized major NATO allies and refused to endorse a global climate change accord, but she told a packed beer tent in Munich that the days when Europe could completely count on others were "over to a certain extent". "I have experienced this in the last few days," she said. "And that is why I can only say that we Europeans must really take our fate into our own hands."

The way that we have retreated from internationalism to ugly nationalism in Britain.

The way that we have retreated from international trade to protectionism.

The sense that somehow or other democracy is failing.

The habit of lying in our public discourse.

What was it Goebbels said? Tell it often, tell it big ... stick it on the side of a bus perhaps and drive it around the country. I’m not saying Hitler is around the corner, of course I’m not, although you might conclude the conditions for something like that to emerge are there.”

He said the world would be a better place if more politicians had a better grasp of history. He admitted to sounding “apocalyptic” but said if society parted company from liberal values of “respect, tolerance, internationalism and so on then the next step history shows is something worse”.

The city’s experts, David Koren and Ben Avrahami, also revealed that Turkey has begun pouring millions of dollars into non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in eastern Jerusalem, in order to strengthen Ankara’s status among the Arab residents, at the expense of Jordan and Israel.

“The growing involvement of the Erdogan regime, which is now the main patron of the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide, shows that the Turkish actions in Jerusalem are part of a wider process of creating regional Turkish hegemony at the expense of other players,” wrote the Jerusalem mayor’s advisers on the eastern part of the city, noting that “the biggest loser from the increased Turkish presence is Jordan, which for many years had enjoyed the status of Custodian of the Holy Places and the protector of the residents of eastern Jerusalem.

One hundred years after the last Turkish soldier was chased out of Jerusalem by the invading British Empire, “Turkey’s public support for the Palestinian cause and the Al-Aqsa conflict, and their channeling of millions of dollars into eastern Jerusalem, bear many fruits in the form of sympathy and support,” the experts concluded, adding that the Turks’ “involvement is made possible by their cooperation with Muslim Brotherhood elements in the city, who are often being used as their allies and collaborators.”

It is a law every president for the past 22 years has baulked at. It would pre-empt the Oslo accords and negate Washington’s assumed role as “honest broker”. Carrying out Congress’s wish would deny the Palestinians East Jerusalem, the only credible capital of a future Palestinian state.

But equally significantly, the law would recognise Israel’s efforts to claim sovereignty over the Old City’s holy places, especially the incendiary site of Al-Aqsa mosque. That could provoke a conflagration both locally, among Palestinians, and more generally in the Middle East. Trump’s key advisers are reported to be bitterly divided. Some, such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, warn that, if the president fails to approve the deferral, his claims to be crafting the “ultimate deal” to bring peace to the region will be doomed from the outset.

Jerusalem is the most intractable of the final-status issues set out in the Oslo process. Those expecting miracles of Trump are going to be disappointed. His commitment to pressuring Netanyahu is weak, while the Israeli prime minister’s commitment to making concessions is non-existent. Whether Trump signs the waiver or not on 1 June, all indications are that the US president – faced with domestic pressures and an intransigent Israeli government – is going nowhere with his “ultimate deal”. The only real question to be decided on 1 June is whether Trump prefers to take the fast or protracted route to failure.

The approximately $110 billion weapons deal is the largest in American history and includes advanced air defense systems, ships, helicopters, intelligence-gathering aircraft, tanks, artillery and cybersecurity systems, according to the US State Department.

“When the minister of defense is saying the opposite thing from the prime minister, you know that something is wrong. The Israeli military establishment is worried. This is a big deal,” he added. “The prime minister must stop being afraid of President Trump’s short fuse and tell him publicly: ‘For you it is a question of money and jobs — for us it’s a matter of life and death,'” he said. “...when your biggest ally is talking you want to listen.

But when push comes to shove, Israel and Israel alone will determine what’s good and what’s bad for us. And we cannot be forced to do anything which hurts our security.”

What is less considered are attacks that leave far more civilians dead, happen nearly daily instead of rarely, and produce a constant feeling of terror and dread. These are the civilians on the receiving end of US and allied bombs in places like Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere. Last week alone, US and “coalition” attacks on Syria left more than 200 civilians dead and many hundreds more injured.

In fact, even though US intervention in Syria was supposed to protect the population from government attacks, US-led air strikes have killed more civilians over the past month than air strikes of the Assad government. That is like a doctor killing his patient to save him.

The launch of the Scud missile at 7.30am local time is the country’s ninth missile test this year and follows a series of test-launches in recent weeks. Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Vladimir Titov said: "We are at the same time calling on the partners with whom we are working to show restraint, including towards military activity in this region.”

Japan has already condemned the missile launch which flew about 280 miles (450 km) before landing in the Japanese exclusive economic zone, within the Sea of Japan. Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, said: “This ballistic missile launch by North Korea is highly problematic from the perspective of the safety of shipping and air traffic and is a clear violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions.

"Japan absolutely cannot tolerate North Korea's repeated provocative actions. We have strongly protested to North Korea and condemn its actions in the strongest terms."

In reality, it’s the clear cutting of coastline forests that halts the water respiration and evaporation cycle that helps bring rainfall to inland areas. The more forests near the coasts that are cut down for cattle ranching, soybean production and monoculture food cropping, the worse the droughts become inland.

In effect, this is REAL “climate change” because the human activity of cutting down trees really does reduce freshwater rainfall inland. However, it has nothing to do with carbon dioxide or burning fossil fuels. It’s all about the fact that croplands don’t re-release moisture back into the atmosphere the way forests do.

An angry Trump yelled at Abbas during their talks last Tuesday for his alleged direct involvement in incitement against Israel, Channel 2 reported, citing an unnamed American source. “You tricked me in DC! You talked there about your commitment to peace, but the Israelis showed me your involvement in incitement [against Israel],” Trump is said to have shouted at a shocked Abbas.

The TV report said the outburst was followed by several minutes of shocked silence from the Palestinians, and that the meeting was very tense before the two sides managed to get back on track. Abbas, for his part, told Trump in their joint White House press conference that “that we are raising our youth, our children, our grandchildren on a culture of peace.”

In the wake of that claim, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed Abbas for the remark, saying it was “unfortunately not true.” The PA, Netanyahu charged, “names their schools after mass murderers of Israelis and pay terrorists.” Israel has accused the Palestinians, including Abbas’s Fatah party, of fanning hatred on social media and calling for violence against Israelis.

The Palestinian Authority has paid out some NIS 4 billion — or $1.12 billion — over the past four years to terrorists and their families, a former director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and ex-head of the army’s intelligence and research division told a top Knesset panel on Monday.

Setting out the figures, Brigadier-General (res) Yossi Kuperwasser told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the longer the period for which a Palestinian security prisoner is jailed, “the higher the salary… Anyone who has sat in prison for more than 30 years gets NIS 12,000 ($3,360) per month,” said Kuperwasser, according to the (Hebrew) NRG website. “When they’re released, they get a grant and are promised a job at the Palestinian Authority. They get a military rank that’s determined according to the number of years they’ve served in jail.”

Kuperwasser also told the committee that PA claims that the payments to terrorists’ families are social welfare benefits to the needy are false. The Palestinians’ own budgetary documents, he said, “clearly state that these are salaries and not welfare payments.”

Writing in the London-based Arabic-language Al-Sharq Al-Awsat daily while President Donald Trump was on his state visit to Saudi Arabia, Mash’al Al-Sudairi, a columnist from the Gulf kingdom, asserted that from the 1940s until the present day, “Palestinian leaders, while in power, excelled in two things: rhetoric and missing opportunities.”

He criticized the Palestinians for their blanket refusal to accept the 1947 UN partition plan, which would have given them 49% of mandatory Palestine, far more than what is commonly discussed today in the two-state solution.

At this point stocks are about as overvalued as they have ever been, and every other time we have seen a bubble of this magnitude a historic stock market crash has always followed.  Those that are hoping that this time will somehow be different are simply being delusional.

Since November 7th, the Dow is up by about 3,000 points.  That is an extremely impressive rally, and President Trump has been taking a great deal of credit for it. But perhaps he should not have been so eager to take credit, because what goes up must come down.

And as I have explained many times in the past, stocks would have to fall about 40 to 50 percent from current levels just for the stock market to get back to “normal” again.  The valuations that we are seeing today are absolutely insane, and there is no possible way that they are sustainable.

When the crash happens, many people will be pointing their fingers at Trump, but it won’t be his fault. Instead, it will be the Federal Reserve that will be at fault, and hopefully this coming crisis will convince the American people that it is time to end this insidious debt-based central bank for good.