In the seventh century, the Damascus-based Umayyad rulers built up Jerusalem as a counter-weight and hajj pilgrimage alternative to Mecca, where their political rivals were. This is when the important Muslim shrines, the Dome of the Rock (691 CE) and, later, the Al-Aqsa Mosque (705 CE), were intentionally built on the site of the destroyed biblical Jewish temples – a time-honored practice to physically signal the predominance of Islam.

However, references in the Quran and hadith to Muhammad’s night journey to heaven on his steed Buraq from the ‘farthest mosque’ couldn’t mean Jerusalem because the Quran refers to Palestine as the “nearest” place. And it couldn’t have been a reference to the Al-Aqsa (‘Furtherest’) Mosque, for the simple reason that the Al-Aqsa Mosque didn’t exist in Muhammad’s day.

With the demise of the Umayyad dynasty and the shift of the caliphate to Baghdad, Jerusalem fell into a long decline, scarcely interrupted by occasional bursts of Muslim interest in the city during the Crusader period and the Ottoman conquest. Mark Twain, visiting in 1867, described it as a “pauper village.”

It did, however, become a majority Jewish city during the nineteenth century. The 1907 Baedekers Travel Guide lists Jerusalem with a population of 40,000 Jews, 13,000 Muslims and 7,000 Christians. So little did Jerusalem mean to the Ottomans that, during the First World War, they abandoned it to the British without a fight and even contemplated entirely destroying the city before pulling out.

Only upon the Arab confrontation with Zionism in the twentieth century did Jerusalem become a passionate Islamic issue. Today, the  PA uses Jerusalem as a propaganda instrument, at once inciting violence and orchestrating anti-Israel campaigns.

It is “these religious groups that are composed mainly of whites from the deep American South” that push conflicts and justify belligerence, while favoring the Old Testament “rather than be guided by the incisive look, full of love, of Jesus in the Gospels.”

The article appeared in both Italian and English in the Vatican-vetted journal La Civiltà Cattolica, of which Father Spadaro is editor-in-chief. In it, the Jesuit priest says that US Evangelicals and Catholics have engaged in “an ecumenism of conflict” that seeks to advance “a theocratic type of state.”

Conservative Christians, the article warns, are ultimately driven by “the desire for some influence in the political and parliamentary sphere and in the juridical and educational areas so that public norms can be subjected to religious morals.”

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which consists of 57 member states and calls itself the “collective voice of the Muslim world,” also slammed Israel for closing the Mount, claiming the move amounted to “a serious crime and a dangerous precedent.” The Jordanian government, which administers the mosques on the Mount, issued a statement reading, “The Jordanian government opposes any harm against Muslims in carrying out their religious worship in their holy places, freely and with no obstacles.”

None of the statements mentioned the reason for Israel’s rare temporary closure of the Temple Mount.  Mount preachers are notorious for using Friday night sermons to incite against Israel – especially with false claims of Israeli threats to the Al Aqsa Mosque – and there was fear here that the services could have been used to instigate further violence on the Mount following Friday’s terrorist attack at the site.

Two Israeli Border Police Officers were murdered and a third was wounded on Friday when three Palestinian terrorists opened fire at security forces near an entrance to the Temple Mount at the Lions Gate and then fled into the Mount complex.  The Palestinian assailants, reportedly carrying two rifles and a pistol, were pursued by Israeli forces and were shot and killed as they tried to escape toward the mosques on the Mount. One unnamed Israeli official responded to the Jordanian statement, telling Israeli TV that “instead of condemning the attack, Jordan chose to attack Israel, which is protecting worshipers and maintaining freedom of worship in the place.”

Swiss investor Marc Faber, the man known as “Dr Doom”, predicts that stocks will plunge by 40 percent or more. Mr Faber, the editor of ‘The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report’ and a perennial bear, told CNBC recently: “We have a bubble in everything.”

Recently, Professor Shiller urged investors to tread cautiously because market valuations are at “unusual highs”. In a recent interview with CNBC, he said: “We are at a high level, and it's concerning,” highlighting that the only times valuations have been higher were in 1929 and 2000.

What is a stock market crash? Quite simply, it is a sudden dramatic drop in stock prices across a significant cross-section of a stock market. While there is no specific threshold for stock market crashes, they are typically defined as a fall of more than 10 percent in a stock index over the course of a day or two.

How does a crash differ from a ‘correction’? The speed of the decline is what differentiates a crash from a stock market correction. While a crash occurs when markets experience a sudden double-digit drop in a couple of days, a correction occurs when prices fall by 10 percent or more from the index’s 52-week high.

A trip down memory lane… 1929: The Great Depression. In the worst stock market crash in US history, the Dow Jones plunged 25 percent in just four days, starting on October 24. It wiped out $30 billion in market value. The Dow continued its descent until July 1932, when it bottomed out nearly 90 percent lower from its 1929 highs.  

Under the plan the radioactive material tritium, which is being used to cool reactors whose cooling systems were damaged in the 2011 tsunami, will be released into the Pacific Ocean. "I'm very sorry that Tepco has been prolonging making a decision," the new chairman of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) Takashi Kawamura told reporters on Thursday, reported Reuters. "We could have decided much earlier, and that is Tepco's responsibility."

The plan still requires the approval of the Japanese government before TEPCO can proceed. Some 770,000 tons (metric) of tritium-containing water is currently stored in 580 tanks at the plant, reported the Japan Times.

The scientists, from Pennsylvania State University and other academic institutions, discovered that despite this process there were “high loads of chloride, barium, strontium, radium and organic compounds” in the Conemaugh River watershed. Stream sediments in Blacklick Creek, just downstream from one treatment plant, were found to contain about 200 times the level of radium upstream of the plant.

The highest concentration of radium found was just 14 per cent below the level at which it would have to be treated as radioactive waste in some US states. However the researchers said the risks of the pollutants discovered were “difficult to assess”.

Today they have listening devices that can be pointed at you from 100 yards away. This is very disturbing and inconsistent as it seems to be a very desperate measure by a government that welcomed refugees.

As government mismanagement comes to a boil, they become increasingly desperate to retain power. This is yet another sign of the times that what we are facing is the collapse of government. If everything was fine, they would not care what you have to say. The mere fact that we are looking at this crisis in government is why we suddenly see outright censorship now appearing on the internet.

German firms have also profited from the fact that, due to the crisis, Greece has been forced to sell government property. In a joint venture, just recently, a German investor bought the majority of shares of Greece's Thessaloniki Port Authority - in cooperation with a fabulously rich Greek oligarch. At the same time, the German discounter Lidl was able to increase its market shares in competition with its Greek supermarket rivals because growing poverty is forcing people to buy low-priced groceries.

Mass emigration, particularly that of highly qualified Greeks, is generating little noticed profits. Many Greeks, whose expensive education was paid by Athens, now work in Germany - placing their skills, for which Germany has not paid a cent, at Germany's disposal.

On Tuesday, Dow Chemical (DOW) announced that an agriculture fund backed by the Chinese government would pay $1.1 billion for its Brazilian corn seed and research business. Chinese firms have spent $91 billion over the past decade purchasing nearly 300 foreign companies involved in agriculture, chemicals and food, according to Dealogic.

Why the massive spending spree? Experts say the purchases are part of China's plan to improve its ability to supply food to its population of nearly 1.4 billion. As Chinese living standards improve and citizens demand more meat products, the country needs a growing supply of animal feed.

But the issue is particularly sensitive in China, which suffered severe food shortages during Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward," which began in the late 1950s. Historians say that tens of millions of people starved to death during the famine, which remains a taboo subject in China.

China isn't the only country acting to strengthen its agriculture prowess. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Japan have also been buying into businesses in the global food supply chain, but their actions are not as high-profile as China's.

“On the Iraq-Syria situation, we have agreed to continue working together, in particular on the building of a roadmap for the post-war period,” Macron said during a joint news conference in the aftermath of talks with Donald Trump in Paris. “We have asked our diplomats to work in that direction, so in the next few weeks a concrete initiative can be taken and managed by the P5 [the five permanent members of United Nations Security Council (UNSC)].”

The so-called "contact group" on Syria, according to Macron, should include UN Security Council members, as well as representatives of the Syrian government and rebel groups. President Assad’s departure is no longer as relevant for Paris, as fighting terrorism at home has now become the top priority, Macron stated.

Donald Trump confirmed that the US and Russia are working on a second ceasefire agreement in Syria as a follow up to the one he and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed upon during their first meeting on the sidelines of G20. “One of the great things that came out if this meeting, by the way, was the fact that we got the ceasefire that now has lasted for almost five days. Five days doesn’t sound like a long period of time. In terms of a ceasefire in Syria it’s a very long period of time," Trump said.

Domestically, Americans are assured that, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing, that is, flooding the financial markets with newly printed money that has driven up the prices of stocks and bonds, America has enjoyed an economic recovery since June of 2009, which must be one of the longest recoveries in history despite the absence of growth in median real family incomes, despite the growth in real retail sales, despite the falling labor force participation rate, despite the lack of high value-added, high productivity, high wage jobs.

The “recovery” is more than a mystery. It is a miracle. It exists only on fake newspaper.

According to CNN, an unreliable source for sure, Jennifer Tescher, president and CEO of the Center for Financial Services Innovation, reports that about half of Americans report that their living expenses are equal to or exceed their incomes. Among those aged 18 to 25 burdened by student loans, 54% say their debts are equal to or exceed their incomes. This means that half of the US population has ZERO discretionary income. So what is driving the recovery?

Nothing. For half or more of the US population, there is no discretionary income there with which to drive the economy.

The older part of the population has no discretionary income either. For a decade there has been essentially zero interest on the savings of the elderly, and if you believe John Williams of shadowstats.com, which I do, the real interest rates have been zero and even negative as inflation is measured in a way designed to prevent Social Security cost of living adjustments.

In other words, the American economy has been living on the shrinkage of the savings and living standards of its population.

It was Macron’s fourth meeting with Trump since his election in May. The two have acrimoniously clashed over climate change and Macron has made not-so-hidden allusions to his opposition to building “walls,” but on Thursday they stressed their common positions, from trade to terrorism. Preceding the visit, French officials laid out their strategy to approach Trump: hold your ground where you disagree, and pivot to areas of agreement. And don’t forget his love of pomp and the military.

The strategy seemed to work. “You have a great president, and I think you’re going to have a very peaceful and beautiful Paris, and I’m coming back,” Trump said at a joint news conference with Macron.

“What we’ve witnessed over the last month or so since Trump’s first trip to Europe is an adjustment in how Europe is going to deal with Trump,” said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations who was the senior director for European affairs on the National Security Council under Barack Obama. “Macron gets stature. He’s raising France’s profile and its game after a period in which many French voters were profoundly apathetic about the French presidency.”

Parts of central Mexico have turned into Mad Max-scapes of burned-out abandoned vehicles, vans hollowed out to hold giant tanks and trucks converted into homemade armored cars.

It is an industrial-scale operation, involving a string of villages and hamlets along pipeline routes. The government says more than 6,000 illegal pipeline taps were found in 2016 and officials have been detecting an average of about 20 taps a day this year. It estimates fuel theft costs Mexico about $1 billion a year.