The case is over the aggressive actions by the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, which has published guidelines for handling transgender issues in church gatherings that are “open to the public.” The lawsuit filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of Fort Des Moines Church of Christ aims “to stop the commissioners and the executive director of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, the Iowa attorney general, and the city of Des Moines from compelling an Iowa church to communicate government messages to which it objects and from forcing the church to use its building in violation of its religious beliefs.”

It explained the commission believes its interpretation of state law allows it “to force churches to allow individuals access to church restrooms, shower facilities, and changing rooms based on his or her gender identity, irrespective of biological sex.” The brief said that for “the first time in our nation’s history, state officials are reaching into the internal affairs of churches to silence them from teaching and publicly promoting a central tenet of their faith and forcing them to operate their own facilities in a way that contradicts their faith.”

“This unprecedented overreach eviscerates the First Amendment and the foundational freedoms it embodies; the freedom of church autonomy, freedom to worship, freedom of speech, freedom of repressive association, and freedom to peaceably assemble without government interference.” The immediate protective order is needed, the church brief argues, because the state’s actions “directly and continually harm the church’s ability to teach its doctrines, to govern itself, and to follow its faith.”

A palliative care center at McGill University Health Centre did not permit euthanasia within the clinic. The Health Minister would not let that stand.

Note carefully, it wasn't that a patient who wanted to be killed couldn't be terminated in the hospital. Just that the patient would have to be moved out of the palliative wing. As I said, the Health Minister would not let that stand.

And now, the palliative care center has bowed the knee. From the Montreal Gazette story: The McGill University Health Centre has repealed its policy exempting the palliative care unit from offering medical aid to die, said Health Minister Gaétan Barrette on Wednesday.

"This morning, I met with Mr (Normand) Rinfret and he told me that as of this very moment, the policy has been repealed," Barrette said, referring to the MUHC's executive director. "As we speak today, no patient can be transferred out of the palliative care unit at the MUHC, and medical aid in dying will be made available in the unit itself."

The culture of death brooks no dissent. It seeks to poison every nook and cranny of the medical sector and society. We will see such pressure nationally soon enough as the national law begins to masticate medical ethics in the rest of the country. Canada is no longer a free country. Any nation that forces doctors to commit or be complicit in - and hospitals to permit - homicide, is a tyranny.

The Crusaders weren't pious. But they had something to do with Christianity, right? Right? That something was the desire impious religious peasants had for martyrdom and the religious promise of redemption that Pope Urban II gave them. Now switch out white Christians with brown Muslims and kindly cease with this bigotry of low expectations. This has something to do with Islam.

It is not a failure of security. We can deploy all the troops we want and it won’t solve anything. Some have accused the French authorities of letting their guard down after the Euros; that’s nonsense. To imagine the security apparatus would lapse into such complacency during a period of unprecedented threat – and unprecedented scrutiny – is absurd.

In fact, what we ask of them is impossible. As in the Orlando attacks, and probably here, people can now be radicalised through social media and online interactions that governments are not – and will never be – equipped to handle. You can’t disrupt a network that was barely a network to begin with and you can’t break up a conspiracy of one. There will never be enough police to stop every runaway truck or every gunman in an airport, or nightclub, or stadium.

So please stop denying the nature of jihadism. Please stop ignoring the narratives which drive these attacks. Instead of aiding extremists who insist Islam today is perfect, perhaps you should aid us beleaguered reformist Muslims who are attempting to address this crisis within Islam against all the odds.

The name is less clinical than the English term “non-performing loans”, a reflection of the Italian authorities’ emotional rather than business-like approach to the problem. None the less, the loans are indeed causing real suffering. The €360 billion (£300 billion) of sofferenze from Italian banks show borrowers are weighed down with debts they cannot afford, while the banks are struggling to offer new credit to the households and firms that need them.

When other countries such as the UK, Ireland and Spain ran into trouble, they bit the bullet and cleaned up their banks quickly. Italy did not. In a way, Italy’s authorities had good intentions. When loans turn bad and banks lose money, someone has to pay. It should be the banks’ investors, the shareholders and bondholders who take the risk of investing in return for the chance of profits.

Unfortunately in Italy, households are keen investors in bank bonds, and would be badly burnt if they had to face up to those losses. So nothing was done. The bondholders have so far kept sight of their savings, and the banks have been allowed to ignore their bad loans. It saved the country some short-term pain, but the financial problems never went away.

Now they have spread to the wider economy, and are morphing into a political crisis with implications across the EU. It could bring down Italy’s government. If no compromise is reached between Rome, which wants to protect bondholders, and the EU, which wants to enforce the rules, it could even bring down the eurozone. “This could be a bigger risk than Brexit,” says a lawyer who is close to the situation.

In his previous job as foreign secretary, he spoke out against a raid on the City which the UK successfully defeated – but which is flaring up once more as European leaders eye up valuable markets they hope to wrest from London. Previously, The European Central Bank tried to force the flow of euro-based transactions out of London and into the eurozone, resulting in a legal challenge from the UK.

Britain won the case in 2015 after arguing for four years that, as part of the EU’s single market, the UK has to have an equal right to host clearing houses, which can process trades with a value of more than $1 trillion per day. When challenged in May to explain how the UK could stand up to the EU when defending British financial services, Mr Hammond cited the case as an example of the government’s efforts.

“When the European Central Bank disgracefully tried to prevent euro-denominated financial instruments from being cleared in the City of London, we went to the ECJ and won the case, with a clear declaration that the ECB’s proposal was illegal,” Mr Hammond said. European leaders, led by French President François Hollande, hope to revive attempts to take the market as Britain prepares to leave the EU.

Welcome to the upside-down world of modern monetary policy. In this new reality, borrowers get paid and savers penalized. Almost 500 million people in a quarter of the global economy now live in countries where interest rates measure less than zero. That would’ve been an almost unthinkable phenomenon before the 2008 financial crisis, and major economies didn’t seriously consider until two years ago, when the European Central Bank first partook in the experiment. Now the ECB and the Bank of Japan are diving deeper into the sub-zero world as they seek more ways to spark inflation.

In calling for the end of the 500 euro note to thwart tax evasion and terrorism financing, Draghi also knows scrapping the denomination would make it harder to just sit on cash. BOE policymaker Andrew Haldane and former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff are among those predicting “cashless” societies, which would also increase the potency of central banks running negative rates.

The upshot: Now that they’ve tried the tool, central banks are likely to put it to use. Where once they assumed the “zero lower bound,” as it’s known in technical jargon, was as low as they could go, now they know better. Says Gabriel Stein, an economist at Oxford Economics, “Negative rates are here to stay.”

The constitution was imposed on Japan by the United States after the Second World War; it has never been amended. Why should it be amended now? As Bloomberg reports, the LDP has pointed out that “several of the current constitutional provisions are based on the Western European theory of natural human rights; such provisions therefore [need] to be changed.”

Dozens of LDP legislators and ministers — including Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe — are members of a radical nationalist organization called Nippon Kaigi, which believes (according to one of its members, Hakubun Shimomura, who until recently was Japan’s education minister) that Japan should abandon a “masochistic view of history” wherein it accepts that it committed crimes during the Second World War. In fact, in Nippon Kaigi’s view, Japan was the wronged party in the war.

According to the Congressional Research Service, Nippon Kaigi believes that “Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia” during WW2, that the “Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate,” and that the rape of Nanking was either “exaggerated or fabricated.” It denies the forced prostitution of Chinese and Korean “comfort women” by the Imperial Japanese Army, believes Japan should have an army again — something outlawed by Japan’s current constitution — and believes that it should return to worshipping the emperor.

Civil rights group Color of Change — which Mr Soros gave $500,000 to in his Foundation’s latest tax return — collected more than 100,000 signatures on a petition to demand Coca-Cola and other companies withdraw their support from the convention. Coca-Cola caved to the pressure and decided to give only $75,000 to the convention, compared to the about $660,000 it gave in 2012. Other corporate sponsors were scared off.

Brave New Films, which received $250,000 from Mr Soros’s foundation, tried to make waves for Republicans by creating misinformation about their convention through social media.

MoveOn.org is also planning activity. They proudly took responsibility for shutting down Mr Trump’s rally in Chicago in March, and fundraised off their success.

Last weekend, the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), a progressive organization that was given $900,000 by Mr Soros’s Foundation, held a People’s Convention in Pittsburgh, to organize social justice movements ahead of the political conventions both in Cleveland and Philadelphia. The conference included Black Lives Matter organizers, those campaigning for immigration reform, the Fight for $15, LGBTQ rights, and environmental justice activists. Its purpose was to give them the tools to communicate and engage with one-another’s campaigns to amplify their collective voice.

The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) — which Mr Soros gave $1.7 million to in his latest filings — won a lawsuit on behalf of anti-Trump protesters to both expand the area of their protests and allow people to make speeches inside the event zone in locations other than the free speech zone designated by the city.

Professional protesters like CodePink have filed for demonstration permits, along with lesser known anti-Trump groups. CodePink helped stir the chaos at the California Republican convention in April. Republicans beware, for the Soros zombies are coming and they’re well funded and organized.

It seems that the situation is being deliberately stoked into conflict, and that tensions are programmed to reach a boiling over point. If true, there is no indication of where the point of no return would be. The US has the excuse of protecting its ally, and former territory, the Philippines, and thus has a pretext to play policeman in the region.

But in turn, that is only a thinly-veiled ruse to amplify the military pressure, and let bloated speech and menacing saber-rattling episodes set the tone for ‘diplomacy’ with the Red Dragon. Now, there is not only an escalation, but an acknowledgement on both sides of the Pacific that things are headed towards war – and it is being openly discussed in those stark terms.

Are we really to expect a looming world war from China, who has played the parts of villain, ally, trade partner and rival all at the same time? No one can say, but there is plenty of worry that war could really happen. Even billionaire George Soros warned that the potential danger of WWIII breaking out with China was ‘not an exaggeration’.