Nor was it helped by the President of the EU Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, having called for the creation of such an army. There are already a number of intergovernmental military collaborations under the aegis of the European Union, specifically within its Common Security and Defence Policy as set out in the Lisbon Treaty.

It is true that at the moment they have the appearance of being piecemeal but there is no reason to believe that the EU will not integrate some or all of them into a single, unified military force as soon as it becomes possible. Indeed, it would be naive to expect them not to. As a nascent state, it would be happier with its own armed forces under its own command rather than rely on the scattered cooperation of its individual members.

And Article 42.7 of the Lisbon Treaty invites the suggestion, for it says: If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power, in accordance with article 51 of the United Nations charter.

The US Treasury Department recently announced that the US would monitor China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Germany for potential currency manipulation. The report noted that Germany has built up a significant bilateral trade surplus with the US, in addition to holding the second-largest current account surplus in the world, at approximately 8.3 percent of GDP.

It isn’t currency manipulation that has put Germany on this monitoring list. It is the fact that European and Chinese demand for German products has fallen. As a result, the US has become the destination for Germany’s exports in order to make up the difference. Export to the US, however, is a Band-Aid on a deeper wound.

Interest rates are low, and German banks are viewed as a safe haven in the European Union for stashing money. But since Germany is a creditor, many of the assets on German books are the unpaid debts of other eurozone countries. That means Germany is deeply exposed to a eurozone that still has not meaningfully recovered from the 2008 crisis.

Account surplus is usually seen as a positive. But if Germany has a surplus of 8.3 percent of GDP, why not use that surplus to stimulate domestic demand? Germany must be either unwilling or unable to use the surplus to stimulate domestic demand. This is in part because Germany is a creditor and invests abroad and in its own banks and companies. And this gets at the root of the entire problem. Germany exports almost half of its GDP. Germany imposed austerity on the EU after 2008, which has resulted in stratospherically high unemployment rates in southern Europe.

Demand has not returned to pre-financial crisis levels. Germany has been able to skirt the crisis while most of Europe is either still suffering or is in the doldrums. There are limits to US demand and its tolerance of German exports. All of this offers different unique prisms through which to see how the European Union’s connective tissue is fraying as the bloc’s economic logic becomes increasingly illogical.

Germany is the powerhouse of the EU and the fourth-largest economy in the world. But the truth is, the Germans are facing a profound crisis - and there's no way they can prevent it.

GERMANY - The Alternative for Germany party, started three years ago as a protest movement against the euro currency, won up to 25 percent of the vote in German state elections in March, challenging Germany’s consensus-driven politics. The party’s recently adopted policy platform says “Islam does not belong in Germany” and calls for a ban on the construction of mosques.

FRANCE - The National Front is a nationalist party that uses populist rhetoric to promote its anti-immigration and anti-European Union positions. The party favors protectionist economic policies and would clamp down on government benefits for immigrants, including health care, and drastically reduce the number of immigrants allowed into France.

THE NETHERLANDS - The anti-European Union, anti-Islam Party for Freedom has called for closing all Islamic schools and recording the ethnicity of all Dutch citizens.

GREECE - Founded in 1980, the neo-fascist party Golden Dawn came to international attention in 2012 when it entered the Greek Parliament for the first time, winning 18 seats and becoming the country’s third-largest party.

HUNGARY - Jobbik, an anti-immigration, populist and economic protectionist party, won 20 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections in 2014, making it Hungary’s third-largest party.

SWEDEN - The Sweden Democrats party, which has disavowed its roots in the white-supremacist movement, won about 13 percent of the vote in elections in September 2014, which gave it 49 of the 349 seats in Parliament.

AUSTRIA - Norbert Hofer of the nationalist and anti-immigration Freedom Party emerged as the clear front-runner in the first round of the presidential election in Austria in late April, winning 35 percent of the vote.

SLOVAKIA - The anti-Roma People’s Party - Our Slovakia - won 8 percent of the vote in March elections, securing 14 seats in the country’s 150-member Parliament.

Shank, the president of the Minneapolis futurist group TwinCities+, has a chip installed in his hand that can communicate electronically with his front door and tell it to unlock itself. His wife has one too. "You have mental checklists as you’re coming and going out of your home," Shank says. "One of those things is my wallet, keys, all those things I have with me. Once you start to eliminate all those things, you start to see all the mind space it actually clears not to have to worry about them."

In fact, Shank has several chips in his hand, including a near field communication (NFC) chip like the ones used in Apple Pay and similar systems, which stores a virtual business card with contact information for TwinCities+. "For people with Android phones, I can just tap their phone with my hand, right over the chip, and it will send that information to their phone," he says. In the past, he’s also used a chip to store a bitcoin wallet. Shank is one of a growing number of "biohackers" who implant hardware ranging from microchips to magnets inside their bodies.

It is not entirely clear what inspired Omar Mateen to commit the worst mass shooting in US history, or what might have been done to stop it. But it happened in a gay club, just two weeks shy of the first anniversary of the US Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, and on a weekend when cities across the country, including Washington, were holding gay pride festivals.

It was perpetrated during the holy month of Ramadan by an American-born man whose family originally came from Afghanistan. During the attack, he reportedly made a 911 call pledging allegiance to the Islamic State.

Meanwhile, the country’s anxieties have been rekindled. “In one sense, all of this seems so far out of control, you just wonder if there’s any way of ever getting it under control,” said George Pettice, an insurance agent from Charlotte, North Carolina. “Do we now start locking ourselves up in our houses, afraid to go anywhere?”

Not since 9/11 has a moment like this brought the nation together, and that evaporated quickly. Since then, calamity seems only to drive the left and the right further apart, while faith in the nation’s institutions deteriorates further.

But where it gets more disturbing is that as Judicial Watch reported several days ago, in a post titled, “DHS Quietly Moving, Releasing Vanloads Of Illegal Aliens Away From Border”, border patrol sources said that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was quietly transporting illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to Phoenix and releasing them without proper processing or issuing court appearance documents.

And this is where the Mateen-G4S link emerges. A security company contracted by the US government is driving the OTMs from the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector where they were in custody to Phoenix, sources said. The firm is the abovementioned G4S…

In other words, Mateen, who according to preliminary reports, had been on a terrorist watchlist, and who still managed to obtain weapons thanks to his various licenses and permits just last week, was employed by one of the world’s largest security companies, where he may have had extensive clearances well above his pay grade, not to mention access to sophisticated military weapons and equipment.

It gets even more bizarre: despite his chequered history and his numerous FBI encounters, the Orlando Police just reported that he had managed to purchase firearms in just this past week. A Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives spokesperson confirmed that Mateen legally purchased 2 firearms — a handgun and a long gun, “within the past few days.”

The page was run by Pamela Geller, the well-known Islam critic and Breitbart contributor who led efforts to stop construction of the Ground Zero Mosque. Geller reported the removal of her Facebook group on Twitter, and called on supporters to politely request its reinstatement in a subsequent post on her personal website.

The timing of the shutdown cannot be ignored. According to Geller, the group has been in operation for six years, since 2010. Yet only now, with concerns about Islam at a height following Omar Mateen’s homophobic, religiously-motivated attack on the Orlando dance club, has the page been taken down.

Facebook isn’t the only platform that appears to be targeting critics of Islam. Reddit is also in the midst of a censorship controversy. Moderators of /r/News, the site’s primary discussion board for breaking news, went on a censorship spree following the Orlando shootings, deleting posts linking the shooter to Islam, as well as hundreds of comments — including one that offered Orlando residents advice on how to donate blood to survivors.

Soros is funding groups to help bring as many "refugees" into the EU as possible and he's doing the same here in the US through his Open Society Foundation. For years now, he's been supporting the agenda to overrun America with Mexicans, and just recently he put up $15 million to get as many Latinos as possible to register to vote so they can defeat Donald Trump.

He's also funded the radical leftist groups which spawned BLM and others to destabilize our nation internally through fomenting racial strife. Mr Soros argues that there remains a good chance the European Union will collapse under the weight of the migration crisis, continuing challenges in Greece and a potential exit by the United Kingdom from the EU. “If Britain leaves, it could unleash a general exodus, and the disintegration of the European Union will become practically unavoidable,” he said.

The EU is not going to collapse because of Brexit, it's collapsing because they've been overrun with millions of hostile military-aged male foreigners who come only to get on welfare and get their hands on European women. Soros earlier this year demanded the EU take on massive amounts of debt to finance the invasion, saying it will "benefit" them in the future.

Mateen had committed himself to ISIS before carrying out the bloodiest mass murder in US history at a gay nightclub in Orlando on Sunday, federal officials said. The shooting — one of the worst mass shootings in US history — left at least 50 people dead, including the gunman, and more than 53 wounded, officials said.

Mateen was licensed to work as an armed security guard in the state of Florida, federal law enforcement sources said.

His claims have been supported by a senior politician in Denmark who has written to the Daily Express expressing how his country will follow Britain's lead to the EU exit door. Sven Skovmand, a former member of the Danish parliament for the Social Liberal Party and the People's Movement against the EU, said that there is a cross party movement in his country pushing for their own Brexit looking for inspiration from Britain.

In his speech, Mr Farage said he believed that UK withdrawal from the EU following the June 23 referendum would spark an exodus by "many other countries", bringing an end to "the entire European project". He said: "I hope that on June 23, it isn't just Independence Day for the UK, I hope it brings an end to this entire project and in a few years' time, we can be sovereign, democratic nation states that work and trade together."

He was loudly applauded by supporters as he departed with a quote from polar explorer Lawrence Oates, who famously left the tent on Captain Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition to walk out to his death alone, with the words: "I'm going out now, I may be some time."

Writing for the Daily Express online, Mr Skovmand confirmed that Denmark is ready to follow Britain's lead. He said: "It is not only in the UK where people are against the EU. Also in Denmark there are many people that are against the EU and we have a cross political movement that works for Denmark's withdrawal from the EU."

“Every election year politicians promise change. Obama promised change and every year they fail to deliver,” Trump said. “Why would politicians want to change a system that’s totally rigged in order to keep them in power?" asked Trump aloud. “Why would politicians want to change a system that’s made them and their friends very wealthy?"

“We can’t fix the system by relying on the very people that rigged it. We can’t solve our problems by counting on politicians who’ve created our problems. The Clintons have turned the politics of personal enrichment into an art form for themselves. They have made hundreds of millions of dollars selling access, selling favors, selling government contracts and I mean hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Mr Trump went on to say that Hillary’s use of “a totally illegal private server” that was installed at her residence was to “keep her corrupt dealings out of the public record.” Obama “is protecting her,” Trump said. One of the highlights of the speech was when Trump said, “We can turn this all around by putting America first.”