The programme, broadcast in late September, purported to show a “dirty thunderstorm” above the Calbuco volcano in southern Chile, with flashes of lighting within clouds of ash. The scene was actually created by using footage from two different eruptions four years apart.

It is the latest fakery row for the BBC, which came under fire for another of its nature programmes, when the Sir David Attenborough programme Frozen Planet was found to have faked a scene of a polar bear being born in the wild.

It transpired that the bear was actually filmed in a zoo, despite Sir David’s voiceover referring to cubs being born “beneath the snow” with intercut footage of polar bears in the wild. At the time, the BBC denied misleading the audience.

 Relying on massive military force (and using gigantic complexes to support it) as the be-all and end-all of power, and belittling diplomacy

 Maintaining standing armies, instead of disbanding military forces between wars

 Using more mercenary forces than citizen troops

 Spending disproportionately large amounts of blood and treasure in order to counter threats on the status quo … which simply exacerbates the threat against the empire

 Going ethically and morally bankrupt

 Ending up having bankers and financiers running the real power

 Suffering great hiccups in finance and trade

 The leaders no longer really believe in or follow the ideals of the founders

The US is also following the age-old recipe for imperial decline by:

 Creating unsustainable levels of inequality

 Destroying upward mobility

 Incurring staggering levels of debt to finance war and luxury goods

 Debasing its currency

 Military overspending

 Runaway corruption

 Apathy and greed

And the decline of the America empire is speeding up due the to US falling into the Thucydides trap [where a rising power causes fear in an established power which escalates toward war - wikipedia].

A poll had been taken to find out how Americans felt about potentially cutting off federal funding for Planned Parenthood. I figured that it would be pretty close to 50/50, and considering all of the revelations that have come out in recent months I wouldn’t have even been surprised if a majority of Americans wanted to defund the organization. Well, it turns out that the survey discovered that Americans are against cutting off federal funding for Planned Parenthood by a more than two to one margin.

Here is an excerpt from that USA Today article…

“Some congressional Republicans remain determined to cut off federal funding for Planned Parenthood, but a nationwide USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds Americans back government support for the group by more than 2-1. Two-thirds of those surveyed, 65%, say funding should continue for the group, which provides contraception, cancer screening and other health services to women; 29% say it should be cut off.”

So for those of us that are awake and that do still care about this country, let us mourn for America, because at this point there does not appear to be much hope for her.

“We don’t contemplate any change, but nor does Israel,” Kerry said Monday in Madrid, Spain. “Israel understands the importance of that status quo. What is important is to make sure everybody understands what that means. We are not seeking some new change. We are not seeking outsiders or others to come in.”

France has introduced a proposal to the United Nations Security Council that would station international observers on the site, which is holy to Jews and Muslims. [Israel’s] Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan over the weekend called the French initiative a “prize” for Palestinian violence.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting that Israel cannot accept the resolution. “It doesn’t mention Palestinian incitement; it doesn’t mention Palestinian terrorism; and it calls for the internationalization of the Temple Mount,” he said. “Israel will protect the holy sites, will guard the status quo. Israel is not the problem on the Temple Mount. Israel is the solution.”

PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, almost fizzled out earlier this year when its leader resigned after a photo was published of him posing as Hitler. But it has swelled again as Germany implements Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to accept a tide of refugees that could exceed a million this year, as she argues that Germany can not only cope but, with its aging population, will benefit in the long term.

PEGIDA supporters waved the national flag and carried posters bearing slogans such as "Hell comes with fake refugees" and "Every people should have its country, not every people a piece of Germany". Gathering outside Dresden's historic opera house, the Semperoper, PEGIDA supporters chanted "Deport! Deport!" and "Merkel must go!".

"We're just normal people who are scared of what's coming," said 37-year-old Patrick, a car mechanic. "As a German citizen who pays taxes, you feel like you're being taken for a ride."

42-year CIA veteran Milton Goodman explains:

“In the spring of 1961, I was part of a small group of undergraduates who met with the president’s brother, Milton Eisenhower, who was then president of Johns Hopkins University. Milton Eisenhower and a Johns Hopkins professor of political science, Malcolm Moos, played major roles in the drafting and editing of the farewell speech of January 1961.

The actual drafter of the speech, Ralph E Williams, relied on guidance from Professor Moos. Milton Eisenhower explained that one of the drafts of the speech referred to the ‘military-industrial-Congressional complex’ and said that the president himself inserted the reference to the role of the Congress, an element that did not appear in the delivery of the farewell address.

When the president’s brother asked about the dropped reference to Congress, the president replied: “It was more than enough to take on the military and private industry. I couldn’t take on the Congress as well.”

Indeed, Congress members – part of the fatcat club which makes money hand over fist from war – are heavily invested in the war industry, and routinely trade on inside information … perhaps even including planned military actions.

In a scathing assessment of Western foreign policy, parliamentary speaker Mohammad Jihad al-Laham said Russia's intervention in the region was having a positive difference whereas America and Britain had created instability and war. He also provided more evidence of Putin's growing grip on power in the war-torn country, saying that Syria was ready to forge even closer ties with Russia.

The firebrand politician - who is little more than a stooge for brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad - also branded US-led airstrikes "illegal" because they had not been requested by the Syrian government. He said: "Things that have been done for the last 15 days by Syria in cooperation with Russia exceed achievements of US-led alliance in the last year.

“We will make efforts to develop friendly relations between Russia and Syria that will have positive effects upon the whole world and harmonize with norms of international law." Putin says his bombers have blasted more than 100 Islamist positions including a key command centre and a suicide belt factory. But the US and Britain have accused him of only looking to prop up Assad's regime, and say the vast majority of strikes are actually hitting moderate rebels including the Syrian Free Army.

But bigger trends are at play globally. We are seeing the return of great power politics – and with it, the risk of powerful states going to war. Conflict with the likes of Russia or China was something that seemed buried with the end of the Cold War. Yet today’s simmering tensions mean there is a risk of such an outcome becoming all too real.

As in the past, it is perfectly possible that a third world war could start with a small event, or even by accident. One of the many Russian bomber planes now probing NATO’s borders could collide with an RAF Typhoon, prompting an aerial skirmish the likes of which the world has not seen for decades.

Indeed, the skies over Syria are starting to get dangerously crowded, with Russian jets flying near US planes on bombing runs, and sparring with NATO air defences in neighbouring Turkey. Perhaps it could happen at sea, when a Japanese or American ship scrapes paint with its Chinese Navy counterpart amid the reefs in the Pacific that are being militarized as part of Asia’s current arms race.

He said patients often came in complaining of a headache but that a simple heel-to-toe test revealed that they had developed a backwards curve in the neck having spent hours hunched over electronic devices. "The condition is called 'text neck' because it is often caused when people sit with their heads dropped forward looking at their devices for several hours at a time. Instead of a normal forward curve, patients can be seen to have a backwards curve. It can be degenerative, often causing head, neck, shoulder and back pain.

Dr Carter, from Niagara Park on Australia's New South Wales Central Coast, warned that the condition could lead to anxiety and depression as well as spinal damage. And he said 50 per cent of the patients he diagnosed were school-aged children and teenagers.

Every parent lives with a fear of the dangers that prey on young children: the predators who lurk at bus stops and playgrounds, the traffickers who make a living by selling young bodies, the peddlers who push drugs that ensnare and addict, the gangs that deal in violence and bullets, the drunk drivers, the school bullies, the madmen with guns, the diseases that can end a life before it’s truly begun, the cynicism of a modern age that can tarnish innocence, and the greed of a corporate age that makes its living by trading on young consumers.

Children are taught from an early age that there are consequences for their actions. Hurt somebody, lie, steal, cheat, etc, and you will get punished. But how do you explain to a child that a police officer can shoot someone who was doing nothing wrong and get away with it? That a cop can lie, steal, cheat, or kill and still not be punished?

It’s getting harder by the day to tell young people that we live in a nation that values freedom and which is governed by the rule of law without feeling like a teller of tall tales. Yet… unless something changes and soon for the young people growing up, there will be nothing left of freedom as we have known it but a fairy tale without a happy ending.

When the phenomenon was announced earlier this year forecasters hoped it would fizzle out before winter. But temperatures in the Pacific Ocean have been rising steadily and the most powerful El Nino on record is expected to be confirmed within days. The knock-on effects around the globe, which include unusually cold winters in Britain, could be catastrophic.

The last El Nino, six years ago, saw the UK crippled by the worst winter for decades with widespread harsh frosts, sub-zero temperatures and heavy snow setting in from early December and lasting until March. Warnings have been issued across the southern United States where the strength of El Nino is already causing worrying shifts in the jet stream.

Climate experts say the region is set for below average temperatures and above average precipitation which is likely to fall as snow. It is a frightening reminder back to the winter of 2009 which saw both the US and Great Britain crippled by heavy snow and weeks of sub-zero temperatures.

Semtex is different. You can drop it. You can throw it. You can put it in the fire. Nothing will happen. Nothing until you put the right detonator in it, that is. To me, the US – and most of the supposedly free West – increasingly looks like a truck being systematically filled with Semtex.

But it’s easy to counter cries of alarm with the fact that the truck is stable – because it’s true: you can hurl more boxes into the back without any real danger. Absent the right detonator, it is no more dangerous than a truckload of mayonnaise. But add the right detonator and you’re just one click away from complete devastation. We can see how fragile the US is now by considering just four tendencies.

Destruction of farms and reliable food source

The average American is a long way from food when the shops are closed. The number of farms in the country has fallen by some 4 million from more than 6 million in 1935 to roughly 2 million in 2012. And only about 2 percent of the US population live on farms. That means that around 4.6 million people currently have the means to feed themselves. Food supply logistics are extended, sometimes stretching thousands of miles. The shops have nothing more than a few days’ stock. A simple break in that supply line would clear the shops out in days.

Weak economic system

The American economic system is little more than froth. The US currency came off the gold standard in 1933 and severed any link with gold in 1971. Since then, the currency has been essentially linked to oil, the value of which has been protected and held together by wars. The whole world has had enough of the US and its hubris – not least the people of the US themselves, which the massive support currently for Putin’s decision to deal with ISIS demonstrates. Since pro-active war is what keeps the US going, if it loses the monopoly on that front, its decline is inevitable. Fiat economies always collapse.

Americans increasingly on mind-altering drugs

According to the Scientific American, use of antidepressants among the US population was up 400 percent in the late 2000s over the 1990s. Many of these drugs are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. These are the type of FDA-approved narcotics lone gunmen are frequently associated with, and their psychoses often attributed to a forced or sudden withdrawal from such drugs. Pharmaceuticals are produced at centralized points by companies which themselves rely on extended logistics systems both to produce and to deliver their output. If the logistics system fails, there’s no more supply.

Morals in decline

During the objective hardship of the 1930s, there was surprisingly little crime. People were brought up with a conception of morals and right and wrong. Frugality and prudence were prized virtues. Communities were generally fairly cohesive. Relative to then, society today is undisciplined, unrealistic and selfish. Around 250 million shoppers participated in the Black Friday sales in 2013 in which around USD 61 billion was spent on consumer items – up roughly 100 percent on 2006 figures. Stampedes and even murders are not uncommon each year with people openly fighting each other over reduced-price items.

My point is that just because US – and many other countries organised after the same template – do not look explosive, doesn’t mean they won’t blow up. Whereas 80 years ago we could absorb major shocks, today we cannot.

Nowhere to run

In the past, people were in rural communities. They could grow food. They had real communities. They also had self-control and a conception of morality.

Today, if the supply lines go down, you are stuck in a house you can’t heat surrounded by millions of FDA-approved drug addicts who are going psycho because they have run out of juice and people who would murder their own grandmother to get a cut-price iPhone.

I would argue that the right shock event – or combination of shock events – will detonate the explosive. I am saying that while it may be possible to keep loading box upon box of societal Semtex into the truck, given the right detonator the collapse will be swift, unstoppable and devastating.

The French daily Le Figaro reported on Saturday that the French envoy to the United Nations introduced a draft text that would be endorsed by the president of the Security Council – currently Spain – to station “independent observers” on the Temple Mount to “identify possible violations of the status quo.”

A senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office dismissed the initiative as “baseless” and as “only declarative.” “We expect that they condemn the incompetence of the Wakf on the Temple Mount,” the official said. “Those who brought explosives and fired firecrackers were Palestinians who turned the Temple Mount into a terrorism warehouse, and they are the ones who tried to change the status quo.”

Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan called the French initiative “distorted and biased,” and said it gives a “prize” to Palestinian violence. Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely said any international intervention on the Temple Mount would be a violation of Israel’s sovereignty there. “Only one side is preserving the status quo, and that is Israel, which wants to allow freedom of religion for everyone,” she said.

During his speech, Mr Danon held up a piece of card with a diagram of a human body entitled "How to Stab a Jew", which he said was "an example of what Palestinian children are being exposed to day in and day out, in school, after school".

Sky News has been unable to verify Mr Danon's claims, in which he said: "When a Palestinian child returns from school and opens (sic) the television, he doesn't see Barney or Donald Duck, he sees murderers portrayed as heroes. When he opens a textbook, he doesn't learn about math and science, he's being taught to hate." Mr Danon's speech came amid an increase in violence in which 41 Palestinians and seven Israelis have died.