In her first public comments since her summer break, Merkel told broadcaster ZDF that she was sure Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, would ensure the participation of the fund if conditions on Greekmerk pension reform and debt relief were met. "Mrs Lagarde, the chief of the IMF, made very clear that if these conditions are met, then she will recommend to the IMF board that the IMF takes part in the programme from October," Merkel said. "I have no doubts that what Mrs Lagarde said will become reality."

Uncertainty over the IMF role in the 86 billion-euro bailout has become a headache for Merkel before Wednesday's vote in the Bundestag. Lawmakers from her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), want the IMF involved because of its reputation for rigour. Volker Kauder, a close Merkel ally and the leader of her conservatives in parliament, has even described IMF involvement as a "condition" for supporting a new bailout.

In the interview, Merkel rejected the notion that Germany had driven too hard a bargain with Greece or that Berlin had been isolated in the talks on a third bailout. "It doesn't help if we are all nice with each other now, only to have a situation in two to three years where we are worse off than today. The euro crisis has already lasted too long," she said. Asked whether Berlin was striving for a "German Europe", Merkel said: "We don't want this".

Nate Stephenson, a research ecologist with the US Geological Survey, was walking through the woods last year when he noticed some of the trees he'd been studying for decades had dropped most of their leaves. He joined forces with other researchers from the USGS, as well as from the National Park Service, US Forest Service, Stanford University, UC Berkeley and the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, to launch a comprehensive health study on the sequoia.

The punishing drought in California is about to stretch into its fifth year. The state suffered through its driest January on record this year and officials have been struggling to come up with innovative water-saving methods, including the recent introduction of millions of "shade balls" to cover a reservoir. But many scientists are worried about how the water shortage will affect many ecological elements of the state, including from residents' lawns to farmers' fields.

Iran’s venerated Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of its Islamic revolution, is credited with naming the organization. Khomeini’s “founding vision [was] the eradication of Zionism [as] an inevitable precondition for redeeming contemporary Islam” (see The Nuclear Deal: No Pause in Iran’s Vow to Destroy Israel, by Michael Segall, August 16, 2015, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs). According to Segall, Khomeini’s obsession “keeps guiding the current generation of Iran’s religious, political and military establishment.

“To him the destruction of Zionism was an axiom never to be questioned or strayed from and an objective to be perpetually and actively pursued. According to this vision, Israel should be fought as part of a protracted global struggle between Islam and the West, which ‘planted intentionally the Zionist Entity in the heart of Islamic World’.”

How important is the Quds Force? A news item currently reports the defiance of an international travel ban by the head of the organization, Qassem Souleimani, in traveling to Russia to discuss the delivery to Iran of surface-to-air missiles and other weapons. Such missiles could help protect Iran’s presumed nuclear armaments facilities.

Quds Force reports directly to the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei, Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor as Iran’s ultimate boss, who recently published a book called Palestine on the destruction of Israel.

Syriza's energy minister Panos Skourletis said it was now "self evident" that parliamentarians would decide on whether or not to continue supporting the government after a "deep wound" had been inflicted on the ruling coalition. Lawmakers voted to ratify a 30-page "Memorandum of Understanding" to keep the country in the eurozone for the next three years on Friday.

But the terms of the deal, which roll back a number of key pledges from the anti-austerity government, have split the ruling party. Mr Tsipras failed to get the backing of at least 120 of his own MPs, a constitutional threshold that could oblige him to trigger a vote in his leadership. In a detailed evisceration of the austerity measures, former rebel finance minister Yanis Varoufakis denounced the agreement as encapsulating "the Greek government’s humiliating capitulation". "Greek sovereignty is being forfeited wholesale" he said. "Not since the Soviet Union has wishful thinking, unsupported by anything tangible, posed as policymaking."

Support for the ruling coalition has becoming vanishingly thin. Greece's two main opposition parties - which have so far voted to keep the country in the euro - vowed to pull the plug on the embattled premier should a vote be called in the coming weeks. Pasok, the much depleted socialist opposition, joined the conservative New Democracy in refusing to endorse Mr Tsipras and his junior coalition partner, led by defence minister Panos Kammenos. "The government has signed the third and most onerous bail-out. All the negative consequences for the country and its citizens bear the signatures of Mr Tsipras and Mr Kammenos," said a Pasok party statement. "We have no confidence in the Tsipras-Kammenos government and of course will not give it if we are asked."

Take the 2008 financial crisis as a benchmark. Between June 2008 and June 2015, the euro has dropped 12.5% in value against a broad basket of currencies, according to the Bank for International Settlements. That has added to Germany’s export advantage with the rest of the world. China’s exchange rate appreciated 34% during the same period of time, hurting its trade position. The depreciation of the yuan in the past few days is a small fraction – so far at least – of the appreciation it experienced in the years since the financial crisis and of the depreciation the euro experienced.

Germany has soaked up a larger share of global output, thanks in part to the reduced value of the euro which helps its exports and restrains its imports from the rest of the world. Germany’s current account surplus – a broad measure of its excess of exports over imports – increased from 5.8% of gross domestic product in 2008 to an estimated 7.5% of GDP in 2014, according to the International Monetary Fund. The IMF sees Germany’s trade surplus shooting up to 8.4% of GDP in 2015.

Of course, Germany can’t be accused of manipulating its currency for a trade advantage. It is part of the euro-area currency zone controlled by the European Central Bank, and Germans have generally resisted the ECB’s easy money policies that have cheapened the euro. China might now be intentionally cheapening its currency for trade advantage as its domestic growth slows. Still, on the global stage it is Germany that has gotten the actual advantage and ought to be asked by the rest of the world: What have you done for us lately?

Anja Reschke, an anchorwoman for German public broadcaster ARD, for instance, touched off a national debate after an on-air commentary blasting refugee bashing. Soon after airing, the segment went viral, with 15 million hits and counting. In it, Reschke bluntly said what many others here have feared to — condemning the haters as well as calling out those Germans who have remained silent. To make her point, she used the terminology of the Nazi era, earning a bravo from some while angering others.

“If you’re not of the opinion that all refugees are spongers who should be hunted down, burned or gassed, then you should make that known very clearly,” she said in her commentary. The spot, she said in an interview with The Washington Post, provoked an outpouring of support — but also a flood of even fouler comments aimed at her.

“I received e-mails saying, ‘Let the hag burn’ and calling me a ‘negro-gypsy-whore,’ ” said Reschke, a white ethnic German. “And then there were the people who said, ‘Look, I’m afraid our race is getting polluted by all those evil people from the whole of Africa, but no, I’m not a Nazi.’ ”

As Europe faces a refugee crisis, Germany this year is set to accept a record number — more than 500,000. Yet Reschke's commentary came as acts of aggression against refugee homes in Germany are rapidly rising, reaching 202 so far this year compared to 198 during all of 2014.

In July, China announced official gold reserves had increased almost 60 percent since 2009, China’s central bank claimed gold reserves were 1,658 tons (53.31 million fine troy ounces) as of the end of June, up from 1,054 tons in April 2009.

Financial analyst Stephen Leeb, the author of various investment newsletters, including The Complete Investor, cited China’s history of publishing unreliable financial data. He said the Chinese estimate was calculated to understate the amount of gold Beijing’s central bank holds through its member banks. “I would be very surprised if the Chinese don’t have more gold and significantly more gold than the US claims (8,100+ tons),” Leeb said in reaction to China’s July announcement. “I certainly would not be at all surprised if the Chinese have 15,000 tons of gold.”

Fund analyst Jeffrey Borneman also notes that China has joined the London Bullion Market as a major player at the same time Beijing has moved from trading “paper gold” to trading the real metal through the Shanghai gold market. The aim is to bid up the price of gold with what Goldman calls the “Shanghai Fix.”

He argues that China’s goal is to “adjust upward” the price of gold to maximize the value of a hoard of gold it holds today, which may be more than double the amount held by the United States. “The introduction of the yuan to the SDR, coupled with China’s ability to influence the price of gold, is nothing short of a shift in the balance of power the world hasn’t seen since the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944, just before the end of World War II,” Borneman wrote in a recent newsletter.

“The COMEX gold futures market in New York and the Over-the-Counter (OTC) trades cleared through the London Bullion Market Association do set prices which are followed most widely in the world. They are also markets dominated by a handful of huge players, the six London Bullion Market Association gold clearing banks — the corrupt JP MorganChase bank; the scandal-ridden UBS bank of Zurich; The Bank of Nova Scotia — ScotiaMocatta, the world’s oldest bullion bank which began as banker to the British East India Company, the group that ran the China Opium Wars; the scandal-ridden Deutsche Bank; the scandal-ridden Barclays Bank of London; HSBC of London, the house bank of the Mexican drug cartels; and the scandal and fraud-ridden Societe Generale of Paris,” Engdahl narrated.

Furthermore, Western banks are issuing numerous paper “gold-futures” and other speculative contracts which are in fact disconnected from real physical gold. In a word, operations with the precious metal in London and New York are in questionable hands, the economic researcher noted. The West's ultimate goal is to preserve the dollar's monopoly in the market thus breathing life into the US-led global financial system. But no one likes monopolists.

However, "rather than scream and cry 'fraud' at the owners of the COMEX/CME or the London Bullion Market Association Big Six clearing banks, these countries are involved in the general move to create an entirely different gold market, one that not JP MorganChase or HSBC or Deutsche Bank control, but one that China, Russia and others of a like mind control," Engdahl stressed. This new approach is connected closely with the China-led New Silk Road project and the Shanghai-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

"As China has expressed it, the aim is to enable the Eurasian countries along the Silk Road to increase the gold backing of their currencies. That sounds very much like some clear-thinking and far-sighted governments are thinking of creating a stable group of gold backed currencies that would facilitate orderly trade free from Washington currency wars," the economic researcher elaborated.

The bruising workplace described by The New York Times is basically a stand-in for the white-collar, always-on, male-centric workplace that many US workers know all too well. Amazon culture, as portrayed by the Times, comes off like the pinnacle of what’s prized at the highest reaches of corporate America: Workers kill themselves trying to please a corporation that, at the end of the day, doesn’t care much about them.

Workers don’t stay long with Amazon because of the company’s punishing work ethos, according to the Times reporters, who spoke with more than 100 current and former "Amazonians." "When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness," former Kindle team member Molly Jay told the Times. She was labeled a problem worker after she began taking weekends and nights to care for her father, who was dying from cancer. Workers who became parents at Amazon were also penalized, according to the story.

Time is now rapidly running out. From China to Brazil, the central banks have lost control and at the same time the global economy is grinding to a halt. The FTSE 100 has now erased its gains for the year, but there are signs things could get a whole lot worse.

China was the great saviour of the world economy in 2008. The launching of an unprecedented stimulus package sparked an infrastructure investment boom. The voracious demand for commodities to fuel its construction boom dragged along oil - and resource-rich emerging markets. The Chinese economy has now hit a brick wall. The China slowdown has sent shock waves through commodity markets. The Bloomberg Global Commodity index, which tracks the prices of 22 commodity prices, fell to levels last seen at the beginning of this century.

Billions of dollars in loans were raised on global capital markets to fund new mines and oil exploration that was only ever profitable at previous elevated prices. With oil and metals prices having collapsed, many of these projects are now loss-making.

The great props to the world economy are now beginning to fall. China is going into reverse. And the emerging markets that consumed so many of our products are crippled by currency devaluation. The famed Brics of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, to whom the West was supposed to pass on the torch of economic growth, are in varying states of disarray. The central banks are rapidly losing control. The Chinese stock market has already crashed and disaster was only averted by the government buying billions of shares.

The UK stock market is in its 77th month of a bull market, which began in March 2009. On only two other occasions in history has the market risen for longer. One is in the lead-up to the Great Crash in 1929 and the other before the bursting of the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s. In the US, Professor Robert Shiller’s cyclically adjusted price earnings ratio – or Shiller CAPE – for the S&P 500 stands at 27.2, some 64 percent above its historic average of 16.6 percent. On only three occasions since 1882 has it been higher – in 1929, 2000 and 2007.

If the communal leadership and its members fail to fight, American Jews will find themselves communally disenfranchised. By singling out and demonizing Jewish American opponents of the deal as corrupt, treacherous warmongers, Obama is setting the conditions for treating them as disloyal citizens can expected to be treated. In that meeting with American Jewish leaders, Obama seemed to present them with a choice. He reportedly told AIPAC’s representatives, “If you guys would back down [from their opposition to the deal], I would back down from some of the things I’m doing.”

Actually, he gave them no real options. Obama effectively told the leaders of the American Jewish community that as far as he is concerned, Jews have no right to advance their collective concerns as Jews. If they do, he will attack them. If they give up that right under duress, then he will leave them alone. So remain free and be hounded, or give up your rights and be left alone.

Some commentators have characterized the fight over the deal as a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. This may be the case. But first and foremost, it is a fight over whether or not Jews in America have the same rights as all other Americans. To be sure, Israel will be harmed greatly if Congress fails to vote down this deal. But Israel has other means of defending itself. If this deal goes through, the greatest loser will be American Jewry.