Under a major review of the sickness benefit system to be conducted by Professor Dame Carol Black, the chair of the Nuffield Trust, drink and drug addicts could be denied benefits if they refuse medical treatment. The potential savings from the policy – one of a range of options being considered - will be assessed by government statisticians, who will examine in detail for the first time the toll on the economy from such conditions.

There are around 90,000 people who claim sickness benefits whose illness is primarily due to their drug or alcohol addiction. It means that 25 per cent of alcoholics, and an estimated 80 per cent of heroin and crack users, claim benefits, according to figures released by Downing Street. Another 1,800 people are entitled to sickness benefits as a result of conditions primarily caused by obesity. A quarter of adults and 15 per cent of children are thought to be obese.

The Department of Health puts the cost of obesity at £5 billion to the NHS and £27 billion to the wider economy each year. However, a recent study by McKinsey and Company suggest the true cost is higher – some £47 billion a year. Some £638 million is spent on preventative programmes, while £6 billion is spent on the medical costs of related conditions and a further £10 billion on diabetes, the global consultancy estimated. The total cost of alcohol addiction is £21 billion a year, the most recent government figures suggest.

“To this end, the department prohibits its staff and volunteers from discriminating against youth based on sexual orientation or gender identity,” Floden said. That means Christian pastors who have served as volunteers but cannot sign a statement assuring the state they will never refer to homosexuality as “sinful” are being dropped from the program. WND reported Friday that the issue was being raised by the non-profit legal group Liberty Counsel. The lawyers sent a letter to Bob Hayter, commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice, demanding that the state religious test be dropped and that a dismissed counselor be reinstated.

“Liberty Counsel writes regarding the blatantly unconstitutional revocation of volunteer prison minister status of ordained Christian minister David Wells, who has provided voluntary spiritual counseling and mentorship to juvenile inmates under the control of the Department of Juvenile Justice … This revocation was issued by Warren County Regional Juvenile Detention Center on the basis of the April 4, 2014, DJJ Policy 912, which mandates full DJJ support of homosexuality and transvestism.

“With no evidence of any violation of DJJ policy on Mr Wells’ part, his volunteer status was revoked by the Warren RJDC superintendent because he could not sign a state-mandated statement that homosexuality was not ‘sinful,’ among other things,” the letter said. Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, said the point is that juveniles are in custody for sex crimes, and their behavior and attitudes will generate questions. Pastors, he said, need to be able to respond.

“Pastor Wells must be able to discuss what the Bible says about matters of sexuality with the juveniles he is trying to help. To remove the Bible from a pastor’s hands is like removing a scalpel from a surgeon’s hands. Without it, they cannot provide healing,” he said. Wells had volunteered for more than 10 years at the facility under the prison ministry of Pleasant View Baptist Church in McQuady.

But Superintendent Gene Wade dismissed him in a terse note on July 7. He wrote, “I must terminate your involvement as a religious volunteer serving the youth in this facility per DJJ Policy 112, Section IV, Paragraph H, (8).”

“DJJ 912 equates the teaching of biblical morality with ‘derogatory,’ ‘biased’ and ‘hateful’ speech,” added Staver. “In so doing, the DJJ policy creates an unconstitutional, religious litmus test for DJJ access. The First Amendment prohibits the government from viewpoint discrimination. This detention center may not prohibit the expression of biblical morality simply because a few DJJ policymakers object to the Bible and its teaching,” the letter said.

“The judge’s bias against religious freedom was so ruthless that he even refused to allow JONAH’s chief attorney to mention the First Amendment freedom of religion in his closing argument,” Doyle said. “This verdict sends a chilling message to anyone of faith who either offers counseling or wants to receive counseling to overcome unwanted same-sex attractions,” he said.

What exactly, he asks, is the legal import of intimacy and spirituality, and "who ever thought" that they were "freedoms" of a kind that merited constitutional protection? How can this claim be traced by a legal analysis to clauses in the Constitution? How can the court justify the creation of "'liberties' that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention?"

There may be answers to these questions, but, Scalia insists, the court doesn't really answer them. It instead proclaims the virtues of the moral perspective it "really likes" while heaping scorn on the moral perspective it "really dislikes."

Once the court's preferred morality is in place, it is hard to see what stands in the way of deriving from it a case for the protected constitutional status of polygamy, also a form of intimacy that could be said to express the dignity, identity and self-expression of those who engage in it. The legal judgment against polygamy was established in an opinion that cited as its chief support the older morality the court has now rejected.

Whatever the problems with the traditional definitions of either conscientious objection or marriage - and there are many - they at least provided a formula for adjudicating individual cases: If you're a man and a woman, you can get married; if you believe in God and belong to an established church, you can get an exemption. By departing from tradition and becoming more inclusive and less doctrinaire, the court has deprived itself of any brakes that might stop the train it has set in motion. Many will think this is a good thing. The question Scalia and the other dissenters raise is whether it is a legal good thing.

Now, as the legal definition of marriage rapidly changes, the floodgates are open, and the fundamental transformation of the American family will take on new speed and new dimensions. Efforts to redefine the family structure have been long at work, and there have been some influential forces on the far left and communist left that cannot and should not be ignored in that process.

"Takedown" exposes how gay marriage is serving as a Trojan horse for the far left to secure the final takedown of marriage that it has long wanted, and countless everyday Americans are oblivious to the deeper forces at work. "Takedown" takes no prisoners and bluntly shows the reader that even Karl Marx and his more anti-marriage comrade Engels would be dumbfounded at the mere thought that modern Americans would gladly join them in their rejection of God's design for natural marriage and the family.

The footage showed him snorting powder from a woman's breasts with a £5 note. Baroness D'Souza said his behaviour was "shocking and unacceptable" and that she was referring him to the police. "Lord Sewel has this morning resigned as chairman of committees. The House of Lords will continue to uphold standards in public life and will not tolerate departure from these standards," she said.

"These serious allegations will be referred to the House of Lords commissioner for standards and the Metropolitan Police for investigation as a matter of urgency."

The directive is contained in a 39-page consultation document issued by the Home Office in a bid to bolster its Prevent anti-terrorism plan. The document accompanies the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill, currently before parliament. It identifies nurseries and early years childcare providers, along with schools and universities, as having a duty “to prevent people being drawn into terrorism”.

Never fear good citizens of Great Britain. While your government actively does everything in its power to protect criminal financial oligarchs and powerful pedophiles, her majesty draws the line at toddler thought crime.

The fact that this story broke on the same day that chairman of the UK’s Lords Privileges and Conduct Committee, Lord John Sewel, was caught on video snorting cocaine off the breast of a prostitute with a £5 note, is simply priceless. You just can’t make this stuff up. The UK government is so far gone that it insists on protecting the public from toddlers, rather than protecting toddlers from powerful sexual predators.

We learn from the Independent:

A three-year-old child from London is one of hundreds of young people in the capital who have been tipped as potential future radicals and extremists. As reported by the Evening Standard, 1,069 people have been put in the government’s anti-extremism ‘Channel’ process, the de-radicalization program at the heart of the Government’s ‘Prevent’ strategy.

The 32-page Urdu-language document obtained by American Media Institute (AMI) and reviewed by USA TODAY details a plot to attack US soldiers as they withdraw from Afghanistan and target American diplomats and Pakistani officials.

AMI obtained the document from a Pakistani citizen with connections inside the Pakistani Taliban and had it independently translated from Urdu by Harvard researcher and translator Mustafa Samdani. The Pakistani's identity was shared with USA TODAY, which has agreed not to identify him publicly because of concerns for his safety.

The document was reviewed by three US intelligence officials, who said they believe the document is authentic based on its unique markings and the fact that language used to describe leaders, the writing style and religious wording match other documents from the Islamic State, also known as ISIL and ISIS. They asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

In the first half of 2015, Germany has seen almost as many crimes against refugee accommodation as in all of 2014, according to the Interior Ministry. Of the 173 crimes recorded, 19 were violent. A poll for Spiegel by the TNS institute, found a majority of Germans were at least open to some of the views voiced by PEGIDA and the right-wing party – Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has voiced sympathy for the demonstrators.

Over a third, 34 percent, believed Germany was undergoing a process of “Islamization”, while 65 percent said the chancellor’s coalition was not taking current record levels of immigration and asylum seekers seriously enough. Germany has an estimated 4 million Muslims, in a total population of nearly 81 million. Muslims are flooding Europe with thousands of parasite wannabes and potential terrorists heading to Germany every week.

On July 20, they scored an important legal victory when a federal appeals court ruled they had the right to challenge 26 of the land leases that the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had provided to the Calpine Corporation, without tribal consultation. These leases had effectively authorised Calpine to conduct test drilling and research geothermal development in the Medicine Lake Highlands.

This is the area where Medicine Lake, whose azure waters are believed by many tribes in northern California to heal and provide good fortune, lies nestled in a volcanic crater. The leases were continued for 40 years without the appropriate environmental review and again, without tribal consultation.

The Pit River people say the plans to use hydraulic fracturing chemicals to drill almost 3km into the volcano, risk contaminating the sacred lake. Furthermore, new research released this spring indicates that the lake is one of drought-stricken California's last pristine supplies of water.

Medicine Lake is surrounded by a harsh landscape sculpted by centuries of eruptions and lava flows. Beneath this volcanic fury lie aquifers that store massive volumes of clean water, feeding California's arterial rivers that in turn support the state's agriculture industry.

So what happens in Europe really matters, and at this point the European economy is absolutely primed for a meltdown. European debt levels have never been higher, European banks are absolutely loaded with non-performing loans and high-risk derivatives, and the unemployment rate in the eurozone is currently more than double the unemployment rate in the United States.

In all the euphoria surrounding the “deal” that temporarily kept Greece in the eurozone, I think that people have forgotten that the economic and financial fundamentals in Europe have continued to deteriorate. Whether Greece ultimately leaves the eurozone or not, a great financial crisis is inevitably coming to Europe. It is just a matter of time.

Yes, definitely keep an eye on what is happening in China. Without a doubt, it is very big news. But I believe that what is going on in Europe will ultimately prove to be an even bigger story. The greatest financial crisis that Europe has ever seen is coming, and it is going to shake up the entire planet.

Professor John McMurtry says that the US government is a gigantic mass-murdering machine which earns profit through waging wars, and is never held accountable over its unspeakable war crimes and crimes against humanity. He also believes that the US has become a police state, which treats its citizens in the most derogatory manner.

“I have travelled alone with only backpack possessions through the world, and have found no state in which police forces are more habituated to violent bullying, more likely to draw a gun, more discriminatory against the dispossessed, and more arbitrarily vicious in normal behavior,” said McMurtry. “The US now leads the globe in an underlying civil war of the rich against the poor.”

“The US can … detain, kidnap and imprison without trial or indictment any US citizen or other citizen anywhere by designating them enemies to the US,” Professor John McMurtry noted in an exclusive interview with Fars News Agency.

Scientists claim the tectonic activity that formed these islands could reveal a previously unrecognised volcanically active zone in the region. 'Earthquake activity has been affecting the southern Red Sea for decades, suggesting the presence of a magmatically active zone that has previously escaped notice,' they wrote.

The formation of volcanic islands along mid-ocean ridge systems is still not well understood, the researchers added. Beneath the Red Sea is a huge crack in the Earth's crust, known as a rift, where the African and Arabian tectonic plates are moving apart at the rate of around 0.4 inches per year. Sometimes, however, the rift moves apart suddenly – and geologists believe the latest volcanoes may have been the product of one of these events.

The annual survey, which was conducted by Gallup-Healthways, found that the US - which did not make the top 10 either - took somewhat of a dip in the compilation of world happiness rankings. The list included 145 nations around the world and the subjects were more than 146,000 adults.

The participants answered questions about their feelings of well-being. There were five categories they were asked to consider: their sense of purpose, relationships with others, financial circumstances, connection to community, and physical health. Their responses were then assessed as "thriving," "struggling," or "suffering" in each of these five areas. The US, which was ranked at #12 in the 2013 survey, fell to #23 in 2014, indicating a lower overall level of satisfaction among residents.

The Shanghai Composite index fell 8.5 percent despite emergency measures to shore up the market, with a roster of the biggest blue-chip companies down by the maximum daily limit of 10 percent. The mood was further soured by news that corporated profits in China are now contracting in absolute terms, falling 0.3 percent over the past year. The violence of the moves unnerved investors worldwide, stirring fears that the Communist Party may be losing control after stoking a series of epic bubbles in property, corporate investment and equities to keep up the blistering pace of economic growth.

Mark Williams, chief Asia strategist at Capital Economics, said the Chinese authorities appear to have been testing the waters to see what would happen if they stopped intervening. The market verdict was swift and brutal. “They have got themselves into a very difficult situation. They have put a lot of credibility on the line to shore up prices and this credibility has been badly damaged,” he said.

Western banks say they are coming under heavy pressure from Chinese officials to refrain from negative comments. They are effectively gagged if they wish to do business in China. “Large parts of the market are closed, and those stocks that are still trading are selling off regardless of support measures. Clearly something very serious is happening,” said one economist. The long-standing assumption that the Chinese authorities know what they are doing has been shattered.

“Assuming the (agreement) goes through the US government and the UN Security Council, it’s hard to see what the Israelis can do to protect themselves other than attack the Iranian facilities,” said Middle East Forum president Daniel Pipes in an interview with G2.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been outspoken in his opposition to the agreement. Pipes, a historian, writer and political commentator, said that he sees such an attack as “the next stage” and suggests Israel could receive the assistance of Saudi Arabia. “The now-open relationship between Riyadh and Jerusalem makes the prospect of Saudi assistance less far-fetched than it once was,” Pipes said.

He added that “leaks of Saudi documents shows how preoccupied the leadership is with the Iranian threat.” “So, yes, Saudi assistance to Israel could happen,” he said. Pipes said he “didn’t doubt” that Israel would launch some kind of an attack, and “under consideration” among various options is a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, attack on Iranian facilities.