The first GOP Congressman to issue a full statement on the agreement was Senator Bob Corker (Republican for Tennessee), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of the most prominent critics of the Obama administration's conduct during talks, as well as the deal itself as its form began to take shape over the past several months. In his statement, released Tuesday afternoon, Corker said he would reserve full judgement until after reading the full text of the deal, but said he was deeply pessimistic it would be a good deal for the US and its allies.

Meanwhile GOP Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee issued a more scathing rebuke of the Obama administration. "Shame on the Obama admin for agreeing to a deal that empowers an evil Iranian regime to carry out its threat to wipe Israel off the map," Huckabee tweeted. "As president, I will stand with Israel and keep all options on the table, including military force, to topple the terrorist Iranian regime," he vowed. Fellow GOP presidential hopeful Senator Marco Rubio also harshly criticized Obama for negotiating "from a position of weakness."

Fix the Court reviewed cases heard by the court between 2009 and 2013, and focused on 19 cases in which the three justices owned stock in companies that filed “friend of the court” or amicus curiae briefs. The report says that, in those cases, 68% of the time Roberts, Breyer and Alito sided with the companies in which they owned stock.

The other six justices were omitted from the study because they don’t own a significant amount of common stock in individual companies. The 19 conflict-of-interest cases involved such matters as mandatory arbitration, affirmative action, and corporate immunity for international law violations.

Examples provided by Fix the Court include three class-action cases, Wal-Mart v Dukes, AT&T v Concepcion, and Comcast v Behrend, in which Roberts owned up to $100,000 in shares of Intel (which filed a brief in support of Comcast); up to $100,000 in shares of Dell (which supported AT&T) and up to $400,000 combined in shares of Intel, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard (which filed for Wal-Mart).

In another case, Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum, Breyer and Alito sided with the defendant, which was supported by IBM (Breyer owned up to $50,000 in shares) and by Caterpillar, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, IBM and Proctor & Gamble (Alito owned as much as $280,000 in these companies).

Not once did any of the justices recuse himself from a case due to an amicus-related conflict of interest, according to Fix the Court.

The debt-fueled prosperity that so many of us take for granted is about to come to a screeching halt, and we are about to enter the hardest times that any of us have ever known. And I am not just talking about economics either. Based on all of the intel and information that I have gathered, we are about to enter a “perfect storm” that is going to shake this country in just about every possible way that it can be shaken. So I hope that you will truly savor this summer – days like this will not come around again any time soon.

Have you ever known someone that lived a seemingly charmed life even though that individual made foolish decision after foolish decision? In the end, reality almost always catches up with people like that. And in so many ways, we have been living a charmed life as a nation even though we have been making incredibly foolish decisions for decades.

We have cursed ourselves over and over again, and just about every form of evil that you can possibly imagine is exploding all around us. As a nation, we now stand for just about everything that is foul, disgusting and wicked, and the rest of the world is absolutely horrified by what has happened to us. Once upon a time, we were one of the most loved nations on the entire planet. Now we are one of the most hated.

A moderator's message on the blocked webpage said that the move was due to a ruling by a court in the mainly Muslim North Caucasus region of Chechnya in May 2015. "The community has been blocked due to the possible violation of the site's rules," it said. VKontakte, Russia's largest social networking site, did not respond to a request for comment.

A scan of the court decision published by Russian media accused the page of publishing materials that can "insult the feelings of Orthodox Christians", based on an inspection of the page by prosecutors on April 6.

A cached version of the group's website showed posts with pictures making fun of religion, mostly focusing on the Russian Orthodox Church. The influence of Russia's Orthodox Church in official circles has grown dramatically under the leadership of ex-KGB agent President Vladimir Putin.

For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan. Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada.

If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

"There will not be a 'Grexit'," said European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker, referring to the widespread fear that if there had been no deal, Greece would have had to leave the eurozone. Mr Tsipras also said he had the "belief and the hope that… the possibility of 'Grexit' is in the past".

"The deal is difficult but we averted the pursuit to move state assets abroad," he said. "We averted the plan for a financial strangulation and for the collapse of the banking system." Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the head of the eurozone group of finance ministers, said the agreement included a €50 billion Greece-based fund that will privatise or manage Greek assets. Out of that €50 billion, €25 billion would be used to recapitalise Greek banks, he said.

Greek banks have been closed for two weeks, with withdrawals at cash machines limited to €60 per day. The economy has been put under increasing strain, with some businesses closing and others struggling to pay suppliers. Parliaments in several eurozone states have to approve any new bailout. "The road will be long, and judging by the negotiations tonight, difficult," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday morning.

French President Francois Hollande said the agreement had allowed Europe to "preserve integrity and solidarity". "We also had to show that Europe is capable of solving a crisis that has menaced the eurozone for several years," he said.

In a nationwide referendum just last Sunday, nearly 62 per cent of voters rejected an austerity deal that had been offered by the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank. There were scenes of wild jubilation across the country. “It was an expression of the will of the people,” Manos Agelidis, 27, a biomedical engineering PhD student, told The Telegraph as he celebrated with friends.

Fast forward just a few days, however, and Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, did the unthinkable. On Thursday, with a deadline imposed by the creditors looming, he buckled. His radical Left-wing Syriza government, which came to power in January on the unrealistic promise of putting an end to austerity and the country's six-year long economic nightmare, put forward a plan that promises spending cuts of €12 billion in return for a third international bail-out, this time worth €53.5 billion (£38.4 billion).

What swung it appears to have been Mr Tsipras' realisation that after five months of painstaking and often acrimonious negotiations, Europe's patience really had finally run out and that without a drastic compromise, Greece could crash out of the euro. He also won vague acknowledgment from the creditors that the nation's monumental debt of €320 billion is unsustainable and needs to be restructured.

But on the streets of Athens and in tavernas on the islands, many ordinary Greeks were dumb-founded over the spectacular U-turn. There was a rally against the new bail-out in central Athens on Friday, with demonstrators chanting slogans and waving banners with messages such as "Greece is not a colony" and "No, overturn the bailout". Several thousand Leftists protested in front of Parliament – the exact same place where just a few days before they had celebrated the rejection of the previous bail-out. But if and when the deal is accepted by all sides, the recriminations are likely to start in earnest.

The country faces "a time-out" from the single currency bloc if Greece fails to unlock between €82 billion and €86 billion in a third bail-out deal, according to a draft eurogroup statement. The text was released a day after it was revealed that Wolfgang Schaeuble, Germany's finance minister, had tabled the proposal in Brussels.

Athens must now pass a series of tough reforms by Wednesday before the rest of the eurozone will consider a third rescue package, which includes up to €25 billion to shore up the country's beleaguered banking sector. Reforms include VAT hikes, pension cuts and a "scaled up privatisation programme" that will see €50 billion of the country's assets transferred into an "external fund" and sold off under Brussels' supervision.

Greece will also have to welcome back international debt inspectors from the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank to monitor the country's progress. "In case no agreement could be reached, Greece should be offered swift negotiations on a time-out from the euro area, with possible debt restructuring," the draft text said.

We are Government MPs from the European countries who didn’t join the EU – those in the European Free Trade Area (EFTA). It’s been many years since any opinion poll showed a pro-EU majority in an EFTA nation. Iceland has formally withdrawn its application, and the Swiss pro-EU campaign has admitted defeat and closed down. As for Norway, the latest survey there showed 17.8 per cent in favour of joining, 70.5 per cent against.

Why do people prefer our deal to yours? Not because it’s perfect – nothing is perfect – but because it allows us to participate in the European market while retaining our self-government. Of course, each of our states have struck slightly different deals with Brussels. Iceland is part of the European Economic Area, which brings it within some elements of EU jurisdiction, albeit almost entirely in economic fields; Switzerland relies instead on a series of bilateral treaties.

Still, the broad picture is similar enough. We buy and sell freely within the European market. But we are outside the Common Agricultural Policy, the Common Fisheries Policy, the Common Foreign and Security Policy, the rules on common EU citizenship, the harmonisation of criminal justice and other non-economic matters. We pay a contribution to the EU budget – but less than a third, in per capita terms, of what Britain does.

Critically, we are also outside the Common External Tariff. In other words, as well as trading freely with the EU, we can also sign bilateral treaties with non-EU states – something that Britain, as an EU member, can’t do. This is a real advantage in a world where Europe is the only continent that isn’t growing. For example, both our countries signed free trade agreements with China last year. Britain isn’t allowed to do so.

Iran currently faces economic pressure from several different sources. The United Nations began sanctioning Iran in 2006, after the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that the Islamic Republic was ignoring restrictions on developing nuclear weapons. The United States then began sanctioning the country in 2011, and the European Union followed the next year. Most previous reports on the current negotiations suggested that only the UN sanctions would be immediately lifted, while the US and EU sanctions would remain, at least until Iran guarantees its good will.

The Fars report also states that “the upcoming UN Security Council resolution – that will call all the previous five resolutions against Iran null and void - will be the last resolution to be issued on Iran’s nuclear program and [the UN will withdraw] Iran’s nuclear dossier from under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. This last resolution will remain valid and will be implemented for a specifically limited period of time and will then automatically end at the end of this period.”

While the Fars report did not discuss the deal's restrictions on Iran, a senior US official confirmed that Iran will not open all of its facilities to international inspectors. He explained that if the inspectors believe that Iran is illegally developing nuclear weapons, they will ask permission from the Islamic Republic to inspect suspicious sites.

Under new legislation proposed by over two dozen Democrats, that same rule would be applied federally. The bill, introduced by Representative Lois Capps, Democrat for California, would introduce new “gender-neutral” terms such as “spouse” or “married couple.” “The Amend the Code for Marriage Equality Act recognizes that the words in our laws have meaning and can continue to reflect prejudice and discrimination even when rendered null by our highest courts,” Capps said. “Our values as a country are reflected in our laws. I authored this bill because it is imperative that our federal code reflect the equality of all marriages.”

Capps said that amending the language used was necessary to reflect “the equality of all marriages” following last month’s Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage that mandated all states to license same sex marriages. “Now that compulsory gay marriage is the law of the land thanks to the US Supreme Court, liberals are reaching out from that decision to see where else they can force the gay lobby’s agenda on the country,” writes Warner Todd Huston.

Volcanoes are erupting around the globe this weekend, causing flight cancellations in southeast Asia and evacuations in Mexico. Hundreds of people have been forced to flee from their villages located at the foot of the Colima Volcano in western Mexico's Colima State, following an eruption this weekend which saw the active mountain spew ash and fire. The volcano, also known as the Volcano of Fire, also forced a local airport to close as authorities have sealed off a 7.5 mile area amid fears an even bigger eruption may occur.

In Chile, the Villarrica Volcano, around 460 miles south of the capital Santiago, has been erupting overnight. The Villarrica, located near the popular tourist resort of Pucon is among the most active in South America.

In Bali, Indonesia a volcano eruption on the neighbouring island of Java has forced one of Indonesia's busiest airports to close for the second time in just a few days. Mount Raung on Indonesia's main island of Java has been erupting for weeks, and on Thursday a cloud of drifting ash forced the closure of Bali airport during peak holiday season, and four others.

Indonesian government vulcanologist Gede Suantika said that Mount Raung continued to erupt Sunday, spewing ash up to 3,200 feet into the air, and the wind had in the morning pushed the cloud of dust towards Bali, some 90 miles away. Authorities raised the alert status of Mount Raung, a 3,300-metre volcano, late last month to the second highest level after it began to spew lava and ash high into the air.

Air traffic is regularly disrupted by volcanic eruptions in Indonesia, which sits on a belt of seismic activity running around the basin of the Pacific Ocean and is home to the highest number of active volcanoes in the world, around 130. Also in Indonesia, Mount Sinabung in Sumatra, has been erupting for two months, forcing the evacuation of more than 10,000 people.

It is clear that many conspiracy theories about the training exercise were bizarre, to say the least. The United States government is not “taking over”, they already “took” over. There’s no need to “invade” Texas, the government already controls it. But while there were plenty of rumors and conspiracy theories about Jade Helm these have apparently been generated in large part by the unusual secrecy surrounding the exercise.

A military spokesman even told the Washington Post that they will not be allowed to observe Jade Helm exercises, or report on them, in any way. Still, there is a plethora of social media users who see the words “Jade Helm” in the title of an article and then start talking about how any critical concerns about the exercises are tantamount to “tin foil hats”. But the Internet is replete with fallacious argumentation, and the government seems to count on the action-reaction of these types, interplaying and debating with those who jump to the most outrageous conclusions, to cooperatively create an informational smokescreen for whatever it is that the military is trying to hide.

We go on with that chaos around the Channel Tunnel and across much of Europe over the ever-growing flood of desperate immigrants trying to find safety from Africa and the Middle East. We might continue with the impasse between the EU and Russia over Ukraine; or with the insistence by Germany and Poland that, to keep their economies functioning, they must – regardless of their commitment to the EU that they will reduce “carbon emissions” by 40 per cent within 15 years – continue to burn vast quantities of “CO2-polluting” coal.

The answer to what these have in common is that they all reflect the moment when, more obviously than ever before, the dream of a cosily “united Europe” is running into the brick wall of that very thing the “European project” was above all designed to rise above: a narrow sense of national interest. To the man who more than any set the “project” on its way, Jean Monnet, this was always its supreme purpose. He wanted to create a “supranational” government capable of eliminating that destructive evil which he described as “national egoism”.

For decades his dream seemed to be inching successfully towards its goal. But what we are seeing today is that the sense of national interest is so ingrained in human nature that it cannot be eliminated. The desperate Greeks, having seen their country crucified on the folly of the euro, fight crazily to survive as a nation without any idea of how this can be done. Many Germans, looking to their own interest, are fed up with having to pour their money into the bottomless pit of Greek debt – while the EU struggles to deal with a crisis it brought on itself, to which there is no sensible solution.

We are caught between that belief that we must all pool the interests of our countries in some artificial “common interest”, and the reality that, when it comes to the crunch, there is no way to stop that damned “national interest” reappearing. Such is the lesson which every day’s news should now be bringing home to us. But how we might escape from it, not a single politician can yet begin to give us a plausible answer.

In a weekend billed as Europe’s last chance to save the monetary union, ministers will now reconvene on Sunday morning ahead of an EU leaders' summit later in the evening, to thrash out an agreement or decide to eject Greece from the eurozone. Should no deal be forthcoming, the German government has made preparations to negotiate a temporary five-year euro exit, providing Greece with humanitarian aid while it makes the transition.

An incendiary plan drafted by Berlin's finance ministry, with the backing of Angela Merkel, laid out two stark options for Greece: either the government submits to drastic measures such as placing €50 billion of its assets in a trust fund to pay off its debts, and have Brussels take over its public administration, or agree to a "time-out" solution where it would be expelled from the eurozone.

There is now open revolt among the eurozone's 19 member states, with a group of smaller creditor nations threatening to reject a European rescue from the bloc's firefighting fund, the ESM. Finland's parliament stands on the brink of withdrawing its negotiating mandate from the government, in a move which would force creditors to adopt an emergency voting procedure to pass a new rescue deal.