The Germans are not alone in their support for strengthened defense cooperation and even a European army. The majority of parliamentary factions also back them.

At the same time, the German parliament insists on maintaining full autonomy in its decisions regarding the deployment of Germany’s armed forces. However, if one wants to set up joint defense units, states have to give up sovereignty. They would have to agree on mutual dependency long before deploying any troops. Although the government and parliament could refuse the deployment of their capabilities, they would not be able to veto the overall mission.

Britain has agreed to become a founding member of the China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, despite America's concerns. The $50 billion AIIB has been feted by Beijing as a way of financing regional development, and is seen as a potential rival to US-based institutions such as the World Bank.

"There will be times when we take a different approach (to the United States)," a spokesman for David Cameron said, referring to the decision to join the bank. "We think that it's in the UK's national interest." Chancellor George Osborne echoed the Prime Minister's view. “Forging links between the UK and Asian economies to give our companies the best opportunity to work and invest in the world’s fastest growing markets is a key part of our long-term economic plan,” he said.

On Friday, the blue-chip CSI 300 index plummeted 7.8 percent, while the smaller Shenzhen Composite declined by the same margin to post its lowest close since May. In the past two weeks around $1.2 trillion (£600 billion) has been wiped off the value of Chinese listed companies since the market reached its peak on June 12.

Since the beginning of the year China’s stock market bubble has inflated to epic proportions as speculators piled in by borrowing money to buy stocks in ever larger volumes. At the beginning of the year, the value of outstanding loans used by securities firms to fund investment had swollen to exceed $260 billion. By the beginning of this month that figure had grown to $364 billion.

Many of those investments are now worth less than the value of the loan as more traders exit the market in order to cover margin calls on their outstanding debts. Given the scale of leveraging that underpins both the Shanghai and Shenzhen indexes, few experts are predicting that the current stocks rout will end until more of this debt is washed out of the system.

Greece's creaking banking system is now facing the prospect of a devastating run on its assets after Athens failed to give ground on an ultimatum presented by its paymasters. In a three-hour aborted session of finance ministers, both sides failed to agree on a final version of a deal to report back to European leaders convening for a two-day summit.

At the summit, which was billed as David Cameron's bid to kick-start his EU renegotiation ploy, leaders such as Germany's Angela Merkel and Holland's Mark Rutte, reportedly told Alexis Tsipras to "shut up" over his pleas for a reprieve over the dinner table. Negotiations will now spill over into the weekend, raising fears that capital controls will need to be imposed as early as Monday in the absence of a deal to stave off a debt default on June 30.

Amid the acrimony, Ms Merkel accused Greece of taking "regressive" steps, warning that Berlin would not be "blackmailed" by the debtor's demands, she told her MEP's. “We have not made the necessary progress. In some areas one even gets the impression that we have moved backwards," said Ms Merkel. The German premier is pushing for a solution by Sunday at the latest, to ensure markets do not spiral into chaos on Monday morning.

The Greeks have regularly said they don’t have enough money to make an imminent payment right up to the point at which they have handed over more cash. The various creditors have regularly said they will not give Greece any more money right up to the point at which they have afforded the country just a smidgen more fiscal latitude.

Equally, the red lines on either side have always been somewhat blurry. The Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras has, for example, repeatedly refused to countenance cutting pensions, but his latest proposals have suggested increasing the retirement age and raising contributions. The creditors have repeatedly refused to countenance a debt write-off, but they have floated the possibility of restructuring loans to reduce the rate of interest and increase the amount of time Greece has to pay up. You say tom-a-to, I say tom-ah-to.

The whole sorry spectacle is deeply unedifying – ’twas ever thus. The upside is that a “Grexident”, one of the uglier neologisms born out of the protracted negotiations, is also a misnomer: the various deadlines and rules are too flexible (regardless of what anyone says) to accidentally trip Greece into default and cause the country to stumble out of the eurozone.

If Greece goes, somebody somewhere will definitely get the blame for pushing it. None of those involved – not the Greek government, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank nor the eurozone politicians and technocrats – wants that to be them. Hence why the game of chicken has turned into one of pass-the-parcel.

June 29: Recalling the Bundestag

Under national laws, any extension must be approved by a handful of eurozone parliaments — most importantly the German Bundestag, which is due to be on recess next week. Although the centre-right bloc of Chancellor Angela Merkel has become increasingly restless over Greece, they are likely to back any extension she endorses — even if they have to return from holiday to do so. But the vote must be held either the 29th or 30th, giving legislators precious little time to review the agreement.

June 30: Expiration date

The date Greece’s bailout expires and when it is due to repay €1.5 billion in loan repayments to the International Monetary Fund. Even if a deal is in place before the deadline expires, it remains unclear how — or whether — Greece will find the money to pay the IMF, since there is not enough time for Athens to pass all the economic reforms necessary to gain access to any of the €7.2 billion in bailout funds.

But credit rating agencies have said that non-payment to the IMF is not formally a default, and the ECB is unlikely to decide it means Greece is bankrupt. If it did, much of the collateral used by Greek banks to obtain their emergency loans — particularly Greek government bonds — would be worthless. That would mean the ECB having to cut off emergency funding, probably forcing a Grexit.

July 1: The extended bailout

If a deal is reached and all the legislative approvals are voted in time, Greece’s bailout would be extended for anywhere from three to nine months. For the EU’s portion of the bailout, the extension is expected to include a bit more money as well. Another €1.5 billion in profits on Greek bonds held by the ECB — which are to be refunded to Athens as part of a deal reached three years ago — come online July 1. All told, that’s about €16 billion in EU aid available to Athens as part of the extension. The length of the extension will depend largely on how long officials determine that money can last. There is also about €16.4 billion remaining in the IMF’s portion of the bailout, which runs through March 2016.

July 20: Drop-dead deadline

This may be the real drop-dead deadline: the date two bonds totalling €3.5 billion fall due to the ECB. Although credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s said recently it would not consider a failure to pay these bonds a full default — it said only non-payment on bonds held by private creditors constitutes a default in their books — it would be virtually impossible for Greece to survive inside the eurozone if it defaulted on the ECB.

That means Greece must legislate for and implement the entire reform programme before this date so that it ensures it has bailout funding in time to repay the ECB. Another €3.2 billion is due for two more bonds held by the ECB on August 20.

When many people hear the word “derivatives”, they tend to tune out because it is a word that sounds very complicated. And without a doubt, derivatives can be enormously complex. But what I try to do is to take complex subjects and break them down into simple terms. At their core, derivatives represent nothing more than a legalized form of gambling. A derivative is essentially a bet that something either will or will not happen in the future. Ultimately, someone will win money and someone will lose money.

There are hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of these bets floating around out there, and one of these days this gigantic time bomb is going to go off and absolutely cripple the entire global financial system. Back in 2002, legendary investor Warren Buffett shared the following thoughts about derivatives with shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway…

“The derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle, and these instruments will almost certainly multiply in variety and number until some event makes their toxicity clear. Central banks and governments have so far found no effective way to control, or even monitor, the risks posed by these contracts. In my view, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.”

Those words turned out to be quite prophetic. Derivatives have definitely multiplied in variety and number since that time, and it has become abundantly clear how toxic they are. Derivatives played a substantial role in the financial meltdown of 2008, but we still haven’t learned our lessons. Today, the derivatives bubble is even larger than it was just before the last financial crisis, and it could absolutely devastate the global financial system at any time.

We cannot afford for these “too big to fail” banks to actually fail. Even the failure of a single one would cause a national financial nightmare. The “too big to fail” banks that I am talking about are JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. When you total up the exposure to derivatives that all of them currently have, it comes to a grand total of more than 278 trillion dollars. But when you total up all of the assets of all six banks combined, it only comes to a grand total of about 9.8 trillion dollars. In other words, the “too big to fail” banks have exposure to derivatives that is more than 28 times the size of their total assets.

Our financial system has been transformed into the largest casino in the history of the planet. For the moment, the roulette wheels are still spinning and everyone is happy. But sooner or later, a “black swan event” will happen that nobody expected, and then all hell will break loose.

Attacks on churches, schools and religious groups are deliberately horrific, designed to generate maximum publicity. Yet these grievous human rights abuses, which in some areas have amounted to genocide, have not been met with a clear and coordinated response from the international community. In the context of the wider geopolitical power struggles that created the breeding ground for this persecution, these suffering populations become collateral damage.

Pope Francis has repeatedly condemned the "complicit silence" of the international community, which allows this brutal persecution to continue. This is an issue that concerns everyone. Where the right to freedom of conscience and religion is denied, other serious human rights abuses will follow. If we open our hearts and minds to hear the voices of the victims, we cannot fail to see that the denial of their dignity wounds all of humanity.

The female farmer, who did not want to be named, had gone out to check her flock of 100 ewes and 90 lambs on Midsummer's Day morning. The corpse had been dragged around to leave an intricate bloody spiral on the grass in the remote Teign Valley on Dartmoor in Devon. The farmer says it the latest in a line of attacks by devil worshippers across Devon and Cornwall - mostly carried out on lonely moors at night.

On April 18, the night of a full moon, the same farmer found the severed leg of a lamb. She said she does not want to be named for fear of reprisals, adding: "We get enough hassle with dogs worrying sheep - we don't need devil worshippers as well."

The UK must consider whether the country’s influence could be best exerted individually, aligning it with that of Europe only when it is in Britain’s own interests, and whether this could be done without compromising the UK’s international standing or energy security. By leaving the EU, Britain would see more freedom of action for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, retain its seat on the United Nations Security Council, retain membership of key international bodies, and be able to work with the EU as it sees fit.

The EU has developed a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). It began as informal cooperation but is now incorporated in the Treaty structure itself, an integral part of the EU. Change has been rapid, and the ambition for further EU action is deep.

In continuing to establish its own foreign policy identity, the EU now constitutes a growing threat to British influence. This is particularly felt in international institutions, where increasingly the EU corporately occupies the place and function once filled by British diplomats. The establishment of an EU diplomatic corps, the EEAS, in parallel to British diplomats, can only harm the UK’s lead over its competitors, as the central importance of EU delegations grows while the FCO faces inevitable calls for cuts.

Despite court orders allowing Jews to visit and pray at Judaism’s most holy site, Israeli Police have ignored and violated the judicial decisions. Following the meeting, Glick told the news website that the state does have the ability to enforce rule of law on the Mount but for some reason is not doing so. In one of many example, groups of Islamist women, known as mouribatoun, are paid to sit at the visitors entrance to the Mount to harass Jewish visitors.

For unknown reasons, Glick says that police are preventing the disbandment of the women who verbally attack Jews with anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric. “If we’re talking about racist chanting, the law allows for up to two years imprisonment,” Glick stated. Glick and Etzion’s activist efforts are part of a larger struggle to end Israeli appeasement of the Jordanian government, which has threatened to cut ties with Israel if Jews are allowed to pray on the Temple Mount, as well as Muslim extremists.

One activist present at the meeting told Arutz Sheva, “The fundamental responsibility to impose the rule of law on the Temple Mount lies with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who bizarrely refuses to deal with the issues and is not willing to hear about it.” He added, “Meanwhile, the Mount is run like the Wild West.”

1. The SLAVE states of Maryland, Missouri, Delaware, Kentucky, as well as the District of Columbia, were SLAVE STATES in the Union that fought for the NORTH.

2. Two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was made in 1863, the Union states of Delaware and Kentucky continued to have slavery until the Thirteenth Amendment was passed that abolished slavery.

3. A year into the war, President Lincoln wrote a letter to the New York Tribune stating, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.” Not exactly a civil rights leader…

4. Most white southern families had no slaves, which means most white soldiers in the south had no slaves. And they definitely didn’t have slaves like some of the NORTHERN army soldiers who were from the states of Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky. According to the census of the entire United States, with 27 million people, about 1.4% were slave owners, or 4.8% of southern whites owned slaves. (americancivilwar.com)

5. Here is something you won’t learn about in Black History Month: There were over 3,000 BLACK slave owners who lived in the south. According to the US census, in South Carolina in 1830, about a fourth of the negro slave masters owned 10 or more slaves.

The TPP, as you may have heard, outright surrenders US sovereignty to multinational corporations, handing them total global monopolies over labor practices, immigration, Big Pharma drug pricing, GMO food labeling, criminalization of garden seeds and much more. In all, the TPP hands over control of 80% of the US economy to global monopolists, and the TPP is set up to enable those corporations to engage in virtually unlimited toxic chemical pollution, medical monopolization, the gutting of labor safety laws and much more.

Plus, did I mention the TPP will displace millions of American workers as corporations outsource jobs to foreign workers? While corporations rake in the profits from new global powers, everyday American workers will lose their livelihoods and their jobs (not to mention their pensions).

America is now officially a nation of slave workers beholden to multinational corporate interests. How does your silly flag outrage feel now?

“I’m offended that everyone is offended by something.

I’m offended that because I’m a white male, people automatically classify me as privileged, regardless of knowing where I’ve come from or what I’ve been through. I’m offended that our First Amendment has turned into freedom of speech [just as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings]. I’m offended that people assume I’m racist because I believe in economic development by way of Capitalism and a free-market economy.

I’m offended that people who are too afraid to ask for food stamps, disability, or unemployment (because they don’t want a handout) are probably the ones who could use it most, yet the majority of recipients who do in fact receive handouts abuse their “privilege” and continue to make frivolous purchases.

I’m offended that people care more about taking down an outdated Confederate flag but don’t get riled up when their American flag is being burned in the street. I’m offended that people care more about blocking homosexuals from getting married than fixing their own, broken and unstable, heterosexual marriages. I’m offended that fast food workers get paid more than my soldiers yet still expect to get paid more than nurses.

I’m offended by people who claim how offended they are, while they do nothing but gripe about it on their phones or laptops, when they could be writing or calling their respective representatives to actually get something accomplished. I’m offended by the lack of initiative, hard work, and tenacity in this country. I’m offended by complainers who pity themselves and just want to take as much as they can. I’m offended by those who have in fact “made it” yet are too rude to give back to the communities in which they’ve come from.

I’m offended by people who vote for a person based on the party they represent, the race or gender, age or a religion of a candidate… instead of how the candidate proposes to address each issue, respectively. I’m offended by people who aren’t open-minded and think they’re always right, no matter what. I’m offended by people who don’t listen and read and legitimately try to understand unfamiliar concepts before brushing them off. I’m offended of what our country has become.

I don’t claim to know solutions to these issues… eventually maybe we will. I just pray that we can one day change our country for the better. And hope that our offenses can turn into progress.”

Monuments such as the Angel of the North and the London Eye, or public works of art such as Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth or Liverpool’s Superlambananas, may need to be blacked out in holiday snaps to avoid breaching the copyright of individual architects or artists.

Members of the public would only be able to upload the uncensored photograph with prior consent from the author. These are restrictions that already exist in some member states of the EU, including France, Belgium and Italy, but in an attempt to harmonise copyright law, Brussels could extend this to the UK as early as next month.

The UK, along with countries such as Spain and Germany, currently enjoys “freedom of panorama”, a provision in copyright law that allows people to publish photographs of modern buildings or public art installations and use any way they like without infringing copyright.

However, where this clause does not exist, restrictions extend even to educational, not-for-profit websites such as Wikipedia. The website’s page for the Atomium building in Belgium, for example, is illustrated by a silhouetted shot of the building, due to copyright restrictions.