This time, however, it has the potential to be a conflagration for the history books. With a Supreme Court closely divided between five conservative justices and four liberal ones, every person on the bench is critical. Many of the most groundbreaking Supreme Court decisions of recent times have been decided by the slimmest of majorities. Justice Scalia, however, was more than just another court vote. He was also one of the chamber's most outspoken advocates for conservative jurisprudence. He was a towering voice for the doctrine of originalism - that the text of the Constitution is immutable and not open to "modern" interpretations.

His fiery dissents, such as in recent cases on gay marriage and the constitutionality of President Barack Obama's healthcare reform, served as rallying cries for conservatives across the US. Because Justice Scalia's death comes just 11 months before the end of Mr Obama's term as president, Republicans in the Senate are going to be under intense pressure from some conservatives to do everything they can to delay confirmation of a replacement until a new chief executive is sworn in on 20 January 2017.

That could involve slowing down confirmation hearings in the Senate committee and filibustering any nominee before they receive a vote in the full Senate. Then, conservatives hope, a Republican president would name a replacement more likely to maintain the one-vote conservative majority on the Court.

"Justice Scalia was an American hero," tweeted Texas Senator Ted Cruz. "We owe it to him, and the nation, for the Senate to ensure that the next president names his replacement."

In an opinion piece for Project-syndicate.org, the billionaire stated that “the best way to cause the disintegration of the Euro bloc is to flood the EU with Syrian refugees. There is no reason to believe that Putin intervened in Syria in order to aggravate the European refugee crisis,” Soros says. “But once Putin saw the opportunity to hasten the EU’s disintegration, he seized it. He has obfuscated his actions by talking of cooperating against a common enemy, ISIS [Islamic State/IS, also known as ISIL].”

According to Soros, “Putin’s Russia and the EU are engaged in a race against time: The question is which one will collapse first. The Putin regime faces bankruptcy in 2017, when a large part of its foreign debt matures, and political turmoil may erupt sooner than that.”

Soros speculates that the EU may be doomed to disintegrate due to its current problems: “Ever since the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent rescue packages for Greece, the EU has learned how to muddle through one crisis after another. But today it is confronted by five or six crises at the same time, which may prove to be too much. As Merkel correctly foresaw, the migration crisis has the potential to destroy the EU.”

"The number of conflicts, their victims, and their refugees" has been increasing worldwide, for the past five years and this development will "most likely continue this year." The journal, "Internationale Politik," substantiates this assumption by presenting an overview of the current wars. Today's deadliest wars - in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and South Sudan - are indeed a direct or indirect outcome of western hegemonic policies.

With its military interventions or subversive support for insurgents, this policy is aimed at provoking pro-western putsches or weakening non-compliant states. "Internationale Politik" assesses the possibility of conflicts in China's vicinity. During the years of China's rise, western powers were unsuccessful in knitting strong ties with the resource-rich Arab world, in view of the impending power struggle with the People's Republic of China. This power struggle is already emerging.

In a draft policy statement on “family engagement,” the two unconstitutional bureaucracies openly state their joint position: families are “equal partners” in everything from children's “development” and “education” to their “wellness across all settings.”

Virtually no area of family life, including the health and “mental health” of parents, as well as a family's “attitudes” and even its “housing,” would be free from government intrusion under the government's Orwellian vision. Even vague notions of “family wellness,” as defined by bureaucrats in Washington, DC, would be put under a government microscope. "Parenting interventions" will be used to ensure compliance.

“It is the position of the Departments [of HHS and Education] that all early childhood programs and schools recognize families as equal partners in improving children’s development, learning and wellness across all settings, and over the course of their children’s developmental and educational experiences,” reads the draft policy.

And it gets even more bizarre: As defined in the document, family means “all the people who play a role in a child’s life and interact with a child’s early childhood program or school.”

On June 9th 2015, Deutsche Banks holdings were downrated to BBB+, even lower than Lehman immediately prior to their collapse. And what makes all this so scary? Deutsche Bank’s derivatives holdings are the largest in the history of the planet. Even larger than JP Morgan’s by $5 trillion. We are talking $75 trillion, that is 20 times more than the entire GDP of Germany.

In other words, any major loss of confidence in the global stock market to which DB is exposed could result in an even larger recession than 2008. Given the fact that the percentage of GDP made up by this kind of financial speculation is even higher than pre-2008 in most western countries, it could result in global economic collapse. A write-down of this magnitude would imply that DB has a NEGATIVE net worth of 238 billion euros.

In other words, DB is technically insolvent. The bottom line: $600 trillion in gross notional derivatives backed by a tiny $600 billion in real assets: a whopping 0.1% margin requirement! Surely nothing can possibly go wrong with this amount of unprecedented 1000x systemic leverage.

We are too fragile, fiscally as well as psychologically. Our economies, cultures and polities are still paying a heavy price for the Great Recession; another collapse, especially were it to be accompanied by a fresh banking bailout by the taxpayer, would trigger a cataclysmic, uncontrollable backlash.

The public, whose faith in elites and the private sector was rattled after 2007-09, would simply not wear it. Its anger would be so explosive, so-all encompassing that it would threaten the very survival of free trade, of globalisation and of the market-based economy. There would be calls for wage and price controls, punitive, ultra-progressive taxes, a war on the City and arbitrary jail sentences.

For fear of allowing extremist or populist parties through the door, mainstream politicians would end up adopting much of this agenda, with devastating implications for our long-term prosperity. Central banks, in desperation, would embrace the purest form of money-printing: they would start giving consumers actual cash to spend, temporarily turbo-charging demand while destroying any remaining respect for the idea that money needs to be earned.

History never repeats itself exactly, but the last time a recession was met by pure, unadulterated populism was in the Thirties, when the Americans turned a stock market crash and a series of monetary policy blunders into a depression. President Herbert Hoover signed into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, dreamt up by two economically illiterate Republican senators, slapping massive taxes on the imports of 20,000 goods and triggering a global trade war. It was perhaps the most economically destructive piece of legislation ever devised, and it took until the Nineties before the damage was finally erased.

Foreign and defence ministers of the leading international states backing different factions in the war-torn country met in separate meetings in Munich and Brussels following the collapse of the latest round of peace talks. Both Russia and the United States demanded ceasefires in the long-running civil war so that the fight could be concentrated against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) - but each on their own, conflicting terms.

But the Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, staged their own intervention, saying they were committed to sending ground troops to the country. Their favoured rebel groups have been pulverised by Russian air raids and driven back on the ground by Iranian-supplied pro-regime troops. They said their declared target was Isil. But the presence of troops from Gulf states which have funded the Syrian rebels would be taken as a hostile act by the Assad regime and its backers, and a sign that they were committed to staking their claim to a say in the final Syrian settlement.

Russia issued a stark warning of the potential consequences. "The Americans and our Arab partners must think well: do they want a permanent war?" its prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, told Germany's Handelsblatt newspaper in an interview due to be published on Friday but released on Thursday night. “It would be impossible to win such a war quickly, especially in the Arab world, where everybody is fighting against everybody. All sides must be compelled to sit at the negotiating table instead of unleashing a new world war.”

Critics of Merkel’s policy became even more outspoken and angry after a string of sexual assaults that took place in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, most of which were committed by migrants. Several attempts have been made since then to instruct new arrivals on German etiquette, including the treatment of women. One of them, however, was mocked on Twitter, with jokes pointing out how it resembled an airline safety guide.

A German grandfather wasn’t joking at all, however, when he approached the mayor of his town, who happens to be a member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), earlier this month. When the concerned resident pointed out that the town’s schoolgirls were reporting being sexually harassed by residents of a refugee shelter and asked what could be done about it, the mayor said the answer was simple – the girls should take alternate routes to school which don’t require passing the shelter so as not to “provoke” the refugees. The response was met with outrage at a town hall meeting.

Residents have also been outraged by reports that refugees aren’t being arrested for crimes. A German police officer recently stated that law enforcement cannot take actions against law-breaking refugees without being accused of excessive violence or racism.

Despite this, there remains an extremely important story to tell, one that includes all the hallmarks of a literal police state including road blocks, road closures, check points, private mercenaries, papers please demands, and even guns pointed directly at the heads of law-abiding American citizens.

While one can imagine that the de facto martial law across Harney County may soon come to an end, (will it?!?) the fact remains that this happened in an American state, to American citizens and literally nothing is being said about it in the mainstream media or by the numerous FBI officials who keep telling the public that this was all for their own safety.

So there you have it. Oregon citizens were terrorized at gunpoint by armed thugs all in the name of protecting the people from citizens occupying a random wildlife refuge that literally never used violence on even one occasion.

Obviously there is vastly more to the story and the seemingly unimaginable response to the occupation of the wildlife refuge proves that the powers that be are indeed scared out of their minds that the American people will actually wake up in mass to their crimes and corruption.

It isn’t just the scale of the Shah of Iran’s £1.5 billion celebration in 1971 which elevates this party above all the rest. It isn’t the absurd touches, such as helicoptering a car-sized block of ice across the desert every day to top up the ice buckets for the white wine. It isn’t the arrogance of importing 50,000 songbirds to create gentle birdsong (most died within days through lack of water). It isn’t even the official video of the party — for which a Hollywood film crew was recruited and Orson Welles, no less, hired as narrator.

What really singles out the Shah of Iran’s three-day party at Persepolis as the true ‘party of the century’ was its impact. For it was the catalyst for a political revolution which continues to bedevil the entire Middle East — and the rest of the world — to this day. Not since Marie-Antoinette’s immortal (if invented) remark — ‘let them eat cake’ — has there been such an ill-advised catering directive. While the Shah and his guests were feasting on caviar, peacock and 1945 Chateau Lafite in air-conditioned tents, his opponents were stoking the flames of resentment.

None was noisier than an exiled mullah called Ayatollah Khomeini, who denounced all those attending the ‘shameful’ party as ‘traitors’ and ‘vultures’. He encouraged hungry Iranians to rise up against their ruler. Pretty soon, they did. The great irony is that the Shah’s feast was supposed to reinforce the throne it ultimately toppled. It was to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire. During the official video, the narrator, Orson Welles, declares: ‘This was no party of the year, it was the celebration of 25 centuries!’ It also ensured there wouldn’t be a 26th.

Watching the ‘catastrophic’ party from exile in Paris, the Shah’s enemy Ayatollah Khomeini raged: ‘Let the world know that these celebrations have nothing to do with the noble, Muslim people of Iran. All those who take part are traitors to Islam and the Iranian people.’ Eight years later, the so-called ‘King of Kings’ had fled for his life, his country consigned to decades of misery under the Ayatollah’s grim theocracy.

On average, investors have lost a collective $57 billion per trading day this year. Ouch. That’s roughly equal to the GDP of Canada in 2014, according to the World Bank. Global economics have also played a part shaking investor confidence: Jitters about growth in the Chinese economy have reverberated across global markets as oil prices continue to fall, with no OPEC deal in sight.

Now some are beginning to wonder if the relationship between the economy and the market will flip. Will the drop in the stock market because of the huge loss of wealth drag the US economy into a recession? Some economists believe that lower stock market values cause people to spend less, which is the so called wealth effect. Others have argued that drops in the stock market really don’t impact spending.

What’s more, the $1.75 trillion drop comes after years of gains for investors, in which the stock market value of US corporations rose from $14.9 trillion at the end of 2009 to a peak of nearly $23 trillion in the middle of last year. Unfortunately, we may get to see which side of that argument is right.

British vending machines selling snacks, drinks and phone chargers are rapidly adopting card and contactless technology with the number soaring by 20 percent a year, according to Creditcall, a payments company. Coca-Cola is among major brands to have the new technology already installed on thousands of its vending machines across the country, making it quicker and easier for its customers to buy drinks on-the-go.

By 2018 drivers will also no longer face the burden of counting shrapnel when they buy parking tickets, as by then, the vast majority of machines will give them the option of paying by contactless card, according to the British Parking Association.

EU rules mean that by 2020 it will be compulsory for all machines to offer tap-and-go payments. Partly because of the diminishing need for people to carry coins, nearly four in every five pounds (78.5%) spent in UK shops is now made through debit and credit cards, figures from the UK Cards Association showed.

That spending is highly concentrated, as the US and five of Europe's largest countries account for nearly two-thirds of the entire market. This means that billions and billions of dollars are secured by Americans being diagnosed with cancer. That's one profitable industry; however, it could all be completely dismantled by one thing: a cure.

As Mike Adams recently reported, "A universal cancer cure would destroy the profitability of the highly lucrative cancer industry and collapse the American Cancer Society, hospitals, oncology clinics and pharmaceutical companies that depend on chemotherapy revenues to stay profitable." This means that anyone moving closer to developing a cure for cancer would be considered an extreme threat to the medical establishment and likely stopped at any cost.

With that in mind, the mysterious deaths and disappearances of several natural health doctors throughout Florida is as suspicious as it is concerning. Breakthroughs using this type of medicine are extremely "controversial," as they threaten everything that the medical-industrial complex stands for, ie costly chemotherapy treatments and cancer drugs.

Doctors leading this type of research are routinely raided and shut down by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), after which they're treated like criminals and their reputations smeared. This is typically orchestrated against doctors who are considered a threat by the medical establishment.

The Cascadia can deliver a quake that's many times stronger - plus a tsunami. "Cascadia can make an earthquake almost 30 times more energetic than the San Andreas to start with, and then it generates a tsunami at the same time, which the side-by-side motion of the San Andreas can't do," said Chris Goldfinger, a professor of geophysics at Oregon State University.

The Cascadia is capable of delivering a 9.0-magnitude quake - an awesome show of force by Mother Nature. "You're going to have three to five minutes of shaking, and if you're used to earthquakes in California, they typically last 15 to 30 seconds and before you are really sure of what is happening, it is over," Goldfinger says.

A 9.0 will be different. "In this case, three minutes - and I've been in a 9 in Japan - three minutes is an eternity. It is a very, very long time," Goldfinger says. "We'll lose a lot of bridges. We'll lose our highway routes. The coast will probably be closed by downed bridges or landslides or both." Rescue crews will be overwhelmed.