Lee Fuell, who is the technical director for force modernization and employment at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC), said that if hypersonic missile attacks were “combined with more traditional ballistic missile attacks forcing a target to defend against very high aspect warheads coming in this way at the same time they have to defend against low altitude, very high speed targets coming in [another] way, it makes the defense problem orders of magnitude worse for the defender.”

In other words, US missile defense systems could theoretically be overwhelmed by such an attack. As the superpowers compete for military superiority, billions of dollars are being spent while the world becomes increasingly unstable in terms of the possibility of a full-scale attack being staged — whether triggered by accident or on purpose.

For Pope Francis, a key element of his narrative is the (often exaggerated) notion that he’s a liberal maverick. Even when he does or says something that other popes have done or said a thousand times before, it’s touted as an innovation. Recent days have brought examples on the ecumenical front of the push for unity among the various branches of Christianity.

In more traditional Catholic circles, all this has elicited alarm, with some seeing Francis as too “soft” on the boundaries between Catholicism and the rest of the Christian world. Yet if Francis is to be judged weak on that basis, then so must every pope for at least the last 50 years, including figures whose own narratives make them out as iron-willed (St John Paul II) or arch-conservative (Pope Benedict XVI).

Catholicism’s commitment to ecumenism was ratified at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), and every pope since has moved the ball. Even before the council ended, Pope Paul VI in 1964 traveled to Jerusalem to meet Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople, the first encounter between the leaders of Western and Eastern Christianity in more than 500 years.

The bottom line is that if Francis is to be styled as a revolutionary for his ecumenical agenda, it’s a revolution that started long before he arrived, and will almost certainly continue long after he’s gone.

Both Marius and Ruth are practicing Christians and their faith got their children removed from their home. Cristian Ionescu, a relative of the Bodnarius, told World Magazine that the two Bondariu girls were taken from school without their parent's consent or knowledge and later the same day police arrived at the family's home to remove two of the three sons.

The 3-month-old son was left with Ruth. She called Marius, who was at work as an IT engineer for the mayor's office. Marius rushed home and the couple immediately turned to the police station for answers. Unfortunately, they were turned away with no more information than they had when they arrived.

The next day, police returned to the Bodnariu home to remove the baby with claims that Ruth's tears at the police station "posed a danger to the child." Two days after their youngest boy was taken, Barnevernet officials told the couple their children were "integrating well" in two separate foster homes. The Bodnarius' were later notified by the government that their children were removed under charges of "Christian radicalism and indoctrination."

The children's removal was initiated by the school principal, who told Barnevernet the Bodnarius' were "very Christian," and their belief that God punishes sin "creates a disability in the children." Though the principal admitted the girls showed no signs of physical abuse, she insisted their parents required "help and guidance."

Chaotic Moon’s dual-purpose tattoo is comprised of electro conductive ink embedded with sensors and microchips. Here is the reasoning why this product is so desirable according to one of the developers, Eric Schneider, who mentions the banking aspect to CBSNewYork: “We carry wallets around and they are so vulnerable (more vulnerable than millions of people getting hacked at once?). With the tech tattoo you can carry all your information on your skin and when you want your credit card information or your ID, you can pull that up automatically through the system,” he said.

And the medical: “Rather than going to the doctor once a year for your physical, this tech tattoo can be something you put on your body once a year and it monitors everything that they would do in a physical and it sends that to your doctor, and if there’s an issue they can call you,” Schneider said. “So the tech tattoos can really tie in everything into one package. It can look at early signs of fever, your vital signs, heart rate, everything it needs to look at to notify you that you’re getting sick or your child is getting sick.”

We already have seen an uptick in new biometric security measures being rolled out for policing, travel and banking. Many of these measures – as well as what is being planned by Chaotic Moon – are tied to a smartphone, which we have learned ad nauseum is anything but secure. However, what at first seems sensible is moving down the slipperiest of slopes into areas most couldn’t have imagined.

This is no longer the personal choice about how to apply tech to one’s own body or family, but is now becoming a system where government agencies take the role of parent, and we-the-people become children. Most troubling of all is that it likely will be mandated unless there is mass opposition.

The Bank of Japan said it would begin to charge banks for the privilege of holding money at the central bank, cutting its rate from 0.1 percent to -0.1 percent. It is the latest attempt by monetary policymakers to kickstart the economy three years after the government of Shinzo Abe launched an unprecedented assault on deflation and low growth.

The Bank of Japan has already embarked on the most ambitious programme of quantiative easing seen anywhere in the world, buying up assets to the tune of 80 trillion yen a year in government bonds. Central banks have increasingly taken recourse to negative rates, eight years after the onset of the financial crisis.

The European Central Bank imposed a negative deposit rate in 2014, following the likes of Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark in a round of global "competitive easing". The Bank of England's chief economist has suggested the UK may also need to impose negative rates to fight off the next recession.

Le Pen spoke at the end of the first meeting of the Europe of Nations and Freedom group within the European Parliament, which was formed last summer. The 36-member parliamentary group is the smallest in the European Parliament, but includes some parties gaining strength in the polls in their home countries.

At a news conference, Le Pen along with populist leaders from host Italy, the Netherlands and Austria expressed their common view that Europe's borders must be closed to mass migration from the Middle East and Africa and said that sovereignty over such policies must be restored to nations. They cited both the threat of terrorism and the strain on budgets.

"European structures that were poorly constructed are crumbling everywhere," Le Pen said. "But I have to say to European citizens that they have nothing to fear in the end of this ancient world. To the contrary, they can hope for the return of the nations and their freedom."

Also attending the Milan event Thursday and Friday were leaders of nationalist parties from the United Kingdom, Belgium, Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic.

The mosquitoes are a genetically modified (GM) version of the Aedes aegypti, the species responsible for transmitting the dengue virus to humans. The farm was inaugurated early last week and is expected to produce millions of GM insects each month.

The company breeds and releases into the wild male mosquitoes that don’t produce viable offspring. When females mate with the GMO males, they lay eggs that hatch but the larvae die before adulthood. Oxitec says trials conducted in Brazil and other countries over the past decade show releasing bioengineered male mosquitoes can reduce the wild Aedes aegypti population by 90 percent.

The primary concern, de Mier said, was the uncertainty and lack of scientific data regarding potential the GM mosquitoes will pose long-term harm to Key West’s ecosystem and its inhabitants. She and others who oppose the research also point out the potential risk of females being released along with the males, the possibility that the gene will mutate, and any unforeseen potential negative effects it might have on the area’s insects and wildlife. Researchers, however, dismiss these concerns.

In other words, Oxitec has been producing genetically modified mosquitoes on an industrial scale for years in Brazil, the country that now finds itself at ground zero of this Zika outbreak. With regard to Oxitec’s trials in Malaysia and Grand Cayman, Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology found, “Deficits in the scientific quality of regulatory documents and a general absence of accurate experimental descriptions available before releases start.” These are fascinating coincidences.

This brings us to an important point. Beyond the Bundesbank’s hype, its important to note that the repatriation information in all of the press releases and updates from the Bundesbank since 2013 has excluded most of the critical information about the actual gold bars being moved.

So, for example, in this latest update concerning the 2015 transport operations, there is no complete bar list (weight list) of the bars repatriated, no explanation of the quality of gold transferred and whether bars of various purities were involved, no comment on whether any bars had to be re-melted and recast, no indication of which refineries, if any, were used, and no explanation of why it takes a projected 7 years to bring back 300 tonnes of gold that could be flown from New York to Frankfurt in a week using a few C-130 US transporter carriers.

The White House announced on Saturday that Obama will visit the Islamic Society of Baltimore (ISB) on Wednesday. He has visited several mosques overseas as president but has resisted visiting one in the homeland. The purpose of the trip, according to the White House, is to “celebrate the contributions Muslim Americans make to our nation and reaffirm the importance of religious freedom to our way of life.”

But ISB is a curious choice for Obama’s first domestic visit. The mosque is a member of a network of mosques controlled by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a Muslim civil rights group named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror case. Several executives with that organization were convicted of sending money to aid the terrorist group Hamas.

An imam who served at ISB for a total of 15 years has also been a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood network and has worked for an Islamic relief group that was designated as a terrorist organization by the Treasury Department in 2004.

With so many Americans now unable to find jobs while many existing companies are closing plants and cutting jobs across the board, how will millions of Americans find food when warnings of widespread food shortages worldwide have already been going out from many different sources? As ANP has previously reported, the only thing standing in between civilization and anarchy are 9 meals.

Many Washington DC grocery stores had empty shelves after merely a snowstorm, leaving customers asking what happened to all the food and amazed at how quickly what was in the store was all gone. What happens when economic collapse, war or worse arrive and the chain of instant food and supplies nearly completely dries up? We're clearly heading in that direction and the answer to what may happen then is clear.

With the nation burning through almost $100 billion in reserves in 2015, things are not looking good for the US ally, as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects many deficit years ahead. But here’s where you and I should be concerned: Rather than first selling their physical assets that produce cash flow, the first and most logical move for the Saudis to make will be to start to sell their over-sized holdings of US debt.

How much US debt do they own? We don’t exactly know, as the US Treasury Department keeps that data mysteriously secret (despite reporting on every other nation individually). But what we do know is that the Saudis are the 3rd largest holders of our debt, so if they start selling it will likely impact us in a big way. China and Russia already began dumping US debt in 2015, as they plan to move away from the dollar system.