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.

The slide in the US followed large losses all around the world and left all three major US indexes down at least 10 percent since the beginning of the year. The latest slump reflected heightened concerns that global economic growth is slowing, even as Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen reiterated her confidence in the US economy in testimony to Congress Thursday.

"A lot of people are having trouble assessing the true value of stocks," said JJ Kinahan, TD Ameritrade's chief strategist. "What it says to me is we're going to continue with volatility." Financial companies were among the biggest decliners amid growing anxiety that interest rates in the US and elsewhere would remain low and sap bank profits.

The price of oil tumbled to $26.21, its lowest level since May 2003. Investors fled to the traditional havens of bonds and precious metals. Gold jumped 4.5 percent. In the first 42 days of the year, more than £181 billion has been wiped off Britain's biggest companies - that's more than double the amount that the blue chip index lost last year. In the first four days of this week, the FTSE 100 has surrendered £80.3 billion in value.

On Tuesday, the EU’s six original member nations - including Italy, Germany and France - stressed their commitment to “the process of creating an ever closer union among the people of Europe.” The declaration by foreign ministers comes at an awkward time for Prime Minister David Cameron, who is pushing for changes to Britain’s relationship with the EU ahead of a national referendum - probably later this year - on whether to remain in the bloc.

Cameron and EU leaders hope to strike a deal at a February 18-19 meeting in Brussels, but differences remain over contrasting visions for the future of the union. European Council President Donald Tusk, who is shepherding the negotiations, said Wednesday that the talks were “a very fragile political process” but he hoped to get an agreement next week.

Throughout the negotiations, Cameron has stressed that Britain is happy to be part of the EU’s free-trade zone, but wants assurances it will not have its laws and economy tied more closely to the other member states. “We are going to keep our borders,” Cameron said last week. “We are never going to sign up to things like a European army. We are never going to sign up to an ever closer union.”

British Euroskeptics seized on the six “core Europe” nations’ declaration as proof that the EU aims to become a European super-state. The tabloid Daily Express said it could leave Cameron’s reform agenda “in tatters.”

The Prime Minister has recently linked Britain’s EU membership to national security as he campaigns for the UK to remain in the 28-member bloc ahead of the upcoming in/out referendum. But, speaking at a conference of leading eurosceptics yesterday, Mr Cameron’s former minister described such an argument as the “least credible” that could be made by those campaigning for Britain to remain tied to Brussels - which he labelled ‘Remainians’.

Dr Fox pointed out how NATO and the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence community - made up of Britain, the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia - were the main sources maintaining the UK’s national security. He asked: Which bits of these actually refer to the EU? “And therefore which part of our national security is damaged by being outside the EU?”

The Tory MP said a vote for Brexit would act as a "wake-up call" for NATO and will "end the EU’s defence pretensions". He said Britain cutting ties with Brussels would "mean the remaining EU simply does not have the military capacity to pretend it can be an alternative to NATO". He added: "That would be good for Britain, it would be good for the EU and it would be good for NATO."

As the US-led coalition steps up air strikes on IS positions in Syria and Iraq there are growing fears that the IS "enclave" around the Libyan city of Sirte is providing a safe haven in which jihadists can train, fund and plan attacks across the Mediterranean. So how real is this threat?

Last week the US State Department and the Pentagon jointly raised their estimate of the number of foreign jihadists with IS in Libya to 4,000-6,000. They believe large numbers are being recruited from African countries to the south, helped by cash inducements.

Libya today is awash with powerful weapons and there are unlimited places in which to train jihadists for future terrorist attacks, with little chance of being disrupted by any kind of central authority because there isn't one. Both IS and Western governments have made much of Libya's proximity to southern Europe, pointing out that it brings the group geographically much closer to the West than its bases in Raqqa or Mosul.

In a world where governments are blowing up children with drones and calling them collateral damage in phony terror wars on a daily basis, social engineering has turned average people into walking arguments that the film Idiocracy was actually a documentary, busily wasting their time fretting over how offensive otherwise innocuous words are. Human beings are mammals. A female mammal who has children has traditionally been called a “mother” or “mom,” to separate this mammal linguistically from the male version, who has traditionally been called a “dad” or “father”.

Well, not anymore in one Florida college classroom where a professor has decided that language is offensive because it isn’t “inclusive” enough. In the syllabus for her “Creativity In Context” class — a required course for any student pursuing a minor in Innovation — UF professor Jennifer Lee informs students of her four paragraph long classroom “communications policy” that she says will enforce “ethical conduct” in the classroom.

The syllabus explains that this means replacing the words “boyfriend”/”girlfriend” with the more inclusive “partner” or “significant other.” The rule applies to conversations about married couples too: saying “husband” or “wife” is forbidden. Even the words “mom” and “dad” have a more “inclusive” alternative — students are told to use the word “family” instead.

Pretty soon the only way to be “free of stereotypes” will be to not speak at all. Then they’ll have to move on to weeding out the offensive facial expressions. Take this all the way out and we end up in one of those dystopic futures like in the film The Giver where everyone is medically forced into having no emotions at all because emotions are just too “dangerous” and “offensive”.

The group had been gathering during their lunch hour to sing and pray together since 2001. However, when they attempted to place an announcement in the newsletter that titled the theme of their meeting, which is "Jesus is our life," that's where there was an issue. NASA's legal department explained that including the name 'Jesus' within the club's announcement made that announcement "sectarian" or "denominational."

Under Barack Hussein Obama Soetoro Sobarkah, the space agency has not only promoted a communist agenda, but been ordered to reach out to Muslims. Perhaps this is partly where some of this comes from. NASA is not violating the First Amendment by publishing the name Jesus in its newsletter and it should know better. Thankfully, there are those that do and are holding these NASA attorneys accountable and calling them out.

Its significance for both Churches is immense. Whatever the joint declaration they sign when they meet in Cuba, the simple fact of their meeting is a clear signal the hostility and chill of the past thousand years or so since the Great Schism may finally be edging towards a warmer phase in relations.

That relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church matters because about two-thirds of the world's more than 200 million Orthodox Christians are Russian. Earlier popes tried to pave the way for such a thaw with Moscow, most notably Pope Saint John Paul II, who tried to reach out to the Russian Orthodox Church.

However, those efforts were hindered by post-Cold War suspicion - above all in Moscow - which was only added to by the Pope's own Slavic roots. This "personal conversation" between the two leaders at Jose Marti International Airport in Havana has been made possible by many relatively recent geopolitical shifts.

Grave sins include defiling consecrated bread and wine, violating confessional secrecy, and plotting to kill a pope. Pope Francis has often said the Church needs to be less rigid and judgemental.

He has declared this a Holy Year of Mercy, and is using it to spread a message of forgiveness - particularly among Catholics who have strayed from the faith and are keen to return. At a Vatican ceremony on Tuesday, the Pope addressed some 700 of the chosen priests, saying penitents should be welcomed with open arms, instead of being judged with "a sense of superiority".

The grave sins that the priests can temporarily forgive may usually only be pardoned by senior bishops, Vatican officials or the Pope himself. Abortion falls within the category of serious transgressions, but the Pope last year announced that he would allow all regular priests to grant absolution for this sin to women who wished to repent, for the duration of the Holy Year. The Pope said that he recognised some women felt they had no choice but to take the "agonising" decision to have an abortion.