So what is a "solar minimum"? Our sun doesn't maintain a constant intensity. Instead, it cycles in spans of approximately 11 years. When it's at its maximum, it has the highest number of sunspots on its surface in that particular cycle. When it's at its minimum, it has almost none. When there are more sunspots, the sun is brighter. When there are fewer, the sun radiates less heat toward Earth.

But that's not the only cooling effect of a solar minimum. A dim sun doesn't deflect cosmic rays away from Earth as efficiently as a bright sun. So, when these rays enter our atmosphere, they seed clouds, which in turn cool our planet even more and increase precipitation in the form of rain, snow and hail.

If Earth were to enter the next Ice Age too quickly, glaciers could advance much further south, rainforests could turn into savannah, and sea levels could drop dramatically, causing havoc.

Are you aware that the American government has been slowly giving away its power to international bureaucrats to determine how its businesses and citizens are taxed? Most wars do not turn out the way the people who started them intended. Setting aside the hot military wars, look at the consequences of the “war on drugs” and the “war on money laundering and tax evasion.”

The global war on money laundering and tax evasion has failed in the three decades since it began in earnest, and it is now on its way to undermining the rule of law around the world, the legitimate role of financial institutions, and the right of sovereign governments to determine their own tax policies.

The new anti-money-laundering laws and regulations have resulted in millions of Americans who live abroad and others living outside their home countries being unable to get bank accounts and other financial services in the countries where they live. Rather than protecting people who need financial services, government regulations are increasing their misery. Banks avoid potential government fines by dumping customers, whose source or use of their money is too difficult to figure out.

As global taxes are increasingly implemented, Americans and citizens of other countries will lose their democratic right to determine their own taxes — and Americans will be right back where they were under King George III. What happened to “no taxation without representation”?

• Richard W Rahn is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.

“Rockefeller by no means neglected their program of converting our government into a totalitarian device for looting. The basic plan was published in 1930 by his intimate friend Hoffman Nickerson in his book, the American Rich. Nickerson’s scheme is to nullify the Constitution by converting our Government into an absolute monarchy. He concludes, the only perfect form of government is hereditary absolute monarchy, but it might be wiser at the start not to violate American sentiment by undertaking to impose it openly.

“The conversion of President to absolute monarch merely requires the elimination of checks and balances on the power of the President that the framers of the Constitution ‘unwisely’ incorporated into it, to convert his role to that of absolute dictator.

“The key to converting Congress into a mere ‘rubber stamp’ is the budget plan. If the Presidential elective monarch presents to Congress, year after year, budgets so huge and complex that members could not possibly find the time to read it, and so richly provided with graft and pork barrel for each member of Congress that none of them would dare to sincerely attack it for fear of losing their shares – Congress would eschew the powers granted it by the Constitution.

“The presidential monarch would easily rob Congress of its Constitutional power to initial any legislation under the pretence of contrived ‘emergencies’ and ‘crises’…” Does this sound like something we have today?

Inside the ad, a camera captured their facial expressions and fed them through an algorithm, reading emotional reactions like happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear and sadness. With all the unwitting feedback, the campaign could then tweak the message — the images, sounds or words — to come up with a version that voters might like better.

All over the world, political campaigns are seeking voter data and insights that will propel them to victory. Now, in an increasing number of places, that includes the contentious field known as neuromarketing — or in this case, neuropolitics.

Technologies like facial coding, biofeedback and brain imaging have long been used by companies in the hope of pushing the boundaries of marketing and product development. But their use by political parties and governments is a growing phenomenon, evoking futuristic scenes from the movie “Minority Report,” in which eerily well-informed billboards scan commuters’ eyes and call out to them by name.

With Russia, Iran and China on one side and the US, France, Australia and Britain plus the GCC countries, Turkey and Jordan on the other and Iraq and Syria in the middle, a lot is at stake in the world’s tinderbox.

US president Obama promised no less than 15 times to the world that American troops would not be deployed to Syria. With intensifying US military operations in both Iraq and Syria, dozens of bipartisan US lawmakers issued an open letter on Friday calling for Congress to fulfill its responsibility by voting “as quickly as possible” on whether to authorize a war that is well over a year old.

In the meantime, Obama has just authorised the deployment of special forces troops to Syria as it intensifies airstrikes which has coincided with Washington’s shift in approach to the conflict. As Russia intensifies its efforts, Washington is spurred to take more effective action.

There is serious political unrest at the parliamentary level in Britain. Parliament unequivocally voted for no military action in Syria in 2013 yet PM David Cameron simply lied by omission and sent fighter jets in defiance. Just yesterday the head of the British armed forces said “Britain is ‘letting down’ its allies by not taking part in attacking Isil’s key strongholds in Syria,” General Sir Nicholas Houghton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, said it “makes no sense” that RAF airstrikes in Iraq stop at the border, when Britain knows Isil has based its stronghold in Syria.

He seems to have forgotten that Britain is a democracy and its people are not answerable to the army.

The world risks a return to the strategic oil crises of the 1970s as Mid-East producers regain their stranglehold on global supply and drive non-Opec producers out of the market, the International Energy Agency has warned. The Paris-based watchdog said upstream investment in crude oil ventures is collapsing. Low prices are forcing companies to abandon high-cost projects in the US, Canada, Russia, Brazil and parts of Africa, storing up a potential oil crunch in the future. It leaves the world economy dangerously reliant on Gulf supplies, unless counter-measures are taken in time.

Fatih Birol, the IEA’s director, said the oil industry needs $650 billion a year of fresh investment just to keep output steady as old wells are depleted and the decline rate steepens, yet new outlays have fallen 20 percent this year and are expected to drop by another 20 percent next year. “This is what I am worried about the most. It is the first time since the 1980s that investment will have declined for two consecutive years, and it will have serious consequences,” he said.

In a previous article I noted that the federal poverty level for a family of five is $28,410, but 51 percent of all American workers are making less than $30,000 a year at this point. We have seen an explosion in the number of people in this country that are considered to be “the working poor” and it gets worse with each passing year.

One of the most frustrating things for me personally is the rising cost of health insurance. Barack Obama promised that his program would result in a decline in health insurance premiums by as much as $2,500 per family, but in reality average family premiums have increased by a total of $4,865 since 2008.

When I was growing up, it seemed like just about everyone in my entire high school was part of the middle class. But things have changed dramatically in America since that time. Today, the middle class is being absolutely eviscerated and our “leaders” don’t seem to care.

US Airways and Southwest fly planes to a maintenance facility in El Salvador. Delta sends planes to Mexico. United uses a shop in China. American still does much of its most intensive maintenance in-house in the US, but that is likely to change in the aftermath of the company’s merger with US Airways.

The airlines are shipping this maintenance work offshore for the reason you’d expect: to cut labor costs. Mechanics in El Salvador, Mexico, China, and elsewhere earn a fraction of what mechanics in the US do. In part because of this offshoring, the number of maintenance jobs at US carriers has plummeted, from 72,000 in the year 2000 to fewer than 50,000 today.

The private control of this important central bank works through several channels, but centers around a handful of the top wealthy families in the ruling oligarchy – including the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Rockefellers, DuPonts and others. Direct ownership is bolstered through interlocking control between other Federal Reserve branches through board members and directors, as well as ties to family dynasty networks.

The Federal Reserve is in turn steered by the agenda of the Bank of International Settlements, an institution which also has ties to ranking families of the banking houses.

“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.” – Paul Warburg, drafter of the Federal Reserve Act.

“Federal Reserve: It is not federal, and it does not have any reserves.” – G Edward Griffin on the Federal Reserve System.

In stark terms, Dr Paul warns that this country and the world will “soon experience a major economic crisis” unless they change course on monetary and economic policy. Without a doubt, a clearer picture of the Federal Reserve decisions and secret deals would prove the tyranny of monetary control.

One positive step Congress may take this year is passing the Audit the Fed bill. Fortunately, Senator Rand Paul is using Senate rules to force the Senate to hold a roll-call vote on Audit the Fed. The vote is expected to take place in the next two-to-three weeks. If Audit the Fed passes, the American people can finally learn the full truth about the Fed’s operations. If it fails, the American people will at least know which senators side with them and which ones side with the Federal Reserve.

The market is vulnerable to any rate increase, as Yellen well knows, while the future prospects for American jobs is being whittled away.

In a vote of no confidence held on Tuesday, the country's parliament voted by 123 to votes to 107 to bring down the minority government and force Mr Passos Coelho's resignation. The collapse was widely expected after the country's three main left opposition forces - the moderate Socialists, Communists and radical Left Bloc - agreed a historic coalition in a bid to form an alternative government last week.

Portugal's Leftist anti-austerity forces have vowed to reverse key economic policies of the previous government, setting Lisbon up for a battle with the EU only a year after it exited a €78 billion bail-out programme.

Ben Nasr Mehdi, a Tunisian who was first arrested in Italy in 2007 and sentenced to seven years imprisonment for plotting terror attacks with an Islamic State-linked group, was caught trying to re-enter the country last month. Authorities discovered him among 200 migrants who were rescued at sea and taken to the island of Lampedusa. Although he gave a false name, migration officers identified him through finger print records, the Independent reports.

German channel n-tv claims the Italian government initially tried to hide the story to avoid “panic” and “scare tactics”. The news did not emerge until several days after Mehdi had been detained last week. Mehdi was then interrogated for several days before being deported back to Tunisia, where he was handed over to local police. The revelation will likely add to fears that Islamist terrorists are using the migrant crisis as a means to enter Europe.

The world has largely stood by as a dangerous tide of intolerance has washed over the region, according to a new study by the international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need. The study includes disturbing data about the plunging numbers of Christians in the part of the world that gave birth to the faith, and makes a dire prediction of what could happen.

“It’s an answer that depends on the response of the world,” Edward Clancy, director of outreach for the United Kingdom-based Aid to the Church in Need, told FoxNews.com. “What response is there going to be toward us if we act?”

“Unless the global community gets involved, we will witness the loss of Christian witnesses in a land that is biblically significant,” Elijah Brown, executive vice president for 21st Century Wilberforce, told FoxNews.com. He noted that Iraq's second-largest city, once home to a thriving Christian community as old as the faith itself, has now been overrun by ISIS and purged of Christians.

As of September, there were 59,737,817 beneficiaries getting Social Security or disability benefits, according to the SSA. At the same time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 148,800,000 people who had either a full- or part-time job in the United States. That means there were only 2.49 people with jobs for each of the 59,737,817 Social Security and disability beneficiaries.

At the same time, there were only 121,839,000 people with full-time jobs in the United States in September, according to BLS. Those 121,839,000 full-time job holders equaled about 2.04 for each of the 59,737,817 people getting Social Security or disability benefits.