"We wish that Iran would change its policies and stop meddling in the affairs of other countries in the region, in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen," Adel al-Jubeir said at a joint press briefing with his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Riyadh. "It is difficult to have positive relations" with Tehran, "when Saudi Arabia and its people are the target of continuous aggression" from the kingdom's arch rival, said Jubeir.

Saudi Arabia supports rebel groups who are fighting to oust Assad in the Syrian conflict. "We will make sure that we confront Iran's actions and shall use all our political, economic and military powers to defend our territory and people," said Jubeir. He accused Iran of acting like a "colonising state" in Syria, and demanded it pull its fighters out of the country and stop supplying arms to Assad.

"The aim of this delegation's visit is to further promote friendship, deepen cooperation and exchange views with Iran on bilateral military ties and issues of mutual concern," Sun said, according to the statement. The trip will also "promote the preservation of international and regional peace and stability", he added. China and Iran have close diplomatic, economic, trade and energy ties, and China has been active in pushing both the United States and Iran to reach agreement on Iran's controversial nuclear program.

Under a multilateral deal, agreed in July, sanctions imposed by the United States, European Union and United Nations will be lifted in return for Iran agreeing to long-term curbs on a nuclear program that the West has suspected was aimed at creating a nuclear bomb. Sun said that China, the biggest buyer of Iranian oil, was pleased that an agreement had been reached.

The child, named David Hickman, weighed just 3 lbs, 7 ounces at birth. His tragically short life was only 9 hours long. According to reports, the Hickmans went to Shannon’s mother for help when she began having contractions more than two months prior to her due date. The couple says they didn’t notice anything was wrong with the baby until just minutes prior to his death — a claim which an expert on this subject has called a lie. Instead of calling a hospital like most rational people, they prayed over the dying baby and “anointed” his head with oil.

Both halves of the Hickman couple will spend a minimum of 6 years and 3 months in prison for their actions, which is light, considering the fact that their child lost his life over their idiotic beliefs. The judge in the case, Robert Herndon, called one of the cult’s midwives “one of the most dangerous people in Oregon.”

It's happened. The BBC, the pinnacle of quality journalism, joined a string of world-renowned news networks to have grossly misreported a terror attack against Israelis. "Palestinian shot dead after Jerusalem attack kills two" read the headline on Saturday, failing to convey that the casualty was a terrorist who perpetrated a deadly stabbing and shooting attack, rather than an innocent victim.

The BBC headline is a new and unwelcome addition to what seems more like a trend than a series of isolated incidents. In November last year, a shooting spree at a Jerusalem synagogue was reported by CNN as having taken place at a mosque, and only weeks beforehand, the Associated Press led a report on a vehicular attack against Israelis with the headline "Israeli police shoot man in East Jerusalem."

Put together, these reports ostensibly reveal a fundamental anti-Israel bias: To Western journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, violence is one directional, emanating by definition from the Israeli side and directed against the Palestinians. More than latent anti-Semites, the journalists who wrote these shoddy headlines were simply ignorant. They failed to grasp the very rudimentary elements of the story, and exhibited a shocking unawareness of the general context – namely, the "most important story on earth."

How can professional journalists, working for renowned publications read by millions worldwide, make such embarrassing mistakes, time after time? What we see is the proliferation of a custom known as "churnalism," a portmanteau term that refers to journalists being required to produce sizable copy against increasingly tighter deadlines.

The programme, broadcast in late September, purported to show a “dirty thunderstorm” above the Calbuco volcano in southern Chile, with flashes of lighting within clouds of ash. The scene was actually created by using footage from two different eruptions four years apart.

It is the latest fakery row for the BBC, which came under fire for another of its nature programmes, when the Sir David Attenborough programme Frozen Planet was found to have faked a scene of a polar bear being born in the wild.

It transpired that the bear was actually filmed in a zoo, despite Sir David’s voiceover referring to cubs being born “beneath the snow” with intercut footage of polar bears in the wild. At the time, the BBC denied misleading the audience.

 Relying on massive military force (and using gigantic complexes to support it) as the be-all and end-all of power, and belittling diplomacy

 Maintaining standing armies, instead of disbanding military forces between wars

 Using more mercenary forces than citizen troops

 Spending disproportionately large amounts of blood and treasure in order to counter threats on the status quo … which simply exacerbates the threat against the empire

 Going ethically and morally bankrupt

 Ending up having bankers and financiers running the real power

 Suffering great hiccups in finance and trade

 The leaders no longer really believe in or follow the ideals of the founders

The US is also following the age-old recipe for imperial decline by:

 Creating unsustainable levels of inequality

 Destroying upward mobility

 Incurring staggering levels of debt to finance war and luxury goods

 Debasing its currency

 Military overspending

 Runaway corruption

 Apathy and greed

And the decline of the America empire is speeding up due the to US falling into the Thucydides trap [where a rising power causes fear in an established power which escalates toward war - wikipedia].

A poll had been taken to find out how Americans felt about potentially cutting off federal funding for Planned Parenthood. I figured that it would be pretty close to 50/50, and considering all of the revelations that have come out in recent months I wouldn’t have even been surprised if a majority of Americans wanted to defund the organization. Well, it turns out that the survey discovered that Americans are against cutting off federal funding for Planned Parenthood by a more than two to one margin.

Here is an excerpt from that USA Today article…

“Some congressional Republicans remain determined to cut off federal funding for Planned Parenthood, but a nationwide USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds Americans back government support for the group by more than 2-1. Two-thirds of those surveyed, 65%, say funding should continue for the group, which provides contraception, cancer screening and other health services to women; 29% say it should be cut off.”

So for those of us that are awake and that do still care about this country, let us mourn for America, because at this point there does not appear to be much hope for her.

“We don’t contemplate any change, but nor does Israel,” Kerry said Monday in Madrid, Spain. “Israel understands the importance of that status quo. What is important is to make sure everybody understands what that means. We are not seeking some new change. We are not seeking outsiders or others to come in.”

France has introduced a proposal to the United Nations Security Council that would station international observers on the site, which is holy to Jews and Muslims. [Israel’s] Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan over the weekend called the French initiative a “prize” for Palestinian violence.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting that Israel cannot accept the resolution. “It doesn’t mention Palestinian incitement; it doesn’t mention Palestinian terrorism; and it calls for the internationalization of the Temple Mount,” he said. “Israel will protect the holy sites, will guard the status quo. Israel is not the problem on the Temple Mount. Israel is the solution.”

PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, almost fizzled out earlier this year when its leader resigned after a photo was published of him posing as Hitler. But it has swelled again as Germany implements Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to accept a tide of refugees that could exceed a million this year, as she argues that Germany can not only cope but, with its aging population, will benefit in the long term.

PEGIDA supporters waved the national flag and carried posters bearing slogans such as "Hell comes with fake refugees" and "Every people should have its country, not every people a piece of Germany". Gathering outside Dresden's historic opera house, the Semperoper, PEGIDA supporters chanted "Deport! Deport!" and "Merkel must go!".

"We're just normal people who are scared of what's coming," said 37-year-old Patrick, a car mechanic. "As a German citizen who pays taxes, you feel like you're being taken for a ride."

42-year CIA veteran Milton Goodman explains:

“In the spring of 1961, I was part of a small group of undergraduates who met with the president’s brother, Milton Eisenhower, who was then president of Johns Hopkins University. Milton Eisenhower and a Johns Hopkins professor of political science, Malcolm Moos, played major roles in the drafting and editing of the farewell speech of January 1961.

The actual drafter of the speech, Ralph E Williams, relied on guidance from Professor Moos. Milton Eisenhower explained that one of the drafts of the speech referred to the ‘military-industrial-Congressional complex’ and said that the president himself inserted the reference to the role of the Congress, an element that did not appear in the delivery of the farewell address.

When the president’s brother asked about the dropped reference to Congress, the president replied: “It was more than enough to take on the military and private industry. I couldn’t take on the Congress as well.”

Indeed, Congress members – part of the fatcat club which makes money hand over fist from war – are heavily invested in the war industry, and routinely trade on inside information … perhaps even including planned military actions.

In a scathing assessment of Western foreign policy, parliamentary speaker Mohammad Jihad al-Laham said Russia's intervention in the region was having a positive difference whereas America and Britain had created instability and war. He also provided more evidence of Putin's growing grip on power in the war-torn country, saying that Syria was ready to forge even closer ties with Russia.

The firebrand politician - who is little more than a stooge for brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad - also branded US-led airstrikes "illegal" because they had not been requested by the Syrian government. He said: "Things that have been done for the last 15 days by Syria in cooperation with Russia exceed achievements of US-led alliance in the last year.

“We will make efforts to develop friendly relations between Russia and Syria that will have positive effects upon the whole world and harmonize with norms of international law." Putin says his bombers have blasted more than 100 Islamist positions including a key command centre and a suicide belt factory. But the US and Britain have accused him of only looking to prop up Assad's regime, and say the vast majority of strikes are actually hitting moderate rebels including the Syrian Free Army.

But bigger trends are at play globally. We are seeing the return of great power politics – and with it, the risk of powerful states going to war. Conflict with the likes of Russia or China was something that seemed buried with the end of the Cold War. Yet today’s simmering tensions mean there is a risk of such an outcome becoming all too real.

As in the past, it is perfectly possible that a third world war could start with a small event, or even by accident. One of the many Russian bomber planes now probing NATO’s borders could collide with an RAF Typhoon, prompting an aerial skirmish the likes of which the world has not seen for decades.

Indeed, the skies over Syria are starting to get dangerously crowded, with Russian jets flying near US planes on bombing runs, and sparring with NATO air defences in neighbouring Turkey. Perhaps it could happen at sea, when a Japanese or American ship scrapes paint with its Chinese Navy counterpart amid the reefs in the Pacific that are being militarized as part of Asia’s current arms race.

He said patients often came in complaining of a headache but that a simple heel-to-toe test revealed that they had developed a backwards curve in the neck having spent hours hunched over electronic devices. "The condition is called 'text neck' because it is often caused when people sit with their heads dropped forward looking at their devices for several hours at a time. Instead of a normal forward curve, patients can be seen to have a backwards curve. It can be degenerative, often causing head, neck, shoulder and back pain.

Dr Carter, from Niagara Park on Australia's New South Wales Central Coast, warned that the condition could lead to anxiety and depression as well as spinal damage. And he said 50 per cent of the patients he diagnosed were school-aged children and teenagers.