Regardless, Texas aims to bring it home. “We want to show off our strength and resilience,” said Giovanni Capriglione, the Republican lawmaker who sponsored the repatriation bill. “This is to be able to say, ‘Hey, listen, Texas is unique, it’s stable, it’s strong…’” But Capriglione, who represents suburban Fort Worth, said it “isn’t some back-door way to create a Texas dollar or Texas currency.” He said getting the gold back to the Lone Star State was about security.

“Whenever you look at these economic collapses, it’s always based on consumer confidence,” he said. “It does make people feel more secure to have the gold here. It just does.”

Texas has a distrust of the federal government that befits a state that was once a country. Former Governor Rick Perry activated its National Guard last year to secure the Mexican border, saying Washington was doing a lousy job. Abbott directed state forces to monitor a US military training exercise called Operation Jade Helm 15 that will take place this summer in Texas and other states.

The fact of the matter is that the US economy is in tatters. The negative economic reports continue to pile up. The only people who have benefited from 6 years of ZIRP and $3.6 trillion in printed money are the ones closest to the spigot: Wall Street, Wall Street’s bought politicians and the wealthy individual and corporate plutocrats.

There’s no telling how much longer the Fed/Government can delay the coming reset, but when it occurs this country will be quickly reset to Third World economic status.

"Sometimes, it can even be morally necessary, when it's about shielding the weaker spouse or young children from the more serious wounds caused by intimidation and violence, humiliation and exploitation," he said. Francis said there were many families in "irregular situations" and the question should be how to best help them, and "how to accompany them so that the child does not become daddy or mummy's hostage".

The issue is likely to be addressed during the upcoming synod - a gathering of bishops - on the family, which Francis hopes will help reconcile Catholic thinking with the realities of believers' lives in the early 21st century.

Officials said Nevada’s Lake Mead, the 79-year-old reservoir created by the massive Hoover Dam, registered 1,074.98 feet (327.7 meters) above sea level late on Tuesday, but was able to rise above a critical mark by early on Wednesday morning. A water level of below 1,075 feet projected for January would translate to water cutbacks in 2016 for two US western states, Arizona and Nevada. An announcement would be made this August.

Lake Mead supplies water to roughly 40 million people and agricultural customers in Nevada, Arizona, Southern California and northern Mexico. The water source and several other man-made reservoirs springing from the Colorado River have dropped to as low as 45 percent of their capacity as the river suffers a 14th straight year of crippling drought.

September 13, 2015 is the last day of the current seven-year agricultural cycle in Israel known as Shemitah. As Rabbi Lazer Brody points out in a recent article, the US economy has suffered from a collapse or crash at the end of at least the past seven Shemitah cycles.

For example, at the end of the previous Shemitah cycle in 2008, the subprime mortgage crisis in the US caused major financial markets to lose nearly a third of their value. At the close of the Shemitah cycle before that, the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 completely shut down Wall Street for a week. When the New York Stock Exchange reopened on September 17, 2001, the market fell 684 points in one day. At the end of the first week of trading following September 11, approximately $1.4 trillion in value was lost. “The fact that the American economy has nose-dived at the termination of the Shemitah year is more than an established pattern,” Brody asserts. Will we see it again this coming September?

The last day of the current Shemitah year falls on a Sunday, when the US stock market is closed. Nevertheless, based on previous Shemitah cycles, a stock market crash could happen in the weeks just before or after September 13.

More doomsday financial predictions are being seen in Greece, where the country has until June 30 to decide whether or not to exit the European Central Bank. If Greece pulls out, the whole country would uncouple itself economically from the rest of Europe, stop using euro currency and return to using the drachma. Whatever happens on June 30, the economic crisis in Greece, many believe, will likely lead to some sort of ripple effect throughout Europe.

The final blood moon of the current lunar tetrad (when four blood moons in a row occur six months apart) is set for September 28, 2015, very soon after the end of the Shemitah year on September 13. This date corresponds with the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, also known as the Feast of Tabernacles. Unlike the previous three, the fourth blood moon is expected to be visible in Jerusalem.

Recent lunar tetrads have coincided with events of tremendous historical significance for Israel. Four blood moons followed the reestablishment of the State of Israel in 1948. In 1967, there was one blood moon before the Six Day War when the divided city of Jerusalem was reunited and three following. Said another way, during the blood moon tetrad of 1948, the Land of Israel was restored to the Jewish people. During the blood moon tetrad of 1967, the reunited city of Jerusalem was restored to the Jewish people. During the blood moon tetrad of 2015, will Israel regain dominion over the Temple Mount and be able to restore God’s presence there after 2,000 years?

Following a late-night emergency summit in Brussels on Monday, Athens laid out plans to carry out a series of economic reforms worth €8 billion over the next two years. They included a rise in VAT for restaurants, abolition of tax exemptions for Greek islands and plans to end early retirement in the country.

The Greeks were told the measures were a good basis for talks, which will continue with finance minsters in Brussels on Wednesday. But the measures are likely to prove a hard sell to Mr Tsipras's parliamentarians, as they cross a number of the "red lines" that have led to a five-month impasse in negotiations. Syriza MP Yannis Michelogiannakis called the proposals a "tombstone" around the country's neck.

"How can you cut a deal that will increase suicides and make people poorer?" he told Greek television. The anti-austerity government admitted its plight had forced it into a position to carry out “harsh” proposals. "There is full comprehension that there are measures in the proposal that are harsh, and they are measures that, under different circumstances, if it was up to us there was no way we would have taken," said government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis.

Any rescue deal will have to be ratified by the Greek parliament if an agreement is struck in the coming weeks. But with only a 12-seat majority in parliament, Mr Tsipras's five-month government faces a collapse should he fail to secure a majority.

Our correspondent says he appears to be alluding to fears that there are those elsewhere in the Eurozone who want to put the Greek Prime Minister in an impossible position, and engineer the collapse of his radical left-wing government. There are also reports that Greece has rejected an IMF counter-proposal calling for bigger VAT increases, and deeper pension and public spending cuts.

The remarks came as Mr Tsipras prepared for fresh talks to secure a debt deal. Greece must repay €1.6 billion (£1.1 billion) to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by the end of the month, or face default and possible exit from the EU. Eurozone finance ministers are due to finalise a deal on Wednesday evening. On Wednesday, the ECB again increased additional emergency funding for Greek banks to stave off fears of a bank run - the fifth time in eight days it has done so as fearful savers withdraw up to €1 billion a day from domestic banks.

Tight schedule - the week ahead:

Wednesday: Eurozone's 19 finance ministers meet to go through details of latest proposals

Thursday-Friday: Scheduled meeting of all 28 EU member states - any agreement could receive leaders' backing here

Saturday-Tuesday: Agreement will need to be approved by Greek parliament and other eurozone governments - including vote in German Bundestag

Tuesday 30 June: Deadline for Greek repayment of €1.6 billion to IMF

Indeed, according to a comprehensive league table of hyperinflation compiled by Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at The John Hopkins University, Greece and Germany are among the worst such inflations of the modern age. If you think Greece is bad, with inflation peaking in October 1944 at 13,800 percent per month – yes, that’s per month – it’s got nothing on Germany, whose inflation rate reached an astonishing 29,500 percent per month in October 1923.

The Weimar inflation was arguably the fault of the Allies, and the reparations settlement forced on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, while the Greek hyperinflation was undoubtedly the work of the Germans, who forced the Greeks to pay the costs of the occupying army. Yet leaving aside the recriminations, the two episodes had the same underlying monetary and fiscal causes, common to virtually all hyperinflations; denied access to debt markets, and with the tax system in a state of collapse, governments tend to resort to the only available alternative to pay their bills – the central bank printing press. The government issues bonds, and the central bank buys them.

It’s the modern day equivalent of the currency debasement that took place under Henry VIII, widely nicknamed in his time “Old Coppernose”, on account of how the increasingly thin layer of silver on the coinage would wear off on this particular part of the king’s image. For everyone’s sake, this needs to end. The tragedy is that there is not much prospect of it any time soon. And even if Greece did leave the euro, the comedians that now front for a government would not have the stomach for the reforms necessary to support a currency board. It might indeed take another hyperinflation to bring this benighted nation to its senses.

As the standoff between the government of leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and its creditors in the European Union and International Monetary Fund has deepened, there have been growing warnings of an "accident" that could force Greece out of the euro.

This is what it may look like. If the pace of withdrawals continues, Greece may have to introduce capital controls, limiting the amount people can take out of their bank accounts and bringing into plain sight the prospect of an exit from the euro that would ravage savings. "It's very possible that this thing we hope to avoid will occur. Of course if it happens, the next step is chaos and catastrophe," said 55-year-old economist Ioannis Simaresis as he queued up to take money out of a cash machine.

For months, Greek banks have relied on emergency infusions of central bank funds to stay afloat, but with more than 4 billion euros taken out of the system this week, reserves are shrinking fast. If the withdrawals continue, a credit system that has been hollowed out during years of recession could reach the point of no return.

But perhaps more importantly from a big picture perspective, Greece may have already breached the upper limit of its borrowing base. JPM calculates Greek banks’ eligible collateral at €121 billion (€38 billion in EFSF bonds, €8 billion in government securities, and €75 billion in “credit claims”). With Friday’s ELA increase, the country’s total borrowings (that’s OMO plus ELA) amount to some €125 billion. Why would the ECB allow this? Because it knows the breach will be promptly limited or reversed on Monday, or there will be a deal.

As Barclays notes, during the same period over which Greek banks lost nearly €30 billion in deposits, banknotes in circulation jumped by some €13 billion. In short, because Greeks are increasingly prone to stuffing their euros in mattresses, a large proportion of the deposit flight has come in the form of hard currency withdrawals, meaning the Bank of Greece is forced to (literally) print billions in physical banknotes.

The amount of banknotes in excess of the quota for Greece (about €27 billion) represents a liability of the Central Bank of Greece to the Eurosystem in addition to the net liabilities related to transactions with the other Central Banks in the Eurosystem (Target 2 liabilities). Of course, given Germany’s massive TARGET2 credit with the ECB, a liability to the Eurosystem is, for all intents and purposes, a liability to Germany.

So we can add the quiet printing of some €13 billion in banknotes to the list of reasons why German Financial Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, a growing number of German MPs, and, increasingly, the German people have run completely out of patience with Athens.

Such a shortfall would have been unimaginable in establishment circles just a few years ago, when it seemed as if no Western economy would face an economic crisis ever again. And how could such a massive shortfall not trigger an immediate Armageddon, sterling crisis and bond market crash?

The problem for the UK is that while our recovery is real, and some genuine fiscal tightening has taken place, many weaknesses remain; and nobody really knows for sure how consumers and businesses will respond to being weaned off from the drug of easy money. The current account deficit is huge; house prices are horrendously inflated, especially in London and the home counties; the gilts market remains astonishingly favourable to the government, with massive demand for what by historical standards remains low yielding securities; the pound has shot up, hitting exporters; and productivity growth remains abysmal.

We continue to be propped up by relatively low oil prices, even if they are much higher than they were. Rates should have risen modestly a while back, to help the economy readjust to more normal conditions; when the monetary tightening does eventually take place, it will come as a shock.

To paraphrase a claim that became infamous five years ago, we shall soon find out whether the UK is still lying on a bed of nitroglycerin...

"The US Secretary of War calls on Europeans to confront the Russian 'aggression'," Lafontaine writes after a strongly-worded introduction. "The Europeans have every reason to oppose the US aggression." The EU recently agreed to extend economic sanctions against Russia for six more months. The introduction of those sanctions was highly encouraged by the US, but according to a recent study, they are hurting the EU more than initially expected, threatening some 2.5 million jobs.

Lafontaine …concludes: "You continue to play with fire, and Europe has paid with revenue declines in trade with Russia and the loss of jobs ... We need a European foreign policy that restrains the warmongering US imperialism!"

First spotted by open source developers, the Chromium browser – the open source basis for Google’s Chrome – began remotely installing audio-snooping code that was capable of listening to users. It was designed to support Chrome’s new “OK, Google” hotword detection – which makes the computer respond when you talk to it – but was installed, and, some users have claimed, it is activated on computers without their permission.

“Without consent, Google’s code had downloaded a black box of code that – according to itself – had turned on the microphone and was actively listening to your room,” said Rick Falkvinge, the Pirate party founder, in a blog post. “Which means that your computer had been stealth configured to send what was being said in your room to somebody else, to a private company in another country, without your consent or knowledge, an audio transmission triggered by … an unknown and unverifiable set of conditions.”

Germany’s rising power can be measured by the roles that German nationals now play inside the EU bureaucracy and the European institutions. German officials and elected members of the European Parliament wield many of Brussels’ levers of power, including the parliament’s presidency, currently held by Martin Schulz.

The plum post of Head of Cabinet to the European Commission’s Luxembourger president, Jean-Claude Juncker, is a German, as was his predecessor when Portugal’s José Manuel Barroso ran the EU executive. Although the culture of the “eurocrats” who make up the EU’s civil service emphasizes disinterested neutrality, it would be naive to think that nationality plays no part at all.

Uwe Corsepius will hand over his post at the Council of Ministers to a senior Danish diplomat on July 1, before taking up his new job as German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s adviser on EU matters. He is widely seen to have exerted considerable influence on the setting of inter-governmental agendas during his time in Brussels. And his counterpart at the European Parliament, Klaus Welle, has shown no sign that he will relinquish his position or soften his ambition to win still greater powers for the parliament.

But counting heads in the EU institutions does not give the full picture of Germany’s ascendancy. Its true nature and extent are to be found in the ranks of civil society. From think tanks and NGOs to media and business lobbying, Germans have become the EU’s foremost movers and shakers. In the face of a possible UK referendum, the challenge for Germany is to provide Europe with the vision and creativity that effective leadership requires, along with the diplomatic skill to avoid alienating its partners.

Glick told Breaking Israel News that there are billions of dollars worth of gold in Mount Eilat, which he and his partner, Yehoshua Friedman, have received an exclusive license to unearth by the Israeli government. Explaining the discovery, Glick said that everything began with Friedman, a Temple Mount researcher who had been studying each of the 12 unique stones set on the breastplate of the High Priest as described in the Bible. Each stone represents one of the 12 tribes of Israel.

During his studies, Friedman realized that without a geology background he could not properly appreciate the depths and meanings behind each of these stones. This led to his discovery that in 2007 gold had been found in the mountains of Eilat by an Australian research team, who later abandoned the dig because the value of gold at the time was not worth their efforts.

When asked what these modern day Biblical explorers plan to do with their billions in gold, Rabbi Glick replied, “Ultimately, we expect to use the gold in the rebuilding of the Third Temple. Whether we use the gold itself for creating vessels and decoration or by selling the findings and using the money to buy the materials and manpower needed to rebuild the Temple, we look forward to that great day!”