The bruising workplace described by The New York Times is basically a stand-in for the white-collar, always-on, male-centric workplace that many US workers know all too well. Amazon culture, as portrayed by the Times, comes off like the pinnacle of what’s prized at the highest reaches of corporate America: Workers kill themselves trying to please a corporation that, at the end of the day, doesn’t care much about them.

Workers don’t stay long with Amazon because of the company’s punishing work ethos, according to the Times reporters, who spoke with more than 100 current and former "Amazonians." "When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness," former Kindle team member Molly Jay told the Times. She was labeled a problem worker after she began taking weekends and nights to care for her father, who was dying from cancer. Workers who became parents at Amazon were also penalized, according to the story.

Time is now rapidly running out. From China to Brazil, the central banks have lost control and at the same time the global economy is grinding to a halt. The FTSE 100 has now erased its gains for the year, but there are signs things could get a whole lot worse.

China was the great saviour of the world economy in 2008. The launching of an unprecedented stimulus package sparked an infrastructure investment boom. The voracious demand for commodities to fuel its construction boom dragged along oil - and resource-rich emerging markets. The Chinese economy has now hit a brick wall. The China slowdown has sent shock waves through commodity markets. The Bloomberg Global Commodity index, which tracks the prices of 22 commodity prices, fell to levels last seen at the beginning of this century.

Billions of dollars in loans were raised on global capital markets to fund new mines and oil exploration that was only ever profitable at previous elevated prices. With oil and metals prices having collapsed, many of these projects are now loss-making.

The great props to the world economy are now beginning to fall. China is going into reverse. And the emerging markets that consumed so many of our products are crippled by currency devaluation. The famed Brics of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, to whom the West was supposed to pass on the torch of economic growth, are in varying states of disarray. The central banks are rapidly losing control. The Chinese stock market has already crashed and disaster was only averted by the government buying billions of shares.

The UK stock market is in its 77th month of a bull market, which began in March 2009. On only two other occasions in history has the market risen for longer. One is in the lead-up to the Great Crash in 1929 and the other before the bursting of the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s. In the US, Professor Robert Shiller’s cyclically adjusted price earnings ratio – or Shiller CAPE – for the S&P 500 stands at 27.2, some 64 percent above its historic average of 16.6 percent. On only three occasions since 1882 has it been higher – in 1929, 2000 and 2007.

If the communal leadership and its members fail to fight, American Jews will find themselves communally disenfranchised. By singling out and demonizing Jewish American opponents of the deal as corrupt, treacherous warmongers, Obama is setting the conditions for treating them as disloyal citizens can expected to be treated. In that meeting with American Jewish leaders, Obama seemed to present them with a choice. He reportedly told AIPAC’s representatives, “If you guys would back down [from their opposition to the deal], I would back down from some of the things I’m doing.”

Actually, he gave them no real options. Obama effectively told the leaders of the American Jewish community that as far as he is concerned, Jews have no right to advance their collective concerns as Jews. If they do, he will attack them. If they give up that right under duress, then he will leave them alone. So remain free and be hounded, or give up your rights and be left alone.

Some commentators have characterized the fight over the deal as a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. This may be the case. But first and foremost, it is a fight over whether or not Jews in America have the same rights as all other Americans. To be sure, Israel will be harmed greatly if Congress fails to vote down this deal. But Israel has other means of defending itself. If this deal goes through, the greatest loser will be American Jewry.

While he probably would take some heavy criticism, this course would let him add the foreign policy breakthrough to his second-term list of accomplishments. Obama doesn't need a congressional OK to give Iran most of the billions of dollars in relief from economic sanctions that it would get under the agreement, as long as Tehran honors its commitments to curb its nuclear program — at least for now.

"A resolution to disapprove the Iran agreement may have substantial political reverberations, but limited practical impact," says Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "It would not override President Obama's authority to enter into the agreement." Lawmakers on their summer break are deciding how to vote.

Pulling the plug on local cellular service already has been done. In 2011, officials with the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in San Francisco cut off service inside four transit stations for three hours after a BART security officer shot and killed a homeless man and protests erupted in reaction.

The shutdown order was made when a protest organizer sought to coordinate activists via cell phone. The San Francisco shutdown, which is supposed to be controlled by the Department of Homeland Security’s Standard Operating Procedure 303, prevented anyone inside the transit stations “from sending or receiving phone calls, messages, emergency notifications and other transmissions,” according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC.

EPIC now is taking its fight for access to the SOP303 plan to the US Supreme Court after a district judge agreed the information should be made public but an appeals court disagreed.

In the YouGov study, individuals were asked to put themselves on that sexuality scale. In total, 72% of the British public scored themselves at the completely heterosexual end of the scale, while 4% were at the completely homosexual end, with 19% stating they were somewhere in between – classed as bisexual by Kinsey.

One of the most striking findings of the new study is that with each generation, people see their sexuality as less fixed and more fluid. The results for 18-24 year-olds are particularly telling, with 43% placing themselves in the non-binary area between 1 and 5 and 52% place themselves at one end or the other. Of these, only 46% say they are completely heterosexual and 6% as completely homosexual.

Public opinion seems to accept the concept that sexual orientation exists along a continuum, rather than being an either/or choice between being straight and gay. According to YouGov, 60% of heterosexuals support this idea, as do 73% of homosexuals. Only 28% of heterosexuals believe that "there is no middle ground – you are either heterosexual or you are not".

Suicide attempts are alarmingly common among transgender individuals such as Lampe; 41% try to kill themselves at some point in their lives, compared with 4.6% of the general public. The numbers come from a study by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the Williams Institute, which analyzed results from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. Researchers are preparing to launch another version of the online survey on Wednesday.

More than a dozen other surveys of transgender people worldwide since 2001 have found similarly high rates, and the problem has grown more visible since Caitlyn Jenner's coming out raised awareness about transgender health issues overall.

Pastor Carl Gallups, a bestselling author, speaker and radio host, said it won’t work. “Boys are boys, and girls are girls,” said Gallups, author of “Be Thou Prepared.” “For those who are uncertain of ‘what they are,’ check your birth certificate or get a DNA test. This is not rocket science. Neither political correctness nor the radical gay agenda ripping through corporate America can change the facts of nature and science.”

Michael Brown, nationally syndicated radio host and author of the forthcoming book “Outlasting the Gay Revolution,” believes Target is taking part in a social experiment that is doomed to failure. “The reality, of course, is that male-female distinctives go to the very core of human nature – indeed, they are what makes the world go ’round – and to create an environment that denies, or dramatically downplays, their existence is to engage in a social experiment that is sure to fail,” Brown asserted.

“The bad news is that we could have a rough ride in the next few years. The good news is that God did, indeed, make us male and female – as the overwhelming, prevailing norm – and those who celebrate those distinctives and build relationships and families based on those distinctives will flourish.”

It showed the number of girls aged 12 to 15 being prescribed the Pill rose from 3.3 per cent in 2002, to 5.2 per cent in 2011. The figure has grown from 50,000 girls to 75,000, the paper reports. Last month the Telegraph revealed more than 33,000 girls under the age of consent have been given contraceptive implants and injections on the NHS over the past four years.

Official figures obtained by the Telegraph show the extent to which NHS sexual health clinics are giving “long-acting” contraceptives to girls aged 15 and below – even though under-age sex is illegal. The implants and injections are given without the need for parental consent.

They’re convinced because they interpret foreign affairs through the prism of Bronze Age biblical prophesy. Without getting bogged down in the colorful details of Christian eschatology, the story runs something like this: In order for Jesus to return and establish his Kingdom, the state of Israel must first be conquered by an invading army (preferably Persian or Arab) – because God says so. The unfortunate part (if you’re Jewish, at least) is that before Christ descends from the clouds, a holocaust of sorts must occur, resulting in the deaths of 2/3 of Israel’s people. For certain Christians, then, Israel must exist as a state (which is why they defend it so passionately), but it must also suffer immensely so that Christians can escape physical death in the form of the Rapture.

This is the rather sordid truth behind the Christian right’s love affair with Israel. In a recent interview on the radio program “Understanding the Times,” Michele Bachmann articulated the raw insanity of this position with perfect clarity. Bachmann called the nuclear agreement with Iran “the most important national security event of my lifetime.”

Not for geopolitical reasons, of course, but because it fulfills God’s prophesy: “All the nations of the world signed an agreement that slams the door against Israel.” Even better, she continued, the agreement prepares the way for Israel’s ruination “with the United States leading that charge.” Which apparently is also part of God’s plan, according to Bachmann’s interviewer, Jan Markell, who expanded on Bachmann’s observation…

“There are consequences to doing things like this against God’s covenant land, there are horrible consequences,” Markell said. “Then you throw in some other things such as the Supreme Court decision back in late June and a lot of other things. Judgment isn’t just coming; judgment is already here.” The prophesy to which Bachmann and Markell refer, as Scott Eric Kaufman noted earlier this month, is Zechariah 12:3, which refers to “all the nations of the earth” gathering against the state of Israel.

And there’s no rules in this free-for-all space race. Rogue, cosmic cowboys reign supreme. While physical damage on Earth would be minimal in a space war, our entire way of living could be at threat. According to Reuters, Earth’s orbit “is looking more and more like the planet’s surface — heavily armed and primed for war”.

At least 1,200 satellites that are orbiting Earth for various uses, including navigation and communication, are also being primed for “planetary surveillance”, Scientific American reports. The satellites circle the globe communicating messages from the likes of the US military, 80 per cent of which is done through civilian satellites.

While the US remains the “undisputed king of the hill” as the “most heavily armed space power”, China and Russia are keen to claim their own territory, working to destroy US satellites and replace them with their own.

“CADA prohibits places of public accommodations from basing their refusal to serve customers on their sexual orientation, and Masterpiece violated Colorado’s public accommodations law by refusing to create a wedding cake for Craig’s and Mullins’ same-sex wedding celebration,” the court wrote. Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm that specializes in religious liberty cases, represented Phillips. They argue that the court is denying their client his fundamental freedoms.

“Jack simply exercised the long-cherished American freedom to decline to use his artistic talents to promote a message with which he disagrees,” ADF attorney Jeremy Tedesco said. “Government has a duty to protect people’s freedom to follow their beliefs personally and professionally rather than force them to adopt the government’s views.”

I spoke to Jack on Thursday just moments after the court ruling was handed down. He remains steadfast in his Christian faith.

“The court’s ruling is not fair,” he said. “It shows that some people have more equal rights than others. When you’re not in line with the same-sex agenda, you don’t have as much equal rights.” As it stands Jack will be required by the government to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples. If he denies anyone service, he will be required to explain why. He is also expected to retrain his staff in the state’s anti-discrimination policies – including his 88-year-old mother.

It sounds like the government wants to round up Phillips and his staff and haul them to a re-education camp – where they can be purged of the religious beliefs that offend the LGBT community. Jack said Christian business owners are under attack – especially those providing goods and services to the wedding industry. “A lot of Christians are under attack – bakers and florists, wedding chapels,” he said.

And when all is said and done Jack Phillips does not answer to the Colorado Court of Appeals. He answers to a Higher Power. “It’s not up to the courts to decide what marriage is,” he said. “It’s up to God to decide that. If we are living in obedience to Jesus Christ and the teachings of the Bible we are on the right side of history – no matter what they say.”

"There is the danger that stones could rain down on areas near the mountain's base, so we are warning residents of those areas to be ready to evacuate if needed," the official added. The agency also said it had raised the warning level on the peak, 990 km southwest of Tokyo, to an unprecedented 4, for prepare to evacuate, from 3.

Japan on Tuesday restarted a reactor at the Sendai nuclear plant, some 50 km from Sakurajima. It is the first reactor to be restarted under new safety standards put in place after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Two years ago, Sakurajima shot ash some 5,000 meters into the air. Japan lies on the "Ring of Fire" - a horseshoe-shaped band of fault lines and volcanoes around the edges of the Pacific Ocean - and is home to more than 100 active volcanoes.

According to Feeding America spokesman Ross Fraser, 46 million Americans got food from a food bank at least one time during 2014. Because the demand has become so overwhelming, some food banks are cutting back on the number of days they operate and the amount of food that is given to each family. Many impoverished Americans are lining up at food banks as early as 6:30 in the morning just so that they can be sure to get something before the food runs out. And yet there are still many people out there that have the audacity to say that everything is just fine in America.

Shame on them for ignoring the pain of millions upon millions of their fellow citizens. Poverty in America is getting worse, not better. And no amount of spin from Barack Obama or his apologists can change that fact. This year, it is being projected that food banks in the United States will give away an all-time record 4 billion pounds of food. Over the past decade, that number has more than doubled. And that number would be even higher if food banks had more food to give away. The demand has become so crushing that some food banks have actually reduced the amount of food each family gets…

All of the ingredients are there for civil unrest to erupt in cities all over the United States. When the next major economic downturn happens, anger and frustration are going to flare to extremely dangerous levels. At this point, it will not take much to set things off. Desperate people do desperate things, and desperation is rising even now in this country. So how did things get so bad? Stupid decisions lead to stupid results, and very soon we will start to pay a very great price for decades of incredibly stupid decisions.