In a speech at a Tehran mosque punctuated by chants of "Death to America" and "Death to Israel", Khamenei said he wanted politicians to examine the agreement to ensure national interests were preserved, as Iran would not allow the disruption of its revolutionary principles or defensive abilities.

An arch conservative with the last word on high matters of state, Khamenei repeatedly used the phrase "whether this text is approved or not", implying the accord has yet to win definitive backing from Iran's factionalized political establishment. "Whether the deal is approved or disapproved, we will never stop supporting our friends in the region and the people of Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Lebanon. Even after this deal our policy towards the arrogant US will not change," he said.

Under the agreement reached on Tuesday, sanctions will be gradually removed in return for Iran accepting long-term curbs on a nuclear program that the West has suspected was aimed at creating a nuclear bomb. Iran denies it seeks a nuclear bomb. Khamenei's combative remarks about US policies in the Middle East may sit awkwardly with a diplomatic offensive Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif plans in coming days in the wake of the deal.

The EMP Commission to Congress reported that if the power grid was down for a full year, upwards of 90 percent of the population would die, either from starvation, sickness or civil unrest. The most public action was taken by the Pentagon, which has decided to move its command center for North America into an EMP-proof bunker.

In April it was revealed that the headquarters for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the US Northern Command were moving back into an underground facility inside Cheyenne Mountain outside Colorado Springs. “Because of the very nature of the way that Cheyenne Mountain is built, it’s EMP-hardened,” NORAD and North Command’s top officer, Admiral William Gortney, told the press. “It wasn’t really designed to be that way, but the way it was constructed makes it that way.”

The Cheyenne Mountain Complex was built in the 1960s to coordinate US and Canadian defenses during the Cold War. The Pentagon will spend $1.5 billion to upgrade the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, which was closed in 2004, Defense One reported. Facilities inside the mountain include sleeping quarters, a water supply and a power station. All US military forces presumably would be directed from the facility in the event of an EMP attack or a solar storm (GMD incident) that took out the power grid.

Mr Abe’s party and its allies in the lower house of Parliament approved the package of 11 security-related bills after opposition lawmakers walked out in protest and as demonstrators chanted noisily outside, despite a gathering typhoon. The upper chamber, which Mr Abe’s coalition also controls, is all but certain to endorse the legislation as well.

The vote was the culmination of months of contentious debate in a society that has long embraced pacifism to atone for wartime aggression. It was a significant victory for Mr Abe, a conservative politician who has devoted his career to moving Japan beyond guilt over its militarist past and toward his vision of a “normal country” with a larger role in global affairs.

Mr Abe has pressed this agenda, though, against the wishes of much of the Japanese public, and his moves have generated unease across Asia, especially in countries Japan once occupied and where its troops committed atrocities. Final passage of the bills would represent a break from the strictly defensive stance maintained by the Japanese military in the decades since the war.

EU Commission President Jean Claude-Juncker has stated in the last few weeks that he wants a European Army and a command and control structure has already been set up in Brussels. Some in the British government, especially many in the Treasury, seem to think this is good news as it means we can continue to cut our military expenditure and therefore our capability, because we can rely on our EU colleagues to help us out.

A British ‘Yes’ vote will lead to deeper military integration and activity, and a reduced Anglo-American influence. The emergence of this EU army indeed directly threatens the continued existence of NATO.

“How is it not news that senior executive at Planned Parenthood, an organization that receives millions of taxpayer dollars each year, seems to be violating the law and selling aborted babies’ body parts apparently obtained through illegal partial-birth abortions? This practice is as ghoulish as anything Josef Mengele ever did. And this isn’t news?” asks Dan Gainor, vice president for culture at the conservative media watchdog.

“ABC and CBS are so outlandishly pro-abortion they passed on the news that a taxpayer-funded entity appears to have been breaking the law and trafficking human body parts. As with the Gosnell nightmare, journalists have refused to cover this story because it upsets the narrative they actively push which is that Planned Parenthood cares about women’s health,” Mr Gainor adds.

Democrats have not had much to say about the situation either. Live Action News, a pro-life news site, describes the party as “deafeningly silent.” Some Republican lawmakers have called for an investigation of the grisly revelations revealed by the video; 11 of the GOP presidential hopefuls have already issued statements condemning the findings.

“This latest expose of Planned Parenthood’s trafficking of baby parts for profit should be the final nail in the coffin for the abortion giant. Congress must take immediate action to stop all taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood and end the bankrolling of this horrific human rights abuser,” says Lila Rose, president of Live Action - a youth-led organization supporting “a culture of life and advancing human rights,” and the parent group for the aforementioned news site.

It has long been fighting an expanding coalition of free marketeers, parliamentary "souverainistes", anti-immigrant populists on the Right. It has now lost its remaining emotional hold on the Left after the scorched-earth treatment of Greece over the past five months - culminating in the vindictive decision to impose yet harsher terms on this crushed nation just days after its cri de coeur in a landslide referendum. This has been coming for a long time. We Conservatives have watched in disbelief as one Socialist party after another immolates itself on the altar of monetary union, defending a project that favours the elites - a "bankers' ramp", as the old Left used to call it.

As for the conduct of Germany over the past week, what can one politely say? It is deemed poor taste to mention that the allied powers agreed to wipe out half of Germany's external liabilities at the London Debt Agreement in February 1953. This act of statesmanship came less than eight years after the end of the Second World War, and the Nazi occupation of Greece, when the horrors were still fresh in everybody's mind. It is roughly equivalent to the lapse in time today since the Lehman crisis.

Debt relief came at some cost to Britain, the biggest pre-war creditor. It was agreed in the collective interest, on the basis of economic science, and deliberately framed as a "negotiation among equals" in order to clear away the fog of moral judgments. The result was the German Wirtschaftswunder and the glory years of post-War reconstruction. Whatever you think of Greece's behaviour - and it hasn't hurt anybody - can we not at least have a minimum of common sense?

We already know that the EMU accord - if that is the right word – is an economic and diplomatic fiasco of the first order. It does serious damage to the moral credibility of the EU but resolves nothing. There is not the slightest chance that Greece will be able to stabilize its debt and return to viability under the Carthaginian settlement imposed on Alexis Tsipras - after 17 hours of psychological “water-boarding”, as one EU official put it.

The latest paper by the International Monetary Fund has torn away the fig-leaf. The country needs a 30-year moratorium on debt payments and probably outright subsidies to recover from the devastation of the past six years. Instead it gets pro-cyclical fiscal contraction of 2 percent of GDP by next year. Some are already comparing the terms to the Versailles Treaty but this does not quite capture the depravity of it. The demands imposed on Germany in 1919 were certainly vindictive and narrow-minded – as Keynes rightly alleged – but they were not, on the face of it, beyond reach.

France was forced to pay reparations after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 that were roughly equivalent to Versailles, albeit in very different circumstances. It dutifully did so, while plotting revenge. What Greece is being asked to do is scientifically impossible. Almost everybody involved in the talks knows this. Yet the lie goes on because the dysfunctional nature of EMU politics and governance makes it impossible to come clean. The country is dishonestly kept in a permanent state of crisis.

Wolfgang Schauble is entirely right to argue that a velvet divorce and an orderly exit from the euro for five years would be a “better way” for Greece, as he did on German radio this morning. It would allow the country to regain competitiveness at a stroke without a disastrous over-shoot or the risk that events might spin out of control. It would clear the way for proper debt relief – or a standard IMF-style package.

Right now, the debt to GDP ratio for the entire planet is up to an all-time record high of 286 percent, and globally there is approximately 200 TRILLION dollars of debt on the books. That breaks down to about $28,000 of debt for every man, woman and child on the entire planet. And since close to half of the population of the world lives on less than 10 dollars a day, there is no way that all of this debt can ever be repaid. The only “solution” under our current system is to kick the can down the road for as long as we can until this colossal debt pyramid finally collapses in upon itself.

As we are seeing in Greece, you can eventually accumulate so much debt that there is literally no way out. The other European nations are attempting to find a way to give Greece a third bailout, but that is like paying one credit card with another credit card because virtually everyone in Europe is absolutely drowning in debt.

Even if some “permanent solution” could be crafted for Greece, that would only solve a very small fraction of the overall problem that we are facing. The nations of the world have never been in this much debt before, and it gets worse with each passing day. According to a new report from the Jubilee Debt Campaign, there are currently 24 countries in the world that are facing a full-blown debt crisis…

■ Armenia

■ Belize

■ Costa Rica

■ Croatia

■ Cyprus

■ Dominican Republic

■ El Salvador

■ The Gambia

■ Greece

■ Grenada

■ Ireland

■ Jamaica

■ Lebanon

■ Macedonia

■ Marshall Islands

■ Montenegro

■ Portugal

■ Spain

■ Sri Lanka

■ St Vincent and the Grenadines

■ Tunisia

■ Ukraine

■ Sudan

■ Zimbabwe

And there are another 14 nations that are right on the verge of one…

■ Bhutan

■ Cape Verde

■ Dominica

■ Ethiopia

■ Ghana

■ Laos

■ Mauritania

■ Mongolia

■ Mozambique

■ Samoa

■ Sao Tome e Principe

■ Senegal

■ Tanzania

■ Uganda

So what should be done about this? Should we have the “wealthy” countries bail all of them out? Well, the truth is that the “wealthy” countries are some of the biggest debt offenders of all. Just consider the United States. Our national debt has more than doubled since 2007, and at this point it has gotten so large that it is mathematically impossible to pay it off. Europe is in similar shape. Members of the eurozone are trying to cobble together a “bailout package” for Greece, but the truth is that most of them will soon need bailouts too…

Once all of these dominoes start falling, the consequences for our massively overleveraged global financial system will be absolutely catastrophic…

“Pope Francis knows that heavy debt loads cause poverty and inequality,” said Eric LeCompte, who consulted the Vatican on its position. LeCompte is the head of the religious development organization Jubilee USA Network. “The Pope’s statement is a logical extension of the Catholic Church’s strong support of debt relief for struggling countries.” Last year, LeCompte led a delegation of global Jubilee organizations to advise Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin on the need for a bankruptcy process to address inequality. The Catholic Church is a founder of Jubilee USA and supports its efforts to win debt relief for struggling countries.

In September of 2014, the United Nations General Assembly voted 124-11 to develop the bankruptcy process that Pope Francis referenced. LeCompte addressed the UN earlier this year on the creation of the process. This Fall, the United Nations is set to review progress on the proposal. Because International Monetary Fund (IMF) studies point to debt as a cause of inequality, the IMF is exploring aspects of a bankruptcy process based on an April 2013 paper. In addition to the debt crisis in Greece, nearly 50 countries‎ face worrying levels of debt distress according to World Bank statistics.

"Rome is on the verge of collapse," Giancarlo Cremonesi, the president of the Rome Chamber of Commerce, told Reuters. "It is unacceptable that a major city which calls itself developed can find itself in such a state of decay." Rome is the most popular tourist destination in the country, attracting some 10.61 million foreign visitors in 2014. This was down from more than 11 million the year before and locals say the poor state of infrastructure is hurting.

"All my clients say Rome is beautiful, but all of them, without fail, complain about the services," said Marcello Lazazzera, who owns a small bed and breakfast, Domus Cornelia. "The metros never arrive on time, the stations are full of pickpockets, the streets are full of rubbish. Instead of getting better, the situation is getting worse."

It could get worse still in 2016, when 25 million pilgrims are expected to flow into the Eternal City in response to Pope Francis's call for an extraordinary Holy Year - one of the Roman Catholic Church's most important events.

This manipulation works because the hedge funds, the main purchasers of the short contracts, do not intend to take delivery of the gold represented by the contracts, settling instead in cash. This means that the banks who sold the uncovered contracts are never at risk from their inability to cover contracts in gold. At any given time, the amount of gold represented by the paper gold contracts (“open interest’) can exceed the actual amount of physical gold available for delivery, a situation that does not occur in other futures markets.

In other words, the gold and silver futures markets are not a place where people buy and sell gold and silver. These markets are places where people speculate on price direction and where hedge funds use gold futures to hedge other bets according to the various mathematical formulas that they use. The fact that bullion prices are determined in this paper, speculative market, and not in real physical markets where people sell and acquire physical bullion, is the reason the bullion banks can drive down the price of gold and silver even though the demand for the physical metal is rising.

For example last Tuesday the US Mint announced that it was sold out of the American Eagle one ounce silver coin. It is a contradiction of the law of supply and demand that demand is high, supply is low, and the price is falling. Such an economic anomaly can only be explained by manipulation of prices in a market where supply can be created by printing paper contracts.

If this supposition is correct, it indicates that seven years of bailing out the big banks that control the Federal Reserve and US Treasury at the expense of the US economy has threatened the US dollar to the extent that the dollar must be protected at all cost, including US regulatory tolerance of illegal activity to suppress gold and silver prices.

Higher interest rates will provide long-awaited relief to savers, who have seen their returns shrink in the wake of the financial crisis. But it will increase the pressure on borrowers, who will have to pay more for their mortgages and credit card bills. The increase in interest rates could also hit the housing market.

The Bank of England base rate - used as the starting point for banks’ and building societies’ saving and borrowing rates - is expected to rise slowly over the next few years, said Mr Carney.

While a dino receptionist does the check-in and check-out for English-speaking visitors, a female android resembling a remote ancestor of the robotic servant from the “Humans” TV-series welcomes guests in Japanese. They are accompanied by an automated trolley that takes guests’ luggage to their room. A transparent locker system, called a “robot cloak room,” features a giant industrial-looking robotic arm.

During check-in, visitors still have to type in information on a touch panel screen. They will also have to get used to facial recognition technology replacing standard electronic keys. The virtual concierge, a doll-like robot with voice recognition, is responsible for reminding guests of breakfast time and scheduled events. Moreover, there is a lamp-sized robot in every room, nicknamed Tuly for its fat, pink tulip shape, which can provide information on time and weather, turn the lights on and off, and even give guests a wake-up call.

But “they still can’t make beds,” said president of HTB company, Hideo Sawada, as cited by AP. “I wanted to highlight innovation. I also wanted to do something about hotel prices going up.” He added that the introduction of robots served as a drive in creating “the most efficient hotel in the world” with the help of cutting-edge technology. Sawada hopes that his robots will soon be able to master the Chinese and Korean languages. He also has plans to open another hotel abroad.

Tehran entered these talks, let us not forget, out of sheer desperation to escape the crippling effects of the economic sanctions imposed by the West in retaliation for Iran’s less-than-forthright disclosures about its nuclear activities. These included building a heavily fortified underground uranium enrichment facility at Natanz (whose existence was exposed by the Iranian opposition in 2003) and a similar establishment built deep within a mountain at Fordow (whose existence was exposed by British intelligence in 2009).

Iran’s obsession with acquiring the ability to enrich uranium well beyond the level required for civilian and commercial applications, as well as its concurrent investment in building ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, has led Western intelligence to conclude – not unreasonably – that Tehran has been working on a clandestine atomic weapons programme.

One of the main objectives of the Vienna talks, part of a diplomatic process that first began more than a decade ago, has been to get to the bottom of Tehran’s deliberate obfuscations. Western officials wanted to establish whether a country that is sitting on the world’s second largest oil reserves was seriously developing an indigenous nuclear power industry, or something far more sinister.

Yet such is the Iranians’ negotiating skill that, despite years of intense diplomatic activity on the part of the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany), we are still no closer to understanding precisely what they have been up to. And yet, far from holding the Iranians to account for their deception, we now have the bizarre situation where we have world leaders from Washington to Tehran – even including Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad – celebrating the conclusion of a deal which leaves us none the wiser about Iran’s true nuclear intentions.

Moreover, the deal set out in Vienna yesterday allows Iran to retain vital capabilities that can be used for making nuclear weapons, such as developing more sophisticated methods of enriching uranium to weapons grade, as well as continuing development work on its ballistic missile programme.

The main reason we have ended up with this apology for a deal is that, rather than maintain the economic pressure on Iran until it guaranteed proper cooperation, President Barack Obama indicated he was more interested in securing his foreign policy legacy by signing a historic accord, irrespective of the concessions this would require.

"The dramatic deterioration in debt sustainability points to the need for debt relief on a scale that would need to go well beyond what has been under consideration to date,” said the IMF in a confidential report. Greek public debt will spiral to 200 percent of GDP over the next two years, compared to 177 percent in an earlier report on debt sustainability issued just two weeks ago.

The findings are explosive. The document amounts to a warning that the IMF will not take part in any EMU-led rescue package for Greece unless Germany and the EMU creditor powers finally agree to sweeping debt relief. This vastly complicates the rescue deal agreed by eurozone leaders in marathon talks over the weekend since Germany insists that the bail-out cannot go ahead unless the IMF is involved.

The creditors were aware of the IMF’s report as early as Sunday, yet chose to sweep it under rug. Extracts were leaked to Reuters on Tuesday, forcing the matter into the open. Its conclusions validate what Greece’s Syriza government has been saying all along. The debt cannot be repaid. Any formula that fails to recognize this merely stores up an even bigger crisis down the road.