To set the stage, following the release of the first two shocking videos showing top Planned Parenthood doctors discussing and arranging the sale of aborted babies with actors posing as biotech firm officials, the biotech company StemExpress, which purchases aborted babies from Planned Parenthood to sell to research universities and other places, got a judge to issue a restraining order preventing the release of any more videos related to StemExpress.

Why?

Center for Medical Progress president David Daleiden, who coordinated the shocking undercover videos, explained to CNN this morning that StemExpress has something to hide — a secret that has significant bearing on Planned Parenthood: “In a meeting with their top leadership where their leadership admitted that they sometimes get fully intact fetuses shipped to their laboratory from the abortion clinics they work with, and that could be prima facie evidence of born alive infants. And so that’s why they’re trying to suppress that videotape and they’re very scared of it,” Daleiden said.

What does that mean?

If true, that means Planned Parenthood could be breaking the federal law known as the Born Alive Infants Protection Act that requires abortion clinics, hospitals and other places that do abortions to provide appropriate medical care for a baby born alive after a failed abortion or purposefully birthed to “let die.” That would be one of the potential ways Planned Parenthood could produce a “fully intact” baby to sell to StemExpress for research. Most “crunchy” abortion methods would do damage to the baby’s body.

Astonishingly, Kerry himself said Wednesday that he has not read the agreements but has been “briefed” on their contents. Senator Tom Cotton, Republican for Arkansas, wanted to know why these deals can’t be made public. “Why can’t we confirm or deny the content of these agreements in public?” Cotton asked in a Senate hearing. “Why is this classified? It’s not a sensitive US government document. The Ayatollahs know what they agreed to.” “Because we respect the process of the IAEA and we don’t have their authorization to reveal what is a confidential agreement between them and another country,” said Kerry.

Cotton said, “So the ayatollahs will know what they agreed to but not the American people?” Kerry said members of Congress would be able to learn about it in a classified briefing. Kerry said he believes one staffer in his department may have read the agreement "at their facility" but didn't possess a copy of it. "The IAEA is an independent entity under the United Nations, Senator, which I know you know." "I have received several classified briefings on the deal, and look forward to another one, but what Congress would like is the text of the deal," Cotton said.

Cotton said reports by media, including the latest by the Associated Press, indicate that Iran will be allowed to collect its own samples and submit those samples to the IAEA, "much like an NFL player taking his own urine sample and sending it to Roger Goodell for a drug test. Can you confirm or deny that that is the content of those side deals?" "I can't here in this session," Kerry responded. Today's testy exchanges in the Senate hearing come a day after similarly heated exchanges between Kerry and Representative Scott Perry in the House.

Perry gave Kerry a public dress-down on the Iran deal, suggesting the secretary of state could have forged a better deal if he had only kept America's interests as the top priority. Perry said: "There is a history for … getting a better deal and if the ayatollah doesn't like it and doesn't want to negotiate it, oh boo hoo, we're here for America, we stand for America. You represent America," according to news video of the Capitol Hill committee meeting.

Kerry replied a bit tersely: "Congressman, I don't need any lessons from you about who I represent. I represent and fought for our country since I was out of college."

What is different this year is the political storm from which she has emerged in Berlin and the speculation still rife in Germany about her future. It has been a bruising few months. Largely due to the drama of the Greek debt crisis, whose twists and turns could have come straight from one of the operas Mrs Merkel so enjoys.

There was open rebellion from 60 of her own conservative MPs, who refused to back a third bailout for Greece. But she was also criticised by those who felt, conversely, her stance on Greece had been too harsh. She has been chancellor for 10 years and must choose whether to lead her conservatives into the next general election in 2017.

Commentators wonder whether Mrs Merkel's moment has passed. There are few obvious challengers.

Tonnes of comments have been written in the last weeks about how Germany has put its narrow national interests above the European interest. By turning Grexit into a real policy option, the narrative goes, Schäuble has further damaged Greece and weakened the eurozone.

The only problem with that story is that Schäuble doesn’t fit into the role of the villain. Schäuble is the last political survivor of the Helmut Kohl era. As a German interior minister, he managed the internal aspects of German reunification in 1990. And since his youth, Schäuble, born in 1942 in southwestern Germany close to the French border and the son of a tax adviser, is a firm believer in European integration.

He was the co-author of a legendary paper in 1994 (Schäuble-Lamers Paper), according to which Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg — so-called core Europe — would integrate much faster and more deeply than the rest. Schäuble wants to move ahead now because he feels that the eurozone is fragile and that time is running out. His ambition is to become the architect of a eurozone that is viable in the long term, with members that sign up to the same policies and with capable and competent institutions.

The future of the eurozone and of the EU will be decided in many European capitals. Paris and Brussels will be first among them, but Berlin will also be key. Germany has become the EU’s centre of gravity in the last years, because of its own weight and the relative success of its economy, but also because of the country’s deep commitment to the EU. Unlike in most other EU countries, all major parties in Germany are enthusiastically pro-EU, and the political class still signs up to federalism as the ultimate vision for Europe’s future.

Like spraying lighter fluid on a roaring barbecue, the neocons also want a military escalation in Ukraine to burn the ethnic Russians out of the east, and the neocons dream of spreading the blaze to Moscow with the goal of forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin. In other words, more and more fires of Imperial “regime change” abroad even as the last embers of the American Republic die at home.

Much of this “strategy” is personified by a single Washington power couple: arch-neocon Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and an early advocate of the Iraq War, and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who engineered last year’s coup in Ukraine that started a nasty civil war and created a confrontation between nuclear-armed United States and Russia.

There’s also a family-business aspect to these wars and confrontations, since the Kagans collectively serve not just to start conflicts but to profit from grateful military contractors who kick back a share of the money to the think tanks that employ the Kagans. For instance, Robert’s brother Frederick works at the American Enterprise Institute, which has long benefited from the largesse of the Military-Industrial Complex, and his wife Kimberly runs her own think tank called the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

So, to understand the enduring influence of the neocons – and the Kagan clan, in particular – you have to appreciate the money connections between the business of war and the business of selling war. When the military contractors do well, the think tanks that advocate for heightened global tensions do well, too. And, it doesn’t hurt to have friends and family inside the government making sure that policymakers do their part to give war a chance — and to give peace the old heave-ho.

Most people, however, have no awareness at all that commercial wheat products are saturated with glyphosate before harvest. They think glyphosate is only used on genetically modified crops like corn and soybeans. But it turns out that glyphosate is routinely used as a wheat crop drying chemical to speed up harvesting. The very chemical that was designed to kill weeds, in other words, is so toxic to plant life that commercial farmers are using it to accelerate the death of wheat crops, thereby reducing the delay between cutting the crop and delivering it to market. The upshot is that the commercial wheat products you're buying in the store are saturated with deadly, cancer-causing glyphosate weed killer.

Essentially, much of the entire non-organic wheat-based food supply is now heavily contaminated with glyphosate, a toxic chemical now widely recognized as being genotoxic (damaging to your DNA and potentially leading to cancer). To protect yourself from glyphosate, it is crucial that you only purchase and consume certified organic wheat products. Wheat, by the way, contains gluten. It is my belief that many of the complaints people have been voicing against gluten are really symptoms of glyphosate toxicity and not directly caused by gluten itself. This issue needs serious further investigation, but a simple way to test this yourself is to switch to organic wheat products and see how those work for you.

The glyphosate sprayed on wheat crops ends up in your food. When you eat glyphosate-sprayed wheat, you inevitably absorb this cancer-causing chemical into your own body. "This chemical doesn't break down immediately, and can follow the grain into food manufacturing processes," explains the Soil Association. "Tests by the Defra committee on Pesticide Residues in Food (PRiF) have found that as much as 30% of UK bread contained this weedkiller. UK wheat will also be used for lots of other foods including biscuits."

The bottom line? If you're eating products derived from wheat that isn't organic, you're probably eating cancer-causing weed killer. In the UK, a recent study found that 70% of the population had traces of glyphosate in their urine. In the United States, the corporate-sellout EPA has known for decades that glyphosate causes cancer, but they actively hid this data from the public. Because it's so widely used in conventional agriculture, glyphosate is found in 75% of air and rain samples. This means you'll even get glyphosate raining down on your own home garden!

An IMF official said the fund would withhold financial support unless it has guarantees Greece can carry out a "comprehensive" set of reforms and will be the beneficiary of debt relief from its European creditors. The comments came after the IMF's executive board was told that the institution could no longer continue pumping more money into the debtor nation, according to a leaked document seen by the Financial Times.

The Washington-based Fund has been torn over its involvement in Greece - its largest ever recipient country. The world's "lender of last resort" said it would continue talks with its creditor partners and the Leftist government of Athens, but made it clear the onus of keeping Greece in the eurozone now fell on Europe's reluctant member states. "There is a need for difficult decisions on both sides... difficult decisions in Greece regarding reforms, and difficult decisions among Greece's European partners about debt relief," said the official. "One should not be under the illusion that one side of it can fix the problem."

The delay could last well into next year, forcing the other two-thirds of the Troika - the European Central Bank and European Commission - to bear the full costs of keeping Greece afloat.

Prime minister Alexis Tsipras is also battling an internal revolt among his Syriza party over the recessionary measures he was forced to submit to in a July 13 agreement. Mr Tsipras delivered a firm ultimatum to his restless Central Committee, which is made up of 200 party members, half of whom have already voted to reject the conditions to re-start talks.

He called on them to hold an internal party vote as early as Sunday on whether or not to back his government. Should Mr Tsipras fail to gain a majority, he has said he will call snap elections as early as September. Up to 17 Syriza members resigned from the party following the showdown, according to reports in Greek media. “Whoever thinks another government and another prime minister would do better should speak up,” said a defiant Mr Tsipras.

The "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" quoted Brussels diplomats as saying that at a meeting of EU finance ministers two weeks ago, Schäuble had called for a quick discussion between EU states about how the EC could fulfil its original functions, which also include monitoring competition within the EU.

Schäuble was concerned that the body's increasing political activities made it incapable of carrying out its function of watching over the correct implementation of the European treaties, according to the report. The paper said Schäuble has proposed setting up new, politically independent bodies to take over monitoring tasks in view of the EC's increasing political activity as a "European government."

According to the paper's report, Schäuble feels that EC president Jean-Claude Juncker exceeded the body's remit in recent negotiations over new loans for Greece. The German finance minister has often stated that the EC was not empowered to negotiate over Greek loans, but that this was the task of the Eurogroup - made up of eurozone finance ministers - as the representative of European creditors, the paper said.

Schäuble attracted much criticism during the recent negotiations on a third bailout for Greece because of his proposal for Greece to temporarily leave the common euro currency. The German Finance Ministry has dismissed the report, saying that Schäuble merely thought it "important for the Commission to find the right balance between its political function and its role as guardian of the treaties." This had nothing to do with a "disempowerment of the Commission," the ministry said.

The current issue of German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reports on plans to more closely coordinate eurozone members’ budgets. In the future, a European finance minister could control a significant chunk of what were previously national budgets. A new European treasury might also have its own tax powers, either by taking over national taxes or being allowed to levy surcharges on them.

The idea behind these proposals is simple. By consolidating national budgets, it would be possible to run eurozone-wide spending programs. This is an attractive proposition for stimulus-minded politicians, intent on fine-tuning the operations of eurozone economies and compensating for differences between them.

There is only one problem with these plans: They will not work.

There are numerous ways in which plans for European fiscal integration will fail. The first one is that there is close to zero public appetite for fiscal integration in those countries currently underwriting the various eurozone bailout programs. The second problem with the proposals being discussed is that they run counter to the institutional and legal framework of the monetary union. Its basic idea, beginning with the Treaty of Maastricht, had always been to compel eurozone members to fiscal discipline.

Then there is a political problem with having a European treasury, a European tax system and a European finance minister. How could such a system claim legitimacy? As Der Spiegel argues, the introduction of a European tax could be a step towards establishing its own legitimacy. Besides these problems, there is yet another issue that the European Union would have to tackle should it ever come to a eurozone Treasury.

Introducing a new tier of government only for eurozone member states, the European Union would be split into two parts: One of eurozone governments and the other of countries such as Denmark, Poland and the United Kingdom outside it. It is not obvious whether the European Union would be able to manage such a formal division of its members. In any case, it would change the character of the European Union. The irony behind all of this is, of course, that fiscal integration only seems necessary because the preceding monetary integration did not work. Only in the EU would such a failure be seen as an invitation to keep digging.

At first glance, the statement did not appear menacing. I was told I could expect to receive a benefit of “about $2,136 a month” upon reaching age 70 — which certainly seems like good news. But immediately I thought of a parallel of President Obama’s infamous Obamacare promise: “If you like your Social Security, you can keep your Social Security.” Then, as if on cue, I saw an asterisk with the following message: The law governing benefit amounts may change because, by 2033, the payroll taxes collected will be enough to pay only about 77 percent of scheduled benefits.

I could not believe I was seeing the equivalent of what I was just thinking, but with a new twist, “If I like my Social Security, I can keep 77 percent of it.” With an asterisk, my beloved government was informing me that they will be unable to fulfill their part of a financial arrangement into which, as their statement attested, I had been making mandatory contributions starting in 1971 at age 16. The skepticism I felt when I saw my initial monthly benefit was entirely justified. There are just too many Baby Boomers and too many financial promises with elected leaders too afraid to inflict the necessary pain of real reform.

Meanwhile, here is the truth, as stated by the Social Security Administration in its annual Trustees Report from 2014: Social Security is not sustainable over the long term at current benefit and tax rates. In 2010, the program paid more in benefits and expenses than it collected in taxes and other noninterest income, and the 2014 Trustees Report projects this pattern to continue for the next 75 years. The old cliché “demographics is destiny” has never been more applicable.

In January 2011, the first 1946-born Baby Boomers began turning age 65, at the rate of 10,000 a day. This gray-haired evolution continues for 19 straight years — until the end of 2029 — when the youngest crop of Baby Boomers, born in 1964, finally turn 65.

What comes to mind is a classic 1965 song by The Who, “My Generation.” If you are of a certain age you know the famous lyrics, “I hope I die before I get old.” Now, since the Baby Boomer generation is already redefining what it means to be “old,” it’s time to rewrite the lyrics: “I hope I die before the government goes broke.” As things are going right now, you won’t, but it will.

Most of us like to think that “someday” we will get out of the hole and quit being debt slaves, but very few of us ever actually accomplish this. That is because the entire system is designed to trap us in debt before we even get out into the “real world” and keep us in debt until we die. Sadly, most Americans don’t even realize what is being done to them.

In America today, debt is considered to be just part of normal life. We go into debt to go to college, we go into debt to buy a vehicle, we go into debt to buy a home, and we are constantly using our credit cards to buy the things that we think we need. As a result, this generation of Americans is absolutely swimming in debt. The following are some of the findings of the Pew survey that I mentioned above… ”8 in 10 Americans have debt, with mortgages the most common liability.”

”Although younger generations of Americans are the most likely to have debt, older generations are increasingly carrying debt into retirement.” ”7 in 10 Americans said debt is a necessity in their lives, even though they prefer not to have it.” Most of us wish that we didn’t have any debt, but we have bought into the lie that it is a necessary part of life in America in the 21st century.

It has been estimated that 43 percent of all American households spend more money than they make each month, and US households are more than 11 trillion dollars in debt at this point.

And it will be corporate America that plays the role of difference-maker in getting US politicians to implement the plan. The bill introduced last week in both houses of Congress is called the Equality Act. Forty senators, led by Jeff Merkley, Democrat for Oregon, Tammy Baldwin, Democrat for Wisconsin, and Cory Booker, Democrat for New Jersey, introduced “historic, comprehensive federal legislation to ban discrimination against LGBT Americans,” Merkley reported on his website. The legislation was filed simultaneously in the House by 158 lawmakers led by Representative David Cicilline, Democrat for Rhode Island.

While all the co-sponsors are Democrats, don’t be fooled. The collective power of America’s corporate behemoths – names like Apple, Nike, General Mills, Facebook, Google, Dow Chemicals, Levi Strauss and American Airlines – have a history of getting their way when bringing pressure to bear on Republican politicians. Just ask Indiana’s Republican Governor Mike Pence.

Back in March when he signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the full weight of corporate America came down on his shoulders. Apple CEO Tim Cook, who is openly homosexual, scolded him on morality. Threats to leave the state poured in from Indiana-based businesses Ely Lily, NASCAR, General Electric and Salesforce.

Perhaps the most aggressive stance came from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who said his company was helping employees uncomfortable with Indiana’s new law transfer out of the state. “CEOs have a lot of power and control over investments in states,” Benioff told CNN. “And we want to invest in states where there is equality. One thing you’re seeing is there is a third political party in this country, which is the party of the CEOs.”

Not to be outdone, the NCAA threatened to pull its lucrative college basketball tournaments from the state. Sensing a mutiny over the issue, Pence caved. He inserted new language into the law, essentially gutting its protections for religious freedom and turning it into an LGBT rights law.

The Wall Street Journal said the nation just passed a security law that boosts its cyber defenses and presses for technological advances that give government the power to control Internet access. Specifically, the law includes a mandate for Chinese companies to use local technology vendors when possible and to help create an Internet “kill switch” in times of national emergency.

The newspaper said it’s all part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s plan to take control of the Internet, and clamp down further on what social media users post. The news comes as the United States has fingered China in several recent and high-profile cybersecurity attacks, including one that reportedly breached the data of more than 21 million federal employees, as WND extensively reported.