In a famous speech in 1946, Winston Churchill proposed “a kind of United States of Europe” as a way of eradicating Europe’s warring past, but it was fairly obvious that he did not envisage Britain as part of it. “We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked but not combined. We are interested and associated but not absorbed,” was how Churchill put it, a way of thinking that has defined Britain’s ambivalent attitude to Europe ever since.

Instead, this would be primarily a Franco-German construct, with Britain pursuing an alternative destiny as part of a Commonwealth of Nations. At the time, Britain still had rationing and austerity, but as the victorious nation, it nonetheless looked in rather better shape than much of the rest of an economically ruined continent.

In or out, Britain has little option but to remain part of the single market. Anything else would be a giant economic leap in the dark. The real issue is only that of terms, and ensuring that whatever other madnesses the eurozone inflicts on itself to hold the whole thing together do not directly disadvantage us. As things stand, the eurozone is on a long road to oblivion. It will be a very different, and less blindly integrationist, Europe we will be dealing with 10 years hence, or so we must hope.

Justice Barbara Jaffe has granted a "writ of habeas corpus" and is ordering officials at Stony Brook University to show cause for why they are holding the chimps, Hercules and Leo, in captivity. When word got around that a couple of chimpanzees had been granted human rights by a court of law, Justice Jaffe clarified her statements, striking down the "writ of habeas corpus" which theoretically gave the chimps the same rights as humans. Striking down her initial wording, she said it was simply a way to formally direct the university officials to the courtroom to present their case.

The Nonhuman Rights Project, which signed off on the judge's order, saw a first-time glimpse of what they work so hard for - court recognized animal rights. They believe that some animals, like chimps, are "legal persons" with the right of "bodily liberty." The question being raised is this: Are chimps the property of human owners or do the animals have the right to own their own body and liberty? Does an animal have the same rights as humans? If they are being harmed, abused, or detained, can they be represented in court and ultimately be freed?

The Nonhuman Rights Project seeks to free Hercules and Leo from their cages at Stony Brook in hopes they will be released to an animal sanctuary in Florida. However, if the chimps are indeed property of Stony Brook and no harm can be proven, then can the court order the animals be taken away from their owners? "Nonhuman animals do not have legal rights any more than they have legal responsibilities," said Bob Kohn, a lawyer from Manhattan, who opposes efforts to give human rights to chimps and other animals. "For a court to hold otherwise would have tremendous adverse legal and moral implications for mankind."

The elitists running the system know better than any of us what is really going on in the real economy as they have access to the unmanipulated, raw data – something to which they go to great lengths to prevent we plebeians from seeing.

The greatest amount of effort to cover up the truth about what is happening beneath the surface headlines is the effort being exerted to push the price of gold lower. The truth is that the US is nothing a but gigantic bloated, debt-addicted Ponzi scheme that is quickly losing its global economic and military hegemony while the US elitists steal everything in sight from the middle class.

If gold were allowed to trade freely, it would be priced at a significantly higher level than where it is now. The problem is that a rising price of gold would signal to a large portion of the population that something is drastically wrong with the US financial, economic and political system.

Armstrong has predicted for years that governments worldwide would melt down in a crisis of insolvency and lack of trust starting this October. Specifically, Armstrong predicts that a major cycle will turn on October 1, 2015, shifting investors’ trust from the public sector and governments to the private sector.

Edelson is another long-time student of cycle theory. Edelson – a big fan of Armstrong – has also studied decades of data from the Foundation for the Study of Cycles. Edelson is predicting the biggest financial crisis in world history – including a collapse of government solvency – starting on October 7, 2015 – the same week as Armstrong’s prediction – when the European Union breaks up. Edelson also thinks that huge sums of investment will flow from the Eurozone to America, driving up US stocks (unlike Armstrong, Edelson thinks US bonds will also benefit). He thinks that Japan will be the next domino to fall … and that Japan’s default will also drive investments into the US as a safe haven.

In other words, both Armstrong and Edelson think that – as the best looking horse in the glue factory – the US stock market will skyrocket as others fall apart. But to be clear, both believe that the domino collapse will eventually hit the US, and America will end up defaulting on its debts – and falling into financial crisis – as well. Are Armstrong and Edelson right or wrong? We don’t have long to wait to test their very public predictions.

Correction: Several people have pointed out that Armstrong is not predicting that the crisis will be felt on October 1, 2015. Rather, he’s forecasting that October 1st is a major turning point, but that the governmental financial crisis may not be felt until some months later.

Of course Hollande is not the only one calling for more centralization. Last month, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem proposed a plan that would create a shared European treasury.

I believe that we are right on the verge of a very significant European financial crisis. In particular, keep on eye on the big banks. Just like in the United States, the “too big to fail” banks in Europe are massively overleveraged and are tremendously exposed to derivatives. In fact, the bank with the most exposure to derivatives on the entire planet is Deutsche Bank. It has been reported that Deutsche Bank has a whopping 75 trillion dollars worth of exposure to derivatives, their co-CEOs were recently forced to resign, and there are all sorts of rumblings about troubles going on behind the scenes at the bank.

What do you think would happen if the biggest and most important bank in Germany suddenly became the next Lehman Brothers? That is something to think about. Meanwhile, the euro continues to fall. For a long time, I have been repeating my prediction that the euro would fall to parity with the US dollar. One year ago, the EUR/USD was sitting at 1.35. Today, it has come all the way down to 1.08.

There will be more ups and downs, but we are almost there. A time of great chaos is coming to Europe, and the eurozone will be deeply shaken.

Thousands of hand-held, ground-to-air missile launchers were seized by militiamen as they captured regime bases during the Libyan revolution in 2011. The missiles have since turned up in warzones and failed states across Africa and the Middle East and have been described as an unprecedented menace to air traffic.

As well as being used in military conflicts, there are fears the weapons, known as Manpads, could be used by terrorists to target civilian airliners as they take off or land. A team of British experts including troops from the RAF Regiment has been training foreign governments on how to increase security at airports to stop such an attack, it has now been disclosed.

All around, their Whitehall colleagues were finding ways of imposing cuts, but in Dfid’s imposing new headquarters off Trafalgar Square, the big worry was how to shovel money out of the door. This is the central message of the latest report on Dfid from the National Audit Office. The most powerful objection to the Government’s promise to devote 0.7 per cent of national income to overseas aid was that spending money would then become an end in itself.

Back in 2013, Britain became the first G7 country to hit the 0.7 per cent target by the simple device of giving Dfid the biggest percentage increase in its budget ever enjoyed by any Whitehall department in peacetime history. Overnight, Dfid’s allocation jumped by 33 per cent to £10.4 billion – and spending this money became the ministry's central goal.

The rational way to run anything – whether a Whitehall department or a fish and chip shop – is to decide what you want to achieve and then spend as little as you can get away with. Once you subordinate everything to hitting a spending target, you turn the rules of rational management on their head. But in a Government supposedly wracked by austerity, officials at the Department for International Development had to spend £3.7 billion in just eight weeks.

Dfid found itself on a spending splurge in November and December 2013. At first, its officials thought they would have to shovel £2.7 billion out of the door in those two months. But the figures went awry and it turned out they would somehow have to spend £3.7 billion. In the end, the cash wasn’t wasted. But it’s never a good idea to make spending money a target in itself. And if Dfid’s role is increasingly going to be writing cheques for international organisations, then does it really need a staff of 2,700?

Along with genuinely worthy projects, officials at the EDF have somehow contrived to spend thousands of pounds on trapeze lessons, a study on the development of the Pacific Coconut, flying a gamut of officials from across Oceania to a renewable energy conference in Aruba (no, really), supporting the work of the EU’s press operation in Jamaica, and a study into the “youth perceptions, attitudes and views towards EU development policy” in Zimbabwe.

Just weeks after revelations that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office spent taxpayers’ money on Facebook lessons for teenagers in Laos and trying to find a companion for a rare fish, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that too much of our foreign aid is simply being wasted. Even when the projects themselves are potentially useful, they don’t always get delivered: Ian Birrell recently uncovered the sorry tale of the Caribbean island of Montserrat, which has seen almost £400 million in British foreign aid and yet still does not have the permanent hospital, among other utilities, that the money was supposed to be used for.

But is the French debt position really so much worse than ours? This year it looks as though, in gross terms, the French debt to GDP ratio will be just above 98 percent. That sounds pretty horrific. Yet the equivalent UK figure will be about 87 percent. The Maastricht debt criterion governing a country’s eligibility for joining the single currency was that the gross debt to GDP ratio was to be no higher than 60 percent, or at least converging on 60 percent “at a satisfactory pace”.

What happens to Greece remains vital to the future of Europe. The Franco-British experience shows what should have been obvious from umpteen other episodes around the world: you cannot cut your way to prosperity. To oblige Greece to engage in more austerity in current conditions is sheer madness. What it needs is more aggregate demand. Given this, the deficit will turn into surplus and the debt to GDP ratio will fall. Does anyone believe that the deal that seems to have been done to keep Greece in the euro will do anything to boost the Greek economy?

Exports in the double-digit billions are expected. Meanwhile experts are calling for realigning power relations in the Persian Gulf under western leadership to establish a balance of power between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This would prevent the hegemony of either and offer the West favorable opportunities to influence developments in the region. Comprehensive German arms exports to Saudi Arabia and the weakening of Iranian positions, particularly in Syria, would form the basis of this desired balance of power.

According to experts, the EU could play a leading role in reshaping the region, if resistance in the US Congress, at the last moment, does not block the nuclear deal.

Whereas social-democratic observers do not exclude an attenuation of the contradictions, southern European conservative media are among those who speak of a revival of German hegemonic ambitions, which had largely determined or triggered the First and Second World Wars. The consequences of the French-Italian submission during negotiations in Brussels are generating those fears, because Paris had not succeeded to and Rome had not even seriously attempted to thwart the German dictates of sovereignty over Greece. Both Italy and France are aware of the dangers of becoming the next victim of German financial dictatorship.

They are competing for admission in a northern European core Europe, whose membership will be decided by Berlin, in the case of a possible collapse of the European Union. Current events are directly linked to German foreign policy endeavours in the 1990s and the territorial expansion of Germany's economic basis through the so-called reunification.

Attempts by the Israeli Police to curtail this right on the Temple Mount have been defeated several times in court. Nevertheless, Israeli Police enforce their own rules on the Temple Mount, closely monitoring Jewish visitors to prevent any kind of visible prayer, escorting any “violators” off the Mount and occasionally arresting and banning Jews from the holy site. Muslim prayer, however, is freely allowed.

Although the sign does not specify non-Muslim prayer, it is clearly aimed solely at Israelis and tourists. It is written in Hebrew and English – not Arabic – and it is posted only at the visitors’ gate and not at the multiple Temple Mount entrances used by Muslims.

Rabbi Yehuda Glick, founder of the Temple Mount Heritage Foundation and a world renowned Temple Mount activist, expressed his dismay at the decision to erect the sign. “We cannot understand why the police have adopted the radical Muslim narrative of the sanctity of the Temple Mount to Muslims only,” he told Breaking Israel News. “We will continue to convince public opinion and decision makers that Jews deserve human rights in the capital of their sovereign state too.”

An explosive Channel 4 documentary is set to reveal details of how Prince Philip's sister met and admired Adolf Hitler, whom she described as a 'charming and seemingly modest man'. Three of his sisters were married to senior Nazi officers – one a colonel in the SS – and when Philip attended a family funeral in Germany in 1937 he was confronted by crowds giving the Heil Hitler salute. The documentary includes previously unseen extracts from a private memoir in which one sister talks of her early admiration for Hitler.

Meanwhile the footage showing the Queen performing a Nazi salute as a child could have been accidentally leaked by Buckingham Palace, it has been reported. The Duke of Edinburgh, now 94, served bravely in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and his family's history is no secret. But the Palace will not welcome a fresh focus on his sister's links to the Third Reich while controversy continues over the footage of the Queen.

Churchill continued: “The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities … but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.”

Churchill concluded: “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”

The address marked the end of Pope Francis' week-long pilgrimage to Latin America, during which he also assailed the prevailing economic system as the "dung of the devil," saying that the systemic "greed for money" is a "subtle dictatorship" that "condemns and enslaves men and women." During Sunday's rally, which was held on the banks of the Paraguay River outside the capital Asunción, the Argentinian pontiff went off-script as he addressed tens of thousands of local youth.

"They wrote a speech for me to give you. But speeches are boring," Pope Francis said. "Make a mess, but then also help to tidy it up. A mess which gives us a free heart, a mess which gives us solidarity, a mess which gives us hope."

He also encouraged those present to look at their less fortunate peers, some of whom he met earlier in the day during a visit to the Banado Norte shantytown, and spoke of the connection between authentic liberty and responsibility and the necessity of fighting for the right to lead a dignified life. "We don't want young weaklings. We do not want young people who tire quickly, who live life worn out with faces of boredom. We want youths with hope and strength," Francis told the crowd.