He remarks about the situation with the automotive industry were more critical than a pre-retirement unemployment supplement known as AER, which he also thought wouldn't have had a severe impact on elections (while senator Bourquin thought would have driven voters to right-wing National Front).

Moscovici's conclusion was that "the situation is dire" although the finance minister ignored warnings that without a "pre-retirement unemployment supplement known as the AER... the ruling Socialist Party will have a rough time in the industrial basin of the country, with voters turning to the rightwing National Front." Moscovici disagreed. Fast forward 3 years, and not only did French unemployment just hit an all time high confirming that the economic situation has indeed never been more dire...

...but the frontrunner for the next French president is none other than National Front's Marine Le Pen, who will no doubt seize this memo as further proof of the terrible economic state of the country and leverage it even more to her benefit, and add even more fuel to the Frexit fire. As a reminder, Le Pen now prefers to be called Madame Frexit because as she warned last week, when she becomes president, unless the Eurozone yields to her demands, France will be the next country out of the monetary project effectively ending the Eurozone.

Details of the secret negotiations were revealed in a report by the International Crisis Group in Brussels, which concluded that reopening the sites to non-Muslims could help keep peace on the Temple Mount. But an agreement could be harder to reach with Israel’s new government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s center-right Likud party.

Some Israeli leaders have said opening the site to paying visits would give the Jordanian-influenced Waqf, an Islamic trust that oversees the daily religious affairs in and around the mosque, an incentive to maintain peace on the contested holy site. However, an official in Netanyahu’s office said, “There are no negotiations and no change in the status quo at the Temple Mount,” Haaretz reported.

We were fighting the Germans in the second world war and a number of them were members of the Nazi party. The concentration camps that killed six million Jews had staff that were members of the Nazi party of German nationality but also a large number of people who were simply German nationals.

Your report on the Queen’s visit to Bergen-Belsen (27 June) contained the sentence: “This was the Queen’s fifth visit to Germany but her first to a former Nazi concentration camp.” The headline was “Queen visits Belsen, where the world awoke to Nazi evil”. The idea of separating Germany from the Nazis is an extremely worrying development and everybody who cares about the holocaust, and historical accuracy, ought to be objecting to this interpretation.

Matthew Evans, House of Lords

“This is something we all need to understand, the two sides of early detection. It does help people, but it’s almost guaranteed to harm others,” said H Gilbert Welch, a professor of medicine, public policy, and business administration at Dartmouth College, and author of the book Should I Be Tested for Cancer? (He reveals his answer in the book’s subtitle: “Maybe not.”)

The more you look for disease, the more you find it. And in the case of cancer, it’s hard for doctors to know if what they find is dangerous and needs to be addressed, or if it’s just a small tumor that won’t grow and poses no threat. “We can’t be sure which is which, so we treat everybody,” Welch explained at the Aspen Ideas Festival’s Spotlight Health session. “That means we’re treating people who will never experience problems from their disease.”

"Now such a meeting is getting closer every day but it must be well prepared," Metropolitan Hilarion, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church's foreign relations department, said in an interview with Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper.

He said the meeting between the head of the 1.2 billion member Roman Catholic Church and the head of Russian Orthodox Church - which counts some 165 million of the world's 250 million Orthodox Christians - would take place in a "neutral" country, not in Moscow or the Vatican. Austria or Hungary were possibilities, he said. Hilarion, one of the most influential people in world Orthodoxy, said he could not say if the meeting could take place as early as this year, but there was currently "a good dynamic" between the two Churches.

I am the daughter of a gay father who died of AIDS. I described my experiences in my book: Out From Under: The Impact of Homosexual Parenting. Over fifty adult children who were raised by LGBT parents have communicated with me and share my concerns about same-sex marriage and parenting. Many of us struggle with our own sexuality and sense of gender because of the influences in our household environments growing up.

We have great compassion for people who struggle with their sexuality and gender identity — not animosity. And we love our parents. Yet, when we go public with our stories, we often face ostracism, silencing, and threats. I want to warn America to expect severe erosion of First Amendment freedoms if the US Supreme Court mandates same-sex marriage. The consequences have played out in Canada for ten years now, and they are truly Orwellian in nature and scope.

In Canada, freedoms of speech, press, religion, and association have suffered greatly due to government pressure. The debate over same-sex marriage that is taking place in the United States could not legally exist in Canada today. Because of legal restrictions on speech, if you say or write anything considered “homophobic” (including, by definition, anything questioning same-sex marriage), you could face discipline, termination of employment, or prosecution by the government.

Why do police prosecute speech under the guise of eliminating “hate speech” when there are existing legal remedies and criminal protections against slander, defamation, threats, and assault that equally apply to all Americans? Hate-crime-like policies using the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” create unequal protections in law, whereby protected groups receive more legal protection than other groups.

Americans need to prepare for the same sort of surveillance-society in America if the Supreme Court rules to ban marriage as a male-female institution. It means that no matter what you believe, the government will be free to regulate your speech, your writing, your associations, and whether or not you may express your conscience. Americans also need to understand that the endgame for some in the LGBT rights movement involves centralized state power — and the end of First Amendment freedoms.

The policies pursued by the Obama Administration and facilitated by cowardly politicians and a compliant media are not simply the intersection of radical ideology and incompetence, but a dangerous subversive element of an anti-American and anti-Western strategy. Cultural Marxism and its many variants, such as political correctness and multiculturalism, is now firmly ensconced in the White House and the Democrat Party, while the Republican Party, dominated by eunuchs and the avaricious, continuously accommodates its “principles” to match an ever-shifting leftward movement of the “conventional wisdom.”

It does so solely in order to maintain its place as the token opposition and grifter at the federal tax-revenue trough for the personal financial benefits that it provides. Obama’s transformation is fundamentally the degradation and humbling of a great nation he considers venal and corrupt, but is, in reality, merely a description of the content of his own character. He and his present anointed successor and Mini Me, Hillary Clinton, are manifestations of modern-day, totalitarian Liberalism, in its insatiable thirst for power, where persuasion is replaced by coercion to implement policies that are inherently damaging to liberty and the national interest.

Unfortunately, the federal government, as an institution, has largely come to reflect those same characteristics, the tyranny that led the Founding Fathers to declare independence. In their effort to make the central government “too big to fail,” the political-media complex has made it too corrupt to reform.

Greece’s public debt is, unsurprisingly, the highest in the EU - standing at 177% of its GDP. Italy and Portugal are the next most indebted countries, with debts of 132% and 130% of national economic output respectively. The smallest debts, as a proportion of GDP, were seen in Estonia, Norway and Bulgaria - all of whose government debts are below 30% of their GDP. The United Kingdom’s debt currently accounts for 89.4% of its GDP, ninth highest in the EU.

13 EU nations saw their public debt accelerate at a faster rate than Greece’s over the period, while five have debts standing at over €1 trillion: Germany, Italy, the UK, France and Spain.

Here is the big point: there is zero chance of the European Central Bank turning Emergency Liquidity Assistance back on - life-saving lending to banks - unless Greeks give an affirmative vote to a bailout proposal from the rest of the eurozone and the IMF, which Juncker sees as a proxy for Greece's monetary future. As for Athens, most of the Syriza government detests the bailout offer - for the way it pushes up VAT and cuts pensions.

So we will have the bizarre spectacle of a Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, arguing both against the bailout and for remaining inside the eurozone - so goodness only knows how he will vote. And Greek people will be torn between fear and loathing of bailout proposals that will damage the living standards of many of them, and fear and loathing of abandoning the euro and seeing their banks closed sine die.

Given how messy all this is, no-one should be remotely surprised that stock markets have cracked, and that borrowing costs for the eurozone's weaker economies - such as Italy, Spain and Portugal - have all risen. Because Greece is now staring into something of a financial and economic abyss.

A no vote would presumably see Greek banks subject to economy-crushing restrictions on cash withdrawals and international transfers for the indefinite future. Greece would be careering towards the euro door marked exit, even though such a door was never supposed to exist, let alone be opened. At that historic juncture, the euro would no longer be a proper single currency for most of Europe.

It would be transformed into a de facto currency peg: the currencies of Spain, Portugal, Italy and the rest might all be called "the euro", but they would once again be perceived as domestic currencies, pegged to the benchmark eurozone currency, the German euro. And investors would realise that if the going for any weaker eurozone economy got too tough while retaining the euro, well that economy could devalue by abandoning the euro. So at that point, investors would increase what they charge the likes of Spain, Portugal and Italy to borrow, to cover the risk of them crashing out of the euro. That is why the drama being played out in Greece could turn into an existential threat to the whole great European monetary and economic adventure.

The immediate headlines that got us to this point are these: After an intractable series of negotiations over a bailout extension with Greece’s creditors, the nation’s left-wing government left the table Friday and said it would hold a referendum on July 5.

Greek leaders think the offer on the table from European governments and the International Monetary Fund is lousy, requiring still more pension cuts and tax increases in a depressed economy, and intend to throw to voters the question of whether to accept it. Whatever the exact phrasing of the question (and assuming the referendum goes forward as planned), it really boils down to this simple choice:

A “Yes” vote means that Greece will continue the grinding era of austerity that has caused so much pain to its citizens over the last five years, in exchange for keeping the euro currency and the monetary stability it provides.

A “No” vote almost certainly means that the country will walk away from the euro and create its own currency (which will surely devalue sharply), bringing financial chaos in the near term but creating the possibility of a rebound in the medium term as the country becomes more competitive with its devalued currency. The world should be rooting for a happy outcome to this Greek tragedy. It’s just not at all clear what a happy outcome would look like at this point.

Of the 30 PPDs issued by Obama, 19 have not been released. And for 11 of those, the White House has not disclosed even the subject of the order. “It’s not only the public that doesn’t have copies. It’s also Congress that doesn’t have copies. It’s a domain of largely unchecked presidential authority. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it’s lacking in independent oversight.”

But they have the same legal force as an executive order, forming a body of largely secret law, said Harold Relyea, a political scientist who advised Congress on national security directives before retiring from the Congressional Research Service. “The difference is that while executive orders are public by law — they must be published in the Federal Register to be effective — PPDs are not,” he said. “It is a kind of secret law. People have to obey it. But it’s a directive that can allocate money, direct people or take a course of action.”

“Shifts in hearts and minds is possible,” he said. “And those who have come so far on their journey to equality have a responsibility to reach back and help others join them. Because for all our differences, we are one people — stronger together than we could ever be alone.”

“That’s always been our story. We are big and vast, and diverse. A nation of people with different backgrounds and beliefs, with different experiences and stories, but bound by our shared ideal that no matter who you are, or what you look like, how you started off, or how and who you love — America’s a place where you can write your own destiny.”

This veiled call to arms indicates that the war on conservatives is truly going hot. He has labeled religious people as backward and a hindrance to all others. The left isn’t capable of ‘help’. The socialists accomplish their ends with verbal and physical assaults wrapped inside lies and corrupt measures.

The financial sector in the West no longer funds real investments in plant and equipment. So much of the US manufacturing economy has been moved offshore, and the lack of consumer income growth means that investment opportunities in the US are very limited. With the derivatives, leveraged financial speculation seems to have reached its limits. All of this suggests that looting countries in the name of settling their sovereign debt is the new road to riches.

The financial sector has turned to the looting of the public sector in the Western countries themselves. By destroying Western social welfare systems, as has happened in Greece, public revenues are freed that the One Percent can capture. In the US Obamacare is a mechanism that allows private insurance companies to loot the public funds assigned to health care. The examples are numerous, and privatizations will result in the demise of public goods, from health care, to education, to pensions.

The Delphi Declaration recognizes this and correctly warns the Italians, Spanish, French, and Germans that they are next on the list of countries whose public sectors will be plundered. The leaders of Russia and China must be amused to watch Western countries consume themselves.

The multilateral institution, seen as a rival to the Western-dominated World Bank and Asian Development Bank, was initially opposed by the United States but has attracted many prominent US allies including Britain, Germany, Australia and South Korea. Other founding members include most Asian nations and countries from the Middle East and South America.

Japan and the United States are the most prominent nations not to have any representation in the venture. China has said it has left the door open for them to join. “It’s a huge diplomatic and strategic win for China,” Malcolm Cook, a senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, said of the AIIB.