Returning from a long trip to the Middle East that included stops in Iraq, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, Boehner spoke to a small group of reporters about the war against the Islamic State and the general situation in the region as well as the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran. He said there was great skepticism among Iran's neighbors about the emerging agreement between it and the P5+1 world powers, and he shared those concerns.

“I don’t know how you cut a deal with the devil and think the devil is going to keep his end of the deal,” Boehner said of Obama and his advisers. “All they’ve done this far is talk about a delay of their development of a nuclear weapons for a few months or a year, in exchange for the rehabilitation of their entire economy? I think they are desperate for a deal at any cost and I think this is a prescription for disaster.”

Boehner also responded to White House spokesman Josh Earnest’s March 29 statement on ABC’s "This Week" that Boehner’s opposition to the nuclear negotiations meant he wanted war with Iran, and that he "should have the courage of his convictions to actually say so." On the contrary, Boehner said, he was not for war with Iran, and if the administration had kept up sanctions pressure it could have gotten “a real agreement” rather than the "unverifiable" pact the framework suggests.

Pressed on what that meant, Boehner said: “An agreement that would allow unfettered access to the inspectors to go anywhere at any time. That would be a real agreement.”

The United States government with its refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom has degenerated into a cesspool of communists that have taken over the country. They seek to drive Americans into joblessness, poverty, homelessness and despair. The invaders being flown into the country at taxpayer expense has to be stopped. Our Congress knows all about this, they complain, and yet are allowing it to happen. What happened to the will of the people?

The military is a path to citizenship for immigrants, if the military is going to be filled with foreign invaders then they won’t have a problem confiscating our guns and killing Americans. Illegal alien invaders who have proven their willingness to flout our laws by sneaking into the country, are becoming full US citizens by serving in the military. Others being flown into the country by the thousands are given better treatment than the solders that serve the country.

The USA remains on course to add 100 million legal immigrants within 30 years. That includes the immigrants, their offspring and their chain-migrated relatives. Adding that many people equates to doubling the population of our 35 most populated cities. How do we water, feed, house, warm, transport, educate, medicate that many people and still maintain our environment? Answer: we won't. Nobel Laureate Dr Henry W Kendall said, “If we don’t halt population growth with justice and compassion, it will be done for us by nature, brutally and without pity – and will leave a ravaged world.”

Roman pontiffs are in a better position than most chief executives to speak undiplomatic truths. They have no career prospects to worry about, and since they (along with most of the world’s 1.2 billion baptised Catholics) believe they are God’s chief representatives on earth, they feel they have a moral duty to tell it like it is — or, at least, how they believe it to be.

In deciding to ignore Turkish entreaties, the pope and his diplomatic advisers in the Secretariat of State will have weighed two factors. On the one hand, there is no Muslim state with which the Holy See has built warmer relations than Turkey. Both Francis and Benedict have visited the country, and Vatican officials recognise that under its current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has gone further than ever in acknowledging what happened to the Armenians.

But such goodwill apparently counted for less than the Vatican’s growing desperation over Islamist persecution of Christians, and what officials see as the failure of Muslim clerics and politicians to effectively oppose it. Recent months have seen mass killings of Christians by Muslims in Nigeria, Libya and Kenya. Top of the Vatican’s list of concerns are Iraq and Syria, where the pope and his advisers believe they are witnessing a decisive phase in the eradication of Christianity from countries where it has been present for millennia. Turkey’s equivocal response to the activities of Islamic State has not helped.

For more than a decade, the Vatican has been the scene of a tug-of-war between proponents of careful dialogue with Islam and advocates of bluntness. The latter group feel that tact has got Christians nowhere, and that plain speaking is required even if it proves offensive. This group clearly had the upper hand under Benedict. Francis’s latest comment suggests they are back in the ascendancy.

Dioceses in the UK, Italy, Spain and elsewhere have noticed a dramatic increase in the number of people claiming to be possessed and have responded by training more priests in the dark arts of how to perform exorcisms.

A week-long exorcism conference, held this week at the Pontifical University of Regina Apostolorum in Rome and endorsed by the Vatican, is being attended by around 160 Catholic priests from around the world, who insist that demonic possession is very real.

"Pope Francis talks about the Devil all the time and that has certainly raised awareness about exorcisms," said Father Cesare Truqui, a Mexican priest trained as an exorcist. "But all Latin Americans have this sensibility – for them, the existence of the Devil is part of their faith."

Set up by Hitler's SS in 1937, it held more than 250,000 Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other people not tolerated by the Nazis. More than 56,000 people died there from torture, medical experiments and starvation. Some 80 camp survivors travelled to Weimar from Europe, the United States and Israel, joining US army veterans who helped free Buchenwald on April 11, 1945.

On Saturday they held a minute's silence at 3.15 pm, the time of liberation, and laid red carnations at the mustering point. Fears are growing about anti-Semitism in Europe, underscored by the January attacks in France on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarket, at a time when immigration has shot to the top of Germany's political agenda.

The Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin signed a decree ending a self-imposed ban on delivering the S-300 anti-missile rocket system to Iran, removing a major irritant between the two after Moscow canceled a corresponding contract in 2010 under pressure from the West.

A senior government official said separately that Russia has started supplying grain, equipment and construction materials to Iran in exchange for crude oil under a barter deal. Sources told Reuters more than a year ago that a deal worth up to $20 billion was being discussed and would involve Russia buying up to 500,000 barrels of Iranian oil a day.

“America thinks it’s safe because of the geographical location,” its voiceover says. “Thus you see it invades Muslim lands, and thinks that the army of jihad won’t reach in their lands. But the dream of Americans to have safety became a mirage.”

The hashtag campaign was announced on April 8, last Wednesday, and launched on Saturday, when pro-Isil accounts posted thousands of tweets with the hashtag with variations on the same theme, of America’s vulnerability to lone wolf and other attacks.

American spending was reduced by 6.5 percent as part of measures to cut the US budget deficit, while the three biggest arms spenders after the US — China, Russia and Saudi Arabia — greatly increased their purchases. Saudi Arabia boosted its military investments the most, by 17 percent, while China’s arms spending rose by 9.7 percent to an estimated $216 billion.

The fast build-up of arms in areas such as the Middle East and Africa is “placing an increasingly high burden on economies,” SIPRI program director Sam Perlo-Freeman added. “These increases partly reflect worsening security situations, but in many cases they are also the product of corruption, vested interests and autocratic governance,” he said.

Familiar mega-banks and investing powerhouses such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Macquarie Bank, Barclays Bank, the Blackstone Group, Allianz, and HSBC Bank, among others, are consolidating their control over water. Wealthy tycoons such as T Boone Pickens, former President George H W Bush and his family, Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing, Philippines’ Manuel V Pangilinan and other Filipino billionaires, and others are also buying thousands of acres of land with aquifers, lakes, water rights, water utilities, and shares in water engineering and technology companies all over the world.

The second disturbing trend is that while the new water barons are buying up water all over the world, governments are moving fast to limit citizens’ ability to become water self-sufficient (as evidenced by the well-publicized Gary Harrington’s case in Oregon, in which the state criminalized the collection of rainwater in three ponds located on his private land, by convicting him on nine counts and sentencing him for 30 days in jail). Let’s put this criminalization in perspective:

Billionaire T Boone Pickens owned more water rights than any other individuals in America, with rights over enough of the Ogallala Aquifer to drain approximately 200,000 acre-feet (or 65 billion gallons of water) a year. But ordinary citizen Gary Harrington cannot collect rainwater runoff on 170 acres of his private land.

It’s a strange New World Order in which multibillionaires and elitist banks can own aquifers and lakes, but ordinary citizens cannot even collect rainwater and snow runoff in their own backyards and private lands.

Mr Summers has hailed the birth of the China-led institution as the moment the US lost its role as “the underwriter of the global economic system”. “I can think of no event since Bretton Woods comparable to the combination of China’s effort to establish a major new institution and the failure of the US to persuade dozens of its traditional allies, starting with Britain, to stay out of it,” opined the former president of Harvard and one time candidate to take over the US Federal Reserve. He is only the latest in a chorus of former Washington insiders who are heralding the Communist nation's attempts to rival US hegemony in the “soft power” stakes.

But it was the response of the United States which precipitated a diplomatic row of far greater significance than the establishment of a development bank. Washington’s closest European allies chose to openly flout the unsaid prohibitions over their membership. France, Germany, Italy and the UK will all now be founding members of the AIIB when it is due to launch at the end of the year.

Britain's decision to become the "first Western nation" to submit its interest drew an apoplectic response from the White House. “We are wary about a trend of constant accommodation of China, which is not the best way to engage with a rising power,” said one US official. Undeterred, much of the rest of the developed world has followed the UK’s lead and thrown their hat into the AIIB’s ring.

Washington, seeing the fledgling institution as a proxy in the Sino-US rivalry, spectacularly misjudged the mood of its transatlantic allies. The rush to participate in the AIIB highlighted that no major economy was willing to bypass the opportunity to co-operate with the globe's rising power.

Upon submitting its application for founder status, even Israel chose to rub salt in the wounds of its erstwhile ally, championing the AIIB as "one of the most important initiatives in terms of Chinese foreign policy and in particular for President Xi Jinping." Having failed so dramatically to corral its allies into shunning China's overtures, Mr Summers and many others are now urging the US to "wake up to the new economic era."

Dated April 2015 and drawn up to brief the Senate and House of Representatives on the impact of Britain’s General Election, the memo also warns that the UK faces turmoil if there is a hung parliament. The document – prepared by the Congressional Research Service, an in-house intelligence body that gives confidential analysis to legislators – states that while Britain and the US are likely to ‘remain key economic partners’, a ‘reassessment of the special relationship may be in order… because its geopolitical setting has been changing’.

The memo, edited by Derek E Mix, the CRS’s chief European affairs analyst, says that the development of organisations such as the G20 group of major economies has led to a decline in the ‘influence and centrality of the relationship’. The ‘special relationship’ has been deployed by generations of politicians – most notably Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – to describe the close political, diplomatic, cultural, economic, military and historical relations between the two countries.

It was first coined in a 1944 speech by Winston Churchill, when he said it was his ‘deepest conviction that unless Britain and the United States are joined in a special relationship… another destructive war will come to pass’. Increasingly, however, the relationship has come to be seen as one-sided, with British Prime Ministers more keen to flag up the alliance than US Presidents.

Russ Koesterich, chief investment strategist and managing director at the world's biggest asset manager, said that while the "very gentle" tightening expected by the Fed was unlikely to rock markets in the same way as the "taper tantrum" did in 2013, a "flash crash" in benchmark US Treasury yields last October served as a warning that some investors could be left high and dry when the US central bank raises rates – perhaps as soon as this summer.

"The Fed hasn't raised rates for nine years," he said. "That means you've got almost half a generation of investors who've never lived through a tightening cycle. It's going to cause some angst among individual investors, and if you do see some liquidations, that's going to be one instance where we might be testing liquidity, how investors react and the market's ability to absorb that reaction.

"Investors who became very accustomed to this nice simple ride that we've all enjoyed do need to get prepared for a rougher ride… normal is going to feel difficult following this period of very easy markets." Mr Koesterich also warned that the world was running out of ammunition to deal with the next crisis, saying that one more shock could plunge advanced economies into deflation.

The Bank of England warned last month that a global liquidity storm could endanger financial stability if investors suddenly demanded their money back.

The North American Aerospace Command – NORAD, called the Rocky Mountains complex home. Staffers at the government complex were on constant alert while scanning the skies for the presence of Russian missiles. World War 3 concerns kept the Cheyenne Mountain Complex filled with activity until a decade ago when federal officials declared that Russia was “no longer a threat.”

The Pentagon is reportedly in the midst of “refurbishing” the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. The high-tech communications attributes at the facility will reportedly be protected from electromagnetic pulses, or EMP attack. The bunker buried within the mountain is situated 2,000 feet down and is believed to be protected from a 30 megaton nuclear blast. Pentagon officials announced earlier this week that the Cheyenne Mountain Complex will regain its prominence in the communications and tracking arena for the US Military.

Moving the high-tech and sensitive communication equipment to the facility in the Rocky Mountains will safeguard the servers from an EMP attack, according to statements released by military officials. The Raytheon Corporation was granted a $700 million Pentagon contract to oversee the NORAD, US Northern Command project at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex.

No, those are not the rants of a disheveled malcontent on the street wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and waving an anti-Wall Street placard; that quote is taken from a study, published last year, conducted by two prestigious American Universities, Princeton and Northwestern. Are Americans so brainwashed and/or stupid that they fail to realize this? No, many are painfully aware of it. But think of the Soviet Union in its fading days some years before it collapsed.

The reference to the Roman Empire is more than just metaphor. The facts are disturbing. The data on stratification reveals that America is actually worse than ancient Rome. The 500 wealthiest Roman senators were roughly 10,000 times as rich as the average 'plebe' in the empire, generally a landless farmer or a slave. Big deal, each of the 500 wealthiest Americans is about 20,000 times as rich as the average person in the bottom 90 percent. If we focus only on financial resources, the average American in the top 500 has 40,000 times the wealth- power of the median citizen.

In Rome wealth and political power went together overtly. Today, in America money buys political offices and therefore the votes of the politicians, but usually quietly through the back door. At least the Romans admitted they were oligarchs, their American descendants try to hide the reality by spinning a tangled web of lies and half-truths.

In this kind of distorted socioeconomic looking-glass world, the ruling class uses the Constitution and Bill of Rights as toilet paper. But they and their minions are careful to pay lip service to the founding documents when in front of TV cameras. Privately they sneer up their sleeves as they hand John Q Public the new Social Contract in a sealed envelope. When he opens it, he reads, The Patriot Act... Tax Cuts for the Rich... Debt... Austerity ...Wars, Wars and more Wars. But apologists claim, the US is a democracy and every citizen has a voice when they cast their ballots in elections. Like all the other noble ideals, in the realm, it sounds good in theory but does not work in the real world.