The US-born former diplomat, who is now a Knesset member for the Kulanu party, notes in his foreword that the Hebrew term for “ally” is ben brit — literally “the son of the covenant.” And what he documents is actually the breaching of a covenant, the collapse of an alliance — an accumulated arc of abandonment by the Obama administration, and most especially the president himself, of Israel.

It’s a charge, unsurprisingly, that the administration has rushed to deny, and, rather more surprisingly, that Oren’s own party chief Moshe Kahlon has hurried to dissociate Kulanu from. Oren’s style is not excitable or melodramatic. In fact, he writes in generally understated tone, with the measured sense of perspective you’d expect from a best-selling historian. So when he notes, as he does near the very end of the book, that last summer’s Israel-Hamas war left “aspects of the US-Israeli alliance in tatters,” you take him seriously, and you worry.

And when you read that Washington worked relentlessly to quash any military option for Israel, most especially in 2012 — arguably the last moment at which Israel could have intervened effectively to thwart Iran’s drive to the bomb (though Oren does not confirm this) — you sense that he has exposed the emptiness of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s endless assertions that Israel will stand alone if necessary to stop a nuclear Iran. And you register, with all its grim repercussions, the realpolitik of a broken relationship with our key defender — the rupture that now leaves Israel vulnerable to an increasingly bold Islamist regime that avowedly seeks our annihilation.

"They [the electorate] haven’t been told the truth about the ultimate objective of the federalists. The project is to create the United States of Europe. And the people of Europe haven’t been asked whether they want to have a United States of Europe, and watched that happen while they have never been told truth about it."

His remarks come amid increasing disenchantment in the European Union as a politico-economic alliance and speculations on possible exits from the bloc by several member states. Eurosceptic parties including Britain’s UKIP, Spain’s Podemos and the French Front National have gained support during local and general elections.

In a firebrand speech to his parliament, Mr Tsipras said the IMF bore "criminal responsibility" for his country’s cash crisis. "The fixation on cuts...is most likely part of a political plan...to humiliate an entire people that has suffered in the past five years through no fault of its own,” said Mr Tsipras.

This is the first time the Greek premier has targeted his government’s ire at the Fund in such a public manner. The IMF, which holds the position of senior creditor in the country's €240 million rescue, is demanding Syriza cross its sacred red line on pensions, which they calculate as amounting to 16.2 percent of GDP.

The combative speech came after the prime minister had met with his parliamentarians and leader of opposition centrist To Potami party. According to reports, Mr Tsipras told his counterparts the country would not fulfil its latest IMF repayment on June 30 if no deal was reached. His defiant address further exposes the rift between Greece’s troika of lenders, whose competing demands on the country have led to a five-month negotiating stalemate.

Despite these disheartening numbers for those who support the sanctity of human life, not all recent news has been bad. The Associated Press reported earlier this month that the abortion rate has declined nationwide. The decrease is seen not only in states that have restricted the practice through legislation requiring waiting periods, informed consent, parental notification, and bans on late-term abortion, but also in those states that have no restrictions. The survey found that abortions have dropped 12 percent since 2010.

Americans United for Life’s president, Charmaine Yoest, believes the drop reflects changing attitudes among pregnant women. “There’s an entire generation of women who saw a sonogram as their first baby picture,” she said. “There’s an increased awareness of the humanity of the baby before it is born.”

While the main responsibility of Sunni Caliphs was to maintain law and order in the Muslim realm, as descendants of the Prophet, Shia Imams (spiritual leaders) also provided religious guidance and were considered infallible.

Recent tensions in the Middle East and Asia have been interpreted in some sections of the media as religious conflict between Sunnis and Shias. Although Muslims in the UK have been part of a united community with a shared experience of immigration, the relationship between these groups has recently been in the spotlight in Britain too.

The school district wrote, in its new recommendation for its revamped sex education classes, that: “Students will be provided definitions for sexual orientation terms heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality; and the gender identity term transgender… Emphasis will be placed on recognizing that everyone is experiencing changes and the role of respectful, inclusive language in promoting an environment free of bias and discrimination.”

The big lesson, according to Fox News’s Todd Starnes, is “the idea that there’s no such thing as 100 percent boys or 100 percent girls.” The new rules also come with increased protections against discrimination for transgender students – namely, permitting them to use the bathroom of their choosing.

Parents are, predictably, outraged at the impact this will have on their children. Rather than teach children the basics about their changing bodies, the liberal Left is using it as another excuse to indoctrinate America’s children – by teaching them about something that only a tiny minority of American adults feel is morally acceptable.

In the northern Italian city of Trieste, parents are in uproar over a taxpayer-funded elementary school program that includes dressing little boys as girls and girls as boys to overcome so-called “gender stereotypes.” Schools are calling the exercise “the game of respect,” which purportedly adopts many guidelines from the European standards on sex education, attributed to the World Health Organization.

The so-called “game of respect” consists in a box containing several cards, presenting the figures of different working roles: male and female housewives and husbands, male and female plumbers and firefighters, with the figures represented in exactly the same way to show that males and females are completely interchangeable.

There is also a card with a game called “If he were she and she were he,” where boys and girls are expected to exchange the clothes they are wearing: the boy dresses as a girl and the girl as a boy, and they discuss how they feel in that new “role.” Parents are especially up in arms over the school district’s attempt to conceal the program and its contents from them.

A prescription issued by Ms Zeng allows a patient to obtain medical cannabis in any form at the Canna Clinic. Behind the counter are jars filled with dark-green bundles of various strains of marijuana, from "B52" to "Afghan Kush" and "BC Bud." Cannabis cookies are also on display, along with cannabis-infused honey. Today's special is pre-rolled joints and cannabis chocolates for $2 (€1.8) apiece.

Here in Vancouver, British Columbia, anyone who submits to a pseudo-medical examination can buy as much cannabis as they like. The city is home to a population of some 600,000 and at least 80 specialized stores for cannabis, despite it being illegal in Canada.

Francis also called for a new global political authority tasked with “tackling … the reduction of pollution and the development of poor countries and regions”. His appeal echoed that of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who in a 2009 encyclical proposed a kind of super-UN to deal with the world’s economic problems and injustices.

According to the lengthy draft, which was obtained and published by L’Espresso magazine, the Argentinean pope will align himself with the environmental movement and its objectives. While accepting that there may be some natural causes of global warming, the pope will also state that climate change is mostly a man-made problem.

“Humanity is called to take note of the need for changes in lifestyle and changes in methods of production and consumption to combat this warming, or at least the human causes that produce and accentuate it,” he wrote in the draft. “Numerous scientific studies indicate that the greater part of the global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases … given off above all because of human activity.”

The pope will also single out those obstructing solutions. In an apparent reference to climate-change deniers, the draft states: “The attitudes that stand in the way of a solution, even among believers, range from negation of the problem, to indifference, to convenient resignation or blind faith in technical solutions.”

“Somebody inside the Vatican leaked the document with the obvious intention of embarrassing the pope,” said Robert Mickens, a longtime Vatican expert and editor of Global Pulse, an online Catholic magazine.

The Vatican press office was tense on Tuesday. Hours after a draft of the encyclical was published Monday on the website of L’Espresso, an Italian magazine, the Vatican indefinitely revoked the credentials of Sandro Magister, the journalist who wrote a short introduction that accompanied the magazine’s publication of the draft. Vatican officials say the leaked draft is not the final version of the encyclical, which has been barred from release until Thursday.

Leaks are hardly uncommon in journalism — some would consider them sustenance — and Vatican journalism has been no exception. Most recently, Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy was undermined when his butler leaked documents, in an episode known as VatiLeaks, that exposed infighting and discord in the Vatican. The scandal is considered one of the reasons that Benedict resigned, leading to the March 2013 election of Francis.

But this time, the depopulation agenda may be codified by the Vatican. Professor John Schellnhuber has been chosen as a speaker for the Vatican's rolling out of a Papal document on climate change. He's the professor who previously said the planet is overpopulated by at least six billion people. Now, the Vatican is giving him a platform which many expect will result in an official Church declaration in support of radical depopulation in the name of "climate science."

"The teaching document, called an encyclical, is scheduled for release on June 18 at Vatican City," reports Breitbart.com. "Perhaps with the exception of the 1968 encyclical on contraception, no Vatican document has been greeted with such anticipation."

Sachs, a special advisor to the United Nations and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is a media superstar who can always be counted on to pontificate endlessly on such topics as income inequality and global health. This time, writing in a Catholic publication, he may have gone off his rocker, revealing the real global game plan.

The United States, Sachs writes in the Jesuit publication, America, is “a society in thrall” to the idea of unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But the “urgent core of Francis’ message” will be to challenge this “American idea” by “proclaiming that the path to happiness lies not solely or mainly through the defense of rights but through the exercise of virtues, most notably justice and charity.”

In these extraordinary comments, which constitute a frontal assault on the American idea of freedom and national sovereignty, Sachs has made it clear that he hopes to enlist the Vatican in a global campaign to increase the power of global or foreign-dominated organizations and movements.

Sachs takes aim at the phrase, which comes from America’s founding document, the United States Declaration of Independence, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The plan is quite simple: world government through global taxes, with a religious face to bring it about.

Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, the archbishop emeritus of Guadalajara, presided at the closed doors ceremony, the first ever in the history of Mexico. Also participating were Archbishop Jesús Carlos Cabrero of San Luis Potosí, Spanish demonologist and exorcist Father José Antonio Fortea, and a smaller group of priests and lay people.

The event was not made known to the general public beforehand. According to Archbishop Cabrero, the reserved character of the May 20 ceremony was intended to avoid any misguided interpretations of the ritual. But how can an entire country become infested by demons to the point that it’s necessary to resort to an Exorcismo Magno? “To the extent sin increases more and more in a country, to that extent it becomes easier for the demons to tempt (people),” Fr Fortea told CNA.

Fr Fortea said that “the exorcism performed in San Luís Potosí is the first ever carried out in Mexico in which the exorcists came from different parts of the country and gathered together to exorcise the powers of darkness, not from a person, but from the whole country.”

The Spanish exorcist warned that “to the extent there is more witchcraft and Satanism going on in a country, to that extent there will be more extraordinary manifestations of those powers of darkness.” He also emphasized that a bishop “can authorize its occurrence once a year with his priests in the cathedral. The bishop is the shepherd and he can use the power he has received to drive away the invisible wolves from the sheep, since Satan is like a roaring lion prowling around looking for someone to devour, and the shepherds can drive away the predator from the victim,” he concluded.

The contacts have gone through a number of Arab and European channels in a bid to firm up an informal ceasefire agreement that took hold last August, ending a 50-day war in Gaza started when Hamas escalated its rocket attacks on Israeli civilian centers. "There has been indirect contact between Israel and Hamas, messages passed via Arab channels as well as through European and Turkish sources," one of the sources told AFP, describing it as "an indirect exchange of ideas."

The Egyptian-brokered truce came into effect on August 26, with the sides pledging to resume indirect contacts within a month to pin down a lasting ceasefire and discuss crunch issues. But the follow-up talks were delayed several times and never formally resumed.