"This morning as we celebrate one of the strongest alliances the world has ever known my message to the German people is simple: We are grateful for your friendship, for your leadership. We stand together as inseparable allies in Europe and around the world," Obama said as he addressed the timeless Bavarian scene, complete with the sounds of alphorns.

Obama is closer to Merkel than most heads of state, although their relationship has been tested in the past couple of years, particularly after it emerged that the National Security Agency had tapped Merkel's cellphone. The revelation was particularly chilling in Germany, with its oppressive history of secret government surveillance. But Merkel seemed eager to move on. She said in interviews that she didn't bring the spying controversy up with Obama since they've already discussed what needed to be said in previous meetings. In her speech in Kruen, she addressed him as "dear Barack."

"Although it is true we sometimes have differences of opinion today from time to time, but still the United States of America is our friend, our partner and indeed an essential partner with whom we cooperate very closely," Merkel said through a translator. "We cooperate closely because this is in our mutual interest. We cooperate because we need it. We cooperate because we want it."

Athens-listed equities fell by a further 2.7 percent on Monday, as the Greek economy moved closer to debt obligations it appeared unable or unwilling to meet. The tumble followed a 5 percent fall on the Athens Stock Exchange last Friday, its largest since January. The slide came before Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister, said that the country's creditors were demanding austerity so severe that Greece would be unable to grow.

Speaking in Berlin after stock market trading hours, Mr Varoufakis said that the primary surpluses Greece was instructed to produce would require him to reach "into the guts, into the heart, into the substance of the private sector and extract so much out of it, that the private sector cannot produce the growth".

"One reason that we haven’t reached an agreement, privately we’re being told that there’s a logic to what we’re saying, but politically, it’s very hard for the institutions to come out and admit it," he said. Attendees of the G7 summit made clear on Monday that resolving the Greek standoff was now an international priority. Speaking at the meeting in Germany, Angela Merkel, the country’s chancellor, said: “There’s not much time left. We have to work very hard on this.”

The ruling was a victory for the administration of President Barack Obama, which said the law unlawfully encroached on the president's power to set foreign policy and would, if enforced, undermine the US government's claim to be a neutral peacemaker in the Middle East. In a ruling by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court said the president has exclusive power to grant formal recognition to a foreign government.

"Congress cannot command the president to contradict an earlier recognition determination in the issuance of passports," Kennedy, a conservative who often casts the deciding vote in close cases, wrote in the majority opinion.

"They told me that because I have a lot of money, I have to pay my share," said Ammar, who’s asked that his real name not be used. "They analyse your income and take a percentage." As Isil works to establish its empire, the jihadists have become fastidious bureaucrats: imposing taxes, paying fixed salaries and imposing trading standards laws in a bid to create a healthy economy that will sustain their autocratic rule.

Yet despite brutal punishments for those who break the laws, many Syrian businessmen see ISIL as the only option when compared to the anarchy that prevails in areas controlled by other rebels, including Western-backed groups.

A resident of Al-Bab, an ISIL held territory whose market last month was decimated by a regime barrel bomb, killing up to 50 people, said: "Civilians would rather live under monkeys than under Bashar al-Assad. They would choose anything than a regime that has been bombing its own people. Under ISIL we can exist, but still, we live in fear.”

That sounds like a lot of sleazy money, but this figure pales in significance to the amount of corruption and criminality attributable to Wall Street banks and other Western financial institutions. For example, British bank HSBC alone has been caught running tax evasion, money-laundering for drug cartels and other illicit schemes that is estimated at $180 billion – or more than a thousand-fold the scale of criminality alleged at FIFA.

Wall Street banks, including JP Morgan, are accused of massive, systematic rigging of gold price markets all in a shady bid to shield the US dollar value. That criminality, affecting the price of basic commodities and livelihoods for billions of people worldwide, is estimated to be in the order of trillions of dollars – or a thousand, thousand-fold the FIFA debacle. Moreover, these same banks, along with a slew of other global names – Citibank, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Credit Agricole among many others – were all directly responsible for the explosion in toxic financial derivatives that made their executives multimillionaires but which led to the global financial and economic meltdown in 2008.

That meltdown – which persists seven years on from its inception – has resulted in millions of lives ruined from unemployment and the collapse of pensions and savings funds. Added to that are the myriad social hardships and crippled lives from the ensuing austerity imposed on the general Western public to pay for the financial catastrophe – a catastrophe that was deliberately and recklessly engineered by the major banks, hedge funds and other capitalist investment agencies.

Until Washington and London governments go after priority financial crime in their midst, then anything they say about FIFA can be taken as very wide off the mark.

According to Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, who covered the event, it featured speeches by Saudi General (retired) Anwar Majed Eshki, and Israeli career diplomat Dore Gold. Eshki is a former adviser to Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Gold is Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, and is currently seen as a strong candidate to lead Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Lake notes that Eshki gave his speech in Arabic, Gold gave his in English, and that no questions were taken from the audience.

At least five meetings appear to have taken place between senior Israeli and Saudi officials since early 2014, in secret venues located in Italy, India and the Czech Republic. The main purpose of the clandestine meetings was to discuss what Tel Aviv and Riyadh see as Iran’s increasingly powerful role in Middle Eastern affairs, and to explore ways of stopping Tehran from building nuclear weapons.

This admission, however, does not mean that the Saudis are about to recognize Israel, or that the Israelis are any closer to accepting the Saudis’ 2002 Arab-Israeli peace plan, which Tel Aviv has flatly rejected, says Lake. Admittedly, the rising power of Iran can only do so much to bring Israelis and Arabs closer.

Research by the House of Commons Library found that defence spending has increased in some of the biggest recipients of British taxpayers' aid cash. The cash could have helped at least four developing countries keep their defence budgets above the international benchmark of 2 per cent of gross national income.

Sir Gerald Howarth MP, a former defence minister in the Coalition government who is campaigning against defence cuts, said: “By continuing to provide aid to countries with increasing defence budgets the UK is effectively subsidising their defence budgets whilst we are ramping up overseas aid and cutting our own defence budget. It simply does not make sense.”

Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the Commission, has vented his frustration at Mr Tsipras for rejecting the lenders' proposals last week without telling his parliament that sticking points such as income support for pensioners had been put on the table for negotiations. "He didn't tell parliament that we did address that subject already," said Mr Juncker, adding that he is yet to receive a revised proposal from the Greek leadership following Mr Tsipras' "disappointing" comments.

"I don't have a personal problem with Alexis Tsipras, quite the contrary. He was my friend, he is my friend. But friendship, in order to maintain it, has to have some minimum rules," he said at the G7 summit in Germany. Meanwhile, the President of the European Parliament has put further pressure on Greece to agree a deal with its international creditors and unlock rescue funding, warning of “dramatic consequences” if the indebted country resists compromise.

Mr Tsipras took a defiant stance on Friday by postponing a €300 million payment to the International Monetary Fund and describing the latest reforms and funding proposal from the troika of lenders as an “unpleasant surprise” and “absurd”. Mr Schulz echoed Mr Tsipras’s foreboding tone about how quickly Europe needs to come to an agreement. "Time is running out and the consequences would be dramatic,” he said, warning Greece against “turning down the outstretched hand again”.

On his way back from the Victory Day Parade in Moscow last month, the Cuban leader Raul Castro stopped off in Rome to thank Pope Francis for his role in Cuba's rapprochement with the United States. "If the Pope continues this way," Castro said afterwards, "I will go back to praying and go back to the church - I am not joking."

In September Francis will return the compliment with a stop-over in Cuba when he travels to the United States. And the American visit could turn out to be the most difficult overseas trip of his pontificate. Raul Castro's endorsement is unlikely to recommend Francis to the American right, many of whom responded with visceral rage to President Obama's Cuban initiative.

"There is a lot of scepticism among (US) Catholics," says Stephen Moore, the chief economist at the conservative Washington think tank the Heritage Foundation, and himself a Catholic. "I think this is a Pope who clearly has some Marxist leanings. It's unquestionable that he has a very vocal scepticism (about) capitalism and free enterprise and… I find that to be very troubling."

Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host is blunter. He dismissed Pope Francis's apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospels) as "pure Marxism".

To wit: “Just days after George Soros warned that World War 3 was imminent unless Washington backed down to China on IMF currency basket inclusion, the hacker collective CyberBerkut has exposed the billionaire as the real puppet-master behind the scenes in Ukraine.

In 3 stunning documents, allegedly hacked from email correspondence between the hedge fund manager and Ukraine President Poroshenko, Soros lays out ‘A short and medium term comprehensive strategy for the new Ukraine,’ expresses his confidence that the US should provide Ukraine with lethal military assistance, ‘with same level of sophistication in defense weapons to match the level of opposing force,’ and finally explained Poroshenko's ‘first priority must be to regain control of financial markets,’ which he assures the President could be helped by The Fed adding, ‘I am ready to call Jack Lew of the US Treasury to sound him out about the swap agreement’.”

Needless to say, there was absolutely no mention of any of this in the broader media.

Yesterday, I asked my girl what she thought lay behind the epidemic of mental health problems in young people. “You can never be good enough,” she shrugged. “I got really solid GCSEs but they could have been better. It’s not just academic work, it’s everything. Kids my age spend an average of eight hours a day online and 80 per cent of advertising features the female body, always perfect looking, so pretty much the whole time you know you’re not good enough.”

“Could do better” used to be the laconic teacher’s scrawl on a sub-standard essay; now it’s the self-lacerating mantra of our children during what are supposed to be the best years of their lives. A survey by the World Health Organisation in 2014 revealed that a fifth of 15-year-olds in England said they had self-harmed in the past twelve months. That finding bore out anecdotal evidence I had heard from other parents and teachers.

Like my daughter’s tutor in the sixth form who suggested that her persistent stomach complaint might have a psychological cause. I was taken aback. “Do you really think so?,’ I asked dubiously. “Probably a third of the year are suffering from depression, anorexia or self-harming,” he replied.

Maintaining the suspension of disbelief in the illusion, however, is often more comforting than acknowledging the magician’s secrets. We live in a world of illusion. So many of the concerns that occupy the mind and the tasks that fill the calendar arise from planted impulses to become someone or something that we are not. This is no accident.

As we are indoctrinated into this authoritarian-corporate-consumer culture that now dominates the human race, we are trained that certain aspects of our society are untouchable truths, and that particular ways of being and behaving are preferred.

Psychopaths disempower people in this way. They blind us with never ceasing barrages of suggestions and absolutes that are aimed at shattering self-confidence and confidence in the future. Advertising is just the tip of the iceberg. When we look further we see that the overall organization of life is centered around the pursuit of illusions and automatic obedience to institutions and ideas which are not at all what they seem.

We are in a very real sense enslaved. Many call this somewhat intangible feeling of oppression ‘the matrix,’ a system of total control that invades the mind, programming individuals to pattern themselves in accordance with a mainstream conformist version of reality, no matter how wicked it gets.

Robots deployed in manufacturing today tend to be large, dangerous to anyone who strays too close to their whirling arms, and limited to one task, like welding, painting or hoisting heavy parts. The latest models entering factories and being developed in labs are a different breed. They can work alongside humans without endangering them and help assemble all sorts of objects, as large as aircraft engines and as small and delicate as smartphones. Soon, some should be easy enough to program and deploy that they no longer will need expert overseers.

Some of the latest robots are designed specifically for the tricky job of assembling consumer-electronics items, now mostly done by hand in Asia. At least one company promises its robots eventually will be sewing garments in the US, taking over one of the ultimate sweatshop tasks.

Though the US, Europe and other high-wage areas should benefit from these trends, they won’t have the field to themselves. China also is investing heavily in robots as its wages soar and its population ages. For now, China has just 30 robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees, trailing South Korea (437), Japan (323), Germany (282) and the US (152), according to the International Federation of Robotics, a trade group. But the federation projects that the total number of industrial robots being used in China will exceed that of North America next year. IHS Technology, a research firm, projects that robot sales in China will surge to about 211,000 units in 2019 from 55,000 last year.

Greater use of robots means fewer people are needed on factory floors; those doing routine tasks requiring little education are most vulnerable. Yet even highly automated factories create or sustain jobs in design, engineering, machine maintenance and repair, marketing, logistics and other services.

US President Barack Obama is expected to sign the USA Freedom Act after it was approved by the Senate 67-32 on Tuesday. “The Senate approving the NSA surveillance, it’s not a surprise, even with Rand Paul’s filibuster, the minor amendments,” Martin said. “The fact is that we are a surveillance society. There are no more civil liberties; there is no more right to privacy, regardless to the Constitution,” he added.

Although the Freedom Act would curtail some of the National Security Agency’s now-expired powers it gained under the Patriot Act in the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001, it would authorize the agency to still track those potentially deemed as threats. “The fact of the matter is that the Freedom Act is really no different than the Patriot Act. All the government has to do now is say that someone is dangerous or they’re suspected of being a terrorist, and they can collect the data,” he noted.

“The fact is that the United States has devolved into a soft-core totalitarian dictatorship. There’s no right to privacy. And the American people, if they carry around a smart phone should seriously consider getting rid of it,” the journalist said. “They should very seriously consider what they write in their emails and be very cautious of that, because even dry humor can be construed by the government as ‘terrorism,’” he stated. “It’s a sad state of affairs, and hopefully other nations, particularly Europe and around the world would begin disassociating and disaffiliating with the United States,” Martin concluded.