House Bill 1328 wasn’t drafted that way, but then a lobbyist representing law enforcement — tight with a booming drone industry — got his hands on it. The bill’s stated intent was to require police to obtain a search warrant from a judge in order to use a drone to search for criminal evidence. In fact, the original draft of Representative Rick Becker’s bill would have banned all weapons on police drones.

Then Bruce Burkett of the North Dakota Peace Officer’s Association was allowed by the state house committee to amend HB 1328 and limit the prohibition only to lethal weapons. “Less than lethal” weapons like rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, sound cannons, and Tasers are therefore permitted on police drones. Becker, the bill’s Republican sponsor, said he had to live with it.

“This is one I’m not in full agreement with. I wish it was any weapon,” he said at a hearing in March. “In my opinion there should be a nice, red line: Drones should not be weaponized. Period.” Even “less than lethal” weapons can kill though. At least 39 people have been killed by police Tasers in 2015 so far, according to The Guardian. Bean bags, rubber bullets, and flying tear gas canisters have also maimed, if not killed, in the US and abroad.

Despite the revelations of the past several years, nothing has changed to push back against the American police state. Our freedoms — especially the Fourth Amendment — continue to be choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation. Despite the recent outrage and protests, nothing has changed to restore us to our rightful role as having dominion over our bodies, our lives and our property, especially when it comes to interactions with the government.

Forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases — these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.

Thus far, the courts have done little to preserve our Fourth Amendment rights, let alone what shreds of bodily integrity remain to us. We have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp — call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.

Government surveillance, police abuse, SWAT team raids, economic instability, asset forfeiture schemes, pork barrel legislation, militarized police, drones, endless wars, private prisons, involuntary detentions, biometrics databases, free speech zones, etc… these are mile markers on the road to a fascist state where citizens are treated like cattle, to be branded and eventually led to the slaughterhouse.

Increasingly, things become those people’s private possession — even what was formerly a public asset becomes now private. Beaches become private. Schools become private. Natural resources become private. It’s not just the art that was stolen by the Nazis and privatized to them and/or shown at museums that they control, which becomes private; it’s whatever the elite want to have, and to control: it’s all now private. That’s the fascist ideal.

The legal system accommodates the legal owners, in any fascist nation, just as the legal system accommodates the legal owners in any nation at all. And, in fascism, the legal owners are the aristocracy, which are the people who have helped bring the system into being as it now is. Whereas any aristocracy is always at war against the public, there are also competitions within any aristocracy to determine which aristocrats will be the dominant ones. And, privatizations are now all the rage throughout the world, such as in today’s fascist United States, and today’s fascist United Kingdom.

This time, it’s called instead by such names as “libertarianism” or “neo-liberalism,” no longer “fascism,” so that only the true-believing fascists, the aristocrats, will even know that it’s actually fascism. It’s their Big Con. It’s their Big Lie. Just renaming fascism as “libertarianism” or “neo-liberalism,” has fooled the masses to think that it’s pro-democratic.

“Capitalism” has thus come to be re-defined to refer to only the aristocratically controlled form of capitalism: fascism. The ideological battle has thus apparently been won by a cheap terminological deceit. That’s all it takes for dictatorship to be able to win. Within recent decades, the international aristocracy, with America’s in the lead, has, in fact, set into motion a plan to privatize an emerging world government, so as to prevent it from being democratic: instead of socialist, this would be a fascist world government.

Faced with a human flood, Mrs Merkel has abandoned the Dublin Convention that requires asylum-seekers to be processed in their country of arrival. Berlin’s new policy will allow Syrian refugees to apply for asylum in Germany, rather than in their first port of call. Deciding to do such a thing without the approval of Brussels will surely encourage other EU countries to pursue their own migration policies, too.

But this is the last thing Mrs Merkel wants. She and President Hollande of France have just called for a new, binding European agreement to share the asylum burden. Her proposals, however, were greeted with incredulity by other member states, their inherent flaw being that they would give millions more migrants an added incentive to come to Europe.

Mr Cameron, along with other leaders, is resisting Mrs Merkel’s move, despite moral blackmail from EU and UN officials.

Mrs Merkel may not like it but many Germans, who are expecting a record 800,000 asylum-seekers this year, feel that they have already taken more than their fair share. They blame their coalition government for being a soft touch and street protests are reaching a crescendo. On Thursday, Mrs Merkel was greeted by angry protests and shouts of “traitor” as she visited an embattled refugee hostel near Dresden. Solving this crisis is proving to be the greatest challenge of her career.

Erdan has been carrying out behind-the-scenes staff work in the past few weeks, together with police, the Israel Security Agency (ISA, or Shin Bet), the State Attorney's Office and even the Attorney General, who has agreed to help advance the declaration. In the discussions of the problem, Erdan was shown evidence that the so-called murabitun and murabitat, as the male and female groups of Muslim mayhem-makers are named, are directed by the northern arm of the Islamic Movement in Israel.

The purpose of their activity is to destabilize the status quo on the Temple Mount, and they have succeeded in creating escalation on the Mount, and in making the security situation there untenable.

“We underline the fundamental importance of the formation of a broad anti-terrorist front involving key international players and regional countries, including Syria,” Putin said on Wednesday. “We have common views on the need to intensify the fight against international terrorism, which is relevant, considering the aggressive ambitions of radical structures, particularly the so-called Islamic State.”

During Sisi’s visit to Moscow, the heads of states discussed a wide range of issues, including the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as economic cooperation. In February, Putin and Sisi signed several agreements under which Russia committed to help Egypt build a new nuclear power industry. On Wednesday, Putin hinted that Russia may supply the Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft to Egypt.

Germany, which has taken a tough line on Greece, has profited from the country’s crisis to the tune of 100 billion euros ($109 billion), according to the new study. “These savings exceed the costs of the crisis — even if Greece were to default on its entire debt,” said the report. “Germany has clearly benefited from the Greek crisis.”

When investors are faced with turmoil, they typically seek a safe haven for their money, and export champion Germany “disproportionately benefited” from that during the debt crisis, it said. “Every time financial markets faced negative news on Greece in recent years, interest rates on German government bonds fell, and every time there was good news, they rose.”

Channels for such transactions include China selling directly, as well as through agents in Belgium and Switzerland, said one of the people, who declined to be identified as the information isn’t public. China has communicated with US authorities about the sales, said another person. They didn’t reveal the size of the disposals.

The People’s Bank of China has been offloading dollars and buying yuan to support the exchange rate, a policy that’s contributed to a $315 billion drop in its foreign-exchange reserves over the last 12 months. The $3.65 trillion stockpile will fall by some $40 billion a month in the remainder of 2015 because of the intervention, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey.

“By selling Treasuries to defend the renminbi, they’re preventing Treasury yields from going lower despite the fact that we’ve seen a sharp drop in the stock market,” David Woo, head of global rates and currencies research at Bank of America Corp, said on Bloomberg Television on Wednesday. “China has a direct impact on global markets through US rates.” “Strategically, it probably has been China’s intention to find the right time to lighten up its excessive accumulation of US Treasuries,” he said.

The Palestinian draft resolution, which was seen by Reuters, says that the flags of non-member observer states "shall be raised at the United Nations Headquarters and Offices following the flags of the member states of the United Nations." The draft resolution specifically refers to both the Vatican and the State of Palestine, both of which are non-member observer states at the United Nations.

The initiative comes one month before the scheduled appearance of Pope Francis for a major speech before a high-level gathering of the 193-nation UN General Assembly on September 25. Currently, only member states' flags fly at UN headquarters. UN diplomats say the United States and Israel, which do not recognize Palestinian statehood, would likely be irked by any move to fly the Palestinian flag at UN headquarters in New York City.

The flag-flying resolution, which diplomats said the Palestinians were expected to circulate to the full assembly as early as on Wednesday, had apparently been prepared without the explicit consent of the Vatican's mission to the United Nations.

Many Venezuelans have to carry wads of cash in bags instead of wallets as soaring inflation and a declining currency increase the number of bills needed for everyday purchases. The situation is set to get worse. Inflation, already the fastest in the world, could end the year at 150 percent, said the official.

The government stopped releasing regular economic statistics in December, when it reported inflation had reached 69 percent. A customer would need at least 1,280 bank notes to purchase a 24-inch Samsung television on sale at a mall in eastern Caracas for 128,000 bolivars. Some banks, meanwhile, have reduced daily withdrawal limits at ATMs because of shortages of the highest denominated notes.

But for how troubling the data point seemed to be, it got relatively little press attention, at least on the airwaves. From the morning of August 20 through Sunday evening, the fact that the month we had just endured was the hottest on record was mentioned on major cable news networks all of 10 times.

To determine this, we searched the archive service TVEyes using the term “hottest month,” “warmest month,” “warmest period,” "July" and "hottest," and "July" and "warmest."

Just how little coverage is that? Consider this: During that same period, the name "Donald Trump" was mentioned more than 245 times on MSNBC, more than 265 times on CNN and more than 240 times on Fox News. Those numbers also don't include shows that re-aired (including CNN's hour-long interview with Trump that was rebroadcast several times), and they only reflect a TVEyes search for the businessman presidential candidate’s full name, not "Donald" or "Trump."

But government spokespeople rarely mention the inconvenient fact that these records are being set by less than the uncertainty in the statistics. NOAA claims an uncertainty of 14 one-hundredths of a degree in its temperature averages, or near twice the amount by which they say the record was set. NASA says that their data is typically accurate to one tenth of a degree, five times the amount by which their new record was set.

So, the new temperature records are meaningless. Neither agency knows whether a record was set. Such misrepresentations are now commonplace in NOAA and NASA announcements. They are regularly proclaiming monthly and yearly records set by less than the uncertainties in the measurements. Scientists within the agencies know that this is dishonest.

They also know that calculating so-called global average temperatures to hundredths of a degree is irrational. After all, there is very little data for the 70 percent of Earth’s surface that is ocean. There is also little data for mountainous and desert regions, not to mention the Antarctic. Much of the coverage is so sparse that NASA is forced to make the ridiculous claim that regions are adequately covered if there is a temperature-sensing station within nearly 750 miles. This is the distance between Ottawa, Canada, and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina - cities with very different climates. Yet, according to NASA, only one temperature sensing station is necessary for the two cities and the vast area between them to be adequately represented in their network.

In the final analysis, it is no more meaningful to calculate an average temperature for a whole planet than it is to calculate the average telephone number in the Washington DC phone book. Temperature, like viscosity and density, and of course phone numbers, is not something that can be meaningfully averaged. “Global temperature” does not exist.

The sad answer will be that it had nothing to do with the realities of science, technology or economics. The tragic blunder is based on satisfying political expedience for a privileged few, egged on by vested financial interests, and supported by largely uninformed activists granted the media platforms needed to sway public opinion. As Jay Lehr, science director of the Chicago-based Heartland Institute said, “It is a scam that dwarfs all others that have come before.”