As we have shown multiple times in our columns, the battles over the site are portrayed almost exclusively in a frame which, on the one hand, highlights extremism, political recklessness, religious fanaticism and imminent danger and violence – almost all the fault of Jews – while on the other hand those very same themes, when Muslims are involved, are downplayed or ignored. Even worse, often times their responsibility, it is suggested, falls on Jewish shoulders that, it is claimed, shouldn’t have been in the esplanade in the first place.

When the paschal sacrifice exercises are conducted in some faraway Jerusalem neighborhood, with the priests dressed in white and a goat prepared for the slaughter, many media outlets cover the event, but with a smirk. The accompanying protests of animal rights activists are awarded almost equal air time. In contrast, the Samaritans, with their same sacrificial activity on Mount Gerizim (in the “occupied territories” no less), including the slaughtering and roasting of not one but half a dozen lambs, are a tourist attraction of the first degree. The media’s orientation is positive; the animal rights activists for some reason are not there.

Sunday will be marked as the solemn fast of Tisha Be’av, commemorating the destruction of two temples. The media need not adopt an architect’s plan for its rebuilding or champion a new status quo. On the other hand, it should not lend a hand to those who seek to further keep from our consciousness the ongoing destruction, physical and legal, that exists there. The ever-increasing number of days the site is closed to non-Muslims is another change in the status quo. Why does the media accept that Arabs/Muslims are permitted constantly to create a new “status quo”?

Meanwhile, both the White House and the Iranian government began the task of selling the agreement to domestic critics in Tehran and Washington. While Iran's parliament is unlikely to be able to derail an agreement backed by Ayatollah Khamenei, hard line legislators are expected to mount at least a symbolic opposition.

The parliament has formed a 15-member committee which will review the details of the agreement and give opponents a chance to voice their disapproval. General Mohammad Ali Jafari, head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, is the most prominent public critic, saying the agreement crossed "major red lines" for the Iranian military. "We'll never accept it," he told the Tasnim news agency. Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, is leading the effort to get the deal approved and told parliament that his negotiating team achieved their "key objectives" at the talks.

Even as the Ayatollah signalled his tacit approval of the deal he said that US and Iranian policies remained "180 degrees" opposed and that Iran would continue to back militant groups across the region. "Whether the deal is approved or disapproved, we will never stop supporting our friends in the region and the people of Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Lebanon," Ayatollah Khamenei said. "Even after this deal our policy towards the arrogant US will not change." Iran is a key backer of Hizbollah, the Lebanese militant group, as well as Houthi separatists in Yemen and the embattled Assad regime in Syria.

“When we began our negotiations, Iran had enough fissile material for 10 to 12 bombs. They had 19,000 centrifuges, up from the 163 that they had back in 2003 when the prior administration was engaged in them on this very topic,” Kerry said Thursday. “So this isn’t a question of giving them what they want. It’s a question of how do you hold their program back. How do you dismantle their weapons program? Not their whole program.

“Let’s understand what was really on the table here. We set out to dismantle their ability to be able to build a nuclear weapon, and we’ve achieved that. Nobody has ever talked about actually dismantling their entire program, because when that was being talked about, that’s when they went from 163 centrifuges to 19,000.” In 2013, while testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Kerry said the purpose of the sanctions against the rogue regime was to “help Iran dismantle its nuclear program.”

“I don’t think any of us thought we were just imposing these sanctions for the sake of imposing them,” he said. “We did it because we knew that it would hopefully help Iran dismantle its nuclear program. That was the whole point of the regime.”

It has stirred up nationalism across the Continent from Scotland to Catalonia to Greece. In Greece, it has stoked hatred and memories of WW2 instead of understanding. In the 1950s Robert Schuman and the Founding Fathers laid out the road to a democratic, solid Community currency. Its supranational principles are different from either intergovernmentalism or federalism.

Ask a politician today to define ‘supranational’ — and you will see why ignorance or arrogance has got Europe’s money in such a mess. In the 1990s politicians of a later generation chose the pseudo-federalist Delors Plan. It is destroying not only the consensus for a common currency but tearing apart European society. The European currency was supposed to unite. It was supposed to bring harmony amongst the peoples. It was supposed to bring an era of prosperity and investment in a common future.

It has failed. The reality of the counterfeit euro is much worse. There are several other Member States who could end up in a similar dilemma to Greece. Prepare yourselves!

Mitterrand was worried about recreating a full-sized Germany - Margaret Thatcher rejected the idea - while Kohl was asking the West Germans to give up the Deutsche Mark, a leading symbol of Germany's postwar success. But they came through. Germany was unified, the euro was established, and the former satellite regimes in Eastern Europe were admitted to the European Union a decade later.

The key point in the grand scope of history was not that monetary union and the road to the euro were set up before political union. It was that monetary union was set up at all. EU political union was impossible given the uncertain European universe created by the Soviet Union's collapse. Maastricht was a great achievement, but also a great risk. What was the Kohl-Mitterrand calculation?

It was that EU political integration would advance enough in succeeding years to make the economic union sustainable. It was, without saying it in so many words, that the Union would produce leaders of stature capable of making political union a reality, at least enough to undergird monetary union and the euro.

Florida has seen nine leprosy cases so far this year, but typically only sees an average of four annually, according to the Florida Department of Health. And experts say the reason for the outbreak may be … armadillos.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some armadillos are naturally infected with leprosy. The small animals are naturally nocturnal but are now in their breeding season, according to the University of Florida. As a result, they’re out more during the day now, when they may come into contact with people. Some armadillos are naturally infected with leprosy, and may be inadvertently transmitting it to humans.

Carter “stressed the United States of America's keenness on enhancing peace and stability in the region,” the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) stated Wednesday. During the meeting, Salman expressed doubt about the veracity of the checks and balances on the Iranian nuclear program, and questioned the "snap-back" sanctions program if Iran violated its terms, Carter told reporters. "Those are the same issues that we know will arise," he responded.

Riyadh backs Israel's view that the deal will only empower Tehran and its terror proxies, the Saudi-based Al-Arabiya news site reflected, and is also convinced that Iran will be able to build a nuclear weapon regardless of the deal due to the lax terms imposed on the Islamic Republic - including ample warning before inspections and the limited development of select warheads under "laboratory conditions." Both are faults in the plan Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has stressed several times in various speeches as the deal has developed.

The juxtaposition is a rare acknowledgement of agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia which have no formal diplomatic contact but have reportedly been growing more cooperative as the deal has progressed. After a quiet meeting with Carter Tuesday, Netanyahu briefly alluded to regional agreement over the poor quality of the deal during a press conference Wednesday with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

"In Israel and in many countries in the Middle East, there is broad agreement – this is a bad agreement that must be opposed," he said.

Researchers at the Systemic Risk Centre (SRC) at the London School of Economics said that regulations forcing banks to take the same approach to risk may end up making financial markets less safe. Financial institutions have been made to adopt the same models to forecast risk, which the report’s authors said relied on the false belief “that there is one knowable and correct model” to foresee the future.

The report said: “If the authorities pick one modelling approach over another, they may just as easily be backing the wrong horse, a model that is less accurate.” The fallout from the removal of the Swiss National Bank’s ceiling on the franc against the euro is one example of a shock which “demonstrates the inherent weaknesses of the regulator-approved standard risk models”, the SRC said.

Ms Rinehart, whose family have accumulated vast wealth from iron ore mining, has seen her fortune dwindle since commodity prices began their inexorable slide last year. The Australian mining mogul has seen her estimated wealth collapse to around $11 billion (£7 billion) from a fortune that was thought to be worth around $30 billion just three years ago.

This colossal collapse in wealth is symptomatic of the wider economic problem now facing Australia, which for years has been known as the lucky country due to its preponderance in natural resources such as iron ore, coal and gold. During the boom years of the so-called commodities “super cycle” when China couldn’t buy enough of everything that Australia dug out of the ground, the country’s economy resembled oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

While the rest of the world suffered from the aftermath of the global financial crisis, Australia’s economy – closely tied to China – appeared impervious, with full employment and a healthy trade surplus. However, a collapse in iron ore and coal prices coupled with the impact of large international mining companies slashing investment has exposed Australia’s true vulnerability. Just like Saudi Arabia, which is now burning its foreign reserves to compensate for falling oil prices, Australia faces a collapse in export revenue.

The last big earthquake on the fault, estimated to have a 6.8-magnitude, occurred in 1868, according to the USGS. It killed about 30 people and caused extensive property damage in the Bay Area, particularly in the city of Hayward, from which the fault derives its name. Until the larger 1906 earthquake, it was widely referred to as the “Great San Francisco Earthquake.” “The population is now 100 times bigger in the East Bay, so we have many more people that will be impacted,” said Tom Brocher, a research geophysicist with the USGS. Brocher urged residents to take steps to prepare for a major earthquake.

Retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Tony Shaffer, who today is an intelligence analyst on media outlets including Fox News, told G2 in an exclusive interview that the Chinese already have been conducting espionage on the nation’s critical infrastructures. Shaffer also is a senior fellow at the New York-based-London Center for Policy Research.

“The Chinese already have started,” Shaffer asserted. “Much of what used to be done to hack bulk power systems, SCADA systems, the Internet – it’s already being done.” SCADAs, or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems, are computer-based systems that monitor and control industrial processes remotely, enabling the automatic functioning of the nation’s critical infrastructures.

SCADAs, or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems, are computer-based systems that monitor and control industrial processes remotely, enabling the automatic functioning of the nation’s critical infrastructures.

"When we go swimming and we complain that our eyes are red, it's because swimmers have peed in the water," Michele Hlavsa, chief of CDC's healthy swimming program, told "Today."

The CDC also said in its report that the chlorine smell of pools isn't actually what you think. "What you smell are actually chemicals that form when chlorine mixes with pee, poop, sweat and dirt from swimmer's bodies... These chemicals - not chlorine - can cause your eyes to get red and sting, make your nose run, and make you cough."

"Yuck!" the CDC concluded.

Asked to sign the petition to support a 1% income tax on all white Americans in order to “even out the playing field” and redistribute the wealth amongst minority communities, the first man in the clip is incredulous that such a policy would pass but signs his name to it anyway.

Thankfully, a number of individuals refused to sign the petition, realizing that fighting racism by instituting racist policies was a dumb idea. The timing of the stunt is appropriate given recent revelations of a new government program that isn’t a million miles away from the notion of a white privilege tax.

The New York Post reports on the White House’s new data collection program which will pry, “into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of 'racial and economic justice'.” “This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make 'disparate impact' cases against [discrimination],” writes Paul Sperry.

In proposing that Greece could be better off outside the euro, the irascible 72-year-old crossed a political Rubicon: he confirmed that the single currency was "reversible" after all. But having broken the euro's biggest taboo, commentators have now suggested that it should be Mr Schaeuble's Germany, rather than Greece, that should now take the plunge and ditch the euro.

Princeton economist and former IMF bail-out chief Ashoka Mody is among the most recent proponents of a German exit from the euro.

Mr Mody notes that a return to the deutsche mark would provide a two-fold boost to the rest of the beleaguered eurozone: it would immediately cause the euro to plummet in value, stimulating exports in the southern periphery, and also cause far less disruption to the rest of the bloc than a potential Grexit. "A deutsche mark would buy more goods and services in Europe (and in the rest of the world) than does a euro today, the Germans would become richer in one stroke", writes Mr Mody.

And for all its relative economic strength, the euro was always at its heart a political construct designed to neuter a reunified Germany 25 years ago. Paradoxically, Mr Mody now says that a release from the shackles of the single currency could finally pave the way for Germany to act as the "benevolent hegemon" a functioning fixed-exhange rate system has always needed. "To stay close, Europe's nations may need to loosen the ties that bind them so tightly," he writes.