The immediate headlines that got us to this point are these: After an intractable series of negotiations over a bailout extension with Greece’s creditors, the nation’s left-wing government left the table Friday and said it would hold a referendum on July 5.

Greek leaders think the offer on the table from European governments and the International Monetary Fund is lousy, requiring still more pension cuts and tax increases in a depressed economy, and intend to throw to voters the question of whether to accept it. Whatever the exact phrasing of the question (and assuming the referendum goes forward as planned), it really boils down to this simple choice:

A “Yes” vote means that Greece will continue the grinding era of austerity that has caused so much pain to its citizens over the last five years, in exchange for keeping the euro currency and the monetary stability it provides.

A “No” vote almost certainly means that the country will walk away from the euro and create its own currency (which will surely devalue sharply), bringing financial chaos in the near term but creating the possibility of a rebound in the medium term as the country becomes more competitive with its devalued currency. The world should be rooting for a happy outcome to this Greek tragedy. It’s just not at all clear what a happy outcome would look like at this point.

Of the 30 PPDs issued by Obama, 19 have not been released. And for 11 of those, the White House has not disclosed even the subject of the order. “It’s not only the public that doesn’t have copies. It’s also Congress that doesn’t have copies. It’s a domain of largely unchecked presidential authority. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it’s lacking in independent oversight.”

But they have the same legal force as an executive order, forming a body of largely secret law, said Harold Relyea, a political scientist who advised Congress on national security directives before retiring from the Congressional Research Service. “The difference is that while executive orders are public by law — they must be published in the Federal Register to be effective — PPDs are not,” he said. “It is a kind of secret law. People have to obey it. But it’s a directive that can allocate money, direct people or take a course of action.”

“Shifts in hearts and minds is possible,” he said. “And those who have come so far on their journey to equality have a responsibility to reach back and help others join them. Because for all our differences, we are one people — stronger together than we could ever be alone.”

“That’s always been our story. We are big and vast, and diverse. A nation of people with different backgrounds and beliefs, with different experiences and stories, but bound by our shared ideal that no matter who you are, or what you look like, how you started off, or how and who you love — America’s a place where you can write your own destiny.”

This veiled call to arms indicates that the war on conservatives is truly going hot. He has labeled religious people as backward and a hindrance to all others. The left isn’t capable of ‘help’. The socialists accomplish their ends with verbal and physical assaults wrapped inside lies and corrupt measures.

The financial sector in the West no longer funds real investments in plant and equipment. So much of the US manufacturing economy has been moved offshore, and the lack of consumer income growth means that investment opportunities in the US are very limited. With the derivatives, leveraged financial speculation seems to have reached its limits. All of this suggests that looting countries in the name of settling their sovereign debt is the new road to riches.

The financial sector has turned to the looting of the public sector in the Western countries themselves. By destroying Western social welfare systems, as has happened in Greece, public revenues are freed that the One Percent can capture. In the US Obamacare is a mechanism that allows private insurance companies to loot the public funds assigned to health care. The examples are numerous, and privatizations will result in the demise of public goods, from health care, to education, to pensions.

The Delphi Declaration recognizes this and correctly warns the Italians, Spanish, French, and Germans that they are next on the list of countries whose public sectors will be plundered. The leaders of Russia and China must be amused to watch Western countries consume themselves.

The multilateral institution, seen as a rival to the Western-dominated World Bank and Asian Development Bank, was initially opposed by the United States but has attracted many prominent US allies including Britain, Germany, Australia and South Korea. Other founding members include most Asian nations and countries from the Middle East and South America.

Japan and the United States are the most prominent nations not to have any representation in the venture. China has said it has left the door open for them to join. “It’s a huge diplomatic and strategic win for China,” Malcolm Cook, a senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, said of the AIIB.

Far from coming from a strictly religious perspective, he comprehensively addresses the issue from the point of ecological and economical balance, noting:

"The expansion of these [genetically engineered] crops has the effect of destroying the complex network of ecosystems, diminishing the diversity of production and affecting regional economies, now and in the future. In various countries, we see an expansion of oligopolies for the production of cereals and other products needed for their cultivation. This dependency would be aggravated were the production of infertile seeds to be considered; the effect would be to force farmers to purchase them from larger producers.

"Certainly, these issues require constant attention and a concern for their ethical implications. A broad, responsible scientific and social debate needs to take place, one capable of considering all the available information and of calling things by their name. Discussions are needed in which all those directly or indirectly affected (farmers, consumers, civil authorities, scientists, seed producers, people living near fumigated fields, and others) can make known their problems and concerns, and have access to adequate and reliable information in order to make decisions for the common good, present and future.

"This is a complex environmental issue; it calls for a comprehensive approach which would require, at the very least, greater efforts to finance various lines of independent, interdisciplinary research capable of shedding new light on the problem."

When the pontiff John Paul II ascended to the Temple Mount in 2000, Judaism’s most holy site, he wasn’t welcomed by Israeli officials, but by representatives of the Palestinian Authority, and the holy complex was bedecked in Arab flags. It was the Pope's implicit recognition of Islamic hegemony. It was taken to mean that Islam and Christianity superseded Judaism and have the right to “inherit” its holy places.

Since then, the Holy See’s taking a stance as the ally of the heads of the Palestinian Authority in the place most holy to the Jewish people, became almost a fait accompli. The Catholic de-legitimization of Israel passes through the war on Jerusalem and the war on Jerusalem passes through the Temple Mount. The site where the Jewish people worshipped for hundreds of years and the focal point of every practicing Jew’s prayers is under assault from the Vatican.

The Vatican-PLO agreements have been signed to enable the eviction of the Jews from Jerusalem. This follows a memorandum signed by Palestinian and Vatican officials in 2000 which repeated the Vatican call for an international mandate to preserve “the proper identity and sacred character” of Jerusalem. It means a return to a time when half of Israel’s capital was under Islamic control, the Old City was closed to Jews, the synagogues were desecrated, and walls, barbed wire, and snipers divided the city by force.

The Vatican is consistent. In 1964, when Pope Paul VI made the first papal visit to Jerusalem, Jews and Christians with Israeli passports were barred from entering the Old City. And no Vatican official complained about that. What will the Jews do apart from pleasing tyrants and their collaborators? Here's what should do. Start taking control of the Temple Mount. It will be harder to take you away.

Germany, therefore, must become more active - militarily as well, beginning, for example, with joint maneuvers with the bordering countries. Until now, Germany only has a permanent presence in Djibouti, in the western Indian Ocean, which is seen as insufficient. This plea for opening a parallel theater of conflict alongside the power struggle with Russia, dovetails with existing German activities, for example, the reinforced arms buildup of the East and Southeast Asian rivals of the People's Republic of China.

As has now been confirmed in the new Arms Exports Report, published in the middle of this week, Germany's arms export policies have already begun to focus on East and Southeast Asia. Four countries from these regions are among the top ten customers of German military hardware, but only two NATO member countries.

Scientists tell us that it is a matter of when, not if, the next eruption will happen, and even a minor eruption could result in tens of thousands of Americans being literally buried alive in super-heated mud. So what would a full-blown eruption do? It would potentially cause death and destruction on a scale that is almost unimaginable.

If Mount Rainier were to erupt as powerfully as Mount St Helens did in its May 18, 1980, eruption, the effect would be cumulatively greater, because of the far more massive amounts of glacial ice locked on the volcano compared to Mount St Helens and the vastly more heavily populated areas surrounding Rainier. Lahars from Rainier pose the most risk to life and property, as many communities lie atop older lahar deposits. According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), about 150,000 people live on top of old lahar deposits of Rainier. Rainier is also capable of producing pyroclastic flows and expelling lava.

Most people don’t even know what “lahars” are, but they can be exceedingly deadly. Heat from an eruption will melt ice and glaciers on the mountain and turn them into mudslides moving up to 50 mph, with the potential to be more than 400 feet deep in nearby valleys. Rainier has had a history of lahars, ranging from more than 5,600 years ago to only 500 years ago. The largest of these debris flows – the Osceola Mudflow – occurred 5,600 years ago, covered 212 square miles of land from Rainier to Kent and was hundreds of feet deep.

Mount Rainier lies along the Ring of Fire, and right now volcanoes all along the Ring of Fire are waking up. A couple of months ago, I wrote an article entitled “The Number Of Volcanoes Erupting Right Now Is Greater Than The 20th Century’s YEARLY Average”. Since that time, the number of volcanoes that are currently erupting around the world has grown even larger. At this point, 41 volcanoes are currently erupting, and the vast majority of them are along the Ring of Fire.

In any event, a full-blown eruption of Mount Rainier would cause death and destruction on a scale that is absolutely unprecedented in modern times, and scientists assure us that such an event is in our future.

These low interest rates have in turn fuelled economic booms, encouraging excessive risk taking. Booms have then turned to busts, which policymakers have responded to with even lower rates. Claudio Borio, head of the organisation’s monetary and economic department, said: “Persistent exceptionally low rates reflect the central banks’ and market participants’ response to the unusually weak post-crisis recovery as they fumble in the dark in search of new certainties.”

“Rather than just reflecting the current weakness, they may in part have contributed to it by fuelling costly financial booms and busts and delaying adjustment. The result is too much debt, too little growth and too low interest rates. In short, low rates beget lower rates."

The BIS warned that interest rates have now been so low for so long that central banks are unequipped to fight the next crises. “In some jurisdictions, monetary policy is already testing its outer limits, to the point of stretching the boundaries of the unthinkable,” the BIS said. Policymakers in the eurozone, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland have taken their interest rates below zero in an attempt to support their economies, contributing to a decline in bond yields.

Their imposition capped a dramatic weekend for Greece that has pushed the country towards a likely default on 1.6 billion euros ($1.77 billion) of International Monetary Fund loans on Tuesday and closer to an exit from the euro currency bloc. French President Francois Hollande appealed to Tsipras to return to the negotiating table and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was willing to talk to the 40-year-old Greek leader if he wanted.

"There are a few hours before the negotiation is closed for good," Hollande said after a cabinet meeting on Greece. But with Greece's bailout programme expiring in less than 48 hours, hopes of a last-minute breakthrough were fading fast. Greeks - used to lengthy talks with creditors before a eleventh-hour deal materializes - were left stunned.

European bank shares fell sharply on Monday. Top banks in Spain, France and Germany were down more than 6 percent as the risk of a spillover to banks in other peripheral euro zone countries spooked investors. The Greek government will keep banks shut at least until after July 5, the date of the referendum, and withdrawals from automated teller machines were limited to 60 euros a day when they reopened at midday. The stock exchange will also stay shut.

Greece risks default and moving closer to a possible exit from the eurozone. Greeks have been queuing to withdraw money from cash machines over the weekend. Mr Tsipras did not give details of how long banks would stay shut, or exactly what controls on capital would be imposed.

The Greek prime minister said he had sent a new request for an extension to the bailout. "I am awaiting their immediate response to a fundamental request of democracy," he said. The announcement comes after a particularly turbulent few days for Greece.

The swift pace of hiring follows a bumper month in May – when 280,000 jobs were created – and take the unemployment rate 0.1 percentage point lower to 5.4 percent in June. Analysts at UBS said: “Although there is some month-to-month volatility in the unemployment rate, the trend is firmly downward.” The Swiss bank expects unemployment to drop to 5 percent in the final quarter of the year, and to 4.6 percent a year later.

The jobs data will pave the way for the Federal Reserve to increase its rates from the emergency levels of the past six years. Central bank watchers now believe that a rate rise could come in September.

But after announcing his intention to tighten connections between the two cities, the mayor came under a firestorm of criticism from local left-wing parties and pro-Palestinian activists, Channel 2 reported Thursday. Coincidentally, the decision came the same day as an announcement by British low-cost airline EasyJet that it would begin operating a new Tel Aviv-Amsterdam route.

The airline said one-way fares would start at less than 50 euros ($55). The Netherlands’ ambassador to Israel Caspar Veldkamp hailed the new flight route, telling financial newspaper Globes that the connection “would provide yet another boost to our strong ties.”