But is the French debt position really so much worse than ours? This year it looks as though, in gross terms, the French debt to GDP ratio will be just above 98 percent. That sounds pretty horrific. Yet the equivalent UK figure will be about 87 percent. The Maastricht debt criterion governing a country’s eligibility for joining the single currency was that the gross debt to GDP ratio was to be no higher than 60 percent, or at least converging on 60 percent “at a satisfactory pace”.

What happens to Greece remains vital to the future of Europe. The Franco-British experience shows what should have been obvious from umpteen other episodes around the world: you cannot cut your way to prosperity. To oblige Greece to engage in more austerity in current conditions is sheer madness. What it needs is more aggregate demand. Given this, the deficit will turn into surplus and the debt to GDP ratio will fall. Does anyone believe that the deal that seems to have been done to keep Greece in the euro will do anything to boost the Greek economy?

Exports in the double-digit billions are expected. Meanwhile experts are calling for realigning power relations in the Persian Gulf under western leadership to establish a balance of power between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This would prevent the hegemony of either and offer the West favorable opportunities to influence developments in the region. Comprehensive German arms exports to Saudi Arabia and the weakening of Iranian positions, particularly in Syria, would form the basis of this desired balance of power.

According to experts, the EU could play a leading role in reshaping the region, if resistance in the US Congress, at the last moment, does not block the nuclear deal.

Whereas social-democratic observers do not exclude an attenuation of the contradictions, southern European conservative media are among those who speak of a revival of German hegemonic ambitions, which had largely determined or triggered the First and Second World Wars. The consequences of the French-Italian submission during negotiations in Brussels are generating those fears, because Paris had not succeeded to and Rome had not even seriously attempted to thwart the German dictates of sovereignty over Greece. Both Italy and France are aware of the dangers of becoming the next victim of German financial dictatorship.

They are competing for admission in a northern European core Europe, whose membership will be decided by Berlin, in the case of a possible collapse of the European Union. Current events are directly linked to German foreign policy endeavours in the 1990s and the territorial expansion of Germany's economic basis through the so-called reunification.

Attempts by the Israeli Police to curtail this right on the Temple Mount have been defeated several times in court. Nevertheless, Israeli Police enforce their own rules on the Temple Mount, closely monitoring Jewish visitors to prevent any kind of visible prayer, escorting any “violators” off the Mount and occasionally arresting and banning Jews from the holy site. Muslim prayer, however, is freely allowed.

Although the sign does not specify non-Muslim prayer, it is clearly aimed solely at Israelis and tourists. It is written in Hebrew and English – not Arabic – and it is posted only at the visitors’ gate and not at the multiple Temple Mount entrances used by Muslims.

Rabbi Yehuda Glick, founder of the Temple Mount Heritage Foundation and a world renowned Temple Mount activist, expressed his dismay at the decision to erect the sign. “We cannot understand why the police have adopted the radical Muslim narrative of the sanctity of the Temple Mount to Muslims only,” he told Breaking Israel News. “We will continue to convince public opinion and decision makers that Jews deserve human rights in the capital of their sovereign state too.”

An explosive Channel 4 documentary is set to reveal details of how Prince Philip's sister met and admired Adolf Hitler, whom she described as a 'charming and seemingly modest man'. Three of his sisters were married to senior Nazi officers – one a colonel in the SS – and when Philip attended a family funeral in Germany in 1937 he was confronted by crowds giving the Heil Hitler salute. The documentary includes previously unseen extracts from a private memoir in which one sister talks of her early admiration for Hitler.

Meanwhile the footage showing the Queen performing a Nazi salute as a child could have been accidentally leaked by Buckingham Palace, it has been reported. The Duke of Edinburgh, now 94, served bravely in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and his family's history is no secret. But the Palace will not welcome a fresh focus on his sister's links to the Third Reich while controversy continues over the footage of the Queen.

Churchill continued: “The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities … but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.”

Churchill concluded: “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”

The address marked the end of Pope Francis' week-long pilgrimage to Latin America, during which he also assailed the prevailing economic system as the "dung of the devil," saying that the systemic "greed for money" is a "subtle dictatorship" that "condemns and enslaves men and women." During Sunday's rally, which was held on the banks of the Paraguay River outside the capital Asunción, the Argentinian pontiff went off-script as he addressed tens of thousands of local youth.

"They wrote a speech for me to give you. But speeches are boring," Pope Francis said. "Make a mess, but then also help to tidy it up. A mess which gives us a free heart, a mess which gives us solidarity, a mess which gives us hope."

He also encouraged those present to look at their less fortunate peers, some of whom he met earlier in the day during a visit to the Banado Norte shantytown, and spoke of the connection between authentic liberty and responsibility and the necessity of fighting for the right to lead a dignified life. "We don't want young weaklings. We do not want young people who tire quickly, who live life worn out with faces of boredom. We want youths with hope and strength," Francis told the crowd.

Under current US immigration policy, an ISIS terrorist doesn’t need to hop a fence or swim a river to reach America. He can enter the US legally as a student, as a skilled guest-worker, as a refugee, as an entrepreneur, or as a tourist – and fly here in the comfort of a jumbo jet. According to US Census data, the US welcomes about 100,000 Muslim immigrants legally each year. This represents the fastest growing segment of immigrants coming to America. While some may enter with questionable backgrounds, the chances are greater that they will get radicalized after they arrive.

Take the case of Chattanooga terrorist Youssef Mohammad Abdulazeez. He arrived with his parents from Kuwait in 1996 at the age of 6. He attended US schools, and by all accounts was a fully assimilated US naturalized citizen. Abdulazeez was a success story just waiting to be told by Obama’s newly created White House Taskforce on New Americans, which collaborates with community-organizing groups like Welcoming America to convince Americans that expansive immigration brings only good things to their cities and towns.

But something happened over the last two years of Abdulazeez’s life that changed him. Last year, at the age of 23, he traveled to Jordan and Yemen for seven months, and US intelligence agencies aren’t sure who he visited or what he may have been taught while visiting the Middle East. FBI Director James Comey’s dire warning to Congress several weeks before the Chattanooga attack now seems prophetic because it applies perfectly to young Muslims like Abdulazeez.

The message of ISIS to Western recruits is this: “Come to the so-called caliphate, and if you can’t, kill somebody. Kill somebody where you are,” Comey said. “He told them, with obviously deep concern, that his agency is simply incapable of managing the threats now proliferating across the entire country,” said Clare Lopez, vice president of research and analysis for the Center for Security Policy and a former CIA analyst.

The skyscraper has carried out the tradition “for several years now — it is an annual lighting,” a building spokeswoman told AFP.

The Empire State Building famously shines specific colors for a number of religious holidays — pastel shades for Easter, blue and white for Hanukkah, and red and green for Christmas.

It also has marked a number of events — red, white and blue for the US women’s World Cup victory, rainbow colors for gay Pride Week, and blue, white and purple for World Oceans Day on June 8. The tower is otherwise illuminated in white each night.

Deeper fiscal integration in the eurozone is a "huge mistake" that could end up tearing the bloc apart, Sweden's former finance minister has warned. Anders Borg said forcing countries to cede sovereignty could trigger a right-wing backlash across Europe, as he predicted that countries such as Sweden and Poland, which are obliged to join the euro, would not adopt the single currency for "decades".

"If you go for tighter co-operation that basically brings higher taxes to the north to subsidise the south, you build in a political divide that is not sustainable in the long term," he said.

The difference is that World War II was a war declared under Article I, Section 8, Clause II of the Constitution whereas the war on terror is undeclared and thus illegal. Clark is in essence advocating a life sentence for people who have not committed a crime but merely engaged in speech — often reprehensible, yet constitutionally protected — the government considers radical and in opposition to its foreign policy.

The Bush administration declared the war on terror would last a generation or more. Senior officials with the Obama administration meanwhile have said — when formulating “disposition matrix” to determine how terrorism suspects will be disposed of — they had reached a “broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade” or more. Clark’s remarks reveal the mindset of the upper echelon of government. Those who disagree with the government are now to be rounded up and shut up indefinitely in political internment camps.

Mass internment of official enemies on par with Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union is now “on the table” and openly discussed as suspicious attacks and FBI orchestrated and grandstanded terror plots continue to grab headlines and build a reactionary consensus as the designed result of an incessant, decades-long propaganda campaign.

As LifeNews reported, Dr Nucatola tells actors posing as buyers from a human biologics company, StemExpress, that Planned Parenthood charges per-specimen for baby body parts and is aware of their own liability for doing so. She also explains that some body parts, such as livers and heads, are much more popular and go for a higher price than other specimen.

After considerable international outrage over the video, StemExpress took down its web site — putting it in “maintenance mode.” Now, the web site is back up and anyone can purchase body parts from babies Planned Parenthood kills in abortions. In a flyer from Stem Express, they describe their business as “a multi-million dollar company that supplies human blood, tissue products, primary cells and other clinical specimens to biomedical researchers.”

Then they encourage organizations to pursue their business because they can help them implement programs that bring in financial profits. The Federalist points out that the Stem Express flyer even quotes a Planned Parenthood official who endorses their business. StemExpress makes a considerable amount of money selling the aborted baby body parts. It sells fetal liver cells from anywhere between $488 to $24,250.

Before the Temple can rise, builders must secure a red heifer, or “para aduma,” a three-year-old female cow with totally red hair that is supposed to be able to restore a state of “purity” after ritual slaughter. The Temple Institute, an Israeli organization dedicated to constructing the Third Temple, has launched a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo to breed such animals and has already succeeded in accumulating almost $15,000 in three days.

The group’s previous campaign in 2014 succeeded in raising more than $100,000 to pay for the creation of construction plans that meet both architectural and Scriptural standards. The group admits red heifers are not uncommon around the world, but claims a “para aduma” suitable for ritual use actually must be raised in Israel and meet painstaking specifications laid out in Scripture.

Yet the fierce debate over the Third Temple and its importance for the contemporary world does not detract from a shared sense among many commentators of prophecy being realized in the modern world. Noting what he sees as the rise of global immorality, ominous signs of war in the Middle East, and the return of the state of Israel, Carl Gallups - pastor, talk-show host and author - enthuses, “The solid signs of Jesus’ soon return are all around us.”

And Joel Richardson - filmmaker, evangelist and best-selling author - believes Christians are going to be forced to confront their deepest held beliefs about the end times sooner rather than later. “If the Christian church seems divided now, imagine the great controversy in the days ahead when the third Jewish Temple is rebuilt. Those days are indeed coming and coming quickly.”

Excuse the slightly strange introduction to this week’s column. I don’t know why but when I read this week about the tourists queuing round the block for days at a time to snap up prime London real estate, this song started playing in my head. The flats, which started at £350,000 for a studio, sold out within four hours, with half of the buyers living overseas; many of the purchasers of Maine Tower’s “elite lifestyle services” have never seen the plot on which the 41-storey skyscraper will be built. But who cares what it looks like, as long as your money is safely invested out of your own faltering economy?

More likely, they’ve got bored and decided to gamble on real estate in another part of the property playground they never plan to inhabit. Meanwhile, local people are priced further and further out, unable to live in the land they call home.

In a capital city where so many cannot afford their own homes, and so soon after housing benefit was taken away from the already much-maligned young, it seems obscene to learn that vast swathes of it are being bought up by rich foreigners who will probably leave their luxury apartments empty because renting harms the property’s market value.

Up to 200,000 Germans are believed to have filed official declarations last year renouncing their membership of the Protestant church, the highest number in almost two decades. A similar number are thought to have left the Catholic Church. Church members in Germany are required by law to pay tax to fund church activities, which is collected by the government.

Under German law, anyone who was baptised as a child is automatically a member of the church and obliged to pay the tax, charged as a percentage of their income, regardless of their beliefs or whether they attend church services. Until recently, many Christians have been prepared to pay the extra tax for the benefits it brings them, including access to church schools and day care facilities that are funded by the state.

A decision to extend the 8 or 9 per cent charge to capital gains income, or the profit earned from selling an asset, appears to have sparked the sharp decline in church membership. The new tax regulation was “just the straw that broke the camel’s back for people who were already thinking of leaving”, Ruth Levin, spokesman for the Protestant church in Disnlaken, told Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.

Around 30.8 per cent of Germans, or 24.7 million people, are Catholics, according to the 2011 census, while 30.3 per cent, or 24.3 million people, are Protestants.