Speaking before Congress, the former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) said the deal being worked out between Iran and Western powers “leaves a lot to be desired,” and that there was no doubt Tehran would eventually develop nuclear weapons. And, he added, there was no doubt that those weapons would be directed against Israel.

Flynn was joining critics from Israel, France, and elsewhere, who have been warning that the deal being built on a set of understandings announced earlier this year by US Secretary of State John Kerry would not enforce supervision of the agreement – in essence, relying on nothing more than Iran's promise that it will not develop nuclear weapons.

With the deadline for the agreement set for the end of June, diplomatic activity surrounding the deal has increased considerably in recent weeks – but just Thursday, France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius reiterated that the deal, as it stands, did not have enough teeth. Israel, too, is very concerned about the brewing deal. Speaking to the Politico web site last week, Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz, Israel's point man on the Iran deal, said that “The Iranians are using delay tactics. It seems they want to come close to the deadline without an agreement. There will be no time to close all the loopholes and clarify all the details.”

Iran also means what it says about destroying Israel, Flynn added – and it is not only Israel Iran is after. To defend itself, Saudi Arabia is likely to develop a nuclear program of its own “touching off a dangerous domino effect in the region” which could lead to tragic consequences.

“I’ve been there three times and I can tell you it is far more than a trade agreement,” he said. “It is a creating of an economic union. The congressional resource said it is a wide-ranging political and economic partnership that is created where the Sultan of Brunei gets one vote. The president of the United States gets one vote. Twelve countries – they have the ability to add other treaties and pass them. They have the ability to deal with climate issues, wage issues and environmental issues. There’s just no doubt about that.”

The junior Alabama senator went on to explain that he felt it was being kept secret because if the public were aware of this union, which he likened to the European Union, it would be stopped dead in its tracks. “I think it’s because if the trade commission – if the international commission, the Pacific union that is being created here – were made public, it wouldn’t go anywhere.”

"It's panic in parliament," Yannick Jadot, a Green MEP from France, told AFP. Ministers have disagreed over a controversial dispute mechanism that some fear would allow big companies to bypass national courts to resolve disputes with investors. Socialist groups in the European Parliament reportedly blocked the dispute mechanism on Tuesday, which resulted in the vote being postponed.

TTIP negotiations were initiated by Europe to speed economic recovery. Commentators have said the US is growing tired of constant delays to an agreement. "It’s now very much up to EU to decide if they want this agreement. The patience of the US is running out," Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, director of European Centre for International Political Economy, told The Independent.

But the media will never tell you about Mexicans gang-raping a lesbian in Richmond, California, an Indian immigrant in San Francisco importing 12-year-old girls he bought from their parents for sex, or three children being beheaded by Mexicans in Baltimore. Don't Americans have a right to know about the cultures flooding into our country?

When it comes to immigration, you'll only hear "Diversity is a strength," "Immigration is fantastic for the economy," "Polls show Americans overwhelmingly support a 'path to legalization'" - pay no attention to the outpouring of hostility every time an amnesty bill comes up - and "Oh, look! An immigrant valedictorian!"

The media don't need to run this scam forever. Democrats only need to keep it going until they have California-style majorities in every state, and then they'll say, "S***w you, America. We did this deliberately, and now there's nothing you can do about it."

That's exactly what the Labour government of Tony Blair did - as we found out in 2009. In public, Blair's government claimed that the mass immigration of the Third World to Britain was absolutely crucial to the economy! Once they were out of office, Blair adviser Andrew Neather admitted that their real objective had been "to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date," as the London Telegraph reported in 2009.

That's one way of winning elections. It's cheating, but it works!

The scale is starting to match the 'taper tantrum' of mid-2013 when the US Federal Reserve issued its first gentle warning that quantitative easing would not last forever, and that the long-feared inflexion point was nearing in the international monetary cycle. Paper losses over the last three months have reached $1.2 trillion. Yields have jumped by 175 basis points in Indonesia, 160 in South Africa, 150 in Turkey, 130 in Mexico, and 80 in Australia.

The epicentre is in the eurozone as the "QE" bet goes horribly wrong. Bund yields hit 1.05 percent this morning before falling back in wild trading, up 100 basis points since March. French, Italian, and Spanish yields have moved in lockstep. A parallel drama is unfolding in America where the Pimco Total Return Fund has just revealed that it slashed its holdings of US debt to 8.5 percent of total assets in May, from 23.4 percent a month earlier. This sort of move in the staid fixed income markets is exceedingly rare.

Economic historians will one day ask how it was possible for €2 trillion of eurozone bonds - a third of the government bond market - to have been trading at negative yields in the early spring of 2015 even as the reflation hammer was already coming down with crushing force. "It was the greater fool theory. They always thought there would be some other sucker to buy at an even higher price. Now we are returning to sanity," said Mr Stein.

The bond ructions this week are an early warning that it will not be easy to wean the world off six years of zero rates across the G10, and off dollar largesse on a scale never seen before. Central banks have no safe margin for error.

Like other Greek owners of small and medium-sized companies in Greece, Mr Fotiades feared a radical government would resort to capital controls if relations with the country’s creditors deteriorated sharply. To protect his savings he bought a brand new Mercedes-Benz car, then took the advice of a financial consultant and invested the remainder in money market funds based in Luxembourg.

“I didn’t want to sit by and see my hard-earned money disappear in a bail-in,” he said, recalling a banking collapse in Cyprus in 2013, in which the government raised almost €8 billion by taxing bank deposits of more than €100,000 after imposing the eurozone’s first capital controls.

“The smart money left early on... The shipowners pulled out funds and manufacturing companies set up accounts outside Greece with foreign banks so they could be sure they’d continue trading,” said an Athens-based banking analyst.

An additional impetus for the necessary search for an alternative is provided by the fact that German gas imports from the Netherlands are on the verge of being shut down. Beginning 2020, The Hague intends to drastically reduce gas production from the country's largest gas field, because draining the deposit would heighten dangers of earthquakes.

Wintershall is particularly expanding its activities in Norway and has already begun shale gas production in Argentina, where the world's second largest shale gas deposits are estimated to be found. Wintershall's orientation shift also reduces its interest in business with Russia, while reinforcing its transatlantic interest.

The robot will be completely autonomous and should be able to help with everything from fetching tools to holding objects and even assisting with cleaning and engineering tasks. The project is a collaboration between the technology arm of the online supermarket and four universities across the European Union. The robotics team at Ocado Technology believe it could become "the most advanced assistive robot in the world".

SecondHands will use 3D vision to see both depth and colour, with artificial intelligence allowing it to learn by example and respond to its surroundings. Once trained in a series of basic tasks the robot should be able to increase its own intelligence and act independently. SecondHands will also be able to understand natural speech, allowing it to respond to voice commands.

The robot will eventually be put to work alongside engineers at Ocado's vast logistics factories in the UK, which handle more than 167,000 orders per week. When something goes wrong with a mechanical component SecondHands will help engineers carry out repairs quickly and safely. It could also operate in areas too dangerous for humans, examining high-speed conveyors at close quarters and handling toxic materials. The EU is funding the project to the tune of €7 million (£5.1 million) as part of its Horizon2020 initiative…

In 2014, Chinese factories accounted for about a quarter of the global ranks of industrial robots — a 54 percent increase over 2013. According to the International Federation of Robotics, it will have more installed manufacturing robots than any other country by 2017.

Midea, a leading manufacturer of home appliances in the heavily industrialized province of Guangdong, plans to replace 6,000 workers in its residential air-conditioning division, about a fifth of the work force, with automation by the end of the year. Foxconn, which makes consumer electronics for Apple and other companies, plans to automate about 70 percent of factory work within three years, and already has a fully robotic factory in Chengdu.

Chinese factory jobs may thus be poised to evaporate at an even faster pace than has been the case in the United States and other developed countries. That may make it significantly more difficult for China to address one of its paramount economic challenges: the need to rebalance its economy so that domestic consumption plays a far more significant role than is currently the case.

According to the Australian foreign minister, Julie Bishop, Nato has expressed deep concerns about the materials seized by Isis from research centres and hospitals that would normally only be available to governments.

The threat of Isis’s radioactive and biological weapons stockpile was so severe that the Australia Group, a 40-nation bloc dedicated to ending the use of chemical weapons, held a session on the subject at its summit in Perth last week. “This is really worrying them,” Ms Bishop said in an interview with The Australian.

The growing concerns about Isis’s development of weapons of mass destruction come at a time when experts fear the militant group will be “more active than ever” to mark the start of Ramadan and the one-year anniversary of its declaration of a “caliphate”.

Isis said it was changing its name to “Islamic State” following the first public address by its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Mosul on 29 June last year, and the US-based Institute for the Study of War has noted that the group usually reserves its major operations to coincide with the Islamic holy month.

In addition to the Humvees, Iraqi forces previously abandoned significant types and numbers of heavy weapons to Islamic State. For example, losses to Islamic State include at least 40 M1A1 main battle tanks, as well as small arms and ammunition, including 74,000 machine guns, and as many as 52 M198 howitzer mobile gun systems. “We lost a lot of weapons,” Abadi admitted.

Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi may be the most honest politician on the planet, at least judging by this one statement. His troops most certainly did “lose a lot of weapons.” Let’s add this up. Iraqi forces abandoned and/or lost some 2,300 armored Humvees, 40 M1A1 battle tanks, 74,000 machine guns and 52 howitzers. This is not simply “a lot of weapons.” It is more weaponry – and better weaponry – than the entire army has in many nations, and doesn’t include what the Islamic State acquired in its many subsequent victories.

Last November, in “How The Petrodollar Quietly Died And No One Noticed,” we said the following about the slow motion demise of the system that has served to perpetuate decades of dollar dominance.

Two years ago, in hushed tones at first, then ever louder, the financial world began discussing that which shall never be discussed in polite company - the end of the system that according to many has framed and facilitated the US Dollar's reserve currency status: the Petrodollar, or the world in which oil export countries would recycle the dollars they received in exchange for their oil exports, by purchasing more USD-denominated assets, boosting the financial strength of the reserve currency, leading to even higher asset prices and even more USD-denominated purchases, and so forth, in a virtuous (especially if one held US-denominated assets and printed US currency) loop.

The main thrust for this shift away from the USD, if primarily in the non-mainstream media, was that with Russia and China, as well as the rest of the BRIC nations, increasingly seeking to distance themselves from the US-led, "developed world" status quo spearheaded by the IMF, global trade would increasingly take place through bilateral arrangements which bypass the (Petro) dollar entirely. And sure enough, this has certainly been taking place, as first Russia and China, together with Iran, and ever more developing nations, have transacted among each other, bypassing the USD entirely, instead engaging in bilateral trade arrangements.

To summarize: Western economic sanctions on Russia have pushed domestic oil producers to settle crude exports to China in yuan just as Russian oil is rising as a percentage of total Chinese crude imports. Meanwhile, the collapse in crude prices led to the first net outflow of petrodollars from financial markets in 18 years, and if Goldman's projections prove correct, the net supply of petrodollars could fall by nearly $900 billion over the next three years. All of this comes as China is making a concerted push to settle loans from its newly-created infrastructure funds in renminbi.

Putting it all together, the PetroYuan represents the intersection of a dying petrodollar and an ascendant renminbi.

Alexis Tsipras, the Greek Prime Minister, has reportedly agreed to consider measures previously deemed a "red line" in the debt talks. Namely, raising the rate of VAT. “I think we’re very close to an agreement,” he told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. The new plan is also said to include a variety of financing options which could tide over the embattled economy and give the country until next March to reach a final deal.

One major Greek proposal was an idea, first floated by finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, for debt held by the European Central Bank to be transferred to the eurozone's crisis-fighting fund, the European Stability Mechanism, which is widely seen as softer, sources told AFP. The move would delay two major payments owed by Greece to the ECB this summer, allowing Athens urgently needed breathing space.