“Pope Francis knows that heavy debt loads cause poverty and inequality,” said Eric LeCompte, who consulted the Vatican on its position. LeCompte is the head of the religious development organization Jubilee USA Network. “The Pope’s statement is a logical extension of the Catholic Church’s strong support of debt relief for struggling countries.” Last year, LeCompte led a delegation of global Jubilee organizations to advise Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin on the need for a bankruptcy process to address inequality. The Catholic Church is a founder of Jubilee USA and supports its efforts to win debt relief for struggling countries.

In September of 2014, the United Nations General Assembly voted 124-11 to develop the bankruptcy process that Pope Francis referenced. LeCompte addressed the UN earlier this year on the creation of the process. This Fall, the United Nations is set to review progress on the proposal. Because International Monetary Fund (IMF) studies point to debt as a cause of inequality, the IMF is exploring aspects of a bankruptcy process based on an April 2013 paper. In addition to the debt crisis in Greece, nearly 50 countries‎ face worrying levels of debt distress according to World Bank statistics.

"Rome is on the verge of collapse," Giancarlo Cremonesi, the president of the Rome Chamber of Commerce, told Reuters. "It is unacceptable that a major city which calls itself developed can find itself in such a state of decay." Rome is the most popular tourist destination in the country, attracting some 10.61 million foreign visitors in 2014. This was down from more than 11 million the year before and locals say the poor state of infrastructure is hurting.

"All my clients say Rome is beautiful, but all of them, without fail, complain about the services," said Marcello Lazazzera, who owns a small bed and breakfast, Domus Cornelia. "The metros never arrive on time, the stations are full of pickpockets, the streets are full of rubbish. Instead of getting better, the situation is getting worse."

It could get worse still in 2016, when 25 million pilgrims are expected to flow into the Eternal City in response to Pope Francis's call for an extraordinary Holy Year - one of the Roman Catholic Church's most important events.

This manipulation works because the hedge funds, the main purchasers of the short contracts, do not intend to take delivery of the gold represented by the contracts, settling instead in cash. This means that the banks who sold the uncovered contracts are never at risk from their inability to cover contracts in gold. At any given time, the amount of gold represented by the paper gold contracts (“open interest’) can exceed the actual amount of physical gold available for delivery, a situation that does not occur in other futures markets.

In other words, the gold and silver futures markets are not a place where people buy and sell gold and silver. These markets are places where people speculate on price direction and where hedge funds use gold futures to hedge other bets according to the various mathematical formulas that they use. The fact that bullion prices are determined in this paper, speculative market, and not in real physical markets where people sell and acquire physical bullion, is the reason the bullion banks can drive down the price of gold and silver even though the demand for the physical metal is rising.

For example last Tuesday the US Mint announced that it was sold out of the American Eagle one ounce silver coin. It is a contradiction of the law of supply and demand that demand is high, supply is low, and the price is falling. Such an economic anomaly can only be explained by manipulation of prices in a market where supply can be created by printing paper contracts.

If this supposition is correct, it indicates that seven years of bailing out the big banks that control the Federal Reserve and US Treasury at the expense of the US economy has threatened the US dollar to the extent that the dollar must be protected at all cost, including US regulatory tolerance of illegal activity to suppress gold and silver prices.

Higher interest rates will provide long-awaited relief to savers, who have seen their returns shrink in the wake of the financial crisis. But it will increase the pressure on borrowers, who will have to pay more for their mortgages and credit card bills. The increase in interest rates could also hit the housing market.

The Bank of England base rate - used as the starting point for banks’ and building societies’ saving and borrowing rates - is expected to rise slowly over the next few years, said Mr Carney.

While a dino receptionist does the check-in and check-out for English-speaking visitors, a female android resembling a remote ancestor of the robotic servant from the “Humans” TV-series welcomes guests in Japanese. They are accompanied by an automated trolley that takes guests’ luggage to their room. A transparent locker system, called a “robot cloak room,” features a giant industrial-looking robotic arm.

During check-in, visitors still have to type in information on a touch panel screen. They will also have to get used to facial recognition technology replacing standard electronic keys. The virtual concierge, a doll-like robot with voice recognition, is responsible for reminding guests of breakfast time and scheduled events. Moreover, there is a lamp-sized robot in every room, nicknamed Tuly for its fat, pink tulip shape, which can provide information on time and weather, turn the lights on and off, and even give guests a wake-up call.

But “they still can’t make beds,” said president of HTB company, Hideo Sawada, as cited by AP. “I wanted to highlight innovation. I also wanted to do something about hotel prices going up.” He added that the introduction of robots served as a drive in creating “the most efficient hotel in the world” with the help of cutting-edge technology. Sawada hopes that his robots will soon be able to master the Chinese and Korean languages. He also has plans to open another hotel abroad.

Tehran entered these talks, let us not forget, out of sheer desperation to escape the crippling effects of the economic sanctions imposed by the West in retaliation for Iran’s less-than-forthright disclosures about its nuclear activities. These included building a heavily fortified underground uranium enrichment facility at Natanz (whose existence was exposed by the Iranian opposition in 2003) and a similar establishment built deep within a mountain at Fordow (whose existence was exposed by British intelligence in 2009).

Iran’s obsession with acquiring the ability to enrich uranium well beyond the level required for civilian and commercial applications, as well as its concurrent investment in building ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, has led Western intelligence to conclude – not unreasonably – that Tehran has been working on a clandestine atomic weapons programme.

One of the main objectives of the Vienna talks, part of a diplomatic process that first began more than a decade ago, has been to get to the bottom of Tehran’s deliberate obfuscations. Western officials wanted to establish whether a country that is sitting on the world’s second largest oil reserves was seriously developing an indigenous nuclear power industry, or something far more sinister.

Yet such is the Iranians’ negotiating skill that, despite years of intense diplomatic activity on the part of the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany), we are still no closer to understanding precisely what they have been up to. And yet, far from holding the Iranians to account for their deception, we now have the bizarre situation where we have world leaders from Washington to Tehran – even including Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad – celebrating the conclusion of a deal which leaves us none the wiser about Iran’s true nuclear intentions.

Moreover, the deal set out in Vienna yesterday allows Iran to retain vital capabilities that can be used for making nuclear weapons, such as developing more sophisticated methods of enriching uranium to weapons grade, as well as continuing development work on its ballistic missile programme.

The main reason we have ended up with this apology for a deal is that, rather than maintain the economic pressure on Iran until it guaranteed proper cooperation, President Barack Obama indicated he was more interested in securing his foreign policy legacy by signing a historic accord, irrespective of the concessions this would require.

"The dramatic deterioration in debt sustainability points to the need for debt relief on a scale that would need to go well beyond what has been under consideration to date,” said the IMF in a confidential report. Greek public debt will spiral to 200 percent of GDP over the next two years, compared to 177 percent in an earlier report on debt sustainability issued just two weeks ago.

The findings are explosive. The document amounts to a warning that the IMF will not take part in any EMU-led rescue package for Greece unless Germany and the EMU creditor powers finally agree to sweeping debt relief. This vastly complicates the rescue deal agreed by eurozone leaders in marathon talks over the weekend since Germany insists that the bail-out cannot go ahead unless the IMF is involved.

The creditors were aware of the IMF’s report as early as Sunday, yet chose to sweep it under rug. Extracts were leaked to Reuters on Tuesday, forcing the matter into the open. Its conclusions validate what Greece’s Syriza government has been saying all along. The debt cannot be repaid. Any formula that fails to recognize this merely stores up an even bigger crisis down the road.

Many of the overhauls on Athens’ to-do list are inspired by the labor market, welfare and budget measures that Germany enacted in 2003 and 2004, when it was struggling with high unemployment and slow growth. Others — such as lifting restrictions on Sunday shopping and deregulating pharmacies — go further and would likely face a political and legal backlash if attempted in Germany.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble rejected the charge that some of the measures the eurozone creditors are asking from Greece would be no-go areas at home. He also said that Greece’s economic and financial difficulties required more aggressive action. “You can’t, with all respect, simply compare the situation in Greece with that in other countries. The kind of decisions that Greece has to take, with all respect, are difficult… The comparison isn’t valid, not even for polemic debates,” Mr Schäuble said Tuesday in Brussels.

While most economists agree that Germany’s purring economic engine is in no urgent need of fixing, politically, the fact that Berlin has balked at some of the measures it is prescribing others could add to the populist narrative gaining ground across the continent — that a German-led Europe is bent on punishing Greece.

The measures Germany wants Greece to implement but that would be illegal here include the “full liberalization” of Sunday trading, expected to generate €2.5 billion ($2.8 billion) in additional spending. The status of Sundays and public holidays as “days of rest from work and of spiritual improvement,” is enshrined in the German constitution and vigorously enforced, although some loopholes exist.

"This is a responsible deal and Israel should also take a closer look at it and not criticize the agreement in a very coarse way," Steinmeier told German broadcaster ARD in an interview on Wednesday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the deal as a "stunning, historic mistake" and said it would enable Iran to pursue a path to nuclear weapons.

But Steinmeier said the basis for the agreement was transparency and the ability to monitor Iran's compliance. "In the agreement, Iran has to commit to these monitoring possibilities. And we will make sure that the monitoring possibilities are also observed after this deal," he said.

US President Barack Obama underscored the United States' commitment to Israel's security in a phone conversation with Netanyahu, the White House said on Tuesday. Obama noted on the call that US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter will be traveling to Israel next week, the White House said in a statement.

"The procession shall be carried out by approximately 5,000 totally naked men and women to protest over Obama's open and aggressive support for homosexuality," Kidala said in a letter to the county commander on Monday. "In fact our party has a network of prostitutes in Nairobi, Nakuru and other counties. This is where we shall get all these people whose number we expect to increase," he told the Star on the phone.

He said the prostitutes agreed to participate free of charge since they will lose customers if homosexuality is legalised.

A startling 60 per cent of young people say they are first exposed to pornography at age 14 – or even younger. Pornography plays a key role in shaping how young people feel about their bodies, about relationships and about one another. Along with other media, pornography tends to objectify women, and several studies have demonstrated the link between this objectification and both sexist attitudes and violence against women and girls.

This plays out in our schools. One in three girls say they experience ‘groping’ or unwanted sexual touching at school and a Childline survey found that a shocking 60 per cent of 13-18 year olds have been asked to share a sexual image or video of themselves.

The Center for Medical Progress has released an undercover video in which executives at the highest levels of Planned Parenthood are implicated in the sale of aborted babies' body parts for medical experimentation – a practice that is illegal. It’s a federal felony, and a conviction can be punished by up to 10 years in prison and $500,000 in fines.

David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress leveled the accusions in the wake of a 30-month-long investigation into Planned Parenthood. "Planned Parenthood's criminal conspiracy to make money off of aborted baby parts reaches to the very highest levels of their organization," he said.

In the video, a woman identified as Planned Parenthood's senior medical services director, during a meeting with undercover investigators posing as buyers from a human biologics company, describes the use of partial-birth abortion to obtain undamaged fetal organs. Planned Parenthood's national president, Cecile Richards, is also seen in the video, praising this horrific practice.

Planned Parenthood is the leading abortion business in the United States. While national abortion numbers have gone down in recent years, Planned Parenthood's share of the total abortion market has continued to increase. Their most recent annual report documents 327,653 abortions at Planned Parenthood in the last reported year – at least 30% of the US total – while the organization raked in 528 million taxpayer dollars. Now it stands accused of tearing apart aborted babies and selling off their body parts for even more cash.

He enumerated the objectives as Iran's ability to go ahead with its nuclear activities, lifting of "cruel and inhumane sanctions," annulment of all "illegal" sanctions adopted by the UN Security Council against Iran and the withdrawal of Iran's nuclear dossier from the Security Council. Rouhani said the sanctions regime imposed on the Islamic Republic was never successful, adding that the bans only targeted the Iranian nation. He said the nuclear case had played into the hands of those involved in an Iranophobia campaign.

The Iranian president added that resistance of the Iranian nation guaranteed their victory in the nuclear talks. "Today, we are at an important juncture in the history of our country and our [Islamic] Revolution and the situation in the region," Rouhani said. He said some powers had had some illusions over the past 12 years regarding Iran, but "a new page has been turned and a new chapter has begun."

"Iran will honor the agreement, if the other side abides by it," the Iranian president said, adding that the Iranian nation always keeps its promises. Rouhani said the Tuesday statement benefits not only Iran and the Iranian people, but all the resistant nations in the region. Israel’s efforts to push the nuclear talks of the past nearly two years into failure have led to the defeat of the Tel Aviv regime, the Iranian president stated.

The 1990s were an important period in modern European history, when political leaders who had experienced at least one of the world wars initiated by Germany, sought to establish a peaceful and unified Europe. Their desire was to create a European Germany, not a German Europe, as it was stated in 1953 by the German writer Thomas Mann.

Politico’s author Gustavo Cardoso wrote in his article that European countries are now taking apart Greece’s financial difficulties and mistakes, but failed to prevent Germany from using its power, which makes Europe too German and Germany less European. According to him, Germany’s hegemony is one of the main factors of the current crisis in Greece and in the EU as a whole. Germany has been imposing its preferences on the rest of Europe. However, instead of bringing stability, the German approach has contributed to the crisis and created an essentially unstable situation.

In his article, Cardoso cited Hans Kundnani, author of the book “The Paradox of German Power”. According to Kundnani, events which have taken place since the beginning of the euro crisis in 2010, to a large extent can be explained by the transformation of national identity and the German economy, which occurred during the two decades between the reunification of the GDR and FRG and the euro crisis itself.

“In other words, Germany today, as in the period 1871-1945, is strong enough to try to impose its will, but at the same time is not strong enough to do it,” Cardoso wrote, referring to Kundnani.

But if history is a useful guide, then the US may already be due another recession. The average post-war growth streak has lasted less than five years. And the Bank for International Settlements, the so-called central bank of central banks, has warned that policymakers may not have room to fight the next financial crisis. So are economists being too complacent? Do they risk ignoring some major warning signs about the global economy's health?

While stocks and shares may not tell us much about the real economy, the transport industry supposedly does just that. And while equities are doing well, David Woo, a strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said: "The transportation market does not share this optimism." Shipping freight rates are down 40 percent so far this year, and "are showing no signs of recovery", according to Mr Woo. And BoAML's latest trucking survey shows "sentiment at the year-low" while rail traffic "remains very weak".

In the intervening period, the US's Federal Reserve has been unable to raise its interest rates. When it eventually does - and current thinking is that this will finally happen by the end of the year - economies could be in for a shock. The Fed's first attempts to tighten up policy, turning off QE, caused a taper tantrum across emerging markets in 2013. There's a real risk that a misstep on rates could lead to a second round of pain for those same economies.