But this isn't a story about Sao Paulo; it's a report that dares to point out that human societies are incredibly short-sighted and nearly incapable of sustainably populating planet Earth. In numerous regions around the world - including California, India, Oklahoma, Brazil, China and many more - human populations are rapidly out-growing the capacity of their local water systems. Even though keeping populations alive requires food… and growing food requires water… almost no nation or government in the world seems to be able to limit water consumption of local populations to levels which are sustainable in the long term.

Instead, the endless greed of the "grow-consume-profit" business model that dominates the global economy leaves no room for any hint of balance with nature. The overriding philosophy of modern business is to dominate nature with chemicals, mining and monoculture to maximize profit while kicking any really large problems down the road for the next generation to deal with. The result is a world where nobody thinks about the long-term implications of today's trends because everybody's too busy trying to extract a buck or two out of the very system that will destroy their future.

Consider Las Vegas while you ponder all this: Here's a city with no water future whatsoever, continuing to build new casinos and grow its population even as the water level of Lake Mead has already dropped to emergency levels (and continues to plummet). What do the people of Las Vegas imagine they will drink when all the cheap, easy water is gone? Will they swallow dust and pretend it's water?

The sobering truth is that nearly everyone who lives in Las Vegas doesn't think about this. By definition, anyone who realized the truth about the disappearing water throughout Nevada, Arizona and California would have already sold their property and moved away. Those who still inhabit regions with unsustainable water supplies - such as Sao Paulo - are choosing to make believe the problem doesn't exist.

This delusional psychology is, of course, reflected across modern human civilization and its governments, where delusional rhetoric and make believe fantasies about "endless economic growth" keep the obedient masses toiling away day after day, hoping they are securing a future which has already been mortgaged away.

From the website of the Irgun Zvai Leumi – the Jewish underground movement before the State of Israel was founded: “One of the operations which undermined the prestige of the British authorities and made them the object of ridicule was the 'Wall' scheme, which concerned prayer arrangements at the Western Wall. In the late nineteen twenties, the Arabs had already begun to complain that blowing the shofar at the Western Wall was an insult to Islam.

In 1931, the King's Order in Council (the legislative authority of the Mandatory government) stipulated that the Moslems' ownership rights to the Temple Mount also encompassed the Western Wall area. As a result, Jews were banned from blowing the shofar at the Wall, despite the fact that this ceremony is an integral part of the Rosh Hashana (New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) prayer services.

The ban deeply offended Jews, and the Irgun decided to act. After the imposition of the ban, Irgun and Betar members "smuggled" a shofar into the Western Wall area every Yom Kippur. There a volunteer was waiting to blow the 'Tekia Gedola', the blast which marks the end of the fast. This was not easily done, since large numbers of British policemen were stationed along the routes to the Wall and conducted careful searches of the belongings of the Jews visiting the Wall.

The shofar blower was usually arrested and jailed in the Kishleh, the police building in the Old City, which had served as a jail since the Turkish era. (The building is still standing and is now used by the Israeli police). The blowing of the shofar at the Wall at the end of Yom Kippur was not only a religious ceremony, but also bolstered national pride throughout the country. On Yom Kippur 5703 (September 1942), Menachem Begin visited the Wall and witnessed the British policemen bursting into the area in search of the Betarite who had blown the shofar.

In summer, 1944, the question of the shofar ceremony at the Wall was raised again. This time the Irgun decided not to confine itself to bringing in a single shofar-blower to mark the end of Yom Kippur. Several weeks before the High Holydays, the Irgun began to issue warnings to the British to keep away from the Wall, and announced that any policemen found near the Wall on Yom Kippur would be "punished.”

Signs were posted which read: “Any British Constable who will commit acts of violence near the Western Wall on the Day of Atonement and, in defiance of the moral law of civilized people, will disturb the worshippers assembled there and will desecrate the sanctity of prayer will be regarded and LISTED by the HEBREW Youth as a CRIMINAL OFFENDER.” The shofar was blown. The followers of Ze’ev Jabotinsky demanded Jews be allowed to blow the shofar at the kotel [the Wall]– whether or not it offended the Arab population – and fought for the right of Jews to do so.

One wonders how – especially with a Likud government in power - anyone can prevent Jews from praying anywhere in Jerusalem. Jews must have the right to pray at the Temple Mount.

“Yields fell this low in Genoa in the 15th century but there has been nothing like this in Europe in modern times,” said professor Richard Werner, from Southampton University. “This reflects the weakness in nominal GDP and a slow economic implosion caused by credit contraction. The European Central Bank is at last starting to act but it is only scratching the surface.”

German, French and Dutch yields have been sliding for months as the eurozone recovery wilts and several countries flirt with recession, but the latest plunge reflects a confluence of forces. “Investors may fear that the worsening tensions with Russia could be the external shock that finally pushes the eurozone into a deflation trap,” said Simon Tilford, from the Centre for European Reform.

David Owen, from Jefferies, said a lack of genuine economic recovery is what lies behind Europe’s falling yields, already replicating the pattern seen in Japan in the 1990s. “A third of all countries in the eurozone are already in deflation once you strip away taxes, and another four have no inflation, including France and Spain,” he said. “Corporate profits fell in the first quarter, and so did household disposable income, if you exclude Germany. We are seeing no growth at all in world trade, which is highly unusual.”

“Tensions between nuclear-armed states and alliances in the Euro-Atlantic area and in both South and East Asia remain ripe with the potential for military miscalculation and escalation,” says the letter to Sebastian Kurz, Austria’s Minister for Foreign Affairs.

“In a vestige of the Cold War, too many nuclear weapons in the world remain ready to launch on short notice, greatly increasing the chances of an accident.

“This fact gives leaders faced with an imminent potential threat an insufficient amount of time to communicate with each other and act with prudence.” There should also be better crisis management in “conflict hotspots” and new security measures, warning that stockpiles were “insufficiently secure, making them possible targets for terrorism”.

Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk. So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:

“It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.”

The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.

Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly worked for the Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a young man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun,” he boasted, adding that “the whole of National Socialism” was “based on Marx”.

Police made several arrests among the demonstrators who numbered well over 500, and a number of stores in Berkeley were looted. One demonstrator who tried to prevent the looting was assaulted, police said. The killings of Garner and of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen, in Ferguson, Missouri, have highlighted the strained relations between police and the black community and rekindled a national debate over US race relations.

On Monday sources from Syrian opposition told Arab media that Israeli warplanes destroyed a storage facility with drones and anti-aircraft missiles belonging to Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon. These weapons, considered to be “capable of tilting the strategic balance,” especially threaten Israel’s ability to act freely in airspace of Lebanon, says a report published in pro-Hezbollah Al-Akhbar newspaper.

Israeli authorities have neither denied nor confirmed the attack. Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz only told an Israel Radio interview Monday, that Tel Aviv had a “firm policy of preventing all possible transfers of sophisticated weapons to terrorist organizations,” apparently referring to Hezbollah.

The dissenters are reportedly Germany’s Sabine Lautenschläger, Luxembourg’s Yves Mersch, and more surprisingly France’s Benoît Cœuré, an indication that Paris is still hoping to avoid a breakdown in relations with Berlin over the management of EMU. The reality is that a full six months after Mr Draghi first talked loosely of a €1 trillion blitz to head off deflation risks, almost nothing has actually happened. The ECB balance sheet has shrunk by over €100 billion.

Once you have launched a monetary union, you have automatically launched a political union too. That is what EMU means. The euro means a single government and a European superstate, and implicitly the abolition of Germany as a fully sovereign independent state. To pretend otherwise is intellectually infantile. To resist this truth - yet to proceed doggedly with EMU anyway - merely condemns Europe to rolling crises and permanent depression.

Mr Draghi is absolutely right about this, which is why those of us who were eurosceptics at Maastricht – and I wrote the leader for the Daily Telegraph on the night of that infamous treaty exactly 23 years ago – always opposed EMU with inflexible determination, and why we have great sympathy for those in Germany who wish to pull out of EMU in order to save their own sovereign state before it is too late.

Mr Weidmann [head of the Bundesbank] is equally right in thinking – as he appears to do – that the headlong charge towards debt pooling and de facto fiscal union by monetary means is a mortal threat to German democracy and the rule of law.

The stakes are very high. A showdown must surely come within months, one way or another.

Traditionalists don’t argue with the principle – they argue with how these driven people have gone about gaining control over the language, what they see as offensive and who the next victims are.

Traditionalists also add that when this process is applied to children from the earliest years, it is no less than social engineering and when applied to adults, it’s simply censorship.

Here are some examples of the profound wisdom of these people:

-*- American historian and educator, Diane Ravitch, in 2003, quoted guidelines by New York publishing houses for prospective writers:

"Topics not to include are: abortion, death or disease, criminals, magic, politics, religion, unemployment, weapons, violence, poverty, divorce, slavery, alcohol or addiction. Women cannot be depicted as mothers or caregivers or doing household work. Men cannot be depicted as lawyers, doctors or plumbers. African citizens are not to be portrayed in a negative light. None of these things can be themes in any publications handled by us."

-*-The Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work, in the UK, believes that "non-fluency in English should not be used as grounds to refuse employment, even for an interpreter or air traffic controller". That means you don’t need English any more to become an English interpreter – you learn it on the job. An under age criminal must now be called a "child at risk", so that he does not become traumatized by the word "hooligan".

PCers reject the criticism that they are the new "Thought Police", that they’re only happy in a "smilingly bland, uniform, anti-intellectual, barely literate mediocrity", that they want to "deliberately re-write history in terms of currently fashionable ethnic and sexual minorities" and that they want to create a "new, officially approved reality".

Instead, they insist they’re working towards a "philosophy of inclusion" and an "uncritical tolerance" for all, whatever their "personal orientation" and irrespective of whether they are terrorists, drug addicts, paedophiles, dropouts… Everyone’s welcome in the Brave New PC World.