What are the largest financial obligations the city is facing? Pensions. $3.5 billion worth of pensions, to be exact. Yes, Detroit owes former government employees - teachers, firefighters, cops and more - a whopping $3.5 billion in current and future payments. Except Detroit doesn't have $3.5 billion to pay the pensions. The city is in a state of economic collapse.

Remember, the US government used billions in taxpayer money to help General Motors move its manufacturing offshore to countries like China. As a result of economically-insane actions and criminal mismanagement, a city that used to be the hub of industrial output in America has become a ghost town of abandoned buildings, crumbling infrastructure and financial destitution.

Realizing it flat-out doesn't have the money to pay these pension obligations, Detroit had little choice but to declare bankruptcy in an effort to avoid paying the pensions. In effect, this is a confiscation of all pension funds by the government, meaning that retired cops, firefighters, school teachers and so on will never see a dime of the pensions they thought they had earned.

“I believe that over the long haul these radical Islamic regimes are going to fail because they don’t offer the adequate enfranchisement that you need to develop a country economically, politically and culturally,” Netanyahu told the German weekly Welt am Sonntag. He said he thought radical Islamism was wholly unsuited to dealing with a global economic and information revolution, and “goes right back to medievalism against the whole thrust of modernity, so over time it’s bound to fail”.

Jerusalem had previously responded more cautiously to Morsi’s removal by the Egyptian army on July 3. Netanyahu avoided any comment at the time, though a confidant expressed hope that Egypt’s new leaders may restore Cairo’s largely frozen contacts with Israel.

In the interview, Netanyahu reiterated Israel’s concern that the US-brokered 1979 peace treaty with Egypt remain intact, alluding also to a surge of violence in a Sinai border region since Israeli ally Hosni Mubarak was toppled from power in Egypt two years ago. “Preserving the peace with Egypt through these convulsions is of central importance to us,” Netanyahu said.

"This is a significant and welcome step forward,” he added. “The agreement is still in the process of being finalized so we are absolutely not going to talk about any of the elements now." The top US diplomat added that PLO chief negotiator Saeb Erekat and Israeli negotiator Justice Minister Tzipi Livni would meet him in Washington "to begin initial talks within the next week or so."

In his brief comments to the press, Kerry praised the courage of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. "No one believes the long-standing differences between the parties will be resolved overnight or just wiped away. We know that the challenges require some very tough choices in the days ahead," he said, according to AFP.

US President Barack Obama on Thursday urged Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to resume talks. "The president encouraged Prime Minister Netanyahu to continue to work with Secretary Kerry to resume negotiations with the Palestinians as soon as possible," the White House said in a statement, after the two leaders spoke by telephone.

Meanwhile, a PA leader told the Associated Press on Friday that Kerry’s plan to get Israel and the PA talking again involves getting Israel to release hundreds of terrorist prisoners.

"In the curia there is talk of a 'gay lobby.' And it is true, it's there. Let's see what we can do," Francis said on June 6 to Latin American religious received in audience. And again: "It is not easy. Here there are many of the pope's 'bosses' with great seniority of service," he confided a few days ago to his Argentine friend and former student Jorge Milia.

In effect, some of these 'bosses' have hatched against Jorge Mario Bergoglio the cruelest and most subtle deception since he was elected pope. They kept in the dark important information that, if he had known it before, would have kept him from appointing Monsignor Battista Ricca "prelate” of the Institute for Works of Religion.

With this appointment, made public on June 15, Francis intended to place a trusted person in a key role within the IOR. With the power to access all of the proceedings and documents and to attend all of the meetings both of the cardinalate commission of oversight and of the supervisory board of the disastrous Vatican “bank.” In short, with the task of cleaning house. Before the appointment, Francis had been shown, as is customary, the personal file on Ricca, in which he had not found anything unseemly. He had also heard from various personalities of the curia, and none of them had raised objections.

Just one week after appointing the “prelate,” however, during the same days in which he was meeting with the apostolic nuncios who had come to Rome from all over the world, the pope became aware, from multiple sources, of some episodes from Ricca's past previously unknown to him and such as to bring serious harm to the pope himself and to his intention of reform.

Sadness over having been kept in the dark with regard to such grave matters, and the intention to remedy the appointment he had made, albeit not definitive but “ad interim": these were the sentiments expressed by Pope Francis once he was aware of those matters.

“Hamas rejects Kerry's announcement of a return to talks and considers the Palestinian Authority's return to negotiations with the occupation to be at odds with the national consensus,” a senior spokesman for the Palestinian political party Hamas told AFP on Friday.

On Friday Kerry announced that Israeli and Palestinian officials would soon come to the US to get to work on the latest 'roadmap' to revive Mideast peace negotiations for the first time since 2010. Kerry’s announcement came as he visited the Middle East this week and after holding three meetings with Abbas during his current visit to the region.

But Hamas, the Islamist party that controls the Gaza Strip, outright rejected the possibility of renewed talks with Israel. Another spokesman for the Hamas government, Ihab al-Ghassin, said that the Palestinian people will not accept such talks because “whoever negotiates on the part of the people who is not chosen by them, represents only himself.”

East Jerusalem, which includes the Old City, is also the Palestinian capital. However, the Netanyahu administration has made it clear that Jerusalem must remain Israel's "indivisible and eternal" capital, though Tel Aviv is internationaly held as the country's capital. Numerous settlements across the east of the city complicate any land settlement agreement for the proposed negotiations.

According to him, it is not necessary to have unity - but that a level "which befits Christians and people who read the gospel" can be reached between the two churches. "The anniversary of the Edict of Milan is an opportunity to go back to the past and to look into the contents of the edict and see how much we need it today," said the patriarch.

Roman Catholic Archbishop of Belgrade Stanislav Hočevar said the anniversary of the Edict was an opportunity to discover the history from the time of a united Church, and that this "enables us to learn the same roots, the same content, the same future." He recalled that the pope's envoy, the cardinal of Milan, Angelo Scola, would visit Niš in September, and added that the forging of mutual ties "leads to a better future."

But while some structural damage and power cuts were reported, officials said there was no risk of a tsunami. The quake hit at 17:09 (05:09 GMT) and was felt as far north as Auckland. It smashed windows, knocked stock off shop shelves and burst some water pipes, but there have been no reports of serious casualties. Sunday's tremor was the latest in a series that have shaken the lower half of New Zealand's North Island in recent days.

New Zealand lies on the notorious Ring of Fire, the line of frequent quakes and volcanic eruptions that circles virtually the entire Pacific rim. The country experiences more than 14,000 earthquakes a year, of which only around 20 have a magnitude in excess of 5.0.

Speaking at a Democratic fundraiser less than a month before directing the US Environmental Protection Agency to impose costly new restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions, Obama said, “we also know that the climate is warming faster than anybody anticipated five or 10 years ago. I don’t have much patience for people who deny climate change,” Obama added.

However, climate scientists including United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lead author Hans von Storch report temperatures have remained essentially flat for the past 10 years, and indeed for the past 15 years. Storch told Der Spiegel that 98 percent of IPCC climate models cannot replicate the prolonged pause in global warming, and the IPCC may need to revise its computer models to correct their apparent warming bias.

During yesterday’s Environment and Public Works hearings, Senator David Vitter asked a panel of experts, including experts selected by Boxer, “Can any witnesses say they agree with Obama’s statement that warming has accelerated during the past 10 years?”

After several seconds of deafening silence, global warming activist Heidi Cullen, who formerly served as a meteorologist for the Weather Channel, attempted to change the subject. Cullen said our focus should be on longer time periods rather than the 10-year period mentioned by Obama. When pressed, however, she contradicted Obama’s central assertion and said warming has slowed, not accelerated.

Boxer may have envisioned her high-profile global warming hearings as an opportunity to build momentum for congressional or EPA action to restrict carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, the very global warming activists she called to serve as expert witnesses delivered a crushing blow to President Obama’s central justification for expensive new restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions.

Here is what to expect: The federal government will collect a huge bundle of money in fines, which is its payoff for allowing the fraud in the first place; bank executives will not be prosecuted but, instead, will receive bonuses for increasing bank profits; and those whose electric bills were higher than they should have been will not be compensated.

This game will continue forever until there is a voter rebellion that leads to making bank executives and so-called government regulators personally liable for their actions.

Sales in China, the world’s hottest pharmaceutical market, increased by 20 percent in 2012 to $1.5 billion, a miracle growth story now under police investigation. Though one of the hottest markets, it is also one of the most competitive, which investigators see as a motive for the bribes dating back to 2007.

Chinese newspapers reported GSK had a network of travel agencies working for them which acted as middlemen to carry out the bribery. "Each doctor had a credit card from the company. The kickbacks were transferred to the cards the day after the drugs were prescribed," one newspaper reported.

Laundering money through over 700 third parties enabled employees to overstep the company’s gift giving limit of $50 per recipient, Xinhua reported. Scores of doctors, hospitals, lawyers, and government officials were showered with perks which included travel, cash bribes, and even sexual favors, the Public Security Ministry said.

According to media reports of early July, the People's Bank of China is mulling the possibility of phasing out the dollar as the reference currency for the yuan exchange rate, and to start using gold as the reference point.

The reports have not been confirmed officially, but analysts are warning that the step, if taken, will weaken the yuan and destabilise China's already troubled economy, ultimately provoking a new bout of the economic crisis worldwide.

Beijing's possible move to back the yuan with gold would not be meant as a strategic measure to strengthen the national currency and increase its attractiveness as an investment medium. Rather, it would be a flaunt aimed at demonstrating to the world (and to the USA in particular) that China is capable of taking the risks associated with a departure from the dollar standard. Experts warn however that, apart from benefiting no-one, such a decision may actually have catastrophic consequences.

Our society is rapidly being transformed into a Big Brother prison grid by a government that is seemingly obsessed with knowing everything that we do. They want a record of all of our phone calls, all of our Internet activity and all of our financial transactions. They even want our DNA.

They put chips in our passports, they are starting to scan the eyes of our children in our schools, and they have declared our border areas to be “Constitution-free zones” where they can do just about anything to us that they want. The Bill of Rights has already been eroded so badly that many would argue that it is already dead. The assault against our most basic freedoms and liberties never seems to end.

Many of these groups have no tangible interest in the Trayvon Martin case per se, but are instead promoting the violent overthrow of the United States in the name of communism. Who are they? Just read the signs displayed in hundreds of pictures on the Internet of the protests themselves! Of course, Martin had nothing to do with this posthumous movement, but the question must be asked, “Is Trayvon sparking a communist revolution?”

These groups and others like them are always looking for a good mob that they can infiltrate and further infuriate, and this is certainly the case here. The top down orchestration appears to be much broader, however, with reporting and misreporting in the media and statements from Administration officials implying that justice was not served in the Zimmerman trial, even though he was unanimously acquitted of both 2nd degree murder and manslaughter.

Where are the FBI, Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security during these protests? Are any of these groups being investigated for sedition?

Since the time in 1945 on his return from the fateful Yalta Conference, that US President Roosevelt met Saudi King Ibn Saud and won exclusive rights for US Rockefeller-group oil companies to Saudi Arabia’s vast oil wealth, the relationship between Saudi and US foreign policy has been one of almost satrapy status for the Saudis.

Following the Kissinger-orchestrated 1973 “oil shock” in which OPEC raised its price by some 400%, Washington extracted a pledge from the Saudis that they would insure that OPEC sold its oil only in dollars, thereby ensuring the continued dominance of the US dollar as world reserve currency. In return, Washington agreed to sell US arms including training the Saudi Air Force.

And in 2010 just as Washington launched its Arab Spring “democracy” offensive in Tunisia, Egypt and across the Islamic arc of crisis, the Obama Administration announced the largest arms deal in US history. The US agreed to sell the Saudis 84 F-15s new and upgrade another 70 as part of a €46 billion deal, the biggest arms deal in US history, as it prepared to isolate Iran.

Before the Egyptian military coup, the Saudis had given secret assurance to Defense Minister and Chief of the Army, General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, that the Saudis along with other conservative Gulf oil states including Kuwait and UAE would guarantee financial support should the Obama Administration cut the €1 billion annual aid to Egypt’s military in retaliation for ousting their man, Morsi. On July 17, the newly-sworn-in Egyptian transitional government confirmed that it has received €6 billion in grants, loans and fuel from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The self-governing island, they say, has endured at least a decade of highly-targeted data-theft attacks that are then directed towards larger countries. "We've seen everything," said Jim Liu, the 28-year-old founder of Lucent Sky, a Taiwanese internet security company specializing in resolving dangerous software vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit in order to gain access to a system.

"We'll see a specific attack signature here, and then six months later see the same signature in an attack on the States." A Pentagon report in May accused China of trying to break into US defense computer networks. It followed another report in February by US computer security company Mandiant that said a secretive Chinese military unit was probably behind a series of hacking attacks that had stolen data from 100 US companies.

Beijing dismissed both reports as without foundation. But Taiwan experts say that hacking methods such as those outlined in the Mandiant report are the same kinds of security breaches that they had seen several years earlier. Regarded by China as a renegade province it must recover, by force if necessary, it is easy to see why Taiwan might be an ideal target for Chinese hackers: it is close to the mainland, Mandarin-speaking and boasts advanced internet infrastructure.