Riley's scoop — along with Michael Hirsch's report in The Atlantic that Silicon Valley and private defense contractors built the government's surveillance system — sheds light on the remarkably close relationship between private technology companies and the government. It turns out there's also some personnel overlap, as reported by James Risen and Nick Wingfield of The New York Times:

"When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for the National Security Agency."

On his death bed, this psychiatrist and autism pioneer admitted that ADHD is essentially a "fictitious disease," which means that millions of young children today are being needlessly prescribed severe mind-altering drugs that will set them up for a life of drug addiction and failure.

The purpose all along for pathologizing ADHD symptoms, of course, was to generate more profits for the drug industry. According to the citizen watchdog group Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHRI), roughly 20 million American children today are taking dangerous, but expensive, psychiatric drugs for made-up behavioral conditions like ADHD. And another one million or so children have been blatantly and admittedly misdiagnosed with phony behavioral conditions for which psychiatric medications are being prescribed.

"Remember, there are two ways drug companies can make money: Invent new drugs, and invent new diseases already invented drugs can treat," writes Dr. Jay Parkinson, MD, MPH, about the fake disease-creation industry. "In the past decade or so, Big Pharma has created no less than 10 new novel drugs per year," he adds, noting that many of the people who have been told they suffer from ADHD actually suffer from "the consequence of bad design," meaning a conventional social and educational system that is unable and unwilling to recognize unique individuality.

In sweeping proposals released after four years of frustrated efforts, Mr Obama ordered new curbs on carbon emissions from power plants and called for America to ready its defences against an already-changing climate. The president also surprised environmentalists by signalling he would reject a controversial oil pipeline if it was found to “significantly exacerbate” the problem of carbon pollution.

“I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that is beyond fixing,” Mr Obama told students at Georgetown University. “As a president, as a father and as an American I’m here to say we need to act.” Mr Obama first promised a new push on climate change during his inagural address on a freezing morning in January, warning that failing to cut emissions “would betray our children”.

Today, as Washington sweltered in the summer heat, Mr Obama finally laid out the details of his plan, which can be carried out by executive order and therefore do not need Congressional approval.

Officials say the sweeping changes would eliminate brigades at 10 Army bases in the US by 2017, including in Texas, Kentucky, Georgia, Colorado, North Carolina, New York, Kansas and Washington. The Army will also cut thousands of other jobs across the service, including soldiers in units that support the brigades, and two brigades in Germany have already been scheduled for elimination.

“Because we repealed ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ our military … is stronger and our country is safer, more equal and more just,” said Valerie Jarrett, the keynote speaker at the Pentagon’s gay pride celebration.

It was the Defense Department second annual gay pride gathering since September 2011, when Mr Obama signed the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a ban on gays serving openly in the military implemented during the Clinton administration. This year’s 35-minute gathering in the Pentagon auditorium was more low-key and shorter than last year’s event, which featured a gay Marine officer, an Air Force lawyer and a lesbian West Point graduate.

Ms Jarrett, one of Mr Obama’s closest confidantes, called the repeal of the gay ban “one of the most significant civil rights accomplishments of the president’s career.”

And yes, if the average rate of interest on US government debt rose to just 6 percent (and it has actually been much higher in the past), the federal government would be paying out about a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt. But that isn't it. Nor does the primary reason have to do with the fact that rapidly rising interest rates would impose massive losses on bond investors.

At this point, it is being projected that if US bond yields rise by an average of 3 percentage points, it will cause investors to lose a trillion dollars. Yes, that is a 1 with 12 zeroes after it ($1,000,000,000,000). But that is not the number one danger posed by rapidly rising interest rates either. Rather, the number one reason why rapidly rising interest rates could cause the entire global financial system to crash is because there are more than 441 TRILLION dollars worth of interest rate derivatives sitting out there.

This number comes directly from the Bank for International Settlements - the central bank of central banks. In other words, more than $441,000,000,000,000 has been bet on the movement of interest rates. Normally these bets do not cause a major problem because rates tend to move very slowly and the system stays balanced. But now rates are starting to skyrocket, and the sophisticated financial models used by derivatives traders do not account for this kind of movement.

So what does all of this mean?

It means that the global financial system is potentially heading for massive amounts of trouble if interest rates continue to soar. So what happens next? Well, nobody knows for sure, but one thing seems certain. The last half of 2013 is shaping up to be very, very interesting.

South Korea is one of the most digitally connected nations in the world and the problem of internet addiction among both adults and children was recognised as far back as the late 1990s. That is now developing into the early onset of digital dementia – a term coined in South Korea – meaning a deterioration in cognitive abilities that is more commonly seen in people who have suffered a head injury or psychiatric illness.

"Over-use of smartphones and game devices hampers the balanced development of the brain," Byun Gi-won, a doctor at the Balance Brain Centre in Seoul, told the JoongAng Daily newspaper. "Heavy users are likely to develop the left side of their brains, leaving the right side untapped or underdeveloped," he said.

The right side of the brain is linked with concentration and its failure to develop will affect attention and memory span, which could in as many as 15 per cent of cases lead to the early onset of dementia.

That's just US government debt and does not include the trillions that will be lost on corporate debt. And they're rising, while yields on junk and emerging-market debt are careening higher. A 3 percentage point rise across the spectrum would just get Treasuries back to where they were before the financial crisis, hence the old “normal.” These trillions were manufactured when the Fed started printing money and buying bonds to force yields down.

As yields go up, this flimsy wealth effect will be reversed. What is the BIS worried about? The banks: "As foreign and domestic banks would be among those experiencing the losses, interest rate increases pose risks to the stability of the financial system....” As I’ve said before, the clicks of investors fastening their seatbelts can be heard around the world.

"Germany's security is also being defended in the Hindu Kush, too," Peter Struck, who was Germany's defense minister at the time, said in 2002. If that's true, then the government should also be expected to defend the security of its people at their own doorstep. Because the massive sniffing out and saving of data of all kinds - that of citizens and businesses, newspapers, political parties, government agencies - is in the end just that: a question of security. It is about the principles of the rule of law. And it is a matter of national security.

We live in changing times. At the beginning of last week, we thought after the announcement of the American Prism program, that US President Barack Obama was the sole boss of the largest and most extensive control system in human history. That was an error. Since Friday, we have known that the British intelligence agency GCHQ is "worse than the United States." Those are the words of Edward Snowden, the IT expert who uncovered the most serious surveillance scandal of all time. American and British intelligence agencies are monitoring all communication data. And what does our chancellor do? She says: "The Internet is uncharted territory for us all."

That's not enough. In the coming weeks, the German government needs to show that it is bound to its citizens and not to an intelligence-industrial complex that abuses our entire lives as some kind of data mine. Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger hit the right note when she said she was shocked by this "Hollywood-style nightmare."

We have Edward Snowden to thank for this insight into the interaction of an uncanny club, the Alliance of Five Eyes. Since World War II, the five Anglo-Saxon countries of Great Britain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada have maintained close intelligence cooperation, which apparently has gotten completely out of control.

The damning article in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily, the party’s official newspaper, came in response to Washington’s accusations of the “deliberate choice by the government to release a fugitive despite a valid arrest warrant.”

Addressing Washington’s allegations, the People’s Daily wrote that China could not accept “this kind of dissatisfaction and opposition.” “Not only did the US authorities not give us an explanation and apology, it instead expressed dissatisfaction at the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region for handling things in accordance with the law,” wrote Wang Xinjun, a researcher at the Academy of Military Science in the People's Daily commentary.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying also denounced the US accusations as “groundless and unacceptable.” “It is unreasonable for the US to question Hong Kong's handling of affairs in accordance with law, and the accusation against the Chinese central government is groundless,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying.

“In a sense, the United States has gone from a model of human rights to an eavesdropper on personal privacy, the manipulator of the centralized power over the international internet, and the mad invader of other countries' networks,” the People's Daily said.

The carefully planned journey of Edward Snowden from Hong Kong to Russia – then to Cuba possibly, before ending up in Ecuador to seek political asylum – underscores just how many countries, big and small, are happy to have an occasion to stick it in the eye of the United States.

The US and the Obama administration in particular are quick to emphasize the importance they give to the human rights of the citizens of the countries they are dealing with. Needless to say, however, those countries don’t always take well to American lesson-giving. With the case of Mr Snowden – a former National Security Agency contractor who leaked details of top-secret American and British surveillance programs and who is now sought by the US on espionage charges – those countries have a chance to turn the tables on the US.

It will be broadcast live by the state-financed "Deutsche Welle." Safeguarding the supply of natural resources to Germany and the expansion of the German "leadership" in Europe will be among the topics discussed, as well as "special forces missions," "drone warfare," "targeted killings" and the "networking" of government and private sectors for the global implementation of "German interests."

The list of speakers has been established accordingly and will include the director of the Munich Security Conference, Wolfgang Ischinger, and board chairman of the Commerzbank, Klaus-Peter Müller. Müller is considered the initiator of the "Celler Trialog," which is taking place since 2007 between the political establishment, the military and industry. The Trialog is calling for an intensification of cooperation between the German military and the economic sector.