Not only did the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia largely create, sponsor and fund Al Qaeda, but also two other groups fighting on the side of the Syrian rebels: Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is a proxy war.

As we’ve documented in detail, the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and their allies back the Sunni jihadists against Shia Muslims. Indeed, the US is involved in a religious war – between the two factions of Islam (and is actually backing the most violent elements) – as part of a geopolitical strategy to exert control over the natural gas market.

Syria’s conflict is often described as a “civil war,” but that is only true insofar as it has yet to spill over into another country on a large scale or draw in too many different forces. But it is the quintessential proxy war, with the Alawite (an offshoot of Shia Islam) Assad regime backed up by Shia allies Hezbollah and Iran, as well as Russia and China.

The Sunni rebels are supported by the Islamist rulers of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, as well as the US, France, Britain and others.

The dollar is not dying. However, the reason it is rising in value has nothing to do with some inherent goodness in the US economy or the color green. Rather, it has to do with currency wars where other nations are trying to devalue their own currencies at the expense of the dollar. They go down, we go up. All of the Fed’s efforts to drive the dollar down have failed, primarily because the Fed is not greater than the combined dozens of nations who desperately want to devalue.

A large part of the global elite’s paranoia stems from their fear of global and uncontrolled war. Along the lines of Schumpeter’s theory of Creative Destruction, regional and local conflicts are controllable – and thus profitable – but unrestrained war ends up destroying the means of production.

Few, if any, Americans would wish for war, but we should realize that if currency wars are not contained, physical conflict will follow. While it may appear that we are lined with the global elite on currency wars, our motives could not be further apart. We seek freedom and liberty: They seek global domination.

In the beginning was the word. More specifically, in the beginning was a speech. "The speech" refers to a handful of thoughts expressed out loud last October by a former member of the Kuwaiti parliament. Too loudly, perhaps. The politician, Musallam al-Barrak, was sentenced in April to five years in prison. In response, several thousand Kuwaitis gathered in front of a prison at the edge of the city to protest. There were warning shots, tear gas and injuries. Barrak has been out on bail since.

One sentence in particular especially unsettled Sheikh Sabah, the emir of Kuwait, although al-Barrak uttered it in a deferential manner: "We will not allow you, your highness, to take Kuwait into the abyss of autocracy." These are words every Kuwaiti now knows. They are spread by smartphone or called out spontaneously in parks. Sometimes at night, a car can be heard honking its horn to the rhythm of the sentence: We will not allow you, we will not allow you.

Many groups have connections throughout the region, and nowhere is there as high a density of Twitter users as in Saudi Arabia, which attempts to keep its bloggers under control with the threat of draconian punishments, so far to no avail. In Bahrain, demonstrators are arrested almost daily, and the government has hired international PR companies to turn attention away from its full jail cells and torture chambers. In Oman, around 50 bloggers were first convicted of slander against the sultan, then pardoned.

In Abu Dhabi, 94 intellectuals, dignitaries, teachers, doctors, housewives and even a sheikh from the ruling family have been on trial since March. They are charged with Muslim Brotherhood sympathies and a conspiracy to overthrow the government. The state claims the group has distorted the image of the United Arab Emirates. The accused, on the other hand, protest their patriotism, report the state-run media. A sense of civic engagement, once awakened, is hard to put back to sleep. And a word once spoken is hard to forget.

“I got a rosary. He wished me strength,” recalls Ernst von Freyberg, who two weeks earlier had been named head of the Vatican bank in the Pope’s last major appointment before his historic abdication in February. Mr von Freyberg will need plenty of prayer and strength as he sets out to rescue the scandal-torn reputation of the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), as the bank is formally known, and help bring the Holy See in line with international financial norms, particularly in combating money laundering.

The bank’s history is anything but mundane, however. Its last chairman, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, an Italian professor of ethics, was unceremoniously sacked a year ago. The bank’s lay board accused him of incompetence and “progressively erratic” behaviour in the midst of a probe by Italian prosecutors into suspected money laundering transactions. Mr Gotti Tedeschi said he feared for his life.

The banker, with links to ultraconservative Catholic group Opus Dei, was said by some Vatican watchers to have fallen victim to internal power struggles over the bank’s push for greater transparency. “They told me it is not as bad as people think outside,” says Mr von Freyberg who was also chosen for his Catholic credentials – he is a member of the religious order 'the Knights of Malta' – and “loyalty to the Pope”.

“The bad reputation of the institute in the media is the key issue and then cleaning up comes sort of parallel to it. You must work at both at the same time,” explains Mr von Freyberg. His mission, Mr Von Freyberg says, is to “get IOR super-compliant and a respected member of the financial system, and out of the newspapers”.

As Mark Bridger was jailed for life for the abduction and murder of five-year-old April Jones, the NSPCC said there was a “worrying link” between his looking at indecent images online and the crime he went on to commit. It called for “effective measures” to curb the ease with which extreme pornography and indecent images of children can be accessed. Bridger’s laptop computer contained a cache of images of children being raped and abused. Police found a horror film in his video recorder paused at a violent rape.

There have been calls for Google to introduce their “safe search” option as a default setting, which would automatically block hard-core pornography and make it far more difficult for children to access accidentally. The current default setting, “moderate”, does not. John Carr, the government’s adviser on internet safety and secretary of a children’s charities coalition on the subject, has said: “Google can do more and should do more.”

The Bilderberg organisers, who include Tory Cabinet minister Ken Clarke, do not release a guest list but a roll-call of luminaries are expected to descend on a luxury Watford hotel from June 6, forcing police to step up security.

Hertfordshire police have refused to release the cost of security for the event, which has previously drawn anti-capitalist demonstrators in other locations around the world. However, they are in talks with the Home Office about a grant for "unexpected or exceptional costs" that is only given out if it threatens the stability of the force's policing budget. The final bill would have to total more than one per cent of the police force's overall spend - or about £1.8 million - for the grant to be successful.

The invitation-only Bilderberg meetings are attended by around 140 members of the international elite. The cloak of secrecy surrounding the meetings, which ban journalists from attending, has fuelled conspiracy theories that so-called Bilderbergers are planning global domination and world unification.

Other top Asian wheat importers South Korea, China and the Philippines said they were closely monitoring the situation after the US government found genetically engineered wheat sprouting on a farm in the state of Oregon. The strain was never approved for sale or consumption.

Wheat, long known as the staff of life, is the world's largest traded food commodity and it is used in making breads, pastries, cookies, breakfast cereal and noodles. Asia imports more than 40 million tonnes of wheat annually, almost a third of the global trade of 140-150 million tonnes. The bulk of the region's supplies come from the United States, the world's biggest exporter, and Australia, the second largest supplier.

Thus capital controls, which two months after the bailout, are still in place. Judging by just released Cyprus Central Bank data they failed. Because even though the deposit outflow in March, when the fiasco happened, was a moderate €3.8 billion, which the European politicians promptly pointed to as confirmation of a job well done, it was the April outflow that was the jawdropping number.

In a month in which deposit flight should have been largely contained, Cyprus banks saw a record outflow of 6.4 billion, or 10% of its entire deposit base, in one month! But the sad punchline is that while deposit flight by domestic residents was an unfortunate if explainable €3 billion, it was the €3.1 billion in deposit reduction by "Non-Euro Residents" - read Russians, who circumvented capital controls, and pulled a whopping 16% of their entire deposits held in the tiny and now completely insolvent island nation.

In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.

The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.” Plot the data, and it looks like this:

New England Complex Systems Institute

Pretty simple. Black dots are the food prices, red lines are the riots. In other words, whenever the UN’s food price index, which measures the monthly change in the price of a basket of food commodities, climbs above 210, the conditions ripen for social unrest around the world. When prices jump, people can’t afford anything else; or even food itself. And if you can’t eat — or worse, your family can’t eat — you fight.

But how accurate is the model? An anecdote the researchers outline in the report offers us an idea. They write that “on December 13, 2010, we submitted a government report analyzing the repercussions of the global financial crises, and directly identifying the risk of social unrest and political instability due to food prices.” Four days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire as an act of protest in Tunisia. And we all know what happened after that.

Ledwidge told the Guardian: "Once the last British helicopter leaves a deserted and wrecked Camp Bastion, Helmand – to which Britain claimed it would bring 'good governance' – will be a fractious narco-state occasionally fought over by opium barons and their cronies."

"Rendering the Afghan armed forces capable of securing the province [Helmand] is regarded by many ordinary British soldiers as little short of ridiculous," Ledwidge writes. Though British and other foreign troops were sent to Afghanistan to stop al-Qaida posing a threat to Britain's national security, "of all the thousands of civilians and combatants, not a single al-Qaida operative or 'international terrorist' who could conceivably have threatened the United Kingdom is recorded as having been killed by Nato forces in Helmand," Ledwidge writes.

He added: "There are no new lessons here, only one rather important old precept: before you engage in a war, understand the environment you are going into, precisely and realistically what it is you are trying to achieve and will it be worth the cost? In other words have a strategy."