Israel is not the odd man out. Only 369 million of the world’s 7 billion people drink water which is intentionally fluoridated. A mere 5% of the world’s people drink artificially fluoridated water. But 194,206,000 Americans drink fluoridated water. That is more than half of all people who drink fluoridated water worldwide.

Why does most of the world – including most rich, developed nations – avoid water fluoridation? As Time Magazine notes:

“What has also changed is how much toxicologists know about the harmful effects of fluoride compounds. Ingested in high doses, fluoride is indisputably toxic; it was once commonly used in rat poison. Hydrogen fluoride is regulated as a hazardous pollutant in emissions from chemical plants and has been linked to respiratory illness.

Even in toothpaste, sodium fluoride is a health concern. In 1997 the Food and Drug Administration toughened the warning on every tube to read, “If more than used for brushing is accidentally swallowed, get medical help or contact a poison-control center right away.”

In 2004, a president was elected when religious voters surged from their pews to vote against the legal recognition of gay relationships. When it came to gay rights, religion was the enemy. A decade later, the story is very different. Congregations across the country increasingly accept, nurture, and even marry their gay brethren. Polls show majorities of major Christian denominations - including American Catholics, despite their church's staunch opposition - support legal gay marriage. Leaders of some of the most conservative sects, like the Southern Baptists, have moved away from the vitriolic rhetoric of yesteryear and toward a more compassionate tone.

Mormons march in gay-pride parades. A sitting Republican senator, a Methodist from the heartland state of Ohio, says the question was settled for him by "the Bible's overarching themes of love and compassion and my belief that we are all children of God." A new pope says, "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?"

Gradually, and largely below the radar, religious Americans have powered this momentous shift. In 2004, just 36 percent of Catholics, the Christian sect most supportive of gay marriage, favored it, along with 34 percent of mainline Protestants; today, it's 57 percent of Catholics and 55 percent of mainline Protestants. Even among white evangelical Protestants, the most hostile group to gay marriage, support has more than doubled, from 11 percent in 2004 to 24 percent in 2013. "This debate has gone from a debate between nonreligious and religious Americans to a debate dividing religious Americans," said Robert Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, who has closely tracked the evolution in public opinion.

For faith leaders and LGBT activists alike, a reconciling, gradual but profound, is under way. "People have been told for decades that homosexuality is a sin, but they know really good LGBT people, and they don't know what to do," said Sharon Groves, director of the religion and faith program of the Human Rights Campaign. "We need to be going into those conservative religious spaces with messages like the pope - who am I to judge? Once people see the humanity of LGBT people, it is very hard to hold onto a vitriolic stance."

I suspect the Bible is included by default simply because it saves it being picked by every second guest, becoming a boring and repetitive bit of radio. It's like if you were able to choose two drinks to take with you: you'd quickly get fed up of people explaining why water is a good thing to have on a desert island, so you would just include it for everyone. It's not an obligation, it's a given.

This might come as a surprise to the NSS but this simply isn't about some kind of religious power struggle. The Bible is widely regarded as the most significant text in English literature, alongside the works of Shakespeare and perhaps Paradise Lost.

You don't have to be a confessing Christian to appreciate the Bible – anyone with a smidge of cultural awareness, historical or anthropological appreciation, or the humility to recognise powerful words even if they don't actively endorse one's current worldview can see that Scripture is a hugely important text, and has been for centuries.

In Britain, an unexpectedly sharp rise in retail sales fuelled recovery hopes and prompted economists to raise their growth forecasts, while US unemployment claims fell to a six year low and inflation started to pick up.

Traders took the data as evidence of a broad recovery that would convince the US Federal Reserve to start slowing its quantitative easing (QE) programme in September and force the Bank of England to raise rates earlier than its current forecast of late 2016.

However, economists warned the UK recovery was being fuelled by dangerous debt-fuelled consumption. Ann Pettifor, director of Prime Economics, said: “There’s nothing seriously underpinning this recovery, and that’s why it’s Alice in Wongaland, the confidence fairy is out there.” The FTSE 100 tumbled 1.6 percent to 6,483.34, its lowest level since early July and its steepest one-day fall in almost two months on the prospect of an end to cheap money.

The TSA sends out its Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams to set up unannounced checkpoints used to “Dominate, Intimidate, & Control” American travelers. The purpose of VIPR teams is to maintain a presence in public areas and force travelers to submit to searches, including opening up bags and being patted down.

The New York Times wrote of the TSA on August 8, “With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals.” TSA records show that the teams ran more than 8,800 unannounced checkpoints outside of airports last year alone. These included searches at train stations, bus stations, the Indianapolis 500, the Superbowl, the Democratic and Republican national conventions, political speeches, and sports stadiums, more. CBS Los Angeles reported that TSA conduct an estimated 9,300 “suspicionless” spot searches of travelers in 2011.

TSA now has grown to a whopping 56,000 agents, violating rights en masse at 450 American airports. Its complete disregard for individual liberties and the constitution illustrates the uncomfortable fact that the United States is becoming a police state.

Hamilton believes the government is miscalculating what it owes by leaving out certain unfunded liabilities that include government loan guarantees, deposit insurance, actions taken by the Federal Reserve as well as the cost of other government trust funds. Factoring in those numbers brings the total amount the government owes to a staggering $70 trillion, he says.

According to FOX, Hamilton believes important areas of federal off-balance-sheet commitments include loans for post-high school education, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Reserve System.

“The biggest off-balance-sheet liabilities come from recognition of the fiscal stress that will come in the form of an aging population and rising medical expenditures,” Hamilton says, adding, “It is worth noting that there are many historical episodes in which off-balance sheet liabilities ended up having quite significant on-balance sheet implications.”

Fabian Picardo said Mariano Rajoy was fuelling the crisis to distract from his domestic troubles – just as the military junta in Buenos Aires did by ordering the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982.

He spoke out as the Foreign Office announced that it is lodging another formal complaint with Spain over the latest ‘unacceptable’ delays at the border with Gibraltar. Yesterday travelers, including a pregnant woman, were forced to wait for between three and five hours in baking heat. David Cameron is expected to decide today or tomorrow whether to sue Spain in the European Court of Justice over its imposition of draconian border controls.

Mr Picardo said: ‘I think what we are seeing is a little bit like what Mr Galtieri deployed in Argentina in 1982, which is an attempt to bang the nationalistic drum to make people look away from the national problems that Spain is suffering and the PM himself is labouring under. What is happening in the background is that the Spanish government has been engulfed in allegations of corruption which affect Mr Rajoy himself.’

Mrs Merkel suggested she would be open to talking about the repatriation of powers later this year if she is re-elected as Germany’s leader. The European Union should consider whether it can “give something back” to national governments, she said. The Prime Minister has said that he wants to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU, winning back a range of powers from Brussels. He would then put the new deal to the British people in a referendum by 2017, where voters could either accept the renegotiated relationship or leave the EU.

Mr Cameron’s allies admit his ability to win public support for his new deal will depend on being able to win back substantial powers from the EU. In a German radio interview, Mrs Merkel said she was open to changing the way EU countries relate to one another and the EU’s central institutions.

“In Europe at the moment we have to take care to coordinate our competitiveness more closely, and for that we don’t have to do everything in Brussels,” she said, adding: “'More Europe’ cannot only mean transferring competences from national states to Europe, but you can also have 'more Europe’ by coordinating national political actions more intensively and rigorously with others.”

Some analysts have suggested that the British bid to repatriate power is doomed because other European governments will not agree to give Britain a better deal. But hopes have been boosted this year by Holland, which has also suggested changes in EU rules to give individual states more autonomy.

The Boy Scouts of America’s newly adopted membership policy — in which youths no longer will be blocked from joining the Scouts based on “sexual orientation or preference alone” — is “a sweeping change to its core values,” said Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal defense organization.

The policy change has legal ramifications for religious chartering groups, potentially exposing them to lawsuits if they continue to sponsor troops while seeking to maintain the traditional Christian teaching that homosexual behavior is immoral. What could happen is “somebody would come and say, ‘We want to use your church for a same-sex wedding ceremony,’ and the church would say, ‘Wait, we have a religious belief against that,’” said Erik Stanley, an alliance lawyer and Eagle Scout.

Most states that have gay-marriage laws also have some kind of “conscience exemption” that does not require churches to perform same-sex ceremonies. But the rebuttal by such a gay advocacy group would be, “Well no, you don’t — or if you do, you’re not sincere or you don’t follow it, because you allow this Boy Scout troop in, and you had to specifically sign a charter saying that you agreed with the BSA policy of allowing in openly homosexual youth,” Mr Stanley said.

“That’s our basic concern — that it weakens the church’s freedom of religion and freedom of association arguments on that point,” he said, adding that churches may need to separate from the Boy Scouts of America to “protect their right to freely preach the Gospel” and “be a witness to our nation’s youth.”

On May 17, the first day the Treasury reported that the debt had hit exactly $16,699,396,000,000 - and was thus just $25 million below the legal limit - Treasury Secretary Lew sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner saying he was beginning to implement what he called "the standard set of extraordinary measures" to prevent the Treasury from exceeding the legal limit on the federal debt.

Since Lew sent that letter - announcing that he would use "extraordinary measures" - the debt has remained stuck at exactly $16,699,396,000,000 for 87 straight days. That includes all 31 days in July when Lew's Treasury says it was running a $98 billion deficit. When Lew stops using "extraordinary measures" to keep the debt at exactly $16,699,396,000,000, the government will have another debt-limit crisis.

A number of top analysts are pointing out the fact that the biggest cluster of "Hindenburg Omens" has appeared since the last stock market crash. And those that have studied this insist that the more "Hindenburg Omens" there are in a cluster, the stronger the signal is.

Meanwhile, another very disturbing sign is the fact that the yield on 10 year US Treasuries is starting to soar again. On Tuesday it shot up from 2.62% to 2.727%. As I have written previously, the yield on 10 year US Treasuries is the most important number in the US economy right now. If that number continues to rise, it is going to be very, very bad news for the financial system.

When the Hindenburg Omen makes an appearance, it is supposedly a signal that the US stock market will likely experience a significant decline within the next 40 days. But of course this has not always happened when a Hindenburg Omen has appeared. However, what we are seeing right now is a highly concentrated cluster of Hindenburg Omens. According to SentimenTrader's Jason Goepfert, the last time such a cluster appeared was before the last stock market crash.

Yet flu scientists are currently at loggerheads over experiments to make the H7N9 bird influenza virus that emerged in China earlier this year even more dangerous.

Some argue that "gain of function" experiments to make the virus more infectious, more deadly and drug resistant in ferrets – the best available test animal for human flu – offer up vital information that could help us defend against a pandemic. Other scientists are concerned that deliberately creating a supervirus could provide a weapon to bioterrorists. What’s more, they point out, existing biosafety measures – such as requiring researchers to wear special safety suits and go through decontamination chambers when leaving the lab – may not be enough to prevent the virus spreading.

Now, a team led by Benjamin TenOever, at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, has devised a genetic failsafe that would switch off mutant strains if they escaped from the lab and infected humans.

Known as the Worldwide Grid, it would give users access to the computing power of all the machines connected to a network no matter where they are in the world. The technology could turn desktop computers into supercomputers and is now being adapted to allow mobile devices such as phones and tablets to connect.

Physicists at CERN already have access to the world’s biggest Grid computing network, combining more than 200,000 computers together. It allows them to analyse more than 26 million gigabytes of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) each year. It is now undergoing an upgrade as the rest of the LHC is similarly upgraded to increase its power. Based on the past three years of use, scientists are intending to improve the efficiency of the system while also decreasing its complexity.

In his novel ‘1984’, George Orwell imagined a future world where speech was greatly restricted. He called the language that the totalitarian state in his novel created “Newspeak”, and it bears a striking resemblance to the political correctness that we see in America right now. According to Wikipedia, ‘Newspeak’ is “a reduced language created by the totalitarian state as a tool to limit free thought, and concepts that pose a threat to the regime such as freedom, self-expression, individuality, peace, etc. Any form of thought alternative to the party’s construct is classified as ‘thoughtcrime.’”

Yes, people are not usually being hauled off to prison for what they are saying just yet, but we are heading down that path. Every single day, the mainstream media in the United States bombards us with subtle messages about what we should believe and what “appropriate speech” consists of. Most of the time, most Americans quietly fall in line with this unwritten speech code. In fact, most of the time we enforce this unwritten speech code among each other. Those that would dare to buck the system are finding out that the consequences can be rather severe.

It would be a huge mistake to underestimate the power of the mainstream media in America today. As I mentioned the other day, Americans watch an average of about 153 hours of television a month. When Americans go to work or go to school, the conversations that they have with others are mostly based on content that the media feeds them. And about 90 percent of what we watch on television is controlled by just six gigantic corporations.

But the media is not the only source that is telling us what to think. The truth is that the messaging that comes from all of our major institutions (the government, the media, the education system, etc) is remarkably consistent. The establishment wants to control what we say and how we think, and they have a relentless propaganda machine that never stops working.