As Syria's two-year-old civil war veered into the potentially atomic arena of Iran's confrontation with Israel and the West over its nuclear program, people were woken in the Syrian capital by explosions that shook the ground like an earthquake and sent pillars of flame high into the night sky. "Night turned into day," one man told Reuters from his home at Hameh, near one of the targets, the Jamraya military base.

The Syrian government accused Israel of effectively helping al Qaeda Islamist "terrorists" and said the strikes "open the door to all possibilities"; but Israeli officials said that, as in January, they were calculating Assad would not pick a fight with a well-armed neighbor while facing defeat at home.

If you take any notice of the British press you will know that the “epicenter” of this British epidemic of epic earthquake proportions – is Swansea in Wales UK. That is where all the fuss is about. There was just ONE laboratory confirmed case out of 183 notified cases – that is 18,200% over-diagnosed – or put another way – 0.005 of notified measles cases were really measles.

For the entire period 1 January to March 31, 2013 for the whole of Wales there were just 26 laboratory confirmed cases out of 446 notifications: 10 in January, 8 in February. And in March just eight cases out of 302 notifications for the whole of Wales.

That is a percentage rate of over-diagnosis and over-notification in March of 3774% or just 0.027 of notified cases were actually measles – and it is medical professionals who do the diagnosing and notifying. Kind of knocks your faith in the ability of doctors to diagnose a basic childhood illness.

The main advances in combating disease over 200 years have been better food and clean drinking water. Improved sanitation, less overcrowded and better living conditions also contribute.

Can “vaccinatable” diseases “return” despite vaccination? Yes. If you are too poorly nourished your body is likely to lack essential nutrients needed to maintain its immune system sufficiently to withstand disease. This will happen regardless of how many vaccinations you have had. This was experienced in Eastern Europe following the collapse of the old Soviet Bloc and the economic chaos which ensued, leaving many in great poverty.

For the same reason vaccines do not “work” and “save” lives in impoverished African and other third world economies. The majority of third world child deaths still occur despite vaccination. These children need proper food, clean water to drink and wash in and sanitation. We give them vaccines instead.

In an announcement intended to show that the government is serious about improving food safety, the Ministry of Public Security said on Thursday that the police had caught a gang of traders in eastern China who bought rat, fox and mink flesh and sold it as mutton. But that and other cases of meat smuggling, faking and adulteration featured in Chinese newspapers and websites on Friday were unlikely to instill confidence in consumers already queasy over many reports about meat, fruit and vegetables laden with disease, toxins, banned dyes and preservatives.

Sixty-three people were arrested and accused of “buying fox, mink and rat and other meat products that had not undergone inspection,” which they doused in gelatin, red pigment and nitrates, and sold as mutton in Shanghai and adjacent Jiangsu Province for about $1.6 million, according to the ministry’s statement. The report, posted on the internet, did not explain how exactly the traders acquired the rats and other creatures.

“How many rats does it take to put together a sheep?” said one typically baffled and angry user of Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblog service that often acts as a forum for public venting. “Is it cheaper to raise rats than sheep?”

But this puts Ms Merkel in a bind, as she has to answer to German voters in September when the country holds parliamentary elections. While the European economy may be deteriorating at an alarming rate, the electorate here is still enamored of her as the Iron Chancellor, advocating the austerity policies that are rapidly falling into disfavor elsewhere, among economists as well as the public.

Her response, in recent months, has been to try a delicate balancing act, quietly easing up on crisis-stricken states, giving them more time to narrow their budget deficits, while showing no outward signs of weakness that her political rivals can pounce upon.

But this stance may become increasingly untenable, if the United States’s more stimulative economic policies begin to bear fruit and Europe continues to struggle, as seems to be the case.

To translate that into plain English, the Fed still thinks that betting against the future of our children to temporarily boost Wall Street for now is a great idea. No surprise there.

Half a world away in the Vatican, Pope Francis in his May Day address told followers in St Peter’s Square “I think about those who are unemployed often because of an economic conception of society that seeks egoistic profit regardless of social justice.” Francis’ statement is a powerful policy insight into what happens to government, business and society alike when a central bank runs amok with the money supply.

Both the Eurozone and the United States are in a state of denial over the destruction of their currencies. The problem with increasing the money supply in the hopes of “stimulating” an economy is that central banks distort everything from the way governments rule their people to how society makes money.

America ought to take a hint from Pope Francis and get its money supply under control. We are not in a recovery; we are in a runaway vortex to national economic annihilation. Inflation is destroying the dollar and erasing our future, all in the name of greed … and a quick buck.

Some Germans are already beginning to recognize this. Professor Bernd Lucke in Germany who has established a political party is saying that Germany should leave the euro because it’s unbalancing the whole single currency. A strong economy like Germany being at the center of the Eurozone and of course in the long run it will actually help the German economy by exiting, because it will allow the other countries in the Eurozone to grow again, and then they’ll be able to afford to buy the German exports. So in the long run, it will actually be in Germany’s interest to exit the single currency because at the moment it’s just destroying everybody else.

By the time it reached Pacific Coast Highway late Thursday night, the blaze had burned about 8,000 acres — or 12½ square miles — and had forced the evacuation of a university and thousands of people from hundreds of homes, officials said. The blaze was 10 percent contained, but the work of more than 900 firefighters and deputies was just beginning, Ventura County fire Captain Bill Nash said. "We know the fire is continuing to grow," Nash said about 3 am Friday.

But he added that firefighters won't be able to determine how much until it can be checked by a helicopter during daylight. "The bottom line is that it's burning to the coast and it's burning toward Malibu," he said, noting the leading edge of the blaze was still about 20 miles from the town.

The ambassadors who gathered in the library of the German Foreign Ministry the Thursday before last knew the situation was unusually serious. These diplomats are accustomed to seeing images of Chancellor Angela Merkel with a Hitler moustache drawn on her face, hearing vitriolic tirades about Germany's enforcement of austerity policies in Europe and experiencing tense diplomatic talks. For some time now, German diplomats have watched anti-German sentiment increase dramatically in many countries in the European Union.

Under these circumstances, the ambassadors who converged at the Foreign Ministry certainly didn't expect the meeting to be any kind of laid-back reunion, but what they encountered still caught them by surprise. Nikolaus Meyer-Landrut, Merkel's EU policy adviser, gave the diplomats an unvarnished picture of the Chancellery's concerns that matters may not improve any time soon. Merkel's adviser left the diplomats with a clear impression that the German government has given up hope of any appreciable progress in European policy before Germany's federal elections this September.

Officials in the Chancellery consider the culprit here to be neighboring France, the country that is meant to function together with Germany as the motor driving the EU as a whole. Paris, Meyer-Landrut said, isn't interested in reaching agreements with Germany on fundamental questions before September. The meaning behind his words was clear: French President François Hollande is counting on the German elections putting a new government in place in Berlin, one he hopes will be more willing to compromise. Hollande no longer expects anything from the current German government.