Democratic Senator Ricardo Lara of Bell Gardens says that the policy means gays can join the scouts only until they turn 18.

“Equality does not have an expiration date,” he said. “Discrimination should not be subsidized.” Scouting leaders have objected that the bill would harm local troops that serve 180,000 California youth. Conservative legal aid groups have promised to sue if the measure becomes law on the grounds that it would punish an organization based on its beliefs.

Lara’s SB323 would deny state tax breaks to youth groups that discriminate on the basis of gender identity, race, sexual orientation, nationality, religion or religious affiliation. It passed the Senate with a 27-9 vote, with the minimum two-thirds majority needed to alter the state’s tax policy.

“This bill is about government vilifying our values and abusing its power to penalize, through taxation, those who hold different beliefs and values,” objected Karen England, executive director of the Capitol Resource Institute, which tries to strengthen traditional families.

If you have not heard about this treaty, don't feel bad. Obama has refused to even give Congress a copy of the draft agreement and he has banned members of Congress from attending the negotiations. The plan is to keep this treaty secret until the very last minute and then to railroad it through Congress and have it signed into law by October.

The treaty is known as "the Trans-Pacific Partnership", and the nations that are reported to be involved in the development of this treaty include the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Brunei, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia. Opponents of this treaty refer to it as "the NAFTA of the Pacific", and if it is enacted it will push the deindustrialization of America into overdrive.

The "one world" economic agenda that Barack Obama has been pushing is absolutely killing the US economy. We are losing jobs and businesses at an astounding pace. And each new "free trade" agreement makes things even worse.

Ethiopia set off alarm bells in Cairo last week when it began diverting a stretch of the river to make way for the $4.7 billion hydroelectric plant. Countries that share the river have argued over the use of its waters for decades - and analysts have repeatedly warned that the disputes could eventually boil over into war.

The high stakes involved were underlined on Monday when senior Egyptian politicians were caught on camera advising President Mohamed Mursi to take hostile action to stop the project, and one went as far as suggesting Cairo destroy the dam.

Most people in the western world assume that China just wants a “seat at the table” and is content to let the United States run the show. But that isn’t the case at all. The truth is that China doesn’t just want to compete with the United States. Rather, China actually plans to replace the United States as the dominant economic power on the planet.

In fact, China already accounts for more global trade than the United States does. So what would happen one day if China announced that it was backing the yuan with gold and that it would no longer be using the US dollar in international trade? It would cause a financial shift so cataclysmic that it is hard to even imagine.

So keep an eye on China, and look out for any news about the yuan. It won’t happen next week or next month, but eventually we could see China back the yuan with gold. When that happens, it is going to be a complete and utter financial disaster for the United States.

In a speech to the American Jewish Committee, Kerry stressed to a strongly pro-Israel crowd the need for urgent progress on a peace deal ending more than six decades of conflict, providing Israel with regional security and the Palestinians with their long-sought independent state.

"If we do not succeed now, we may not get another chance," Kerry said about the peace process, describing it as "hardly a process at all" right now. "I have heard all of the arguments for why it is too difficult to end this conflict," he added. "Cynicism has never solved anything. It has never given birth to a state, and it won't."

Kerry warned that without a two-state solution, Israel will have to choose between its Jewish and democratic nature. He also stressed the need to recognize the fundamental aspirations of the Palestinian people.

Those who believe the Israeli-Palestinian status quo is sustainable and that the separation fence will bring security to Israel are "lulling themselves into a delusion," the US secretary of state said.

"The absence of peace is perpetual conflict. ... We will find ourselves in a negative spiral of responses and counter-responses that could literally slam the door on a two-state solution," he said.

The proposals have already split the Conservative Party, as half of its MPs opposed the legislation in the Commons last month. In a bid to appease religious leaders critical of the Bill, Baroness Stowell, the deputy Tory chief whip in the House of Lords, said that ministers will now consider changes to the legislation to offer churches further protection if they refuse to conduct same-sex marriage ceremonies. The "wrecking" amendment aimed at blocking the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) tabled by Lord Dear, a Crossbench peer, was defeated by 390 votes to 148.

Ben Summerskill from Stonewall, the campaign for gay rights, said he was “delighted” by the result. “We always expected a tough challenge in the House of Lords, and Lord Dear’s ‘fatal motion’ - very rarely used - demonstrates the lengths to which a minority of peers are, sadly, still prepared to go to deny full equality to lesbian, gay and bisexual people,” he said.

And General Lord Dannatt, the former head of the Army, warned that the way legislation was rushed through Parliament goes against what he spent his career fighting for as a soldier. Lord Dannatt, a crossbench peer who was chief of the general staff from 2006 to 2009, accused the Government of committing an “abuse of the democratic process”.

The original small, peaceful protest – brutally cracked down on by the government – was simply against the destruction of one of the few remaining public spaces in Istanbul … for the development of a shopping mall by the prime minister’s son-in-law.

As Pepe Escobar writes at Asia Times: “The recent spark in Istanbul was provided by a small group of very young environmentalists organizing a peaceful sit-in, Occupy-style, in Taksim Square to protest the planned destruction of one of the city center’s few remaining public green spaces, Gezi park.

Gezi park’s destruction follows a globally tested neoliberalism racket; it will be replaced by a simulacrum – in this case a replica of the Ottoman Artillery Barracks – housing, what else, yet another shopping mall. It’s crucial to note that the mayor of Istanbul, also from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), owns a retail chain that will make a killing out of the mall. And the man holding the contract for this “redevelopment” is no less than [Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's] son-in-law”.

But the tinder lit quickly because Turks are sick of Erdogan’s nose-in-business government, which is attempting to ban alcohol, rail against tobacco and otherwise trash liberties in what has long been a very cosmopolitan, largely secular society.

The IMF said falling business investment and the eurozone's ongoing recession, which have hampered German growth, meant the economy would grow by just 0.3 percent this year, compared with an April estimate of 0.6 percent. "The uncertainty, mainly surrounding prospects for the euro area and the ongoing recession in the region, have led to declining German exports to the region as well as a sharp pull back in business investment," the IMF said in a report on Monday.

The Fund also warned of further risks to Germany's growth prospects. "Should the alleviation of uncertainty and an expected gradual recovery in the rest of the euro area fail to materialise, growth can be expected to remain below its potential for longer, leading to a widening of the output gap which would eventually result in slack in the labour market," it said.

The liquidity pumped into the economy and financial asset markets is highly unusual and cannot be maintained much longer. My take is that the stock market reflects Federal Reserve pumping more than an economic recovery.

A good case can be made for the fact that there is no recovery and that we are just beginning our decline. The efforts of government merely served to drive us more deeply into debt and stave off normal economic healing. If this observation is correct, all that has been accomplished is a postponement and accentuation of the pain to come. My economic sense tells me that is the case.

Whether you accept this conclusion or not, don’t be fooled by the performance of the stock market. There is little other than inflationary Fed policy to justify financial asset prices. Furthermore, recent performance really isn’t special as those living through the 1930s learned. In fact, what has happened recently doesn’t even measure up to the initial rebound that occurred during the Great Depression.