While the pope kept silence regarding the identity of the perpetrators of the attacks, another Vatican cardinal spoke out strongly, calling out the radical Islamist ideology that motivated the targeted bombings. The head of the Vatican’s liturgical department, Cardinal Robert Sarah, denounced the “barbaric Islamist violence” behind the Easter attacks.

“As we celebrate the resurrection of the son of God, the terrible attacks in Sri Lanka once again show how the followers of Christ are all over the world the victims of wild and foolish deeds,” wrote the Guinean cardinal, the highest-ranking African prelate in the Catholic Church. “I condemn this barbaric Islamist violence. Pray,” he wrote in a tweet.

But Monbiot was just getting started. Next up, he took us down the intellectual river, into the heart of activist darkness. “We have to overthrow this system which is eating the planet: perpetual growth,” Monbiot declared. And the writer pulled no punches. Annual economic growth targets of 3% represent “madness,” he said. The columnist reached his crescendo. “We can’t do it by just pitting around at the margins of the problem; we’ve got to go straight to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it.”

In a way, I’m glad Monbiot said what he did. With this interview, Boyle, a terrorist sympathizer and champagne socialist, unwittingly gave us a rare window into the malicious faux-humanitarianism that motivates many climate change ideologues. I don’t exaggerate when I say it’s malicious.

Monbiot and his comrades, in seeking to overthrow the modern way of life, are proud servants of moral darkness. They seek to impose socialism, communism, or some other defective ideology precisely because these will limit economic growth and human flourishing.

Electric vehicles in Germany account for more CO2 emissions than diesel ones, according to a study by German scientists. When CO2 emissions linked to the production of batteries and the German energy mix – in which coal still plays an important role – are taken into consideration, electric vehicles emit 11% to 28% more than their diesel counterparts, according to the study, presented on Wednesday at the Ifo Institute in Munich.

Mining and processing the lithium, cobalt and manganese used for batteries consume a great deal of energy. A Tesla Model 3 battery, for example, represents between 11 and 15 tonnes of CO2. Given a lifetime of 10 years and an annual travel distance of 15,000 kilometres, this translates into 73 to 98 grams of CO2 per kilometre, scientists Christoph Buchal, Hans-Dieter Karl and Hans-Werner Sinn noted in their study.

The CO2 given off to produce the electricity that powers such vehicles also needs to be factored in, they say. When all these factors are considered, each Tesla emits 156 to 180 grams of CO2 per kilometre, which is more than a comparable diesel vehicle produced by the German company Mercedes, for example. The German researchers therefore take issue with the fact that European officials view electric vehicles as zero-emission ones.

Obama’s stewardship of our national finances was truly obscene, but George W Bush was nearly as bad. He has even less of an excuse, in fact, because he had a Republican Congress to work with for most of his eight years. During that time, Bush took us from USD $5.8 trillion to USD $10 trillion, something that seemed reckless at the time. Of course, in light of the Obama USD $10 trillion spending extravaganza, Bush looks prudent by comparison.

How is it that we supposedly elect the best and the brightest to represent us in Washington, DC, people with law and medical degrees and MBAs from Ivy League universities, people that come from the finest law practices and accounting firms and consultancies and banks and financial institutions in the country… and our end result is the debt avalanche we now have before us?

Why do we believe politicians of either party when they tell us that they will make our national debt a top priority? Why is it that the American people seem to fail to understand how ruinous our national debt truly is and what an astounding percent of our national budget we are now spending on servicing that debt?

“It is an open issue that must be resolved,” Greece’s deputy foreign minister, Markos Bolaris, told the Guardian, hitting back at German insistence that compensation claims had been conclusively settled.  “For matters of this kind there is international justice,” he said on Friday. “In all disputes the EU abides by it, on principle. Germany may say it has been resolved but what counts is international law.” 

Greeks suffered hugely at the hands of Hitler’s forces, enduring what Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, recently described on a visit to Greece as “unimaginable” horrors.  Tens of thousands were killed in reprisals as Greeks mounted what historians would later hail as a heroic resistance against the Wehrmacht [German army], with entire villages being wiped out between 1941 and 1944.  By the time the occupation ended, an estimated 300,000 people had died from famine and the country’s Jewish community had been almost entirely obliterated.

Indicative of the emotions Nazi-era crimes are still prone to elicit, within hours of the vote in the Greek parliament, the MP in charge of Warsaw’s reparations campaign announced that Poland should follow suit.  Greek compensation claims pale by comparison. Warsaw was razed to the ground by the Nazis after an abortive uprising in which 200,000 civilians died. The lives of 6 million Poles – including 3 million Polish Jews – were lost. Poland, which also faces parliamentary elections this year, has since demanded €800 billion in war debts it insists it is still owned by Germany.

Following the fall of Nazism, Germany has kept up its pacifist ideal and placed a strict ban on exporting arms to States that could use them for evil ends. However, during the Conference on Security that has just taken place in Munich, [Angela Merkel], the German Chancellor, has indicated these restrictions are too narrow. They only allow very few exports and consequently prevent the sales of arms from being a profitable activity.

Under the provisions of this secret clause, France will be able to continue exporting to Saudi Arabia something which the Bundestag, the German Parliament, prohibits. The profits derived from the Saudi sales will be divided between the two States but we do not know in what proportions.

In her study of European political development over more than 200 years, Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard, shows that the story of democracy in Europe is complicated. The ultimate goal, she believes, is liberal democracy, with elections, respect for the rule of law, individual liberties and minority rights. But that’s a rare, and hard-won, achievement. A step forward is often followed by a step back.

The German air force already has multi-tasking Tornado warplanes, which are already capable of deploying American atomic bombs. But those aircraft are going to be replaced, possibly, by European-developed Eurofighters, or by United States manufactured F/A-18 Super Hornets.

Either way, the warplane that Germany selects will have to be equipped with the AMAC (Aircraft Monitoring and Control) system, which allows the use of the new American atomic bombs and enables the regulation of the power of the explosion as well as at what height the bombs explode after they are launched.

Germany does not manufacture atomic weapons but has come to consider itself as a nuclear power because it has vectors to use them, and believes that this gives it the right to sit on the UN Security Council sharing the permanent member position occupied by France. Both countries would thus represent the European Union, under the auspices of NATO.

According to an article in the Financial Times last week “Germany’s federal and state governments have spent €70 billion on bailing out banks since the financial crisis, according to an estimate by Gerhard Schick, head of lobby group Finance Watch.” The figure of €70 billion is about 79 billion US dollars. Why did the US Fed throw $364 billion at one German bank when its country of origin has only reached in its pocket to the tune of $79 billion for all of its troubled banks?

The black hole surrounding derivatives is just as dark today as it was in 2008 – and just as dangerous. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission had this to say about the crash: “the existence of millions of derivatives contracts of all types between systemically important financial institutions — unseen and unknown in this unregulated market — added to uncertainty and escalated panic, helping to precipitate government assistance to those institutions.” There is not one Federal or state regulator today who could tell you which counterparty has the most concentrated risk to derivatives. Nor is there one Wall Street bank who has clarity on this issue — because the majority of the over-the-counter derivative contracts are secret contracts between one party and another.

We know that Deutsche Bank’s derivative tentacles extend into most of the major Wall Street banks. According to a 2016 report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Deutsche Bank is heavily interconnected financially to JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America as well as other mega banks in Europe. The IMF concluded that Deutsche Bank posed a greater threat to global financial stability than any other bank as a result of these interconnections – and that was when its market capitalization was tens of billions of dollars larger than it is today.

Until these mega banks are broken up, until the Fed is replaced by a competent and serious regulator of bank holding companies, and until derivatives are restricted to those that trade on a transparent exchange, the next epic financial crash is just one counterparty blowup away.

The controversy over Julian Assange’s arrest in London seems to have spilled over into the European Parliament this week. Martin Sonneborn, a long-time contributor to Spiegel and ZDF, used his time to tell “a couple of words to the Brits who are likely to remain in the EU until Halloween.” If you extradite Assange to the US, may you get your stupid Brexit right now, and may it be as hard as possible!

Sonneborn also reminded the parliament that earlier this week it approved a bill protecting whistleblowers from being exposed to various forms of persecution, adding “it is now against the EU law to blow such people away.” Further into his emotional speech, Sonneborn recalled a renowned 2007 video showing a US helicopter crew gunning down a dozen civilians, including Reuters’ staff, and then laughing at the dead.

Assange, who was behind the release of the video in 2010, now risks being handed over to “those who deny or conceal it.” The footage, released by WikiLeaks and known as ‘Collateral Murder’, quickly went viral, sparking outrage across the globe. Assange “is a whistleblower who needs international protection, not criminalization,” Heike Hansel, Germany’s Left Party MP told RT. “We say that he delivered the truth to the public about US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and therefore he should be awarded, not persecuted.”

And unlike in the past where this phenomenon was largely contained to Japan and a handful of developed nations, RBC notes that almost all countries are set to experience a decline in the number of children per household in the 2000–2030 period. More specifically, looking from 2015 out to 2030, Euromonitor expects developed markets to have a ~20% decline in the number of children per household and developing markets a ~15% decline. In fact, as the Canadian bank points out, it was as recently as 2012 when the number of couples without children globally surpassed the number of those with children.

In early April, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio declared a state of emergency over a cluster of reported measles cases in the Orthodox Jewish community. If authorities are worried about one benign illness, why not target the source of the virus: international travelers from outbreak-stricken areas? If Bill de Blasio insists on forcibly injecting six month old babies, (who do not have an adequate immune system to handle the MMR vaccine), then why doesn’t he stop all international travelers coming from outbreak-stricken areas such as Israel, Ukraine, and the Philippines? What about all the disease that pours over the Southern border?

If the government insists on micromanaging viruses in the vast world, why do they target healthy, un-vaccinated children and ignore verifiable virus sources from other regions of the world? If stopping measles is so important, why not forbid international travel until the travelers have proven they have overcome infectious disease?