The fickle public had forgotten about all that. Bolton, a member of the "old gang" (Cheney, Rummy, Wolfowitz), could resume the war drumming he loves so much. The press could be expected to amplify it. And old allies would fall into line. Venezuela has oil, a socialist government in turmoil, and pro-American opponents who are ready to exploit the oil and turmoil. What could go wrong with the regional exertion of basic imperial power?

Then the Russians arrived and began supporting the socialist leader that the US wants to oust, Nicolas Maduro. And now a team from the largest standing army in the world, the Chinese People's Liberation Army, have, according to Al-Masdar News, been deployed to a crisis that's becoming more and more dangerous. What this means is that three major nuclear-weapon countries are converging on Venezuela.

Experts know this calm period will eventually end, with destructive results. They just don’t know when this well-documented geological pattern will shift. “Earthquake rates are quite variable: We have a decade or two where we don’t have many earthquakes, and people expect that’s what California is always like,” said Elizabeth Cochran, seismologist with the US Geological Survey. Eventually, “we’re going to dramatically see a change in earthquake rates.”

Scientists have been warning California of seismic dangers, be it the Big One on the San Andreas fault or catastrophes that could come from lesser-known faults, such as Hayward or Newport-Inglewood. “Along the main plate boundary faults, we are in a deficit of earthquakes in the last 100 years,” said Tom Rockwell, a San Diego State paleoseismologist. “At some point, that’s going to change. We’re going to have some big earthquakes.”

“I don’t want to build a (Third) Temple in one or two years, I want to build it now,” Moshe Feiglin said at a Maariv/Jerusalem Post conference in Tel Aviv, referring to the site that currently houses the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque and where both Jewish Temples stood in the past. Such a move would be unrealistic in the extreme; suggestions of even small changes to the status quo on the tinderbox holy site, where Jews can currently visit but not pray, have met with vociferous and often violent protests.

Feiglin is a major supporter of building in Jewish settlements and Jews praying on the Temple Mount, and during his tenure as a Likud lawmaker repeatedly visited the contested compound in Jerusalem’s Old City, which is the holiest site in Judaism as well as the third-holiest spot in Islam. “To build the Temple I need support, I can’t do it alone,” he said at the end of his speech. Zehut’s 344-page manifesto calls for measures to move government facilities to the Temple Mount and give the Chief Rabbinate authority over the site.

Speaking from Downing Street, Mrs May suggested she would make any further Brexit delay “as short as possible”. But her request, which contains little detail, is likely to infuriate EU leaders ahead of an emergency summit in Brussels next week. Responding, Mr Tusk promised to listen to the Prime Minister’s latest plan and urged European colleagues to do the same.

The European Council president said: “Even if, after today, we don’t know what the end result will be, let us be patient.” Mrs May vowed not to hold European Parliament elections in the UK in her address to the nation. The British Prime Minister said: "I have always been clear that we could make a success of no deal in the long term but leaving with a deal is the best solution. So we will need a further extension of Article 50 – one that is as short as possible and which ends when we pass a deal."

"And we need to be clear what such an extension is for – to ensure we leave in a timely and orderly way. This debate, this division, cannot drag on much longer." This will limit any extension until May 22, which is the day before Britain would have to participate in the euro ballot.

These deposits, called “excess reserves,” include the reserves the banks got from our deposits, and on which they are paying almost nothing; and unlike with our deposits, there is no $250,000 cap on the sums banks can stash at the Fed amassing interest. A whopping $1.5 trillion in reserves are now sitting in Fed reserve accounts. The Fed rebates its profits to the government after deducting its costs, and interest paid to banks is one of those costs.

That means we, the taxpayers, are paying $36 billion annually to private banks for the privilege of parking their excess reserves at one of the most secure banks in the world — parking them, rather than lending them out. The banks are getting these outsize returns while taking absolutely no risk, because the Fed, as “lender of last resort,” cannot go bankrupt. This is not true for other depositors, including large institutions such as the pension funds that hold our retirement money.

In an effort to discover the “research” she was referring to, I located an article about a clinical psychologist who insists a decade of research has led him to conclude pedophilia is a deep-rooted, unchangeable predisposition from birth. The article states that the recidivism rate of child sexual abusers is extremely low, yet pedophiles cannot be “cured.” 

According to Cantor, and the young female student in the TEDx video, acceptance of pedophiles’ “orientation” by society will free them to understand they are forever bound by an attraction they will never be able to act out.

Is your head spinning?

Since when has “acceptance” of any sin led a society to refrain from committing that sin?

We knew this day was coming. Didn’t we?

Harold Macmillan submitted the first application for the UK to join the EEC in July 1961. However, thanks to French President Charles de Gaulle’s intervention, the membership bid failed. It was his successor, Edward Heath, who successfully negotiated entry with France's new head Georges Pompidou and took Britain into the EEC on January 1, 1973.

However, according to unearthed reports, in a speech to the British Chamber of Commerce in Paris on May 5, 1970, and again during the election campaign, Mr Heath had promised he would “not go in” the EEC without the “full-hearted consent of Parliament and the people”. Polls of the time clearly showed the consent for entry was not "full-hearted” and many interpreted Mr Heath's claim that he needed the "full-hearted consent of Parliament and the people" as a commitment to a referendum.

As the European Communities Bill passed through parliament, several politicians acknowledged that the public was opposed to going into the EEC. Nicholas Ridley MP said at the time: “There is an opposition from the people, a lack of full-hearted consent to the terms, which makes it wrong for the government to drive on into Europe.” Despite reservations, the bill passed and the UK joined the EEC without the expressed consent of the British public. However, by the start of 1974 there was a two-to-one majority believing the country had been wrong to join.

In 1974, the Labour Party won the general election with a manifesto promising a referendum on EC membership. While campaigning against continued membership in 1975, veteran left-winger Tony Benn accused Mr Heath of deceiving the British people and making false promises about the Common Market. He said: “Before we entered the Common Market, we were told by Mr Heath that it would be a bigger market. The then Labour MP went on to list government figures, which stated that “in the Midlands, Merseyside, in Scotland and elsewhere”, Common Market membership had been a “disaster”, which cost the country “half a million jobs”.

Merkel’s intervention comes as relations between the UK and EU hit an all-time low after Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal was defeated in Parliament at the third attempt on Friday. EU officials say they can do no more to help the British government. The bloc has given the UK about another week to notify of the way forward, as it prepares an all-important summit in Brussels on April 10.

May, who might make a fourth attempt to win Parliament’s support for her deal this week, is considering calling a general election to help break the Brexit deadlock. Her cabinet is split, with some ministers urging her to take the UK out of the EU without a deal on April 12 and others saying they’d quit if that becomes her policy.