On Tuesday, France delayed for six months a plan to raise already steep taxes on diesel fuel by 24 cents a gallon and gasoline by about 12 cents a gallon. Macron argued that the taxes were needed to curb climate change by weaning motorists off petroleum products, but violent demonstrations in the streets of Paris and other French cities forced him to backtrack – at least for now. “No tax is worth putting in danger the unity of the nation,” said Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who was trotted out to announce the concession.

It was a setback for the French president, who has been trying to carry the torch of climate action in the wake of the Paris accords of December 2015. “When we talk about the actions of the nation in response to the challenges of climate change, we have to say that we have done little,” he said last week.

Macron is hardly alone in his frustration. Leaders in the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere have found their carbon pricing efforts running into fierce opposition. But the French reversal was particularly disheartening for climate-policy experts, because it came just as delegates from around the world were gathering in Katowice, Poland, for a major conference designed to advance climate measures.

President Donald Trump, who has said he does not believe climate science, also took to Twitter to say Macron’s setback showed Trump was right to spurn the Paris climate agreement.

But the third, in the form of an amendment by arch Tory rebel Dominic Grieve, could have the effect of giving Parliament, rather than the Government, total supremacy in shaping Brexit. In principle, this may sound admirably democratic. But in a hung Parliament, where the majority of MPs are in conflict with the will of the people and want Britain to remain in the EU, it is a recipe for chaos and betrayal. True, this vote makes the chances of crashing out with no deal vanishingly small. But it also means that Brexit may never happen at all.

Just consider how that would shatter the integrity of our democracy and erode what’s left of public trust in our political class. On June 23, 2016, 17.4 million people voted in the referendum to leave the EU. It was the biggest mandate in the history of the UK, and the turnout of 72 per cent was the largest since the 1992 general election.

Eight months later, the decision to trigger Article 50 – the formal mechanism for leaving – was passed in the Commons by 498 votes to 114. And at the 2017 general election 85 per cent of the vote went to parties who promised to honour the referendum result. Yet now, in their vanity and arrogance, many of those very same MPs who pledged to keep the Brexit flame alive now risk extinguishing it. Could there be a worse breach of faith?

“Something is broken within our society and that is why you have seen the big changes – the vote for Brexit, Trump, and indeed the new Italian Government, and these riots. People want to feel they have got some power over their own future.”

The comments come after Prime Minister Theresa May faced widespread humiliation last night after suffering three separate Brexit defeats in the House of Commons. Mrs May’s Government was found in contempt of Parliament as it suffered three Commons defeats in quick succession. If Mrs May loses her crunch Brexit vote next Tuesday, the Government has 21 days to come back to the Commons to outline what happens next.

And without a doubt, any rational person should be able to see that signs that the US economy is slowing down are all around us. So it isn’t as if those that are preparing for the worst are being irrational. It is just that when large numbers of people all start to move in the same direction, it has a very powerful effect. We witnessed this in the stock market in recent years when people just kept buying stocks even though they were massively overvalued.

The collective belief that there was money to be made in the stock market became a self-fulfilling prophecy which pushed stock prices up to absurd heights. But now that process is beginning to reverse as well, and ultimately the unwinding of that bubble will be quite painful.

Over the past couple of years the dominant economic narrative that the mainstream media was pushing was that the US economy was “booming”, and this encouraged businesses to expand and consumers to go out and spend money. But now the dominant economic narrative has changed, and businesses are starting to take actions that are consistent with the new narrative. In the retail industry, if executives truly believed we would see an economic boom in the years ahead they would be expanding, but instead stores are being closed at a record pace…

The pope said that a man with an ingrained homosexual tendency “should not be accepted into the ministry or consecrated life” since the priesthood “is not his place.” Same-sex attraction, the pope said, is “not just an expression of an affection. In consecrated and priestly life, there’s no room for that kind of affection.”

The story, which was major news by any objective standard, was completely glossed over by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, Donahue observed, as if it never happened. The glaring double-standard is evident for all to see, Donahue suggests. “All the news that’s fit to print” now means just the news that fits the media’s liberal agenda.

Just ignore the fact #MeToo made life infinitely harder for men. Call it the Pence Effect, after US Vice President Mike Pence, who has said he avoids dining alone with any woman other than his wife. In finance, the overarching impact can be, in essence, gender segregation. Interviews with more than 30 senior executives suggest many are spooked by #MeToo and struggling to cope. “It’s creating a sense of walking on eggshells,” said David Bahnsen, a former managing director at Morgan Stanley who’s now an independent adviser overseeing more than $1.5 billion.

Many are also having their lives destroyed due to false accusations. It’s amazing how “empowered women” seamlessly transition into “damsels in distress” whenever it suits them. The newfound ability to destroy a man through mere accusations does not come without costs!

According to the Guardian, the excerpts "will be sufficient information for any MP to make up their mind on the legal aspects of the deal before the upcoming five-day debate, and that it keeps to the protocol that full advice is seen as confidential between lawyer and client." Thus, Trump made an educated guess. And he guessed correctly.

The note – marked ‘not for general distribution’ and obtained by BrexitCentral – is dated 26th November and states that the UK-EU customs union which would come into effect if the backstop is triggered “would be a practical barrier to the UK entering separate trade agreements on goods with third countries”. This is in direct contradiction to the Prime Minister who has insisted that her deal will allow the UK to have an entirely independent trade policy.

The legal note also appears to suggest that the Prime Minister’s claim (also repeated last Monday) that her deal “takes back control of our laws” by ending “the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in the UK” with “our laws being made in our Parliament, enforced by our courts” does not entirely stand up to scrutiny.

In other words, in those circumstances the UK would not be free to set levels of subsidy for UK agriculture, but the EU would remain free to adjust its Common Agricultural Policy however it liked. EU products would therefore have open access to the UK market via the customs union, while Brussels could stop us subsidising agriculture at all unless it was agreed in the Joint Committee.

It capped off a torrid day for the PM which began with an EU legal adviser saying Brexit can be stopped by the UK unilaterally revoking Article 50. In the PM's first defeat, MPs voted for the first time in its history to hold ministers in contempt of Parliament after they refused to publish the full legal advice on the deal. Minutes earlier, they had voted down a Government bid to kill off the motion and instead refer the issue to the Privileges Committee for consideration.

And in the third defeat of the night, 26 Tory rebels - including the PM's former deputy Damian Green - helped pass an amendment saying MPs can tell the Government what to do if the PM loses the crunch vote on her Brexit deal. Pushed by Tory Remainer Dominic Grieve, it allows MPs to table amendments rejecting the government's Brexit plans, and instructing it to do something different. After suffering the defeat on the contempt vote by 311 to 293 votes, Commons Leader Andrea Leadsom said they will publish the full legal Brexit advice tomorrow.