Neither the Japanese government nor TEPCO officials have made a decision as to how they plan to proceed with cleanup at the failed nuclear plant, which was severely damaged by a major earthquake and tsunami that occurred back in 2011. Currently, the amount of groundwater that’s entering the fatally damaged No. 1 nuclear plant amounts to about 160 tons per day.

Purification devices set up at the site are able to remove most of the radioactive materials from this water, except for tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that can’t be removed for “technical reasons.” Consequently, tritium-contaminated water continues to increase, despite the fact that there’s increasingly no where to put it.

Existing storage tanks at the site have a total capacity of about 1.13 million tons of water. But roughly 1.07 million tons of that amount, or about 80 percent of it, is already filled with contaminated water – meaning there’s very little left to spare.

The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician said it was still unclear in Berlin what the essence of the disagreement between the Chancellor and Mr Seehofer was and that other members of the coalition had been left "in the blue". Mr Whittaker said: “We are in a serious situation because the question of the migration crisis evolved into a power question. The question is who is leading the Government? Is it Angela Merkel or is it Horst Seehofer?”

Despite them pledging to back her, her MPs are also demanding a change in Germany’s “open-door” migration policy. And CSU MPs already declared they will support their leader, Mr Seehofer. The rift puts Mrs Merkel in an awkward situation as she is facing a serious challenge to her authority which could limit her ability to negotiate with other EU state members.

And her own position as a Chancellor is under threat because a walkout of CSU MPs from the coalition would see her losing a majority in Parliament. The plan proposed by Mr Seehofer would replace an already existing EU rule, which allows Germany to send asylum-seekers back to the first member state they entered.

Sputnik: What would be your response to those who say that the asylum system in Germany is partly to blame for what happened?

Sebastian Munzenmaier: I would respond that these people are nearly right, because the asylum system is not partly to blame — it is totally to blame. Since Chancellor Merkel opened our borders in 2015, no-one in Germany has any idea of who is living here. By our system we are not able to shift off even known terrorists.

Our courts are totally over-challenged by the wave of cases and the government has no political will neither to get rejected asylum-seekers out of Germany, nor for preventing new ones from entering Germany. We lost our borders, we lost our justice system, we are betrayed by our government and we have hundreds of thousands of young Muslim men. Nobody knows where they come from and nobody knows who they are. So, yes, the asylum system is to blame for what happened.

Our Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is the chancellor for refugees and not for the German people, so the Germans have to decide what they want.

Do they want so-called "welcome politics," which Angela Merkel is doing?

Or do they think: "Okay, we have to secure our borders, we have to secure our streets and all German people shall live in peace and without a threat of robbery, of death"?

Voters across Europe have lost faith in politics partly because of “unachievable targets” on renewable energy, said German Energy Minister Peter Altmaier, who rejected calls from a group of other EU countries to boost the share of renewables to 33-35% of the bloc’s energy mix by 2030. Altmaier made the comments during an on-the-record exchange between the 28 EU energy ministers, who are gathered in Luxembourg today (11 June) for a meeting of the Energy Council.

Energy ministers are expected to thrash out a joint position on three clean energy laws which are currently being negotiated in the EU institutions – the Renewable Energy Directive, the Energy Efficiency Directive and a regulation on the Governance of the Energy Union. “Germany supports responsible but achievable targets,” Altmaier said from the outset, underlining Berlin’s efforts to raise the share of renewables to 15% of the country’s overall energy mix.

But he said those efforts also carried a cost for the German taxpayer, which he put at €25 billion per year. “And if we are setting targets that are definitely above 30%, that means that within a decade, our share has to be more than doubled – clearly more than doubled,” Altmaier pointed out. “We’re not going to manage that,” Altmaier said referring to an objective of putting 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2020 in Germany. “Nowhere in Europe is going to manage that,” he claimed. “And even if we did manage to get enough electric cars, we wouldn’t have enough renewable electricity to keep them on the road,” he stressed.

That all changed in March, when the "America First" president went on the offensive. "What happened for a period of time is the president was constrained by different members" of his administration, said Edward Alden, a specialist on US economic competitiveness at the Council on Foreign Relations. "But the president has become increasingly confident in his own judgment on these issues... He is willing to do radical things he promised during his campaign and for many years before that."

In its latest move, the White House on Friday announced stiff 25 percent tariffs on Chinese imports, sparking immediate retaliation from Beijing. The move, which Trump justified as payback for the theft of American intellectual property and technology, reignited a trade spat between the world's two largest economies, spooking markets and worrying business leaders.

Trump and his most hardline advisors - led by Peter Navarro, who is openly hostile to China - are convinced that the US will win a trade war. Their argument: Washington's trade partners, especially Beijing, have much more to lose than the United States, given their dependence on selling to the US market.

In June 2015, Governor Greg Abbot signed legislation creating the state gold bullion and precious metal depository. The facility will not only provide a secure place for individuals, business, cities, counties, government agencies and even other countries to store gold and other precious metals, the law also creates a mechanism to facilitate the everyday use of gold and silver in transactions. In short, a person will eventually be able to deposit gold or silver – and pay other people through electronic means or checks – in sound money.

The facility began accepting deposits of precious metals on Wednesday, June 6. Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar became the first depositor. He praised the depository as a secure place to store gold and silver. “Once you’ve made that deposit, it is going to be there tomorrow and in the future, until you make a decision to withdraw it or you want to sell it,” he told the Texas Tribune.

By making gold and silver available for regular, daily transactions by the general public, the new depository has the potential for wide-reaching effect. Professor William Greene is an expert on constitutional tender and said in a paper for the Mises Institute that when people in multiple states actually start using gold and silver instead of Federal Reserve notes, it would effectively nullify the Federal Reserve and end the federal government’s monopoly on money.

The Texas Bullion Depository creates a mechanism to challenge the federal government’s monopoly on money and provides a blueprint for other states to follow. If the majority of states controlled their own supply of gold, and people began using precious metals in daily transactions, it could conceivably make the Federal Reserve completely irrelevant.

The pope set his prepared text aside to speak off the cuff to the group, urging everyone to help society regain respect for the value of every child and the plan of God for families. “Children are to be received as they come, as God sends them,” he said. “I have heard that it is typical during the first months of pregnancy to do tests on the baby and if the child is not well or has something wrong we do away with it. Just to keep life peaceful, an innocent child is killed.”

“We do as the Nazis did to safeguard the purity of the race, but we do it with ‘white gloves,’” he said.

The General of the WCC, Rev Olav Fykse Tveit, said the meeting would be a “very useful and significant workshop to dig a bit deeper” into the problems of xenophobia as an expression of populism, as well as its links to racism, conflict, and violence in countries around the world.

Last September, the Vatican launched a two-year campaign to change people’s minds about migrants and to encourage a more welcoming attitude toward them worldwide. Our world “faces not a migration crisis, but a crisis of global solidarity... Be part of a worldwide campaign to reach out to migrants, change perceptions, open hearts and minds, and strengthen the bonds that unite us all.”

A most disturbing image appeared in 2015 when former Argentinian citizen Jorge Mario Bergoglio visited an old friend, in his new job as Pope Francis. The friend was Bolivian Marxist President Evo Morales. He gave him a ‘communist crucifix,’ that depicted Jesus crucified on a hammer and sickle. The only plausible reason he would give such a bizarre gift is that he recognized a ‘fellow traveler.’

The Catholic church has little to do with Christianity. As George Bernard Shaw said, Christianity is the greatest thing in the world. It is just a pity nobody ever tried it. Pope Francis is making sure as a Marxist that nobody will try it. He is making the new religion of environmentalism and global warming the opiate of the masses.

He praised the despotic Kim Jong-un and said North Korea 'has great potential for the future.' Not so for the political press corps. 'So funny to watch the Fake News, especially NBC and CNN,' Trump tweeted of the two networks he sees as most needlessly antagonistic toward his administration. 'They are fighting hard to downplay the deal with North Korea.'

'500 days ago they would have “begged” for this deal – looked like war would break out. Our Country’s biggest enemy is the Fake News so easily promulgated by fools!'