Every night growing numbers of homeless people sleep on the pavement just steps away from “the happiest place on Earth”.  It can be fun to “play make believe” for a while, but eventually reality always catches up with us. Without a doubt, the stock market has been on a tremendous run.  Since Donald Trump’s stunning election victory in November, the market has been setting record high after record high, and it is now up a total of 17 percent…

Homelessness has been growing so rapidly in Los Angeles that the the Los Angeles City Council actually asked Governor Jerry Brown to formally declare a state of emergency. And in New York City, street homelessness is up 39 percent over the past year. This is where the real economy is heading, but a rising stock market makes for much happier headlines.

Unfortunately, the economic suffering that we are seeing right now is just the beginning. Just like in 2008, the major financial crisis that is coming is going to greatly accelerate our economic problems.  And just like last time, millions of people are going to lose their jobs, and millions of people are going to lose their homes. Homelessness is already worse in many parts of the nation than it was during the depths of the last recession, and what we are going to see during the next economic downturn is going to be absolutely unprecedented.

“Jeff Sessions addresses ‘anti-LGBT hate group,’ but DOJ won’t release his remarks,” read the headline. ABC News based its decision to brand ADF as a hate group on the highly-partisan Southern Poverty Law Center. Southern Poverty Law Center accuses ADF of “supporting the recriminalization of homosexuality abroad, ending same-sex marriage and generally making life as difficult as possible for LGBT communities in the US.”

They’ve also labeled the Family Research Council and the American Family Association – both highly respected religious organizations – as hate groups. Let’s just cut to the chase here, folks. Southern Poverty Law Center is a far-left partisan goon squad that labels any ideology they oppose as hate. For ABC News to label such a respected and revered law firm as a hate group is not just shameful – it’s an outright lie.

In the seventh century, the Damascus-based Umayyad rulers built up Jerusalem as a counter-weight and hajj pilgrimage alternative to Mecca, where their political rivals were. This is when the important Muslim shrines, the Dome of the Rock (691 CE) and, later, the Al-Aqsa Mosque (705 CE), were intentionally built on the site of the destroyed biblical Jewish temples – a time-honored practice to physically signal the predominance of Islam.

However, references in the Quran and hadith to Muhammad’s night journey to heaven on his steed Buraq from the ‘farthest mosque’ couldn’t mean Jerusalem because the Quran refers to Palestine as the “nearest” place. And it couldn’t have been a reference to the Al-Aqsa (‘Furtherest’) Mosque, for the simple reason that the Al-Aqsa Mosque didn’t exist in Muhammad’s day.

With the demise of the Umayyad dynasty and the shift of the caliphate to Baghdad, Jerusalem fell into a long decline, scarcely interrupted by occasional bursts of Muslim interest in the city during the Crusader period and the Ottoman conquest. Mark Twain, visiting in 1867, described it as a “pauper village.”

It did, however, become a majority Jewish city during the nineteenth century. The 1907 Baedekers Travel Guide lists Jerusalem with a population of 40,000 Jews, 13,000 Muslims and 7,000 Christians. So little did Jerusalem mean to the Ottomans that, during the First World War, they abandoned it to the British without a fight and even contemplated entirely destroying the city before pulling out.

Only upon the Arab confrontation with Zionism in the twentieth century did Jerusalem become a passionate Islamic issue. Today, the  PA uses Jerusalem as a propaganda instrument, at once inciting violence and orchestrating anti-Israel campaigns.

It is “these religious groups that are composed mainly of whites from the deep American South” that push conflicts and justify belligerence, while favoring the Old Testament “rather than be guided by the incisive look, full of love, of Jesus in the Gospels.”

The article appeared in both Italian and English in the Vatican-vetted journal La Civiltà Cattolica, of which Father Spadaro is editor-in-chief. In it, the Jesuit priest says that US Evangelicals and Catholics have engaged in “an ecumenism of conflict” that seeks to advance “a theocratic type of state.”

Conservative Christians, the article warns, are ultimately driven by “the desire for some influence in the political and parliamentary sphere and in the juridical and educational areas so that public norms can be subjected to religious morals.”

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which consists of 57 member states and calls itself the “collective voice of the Muslim world,” also slammed Israel for closing the Mount, claiming the move amounted to “a serious crime and a dangerous precedent.” The Jordanian government, which administers the mosques on the Mount, issued a statement reading, “The Jordanian government opposes any harm against Muslims in carrying out their religious worship in their holy places, freely and with no obstacles.”

None of the statements mentioned the reason for Israel’s rare temporary closure of the Temple Mount.  Mount preachers are notorious for using Friday night sermons to incite against Israel – especially with false claims of Israeli threats to the Al Aqsa Mosque – and there was fear here that the services could have been used to instigate further violence on the Mount following Friday’s terrorist attack at the site.

Two Israeli Border Police Officers were murdered and a third was wounded on Friday when three Palestinian terrorists opened fire at security forces near an entrance to the Temple Mount at the Lions Gate and then fled into the Mount complex.  The Palestinian assailants, reportedly carrying two rifles and a pistol, were pursued by Israeli forces and were shot and killed as they tried to escape toward the mosques on the Mount. One unnamed Israeli official responded to the Jordanian statement, telling Israeli TV that “instead of condemning the attack, Jordan chose to attack Israel, which is protecting worshipers and maintaining freedom of worship in the place.”

Swiss investor Marc Faber, the man known as “Dr Doom”, predicts that stocks will plunge by 40 percent or more. Mr Faber, the editor of ‘The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report’ and a perennial bear, told CNBC recently: “We have a bubble in everything.”

Recently, Professor Shiller urged investors to tread cautiously because market valuations are at “unusual highs”. In a recent interview with CNBC, he said: “We are at a high level, and it's concerning,” highlighting that the only times valuations have been higher were in 1929 and 2000.

What is a stock market crash? Quite simply, it is a sudden dramatic drop in stock prices across a significant cross-section of a stock market. While there is no specific threshold for stock market crashes, they are typically defined as a fall of more than 10 percent in a stock index over the course of a day or two.

How does a crash differ from a ‘correction’? The speed of the decline is what differentiates a crash from a stock market correction. While a crash occurs when markets experience a sudden double-digit drop in a couple of days, a correction occurs when prices fall by 10 percent or more from the index’s 52-week high.

A trip down memory lane… 1929: The Great Depression. In the worst stock market crash in US history, the Dow Jones plunged 25 percent in just four days, starting on October 24. It wiped out $30 billion in market value. The Dow continued its descent until July 1932, when it bottomed out nearly 90 percent lower from its 1929 highs.  

Under the plan the radioactive material tritium, which is being used to cool reactors whose cooling systems were damaged in the 2011 tsunami, will be released into the Pacific Ocean. "I'm very sorry that Tepco has been prolonging making a decision," the new chairman of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) Takashi Kawamura told reporters on Thursday, reported Reuters. "We could have decided much earlier, and that is Tepco's responsibility."

The plan still requires the approval of the Japanese government before TEPCO can proceed. Some 770,000 tons (metric) of tritium-containing water is currently stored in 580 tanks at the plant, reported the Japan Times.

The scientists, from Pennsylvania State University and other academic institutions, discovered that despite this process there were “high loads of chloride, barium, strontium, radium and organic compounds” in the Conemaugh River watershed. Stream sediments in Blacklick Creek, just downstream from one treatment plant, were found to contain about 200 times the level of radium upstream of the plant.

The highest concentration of radium found was just 14 per cent below the level at which it would have to be treated as radioactive waste in some US states. However the researchers said the risks of the pollutants discovered were “difficult to assess”.

Today they have listening devices that can be pointed at you from 100 yards away. This is very disturbing and inconsistent as it seems to be a very desperate measure by a government that welcomed refugees.

As government mismanagement comes to a boil, they become increasingly desperate to retain power. This is yet another sign of the times that what we are facing is the collapse of government. If everything was fine, they would not care what you have to say. The mere fact that we are looking at this crisis in government is why we suddenly see outright censorship now appearing on the internet.

German firms have also profited from the fact that, due to the crisis, Greece has been forced to sell government property. In a joint venture, just recently, a German investor bought the majority of shares of Greece's Thessaloniki Port Authority - in cooperation with a fabulously rich Greek oligarch. At the same time, the German discounter Lidl was able to increase its market shares in competition with its Greek supermarket rivals because growing poverty is forcing people to buy low-priced groceries.

Mass emigration, particularly that of highly qualified Greeks, is generating little noticed profits. Many Greeks, whose expensive education was paid by Athens, now work in Germany - placing their skills, for which Germany has not paid a cent, at Germany's disposal.

On Tuesday, Dow Chemical (DOW) announced that an agriculture fund backed by the Chinese government would pay $1.1 billion for its Brazilian corn seed and research business. Chinese firms have spent $91 billion over the past decade purchasing nearly 300 foreign companies involved in agriculture, chemicals and food, according to Dealogic.

Why the massive spending spree? Experts say the purchases are part of China's plan to improve its ability to supply food to its population of nearly 1.4 billion. As Chinese living standards improve and citizens demand more meat products, the country needs a growing supply of animal feed.

But the issue is particularly sensitive in China, which suffered severe food shortages during Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward," which began in the late 1950s. Historians say that tens of millions of people starved to death during the famine, which remains a taboo subject in China.

China isn't the only country acting to strengthen its agriculture prowess. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Japan have also been buying into businesses in the global food supply chain, but their actions are not as high-profile as China's.

“On the Iraq-Syria situation, we have agreed to continue working together, in particular on the building of a roadmap for the post-war period,” Macron said during a joint news conference in the aftermath of talks with Donald Trump in Paris. “We have asked our diplomats to work in that direction, so in the next few weeks a concrete initiative can be taken and managed by the P5 [the five permanent members of United Nations Security Council (UNSC)].”

The so-called "contact group" on Syria, according to Macron, should include UN Security Council members, as well as representatives of the Syrian government and rebel groups. President Assad’s departure is no longer as relevant for Paris, as fighting terrorism at home has now become the top priority, Macron stated.

Donald Trump confirmed that the US and Russia are working on a second ceasefire agreement in Syria as a follow up to the one he and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed upon during their first meeting on the sidelines of G20. “One of the great things that came out if this meeting, by the way, was the fact that we got the ceasefire that now has lasted for almost five days. Five days doesn’t sound like a long period of time. In terms of a ceasefire in Syria it’s a very long period of time," Trump said.