At some point reality sets in and it becomes evident that no matter how much Americans might want to see dramatic, positive changes come to this country the chances of that happening are quickly disappearing; the die is cast. That's the reality of living in the America of today, a nation that many astute, respected observers firmly believe is in a protracted state of decline.

A point of no return is that time or stage when a series of actions or a process reaches a point beyond which it becomes impossible to reverse. America has now become a nation that gives every indication that it is rapidly approaching that point of no return -- or has already passed it. Dramatic changes have come to this country in recent times but far too many of them have proven to be negative and damaging.

This is not some kind of baseless conjecture, the facts speak for themselves. The changes that have taken place in this country are not subtle but, rather, have been very dramatic and not in a positive way. America is just not the country it once was and, while we can dispute that notion, it's just happens to reflect reality.

The event, organized by Americans for Prosperity and Citizens United, attracted a crowd of conservatives and tea party members from New Hampshire. They came out to hear potential 2016 Republican presidential candidates like Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Rand Paul (Ky.) and many other GOP politicians and pundits.

Trump called Obamacare "the single greatest lie I've ever seen in politics." He also spoke about Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' resignation speech on Friday. She had misplaced a page of her speech, which he called "emblematic of all of Obamacare."

If a Republican had done that, Trump said, they would be labeled the stupidest person alive. "With her they said, 'Oh isn't that cute, she lost a page.'"

When Trump mentioned former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who has been mentioned as a possible moderate Republican presidential candidate, the audience loudly booed and groaned. The boos crescendoed when he mentioned Bush's comment that people who illegally immigrated to the United States may have "broke the law, but it's not a felony. It's an act of love."

Trump went on to extensively criticize Bush for his immigration stance.

Trump also blasted Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). He said Ryan "is a very nice person" but that Ryan is trying to dismantle Medicare.

In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the 'red line' he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.​Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad's offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.

Obama's change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn't match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army's chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn't hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria's infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.

For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria's neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. 'We knew there were some in the Turkish government,' a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, 'who believed they could get Assad's nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria - and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.'

The area near the finish line of the Boston Marathon was evacuated Tuesday night after two unattended backpacks were left at the finish line.

One of the bags was left near the photo bridge on Boylston Street. The street was shut down between Fairfield and Dartmouth streets.

WBZ-TV photographers on scene say they saw a person with the backpack screaming "Boston Strong" before police cleared everyone from the area.

Given that most Americans living today were born and raised under a massive military establishment, the CIA, and the NSA, a large number of Americans very likely believe that the United States has always had this type of government.

Not so, as Michael Swanson shows in a new book, The War State. Swanson points out that America's warfare state didn't come into existence until more than 150 years after the country's inception. More important, he shows how the warfare state has not only altered our constitutional order in fundamental ways but also how it continues to pose a grave threat to the freedom and well-being of the American people.

Swanson begins by reminding people of the warning issued by Dwight Eisenhower in his Farewell Address in 1960. Eisenhower, a retired general who had served as the Allied commander in World War II, warned Americans of the dangers of the new massive "military-industrial complex" that had come to characterize American life:

The organisers of this summer's Glasgow Commonwealth Games have been accused of signing a "totally unacceptable" deal with a major arms company to provide security for the £524m event.

Selex ES, an Anglo-Italian defence firm which manufactures weapon-targeting systems and supplies drones, has won the contract to provide surveillance cameras, security fencing and communications equipment for more than 20 venues, including the athletes' village, for the Games.

The company, which is owned by the Italian conglomerate Finmeccanica, the world's ninth-largest arms firm, is a significant employer in Britain, with 2,000 staff in Scotland and manufacturing bases from Bristol to York. Its clients include governments with poor human rights records including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.

Anti-arms trade campaigners said the involvement of Selex ES in a major sporting event was immoral and part of a pattern of defence companies that sell to repressive regimes seeking "legitimacy" by involvement with high-profile events.

The young man reached across the table and pushed the timer's red button. Looking up at the faces of a few members of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, Farea Al-muslimi, a Yemeni youth activist and former U.S. exchange student, nervously began to speak. He told the senators that just a week before a U.S. drone had unnecessarily vaporized a member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula along with three other men in his remote village, instantly turning the populace against the United States. What is considered risk-free by the national-security state, Al-muslimi warned, is anything but. "What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant: there is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America," he testified.

In five short minutes, Al-muslimi had cut through the sterile, bureaucratic abstractions of the U.S. drone wars and delivered an impassioned plea to his second homeland: stop terrorizing innocent Yemenis with remote-control killing. His message could easily be spoken by any number of Afghans, Pakistanis, or Somalis as the U.S. global war on terrorism enters its twelfth year.

Frustration with US government rises over failure to clear up questions about surveillance of German chancellor's phone

The US government is refusing to grant Angela Merkel access to her NSA file or answer formal questions from Germany about its surveillance activities, raising the stakes before a crucial visit by the German chancellor to Washington.

Merkel will meet Barack Obama in three weeks, on her first visit to the US capital since documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA had been monitoring her phone.

The face-to-face meeting between the two world leaders had been intended as an effort to publicly heal wounds after the controversy, but Germany remains frustrated by the White House's refusal to come clean about its surveillance activities in the country.

On June 7 Barack Obama made his first public statements about the NSA surveillance programs leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. After justifying the programs as subject to congressional and judicial oversight, he insisted he did not want "to suggest that, you know, you just say 'trust me, we're doing the right thing, we know who the bad guys are.'"

But, he added, "If people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress, and don't trust federal judges, to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here."

The problem isn't so much that the American people don't trust their government with unprecedented powers in the realm of national security, but that the government continues to insist on our trust despite an incontestable track record of deceit and incompetence.

On the ground in a country where unmanned missile attacks are a terrifyingly regular occurrence

The people of Yemen can hear destruction before it arrives. In cities, towns and villages across this country, which hangs off the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, the air buzzes with the sound of American drones flying overhead. The sound is a constant and terrible reminder: a robot plane, acting on secret intelligence, may calculate that the man across from you at the coffee shop, or the acquaintance with whom you've shared a passing word on the street, is an Al Qaeda operative. This intelligence may be accurate or it may not, but it doesn't matter. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, the chaotic buzzing above sharpens into the death-herald of an incoming missile.

Such quite literal existential uncertainty is coming at a deep psychological cost for the Yemeni people. For Americans, this military campaign is an abstraction. The drone strikes don't require U.S. troops on the ground, and thus are easy to keep out of sight and out of mind. Over half of Yemen's 24.8 million citizens - militants and civilians alike - are impacted every day. A war is happening, and one of the unforeseen casualties is the Yemeni mind.