A provision of The Department of State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 2012 said none of the funds “may be obligated or expended with respect to providing funds to the Palestinian Authority.” In signing the waiver, Obama instructed Clinton to inform Congress of the move, on the grounds that “waiving such prohibition is important to the national security interests of the United States.”

A $192 million aid package was frozen by Congress after the PA submitted its unilateral bid for United Nations membership last September. Members of Congress later released $40 million in economic and humanitarian funding for the PA, saying it is “vital to establishing and strengthening the foundations necessary for a future Palestinian state.”

After the funds were released, the State Department expressed concern about being able to provide the necessary funding to address the dire economic and humanitarian hardship facing the PA, and called for more funds to be freed.

Like other governments in the European Union, ousted Prime Minister Mihai Razvan Ungureanu's two-month-old cabinet has faced a wave of public anger against plans for spending cuts and tax hikes. Violent protests toppled his predecessor, Emil Boc. "Today justice was done," said Victor Ponta, head of the left-leaning opposition Social Liberal Union (USL). President Traian Basescu, a political opponent, nominated Ponta to try to form a new government as prime minister.

The defeat came hours before a confidence vote for another budget-cutting EU government, in the Czech Republic. Although Prime Minister Petr Necas survived, his unpopular cabinet may now be hamstrung by a thin majority, infighting among its scandal-plagued parties and public outrage over its policies.

Nicolas Sarkozy is on course in nine days to become France's first president to be voted out of office in 30 years, and a centre-right cabinet in Holland resigned this week over disagreement about budget tightening measures. "The end result seems to ... echo what we have been seeing in other countries in terms of a popular move away from the parties that are pushing for austerity," said Koon Chow, a strategist at Barclay's Capital, of the Romanian vote. "France, Holland, the Czechs - it's all connected."

Official figures due out on Monday are expected to confirm that Spain has fallen back into recession. Earlier this week, the Bank of Spain said the economy contracted by 0.4% in first three months of this year, after shrinking by 0.3% in the final quarter of last year. Other figures released on Friday showed that Spanish retail sales were down 3.7% in March from the same point a year ago, the 21st month in row sales have fallen.

In the first three months of the year, 365,900 people in Spain lost their jobs. The country has the highest unemployment rate in the European Union and it is expected to rise further this year. The rate has risen sharply since April 2007, when it stood at 7.9%."The figures are terrible for everyone and terrible for the government... Spain is in a crisis of huge proportions," Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said.

Take the US economy for example. Barack Obama wants to believe that his policies have worked and that the US economy is improving. So that is what he is telling the American people. The mainstream media wants to believe that Barack Obama is a good president and that his policies make sense and so they are reporting that we are experiencing an economic recovery. A very large segment of the US population still fully supports Barack Obama and they want to believe that the economy is getting better so they are buying the propaganda that the mainstream media is feeding them.

But is the US economy really improving? The truth is that it is not. The rate of employment among working age Americans is exactly where it was two years ago and household incomes have actually gone down while Obama has been president. Home ownership levels and home prices continue to decline. Meanwhile, food and gasoline continue to become even more expensive. The percentage of Americans that are dependent on the government is at an all-time record high and the US national debt has risen by more than 5 trillion dollars under Obama. We simply have not seen the type of economic recovery that we have seen after every other economic recession since World War II.

The horrible statistics about the US economy that you are about to read are not talked about much by the mainstream media. They would rather be "positive" and "upbeat" about the direction that things are headed. But lying to the American people is not going to help them. If you are speeding in a car toward a 500 foot cliff, you don't need someone to cheer you on. Instead, you need someone to slam on the brakes. The cold, hard reality of the matter is that the US economy is in far worse shape than it was four or five years ago. We have never come close to recovering from the last recession and another one will be here soon.

In communities all over America there is a feeling that something fundamental has changed. Businesses that have been around for generations are shutting their doors and there is a lot of fear in the air.

The shaky political consensus both in Japan, the US and Western Europe is that the crisis at Fukushima has been contained. The realties, however, are otherwise. Fukushima 3 was leaking unconfirmed amounts of plutonium. According to Dr Helen Caldicott, "one millionth of a gram of plutonium, if inhaled can cause cancer". An opinion poll in May 2011 confirmed that more than 80 per cent of the Japanese population do not believe the government's information regarding the nuclear crisis.

The Japanese government has been obliged to acknowledge that "the severity rating of its nuclear crisis ... matches that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster". In a bitter irony, however, this tacit admission by the Japanese authorities has proven to been part of the cover-up of a significantly larger catastrophe, resulting in a process of global nuclear radiation and contamination.

"While Chernobyl was an enormous unprecedented disaster, it only occurred at one reactor and rapidly melted down. Once cooled, it was able to be covered with a concrete sarcophagus that was constructed with 100,000 workers. There are a STAGGERING 4400 TONS OF NUCLEAR FUEL RODS AT FUKUSHIMA, which greatly dwarfs the total size of radiation sources at Chernobyl."

A new integration bill which Dutch Interior Minister Piet Hein Donner presented to parliament on June 16, reads: “The government shares the social dissatisfaction over the multicultural society model and plans to shift priority to the values of the Dutch people. In the new integration system, the values of the Dutch society play a central role. With this change, the government steps away from the model of a multicultural society.” The letter continues: “A more obligatory integration is justified because the government also demands that from its own citizens. It is necessary because otherwise the society gradually grows apart and eventually no one feels at home anymore in the Netherlands.”

The new integration policy will place more demands on immigrants. For example, immigrants will be required to learn the Dutch language, and the government will take a tougher approach to immigrants who ignore Dutch values or disobey Dutch law. The government will also stop offering special subsidies for Muslim immigrants because, according to Donner, “it is not the government’s job to integrate immigrants.”

The government will introduce new legislation that outlaws forced marriages and will also impose tougher measures against Muslim immigrants who lower their chances of employment by the way they dress. More specifically, the government will impose a ban on face-covering Islamic burqas as of January 1, 2013. Holland has done that whole liberal thing, and realised - maybe too late - that creating a nation of tribes will kill the nation itself. Australia’s future may well be read here.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, the number of farms in the United States has fallen from about 6.8 million in 1935 to only about 2 million today. That doesn’t mean that there is less farming going on. US farms are producing more than ever. But what it does mean is that farming is increasingly becoming dominated by the big boys. The rules of the game have been tilted in favor of big agribusiness so dramatically that most small farmers find that they simply cannot compete anymore.

Back in 1900, about 39 percent of the US population worked on farms. At this point, only about 2 percent of all Americans now live on farms. Big agribusiness, the food processing conglomerates, and big seed companies such as Monsanto completely dominate the industry. Unless something dramatic is done, the family farm is going to continue to be wiped out of existence. Unfortunately, it does not look like things are going to turn around any time soon.

The way that the farming industry is structured today, it is simply not economically feasible to operate a small family farm. According to Farm Aid, every week approximately 330 farmers leave their land for good. Many old timers are trying to hang on for as long as they can. A very large percentage of family farmers are in their fifties, sixties or seventies at this point. Today, only about 6 percent of all farmers are under the age of 35.

With the dark clouds of the ongoing euro crisis thickening over Spain this spring, German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday staunchly defended her focus on euro-zone austerity and once again insisted that the EU fiscal pact, signed in March, would not be revisited. In comments clearly aimed at French presidential candidate François Hollande, Merkel told Germany's WAZ media group that the pact "cannot be renegotiated." The Socialist Hollande has suggested that, if he emerges victorious over French President Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round of elections on May 6, he would ask for changes to the agreement.

The fiscal pact, which imposes strict new rules governing budget deficits and sovereign debt, was signed by 25 of the 27 European Union member states. The UK and Czech Republic declined to join. Hollande's reply was not long in coming. Speaking to broadcaster France 2 on Thursday evening, he said: "It is not Germany that will decide for the entirety of Europe." When asked what he plans to say to Merkel should he win the election, he said: "I will tell her that the French people had made a decision that envisages a renegotiation of the pact."

The media back-and-forth comes as the US-based ratings agency Standard & Poor's on Thursday downgraded Spain's long-term credit rating by two notches to BBB+. The agency also gave Spain a negative outlook, meaning that further downgrades could come in the near future. In making the downgrade, S&P cited the "increasing likelihood that the government will need to provide further fiscal support to the banking sector." The agency likewise noted its view that "the strategy to manage the European sovereign debt crisis continues to lack effectiveness."

Spain's unemployment rate shot up to 24 percent in the first quarter, the highest level since the early 1990s and one of the worst jobless figures in the world. Retail sales slumped for the twenty-first consecutive month. "The figures are terrible for everyone and terrible for the government ... Spain is in a crisis of huge proportions," Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said in a radio interview. Standard and Poor's cited risks of an increase in bad loans at Spanish banks and called on Europe to take action to encourage growth.

Bank shares dropped 3.38 percent and Spain's country risk, as measured by the spread on yields between Spanish and German benchmark government bonds, spiked by 10 basis points to 434 basis points. Spain has slipped into its second recession in three years putting it back in the centre of the euro zone debt crisis storm.

The government has already rescued a number of banks that were too exposed to a decade-long construction boom that crashed in 2008, and investors fear vulnerable lenders will be hit by another wave of loan defaults due to the slowing economy. With the economy shrinking, Spain has little hope of meeting tough public deficit targets this year even as the government makes tough cuts. The downgrade put Spain's credit rating at the same level as Italy. S&P now has Spain on a BBB+ rating, which means "adequate payment capacity" and is only a few notches above a junk rating.

It has also placed Spain on negative outlook, meaning there is a risk of further downgrades to come. S&P predicts the Spanish economy will shrink by 1.5% this year, having previously forecast 0.3% growth. In 2013 it expects the economy to contract 0.5%, having previously predicted 1% growth. S&P also gave a damning assessment of the situation in the rest of Europe, saying: "In our view, the strategy to manage the European sovereign debt crisis continues to lack effectiveness."

"We think credit conditions, and hence the economic outlook for Spain, could now deteriorate further than we anticipated earlier this year unless offsetting eurozone policy measures are implemented to support investor confidence and stabilize capital flows with the rest of the world." The agency suggested such measures could include a pooling of resources and obligations between eurozone countries and policies to harmonise wages across the currency bloc.

The figures make clear that a huge ‘debt bounty’ has been placed on the heads of thousands of individuals at a time when the economy is in double-dip recession. Some collection agencies involved have a reputation for being heavy-handed and threatening, bombarding people with telephone calls, letters and visits at home and work. In some cases, agencies are sending debtors photos of their own homes as a way of frightening them into paying up. Huge fees are often added to the original debt, making repayments even more difficult.

This is the first time details of the number and value of unpaid debts has been published in a study by the Credit Services Association (CSA), the national body for the UK debt collection industry. The figures are a measure of the consumer debt passed to Debt Collection Agencies (DCAs) or sold to Debt Buyers, which specialise in buying personal debt cheaply and then pursuing the individuals to pay up.

The association said 32 million debts were being pursued, an increase of 4million in the past six months. The growth in so-called payday loan firms, which offer short-term loans at high rates of interest, is one reason for the rise in people being chased for debts. The CSA said local councils, government departments and agencies were also taking a more aggressive approach by employing private debt collection agencies.

"Seasonal flu affects 10 to 20 percent of the world every year - as much as a billion people or more," said Inglesby. "The case fatality rate of wild H5N1 in the WHO database is nearly 60 percent, as you indicated. So if a strain of H5N1 with that fatality rate were engineered to spread like seasonal flu, hundreds of millions of people’s lives would be at risk. Even a strain a hundred times less fatal would place at risk millions of people’s lives."

The National Institute of Health released its policy last month on dual-use research, which is designed to implement recommendations made in a 2003 National Academy of Sciences report titled, “Biotechnology Research in an Age of Terrorism.” Concern has grown recently over advances in the field of biotechnology, in which scientists have created synthetic viruses in laboratories.

“Can we assume this research won’t be replicated and deliberately misused? No. We can hope no potential adversary will have the competence or the intention to pursue this. But we can’t accurately predict their chances this work will be replicated by a malevolent or disaffected scientist somewhere in the world, or a terrorist group, or nation state,” Inglesby said.

The US Secret Service is a case in point. Hookergate has shaken the agency to its very foundations. Secret Service agents went wild in Cartagena, Colombia, prior to a recent summit attended by Mr Obama and other world leaders. A dozen agents and more than 10 military personnel have been implicated so far. Bar hopping, boozing and soliciting prostitutes — all of this took place as the Secret Service was supposed to be laying the groundwork for the president’s arrival. Instead, they behaved like puerile frat boys, taking hookers back to their hotel rooms and partying all night long. Some press reports even claim that cocaine use was involved.

The Secret Service was once a venerated institution; its reputation is now in tatters. These agents were more than unprofessional. They engaged in sexually permissive, immoral and illegal behavior. They also put America’s national security at risk, opening them to potential blackmail. The president’s schedule was in one of the rooms attended by a prostitute. Moreover, the image it sends to the world is that of the ugly American. Decadent, perverse and arrogant — these Secret Service agents embody the worst traits of US culture. Landing on foreign soil, they behaved as a conquering imperial army, lacking self-restraint, humility or even common decency.

Yet, the question must be asked: Is Mr Obama to blame? This is not the first Secret Service scandal under his watch. Rather than cleaning house, he turned a blind eye to the growing venality within the agency. The same applies to the General Services Administration. The GSA is supposed to be a centralized clearinghouse for the federal government to oversee its numerous buildings, ensuring the best value in the use of taxpayer dollars. It has become the very opposite — a symbol of waste, fraud and extravagance.

The sad fact is that the GSA scandal is the tip of the iceberg. The deeper congressional investigators look, the more waste is found. Trips to Hawaii, Guam, the South Pacific and Napa Valley — lavish “conferences” are simply part of the GSA’s regular business operations. It is like a rotten onion. Peel one layer and there is another beneath it. If the commander-in-chief is always partying on the taxpayers’ tab, then why should his subordinates behave any differently — whether at the Secret Service or the GSA? That’s the real scandal.

In the Netherlands, where the ruling government coalition collapsed last weekend over failure to reach a deal on the country's budget, Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager told reporters that he had constructive talks with different political factions. "I cannot say there is the prospect of an agreement," De Jager told reporters on Thursday. "But I see reason to continue talks."

Government instability in the Netherlands has translated into shaky markets this week, and further signals indicated a growing level of popular resistance to austerity measures as a solution for the debt crisis. Large-scale protests over the financial crisis have been staged recently across Europe, including in the Czech Republic, where 100,000 people took to the streets in Prague over the weekend to oppose government reforms and cuts.

On Wednesday, European Central Bank (ECB) head Mario Draghi made headlines by calling for a "growth pact" to help Europe out of the financial crisis. French Presidential candidate Francois Hollande, who is leading in the polls in advance of his country's May 6 runoff election, jumped on the comments. Hollande has proposed renegotiating the euro zone's fiscal pact to add provisions for stimulating growth. Draghi's comments "add a voice to others that confirm that the announcement I made, that the commitment I made, will turn the French election into an election that is also decisive for Europe," Hollande reportedly said on the campaign trail.

But German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a staunch ally of Hollande's opponent, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, reiterated her strong stance in favor of the austerity measures this week, saying Tuesday: "I want to say clearly, it is not the case that we say saving solves every problem, but if you at home talk about how you want to shape your life tolerably, then one of the first conditions is that you somehow get by with what you earn."

"The overarching threat to our whole society today is the exploding federal debt," Ryan said, speaking in a Gothic, oak-paneled auditorium on the Georgetown campus. "Pope Benedict has charged that governments, communities, and individuals running up high debt levels are 'living at the expense of future generations' and 'living in untruth.'"

Ryan said the actions of individuals, charities, private institutions and firms should take precedence over government programs - citing a Catholic doctrine known as "subsidiarity". "I feel it's important to discuss how, as a Catholic in public life, my own personal thinking on these issues has been guided by my understanding of the Church's social teaching," Ryan said. "Simply put, I do not believe that the preferential option for the poor means a preferential option for big government." The best way to lift people out of poverty is to spur economic growth, said Ryan, the influential chairman of the House Budget Committee.

The Republican budget that Ryan pushed through the House of Representatives last month proposes big cuts to federal food aid and Medicaid healthcare for the poor, as well as to education grants, in order to shrink deficits while preserving low tax rates for the wealthy and for corporations. It has drawn sharp criticism from US Catholic bishops for violating Church teachings to help the poor, and on Wednesday, 90 Georgetown faculty members and priests signed a letter rebuking the plan.