The coalition’s unit in Nottingham declares on its website, that the United States has always been “tempted to use its overwhelming military strength” to try to make up for its relative economic decline, exacerbated by the current crisis.

“This means that the target is shifting to Iran and Syria. There are continual calls for intervention in Syria, and the war of words with Iran continually threatens to boil over into a war of aircraft carriers and bombs in the Straits of Hormuz,” the activists say. The protesters compare what they call “current hysteria against Iran” with 2002 debates over the invasion of Iraq. At that time they feared war against Iraq was fatally approaching and held massive demonstrations against it.

Hundreds of anti-war activists have rallied in Tel Aviv to warn the authorities against a potential attack on Iran. Protesters began their march at Tel Aviv's Habima Square, before making their way to the city's Meir Park. Campaigners fear that mounting pressure could escalate into all-out war, the effects of which would reverberate globally.

It showcased a group of eight to thirteen-year-old girls performing a burlesque dance in tan bras that made them appear topless. The Pittsburgh dance teacher, Abby Lee Miller, tells the class how to be overtly sexual in the episode. "I'm hot, I'm mean, you can't have me, you can't afford me," she tells the girls as she teaches them the moves. Despite the girls' unhappiness at the prospect of performing in a faux-nude costume, the show goes on and they perform at a dance contest.

The girls' mothers also appeared horrified at the concept but did not stop Ms Miller. "No one ever wants to hear the word 'nude' associated with their 10-year-old child, ever," said one of the dancer's mothers, Christi. The episode has now been removed from Lifetime's schedule and will never be aired on television again.

Criticism of the show reached new heights after it aired, with a noted psychologist telling Fox News the show may attract paedophiles. “As a treatment professional of sex offenders, I can tell you that adults who are attracted to minors definitely seek out shows just like this to whet their appetites,” said Dr Nancy Irwin.

Ironically that sounds a great deal like the self-important and inflated claims which come from some of the religious organizations these same people most strenuously oppose. And in that sense, the Reason Rally’s organizers are correct that history will be made, even if the turnout is small.

From its best-known speaker, Professor Richard Dawkins, to the event's website, to its very name, this rally is not simply about protecting the rights of non-believers, but about the inferiority of religious belief. And, based on the promised presence of comedian Bill Maher, it will include heaping abuse not only upon belief, but upon believers themselves – something Mr Maher loves doing

A rapidly increasing stream of New Age believers – or esoterics, as locals call them – have descended in their camper van-loads on the usually picturesque and tranquil Pyrenean village of Bugarach. They believe that when apocalypse strikes on 21 December this year, the aliens waiting in their spacecraft inside Pic de Bugarach will save all the humans near by and beam them off to the next age. As the cataclysmic date – which, according to eschatological beliefs and predicted astrological alignments, concludes a 5,125-year cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar – nears, the goings-on around the peak have become more bizarre and ritualistic.

For decades, there has been a belief that Pic de Bugarach, which, at 1,230 metres, is the highest in the Corbières mountain range, possesses an eery power. Often called the "upside-down mountain" – geologists think that it exploded after its formation and the top landed the wrong way up – it is thought to have inspired Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Since the 1960s, it has attracted New Agers, who insist that it emits special magnetic waves.

A grizzled man wearing a white linen smock, who calls himself Jean, set up a yurt in the forest a couple of years ago to prepare for the earth's demise. "The apocalypse we believe in is the end of a certain world and the beginning of another," he offers. "A new spiritual world. The year 2012 is the end of a cycle of suffering. Bugarach is one of the major chakras of the earth, a place devoted to welcoming the energies of tomorrow."

Ministers are ready to use police to prevent striking drivers building blockades and will begin putting together a squad of up to 300 qualified army drivers to man trucks in place of tanker drivers. Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, called on Unite to avert the sort of industrial action that brought Britain to its knees when lorry drivers staged protests across Britain in 2000 when Tony Blair was prime minister.

He said: "Widespread strike action affecting fuel supply at our supermarkets, garages and airports could cause disruption across the country. The general public should not and must not suffer from this dispute and strike action is manifestly not the answer."

The older brother is also linked to militant Islamic groups and is being held over alleged terror offences with his girlfriend and mother. He told cops: "I am very proud of my brother. I regret nothing for him and approve of what he did."

His chilling comments came as new pictures were released yesterday of Thursday's raid in Toulouse in which Merah was gunned down by French special forces. Four cops were wounded during the 32-hour siege and one was shown being stretchered away.

Officials last night said an autopsy on Merah showed he died of two bullet wounds to the head and stomach — but was hit by 20 bullets, mainly in the arms and legs. The terrorist staged a bloodbath at a Jewish school on Monday — killing a teacher, his sons aged five and three and the head's daughter aged eight. The week before he killed three off-duty soldiers.

Civil Aviation Minister Ajit Singh told parliament on Thursday that "the imposition of carbon tax does not arise" because Indian airlines would simply refuse to hand over their emissions data. "Though the European Union has directed Indian carriers to submit emission details of their aircraft by March 31, 2012, no Indian carrier is submitting them in view of the position of the government," he said. India's resolution to boycott the scheme follows China's decision last month to prevent its airlines from complying with the EU directive.

The two Asian giants have attacked the EU scheme, calling it a unilateral trade levy disguised as an attempt to fight climate change. According to a so-called Moscow declaration adopted last month by countries opposed to the tax, governments have decided on a list of retaliatory measures to be taken if necessary, including banning their airlines from participating.

It also allows governments to take tough retaliatory measures against EU carriers and aviation companies and impose their own taxes on EU airlines. The 27-nation EU has said the carbon tax will help it achieve its goal of cutting emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and that it will not back down on the plan.

As water tankers race across northern Mexico to reach far-flung towns, and crops wither in the fields, the government has allotted 34 billion pesos ($2.65 billion) in emergency aid to confront the worst drought ever recorded in the country.

The water shortage wiped out millions of acres of farmland this winter, caused 15 billion pesos ($1.18 billion) in lost harvests, killed 60,000 head of cattle and weakened 2 million more livestock, pushing food prices higher in Mexico. The overall cost to the economy is still being gauged but Mexico's drought-stung winter has been evolving for years and is expected to worsen as the effect of global climate change takes hold, according to the government.

According to Mexico's AMSDA agricultural association, poor weather destroyed some 7.5 million acres (3 million hectares) of cultivable land in 2011 - an area about the size of Belgium. That helped push Mexico's food imports up 35 percent last year, a trend likely to persist through the 2012-13 crop cycle. The water shortage has forced Mexican farmers to cut back cattle herds as pasture lands dry out and increased the risk of wildfires, which ravaged northern Mexico and the southern United States last spring.

The human cost has also been harsh. The government said it provided food rations to more than two million people, though agricultural group AMSDA said 8 million people had been affected by the lack of water. More than 400,000 residents in the six driest states were without water at the end of December, Conagua said, with reservoirs in two states half-empty and another two less than a quarter full.

Lured into the fields by what is so far the warmest March since records began in 1871, Cox is toiling alongside dozens of farmers across the Midwest who have begun seeding what may be a record crop weeks earlier than usual, according to agronomists, farm managers and analysts who keep close tabs on farm activity.

His crop may miss the peak summer heat of July and reap an extra 60 cents a bushel in September if his gamble pays off. Robust ethanol demand and years of low domestic inventories have placed a near-record premium on corn that can be delivered at the end of summer, when grain bins are empty and before the main harvest.

But the risks are high too: planting so early means forsaking some types of crop insurance; and despite the exceptionally mild winter, odds favor another chill at least once this year. Only once in the last century has the Midwest avoided frost between mid-March and mid-April. "It's going in good but we have fear that it might come too quick and a frost will come and kill it," Cox said as he took a break from seeding the first 400 acres on his farm in Greene County southwest of Springfield.

While the vast majority of farmers will opt to wait until nearer April 15, the average last freeze date, anecdotal reports suggest a record number have already begun.

In separate statements on Friday, the Roman Catholic bishops in Germany and Austria slammed the ruling by Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Shaikh as an unacceptable denial of human rights to millions of foreign workers in the Gulf region. Archbishop Mark of Yegoryevsk, head of the Russian Orthodox department for churches abroad, called the fatwa "alarming" in a statement on Tuesday. Such blunt criticism from mainstream Christian leaders of their Muslim counterparts is very rare.

Christian websites have reported Sheikh Abdulaziz, one of the most influential religious leaders in the Muslim world, issued the fatwa last week in response to a Kuwaiti lawmaker who asked if Kuwait could ban church construction in Kuwait. Citing Arab-language media reports, they say the sheikh ruled that further church building should be banned and existing Christian houses of worship should be destroyed.

Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, chairman of the German Bishops Conference, said the mufti "shows no respect for the religious freedom and free co-existence of religions", especially all the foreign laborers who made its economy work.

Representatives from device’s creators Hitachi say the camera uses image-recognition software in combination with algorithms that group similar faces together to create a thumbnail photo of a person. Where before authorities would have spent hours trawling through CCTV footage, an individual can now be found in the blink of an eye. The camera can search a staggering 36 million faces in less than a second for a match of the thumbnail photo.

Furthermore, once the image is saved it can be used to search other databases for a match. The camera is expected in appear on the market next year and provides governments with a tremendous scope for keeping tabs on their citizens. Information is freely and widely available on the internet, so it seems the challenge is no longer the acquisition of data, but processing it.

But if China becomes Saudi Arabia’s most important trading partner, then why should Saudi Arabia continue to only sell oil in US dollars? And if the petrodollar system collapses, what is that going to mean for the US economy? Well, for one thing the value of the US dollar would plummet big time. US consumers would suddenly find that all of those “cheap imported goods” would rise in price dramatically as would the price of gasoline.

If you think the price of gas is high now, you just wait until the petrodollar system collapses. In addition, there would be much less of a demand for US government debt since countries would not have so many excess US dollars lying around. So needless to say, the US government really needs the petrodollar system to continue. But in the end, it is SAUDI ARABIA THAT IS HOLDING THE CARDS.

If Saudi Arabia chooses to sell oil in a currency other than the US dollar, most of the rest of the oil producing countries in the Middle East would surely do the same rather quickly. And we have already seen countries in other parts of the world start to move away from using the US dollar in global trade. For example, Russia and China have agreed to now use their own national currencies when trading with each other rather than the US dollar.

This view of Jews as sub-human sounds a lot like Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, but it goes back much further. In author Andrew Bostom’s book, “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism,” he describes Islam’s early conquests of Jewish tribes in Arabia. “Mohammed’s frustrations in spreading his message were frequently recompensed by murderous attacks on the Jews,” he told CBN News.

Bostom explained that Mohammed demonized Jews because they rejected him as a prophet. Today, Jews play a central role in the end times ideology of Iran's mullahs. They believe the Mahdi, or Islamic messiah, will return to earth, conquer Jerusalem, and massacre the Jewish inhabitants of Israel. Former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani said that while Israel is a one-bomb country, Iran and the Islamic world could survive a nuclear exchange with the Jewish state. According to this view, the heavy losses would be worth it for the greater good of wiping Israel off the map.

Online reports of tanks on the streets of the capital Beijing and shots fired within the secure leaders' compound - which is located next door the top tourist attraction, the Forbidden City - are being closely monitored by the international intelligence communities, including the US and UK.

Popular Chinese microblogging sites Sina Weibo, QQ Weibo and the bulletin board of the search engine Baidu, all reported 'abnormalities' in Beijing on the night of March 19. The comments included rumours of the downfall of the country's Shanghai leadership faction, a reference to high-level officials who hail from the coastal financial hub, which has traditionally been the home of reformers and modernisers in the Party.

Some of the comments claimed a possible 'military coup' had been attempted, along with other reports of gunfire and swarms of plain clothes and uniformed security officers on Changan Street, which is close to Tiananmen Square, the scene of the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters. All the reports have been removed by China's army of internet censors and can no longer be accessed. MailOnline cannot confirm the rumours but the reports have caused a speculative and nervous atmosphere in the capital.

The US administration announced on Thursday that President Barack Obama considers the North Korean “space experiment”, involving the launching of a ballistic missile with a mounted satellite, a “provocation” and direct violation of the international agreements. According to national security official Daniel Russel, Obama will discuss the issue with the Chinese and Russian leaders in the near future.

North Korea, officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is gearing for the missile satellite launch scheduled for April 2012. The West condemns the move, saying that it comes in violation of the UN Security Council resolutions 1718 and 1874, prohibiting the development of ballistic missiles by the country, as well as the conducting of nuclear tests. The Western states, as well as South Korea, fear that the launches could be part of Pyongyang’s effort to build intercontinental missiles, while nuclear tests might be aimed at providing them with nuclear warheads.

The country’s nuclear program and missile launches have long been a bone of contention for the country’s relations with much of the world, leading to its increased isolation.