A sobering new report by the Corporation for Enterprise Development shows nearly half of US households (132.1 million people) don't have enough savings to weather emergencies, or finance long-term needs like college tuition, health care and housing. According to the Assets & Opportunity Scorecard, these people wouldn't last three months if their income was suddenly depleted. More than 30 percent don't even have a savings account, and another 8 percent don't bank at all.

We're not just talking about people who are living on the poverty line, either. Plenty of the middle class have joined the ranks of the "working poor," struggling right alongside families scraping by on food stamps and other forms of public assistance. More than one-quarter of households earning $55,465-$90,000 annually have less than three months of savings.

And another quarter of households are considered net worth asset poor, "meaning that the few assets they have, such as a savings account or durable assets like a home, business or car, are overwhelmed by their debts," the study says.

“Food products are not always what they purport to be,” Markus Lipp, senior director for Food Standards for the independent lab in Maryland, told ABC News. In a new database to be released Wednesday, and obtained exclusively by ABC News today, USP warns consumers, the FDA and manufacturers that the amount of food fraud they found is up by 60 percent this year.”

In addition, 70% of all ground beef was found to contain “pink slime”. Butchers use “meat glue” to create “bigger” cuts of beef, chicken, lamb and fish, even though it leads to much higher levels of food poisoning: British hamburgers were found to contain horse meat and pork … and it could happen in the US as well.

Indeed, modern red meat is arguably not really meat at all. And selling genetically modified food without labeling them as such is arguably food fraud as well, since a large majority of Americans want genetically modified foods to be labeled, genetically engineered foods have been linked to obesity, cancer, liver failure, infertility and all sorts of other diseases, and the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t even test the safety of such foods.

This trend was predictable because food manufacturers have been trying to hide food inflation in various ways. The inflation in food prices, in turn, has been caused by quantitative easing – printed in an attempt to hide bank fraud – and the use of the printed money for wild speculation by the big banks has driven up food and related commodity prices.

And – instead of fighting for safer food – the Department of Justice and FDA often target whistleblowers and do everything they can to cover up wrongdoing. The Department of Agriculture is no better. And the Feds are treating people who expose abuse in factory farms as potential terrorists … and the states want the same power. Widespread food fraud is the predictable result.

The price freeze applies to every product in all of the nation’s largest supermarkets — a group including Walmart, Carrefour, Coto, Jumbo, Disco and other large chains. The companies’ trade group, representing 70 percent of the Argentine supermarket sector, reached the accord with Commerce Secretary Guillermo Moreno, the government’s news agency Telam reported. As AP reports, "The commerce ministry wants consumers to keep receipts and complain to a hotline about any price hikes they see before April 1."

Perhaps they will. What consumers will certainly do is scramble into local stores to take advantage of artificially-controlled prices knowing very well they have two short months to stock up on perishable goods at today's prices, before the country's inflation comes soaring back, only this time many of the local stores will not be around as their profit margins implode and as owners, especially of foreign-based chains, make the prudent decision to get out of Dodge while the getting's good and before the next steps, including such measures as nationalization, in the escalation into a full out hyperinflationary collapse, are taken by Argentina's female ruler.

On Sunday, January 20, during a news conference in Dublin, Father Tony Flannery became the unlikely face of the modern Irish Catholic. Unlikely, because Flannery supports allowing women and married men to become priests. He embraces the role of lesbians and gays in the Catholic Church. Flannery also questions the legitimacy of the Vatican's hierarchy, and he warns that unless power is decentralized and free thought is encouraged, church attendance in Ireland will continue to stagnate.

These views would seem to be counter to the regular average Irish churchgoer, who, according to numerous polls and surveys, is older and slightly more conservative than the general population. But Flannery has been embraced. The well-known 66-year-old Irish priest has been inundated with e-mails, texts and handwritten letters from supporters all over the country.

"The support is overwhelming," Flannery told DW. "When you think of the effort it takes to write a letter ... I do not feel like I will be isolated should I be forced to leave." Flannery, who resides at the Redemptorist Esker Monastery in the West of Ireland, maintains that if he doesn't sign a statement reversing his positions, the Vatican has threatened ex-communication.

Let's take a typical 24-year-old everyperson. This person lives in Nottingham. There's a one-bedroom flat they want but it costs £120,000. You need a salary of more than £25,000 to get a mortgage for that. But this everyperson has no salary. They're one of the 18.5% of people aged 18-24 in the UK who are out of work. Our 24-year-old has a degree and a £25,000 debt to pay off from university. The everyperson has moved back in with their parents, part of the "boomerang adultescents".

A job is the most pressing requirement but many of those are now going to older workers. The over-50s accounted for 93% of the job increases over the last decade, according to analysis by investment bank Citi. And there's the growing number who put off retiring. Working people of pension age have nearly doubled over the last two decades, reaching 1.4 million in 2011, according to the Office for National Statistics.

In 1957 Harold Macmillan declared: "Most of our people have never had it so good." Today no politician would utter those words.

The scoop by Michael Isikoff is actually startling not for the details but rather for the lack of details. It's very vague about a decision-making process that puts American lives on the line. Put simply, the government believes that a lethal drone attack against an American citizen is justified if the targets are a) "senior operational leaders" of al-Qaeda or b) "an associated force."

But what does "an associated force" mean? It seems like the guy who sells the terrorists bomb supplies would probably qualify, but what about the unknowing neighbor or the hired hand? Can we just kill them too in good conscience? Quite unfortunately, the government isn't exactly sure.

The memo suggests that anyone who "present[s] an 'imminent' threat of violent attack against the United States" qualifies for assassination "a lawful killing in self defense," but that "does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons and interests will take place in the immediate future." In other words, an "informed, high-level" official can order the killing of any American citizen that was "recently" involved in threatening "activities." As Isikoff points out, the memo fails to define both of those terms.

"This is a chilling document," said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "Basically, it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen.

A tsunami measuring 0.9m (3ft) then hit Lata in the far eastern Solomons and a tsunami warning was briefly trigged for several Pacific nations. Dozens of homes, in four villages, are reported to have been damaged by waves. Lata is the main town on Nendo, also known as Santa Cruz Island, which is the largest island in the Santa Cruz island chain, part of the Solomon Islands nation.

The worst of the damage was said to have been on the western coast, with one report putting the waves there at 1.5m. Robert Iroga, press secretary to the Solomons prime minister, told the BBC that the waves west of Lata had travelled some 500m inland, and that three villages had been damaged. He said the latest reports from the region were that four people had been killed.

The Solomon Islands form part of the Ring Of Fire, a zone of volcanic arcs and oceanic trenches encircling the Pacific basin. The 8.0 earthquake was followed by several aftershocks, the largest measuring 6.6 magnitude. The region has been experiencing a series of smaller quakes in recent days.

Stock exchanges can now execute trades in less than a half a millionth of a second — more than a million times faster than the human mind can make a decision. Financial firms deploy sophisticated algorithms to battle for fractions of a cent. Designed by the physics nerds and math geniuses known as quants, these programs exploit minute movements and long-term patterns in the markets, buying a stock at $1.00 and selling it at $1.0001, for example. Do this 10,000 times a second and the proceeds add up. Constantly moving into and out of securities for those tiny slivers of profit — and ending the day owning nothing — is known as high-frequency trading.

This rapid churn has reduced the average holding period of a stock: Half a century ago it was eight years; today it is around five days. Most experts agree that high-speed trading algorithms are now responsible for more than half of US trading. Computer programs send and cancel orders tirelessly in a never-ending campaign to deceive and outrace each other, or sometimes just to slow each other down. They might also flood the market with bogus trade orders to throw off competitors, or stealthily liquidate a large stock position in a manner that doesn't provoke a price swing.