When the manipulation of City benchmarks was revealed, "it turned out we didn't have the laws on the statute book to deal with that scandal", he said. "Some criminal charges have been brought, but not as many as would have been the case if the laws were better." Mr Osborne compared the scandals that have plagued the financial services industry since the crisis to other forms of law breaking. "If you go and shoplift at the local WH Smiths you go to prison," he said.

"But if you’re the market trader on the trading floor of a big investment bank, and you rip off people to the tunes of millions of pounds, there are no criminal offences to deal with you." The Chancellor said that "there was a lot of totally understandable anger" at bankers, as they were in part responsible for "the biggest single economic crash of our lifetimes".

Algeria's former energy minister, Nordine Aït-Laoussine, says the time has come to consider suspending his country's Opec membership if the cartel is unwilling to defend oil prices and merely serves as the tool of a Saudi regime pursuing its own self-interest. "Why remain in an organisation that no longer serves any purpose?" he asked.

Saudi Arabia can, of course, do whatever it wants at the Opec summit in Vienna on December 4. As the cartel hegemon, it can continue to flood the global market with crude oil and hold prices below $50.

It can ignore desperate pleas from Venezuela, Ecuador and Algeria, among others, for concerted cuts in output in order to soak the world glut of 2 million barrels a day, and lift prices to around $75. But to do so is to violate the Opec charter safeguarding the welfare of all member states.

"Saudi Arabia is acting directly against the interests of half the cartel and is running Opec over a cliff. There could be a total blow-out in Vienna," said Helima Croft, a former oil analyst at the US Central Intelligence Agency and now at RBC Capital Markets.

Krzysztof Charamsa was still employed at one of the Holy See’s most powerful offices, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. But after decades of hiding, the 43-year-old gay Polish priest wanted to come out with a flourish. He was no longer afraid to confront a church he saw as intrinsically “homophobic” and proposed a symbolic news conference outside the headquarters of the Congregation — the very institution charged with defending and disseminating Catholic teachings around the globe.

But Emilio Sturla, a public relations consultant who worked closely with gay Catholic groups and was helping Charamsa, strongly suggested he reconsider, both men recalled. The public and the church, Sturla insisted, would see such a move as too incendiary. “But that’s what he wanted,” Sturla said. “To be provocative.” And that’s what he did. Charamsa’s move brought the expected denunciations from the church and religious conservatives, who pointed out that he had violated his vow of chastity and the church’s teachings on homosexuality. More surprisingly, his actions have also sparked a split among gay Catholics.

The church officially teaches that homosexual desires are not sinful unless acted upon and calls on gays and lesbians to live lives of chastity. It teaches that gays are deserving of human dignity. But it also describes homosexual acts as a sin that is “intrinsically disordered” and a “grave depravity.”

If you are not familiar with the Ring of Fire, it is an area roughly shaped like a horseshoe that runs along the outer perimeter of the Pacific Ocean. Approximately 90 percent of all earthquakes and approximately 75 percent of all volcanic eruptions occur along the Ring of Fire. Recently, we have witnessed a 4.4, a 5.4 and a 5.7 earthquake in Alaska, a 6.8 earthquake in Chile and 20 earthquakes in Indonesia of at least magnitude 4.3. This violent shaking along the Ring of Fire seems to continue a progression of major disasters that began back during the month of September.

For whatever reason, our planet suddenly seems to be waking up. Unfortunately, the west coast of the United States is one of the areas where this is being felt the most. The little city of San Ramon, California, is about 45 miles east of San Francisco, and over the past several weeks it has experienced a record-breaking 583 earthquakes: Could this be a prelude to a major seismic event in California? So why aren't more Americans alarmed that these records are being broken? We shall see what happens.

So what is a "solar minimum"? Our sun doesn't maintain a constant intensity. Instead, it cycles in spans of approximately 11 years. When it's at its maximum, it has the highest number of sunspots on its surface in that particular cycle. When it's at its minimum, it has almost none. When there are more sunspots, the sun is brighter. When there are fewer, the sun radiates less heat toward Earth.

But that's not the only cooling effect of a solar minimum. A dim sun doesn't deflect cosmic rays away from Earth as efficiently as a bright sun. So, when these rays enter our atmosphere, they seed clouds, which in turn cool our planet even more and increase precipitation in the form of rain, snow and hail.

If Earth were to enter the next Ice Age too quickly, glaciers could advance much further south, rainforests could turn into savannah, and sea levels could drop dramatically, causing havoc.

Are you aware that the American government has been slowly giving away its power to international bureaucrats to determine how its businesses and citizens are taxed? Most wars do not turn out the way the people who started them intended. Setting aside the hot military wars, look at the consequences of the “war on drugs” and the “war on money laundering and tax evasion.”

The global war on money laundering and tax evasion has failed in the three decades since it began in earnest, and it is now on its way to undermining the rule of law around the world, the legitimate role of financial institutions, and the right of sovereign governments to determine their own tax policies.

The new anti-money-laundering laws and regulations have resulted in millions of Americans who live abroad and others living outside their home countries being unable to get bank accounts and other financial services in the countries where they live. Rather than protecting people who need financial services, government regulations are increasing their misery. Banks avoid potential government fines by dumping customers, whose source or use of their money is too difficult to figure out.

As global taxes are increasingly implemented, Americans and citizens of other countries will lose their democratic right to determine their own taxes — and Americans will be right back where they were under King George III. What happened to “no taxation without representation”?

• Richard W Rahn is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.

“Rockefeller by no means neglected their program of converting our government into a totalitarian device for looting. The basic plan was published in 1930 by his intimate friend Hoffman Nickerson in his book, the American Rich. Nickerson’s scheme is to nullify the Constitution by converting our Government into an absolute monarchy. He concludes, the only perfect form of government is hereditary absolute monarchy, but it might be wiser at the start not to violate American sentiment by undertaking to impose it openly.

“The conversion of President to absolute monarch merely requires the elimination of checks and balances on the power of the President that the framers of the Constitution ‘unwisely’ incorporated into it, to convert his role to that of absolute dictator.

“The key to converting Congress into a mere ‘rubber stamp’ is the budget plan. If the Presidential elective monarch presents to Congress, year after year, budgets so huge and complex that members could not possibly find the time to read it, and so richly provided with graft and pork barrel for each member of Congress that none of them would dare to sincerely attack it for fear of losing their shares – Congress would eschew the powers granted it by the Constitution.

“The presidential monarch would easily rob Congress of its Constitutional power to initial any legislation under the pretence of contrived ‘emergencies’ and ‘crises’…” Does this sound like something we have today?

Inside the ad, a camera captured their facial expressions and fed them through an algorithm, reading emotional reactions like happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear and sadness. With all the unwitting feedback, the campaign could then tweak the message — the images, sounds or words — to come up with a version that voters might like better.

All over the world, political campaigns are seeking voter data and insights that will propel them to victory. Now, in an increasing number of places, that includes the contentious field known as neuromarketing — or in this case, neuropolitics.

Technologies like facial coding, biofeedback and brain imaging have long been used by companies in the hope of pushing the boundaries of marketing and product development. But their use by political parties and governments is a growing phenomenon, evoking futuristic scenes from the movie “Minority Report,” in which eerily well-informed billboards scan commuters’ eyes and call out to them by name.

With Russia, Iran and China on one side and the US, France, Australia and Britain plus the GCC countries, Turkey and Jordan on the other and Iraq and Syria in the middle, a lot is at stake in the world’s tinderbox.

US president Obama promised no less than 15 times to the world that American troops would not be deployed to Syria. With intensifying US military operations in both Iraq and Syria, dozens of bipartisan US lawmakers issued an open letter on Friday calling for Congress to fulfill its responsibility by voting “as quickly as possible” on whether to authorize a war that is well over a year old.

In the meantime, Obama has just authorised the deployment of special forces troops to Syria as it intensifies airstrikes which has coincided with Washington’s shift in approach to the conflict. As Russia intensifies its efforts, Washington is spurred to take more effective action.

There is serious political unrest at the parliamentary level in Britain. Parliament unequivocally voted for no military action in Syria in 2013 yet PM David Cameron simply lied by omission and sent fighter jets in defiance. Just yesterday the head of the British armed forces said “Britain is ‘letting down’ its allies by not taking part in attacking Isil’s key strongholds in Syria,” General Sir Nicholas Houghton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, said it “makes no sense” that RAF airstrikes in Iraq stop at the border, when Britain knows Isil has based its stronghold in Syria.

He seems to have forgotten that Britain is a democracy and its people are not answerable to the army.

The world risks a return to the strategic oil crises of the 1970s as Mid-East producers regain their stranglehold on global supply and drive non-Opec producers out of the market, the International Energy Agency has warned. The Paris-based watchdog said upstream investment in crude oil ventures is collapsing. Low prices are forcing companies to abandon high-cost projects in the US, Canada, Russia, Brazil and parts of Africa, storing up a potential oil crunch in the future. It leaves the world economy dangerously reliant on Gulf supplies, unless counter-measures are taken in time.

Fatih Birol, the IEA’s director, said the oil industry needs $650 billion a year of fresh investment just to keep output steady as old wells are depleted and the decline rate steepens, yet new outlays have fallen 20 percent this year and are expected to drop by another 20 percent next year. “This is what I am worried about the most. It is the first time since the 1980s that investment will have declined for two consecutive years, and it will have serious consequences,” he said.

In a previous article I noted that the federal poverty level for a family of five is $28,410, but 51 percent of all American workers are making less than $30,000 a year at this point. We have seen an explosion in the number of people in this country that are considered to be “the working poor” and it gets worse with each passing year.

One of the most frustrating things for me personally is the rising cost of health insurance. Barack Obama promised that his program would result in a decline in health insurance premiums by as much as $2,500 per family, but in reality average family premiums have increased by a total of $4,865 since 2008.

When I was growing up, it seemed like just about everyone in my entire high school was part of the middle class. But things have changed dramatically in America since that time. Today, the middle class is being absolutely eviscerated and our “leaders” don’t seem to care.

US Airways and Southwest fly planes to a maintenance facility in El Salvador. Delta sends planes to Mexico. United uses a shop in China. American still does much of its most intensive maintenance in-house in the US, but that is likely to change in the aftermath of the company’s merger with US Airways.

The airlines are shipping this maintenance work offshore for the reason you’d expect: to cut labor costs. Mechanics in El Salvador, Mexico, China, and elsewhere earn a fraction of what mechanics in the US do. In part because of this offshoring, the number of maintenance jobs at US carriers has plummeted, from 72,000 in the year 2000 to fewer than 50,000 today.

The private control of this important central bank works through several channels, but centers around a handful of the top wealthy families in the ruling oligarchy – including the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Rockefellers, DuPonts and others. Direct ownership is bolstered through interlocking control between other Federal Reserve branches through board members and directors, as well as ties to family dynasty networks.

The Federal Reserve is in turn steered by the agenda of the Bank of International Settlements, an institution which also has ties to ranking families of the banking houses.

“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.” – Paul Warburg, drafter of the Federal Reserve Act.

“Federal Reserve: It is not federal, and it does not have any reserves.” – G Edward Griffin on the Federal Reserve System.

In stark terms, Dr Paul warns that this country and the world will “soon experience a major economic crisis” unless they change course on monetary and economic policy. Without a doubt, a clearer picture of the Federal Reserve decisions and secret deals would prove the tyranny of monetary control.

One positive step Congress may take this year is passing the Audit the Fed bill. Fortunately, Senator Rand Paul is using Senate rules to force the Senate to hold a roll-call vote on Audit the Fed. The vote is expected to take place in the next two-to-three weeks. If Audit the Fed passes, the American people can finally learn the full truth about the Fed’s operations. If it fails, the American people will at least know which senators side with them and which ones side with the Federal Reserve.

The market is vulnerable to any rate increase, as Yellen well knows, while the future prospects for American jobs is being whittled away.