A 4.7-magnitude tremor was followed 30 seconds later by another 4.8-magnitude quake centered in a sparsely populated area about 20 miles northwest of Fairview, Oklahoma, about 97 miles northwest of Oklahoma City. The quakes struck at depths of 2.1 and 3.7 miles below the surface. The twin earthquakes occurred at 10:27 pm CST Wednesday night and were felt from central Kansas to southern Oklahoma and the eastern Texas panhandle, including in Wichita, Kansas, and the Oklahoma City metropolitan area. Two others were reported in the far northern Oklahoma City metropolitan area east-northeast of Edmond, and a third occurred around midday Thursday near Perry in north-central Oklahoma.

This was one of 30 separate earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 or greater reported in Oklahoma within a 19-hour span from Wednesday evening through early Thursday afternoon. Twenty-seven of those, including the two strongest quakes mentioned above, were clustered in southern Woods County.

The move comes as China reported its biggest annual drop in foreign exchange reserves on record in 2015, while the central bank has allowed a sharp slide in the Yuan currency to multi-year lows, raising fears of more capital flight. All banks in certain trading hubs, including Shenzhen, received the order recently, the people added. They declined to be identified because they are not allowed to speak to the media.

While three sources for this story claim they were told that this is an effort to stem the outflow of capital, a different source says something altogether different is taking place: the belief in China is that the US Dollar is now worthless and will soon totally collapse as a currency, leaving everyone who holds dollars, broke. That's why China is doing everything it can to shed US Dollar currency. The way it's being done, however, is a "useful guise" for the Chinese to prevent the collapse from taking place too early and leaving them stuck with trillions in useless US dollars.

Here’s the most dramatic statistic: 450 of 452 suicide terror attacks in 2015 were perpetrated by Muslim extremists. One of the remaining two attacks was carried out by the Kurdish underground. The other was perpetrated by a woman supporter of a leftist group in Turkey.

Even the attack in Turkey initially attributed to a “leftist group” may actually also have been carried out by a Muslim. According to media reports, police were investigating if the perpetrator was a Russian woman “radicalized by Wahhabi ideology.” If that turns out to be the case, that would mean 451 of the 452 attacks were perpetrated by Muslim extremists.

“Unlike what people usually think, last year was not exceptionally ‘wild’ as regards suicide attacks. There were far fewer attacks than in 2014, although the number of fatalities remained almost the same — 4,370 people killed in 2015 as compared with 4,400 people the year before.” Which means, “to put it another way, the terror attacks are more deadly.”

In a draft policy statement jointly issued by the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Education, federal bureaucrats have — on their own initiative — subordinated parents to a secondary role in the rearing of their children.

While the draft is neither finalized nor binding (yet), it serves as a clear shot across the bow of every freedom-loving parent who naively believes that his parenting principles, priorities and practices will be protected and respected by government.

The entire purpose of the 18-page statement is to explain, promote and bureaucratically implement what the departments call “family engagement.” This term sounds like something every good parent would inherently want, but here’s how the government defines it: “the systematic inclusion of families as partners in children’s development, learning and wellness.”

That’s right: the government is going to include you, the parent, as a partner in rearing your child. Are we supposed to thank it for this privilege?

But an investigation by researchers from the University of Wisconsin has uncovered that, despite years of denial, the FDA has known since at least the 1970s that nitrites cause cancer, and yet continues to pander to the meat industry in allowing their use.

Meat curing has been around forever, with the historical record showing that this process allowed ancient cultures to preserve meats for extended periods of time, especially during periods of food scarcity. People didn’t have refrigerators back then, remember, so they had to come up with novel ways of food preservation that would get them through harsh weather conditions and other volatile environmental factors.

The fact that people have been curing meats since time immemorial isn’t necessarily a problem. Salt, after all, is a natural curing agent that, in and of itself, isn’t harmful. It’s when salt is transformed through synthetic chemical alterations – in this case, as nitrites – that it becomes harmful. And these same nitrites, according to independent scientists, have been the subject of intense debate over the years concerning their safety.

The sell-off came as weakening of the yuan led to worries that China's economy was slowing more than expected. The rest of Asia also recovered some losses after the dramatic plunge in Chinese shares had triggered a global sell-off. Markets in Europe and the US made steep losses overnight after trading in the world's second largest economy was closed within the first 30 minutes in the previous session, making it China's shortest trading day on record.

Regulators suspended the "circuit breaker" rule late on Thursday. Analysts said it was creating more panic selling instead of calming sentiment. "The fall in markets looks to have been exaggerated and driven more by fears and regulatory issues around the share market and currency rather than a renewed deterioration in economic indicators," said Shane Oliver, investment strategist at AMP Capital.

Investors were worried that China's moves to weaken the yuan would spark a currency war in the region as other countries tried to remain competitive.

Cameron is on a visit to Germany, where he met with chancellor Angela Merkel in Bavaria on Wednesday and will outline his reform ideas on Thursday at the annual conference of the sister party of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, the Christian Social Union. The UK prime minister campaigned in the EU’s largest economy to enlist its support for his reform proposals ahead of an EU leaders’ meeting next month in Brussels.

If a deal is reached in February, Cameron could call for a referendum in June. In an article appearing in Germany’s biggest-selling newspaper, Bild, Cameron argued support for the UK’s membership has declined and the changes will help address the concerns of the British people. "But these changes will benefit the EU too, and Germany can help deliver them," he wrote.

"The problems in the EU that what we are trying to fix are problems for Germany and other European partners too," he argued. Cameron wants to cut EU bureaucracy and shift powers from Brussels to national capitals.

In August, Beijing decided to tweak its exchange rate peg with the dollar, making the renminbi float in a wider band against the greenback. This sparked immediate market panic that China was entering into the world's currency wars. But the devaluation in itself was small. Allaying fears further, the Chinese began to immediately intervene to prop up the RMB to stop it falling too fast by drawing down their reserves.

But devaluation fears are returning. The country's export performance has stuttered, while the dollar has rocketed on the back of a stronger US economy. Overall, the RMB has weakened by around 10 percent against the dollar over the last two years. "Over half of the weakness has come in the last four months," says Sean Yokota at SEB.

The Communist party has responded to mass capital outflows by using the full force of the state to punish those it accuses of "illegal cash transfers" out of the country. Some claim that the Chinese are beginning to lose control over their exchange rate and their economic policy. China's exchange rate policy, it could be said, has put the country in a bind.

In fact, the White House said the results from various monitors simply weren’t consistent with a hydrogen bomb, which can be far more powerful than an atomic bomb. But one top specialist says the monitor results and North Korea’s claims align fully with the scenario of a device designed for a low yield, yet emitting an enhanced amount of gamma rays.

Peter Pry, an expert on electromagnetic pulse weapons, told WND the explosion indeed was such a device. Pry said Pyongyang’s latest test, which followed three others each in the range of 10 kilotons or less, was “another kind of H-Bomb,” a neutron bomb, or enhanced radiation weapon such as a super-EMP weapon. Such weapons constitute, essentially, a “very low-yield H-Bomb that typically has yields of 1-10 kilotons, just like the North Korean device,” he said.

Pry, like other experts on EMP, was concerned that the North Koreans could launch a missile with a satellite that could constitute a nuclear device designed to explode on command at a high altitude over a highly populated area of a highly technical society such as the United States.

Instances of volcanic eruptions are their highest for 300 years and scientists fear a major one that could kill millions and devastate the planet is a real possibility. Experts at the European Science Foundation said volcanoes – especially super-volcanoes like the one at Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, which has a caldera measuring 34 by 45 miles (55 by 72 km) - pose more threat to Earth and the survival of humans than asteroids, earthquakes, nuclear war and global warming.

The world's most dangerous active volcanoes include Yellowstone, Mount Vesuvius in Campagnia, Italy, and Popocatépetl near Mexico City. If any of them or other massive volcanic peaks suffered a major eruption the team said millions of people would die and earth’s atmosphere would be poisoned with ash and other toxins "beyond the imagination of anything man’s activity and global warming could do over 1,000 years."

Worryingly, scientists say research over the last 300 years of volcanic activity shows we are currently in a "volcano season" meaning increased activity. Volcanoes are also more likely from November to April in the northern hemisphere when ice, rain and snowfall can compress the bedrock.

So your doctor has essentially been deputized now with an Obama executive action.

Mental health professionals, therapists, if they detect that you might leave the office and go grab a gun and do something, they have to call and report you. And now doctors must do the same thing. "Doctors and other mental health professionals play an important role in protecting the safety of their patients and the broader community by reporting direct and credible threats of violence to the authorities."

"But there is public confusion about whether federal law prohibits such reports about threats of violence. The Department of Health and Human Services is issuing a letter," to doctors clarifying that no federal law prohibits them from reporting on potential dangerous behavior by their patients.

The executive action also protects the rights of health care providers to talk to their patients about gun safety. "Doctors and other health care providers also need to be able to ask about firearms in their patients’ homes and safe storage of those firearms, especially if their patients show signs of certain mental illnesses or if they have a young child or mentally ill family member at home."