To strengthen the task force, the Bundeswehr may send an additional unit of its elite Kommando Spezialkräfte (KSK) to Syria “in case of emergency,” Bild reports, citing its source in Bundestag’s defense committee. This was “made very clear” by German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen and Bundeswehr chief of staff General Volker Wieker during preliminary hearings at Bundestag’s defense committee on Wednesday, Bild claims, adding that it's unclear how many special troops could be sent to Syria.

The newspaper reports that possible missions for the KSK unit on the ground could be, among others, rescue operations to “liberate downed Tornado pilots.”

Of course this advice comes with a nifty set of instructions for how to spot a terrorist in your own home:

The first three “signs”:

• Out of character changes in dress, behaviour and changes in their friendship group;

• Losing interest in previous activities and friendships;

• Secretive behaviour and switching screens when you come near—

Imagine that– a teenager who doesn’t want mom and dad to see what he’s doing on his iPhone? Or a 14-year old who starts dressing differently and hanging out with a different group of friends? Funny, this sounds like… pretty much every teenager on the planet.

But even more unsettling are these:

• Showing a mistrust of mainstream media reports and belief in conspiracy theories;

• Appearing angry about government policies, especially foreign policy.

So apparently now questioning the propaganda and government policies are considered evidence of subversive, extremist behavior. If you don’t fall in line, you’re a radical. And the government now wants to train parents to rat out their own children. This is chilling. Disgusting. And unfortunately not too surprising from the country that was the backdrop for George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell’s dystopic view of the future is rapidly becoming reality in many countries across the West.

On Wednesday, a married couple named Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik fired at least 65 shots at a holiday office party in San Bernardino, California. 14 people were killed and 21 were wounded. Later on, hundreds of shots were exchanged as police officers pursued the vehicle that Farook and Malik were attempting to escape in. Fortunately, Farook and Malik are no longer a threat to any of us, but there are thousands more radicals just like them that are already living in this country and that are ready to act at any time.

On Thursday, many in the mainstream media were attempting to figure out what could have possibly motivated a married couple with a new baby to go on such a shooting spree, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. According to CBS News, Farook and Malik have been watching ISIS propaganda online. In addition, NBC News is reporting that the pair had been in contact with jihadists both inside and outside the country…

And despite what just happened in San Bernardino, Obama told CNN this week that ISIS does not pose a significant threat to us…

But Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, had something else on his mind. During a brief meeting, he invited the Prince of Wales to pay an official visit to Israel. Mr Netanyahu’s offer - like dozens of others extended by Israeli leaders to the Royal family - is unlikely to be taken up.

In the 67 years since Israel was founded in territory once controlled by Britain, no member of the Royal family has ever visited in an official capacity. While Prince Charles and others have occasionally set foot in Israel, Buckingham Palace and the British Government have been at pains to stress they were personal visits and not official ones.

The rejected invitations are a source of deep frustration for Israel, especially as the Royal family has made high-profile visits to authoritarian regional neighbours like Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

“The right to bear arms was included in the Bill of Rights, not to deter crime, but to deter oppressive government. Just governments honor and protect the right to bear arms. Oppressive governments fear and prohibit the right to bear arms. Guns are dangerous. The only thing more dangerous is not having them.

Stalin took guns away from his citizens in 1929 then murdered 20 million of them once defenceless.

Mao Zedong took guns away from his citizens in 1935 then murdered 20 million of them once defenceless.

Hitler took guns away from his citizens in 1938 then murdered 13 million of them once defenceless.

Pol Pot took guns away from his citizens in 1956 then murdered 2 million of them once defenceless.”

"Some scientists say Fukushima is worse than the 1986 Chernobyl accident, with which it shares a maximum level-7 rating on the sliding scale of nuclear disasters. One of the most prominent of them is Dr Helen Caldicott, an Australian physician and long time anti-nuclear activist who warns of "horrors to come" in Fukushima. Chris Busby, a professor at the University of Ulster known for his alarmist views, generated controversy during a Japan visit last month when he said the disaster would result in more than 1 million deaths. "Fukushima is still boiling its radionuclides all over Japan," he said. "Chernobyl went up in one go. So Fukushima is worse."

The official line is that the accident at the plant is winding down and radiation levels outside of the exclusion zone and designated "hot spots" are safe. But many experts warn that the crisis is just beginning. Professor Tim Mousseau, a biological scientist who has spent more than a decade researching the genetic impact of radiation around Chernobyl, says he worries that many people in Fukushima are "burying their heads in the sand."

His Chernobyl research concluded that biodiversity and the numbers of insects and spiders had shrunk inside the irradiated zone, and the bird population showed evidence of genetic defects, including smaller brain sizes. "The truth is that we don't have sufficient data to provide accurate information on the long-term impact," he says. "What we can say, though, is that there are very likely to be very significant long-term health impact from prolonged exposure."

That was in 2012. By 2013, Fukushima was pouring 300 TONS of contaminated water into the ocean EVERY day. I wonder what current testing shows for Bluefin tuna and other species of popular fish? The American people have the right to know, even if the news is bad.

The San Bernardino shooting is the 355th mass shooting this year, according to a mass shooting tracker maintained by the Guns Are Cool subreddit. The Reddit tracker defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people, including the gunman, are killed or injured by gunfire. The Mass Shooting Tracker is different from other shooting databases in that it uses a broader definition of mass shooting — the old FBI definition focused on four or more people killed as part of a single shooting.

Speaking after the Colorado Springs shooting last week, President Obama urged Americans to not let this type of violence "become normal." But the data show that this type of incident already is normal. There have been more mass shootings than calendar days so far this year. The number of mass shootings so far this year has already surpassed the total number of mass shootings in 2014, according to the Reddit tracker. And the pace is well above 2013's pace, when a total of 363 mass shootings occurred.

San Bernardino Police Chief Burguan said at a press conference that Farook and his 27-year-old wife, Tashfeen Malik, fired between 65-75 rounds inside a conference center at the Inland Regional Center during a holiday party for county health employees Wednesday morning, killing 14 people and injuring 21 others.

The couple came dressed in black tactical-style vests and were armed with a .223-caliber DPMS Model A15 rifle, a Smith and Wesson M&P15 rifle, a handgun made by Llama and a Smith and Wesson handgun. Federal officials said all four weapons were purchased legally in the United States four years ago - the handguns by Farook himself and the assault rifles by a third party.

During a standoff with police in Redlands that occurred five hours after the San Bernardino massacre, the husband and wife fired on responding cops, who returned fire, peppering the couple's rental Ford Expedition SUV with 380 rounds. Both Farook and Malik were pronounced dead on the scene. When law enforcement officials searched the bullet-riddled vehicle with Utah license plates, they found more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition on or around the deceased shooters.

During the early-morning search of a residence in the city of Redlands associated with a family member of Farook, Chief Burguan said they came away with a massive arsenal of ammunition, including 2,000 9mm rounds, another 2,500 .223 rounds and several hundred long rifle bullets, along with 12 pipe bombs and tools that could be used to construct IEDs. Burguan noted that the couple were well-equipped to carry out another attack. He added that Farook had no criminal record that police were aware of.

The gap between the rhetoric of climate summits and the reality is laughable. Ever since the Rio summit of 1992 it has always been “the last chance” to save the world from dangerous climate change. Meanwhile, the world is nearly as reliant on fossil fuels as it was when the theory of man-made global warming first entered the public consciousness. In 1973 oil, coal and gas accounted for 87 per cent of energy. In 2012 they accounted for 81 per cent. For all the wind and solar farms which now disfigure the English countryside, these two forms of energy even now account for no more than one per cent of global energy consumption.

Much to the annoyance of the climate activists who protested in London and Paris at the weekend, world leaders have failed to commit to a mass switch to renewable energy because they have a careful balancing act to perform. They would love it if their economies could be made to run entirely on renewable energy – as would almost everyone – but they know that if they tried to do so they would not have much of an economy left.

Yet the climate has stubbornly refused to play along. It is now quarter of a century since the IPCC first tried to predict the rise in global temperatures as a result of carbon emissions, which it put at between 0.2C and 0.5C per decade. Since 1998, the rise has been at a rate of just 0.05C per decade. Meanwhile, apocalyptic predictions of drought and tempest have also failed to materialise. Remember how, after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, we were told to expect ever more destructive storms?

Hurricanes have declined since, with not one category 5 storm measured in the Caribbean this decade. Climate predictions are made by mathematical models which try to recreate a computerised version of the Earth’s atmosphere. Trouble is that the atmosphere remains poorly understood and is chaotic in nature. The models tend to reflect the prejudices of the scientists who build them. We know from the leaked emails that climate science operates rather like 15th-century Catholicism, with no tolerance of heretics.

Interior Minister Silvan Shalom and Jordanian Water Minister Hazim Nasser on Monday announced the release of the $800 million tender, which will be formally published Tuesday. The two nations, which made peace in 1994, are seeking a company to construct the canal and operate it for 25 years.

“Today we took an additional historic step to save the Dead Sea,” said Shalom, who served as water minister in the last government, on a trip to Jordan on Monday. “The joint international tender to be published tomorrow is proof of the cooperation between Israel and Jordan, and a response to those who cast doubt on whether the canal project would ever go ahead. This is an exceptional environmental and diplomatic achievement that testifies more than anything to the fertile cooperation between the [two] countries.”

The pipeline will take some four or five years to complete. It will be 180 kilometers long and will pass through Jordanian territory, carrying around 200 million cubic meters of seawater from the Red Sea — at the very southern tip of Israel — per annum.

The remarkable case — which could have repercussions throughout the German legal system, based as it is on the principle of precedent — was reported briefly in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. According to that report, a 43-year-old Serbian national had been arrested after being caught smuggling a large number of people into Germany in his vehicle.

Usually, people smugglers are sentenced to imprisonment of several years in Germany, but in this case the accused was warned, given a two-year suspended sentence, and allowed to walk out of the court building a free man.

His defense — with which the court agreed — was that the crime with which he had been charged was actually the official policy of the Federal German government.