But don't worry. Just when you thought perhaps the CDC could boost their credibility, they found a way to put a sales pitch on the end of their warning. The CDC says if you do come down with the flu, there's a cure. It's just going to cost more money. Money that will end up profiting pharmaceutical giants, GlaxoSmithKline and Roche. CDC officials are urging doctors to prescribe two specific antiviral medications for any patients who come in with flu symptoms.

Just last week, the CDC issued a warning, prompting Americans to take the flu vaccine if they haven't already. Health officials said they had 160 million flu shots on the shelves and ready to go. But just earlier this week, Italy launched an official investigation after about a dozen people died within 48 hours of getting the flu shot. Their national health agency issued an immediate warning, saying DON'T take the vaccine. Here in America, the CDC isn't going that far. In fact, they found a way of turning this failed vaccine into a promotion for yet another big pharma drug.

But those onshore seismometers have detected few signs of the grinding and slipping you would expect to see as one tectonic plate dives beneath another, with the exception of the junctions on the north and south ends of what is formally known as the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The evidence pointing to the colliding tectonic plates being completely stuck has serious implications for earthquake risk on land in the Pacific Northwest.

“If there were low levels of offshore seismicity, then we could say some strain is being released by the smaller events,” said University of Oregon geophysics professor Doug Toomey. “If it is completely locked, it means it is increasingly storing energy and that has to be released at some point.”

Toomey said a big unknown is how much strain has accumulated since the plate boundary seized up, and secondly, how much more strain can build up before the fault rips and unleashes a possible magnitude-9.0 mega-quake and tsunami. Toomey described himself as “very concerned” and said it is “imperative” people in the Northwest continue to prepare for a big earthquake.

However, in recent years a few physicists and cosmologists have started to tackle it. They point out that we now have an understanding of the history of the universe, and of the physical laws that describe how it works. That information, they say, should give us a clue about how and why the cosmos exists.

Their admittedly controversial answer is that the entire universe, from the fireball of the Big Bang to the star-studded cosmos we now inhabit, popped into existence from nothing at all. It had to happen, they say, because "nothing" is inherently unstable.

While the European Union has helped banish the threat of war that scarred the continent from before Charlemagne’s time, the bloc’s two indispensable nations - France and Germany - are increasingly at odds over their economic direction as the continent struggles to shake off its slump.

Those differences were on display in Berlin yesterday at the 47th “Franco-German Financial and Economic Council,” as the French side pressed Germany to ease spending limits to spur Europe-wide growth. That clashes with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s stance - shared by the majority of voters - that Europe’s biggest economy set an example with a balanced budget. Whereas Kohl and Mitterand were recognized in 1988 with a joint award for promoting European unification - known as the Charlemagne Prize and made by the city of Aachen - their latter-day heirs, Merkel and French President Francois Hollande, disagree on the prescription for Europe’s ills. While German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble in October spoke of his “trust” in France, the political class is struggling to bridge the divide that separates their peoples so long as the economic differences prevail. “It shouldn’t be a question of trust,” said Markus Ziemer, a retired optician, enjoying two scoops of Italian ice cream outside Aachen’s white colonnaded theater. “There should be rules to ensure that countries keep their economy in a good order - because they are not doing that.”

The idea is simple: keep citizens from seeing any alternative reporting or analysis in times of crisis or domestic strife, and to reinforce the corporate monopoly of information and commentary by state-sanctioned, or ‘trusted news sources’ only, namely, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX News, MSNBC and CNN.

A number of top alternative news sites (including this one) have noticed that our website has been offline in certain regions at certain times. Others have noticed, and documented, the same observations. This is how far state and corporate interests will go to maintain power of the reality you see and believe in America, and further afield…

What was especially telling about this outage is that it only affected online news sites while allowing other internet traffic to flow normally. This selective targeting of news websites could have been accomplished by “deep packet inspection used inside the routers that move information packets along the internet,” reported Before Its News technical staff. “This technology allows ISP’s to look inside the packets your computer sends and receives and then make a decision to allow the packets through, modify the packets or block them. This technique can also be used to slow or speed up traffic.” This selective blocking that took place earlier this week is widely believed to have been a dry run for a planned online news site blockade by the federal government during an upcoming “major event.”

What sort of major event? The sort of major event where the government wants its official narrative to be the only information allowed to circulate, obviously. These tend to be either terrorism events or false flag events which are seized upon by the government to enact harsh new police state regulations and surveillance initiatives to spy on the American people. Similar events in recent US history include Oklahoma City, Waco and of course 9/11 — all of which were exploited to vastly expand police militarization and the surveillance reach of the federal government. (Patriot Act, anyone?)

What all governments know is the importance of “getting out in front of the narrative” and telling the government’s story first, before anyone else can look at the facts and present a more rational explanation for what happened.

“After tracking the Operation Cleaver team for over two years, we’re led to the inexorable conclusion: The government of Iran, and particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), is backing numerous groups and front entities to attack the world’s critical infrastructure,” Cylance said in its 86-page report, released Tuesday.

“As Iran’s cyber warfare capabilities continue to morph, the probability of an attack that could impact the physical world at a national or global level is rapidly increasing,” the report says. “Their capabilities have advanced beyond simple website defacements, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and Hacking Exposed style techniques.”

“Such broad targeting demonstrates to the world that Iran is no longer content to retaliate against the US and Israel alone,” the report states. “They have bigger intentions: to position themselves to impact critical infrastructure globally.”

The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest numbers for the world economy. And when you measure national economic output in “real” terms of goods and services, China will this year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the US. As recently as 2000, we produced nearly three times as much as the Chinese.

To put the numbers slightly differently, China now accounts for 16.5% of the global economy when measured in real purchasing-power terms, compared with 16.3% for the US. This latest economic earthquake follows the development last year when China surpassed the US. for the first time in terms of global trade.

This will not change anything tomorrow or next week, but it will change almost everything in the longer term. We have lived in a world dominated by the US since at least 1945 and, in many ways, since the late 19th century. And we have lived for 200 years — since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 — in a world dominated by two reasonably democratic, constitutional countries in Great Britain and the USA. For all their flaws, the two countries have been in the vanguard worldwide in terms of civil liberties, democratic processes and constitutional rights.

"In fact, we have discovered that the situation is much healthier than it seemed, because some hundreds of millions of euros were tucked away in particular sectional accounts and did not appear on the balance sheet," he wrote. Pell did not suggest any wrongdoing but said Vatican departments had long had "an almost free hand" with their finances and followed "long-established patterns" in managing their affairs.

Pell is an outsider from the English-speaking world transferred by Pope Francis from Sydney to Rome to oversee the Vatican's often muddled finances after decades of control by Italians. Pell's office sent a letter to all Vatican departments last month about changes in economic ethics and accountability. As of January 1, each department will have to enact "sound and efficient financial management policies" and prepare financial information and reports that meet international accounting standards.

Since the pope's election in March, 2013, the Vatican has enacted major reforms to adhere to international financial standards and prevent money laundering. It has closed many suspicious accounts at its scandal-rocked bank. In his article, Pell said the reforms were "well under way and already past the point where the Vatican could return to the 'bad old days'."

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon has said that the army and air force destroyed some 80 percent of Hamas’ arsenal of long-range M-75, mid-range Grad, and short-range Kassam rockets and mortars in the 51-day conflict during the summer. The IDF, from land, sea, and air, contends that it can keep close electronic and visual tabs on the new tests and immediately detect any shooting carried out by the terror organization.

“We’re aware of Hamas’ training, and the tests they perform with various rockets,” according to the official. In November, Iran’s missile chief said in an official statement that the Islamic Republic is behind the missile buildup among the Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

He described his outgoing government as one of the best in Israeli history but said it had struggled because his rightwing Likud party had not received enough votes to govern effectively. The Israeli prime minister had squabbled openly and bitterly in recent days with the ministers over economic issues and a bill declaring Israel a nation-state of the Jewish people, which both Mr Lapid and Ms Livni had opposed.

In barbed remarks on Tuesday evening, the Israeli leader attacked the sacked ministers, saying that Ms Livni had held a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in May, without his authorisation, after the collapse of US-sponsored peace talks with the Palestinians, which the outgoing justice minister had led.

Mr Netanyahu’s move suggests he is calculating he can win a fourth term in office, and opinion polls suggest Israel’s next government will be even more conservative than the current coalition.

That whole thing about Leviticus clearly forbidding sexual relations between two men? Open to interpretation. At least that’s what Oregon-based Rabbi Debra Kolodny, Executive Director of Nehirim, the national LGBTQI group, says, based on the idea of “queering the text.” “Queering the text,” Kolodny says, “looks for the chidush [a new idea or way of understanding a text], the innovation, the insight that’s never been imagined before because the lens we’re looking for today never existed before.”

Kolodny says contemporary liberal Judaism is at an historical moment in which it can combine its knowledge of history, sociology and sexuality with thousands of years of Jewish tradition to reveal “something that couldn’t be revealed even 20 years ago because we didn’t have the experience under our belt.”

Creating new rituals and traditions and understanding Jewish texts in a way that allows the queer community to live full Jewish lives is a primary goal of the conference. “Queering the text” refers to any number of paths for looking at scripture and is “the lens through which we look at our text,” says Kolodny. “Our goal is to support the total integration and empowerment of LGBTQI Jews, enriching klal Yisrael and all of our lives in the process,” says Kolodny.