The marchers wanted to demonstrate unity after the attacks on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, police officers, and a kosher supermarket. The French government said the rally turnout was the highest on record. World leaders, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, EU President Donald Tusk, and Jordan's King Abdullah II joined the beginning of the Paris march.

"We will bring together all of our allies to discuss ways in which we can counteract this violent extremism that exists around the world," Holder told reporters. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said after the meeting that European interior ministers had agreed to boost cooperation in an effort to thwart further jihadist attacks. "We all agree that we need to put in place better control on certain passengers, on the basis of objective criteria and with respect for fundamental liberties and without disrupting cross-border travel," he said.

He said Europe needed urgent progress in establishing a European Passenger Name Record database, which would facilitate the exchange of data about passengers between member states. "We are convinced of the need for such a tool, to follow those who travel to terrorist operating theaters or who return from there," he said, adding that this database would also be useful in the fight against other serious crimes.

Cazeneuve said the Internet needs to remain a space for free expression, but that Europe should fight against abusive use of the web to spread hate speech, anti-Semitic messages and the recruiting of vulnerable young people for violence. "We need to work more closely with Internet companies to guarantee the reporting and if possible removal of all content that amounts to an apology of terrorism or calls for violence and hatred," he said.

It didn’t happen overnight. It took many years of neglect for our liberties to be given away so casually for a promise of security from the politicians. The tragic part is that the more security was promised — physical and economic — the less liberty was protected.

With cradle-to-grave welfare protecting all citizens from any mistakes and a perpetual global war on terrorism, which a majority of Americans were convinced was absolutely necessary for our survival, our security and prosperity has been sacrificed. It was all based on lies and ignorance. Many came to believe that their best interests were served by giving up a little freedom now and then to gain a better life.

The explosion just before lunch killed 20, including the girl, and injured 18, according to the police. Boko Haram did not immediately claim the attack, but the Islamic insurgents have increasingly used young girls as human bombs as they carve an African “Caliphate” from the plains of northern Nigeria.

Today, Boko Haram controls about 20,000 square miles of territory - an area the size of Belgium. Within this domain, the black flag of jihad flies over scores of towns and villages scattered across the neighbouring states of Borno and Yobe.

The latest conquest was the fishing town of Baga on the shores of Lake Chad, which fell to the Islamists last Wednesday.

“For five kilometres (three miles), I kept stepping on dead bodies until I reached Malam Karanti village, which was also deserted and burnt,” one surviving fisherman, Yanaye Grema, said. Boko Haram’s fighters have now achieved mastery over 11 local government areas with a total population exceeding 1.7 million people, according to the official 2006 census.

Even so, critics say that default would be disastrous as no one would lend to the Greek government ever again. Nonsense. History suggests that it would be a matter of months before the investment bankers came knocking on the door. Nor is this simply the result of a powerful mixture of greed and short memories. What lenders fear is not the history of recent default but the prospect of future default. Once a country has defaulted, the prospect of another default in the next year or two is actually lower.

The second factor that has changed is that the German government now believes that the eurozone is able to withstand a Greek departure from the euro without much ill-effect. What they feared in 2012 was contagion from Greece to Spain, Italy and Portugal. They reckon that with the various support mechanisms in place that is now less likely.

However, BofA Merrill Lynch said: “We see a growing risk of WTI (West Texas Intermediate) and Brent falling to $35 and $40 per barrel near-term to force either non-Opec producers or Saudi to cut.” Saudi Arabia’s influential oil minister Ali Naimi has asserted that the kingdom – the world’s largest exporter of crude – intends to persist with its current strategy of keeping its spigots open to win back market share regardless of how much oil prices fall.

“Whether it goes down to $20, $40, $50, $60, it is irrelevant,” Mr Naimi said in an interview with Middle East Economic Survey late last month.

Prankster Josh Paler Lin recently went undercover with his camera team to follow a homeless man begging next to a freeway on-ramp, to whom he gave $100. Expecting the man to use the money on booze after he was seen stepping foot into a nearby liquor store, Lin and his crew were shocked to observe the man going around a city park handing out food to other homeless individuals, who it was later found didn't even know him.

After filming the man in secret from afar for a few hours, Lin decided to approach him to apologize and explain the situation. The man, surprised to see Lin again, gave him a big hug and thanked him for his generosity. He proceeded to explain how, despite not having a home or much money himself, he gets great joy from sharing with others in need. "There's things money can't buy," the man explained.

The man proceeded to tell his sobering story, which in all reality could happen to any one of us given the perfect storm of harrowing circumstances. "Basically, I was living with my parents," he explained to Lin. My stepdad had cancer, and they had hospice… but the insurance only pays so much. I quit working because I had to be available. So he passed away, and then two weeks later my mother passed away from kidney failure. The building they're in is being sold, the condo, and I all of a sudden found myself homeless. That's been like four months now."

Homelessness is a growing epidemic in America today, with up to 25 percent of homeless people employed but not making enough money to have a place to live. More than 33 percent of homeless people are actually children - the average age of a homeless person is nine years old - and roughly half of all homeless women and children are homeless because they are fleeing domestic abuse.

Yet due to Salman’s own deteriorating health – those close to the palace say the crown prince is suffering from the early stages of dementia – a campaign is growing within Riyadh to bypass Salman and give the throne to Deputy Crown Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, 69, another of the king’s half brothers, should Abdullah be deemed unfit to rule. Both the crown prince and the deputy are seen as identical ideologically, and it is expected that their respected reigns would be short, as “place holders” for the next generation.

“Practically everyone in the state is in unanimous agreement that we will be going forward with either Prince Salman or Prince Muqrin on the throne in the future,” says a Saudi diplomat in Amman, who preferred to remain unnamed due to the sensitivity of the issue. While there is a broad consensus in Riyadh over who should inherit the throne immediately after Abdullah, Saudi insiders and observers say the true intrigue and power struggle is emerging over the appointment of the next crown prince – and with it, the future of the Saudi monarchy.

The prospect of any period of instability is prompting concerns Saudi Arabia would be increasingly vulnerable to challenges from its regional rival, Iran, and from the region-wide conflict with the self-described Islamic State (IS), in which the US-allied monarchy plays a pivotal role. Internally, too, advocates for social change in Saudi Arabia fear instability would create a reflexively conservative political environment that would be inhospitable to their demands.

This is only the second confirmed case in which a wholly digital attack caused physical destruction of equipment. The first case, of course, was Stuxnet, the sophisticated digital weapon the US and Israel launched against control systems in Iran in late 2007 or early 2008 to sabotage centrifuges at a uranium enrichment plant. That attack was discovered in 2010, and since then experts have warned that it was only a matter of time before other destructive attacks would occur. Industrial control systems have been found to be rife with vulnerabilities, though they manage critical systems in the electric grid, in water treatment plants and chemical facilities and even in hospitals and financial networks. A destructive attack on systems like these could cause even more harm than at a steel plant.

It’s not clear when the attack in Germany took place. The report, issued by Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (or BSI), indicates the attackers gained access to the steel mill through the plant’s business network, then successively worked their way into production networks to access systems controlling plant equipment. The attackers infiltrated the corporate network using a spear-phishing attack — sending targeted email that appears to come from a trusted source in order to trick the recipient into opening a malicious attachment or visiting a malicious web site where malware is downloaded to their computer.

Once the attackers got a foothold on one system, they were able to explore the company’s networks, eventually compromising a “multitude” of systems, including industrial components on the production network. “Failures accumulated in individual control components or entire systems,” the report notes. As a result, the plant was “unable to shut down a blast furnace in a regulated manner” which resulted in “massive damage to the system.”

A return to the polls was triggered in December, when the Parliament rejected Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ pro-austerity candidate for president. In a general election, now set for January 25th, the EU-skeptic, anti-austerity, leftist Syriza party is likely to prevail. Syriza captured a 3% lead in the polls following mass public discontent over the harsh austerity measures Athens was forced to accept in return for a €240 billion bailout.

Austerity has plunged the economy into conditions worse than in the Great Depression. As Professor Bill Black observes, the question is not why the Greek people are rising up to reject the barbarous measures but what took them so long.

Greece can regain its sovereignty by defaulting on its debt, abandoning the ECB and the euro, and issuing its own national currency (the drachma) through its own central bank. But that would destabilize the eurozone and might end in its breakup. Will the troika take that risk? 2015 is shaping up to be an interesting year.

The hashtag #OpCharlieHebdo is visible in the video that dedicates the message to: “Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and other terrorists.” It says that the hacktivist group will be going after and shutting down all terrorist accounts on social media in a mission to avenge those killed in the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

Earlier, Anonymous posted a statement on Pastebin, titled: “Message to the enemy of the freedom of speech.” “Freedom of speech has suffered an inhuman assault … Disgusted and also shocked, we cannot fall to our knees. It is our responsibility to react,” the statement says.

The group had successfully attacked many websites in the past, including government, military, religious, and commercial pages. Anonymous’ signature move is to overwhelm the servers with traffic by sending out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which knocks out the websites.

The magazine was temporarily banned by the French government in 1961 and 1966. In 1970 it was banned again for mocking the death of former French President Charles de Gaulle, but this time it took a new name to save itself. It has a relatively low weekly circulation, but is well known for its provocative cartoons, and five of the magazine’s cartoonists were executed in the killings.

The magazine is extremely left-wing in its opinion and completely anti-institution. It mocks politicians, culture and authority figures but it has a special passion for mocking religion – particularly Christianity and Islam. Its cartoons have shown nuns masturbating and popes wearing condoms. The editor, Stephane Charbonnier, who was also killed in the attack, once stated that his magazine would continue its style “until Islam is just as banal as Catholicism.”

Militant Islam practices a ‘takfiri’ doctrine that allows it to brand other Muslims apostates for allegedly going against the faith’s true teachings. A tragic attack on Wednesday took the lives of 12 people, when armed gunmen stormed the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, prompting a citywide manhunt. The magazine had printed cartoons that mocked the Prophet.

Nasrallah went on to say that “Takfiris are the biggest threat to Islam, as a religion [and] as a message.” The Charlie Hebdo terror attack should be taken as “revenge for the honor” of Islam’s prophet, according to a source allegedly belonging to Yemen’s branch of Al-Qaeda, who wrote to several news outlets with the message.

Murder so horrifying, on a pretext so un-Western, that non-Muslims – blinded by grief and rage – turn on Muslims. Blame them. Persecute them. Burn their book, attack their mosques, threaten them in the street, demand their expulsion from Western societies.

Actions that, in turn, scare Western Muslims, isolate them, alienate them. And thus drive some of them to support – and even become – terrorists. Result: terrorists swell their ranks for a civil war they long to provoke non-Muslims into starting.