What the US will give Cuba

• Diplomatic opening: The US will take steps toward restoring diplomatic ties with Cuba, severed since 1961. Embassy in Havana: This will include the goal of reopening a US embassy in Havana in the coming months.

• Release alleged Cuban spies: The US will release three Cubans who were convicted of espionage and imprisoned in the US.

• Easing business and travel restrictions: The US will make it easier for Americans to obtain licenses to do business in Cuba, and to travel to the island.

• Easing banking restrictions: Americans will be able to use credit and debit cards while in Cuba.

• Higher remittance limits: Americans will be able to send up to $2000 per year to family members in Cuba. Small-scale imports of Cuban cigars and alcohol: US travelers will be able to import up to $400 in goods from Cuba, including $100 in alcohol and tobacco products.

• Review of basis for sanctions: Secretary of State John Kerry has been ordered to review Cuba's status as a "state sponsor of terrorism." If his review determines that Cuba no longer deserves that status, that will be a first step towards lifting at least some US sanctions.

What Cuba will give the US

• Release Alan Gross: US contractor Alan Gross had been imprisoned in Cuba for the last five years on charges of attempting to undermine the Cuban government.

• Release political prisoners: Cuba will release 53 political prisoners from a list provided by the United States.

• Increased internet access: Cuba will allow its citizens increased access to the internet.

• Access by the UN: Cuba will allow officials from the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to return to its territory.

After disappearing to Colombia for the winter, 10 of the tagged warblers returned in April 2014. The team was in the field observing them when they received advance warning of the tornadoes. "We evacuated ourselves to the waffle house in Caryville, Tennessee, for the one day that the storm was really bad," Dr Streby said. Elsewhere in the US the storm had more drastic consequences. At least 84 tornadoes caused 35 fatalities and more than $1 billion (£0.6 billion) in property damage. After the storm had blown over, the team recaptured five of the warblers and removed the geolocators.

These are tiny devices weighing about half a gram, which measure light levels. Based on the timing and length of the days they record, these gadgets allow scientists to calculate and track the approximate location of migratory birds. In this case, all five indicated that the birds had taken unprecedented evasive action, beginning one to two days ahead of the storm's arrival.

"The warblers in our study flew at least 1,500km (932 miles) in total," Dr Streby said. They escaped just south of the tornadoes' path - and then went straight home again. By 2 May, all five were back in their nesting area. Remarkably, the warblers' evacuation commenced while the closest tornado was still hundreds of miles away. Weather conditions in the nesting area were still nothing out of the ordinary.

The new study is the first time that migratory birds have been seen taking such dramatic evasive action. "We know that birds can alter their route to avoid things during regular migration," Dr Streby explained. "But it hadn't been shown until our study that they would leave once the migration is over, and they'd established their breeding territory, to escape severe weather." Dr Hewson agreed the finding was "an eye opener".

As Obama put it, at their March meeting in the Vatican, "Pope Francis issued a personal appeal to me" to enter into talks with President Raul Castro to negotiate the release of Alan Gross, the American humanitarian worker imprisoned on the island for five years, while the pontiff urged Castro to pursue the return of three Cubans jailed in the US with the White House. After initial discussions indicated a mutual openness toward resolutions, a November meeting of both sides at the Vatican sealed the agreement that saw Gross returned to the US this morning (along with a long-jailed US intelligence operative) and the Cubans likewise freed to the island.

"In particular," Obama said in closing his speech, "I want to thank Pope Francis, whose moral example shows us the importance of pursuing the world as it should be, rather than simply settling for the world as it is."

And when you throw in international sanctions, wild money printing by the Central Bank of Russia and unprecedented capital flight, you get the ingredients for an almost perfect storm. But those of us living in the western world should not be too smug about what is happening in Russia, because the nightmare that is unfolding over there is just a preview of the economic chaos that will soon envelop the whole world. So far this year, the Russian ruble has fallen nearly 50 percent against the US dollar. That is a monumental shift. And as the collapse of the ruble has accelerated in recent days, we are seeing scenes in Russia that are reminiscent of the Weimar Republic.

In a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding, the Central Bank of Russia made an astounding move. Last night it raised its key interest rate from 10.5 percent all the way up to 17 percent. It was hoped that this desperate move would keep the ruble from plummeting any further. And it did work for a few minutes, but then the collapse of the ruble resumed.

Well, the biggest reason for the freefall of the ruble is the fact that the Central Bank of Russia just printed up about 625 billion rubles and gave it to their friends at Rosneft. Rosneft is an absolutely massive oil company that is controlled by the Russian government. For months, Rosneft has been asking for a bailout (sound familiar?) to refinance loans that can no longer be rolled over with western banks because of economic sanctions.

And on Friday they got one. In an attempt to quietly slip this massive injection of new money past everyone, Rosneft issued 625 billion rubles worth of new bonds just before the weekend and the Central Bank of Russia gobbled most of those new bonds up with freshly created money. Unfortunately for Rosneft and the Central Bank of Russia, the rest of the world took notice…

So that is what led to the panic selling that we witnessed on Monday. Meanwhile, money is being pulled out of Russia at an absolutely staggering pace. Sadly, it isn’t just oil producing nations such as Russia that are going to be devastated by the coming crisis. Eventually, the entire globe is going to feel the pain.

Last week was the worst week for global financial markets in three years, and so many of the exact same patterns that we witnessed just prior to the great financial crisis of 2008 are happening once again. We have been living in a false bubble of relative stability for the past couple of years, but now time is running out. The next great financial crisis is rapidly approaching, and 2015 promises to be the most “interesting” year that we have seen in ages.

If interest rate hikes and interventions continue to have no sway on stabilizing the ruble, the Bank may be forced to enact more radical and less orthodox financial tools.

“The next option, and sort of the nuclear option in finance, is to impose capital controls. That would be any combination of withdrawal limits on the amount of money people can take from their bank accounts, transfer limits of how much people can convert into other currencies, and how much people can send abroad,” Yuval Weber, Associate Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, told RT. So far, both the Central Bank and the Russian President have denied capital controls will be enforced.

Still, White House officials acknowledged there were no guarantees Russia's economic woes and another round of sanctions would compel Vladimir Putin to curtail aggressive actions in Ukraine. The Russian economy has been in a downward spiral for months, but Putin has managed to maintain political support at home.

Russia analysts say it's unlikely Putin will shift his calculus on Ukraine solely because of sour economic indicators or another round of sanctions. But Matthew Rojanksy, a scholar at the Wilson Center, said that if the currency crisis starts hurting the Russian public's ability to buy food or heat homes, Putin could be forced to act in order to stem a political crisis.

"The logic is not that Putin is going to be persuaded suddenly that he's wrong," Rojanksy said. "What is going to happen is the ground is going to shift under Putin."

“There is no doubt that the inscription is one of the most important artifacts ever found in relation to the Bible,” Eran Arie, curator of Israelite and Persian periods at the Israel Museum, wrote in the exhibit catalog.

The breaks in the stone neither obstruct nor obscure the “bytdvd,” or House of David, inscription, which remains “absolutely intact and clear,” said Ira Spar, professor of history and ancient studies at Ramapo College in New Jersey and a research Assyriologist at the Metropolitan Museum. Epigraphers and biblical historians agree almost unanimously that the letters “bytdvd” refer to the House of King David, according to Spar.

And Hanukkah is focused on a particular location: what is today called the Temple Mount, the peak of the Moriah mountain where the great Temples stood for nearly 1000 years. Hanukkah was the liberation movement of the People of Israel, the grass-roots effort of a nation seeking to throw off the yoke of foreign culture that strove to erase the very roots of Jewish civilization.

Could it be that we need the spirit of the Maccabees today? Look what is happening on the Temple Mount, the very place that our ancestors fought for and wrested from foreign control. It is time that we awaken to the calling of the Maccabees. The time has come for the Jewish people to do more than just lighting candles and exchanging presents.

We must prepare to ascend to our destiny on Mount Moriah, and wrest it from the hands of those who so clearly seek our annihilation. Like our Maccabean ancestors, we must once again light the candles of the menorah on that holy mountain, and thereby illuminate the whole world with the light of love and knowledge. That is our true destiny, and the real meaning of Hanukkah.

"The problem is that Lerner didn't follow the right procedural course in challenging it, a Commonwealth Court panel found in a ruling issued [recently]. And so, the state judges determined, he's stuck with that unfounded tax tab," PennLive.com reported. Initially, the report said, Lerner tried to address the appeals process without a lawyer - a near-impossibility these days for most people because of the overly bureaucratic tax system - after the city filed a complaint against him in 2009. Then, city officials alleged that he owed more than $200,000 in unpaid business privilege, wage and net profit taxes for the years 2003 and 2006. However, the figure was not based on any factual information.

As further reported by PennLive.com:

Philadelphia has a policy of sending out tax delinquency notices with fictional "jeopardy assessments." Those assessments are not based on any actual tax determination, and are set deliberately high to induce the targeted taxpayer to contact the city's revenue department to determine the true amount of tax owed, Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt wrote in the Commonwealth Court opinion on the Lerner case.

When an attorney whom Lerner eventually retained asked Reynolds whether the jeopardy assessment "is just something you make up to scare the taxpayers to come in," Reynolds responded, "Basically, yes."

Nicholas Kristof notes at the New York Times that inequality in the US is worse than it was in apartheid South Africa: The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data. The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid. (Whites in America on average own almost 18 times as much as blacks; in South Africa in 1970, the ratio was about 15 times.)

Indeed, economist and inequality expert Thomas Piketty notes that – according to an important measure – inequality in America today is the worst in world history: For those who work for a living, the level of inequality in the US – writes Piketty – is “… probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world …”

In other words, there might have been some squalid country in the distant past where the disparity between people without any job and the king was higher than between a jobless American and the top fatcat in the US. But the spread between the American worker and the American oligarch is the greatest in world history. Indeed, inequality in America has become so extreme that the “99% versus the 1%” meme is grossly inaccurate … because it’s really the .01% versus the 99.99%.

The cause of America’s runaway inequality? The Wall Street Journal notes: Many aspects of the recovery, and the Federal Reserve’s stimulus policies, have benefited the rich over others.

The 20 page instruction leaflet for party members was produced in November 1937 by the Heimatwerk organisation of the Saxony branch of the Nazi Party. The Heimatwerk was formed the previous year and billed itself as the promoter of 'Saxon Germanic culture as a shining example of true Germanness.' It was never intended for publication but distributed to party functionaries to see that the population buckled down to the new way of doing things.

The Nazi guide to Christmas starts off by telling followers that 'no festival is as German as Christmas' and then gives instructions about how many baubles should be placed on the tree. The swastika is 'firmly recommended' to replace a fairy or an angel at the top. Because Nazism viewed organised religion as a competitor - and therefore an enemy - of the movement, its disciples were told that it wasn't really a Christian celebration at all.

The manuscript goes on: 'The festival has been introduced against the wishes of the Church. Priests had to reinterpret it in a Christian light, in their favour, later on. The deep mystery of the German Christmas can only be understood by those who feel its originality and authenticity.'

This was part of the Nazi hijacking of Christmas, turning it into a form of pagan worship in which Germanic myth and legends became central to the celebrations. 'Maria is the German mother,' says the manuscript, 'and Jesus Santa Claus is no longer located in the crib, but will be relocated in a cradle to stand for the constant renewal of the German people.'

Thus it was not the Three Wise Men 'but the German workers and peasants who flock to him!' said the guide discovered in the archives of the Institute of Saxon History and Folklore in Dresden. Presents, parents were advised, should be part of a game of hide-and-seek so that the 'entire festival will be celebrated without Christ, but as a Germanic-fertility jubilee.'

Hitler, who was the Messiah to so many Germans, was indeed to become the new God of the German people. A prayer was suggested for the family to say together: 'We spent Christmas in the field, during combat, with the Germans. One was always with us… He is still with us. We greet him!' Him is not meant to be Jesus, but Hitler, the 'Saviour of the Germans.'

Privately, fissures emerged over fears that the UN initiative could inadvertently prop up Syrian President Bashar al Assad. The war continued to rage on Monday, with an al Qaeda-linked rebel group, the Nusra Front, saying it captured two strategic military bases from the Assad regime in Syria’s northwest after three years of failed attempts.