The basic party platform of the Jewish Home says the party is opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and states that Jerusalem “is the eternal capital of the Jewish people and the state of Israel solely, and will not be divided.” The party’s platform also says that the settlements in the West Bank are important for Israel’s security, should not be uprooted in the future and should remain under Israel’s sovereignty.

In terms of religious life in Israel, the Jewish Home says that it will “fight for the Jewish identity of the state on every level: culture, character, personal status, society and legislation, as a Jewish and democratic state.”

He added that "unconventional measures might entail the purchase of a variety of assets, one of which is sovereign bonds." He also said the ECB is "committed to scale the total magnitude of our measures - lending operations as well as outright purchases". The ECB is planning to increase its liabilities by around €1 trillion from €3 trillion to €4 trillion over the next 18 months, a similar level to that seen in 2012 when the bank stepped in to calm market speculation that Italy and Spain could need an EU bailout.

But buying up the bonds of eurozone treasuries - a process known as "quantitative easing" but which is essentially the same as printing money - would be a new step for the ECB. The bank has hitherto only bought private sector bonds and any new decision would require the support of a majority of its 24-member Governing Council.

Last week, the German Council of Economic Experts, which advises Angela Merkel's government and the Bundestag, warned that the ECB "should avoid massively expanding its balance sheet as long as it does not forecast deflation in the euro area."

Critics of the bank also believe that by loosening the conditions and collateral requirements it attaches to loans, the ECB's portfolio is becoming increasingly risky.

Berlin has achieved a prominent position within the framework of the negotiations and is using this to play a more powerful role in global policy-making. A form of renewed cooperation with Iran, along the lines of "transformation through convergence" strategy, which had been used against the Soviet Union, is considered a probable result of these negotiations.

Test runs for this sort of cooperation have long since been made - in the war against the Islamic State (IS), with US bombers serving as the air force of Iranian commanded militias. US President Barack Obama has suggested the possibility of an expansion of this sort of cooperation.

The biggest city in South America has been stuck in a spiraling water crisis since the summer rains failed to fall last December and January — the driest summer in 84 years. An exceptionally dry winter since then has compounded the problem.

Parts of the Jaguari Reservoir, the highest in what is called the Cantareira System, were so dried out that plants had begun growing on the rocks around a blue pleasure boat, marooned near a wooden landing dock hundreds of yards from any water. A stagnant brown puddle did not trouble the sluice gates of a dam. Now, as scientists debate whether Amazon deforestation is to blame, residents across São Paulo complain of regular shutoffs to their water supply while the state government and the water company deny that rationing is going on.

And despite rain in recent days, the water level keeps falling. Cantareira System reservoirs are at a tenth of their normal level. And a full summer’s rainfall — if it should occur in the season beginning next month — will not be enough to refill them. But critics say the state government, which controls the water company, played down the crisis because of October’s elections, in which the state’s governor, Geraldo Alckmin, was reelected. Critics say SABESP has failed to keep the population properly informed and to introduce enough effective measures to reduce consumption.

Also, the bad news, because as the California’s Department of Conservation’s Chief Deputy Director, Jason Marshall, told NBC Bay Area, California state officials allowed oil and gas companies to pump up to 3 billion gallons (call it 70 million barrels) of oil fracking-contaminated waste water into formerly clean aquifiers, aquifiers which at least on paper are supposed to be off-limits to that kind of activity, and are protected by the government's EPA - an agency which, it appears, was richly compensated by the same oil and gas companies to look elsewhere.

“It’s inexcusable,” said Hollin Kretzmann, at the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco. “At a time when California is experiencing one of the worst droughts in history, we’re allowing oil companies to contaminate what could otherwise be very useful ground water resources for irrigation and for drinking. It’s possible these aquifers are now contaminated irreparably.”

The mount is so sensitive - as the site of Solomon's temple and the rock from which the prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven - that Israeli leaders left it under Palestinian and Jordanian control after they captured the Old City in 1967. Yet, at a time when the Mideast is in flames, right-wing Israelis, including cabinet officials and parliament members, are agitating to change the Temple Mount's status.

The tension threatens to spark another Palestinian uprising - individual terrorist acts against Jews are multiplying. The issue has become a rallying cry for Palestinian radicals, including Hamas. It is also shaking Israel's relations with key Arab allies, such as Jordan, and undermining Israeli hopes for new cooperation with moderate Sunni states in the fight against the Islamic State.

In the worst case, a Temple Mount explosion could put Israel at odds with the entire Muslim world. The national struggle between Israelis and Palestinians could shift into a wider Arab-Jewish religious war. What's so surprising is that the situation has been allowed to deteriorate this far.

More to the point, the Israelis pushing for the "religious freedom" to pray on the holy site really want something else.

Read the websites of groups such as the Temple Institute, and you see that the goal is to rebuild a "third" temple on the locale of the second one, which was destroyed under the Romans. That would mean pushing Palestinians off the Mount.

During the Thursday meeting, attended by Netanyahu and US Secretary of State John Kerry, Jordan’s King Abdullah II expressed dissatisfaction regarding the Jewish Knesset members who had visited the Temple Mount in recent weeks, telling Netanyahu that their presence was inconsistent with the prime minister’s public assurances of maintaining the status quo of the compound, known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif. In response, Netanyahu reportedly told the king he was unable to restrict the movements of MKs, according to news site NRG.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who was invited to attend the talks discussing the recent surge in violence in Jerusalem, refused to participate due to Netanyahu’s presence, according to the report, which cited an anonymous Palestinian source who spoke to the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds al-Araby.

Netanyahu has publicly accused Palestinian Authority officials of disseminating irresponsible and false incitement against Israel, straining relations between Jerusalem and Ramallah.

“What we need is not just recognition [of a Palestinian state]. We need the building of a Palestinian state that can live next to the Israeli one in peace and security,” she said before the council meeting. The meeting is the first one to be chaired by Mogherini who entered her post at the start of November, replacing Catherine Ashton.

On Sunday Netanyahu spoke with Steinmeier against European moves to unilaterally recognize Palestine as a state. “The calls that have been coming from European countries, from European parliaments, to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state pushed peace backwards,” Netanyahu said. “They don’t tell the Palestinians that they have to make their peace with a nation-state for the Jewish people. They just give the Palestinians a nation-state,” Netanyahu said.

Such moves give Palestinians the message that they do not need to make the concessions necessary for peace, Netanyahu said.

"As part of our ongoing efforts to plan and be prepared for any contingency, it is necessary to have these resources in place in advance of any announcement of the grand jury’s decision," Governor Jay Nixon said in a statement. The order also puts the St Louis County Police Department, rather than police in Ferguson, Missouri, in charge of policing protests.

Residents of Ferguson, which saw weeks of sometimes violent protests following the August 9 shooting dead of 18-year-old Michael Brown, are braced for the possibility of more unrest, particularly if the grand jury decides not to criminally charge Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. The past two days have seen protests around the area in anticipation of the grand jury's report. Several dozen demonstrators took to the streets on Monday in Clayton, Missouri, where a grand jury is meeting.

We live at a time when corporations systematically collect our voiceprints and our televisions watch us. We live at a time when reporters that try to dig into the misdeeds of the government have their computers hacked, and when nearly one out of every three Americans has a file in the FBI’s master criminal database. The control freaks that run our society are absolutely obsessed with watching, tracking, recording and monitoring virtually everything that we do. We truly are becoming a “1984” society, and if we continue on the path that we are currently on eventually our world will be transformed into something more hellish than anything that George Orwell ever imagined.

These days, virtually every type of government surveillance is taken to the extreme. For example, there is definitely nothing wrong with normal undercover police work. But these days, almost every single federal government agency conducts extensive undercover operations. At this point, even the IRS and the Department of Agriculture rely on undercover operatives to spy on ordinary citizens. So the next time you are visiting a tax preparer, buying a yacht or attending a peaceful political protest, the person standing next to you just might be a government spy…

And just like in “1984”, most of the population has come to accept the status quo as the new “normal”. So is there any hope that we will wake up, or will our society continue to march toward oblivion?

This followed a 7.3 percent contraction in the previous quarter caused by a rise in national sales tax. It ran counter to economists forecasts for a 2.1 percent rebound. Leaders from the G20 group of countries agreed a package of measures on Sunday they said would add an extra 2.1 percentage points to growth over five years.

But financial markets focused on Japan's economic downturn, which set the stage for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to delay an increase in the sales tax and call a snap election. "It's a bit of shock for the market, because people believed that the Bank of Japan had everything under control."