Setting aside the day for coffee and cake with family and friends has been ingrained in German society for a century. The country’s ban on stores being open, which stretches back to 1919 during the Weimar Republic, was enshrined in the West German constitution after World War II and is still protected. Labor unions and churches oppose any effort to relax rules.

“As few employees as possible should have to work on a Sunday,” Hans Ulrich Anke, the head of the Evangelical Church in Germany, said in a statement. “Pure economic and competition interests must take second place to that.”

O'Donnell reported the brutal attack by two Palestinian boys in a Jerusalem synagogue, killing four rabbis and injuring seven. In fact, it was a massacre, with blood everywhere, including on the Torah – but she called the synagogue a "contested religious site." Contested? Neither the Har Nof synagogue nor the Har Nof neighborhood of Jerusalem is contested.

Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people, has been the capital of the Jewish people through most of history, and was declared the capital when Israel became a state; therefore, the neighborhood and the synagogue are indisputably legal. If it is contested, it is only a war tactic by jihadists, who will use any method to garner supporters when they fear the possibility of loss by modern warfare.

Does O'Donnell also contest the Christian churches or Bahi'a, Buddhist, or Hindu temples in Israel? Does she contest the Al Aqsa mosque, over which dominion was ceded by General Moshe Dayan, whether out of generosity or naïveté and his hope for peace with barbarians. How could he have known that the courtyard would someday be a soccer field for boys… Perhaps he should have been more aware of Islam's bloody 1400-year history!

It is the latest in a string of admissions by BBC figures that it has been guilty of left-wing bias, and comes weeks after the Government accused the Today programme of misrepresenting its spending cuts. Mr Humphrys, 71, told the Sunday Times magazine that the corporation is now facing an ‘existential crisis greater than it’s ever seen’ because ‘people, serious, thoughtful people, talk seriously and thoughtfully about the future of the BBC in a way that they haven’t before.’

The veteran presenter said the last Labour government’s controversial immigration policy was not sufficiently ‘interrogated’ by the BBC, adding: ‘The Labour government underestimated by a factor of 10 the number of people who were going to move from Poland.’ He said the BBC was ‘frightened of appearing racist’, adding: ‘We were too institutionally nervous of saying, isn’t immigration getting a little bit out of hand? And can we be critical of multiculturalism?’

Germany has been marking two anniversaries this year — one a celebration, the other a painful duty. The 25th anniversary of the Mauerfall (as Germans call the fall of the Berlin Wall) is one of those rare events in German history about which they can feel unequivocally happy. The centenary of the First World War is, naturally, a lot more awkward. There’s scant affection here in Germany for the monocled militarists who led the Second Reich to destruction, but a hundred years after Kaiser Wilhelm invaded Belgium the jackboot is on the other foot.

Now the Germans are the good guys, the financial saviours of a debt-ridden continent — and Europe’s shared security looks increasingly uncertain in the face of Russian militarism. Its former foes are now wondering if she might be persuaded to flex her muscles once more.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Nato secretary general, has been among the considered voices calling for Germany to start punching its diplomatic weight. ‘Germany is a normal country today, with the kinds of rights and duties other countries have,’ he said earlier this year. With Putin pushing westwards, and possibly menacing Nato states, Europe needs Germany like never before — not just as an economic power-house, but as a military presence too. Europeans no longer fear Germany. But do the Germans still fear themselves?

The allegations are especially serious because Barclays and Deutsche Bank, among other banks, are being investigated by the DFS over the foreign exchange market. Using algorithms in trading systems is common practice at banks, but employing them as part of an effort to profit from manipulating forex rates could suggest the problem was more widespread than a select few traders.

Neither Barclays nor Deutsche Bank were among the six banks that so far paid £2.7 billion to settle claims with UK, US and Swiss regulators last month.

The French statistics agency INSEE said core inflation fell to -0.2 percent in November from a year earlier, the first time it has turned negative since modern data began. The measure strips out energy costs and is designed to “observe deeper trends” in the economy. The price goes far beyond falling oil costs and is the clearest evidence to date that the eurozone’s second biggest economy is succumbing to powerful deflationary forces.

“Eurozone deflation is now inevitable. There is no way around it,” said Andrew Roberts, at RBS. “We think yields on German 10-year Bunds will fall to 0.42 percent next year.” “The ECB is presiding over a deflationary disaster. They need to act fast and aggressively or else markets will start to attack Italian debt. Italy’s nominal GDP is falling faster than their borrowing costs and that is pushing them towards a debt spiral,” he added.

The Bank of Italy’s governor, Ignazio Visco, said any further falls in prices at this stage could have “extremely grave consequences for economies with very high public debt levels, such as Italy”.

Indeed, the number of Americans relying on government assistance to obtain basic food may be higher now than during the Great Depression. The only reason we don’t see “soup lines” like we did in the 30s is because of the massive food stamp program. And while apologists for government and bank policy point to unemployment as being better than during the 1930s, even that claim is debatable.

Quantitative easing won’t help … it will only make things worse. This isn’t an issue of left versus right … it’s corruption and bad policies which help the super-elite but are causing a depression for the vast majority of the American people. If a patient is bleeding out, doctors have to suture the wounds before they decide whether to give more blood or to taper off the amount of transfusions. But Europe has never treated the wounds … As we noted in 2011, failing to prosecute financial fraud – on either side of the Atlantic – is extending the economic crisis.

In 2012, we pointed out that European (and American) governments were encouraging bank manipulation and fraud to cover up insolvency … trying to put lipstick on a pig.

China would need to satisfy the Washington-based lender’s economic benchmarks and get the support of most of the other 187 member countries. The Asian nation is likely to pass both tests, said Eswar Prasad, who until 2006 worked at the IMF, including spells as heads of its financial studies and China divisions.

“It will certainly help China’s objective of making the renminbi a more widely-used currency,” said Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Renminbi is China’s official name for the yuan. Approval hinges partly on whether the IMF reverses its 2010 decision that the yuan wasn’t “freely usable.” There’s growing evidence that the currency may now pass this test, after already qualifying on the IMF’s other condition of being a large exporter.

The risk of an economic slowdown spreading from Europe’s peripheral nations to the region’s core countries, a sharp slowing of growth in China, and the possibility that US interest rates are hiked before the world’s biggest economy is ready were also on HSBC’s list.

The risk that the European Central Bank fails to launch “full-blown” quantitative easing was cited as another threat, as was the potential for “severe” strength of the US dollar, which would spur a sell-off in commodity markets that are all priced in the currency. Hyperinflation in Japan and a sudden evaporation of market liquidity also posed risks, HSBC said.

Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper, analyzing the pope’s remarks, concluded he believed animals have a place in the afterlife. It drew an analogy to comforting words that Pope Paul VI was said to have once told a distraught boy whose dog had died: “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.”

The news accounts of Francis’ remarks were welcomed by groups like the Humane Society of the United States and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who saw them as a repudiation of conservative Roman Catholic theology that says animals cannot go to heaven because they have no souls. “My inbox got flooded,” said Christine Gutleben, senior director of faith outreach at the Humane Society, the largest animal protection group in the United States. “Almost immediately, everybody was talking about it.”

Charles Camosy, an author and professor of Christian ethics at Fordham University, said it was difficult to know precisely what Francis meant, since he spoke “in pastoral language that is not really meant to be dissected by academics.” But asked whether the remarks had caused a new debate on whether animals have souls, suffer and go to heaven, Mr Camosy said, “In a word: absolutely.”

In his relatively short tenure as leader of the world’s one billion Roman Catholics since taking over from Benedict XVI, Francis, 77, has repeatedly caused a stir among conservatives in the church. He has suggested more lenient positions than his predecessor on issues like homosexuality, single motherhood and unwed couples. So to some extent, it was not a surprise that Francis, an Argentine Jesuit who took his papal name from St Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals, would suggest that they have a place in heaven.

What they won’t say is that it took a record-breaking $20.7 million of advertising, intended to misinform and confuse voters, for them to buy this “victory.” On the very day the judge denied voters in Oregon the right to have their votes counted, the pesticide and junk food makers were buying up seats on Capitol Hill, to make the case that no state should be allowed to pass a law requiring mandatory labeling of GMOs.

They are doing everything in their power to hide the truth about the toxic food they are producing, and the poisons they are unleashing into our environment. Just as we will continue to do everything in our power to expose their dirty, toxic secrets.

The fact is, they are losing. Vermont has passed a solid, enforceable GMO labeling law. Sales of organics continue to outpace sales of their GMO junk food. Companies like Coca-Cola and General Mills are struggling. Last week Hershey's announced it will remove genetically engineered high fructose corn syrup from its brand-name products. The United Nations has declared that small farmers, not Monsanto, will feed the world.

The Marxist vision of society has been disproved many times, always at epic human cost. However, his doctrine that productive forces propel history has stood the test of time – and is invaluable for an understanding of the current predicament of the European Union.

It elegantly explains why European Monetary Union was destined to fail. The state socialists and former communists who invented the euro never got to grips with this aspect of Marxist thought.

Only Conservatives with an intelligent appreciation of economics and history – an enlightened congregation that included Margaret Thatcher, Oliver Letwin, Peter Lilley, Tim Congdon, John Redwood, Nicholas Ridley and Alan Walters – grasped that the EMU would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, and that it was folly to construct a single currency before the political conditions were in place.