On Monday sources from Syrian opposition told Arab media that Israeli warplanes destroyed a storage facility with drones and anti-aircraft missiles belonging to Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon. These weapons, considered to be “capable of tilting the strategic balance,” especially threaten Israel’s ability to act freely in airspace of Lebanon, says a report published in pro-Hezbollah Al-Akhbar newspaper.

Israeli authorities have neither denied nor confirmed the attack. Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz only told an Israel Radio interview Monday, that Tel Aviv had a “firm policy of preventing all possible transfers of sophisticated weapons to terrorist organizations,” apparently referring to Hezbollah.

The dissenters are reportedly Germany’s Sabine Lautenschläger, Luxembourg’s Yves Mersch, and more surprisingly France’s Benoît Cœuré, an indication that Paris is still hoping to avoid a breakdown in relations with Berlin over the management of EMU. The reality is that a full six months after Mr Draghi first talked loosely of a €1 trillion blitz to head off deflation risks, almost nothing has actually happened. The ECB balance sheet has shrunk by over €100 billion.

Once you have launched a monetary union, you have automatically launched a political union too. That is what EMU means. The euro means a single government and a European superstate, and implicitly the abolition of Germany as a fully sovereign independent state. To pretend otherwise is intellectually infantile. To resist this truth - yet to proceed doggedly with EMU anyway - merely condemns Europe to rolling crises and permanent depression.

Mr Draghi is absolutely right about this, which is why those of us who were eurosceptics at Maastricht – and I wrote the leader for the Daily Telegraph on the night of that infamous treaty exactly 23 years ago – always opposed EMU with inflexible determination, and why we have great sympathy for those in Germany who wish to pull out of EMU in order to save their own sovereign state before it is too late.

Mr Weidmann [head of the Bundesbank] is equally right in thinking – as he appears to do – that the headlong charge towards debt pooling and de facto fiscal union by monetary means is a mortal threat to German democracy and the rule of law.

The stakes are very high. A showdown must surely come within months, one way or another.

Traditionalists don’t argue with the principle – they argue with how these driven people have gone about gaining control over the language, what they see as offensive and who the next victims are.

Traditionalists also add that when this process is applied to children from the earliest years, it is no less than social engineering and when applied to adults, it’s simply censorship.

Here are some examples of the profound wisdom of these people:

-*- American historian and educator, Diane Ravitch, in 2003, quoted guidelines by New York publishing houses for prospective writers:

"Topics not to include are: abortion, death or disease, criminals, magic, politics, religion, unemployment, weapons, violence, poverty, divorce, slavery, alcohol or addiction. Women cannot be depicted as mothers or caregivers or doing household work. Men cannot be depicted as lawyers, doctors or plumbers. African citizens are not to be portrayed in a negative light. None of these things can be themes in any publications handled by us."

-*-The Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work, in the UK, believes that "non-fluency in English should not be used as grounds to refuse employment, even for an interpreter or air traffic controller". That means you don’t need English any more to become an English interpreter – you learn it on the job. An under age criminal must now be called a "child at risk", so that he does not become traumatized by the word "hooligan".

PCers reject the criticism that they are the new "Thought Police", that they’re only happy in a "smilingly bland, uniform, anti-intellectual, barely literate mediocrity", that they want to "deliberately re-write history in terms of currently fashionable ethnic and sexual minorities" and that they want to create a "new, officially approved reality".

Instead, they insist they’re working towards a "philosophy of inclusion" and an "uncritical tolerance" for all, whatever their "personal orientation" and irrespective of whether they are terrorists, drug addicts, paedophiles, dropouts… Everyone’s welcome in the Brave New PC World.

It said that if cuts in departmental spending continue at the same pace, £21 billion worth of cuts to welfare or tax rises will be needed by 2019/20. Paul Johnson, the head of the IFS, admitted that the precise nature of planned cuts had not yet been spelt out, and stressed that it would be wrong to describe them as "unachievable".

But he said voters would be justified in asking whether the Chancellor was planning "a fundamental reimagining of the role of the state". And he added: "One thing is for sure. If we move in anything like this direction, whilst continuing to protect health and pensions, the role and shape of the state will have changed beyond recognition."

The classified meetings were reportedly held several weeks ago and included officials from both the State Department and White House, according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, which first reported on the meetings. The possibility of sanctioning Israel for its ongoing construction sends a signal that the Obama administration is willing to go further in its denunciations of Israel than any previous White House.

“I’m obviously not going to comment one way or another on reported internal deliberations,” she said. “We’ve made clear our position on settlement activity publicly and that hasn’t changed.”

The study, published as a research letter in the journal of the American Geophysical Union, was written by Daniel Griffin of the University of Minnesota and Kevin J Anchukaitis of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. By measuring tree rings from nearly 300 blue oaks, and comparing those measurements with data from older trees such as giant sequoias, scientists were able to generate estimates of rainfall for centuries.

As the San Jose Mercury News reported: "The researchers took core samples, which don't harm the living trees, of oaks as old as 500 years and oak logs dating back more than 700 years," the University of Minnesota's Griffin said. "And they sanded down the wood with extremely fine-grain sandpaper, magnifying the rings 40 times under a microscope and measuring them to within one one-thousandth of a millimeter." The scientists then used similar data in the North American Drought Atlas to calculate temperature and rainfall conditions.

"Although there are 37 times over the past 1,200 years when there were three-year dry periods in California, no period had as little rainfall and as hot of temperatures as 2012-14, the scientists concluded," the Mercury News reported. Meanwhile, Californians still hope that this week's storms herald the beginning of a recovery.

The Declaration calls for governments to come together to employ all available technology to track near-Earth asteroids as well as the global adoption of Asteroid Day on June 30 2015 – the anniversary of the asteroid impact at Tunguska, Siberia, which destroyed 800 square miles in 1908.

Lord Rees said: “The ancients were correct in their belief that the heavens and the motion of astronomical bodies affect life on Earth - just not in the way they imagined. Sometimes those heavenly bodies run into Earth. This is why we must make it our mission to find asteroids before they find us.”

The latest one people are talking about is the Forex, or FX, a decentralized foreign exchange market that trades in the world’s currencies. The exchange in the City of London controls around 40% of the FX, amounting to its biggest market on the planet. The daily rate for a given currency is referred to by traders as “the fix” – a nicely ironic term considering that the fix has been in, literally, on the Forex exchange in London for at least 10 years.

The majority of the $5.3 trillion that sloshes through the Forex every day comes from large institutional and government investors moving their money around. In this role, the FX helps to guarantee the savings of working people throughout our "globalized” world.

Legal settlements ironed out by regulators in the US, UK and Switzerland reveal that FX traders from mega-banks JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, RBS, Citibank, UBS and HSBC got caught working together to ensure they wouldn’t face as much risk in this historically volatile market. The main way they did this was for a number of traders from different banks to put their purchases “through during the benchmark-setting window in an attempt to move the daily rate up or down.”

And there are now two systems of justice in America … one for the super-rich, and one for everyone else. But runaway inequality has another effect as well… it’s undermining America’s geopolitical power in relation to the rest of the world.

Sadly, bad government policies, coupled with systematic crime and manipulation by the big banks, are fueling rampant inequality… turning the United States from a leading power and shining city on the hill into a banana republic.

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…