USA - It’s no coincidence that during the same week in which the US Supreme Court heard arguments in Yates vs United States, a case in which a Florida fisherman is being threatened with 20 years’ jail time for throwing fish that were too small back into the water, Florida police arrested a 90-year-old man twice for violating an ordinance that prohibits feeding the homeless in public. Both cases fall under the umbrella of overcriminalization, that phenomenon in which everything is rendered illegal and everyone becomes a lawbreaker. As I make clear in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, this is what happens when bureaucrats run the show, and the rule of law becomes little more than a cattle prod for forcing the citizenry to march in lockstep with the government.

USA - A new study from Princeton spells bad news for American democracy — namely, that it no longer exists. Asking “who really rules?” researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I Page argue that over the past few decades America’s political system has slowly transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where wealthy elites wield most power. Using data drawn from over 1,800 different policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, the two conclude that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of or even against the will of the majority of voters. “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy,” they write, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

UK - HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss bank UBS and US banks JP Morgan Chase and Citibank have all been fined. A separate probe into Barclays is continuing. The UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the US regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued the fines. Separately, the Swiss regulator, FINMA, has penalised UBS 134 million Swiss francs. Barclays, which had been expected to announce a similar deal to the other banks, said it would not be settling at this time. The massive market, in which $5.3 trillion worth of currencies are traded daily, dwarfs the stock and bond markets. About 40% of the world's dealing is estimated to go through trading rooms in London.

UK - The foreign exchange market is not easy to manipulate. But it is still possible for traders to change the value of a currency in order to make a profit. As it is a 24-hour market, it is not easy to see how much the market is worth on a given day. Institutions find it useful to take a snapshot of how much is being bought and sold. This happens every day in the 30 seconds before and after 16:00 in London and the result is known as the 4pm fix, or just the fix.

ISRAEL - The American-born rabbi and Temple Mount activist who was shot by an Arab jihadist on October 29 continues to recover in a Jerusalem hospital, but his supporters are accusing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of failing to support the rabbi’s cause. The rabbi has advocated for Jewish prayer rights on the Temple Mount, considered Judaism’s most holy place, for more than 20 years as chairman of the Temple Mount Heritage Foundation. WND reported on November 2 that 14 other Temple Mount activists besides Glick were the targets of threats by radical Muslims posted on the Internet. They posted a graphic showing the pictures of 15 activists, with a caption in Hebrew that reads: “We, the Muslims, will not allow anyone to touch Al Aqsa. Your actions are liable to drag the entire region into war. The Al Aqsa mosque is for Muslims only, and we will not allow you to control it.”

ISRAEL - Almost 40% of the Jewish population in Israel believes in changing government policy surrounding Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount - even at the cost of bloodshed, according to a survey by the "Peace Index" published Monday by the Guttman Center at the Israel Democracy Institute and the Evens Program for Solution Conflict Resolution at Tel Aviv University. Despite this, 56% of respondents still believe in restricting Jews from praying on the Mount to "prevent friction with the Muslim world." The survey follows Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's declaration recently that his intention is to maintain the "status quo" at the site, whereby Jews are forbidden to pray as a response to Muslim pressure - despite round after round of Arab rioting. The PM emphasized that Jews would continue to be allowed to visit, but that a ban on praying would remain.

ISRAEL - "Those who encourage and allow attacks on mosques and against Palestinians should expect a response," organization warns. The Islamic Jihad on Wednesday vowed to respond "at any moment" to an arson attack against a mosque in the West Bank earlier in the day that Palestinians blamed on settlers. The organization said in the aftermath of the mosque torching in the village of Al-Maghir, east of Ramallah, that "the terrorism of the settlers and the occupation army will be met with a Palestinian will that doesn't accept submission and surrender." The statement added that "those who encourage and allow attacks on mosques and against Palestinians should expect a response." Residents of the village of Al-Maghir reported that a mosque was set on fire early Wednesday, around 3:30am.

GERMANY - Several citizens' initiatives are unambiguously repudiating the semi-official German "commemorative culture." Particularly the "Train of Commemoration" is raising serious accusations against the German government, on the occasion of the upcoming commemoration of the Nazi November Pogroms. According to the initiative's voluminous publication, Berlin is crossing the line between revisionist theses and open denial of Nazi mass crimes.

KENYA - Tetanus vaccines given to millions of young women in Kenya have been confirmed by laboratories to contain a sterilization chemical that causes miscarriages, reports the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association, a pro-vaccine organization. A whopping 2.3 million young girls and women are in the process of being given the vaccine, pushed by UNICEF and the World Health Organization. "We sent six samples from around Kenya to laboratories in South Africa. They tested positive for the HCG antigen," Dr Muhame Ngare of the Mercy Medical Centre in Nairobi told LifeSiteNews. "They were all laced with HCG." …the very group exposing the sterilization agenda of the tetanus vaccines is in fact a pro-vaccination group. Yet even they have now come to realize the horrifying truth: vaccines are the perfect vector for governments to deviously insert covert chemical or viral agents which are never revealed to the public.

USA - AS a senior commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, I lost 80 soldiers. Despite their sacrifices, and those of thousands more, all we have to show for it are two failed wars. This fact eats at me every day, and Veterans Day is tougher than most.

USA - FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is refusing to participate in any public hearings on net neutrality. On a recent Monday night in Brooklyn, five empty chairs stood on stage — one for each member of the Federal Communications Commission. A crowd had amassed in the room for a public hearing to send this message to the agency: Don’t hurt the open Internet. But the commissioners’ absence sent a stronger message: We’re not listening. In fact, the FCC has gone out of its way to avoid attending public gatherings like the one in Brooklyn. It’s been more than five years since all five FCC commissioners left Washington together to participate in a public hearing where anyone could testify. These kinds of public hearings used to be commonplace for the agency, regardless of which political party was in control of Washington.

UK - Britain is not prepared to remain in Europe "come what may" and Brussels needs to address people's concerns about immigration, David Cameron has said. The Prime Minister said that "proper" controls on immigration are needed including reforms to movement within the European Union. He said that Britain will not be "ordered around" by other European Union countries in the single currency union.

UK - Today’s edition of Call Me Old-Fashioned comes from Surrey, where a gay couple are expecting three babies by three different surrogate mothers within seven months of each other. I’m sorry, I’ll just read that again. No, I was right first time. Two homosexuals have hired three women they found on the internet to produce three children for them. They have already dubbed the babies: the ‘twiplets’.

EUROPE - There were growing calls for Jean-Claude Juncker to resign as President of the European Commission amid allegations that he presided over potentially illegal tax breaks given to multinational companies operating in Luxembourg. Bloomberg, the influential financial newswire, devoted its editorial to a call for Mr Juncker’s resignation over revelations multinational companies were allegedly allowed to create complicated structures to avoid billions of pounds of tax when he was Prime Minister of the country.

HUNGARY - At the moment the EU is facing the question whether to become part of the unsuccessful utopias in global history, according to Hungarian President Viktor Orban. This is what an article written by Mr Orban, published on his website, dedicated on the issuance of the book by former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl “With Care for Europe” reads, RIA Novosti reports.