Nest launched in 2011 to strong reviews. Since its launch, Nest's smart thermostat has been replicated by larger players such as Honeywell. Google CEO Larry Page said that Google is "excited to bring great experiences to more homes in more countries."

On the data front, Google could ultimately harness more information about individual homes and their energy usage. Nest, however, did indicate that home data would stay in its company under its privacy policy, which is owned by Google now, and only be used to improve products. Nest was poised to launch a developer program in early 2014.

Consider the moving parts:

• Google has mobile access via your smartphones and various apps on multiple platforms.

• Google has multiple ways into your living room via Android and Chromecast, a streaming TV gadget, as well as tablets and PCs.

• The company had tried to monitor energy usage with utilities, but scrapped the plan in 2011.

• Google's Android will increasingly be in your car.

• And Google is working the robot market.

It remains to be seen how all of these efforts fit together, but it's clear that Google's tentacles are spreading.

The climate between Brussels and Berlin is polluted, something European Commission officials attribute, among other things, to the "reckless" way German Chancellor Angela Merkel blocked stricter exhaust emissions during her re-election campaign to placate domestic automotive manufacturers like Daimler and BMW. This kind of blatant self-interest, officials complained at the time, is poisoning the climate.

But now it seems that the climate is no longer of much importance to the European Commission, the EU's executive branch, either. Commission sources have long been hinting that the body intends to move away from ambitious climate protection goals. On Tuesday, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported as much.

At the request of Commission President José Manuel Barroso, EU member states are no longer to receive specific guidelines for the development of renewable energy. The stated aim of increasing the share of green energy across the EU to up to 27 percent will hold. But how seriously countries tackle this project will no longer be regulated within the plan.

As of 2020 at the latest - when the current commitment to further increase the share of green energy expires - climate protection in the EU will apparently be pursued on a voluntary basis.

However, despite the media’s coverage of the anomaly, or lack thereof, little has been done to protect visitors at Surfer’s Beach. As one can see in photos taken of the area where extremely high levels of radiation were found, not only by Infowars but by Steve Weiss, an electrical engineer who has worked on Geiger Counters for 40 plus years, there are disturbingly no signs warning surfers and beachgoers of the high radiation levels.

Even more startling is one woman’s testimony to Infowars on camera that her friend recently began losing his hair after swimming right off the coast of Half Moon Bay. When asked if the hair loss could possibly be natural, she reiterated that she believed it was due to his exposure to Surfer’s Beach.

The town’s local publication has already admitted to finding levels in excess of 1,400 percent at the site, but why, if they know levels are so out of the ordinary, are there no signs warning the public?

Kerry, a Roman Catholic, met with Vatican leaders on Tuesday to discuss foreign policy and economic issues, including Francis’ outspoken stance on income inequality worldwide. He did not meet with the Pope.

Obama has cited the Pope’s inequality stance himself in an economic address in December. “Across the developed world, inequality has increased,” Obama said. “Some of you may have seen just last week, the Pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length.”

Obama met Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI, in 2009, six months after taking office. That meeting, which took place at the Vatican, was Obama’s only meeting with a Pope. His presidency has been marked by some high-profile clashes with the Catholic Church, including over abortion and contraception.

But Francis’ approach to world economic issues is widely seen as more in line with Obama’s own approach than that of Benedict, who stepped down last year. In an MSNBC interview last year, Obama called Francis an "extraordinarily thoughtful and soulful messenger of peace and justice."

Goldman Sachs has to know that when they release a report like this that it will move the market. And that is precisely what happened on Monday. US stocks dropped precipitously. So is Goldman Sachs just honestly trying to warn their clients that stocks may have become overvalued at this point, or is another agenda at work here? To be fair, the truth is that all of the big banks should be warning their clients about the stock market bubble.

Personally, I have stated that the stock market has officially entered "crazytown territory". So it would be hard to blame Goldman Sachs for trying to tell the truth. But Goldman Sachs also had to know that a warning that the stock market could potentially fall by more than 10 percent would rattle nerves on Wall Street.

So is Goldman Sachs correct about what could be coming? Well, the truth is that there are many other analysts that are far more pessimistic than Goldman Sachs is. For example, David Stockman, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Reagan, believes that the US stock market is heading for "a pretty rude day of awakening"...

We consume far more wealth than we produce, and our entire nation is drowning in a massive ocean of red ink that stretches from sea to shining sea. This is not sustainable, and it is inevitable that the stock market will catch up with economic reality at some point. It is just a matter of time.

As Center for Food Safety reported last week, according to a draft bill outline leaked by Politico, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) is proposing a federal voluntary labeling bill that would block states from passing meaningful mandatory labeling bills, redefine GE food as “safe” and even allow GE foods to be labeled as “natural.”

Without mandatory labeling of GE foods, consumers are being left in the dark about the foods we are purchasing and feeding our families. There is overwhelming public demand — consistently near 95% — for the labeling of GE foods. Yet the US is one of the only developed countries in the world that doesn’t require labeling.

So why would anyone introduce another GE food labeling bill? Because industry will do whatever it takes to make sure you don’t have the right to know whether the food you’re buying is genetically engineered. Voluntary labeling of GE foods has been allowed by FDA for more than a decade and not a single company has “volunteered” to label its products as containing GE food. There is no reason to think they will do so now, when there is more support for mandatory labeling of GE food than there ever has been.

The introduction of this bill would only serve to undermine state and federal legislation meant to grant consumers the right to know and avoid GE foods. Attacking state labeling laws does nothing to address the increasing call from consumers for transparent GE food labeling. Instead, it gives the biotech and food industries yet another free pass and keeps consumers in the dark.

Monsanto has sued over 100 farmers for patent infringement. Jim Gerritsen, president of lead plaintiff OSGATA, previously explained, "We are not customers of Monsanto. We don't want their seed. We don't want their gene-spliced technology. We don't want their trespass onto our farms. We don't want their contamination of our crops. We don't want to have to defend ourselves from aggressive assertions of patent infringement because Monsanto refuses to keep their pollution on their side of the fence. We want justice."

Dave Murphy, founder and executive director of Food Democracy Now!, another plaintiff in the case, added, "Once again, America's farmers have been denied justice, while Monsanto's reign of intimidation is allowed to continue in rural America."

This is evident among some of Israel’s strongest supporters, including Chancellor Angela Merkel. According to a Maariv analysis, Merkel is now looking to establish “normalized relations with Israel”, meaning regular diplomatic relations with the Jewish state, relations void of Germany’s past and the ongoing effort to make amends, relations that will reflect the true interests of Germany in 2014.

A growing number of residents of Germany seem to be shifting to the EU’s anti-Israel trend. There is much significance to Germany’s slow but steady shift, for without Berlin’s staunch backing for Jerusalem, the Jewish nation is all but out in the cold among European Union nations.

One recent example was in September 2012, when Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman turned to his German counterpart, Guido Westerwelle, asking him to lead the opposition to the PA (Palestinian Authority) bid seeking membership in the United Nations. Israel was counting on Berlin to stand firm with Israel against the PA, but at the last moment, Merkel decided not to oppose the PA bid, opting to abstain.

This was the result of Berlin’s failure in efforts to bring additional EU nations on board, to side with Israel. Israel was furious, but more importantly, it marked another shift in Germany’s former unquestionable pro-Israel position. For Israel, Merkel was a last hope and her unilateral decision represented a betrayal of a staunch ally.

The food we like best is loaded with sugars, salts and fats, which trigger an addictive response in our already over-stimulated brains. We can anaesthetise and get high on food in the same way as we can on any other addictive substance, and we do. And what people refuse to accept is that its side effects are just as destructive as using class A drugs.

More people are dying of obesity-related illnesses than from the side effects of alcohol, smoking or drugs, and society frowns more readily on those who use "illicit" forms of self medication than those who are eating themselves to death.

In a recent study, when rats were given the choice between cocaine and sugar, they invariably chose sugar, even when increasing amounts of cocaine were introduced. And our food is absolutely loaded with it. Sugar gives us an instant high, triggering feelings of comfort, happiness, contentment, acting as a sort of anaesthetic. If you’re in any doubt about its mood-altering affect, try giving it up for a few days.

When people say they can’t lose weight because they have a "slow metabolism" or because they’re "naturally overweight", they really aren’t lying. They honestly believe that. But, with a few extremely rare exceptions, the reason people aren’t losing weight isn’t any unfortunate biological disposition, but the fact they are food junkies and have an addiction that they just can’t kick.

It also contends that Snowden offered Russian intelligence officials "incontrovertible proof" to support the claims, and that Russia considers the report to be "accurate":

A stunning Federal Security Services (FSB) [the Russian spy agency] report on the nearly two million highly classified top-secret documents obtained from the United States Department of Defense (DOD) run National Security Agency-Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) by the American ex-patriot Edward Snowden states that this information is providing “incontrovertible proof” that an “alien/extraterrestrial intelligence agenda” is driving US domestic and international policy, and has been doing so since at least 1945, Whatdoesitmean.com reported.

Note: if you are waiting for the "just kidding," it's not coming. This report actually appeared on FARS. Incredibly, this news agency is run by the Iranian government, which the US believes it can complete a nuclear deal with.

As usual, the Pentagon spending is still being spun as a “cut,” since it was lower than the Pentagon’s own demand for an increase, but it is actually $20 billion above the sequestration deal, and includes $90 billion in war funding, more than initially sought.

The nearly 1,600 pages of the bill include all sorts of putative compromises, and a lot of major disappointments, including an official authorization from Congress for President Obama to continue breaking the law by funding the Egyptian military junta.

President Obama has indicated he intends to continue sending $1.5 billion to the Egyptian military annually despite the June coup d’etat. US law explicitly bans military funding after coups, but the administration has insisted they just are going to pretend they didn’t hear that.

Instead, according to James Alan Fox, author and criminology professor at Northeastern University, mass shootings have remained stagnant over 34 years, averaging 20 a year, and few were committed by the type of berserk psychos portrayed by the media.

“Public discourse is grounded in myth and misunderstanding about the nature of the offense and those who perpetrate it,” he writes in the journal “Homicide Studies.” He added: “Without minimizing the pain and suffering of the hundreds of those who have been victimized in recent attacks, the facts clearly say that there has been no increase in mass shootings and certainly no epidemic.”

“Mass murder just may be a price we pay for living in a society where personal freedom is so highly valued,” he wrote in the study co-authored with Northeastern criminology student Monica DeLateur.

The overall US economy had reached its pre-recession level of gross domestic product three years ago, Commerce Department figures show.

National statistics “mask the reality on the ground,” where some county economies were in recession long before December 2007 and others never experienced one at all, said Emilia Istrate, the association’s director of research and one of the authors of the report. “That’s where Americans feel the economy. They feel it locally.”

The roughly 800 counties boasting pre-recession employment levels by 2013 are mostly in the Midwest and South. And just 54 had achieved their pre-recession level of unemployment last year, the report said. “This shows us that although the US economy as a whole is on the right track, we have a fragile recovery, and at the same time it’s an uneven recovery,” Ms Istrate said.

He said that fracking is a “real opportunity” for Britain and that it could solve our gas needs for decades to come. The Prime Minister warned that people refusing to back the process despite being presented with evidence that it is safe are not being “helpful”.

Appearing before the Commons Liaison Committee, Mr Cameron also said that he is in favour of “cash payments to householders” disturbed by the drilling of wells near their homes. Fracking, which involves fracturing rocks deep underground with water and chemicals to extract natural gas, has dramatically cut energy bills in the USA.

Ministers are hoping that it could do the same in the UK. However, the process led to protests last year in West Sussex. Mr Cameron used Tuesday’s hearing to launch a broadside at people criticising fracking projects for ideological reasons.

Mr Cameron said: “There are, though, some people who I think are opposing shale because they simply can’t bear the thought of another carbon-based fuel being used in our energy mix and I think that is irrational because it’s surely better for us to be extracting shale safely from our own country rather than paying a large price for having it imported from around the world.”

Aimed at weakening Sudan, the German government had vigorously supported the secession of South Sudan - not only politically but also with concrete programs for "establishing a state." Sudan was considered to be among the more anti-western segments of the Arab world.

Three-fourths of Sudan's oil reserves are located in South Sudan, which has already established close ties with the pro-western East African countries of Kenya and Uganda. The German government had promoted the geostrategically motivated secessionist project, even though observers had been warning against the renewal of violence in South Sudan.

Already in the 1990s, rival forces had been engaged in brutal combat. Observers warned that this combat could resurge, once Juba decides over the distribution of national resources. And this is exactly what has happened.