One major US bank fears that the thieves would be able to crack the encryption code and make fraudulent withdrawals from consumer bank accounts, said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the data breach is still under investigation.

Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder said "no unencrypted PIN data was accessed" and there was no evidence that PIN data has been "compromised." She confirmed that some "encrypted data" was stolen, but declined to say if that included encrypted PINs. "We continue to have no reason to believe that PIN data, whether encrypted or unencrypted, was compromised. And we have not been made aware of any such issue in communications with financial institutions to date," Snyder said by email. "We are very early in an ongoing forensic and criminal investigation."

The Number 3 US retailer said last week that hackers stole data from as many as 40 million cards used at Target stores during the first three weeks of the holiday shopping season, making it the second-largest data breach in US retail history.

“I don’t believe in God because there’s no evidence that he exists,” I told him. “In the absence of any evidence, I can’t bring myself to believe in something so unlikely.”

“Because you can’t see him?” he asked, trying to get his head around this.

“Well, yes, that’s one reason,” I said.

“So does that mean you don’t believe in Father Christmas?”

So that was why he wanted to have this conversation on today of all days. Why hadn’t I seen that coming? I immediately did a reverse ferret.

“Er, no, I do believe in Father Christmas,” I said. “Definitely. A hundred per cent.”

“So you've seen him?”

“Well, no…” “So why do you believe in him?”

It was a good question.

“Come on, Freddie, of course there’s a Father Christmas,” I said, giving him a wink. “Who do you think fills your stocking on Christmas night? Now run along and be a good boy or Santa will bring you a lump of coal.”

There are 14 million Christians throughout the Holy Land [Middle East] but they are a rapidly dwindling minority. Many of them are so desperately vulnerable that they feel they have no choice now but to emigrate. In Iraq alone, since the fall of Saddam, a startling two-thirds have fled. Since 2003 at least a million have left. Most of them went to Syria. Now they face a second wave of displacement as they are no longer protected there.

There have been reports of rape, murder and attacks directed at them and the Christian community lives in terror. When they feel they have to run for their lives they head for Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. It is said that the ancient Syrian Armenian community has all but gone.

Egypt has seen churches being burnt and anti-Coptic rioting. In Gaza and on the West Bank, Christians are caught up in chaotic uncertainty. To be Christian in the Holy Land, the birthplace of Jesus, is to live in fear. The Vatican has confirmed as credible the estimate that 100,000 Christians are killed every year for their beliefs.

Historian Tom Holland has noted how deeply ironic it is, that two devoutly Christian leaders, George W Bush and Tony Blair, brought about, inadvertently, the final demise of Christianity in the Middle East by invading Iraq. Now the Arab Spring has proven the final knell, as Christians are all too easy targets for extremists and are living in dire jeopardy.

The latest leader of China, Xi Jinping, shows every sign of applying that lesson. A month after assuming power in November last year, Xi visited the province of Guangdong on his first major political tour. Of the five days he spent there, three were at a military base, according to official coverage of his trip.

The son of a Communist revolutionary commander, Xi built his career as a friend of the army, and at times an official in it. But he still feels compelled to ask his generals for something in return: loyalty. “First, we must keep in mind that the military must unswervingly adhere to the party’s absolute leadership and obey the party’s orders,” he said on one of his many military inspection tours.

Xi’s injunction that the party comes first is a sign of the insecurity modern Chinese leaders feel at the top of their nation’s huge and increasingly powerful armed forces, military experts say. As it grows mightier, the People’s Liberation Army is growing trickier to govern.

Xi has to win over the force that keeps the Communist Party in power. But he must do so at a time when the PLA is more self-confident than ever, mounting the first serious challenge to the naval dominance of the United States since the end of the Cold War.

For now, China’s sprawling defense industries and research laboratories are relying on a high-tech short cut. In a vast and carefully coordinated effort, China is scouring the globe for know-how that can be coupled with domestic innovation to produce strategic weapons and equipment.

A year ago this month, technicians at a maker of satellite navigation gear in the Belgian town of Leuven worked over the year-end holidays to test one such breakthrough. The Belgians loaded their receivers with a technical code for a new satellite-navigation system called Beidou, or Big Dipper.

The signal from the new Chinese system provided a surprisingly accurate position fix. “It was certainly better than you would expect from somebody doing this for the first time,” says Jan Van Hees, sales manager for privately owned Septentrio, which plans to sell civilian equipment that can use Beidou’s signal.

Beidou is one of the most striking examples of China’s global quest to buy, copy or steal the technology it needs to close the gap with the United States and other leading military powers. Highly accurate satellite navigation is fundamental to modern warfare. Aerospace experts say European and US know-how and equipment have been indispensable for China to design, build, launch, position, test and operate its navigation network and other satellites.

Seven months had passed since they’d launched an undercover operation against a suspected Chinese arms-trafficking network - one of scores operating in support of Beijing’s ambitious military expansion into outer space. The agents had allowed a Colorado manufacturer to ship a type of technology that China covets but cannot replicate: radiation-hardened microchips. Known as rad-chips, the dime-sized devices are critical for operating satellites, for guiding ballistic missiles, and for protecting military hardware from nuclear and solar radiation.

It was a gamble. This was a chance to take down an entire Chinese smuggling ring. But if He succeeded in trafficking the rad-chips to China, the devices might someday be turned against US sailors, soldiers or pilots, deployed on satellites providing the battlefield eyes and ears for the People’s Liberation Army.

Entering He’s office at 2:30 that December morning, the agents looked inside the FedEx boxes. The microchips were gone. The supervisor on the case, Greg Slavens, recoiled. “There are a bunch of rad-chips headed to China,” Slavens recalls thinking, “and I’m responsible.”

In late October, flotillas of Chinese warships and submarines sliced through passages in the Japanese archipelago and out into the western Pacific for 15 days of war games. The drills, pitting a "red force" against a "blue force," were the first in this area, combining ships from China's main south, east and north fleets, according to the Chinese military. Land-based bombers and surveillance aircraft also flew missions past Japan to support the navy units.

In official commentaries, senior People's Liberation Army (PLA) officers boasted their navy had "dismembered" the so-called first island chain - the arc of islands enclosing China's coastal waters, stretching from the Kuril Islands southward through the Japanese archipelago, Taiwan, the Northern Philippines and down to Borneo.

Named Manoeuvre 5, these were no ordinary exercises. They were the latest in a series of increasingly complex and powerful thrusts through the first island chain into the Pacific.

For the first time in centuries, China is building a navy that can break out of its confined coastal waters to protect distant sea lanes and counter regional rivals.

China's Lieutenant-General Ren Haiquan took the podium in a room overlooking the Yarra River last October 29 and began diplomatically enough. But as he neared the end of his speech, he went on the offensive. "Some people" had ignored the outcome of World War Two and were challenging the post-war order, he told counterparts from 15 other nations. It was a pointed reference to Japan's claim over islands in the East China Sea that Beijing insists are Chinese.

"One should never forget history and (should) learn from history," Ren said, according to a copy of his speech. "Flames of the war ignited by fascist countries engulfed the whole region, and many places, including Darwin in Australia, were bombed."

In a jarring coincidence, say officers in the audience, fireballs belched into the sky as he spoke, part of the casino's hourly fireworks display. Visibly displeased at the dig, the senior Japanese officer present, army Lieutenant General Yoshiaki Nakagawa, left with his fellow officers as soon as the speeches concluded, people in the audience said.

“The US needs to recognize that China will not tolerate US military presence in its waters just as the United States will not tolerate Chinese naval ships off the coast of Atlantic City in New Jersey,” Madsen said in a phone interview with Press TV on Wednesday.

Washington and Beijing have been trading barbs since USS Cowpens and a Chinese warship “nearly collided” in the South China Sea earlier in December. “With President Obama’s ‘pivot’ to Asia where he has redirected a lot of US military assets to East Asia, we’re going to see a lot more confrontations like the one we recently saw between a US Navy cruiser and a Chinese aircraft carrier,” Madsen said.

In his tour of the region on Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the United States would increase maritime security assistance to China’s neighbors amid rising tensions with Beijing.

At the time, Shalit did not provide a reason for his resignation. Washington asserted that his authorization of the sale of a miniature cooling system for missiles was in direct violation of Israel’s preexisting obligations to the United States.

The conflict came as a result of differing interpretations of defense agreements between Israel and the US, according to the report. Israel claimed that the highly sensitive part was actually sold to a European company as part of a separate deal, but the Americans contended that the fact that it ultimately wound up in China is a breach of long-standing arrangements between Washington and Jerusalem.

Furthermore, there is fear among the Americans that this advanced technology has found its way from China to Iran.

Mrs Justice Parker said spouses can cause “untold damage” to their offspring in the wake of a divorce or separation. The judge delivered a harsh rebuke to social workers and an official guardian acting for three brothers at the centre of a contact dispute between their mother and father.

Sitting at the High Court in London, Mrs Justice Parker expressed concern that the mother appeared to have turned her 15-year-old son against his father. “Parents who obstruct the relationship with either mother or father are inflicting untold damage on their children and it’s about time the professionals truly understood this,” said the judge.

"The most important thing is the person and not the question of material costs," the defense minister said. "The material must be good enough to ensure that … the people who work here are well protected."

At the same time, though she noted that any new purchases must be "cost-effective."

The quality of equipment issued to Bundeswehr soldiers has been criticized by several people in recent years, although, Hellmut Königshaus, the German parliament's commissioner for the armed forces, acknowledged in his 2012 annual report that there had been some improvement. After her arrival in Afghanistan on Sunday, von der Leyen used a speech to around 300 Bundeswehr soldiers to pledge that she was “there for them.” She said she was “proud” to be their defense minister and took the job “very seriously.”

Von der Leyen also expressed Germany's willingness to remain involved militarily in Afghanistan after the Western military alliance NATO withdraws all of its remaining combat troops from the country by the end of next year. Germany has offered to contribute around 800 Bundeswehr trainers and advisors to a non-combat NATO mission of between 8,000 and 12,000 troops.

Now, the UN weapons inspectors have quietly retracted one of their main claims implying that Assad was behind the attack. Former Associated Press and Newsweek reporter – Robert Parry – notes:

A United Nations analysis of samples taken from one of the two sites of the alleged Sarin attack outside Damascus, Syria, on August 21 found zero chemical weapons agents, and one UN laboratory backed off its earlier claim to have found a residue that can result from degraded Sarin on the remnants of the missile, according to revisions in a new UN report.

The two UN laboratories are now in agreement that there was neither Sarin nor possible derivatives of Sarin on the metal fragments from the Moadamiyah missile.

Time will tell if these two cities will end up like Detroit. However, the fact that they are losing their biggest industries to major competition, much like Detroit did, with depressed housing, casinos bankrupting/closing and businesses fleeing, makes their fate seem eerily similar.

Cash and debit card spending limits are being implemented on 2 million debit card holders because those customers are suspected of having shopped at Target during the time period in question. JPM is considering issuing new debit cards to those customers who were directly affected by the data breach.

Chase customers will be limited to $100 daily withdrawal from ATMs. Debit card users will see $200 – $500 daily limits as well as $500 daily purchase limit. Customers are encouraged to come into their local branch to withdraw more cash if necessary; however that too is limited to $300 per day.