ABC News reported in 2011:

“Questions persisted for decades about the ability of the Mark 1 to handle the immense pressures that would result if the reactor lost cooling power, and today that design is being put to the ultimate test in Japan. Five of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which has been wracked since Friday’s earthquake with explosions and radiation leaks, are Mark 1s.

‘The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant,’ Bridenbaugh told ABC News in an interview. ‘The impact loads the containment would receive by this very rapid release of energy could tear the containment apart and create an uncontrolled release’.”

The New York Times reported that other government officials warned about the dangers inherent in GE’s Mark 1 design:

“In 1972, Stephen H Hanauer, then a safety official with the Atomic Energy Commission, recommended that the Mark 1 system be discontinued because it presented unacceptable safety risks. Among the concerns cited was the smaller containment design, which was more susceptible to explosion and rupture from a buildup in hydrogen — a situation that may have unfolded at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.”

In addition, the Mark 1 included an absolutely insane design element: storing huge quantities of radioactive fuel rods 100 feet up in the air. Indeed, the fuel pools have caught fires several times, and now constitute an enormous danger. As we noted last year, the spent fuel pool at Fukushima reactor number 3 is in a heap of rubble.

Unit 3... It’s too radioactive for Tepco to even get a look at what’s going on in the reactor pools at units 1 through 3, and they have no idea how to do it. Indeed, the technology does not even exist to approach those reactors, as the high radiation levels quickly destroy even robots.

Postscript: Unfortunately, there are 23 virtually-identical GE Mark 1 reactors in the US.

The title of Dr Lucy Jones’ lecture this week to the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco was titled “Imagine America without Los Angeles.” As KCAL9′s Dave Bryan reports, Jones, a Science Advisor for Risk Reduction at the US Geological Survey, says when the “Big One” hits Southern California, the damage could be much greater, and could last much longer, than most of us ever imagined.

“Loss of shelter, loss of schools, loss of jobs and emotional hardship. We are risking the ends of our cities,” she said during the presentation. According to a USGS study called the “Shakeout Report,” when a high-magnitude earthquake rocks the San Andreas fault, the damage will go far beyond the collapsed buildings and freeways seen in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

And they say while the Northridge quake directly affected about a half a million people, a maximum credible earthquake on the San Andreas fault could affect 10 million Californians.

In other words, Representative Rice wants to take President Obama to court for not faithfully executing the laws. "President Obama has adopted a practice of picking and choosing which laws he wants to enforce. In most cases, his laws of choice conveniently coincide with his Administration’s political agenda. Our Founding Fathers created the Executive Branch to implement and enforce the laws written by Congress and vested this power in the President.

"However, President Obama has chosen to ignore some of the laws written by Congress and implemented by preceding Presidents," Rice wrote in a letter to fellow House members to ask them to co-sponsor this resolution. "This resolution allows the House of Representatives to bring legal action against the Executive Branch and challenge recent actions, inactions, and policies."

But the Duke has suddenly dropped from first place to fourth. Two Chinese men came out of nowhere to occupy first and second place. Neither of them appeared in the top 250 UK property investors last year.

Top of the tree is Wang Jianlin, China's richest man (according to Forbes). He claims to be the first Chinese citizen to own a private jet and loves his £21 million Sunseeker yacht so much he decided to buy the whole company this year. He also splashed £700 million on One Nine Elms, part of the South Bank regeneration project that includes Battersea Power Station. Jianlin plans to build Europe's tallest residential tower (670ft) and a luxury hotel on the site.

At number two, Henry Cheng Kar-Shun and family. In June last year Cheng took full control of the Greenwich Peninsula scheme: 10,000 new homes, a 3.5m sq ft commercial district and public facilities. Cheng is the son of Cheng Yu-Tung, a titan of post-war Hong Kong commerce. At the end of 2012 he became chairman of the family property company, New World Development, whose UK interests include stakes in The Knightsbridge, a high-end regeneration scheme, and the social housing specialist Pinnacle Regeneration Group.

And it's the same story in residential: 64% of Mayfair homes over £2 million were bought by overseas buyers last year. Why? Three key reasons: the pound has stayed low making London property fantastic value for many foreign currency buyers. The land itself is so valuable that it's a safe investment in turbulent times. And it's a good way for the super-rich, who already have massive US dollar holdings, to diversify their investments.

Speaking at the London School of Economics, where he teaches, Professor Pissarides will say: “The euro should either be dismantled in an orderly way or the leading members should do the necessary as fast as possible to make it growth and employment-friendly. We will get nowhere plodding along with the current line of ad hoc decision-making and inconsistent debt-relief policies. The policies pursued now to steady the euro are costing Europe jobs and they are creating a lost generation of educated young people. This is not what the founding fathers promised.”

The Cypriot-British economist, who won the Nobel prize in 2010, is speaking days after Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, insisted the crisis in the eurozone was not yet over. Unemployment within the single currency area now stands at 12.1 per cent, meaning more than 19 million people are out of work

Some economists argue Europe cannot enact the policies needed to boost growth and create jobs due to the huge variations in economies across the region. German taxpayers are unwilling to pay out to help crumbling economies such as Greece or Spain while even France now faces financial crisis.

The agreement is expected to begin with a Cyprus-style “bail-in” process in which major depositors in failing banks are tapped first in an effort to support the lender. Then, if more cash is needed, national resolution funds would be used. And if further funds are needed, these would be pooled from across the region over the next five to 10 years, forming the basis of a common fund.

“We will have a European fund as far as I’m concerned, but there will be, especially in the first years, some national responsibility,” said Dijsselbloem. “And if that causes a problem then we will have the ESM [European Stability Mechanism] according to the agreed rules. So, I think the outlines of how this will work are becoming more and more clear,” he added.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, European finance ministers have been working on a plan on what do with failed banks in what is seen as a key part of a banking union. The banking union establishes new rules for bank supervision and dealing with bank failures to avoid government bailouts. It follows over three years of turmoil in the euro zone following bailouts for Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus.

Boehner became speaker in January 2011, after the Republicans won a majority of the House of Representatives in the 2010 elections. He cut his first spending deal with President Barack Obama on March 1, 2011, and that deal took effect after March 4, 2011 when the continuing resolution then funding the government expired. Since then, the federal government has been funded under legislation approved by the Republican-controlled House that Boehner leads.

At the close of business on March 4, 2011, the federal debt was $14,182,627,184,881.03, according to the US Treasury. As of the close of business on December 10, 2013, it was $17,234,005,998,603.93. That means that under federal spending deals negotiated during Boehner's speakership and approved by a Republican-majority House that Boehner leads, the federal debt has increased $3,051,378,813,722.90.

The US government was set for a repeat of the stalemate at the start of next year, when a temporary agreement over its budget expires on January 15 and it breached its borrowing limit the following month. However, politicians from both the senate and congress have brokered a new budget deal, meaning they will not return from their Christmas holidays to a new round of eleventh-hour budget negotiations.

"Today's bipartisan budget agreement is a good first step," President Barack Obama said. "I want to call on members of Congress from both parties to take the next step and actually pass a budget based on this agreement so I can sign it into law." Politicians have staged such games of brinkmanship for each of the past three years, damaging business confidence and slowing economic growth.

The March 2011 tsunami forced hundreds of thousands in the Fukushima area to flee at a moment’s notice. RT’s Aleksey Yaroshevsky reports that many refugees living in quickly-erected 30-square-meter homes in Koriyama were initially promised that conditions would eventually improve, yet most seem to have long abandoned any semblance of better prospects or redeeming what once was.

“When the tsunami hit, we were told to pack only the necessary things and run away,” one refugee told RT. “They said it would be only for two, three days. Now, living in this cage of a house, returning to our old house is a dream which we know won’t ever come true. We are being fed with promises of a bigger house, but that’s as far as it gets: promises.”

Yaroshevsky reports that there are hundreds of such makeshift camps around the region, accommodating over 300,000 people. One man living there told RT that his once profitable job is long gone, and that the broken promises are still very real. “I had a $100,000-a-year business producing honey, now it’s destroyed forever, just like my life,” he said. “On top of all that, I’m offered neither financial compensation nor any job. That’s why I’m taking TEPCO to court.”

And, as everyone knows, month after month the Fed and the BOJ diligently create $85 billion and $75 billion in new outside money out of thin air (that this "credit" ends up in the stock market is a different topic).

Basically, while everyone focuses on the breakneck money creation by the Fed and the BOJ, what happened in the past month is that China quietly created some 20% more money. Perhaps most importantly, between these three entities, nearly $400 billion in liquidity was created de novo in one month! Because when the entire world is a credit-fuelled ponzi scheme, these are the kind of numbers that matter.

So how long before the developed and developing world "have" to create $1 trillion or more in money supply each month to keep the house of cards from toppling?

Once feared as the Black Death – the rodent-borne disease that wiped out a third of the world's population in the Middle Ages – bubonic plague has killed 20 villagers in Madagascar in one of the worst outbreaks globally in recent years, health experts have confirmed.

The confirmation that bubonic plague was responsible for the deaths last week near the north-western town of Mandritsara follows a warning in October from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that the island nation was at risk of a plague epidemic.

The Pasteur Institute of Madagascar revealed on Tuesday that tests taken from bodies in the village last week showed that they had died of bubonic plague. The institute added it was concerned the disease could spread to towns and cities where living standards have declined since a coup in 2009.

The Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) was originally created to oversee the government bailout of the auto and financial industries. But it has used its congressional authority to pursue bank executives who misused bailout funds. To date, SIGTARP has gone after 107 senior bank officers, most of whom have been sentenced to prison, according to The Washington Post. Its work also has produced $4.7 billion in restitution paid to victims and the government.

What it lacks in size it makes up for in terms of criminal authority authorized by Congress. Unlike regulators, SIGTARP can issue search warrants, seize property and even make arrests. But those targeted by SIGTARP have run community banks, not the national institutions that dominate Wall Street.

Mark Williams, a former bank examiner who teaches finance at Boston University, told the Post that it’s been less difficult for SIGTARP to go after the small fish. “The amount of direct evidence of banker wrongdoing in these smaller bank cases is easier to show,” he said. Williams added that SIGTARP’s work nonetheless sets “an important precedence that bad banker behavior will not be tolerated and [will be] aggressively prosecuted.”

In a landmark judgment, five Supreme Court Justices redefined religion in law in order to enable the group to conduct weddings. It follows a five-year legal battle by Louisa Hodkin, a 25-year-old scientologist, who was seeking the right to get married at the Church of Scientology chapel in central London, which she attends.

Miss Hodkin and her fiancé Alessandro Calcioli, who were at court to hear the judgment handed down, hailed the decision as a victory for freedom of worship. But ministers voiced alarm that it could open the way for the group to claim lucrative tax breaks worth hundreds of thousands of pounds a year and other legal privileges.

With volcanoes also awakening around the entire world, have we entered into an entirely new phase of earth changes? Over the course of the past 48 hours, December 7th, through December 9th 2013 - a series of moderate sized earthquakes has struck directly along the edge of the North American Craton.

This newest craton edge earthquake swarm consists of upper 3.0 magnitude and mid 4.0 magnitude earthquakes occurring just south of Yellowstone National Park (supervolcano). Still well within the newly defined perimeter of the underground magma chamber(s) associated with past eruptions. This Yellowstone swarm is on top of yesterday's 4.5 magnitude event in Oklahoma, and the ADDITIONAL 3.7 magnitude event in Northeast Texas (both at fracking operation earthquake swarm locations).

A team found the cavern stretches for more than 90km (55 miles) and contains 200-600 cubic km of molten rock. The findings are being presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco. Professor Bob Smith, from the University of Utah, said: “We’ve been working there for a long time, and we’ve always thought it would be bigger... but this finding is astounding.” If the Yellowstone supervolcano were to blow today, the consequences would be catastrophic.

The last major eruption, which occurred 640,000 years ago, sent ash across the whole of North America, affecting the planet’s climate. Now researchers believe they have a better idea of what lies beneath the ground. It is unclear when the Yellowstone supervolcano will erupt again.

The team found that the magma chamber was colossal. Reaching depths of between 2km and 15km (1 to 9 miles), the cavern was about 90km (55 miles) long and 30km (20 miles) wide. It pushed further into the north east of the park than other studies had previously shown, holding a mixture of solid and molten rock. “To our knowledge there has been nothing mapped of that size before,” added Dr Farrell.