At the back of the Budget book, there’s this chilling paragraph: “The Government will modernise and strengthen HMRC’s debt collection powers to recover financial assets from the bank accounts of debtors who owe over £1,000 of tax.”

Make no mistake; this is a huge change – a "power grab" according to Politics.co.uk. At the moment, if HMRC (HM Revenue & Customs) want to seize your property or cash, they have to take you to court, win and then get a court order. Now, after a couple of warning letters and a phone call, they apparently can do it at the flick of a switch. Crucially, there’s no safeguard built into this system – where's the appeal process?

To repeat, if HMRC decide you owe them cash, they just take it. If you haven't managed to reach agreement with them, then you'll just wake up one morning, check your bank account, and find the money's gone.

According to the president’s recent Executive Order, “Blocking Property of Certain Persons Contributing to the Situation in Ukraine” (first reported by WND’s Aaron Klein), the provisions for seizure of property extend to “any United States person.” That means “any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States.”

President Obama has already re-authorized an EO giving him the ability to seize farms, food, processing plants, energy resources, transportation, and skilled laborers during national emergency. Is it prudent to give a single person the ability to force such actions down the throats of the American people without Congressional oversight or Judicial review?

Three MKs, who were present during the hearings but asked to remain anonymous, said that the funding was to cover preparations throughout 2014 and was similar in size to the Iran strike budget for 2013, the report said. According to the report, some of the legislators present at the sessions grilled Deputy Chief of Staff Major General Gadi Eizenkot, and Brigadier General Agai Yehezkel of the IDF’s Planning Directorate, about the necessity of a strike plan despite talks between world powers and Iran.

Those talks led to an initial agreement in November 2013 for Tehran to scale back its nuclear program, and are still ongoing. The IDF officials responded that they had received instructions from the highest levels of government, apparently Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, to continue with preparations for a strike, the report said. Netanyahu publicly slammed the November interim deal as a “historic mistake,” and he has demanded the full dismantling of Iran’s “military nuclear” capabilities under a permanent deal, whereas US President Barack Obama has spoken of allowing Iran to maintain a closely supervised low-level enrichment capability.

Haaretz noted that both the Prime Minister’s Office and the IDF’s Spokesperson declined to comment on the report. Two days of talks between world powers and Iran came to an end on Wednesday with what EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton described as “substantive and useful discussions covering a set of issues including (uranium) enrichment, the Arak reactor, civil nuclear cooperation and sanctions.” The parties agreed to reconvene April 7-9.

However, Russia has warned that tensions with the US over the Crimea crisis could lead to it altering its position regarding Iran to erode the unified front that Western countries have presented against Tehran. The US and Europe have been strongly critical of Russian actions to annex Crimea following a revolution in Ukraine last month.

"Things are definitely more expensive," exclaimed a mother of three, "I can't believe how much milk is. Chicken is crazy right now, and beef - I paid $5 a pound for beef!" Just don't tell the Fed! Of course, it's not just beef... prices also are higher for fruits, vegetables, sugar and beverages, according to government data. In futures markets, coffee prices have soared so far this year more than 70%, hogs are up 42% on disease concerns and cocoa has climbed 12% on rising demand, particularly from emerging markets.

And it's set to get worse: "To be honest, until a month ago, our feeling and thinking was that most markets were well-supplied," said John Baffes, a senior economist at the World Bank. "Now, the question is: Are those adverse weather conditions going to get worse? If they do, then indeed, we may see more food price increases."

“Drought, harsh winter seen fueling higher food prices,” Chris Christopher, economist at IHS Global, writes in client note.

The freak space weather was caused by a rapid succession of coronal mass ejections, intense eruptions from the surface of the Sun also known as solar flares, which sent a pulse of magnetised plasma hurtling out into space and through the Earth’s orbit. If it had happened just nine days earlier, our world would have been hit, potentially wreaking havoc with the electrical grid, knocking out satellites and GPS and costing economies billions of dollars.

Although very rare, these storms haven’t always passed the Earth by. In 1859, the planet was struck by the so-called Carrington event, which knocked out the telegraph system across the US and literally shocked some of its operators, as the Northern Lights streaked through the sky as far south as Hawaii.

“Had [the latest storm] hit Earth, it probably would have been like the big one in 1859, but the effect today, with our modern technologies, would have been tremendous ,” said Janet Luhmann, who is part of the STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Observatory) team and based at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory.

The near-miss storm of 2012 started with a huge outburst on the Sun on July 22, which propelled a magnetic cloud through the solar wind at a peak speed of more than 2,000 kilometres per second, four times as fast as typical magnetic storms. The magnetic eruption tore through the space that Earth had occupied just over a week before, but luckily, Earth and the other planets were on the other side of the Sun at the time.

Up until now, the financial markets have been slow to react because there has been a belief that the Fed would reverse course on tapering the moment that the US economy started to slow down again. But even though the US middle class is in horrible shape, and even though there are lots of signs that we are heading into another recession, the Fed has continued tapering.

Of course it is important to note that the Fed is still absolutely flooding the financial system with money even after the announcement of more tapering on Wednesday. When you are talking about $55,000,000,000 a month, you are talking about a massive amount of money. So the Fed is not exactly being hawkish. But when Yellen told the press that quantitative easing could end completely this fall and that the Fed could actually start raising interest rates about six months after that, it really spooked the markets.

The Dow was down 114 points on Wednesday, and the yield on 10 year US Treasuries shot up to 2.77%. But this is just the beginning. When it finally starts sinking in, and investors finally start realizing that the Fed is 100% serious about ending the flow of easy money, that is when things will start getting really interesting. Can the financial markets stand on their own without massive Fed intervention? We shall see.

Sterling has ratcheted higher to $1.66 against the dollar, a tad too strong for the Monetary Policy Committee. David Bloom, from HSBC, says sterling is all of a sudden the “least ugly” currency in a world where even the Japanese and the Swiss are holding down their exchange rates. “There is nowhere else to go,” he said. Yet he also warns, like other City veterans, that this intoxicating moment is not going to last. “UK growth is surviving on fumes, driven by a consumer credit boom. Britain has an enormous trade deficit,” he said.

The Chancellor told the House that Britain is now the growth star of the industrial world, galloping up to 2.7 percent this year. The pessimists have had to apologise. Even the lordly IMF is admitting through gritted teeth that it failed to see the mini-boom coming. Yet growth is not the salient indicator. What may matter more is a current account deficit running at more than 5 percent of GDP over recent months, the worst in a quarter of a century and by far the worst of the G7. It is not a “healthy” deficit driven by imports of machinery. It is a consumption spree.

The brutal reality is that Britain is still running the highest budget deficit of any major country in Europe at 6.7 percent of GDP. That is not Mr Osborne’s fault. Labour let the public sector run amok. It ran a recklessly loose fiscal policy at the top of the pre-Lehman boom. The deficit mushroomed to 11 percent when the storm hit, the legacy from Hell. Mr Osborne closed his speech with a large claim: "With the help of the British people, we're turning this country around." The jury is out on that.

Gantz also discussed possible plans for the future of the IDF, and made clear that an armed conflict with Iran is not an impossibility. "We can talk about shorter and longer ranges" Gantz said, "like Iran… which is not out of the IDF's range." The Chief of Staff's admission as such surfaces on the same day that one report claimed the IDF is actively preparing for a conflict with Iran in 2014.

The students asked the Chief of Staff whether it is possible to stop the rocket fire at Gan Yavne and other southern communities, following the barrage of rockets which hit Israel in the last week. Gantz responded, "If we want to make sure that nothing will come from there, we need to retake Gaza… it's a problem we deal with every week." "The decision to 'sleep on it' is a strategic move," he added.

Gantz's comments echo the sentiments of Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, who reiterated last week that Israel must retake Gaza to prevent more rocket fire from the Hamas-controlled territory. "Following an attack like this - a barrage of more than 50 rockets - there is no alternative to a full reoccupation of the entire Gaza Strip," he said. Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz agreed.

The British public broadcaster has just been accused of censorship after its Free Speech show, symbolically dedicated to freedom of speech in the UK, banned a part of the program which dealt with homosexuality in the Islamic world. It was to have included a clip of an interview with Asifa Lahore, the most famous lesbian Muslim in England: "A question that I would like to submit to the Islamic community is: when will it be right to be Muslim and homosexual?” The question was removed after pressure from the Birmingham Central Mosque. But isn't this a program whose motto is “Britain is a democracy where we can say what we want. So let's say it”?

Created by the homosexual Lord Reith and with a program that recognizes equal opportunities for homosexual employees including the right to marriage leave, the BBC has responded to criticism: “Acting on the basis of respect for the mosque, we took the decision to postpone the debate on the rights of gay Muslims”. This is the same media source that does not hesitate to accuse other religions, Jewish and Christian, of "homophobia", just about every day. It is the same media source that fomented a war against Russia’s Putin on LGTB propaganda.

It is the same BBC that, with the directive "Portrayal of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual People", asked its authors to introduce gay and bisexual characters in children’s programs, "in order to familiarize the young viewers with the world of sexual diversity from an early age, and support children who have to deal with the age of the formation, and that might be homosexual”. So it is fine to be homosexual, but not homosexual and Muslim.

No one batted an eyelid about the Islamophile censorship. Not the BBC’s liberal left panel, not the Liberal Democrat peers, not the Huffington Post editor, not the left-wing comedians, not even the trans-gender rights activists. What better proof that Western gay media and culture, puffed up with political correctness and moral arrogance, is allied with fanatical Islam?