They said 100 Jews will be present and will bring with them a portable sacrificial altar and other equipment as described in the Torah. Rabbi Menachem Boorstein, who is involved with studies of the Holy Temples, said that the mitzvah of the Passover sacrificial offering can be carried out without violating Jewish law. The Chief Rabbinate forbids Jews from ascending the Temple Mount, while a growing number of national religious rabbis permit it under certain conditions and in certain places.

Even the idea of publicly asking for permission to offer the sacrifice, let alone the act itself, could be enough to set off Arabs to wage an all-out war. Every time a Jews dares to mumble a prayer on the Temple Mount, Muslim officials and police immediately drag them away.

Remembering such things as the reaction when Binyamin Netanyanhu opened the tunnel from the Western Wall, what happened when Ariel Sharon went up to the Temple Mount, what happens every time Moshe Feiglin goes there, the difficulties in even repairing the bridge leading up to it, can one seriously believe that we can build a synagogue there and there will be no problems, no riots? That this will reduce friction and not impede in any way peace negotiations or any hope for such negotiations? I am perfectly willing to admit that we have a right to visit there, to pray there, perhaps even to build a synagogue there – although I am not certain what the Jewish reaction would be to Arabs building a mosque in the area of the Western Wall.

But what is our right and what is prudent to do at this moment are not the same thing. This is not a situation of our own doing. We did not simply pull a Putin and occupy an adjacent independent state. We entered a defensive war and had Jordan’s King Hussein listened to us, he would not have attacked and his son would today rule over that territory. Nor did we create the refugee problem out of our own initiative. Had the Arabs accepted the UN partition plan, there would have been no war and no refugees.

Watts works for Birmingham City Council, which holds the dubious honour of more complaints of rat infestations than any other area in the country (25.22 requests per 1,000 residents), placing it marginally ahead of Blaenau Gwent and Bridgend in South Wales. The unwanted of England’s second city are not merely expanding in girth, but in territory, too. This week there have been alarming reports of rodents swarming the streets, breaking holes in walls and ravaging bins.

Birmingham may be the epicentre of Britain’s rat kingdom, yet in other, more idyllic, locations, the rats are also on the move. Far away from spilled bin bags in city centre alleys, rural homeowners are now being invaded. The new arrivals in towns and villages are thought to be an unexpected and most unwelcome result of the winter floods. With nests and food sources washed away in the wettest winter on record, rats are being forced to find new countryside homes.

The group said the editor of the Elsevier journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT), Dr A Wallace Hayes, claimed that the retraction of a study conducted by a team headed by Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini was due to some "inconclusive" findings. But that rationale has been roundly criticized by scientists who point out that many studies contain findings that are not at all conclusive.

What is also noteworthy, they point out, is that the retraction comes just a few months after the arrival of a former Monsanto scientist on the editorial board of the scientific journal. "It is a criminal attitude," said Dr Mohamed Habib, a professor of entomology at the University of Campinas, Brazil, who has signed a petition opposing the retraction.

"Truth and ethical values have to be considered as more important than money. The article must be reinstated," he said, adding that the retraction appeared to indicate that powerful economic interests influenced the journal's decision.

There are some that are playing down this threat by making a distinction between the Chinese government and Chinese corporations, but things work differently over in China than they do here. In China, the government is involved in everything. In fact, 43 percent of all corporate profits in China are produced by companies that the Chinese government controls. And all of the rest of the companies are very careful to follow the lead and direction of the Chinese government.

That is why what is going on in places such as Thomasville, Alabama is so alarming. Small communities such as Thomasville are so starved for jobs that they are willing to give land away for free to Chinese companies in order to entice them to build factories…

High-frequency trading (HFT) is a practice carried out by many banks and proprietary trading firms using sophisticated computer programs to send gobs of orders into the market, executing a small portion of them when opportunities arise to capitalize on price imbalances, or to make markets. HFT makes up more than half of all US trading volume.

The trading methods and technology that make HFT possible are all legal, and the stock exchanges HFT firms trade on are highly regulated. But Lewis said these firms are using their speed advantage to profit at the expense of other market participants to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.

"They are able to identify your desire to buy shares in Microsoft and buy them in front of you and sell them back to you at a higher price," Lewis, whose book is available on Monday, said on the television program "60 Minutes" on Sunday.

In 'The Conversation', a law lecturer at Cardiff University, Leanne Smith, comments: “Ultimately, no institutions, religions, lifestyles or individuals have been harmed … The advent of gay marriage changes virtually nothing – but by validating gay relationships, it will transform lives and spread happiness.” But something has changed: Elijah and Zachary do not know which of the two men is their father and they do not know who their mother is.

The California birth certificates list Sir Elton as the legal father and Furnish as the legal mother. The biological mother and the surrogate mother may or may not be the same person, but they have been excluded from the boys’ lives. The UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child guarantees both that “a child of tender years shall not, save in exceptional circumstances, be separated from his mother” and that “the best interests of the child shall be the paramount consideration” in all legislation.

Same-sex marriage not only violates these rights, but institutionalises the injustice. Children living within these partnerships are cut off from their mother or father, or even from both. Of all the harms flowing from the legalisation of same-sex marriage, this is the first and most inevitable.

"Okay, I have to admit it, I feel as if my faith in economic justice is being tested with these “stress tests.” Truth is, I am becoming more stressed than ever. The reason: despite all the “regulations” in the Dodd-Frank Financial “reform” and the Volcker Rule and the Fed’s “oversight,” the bank seems to have free reign to do what they will despite the financial crisis and the pathetic “recovery.”

There have been fines and settlements but nothing is settled. None of them have gone or will go to jail. Economic conditions continue to stress out millions even as the Fed announces “stress tests” that appear on the surface to be a way of insuring that big banks won’t need more bailouts. Sad to say, it’s more of the charade. Partially that’s because the banks dominate the Federal Reserve, a private, not public, institution. And, partially, because when it comes to economic crises, the stories are buried in the business pages and rarely surface as topics of concern on popular talk shows and media that most folks watch.

“But the bigger story is that absolutely nothing was done to address the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, or to fix the system.” That’s one good reason for all of us to be stressed because we can have absolutely no confidence in the stability of our economy, whatever they say about how it’s all getting better."

"Friendly fellows have been replaced by dark monsters," he explained. "These toys can have a negative effect on children. They can destroy their souls and lead them to the dark side." Lego's Monster Fighters range features Lord Vampyre, a fanged Dracula-like character, who battles the likes of Doctor Rodney Rathbone and Major Quinton Steele as they try to prevent him from "cloaking the world in darkness". The priest also cited research by New Zealand's University of Canterbury that found the facial expressions of Lego figures have also become angrier over the years, and that this compounded their evil potential.