Demonstrators also attacked an armored vehicle and attempted to break a police barricade, as police pushed back activists on their way to the regional affairs ministry. At least six people, including four police officers, were hospitalized with injuries and about a dozen received medical help on the site, reports Italian La Stampa daily. Several protesters were detained.

The rally on Thursday was organized by activists from the movement ‘For Housing’ who are demanding that local authorities stop evictions in Rome and use more public funds to help people without homes or those who cannot pay their rent. Similar protests against evictions have taken place in many cities across Italy.

Barclays confirmed it is reviewing its trading going back several years as part of the international inquiry. Chief executive Antony Jenkins, who took the helm 14 months ago after the bank was fined £290 million for rigging Libor interest rates – used for inter-bank loans – said he was unable to comment on the ‘ongoing discussions’.

‘From time to time these legacy issues will arise and will have to be dealt with,’ he said. ‘We are in the process of changing the culture of Barclays. I’ve said it will take five to ten years to deeply embed that cultural change, and we are on track.’

The news comes as Barclays revealed a slump at its ‘casino’ bank – the investment arm – helped drag down profits by 26 per cent to £1.4 billion in the three months to the end of September. Chris Leslie, Labour’s shadow Treasury minister, said yesterday it would be a ‘devastating blow’ if more wrongdoing is discovered at the High Street giant.

Plans for the harmonised euro-flush will be tabled by the European Commission as part of an "Ecolabel" acting as a gold standard for officially approved lavatories aimed at cutting water use.

Martin Callanan MEP, the leader of the Conservative bloc in the European Parliament and Tory spokesman on EU environment measures, condemned the proposals. He accused the commission of breaking a promise made by its president José Manuel Barroso, in a Telegraph article last week, to cut red tape by not meddling in "small things".

"There seems to no limit whatsoever to the commission's self-conferred licence to interfere," he said. "It makes a mockery of Barroso last week supporting our call for less unnecessary red tape! He needs to get a grip of his own bureaucracy."

The EU standard follows almost three years of work by civil servants and difficulties in the workability of a one-size-fits-all rule for drains that vary greatly from London to Bucharest or from Berlin to Vilnius.

Millions of others are seeing the size of their health insurance premiums absolutely explode, and this new law is going to result in massive numbers of jobs being lost. It is almost as if Obamacare was specifically designed to wreck the US economy.

Not that what we had before Obamacare was great. In fact, I have long argued that the US health care system is a complete and total train wreck. But now Obamacare is making everything that was bad about our system much, much worse. Americans are going to pay far more for health care, the quality of that care is going to go down, they are going to have to deal with far more medical red tape, and thousands upon thousands of US employers are considering getting rid of the health plans that they offer to employees altogether due to Obamacare.

If the US health care system was a separate nation, it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet, and now Obamacare is going to absolutely cripple it. To say that Obamacare is an “economic catastrophe” would be a massive understatement.

Gone is the healthy water storage that floated California through two dry years. Major reservoirs around the state need gully-washing storms this winter. "Whatever the storms bring this winter, that's what we will have to cope with next summer," said Steve Haugen, watermaster at the Kings River Water Association, which closely monitors Pine Flat Reservoir.

Northern reservoirs face similar challenges, though water storage is not as low as Pine Flat. Shasta, Oroville, Trinity, New Melones, Don Pedro and Exchequer are hovering at one-third to one-half of capacity, far lower than average for late October. Dwindling reservoirs should be a wake-up call to Californians, said Mark Cowin, director of the state Department of Water Resources. "January through May 2013 were California's driest in about 90 years of recordkeeping," Lucero said.

San Luis Reservoir, which gets water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, is only 22% of its historical average for this time of year. Dry weather was not the whole story. Delta environmental restrictions early this year resulted in pumping cutbacks and the loss of nearly 1 million acre-feet of water at San Luis.

The United States could possibly become "embroiled in a direct hegemonic conflict with China over the Asia Pacific region," which "most likely would include military involvement." Germany is also increasingly participating in the arming and training of the West's allies in Eastern and Southeastern Asia.

An "intensification of the security competition" in the Pacific region can, in any case, be expected, even if it does not escalate into war, one political scientist at the Bundeswehr University in Munich reaffirms. Last June, the Federal College for Security Studies, the German government's central military policy think tank, examined China's arms buildup and discussed military conflict scenarios involving China.

For quite awhile, eventual military confrontations with China have been discussed in the West in light of the People's Republic's decades of uninterrupted economic upswing. China is about to replace the United States as the world's most important trading power. Experts expect that the Chinese GDP will bypass that of the USA in the foreseeable future.

China's significantly growing economic influence is accompanied by a steady growth of its political power. At the same time, the West "is less and less capable of solving its own problems (...) due to the 2009 global financial crisis," according to a recent study by the CSU-affiliated Hanns Seidel Foundation. As the financial crisis has shown, China has even "assumed the role of a fire department to extinguish global crises." With "China's increasing involvement in the World Bank," the USA is threatened with a loss of "its control." According to the Seidel Foundation, the question must slowly, but surely be raised: "Has China's system possibly become superior to that of the West?"

He insisted that the use of six Tornado jet fighters in reconnaissance missions that would call in airstrikes on the Taliban would violate international law. Six years on, he fears his fellow Germans are falling back into the once-disastrous practice of just following orders. “There's a silent change in the minds of the people,” he says.

His fears have been prompted by a comprehensive overhaul of the military over the last two years — including scrapping the draft to create a so-called professional army — that he says represents a creeping return to the militarism that plunged Germany and its neighbors into two world wars.

After World War II, what was then West Germany reluctantly formed a fighting force to support NATO in the event of a Soviet invasion. However, Germany's post-war leaders took strong measures to ensure that no military government like the Nazi “state within a state” would ever rise again.

The army's mandate was restricted to defending Germany from attack. Generals were placed under the control of a civilian defense ministry and a new type of soldier was created. Guided by a concept called “Innere Führung” (“inner conscience”), their duty was not to blindly follow orders but question them. Over the past 15 years, however, serious cracks have emerged in two of the three pillars the post-war architects viewed as essential to creating a morally superior army. Skeptics counter that it's no coincidence the military has been involved in three “wars of aggression” — in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq — since this rethinking began.

The chancellor's foreign policy adviser and Germany's intelligence co-ordinator will hold talks at the White House. The head of US intelligence has defended the monitoring of foreign leaders as a key goal of operations. The US is facing growing anger over reports it spied on its allies abroad.

Stephen Evans BBC News, Berlin, reports: The measure of how seriously Chancellor Merkel takes the matter is that she has sent two of the most important people in her immediate circle of advisers: her foreign policy adviser, Christoph Heusgen, and the German government's intelligence coordinator, Guenter Heiss.

Next week, the heads of the actual spying agencies go to meet their opposite numbers in Washington. This week's meetings are more about how to rebuild trust, while next week's agenda will be more about the detail of how the two countries' agencies might or might not work more in harmony.

It is rare for intelligence officials to speak in any public detail about liaison arrangements with foreign spy agencies because such relationships are so sensitive. Even more unusual is for the United States to point fingers at partners. But that is what NSA Director General Keith Alexander did at a public congressional hearing on Tuesday when, attempting to counter international complaints about the agency's alleged excesses, he said its sources for foreign telecommunications information included "data provided to NSA by foreign partners."

Alexander's disclosure marked yet another milestone in NSA's emergence from the shadows to defend its electronic surveillance mission in the wake of damaging revelations by former agency contractor Edward Snowden. "It is true that in general we stay close-mouthed about intelligence liaison relationships and we only speak in the most general terms about sharing things with our friends and allies," said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst. But, he said, there was nothing wrong in correcting information that was out in public, even though Alexander probably "created or exacerbated some political problems" for a number of European allies with his comments.

"Given the hypocrisy being exhibited by the Europeans in saying they are 'shocked, shocked' that these sorts of things go on - allies spying on allies - I don't think we should feel much compunction about having them feel a little bit of domestic political heat if that is necessary to set the story straight in one of our own congressional hearings," Pillar said.

The American spy agency monitored telephone calls made to and from the residence in Rome where the then Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio stayed during the conclave, the secret election at which cardinals chose him as pontiff on March 13.

The claims were made by Panorama, an Italian weekly news magazine, which said that the NSA monitored the telephone calls of many bishops and cardinals at the Vatican in the lead-up to the conclave, which was held amid tight security in the Sistine Chapel.

The information gleaned was then reportedly divided into four categories — “leadership intentions”, “threats to financial system”, “foreign policy objectives” and “human rights”. At that time, Benedict XVI was Pope, suggesting that the Vatican may also have been monitored during the last few weeks of his papacy.

Unlike the American Patriot system, the Chinese system, produced by China Precision, is not easily compatible with existing NATO air defense systems, and China Precision is even under US sanctions for selling technologies that the US government says could help Syria (Turkey’s new nemesis), Iran, and North Korea develop unconventional weapons.

One would think that Turkey would have made sure its primary security guarantor – the United States – was happy, given that a civil war is raging in neighboring Syria and occasionally spilling into its territory. Yet the US quest to be "Big Man on Campus" and retain "influence" in Europe after the Cold War has allowed its NATO allies to get away with even more than they did back then.

During the Cold War, the United States subsidized its allies’ defense while they got rich. Instead of building up their own defenses to counter the Soviet Union – a much more likely threat to Europe and East Asia than to the United States – they were able to divert scarce resources into their civilian economies to compete with US commercial industries.

Despite the United States heavily subsidizing their security, many allies failed to fully open their markets to US products. In some case, the United States had to accept allied protectionism as the price for stationing protection forces in allied nations! And all this sacrifice from American taxpayers to maintain the "influence" of the American foreign policy elite in allied countries. What exactly does this influence get the taxpayer? Not much apparently.

Thirty-eight percent of children under the age of two have used a mobile device, such as a tablet or smartphone, according to the report fromCommon Sense Media. That’s up from 10% only two years ago.

“This is quite an extraordinary shift for our young children,” James Steyer, chief executive and founder of Common Sense Media, told Agence France-Presse (AFP). “The media children consume can have a profound impact on their learning, social development, and behavior, and the only way to maximize the positive impact — and minimize the negative — is to have an accurate understanding of the role it plays in their lives. These kids are true digital natives,” Steyer said.

Games constituted the most common mobile media activity among young children, 63% of parents reported.

The so-called war on terrorism has actually increased terrorism around the world. Whenever the United States government announces that they are launching a war on something we get more of what they are waging a war on. The war on poverty resulted in more poverty, the war on drugs resulted in more drug use and now we can definitively say the same thing about the war on terrorism.

If the goal of the so-called war on terrorism was to reduce the amount of terrorism in the world it has failed miserably. Anyone with any sort of common sense would look at this study and realize that a policy change is in order.

James Madden, forecaster for Exacta Weather, said: “Another period of very stormy weather and potentially damaging winds may also develop later in the week and into next weekend.”

“This storm may also have the potential to become more widespread than the St Jude storm that we have just experienced. It will begin to turn much cooler than of late as we progress throughout this week, with the risk of ground frosts in parts of the North by midweek.”

In Waltham, an algorithm developed by a startup company called Affectiva performed what is known as facial coding: it tracked the panelists’ raised eyebrows, furrowed brows, smirks, half-smirks, frowns, and smiles. When this face data was later merged with real-world sales data, it turned out that the facial measurements could be used to predict with 75 percent accuracy whether sales of the advertised products would increase, decrease, or stay the same after the commercials aired.

By comparison, surveys of panelists’ feelings about the ads could predict the products’ sales with 70 percent accuracy. Although this was an incremental improvement statistically, it reflected a milestone in the field of affective computing. While people notoriously have a hard time articulating how they feel, now it is clear that machines can not only read some of their feelings but also go a step farther and predict the statistical likelihood of later behavior.