He expressed skepticism that the Obama administration would be able to force Iran to comply with demands that it show its nuclear program is peaceful. Asked if military action against Iran was “inevitable,” Cheney said he had “trouble seeing how we’re going to achieve our objective short of that.”

Cheney faulted the Obama White House’s handling of Middle East politics, saying the US presence in the region had been “significantly diminished” in recent years. “I think our friends no longer count on us, no longer trust us and our adversaries don’t fear us,” he said.

Republican leaders, under pressure from Tea Party-backed conservatives, said the bill was needed because the food stamp program, which costs nearly $80 billion a year, had grown out of control. They said the program had expanded even as jobless rates had declined with the easing recession.

“This bill eliminates loopholes, ensures work requirements, and puts us on a fiscally responsible path,” said Representative Marlin Stutzman, Republican of Indiana, who led efforts to split the food stamps program from the overall farm bill. “In the real world, we measure success by results. It’s time for Washington to measure success by how many families are lifted out of poverty and helped back on their feet, not by how much Washington bureaucrats spend year after year.”

But even with the cuts, the food stamp program would cost more than $700 billion over the next 10 years. The measure has little chance of advancing in the Senate, and Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan and the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, called it “a monumental waste of time.”

If violent crime keeps increasing at this rate, it will approximately double in just six years. When the next major economic downturn strikes it will probably greatly accelerate the growth of the crime rate in this country. Desperate people do desperate things, and there are people out there that are already stealing entire truckloads of food.

In the future, when people are extremely hungry or crazy for their next drug hit, they won't think twice about invading your home or pulling you out of your vehicle. The rise in crime that we are witnessing right now is just the beginning. It is going to get a lot worse than this.

As economic conditions continue to deteriorate, I actually expect that we will start seeing armed guards on food trucks in a few years. Desperate people do desperate things, and as food prices continue to rise I believe that food trucks will become highly prized targets. America is rapidly changing, and not for the better.

Israel severed ties with the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council in March 2012, after it announced it would investigate how the Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria would affect the rights of local Arabs.

This year, on January 29, Israel became the first country to boycott the UNHRC review, which is mandatory for every United Nations member country, after facing increasing criticism for building more Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria. The move, a protest measure against the UN directive stating that Israel's actions are to be reviewed at every UNHRC council meeting, created a media and political hullabaloo with rumors of a full Israeli pullout from the United Nations.

In a personal letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Westerwelle warned that Israel's failure to attend the periodic evaluation - a review infamous for its anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian measures - would alienate Israel's allies and cause "severe diplomatic damage", Haaretz reports.

And two of the counties have entered the civil disobedience phase with a vengeance as their County Board of Supervisors have voted to secede from the state of California. As I read their local community’s media accounts, accompanied by their reasons for secession, I feel like I’m reading an old United States history textbook in which we could substitute the state of South Carolina for the seceding California counties of Siskiyou and Modoc. Emotions are running very high as the residents lifestyles and livelihoods are facing total obliteration.

Over the years, many rural residents have been frustrated by federal environmental laws restricting logging and other forestry activities. The timber industry is dead. The mining industry is dead. The entire region is being deindustrialized and many residents and local leaders have stated that becoming a state would finally allow them to push the federal government to alter the onerous restrictions on government-owned land as well to forsake the private property rights restrictions being imposed upon them.

I have been aware of Agenda 21 abuses in places like Fort Collins, Colorado, where the courts steal the children from parents who protest against draconian Agenda 21 policies. I’m also aware that in places like Santa Cruz, California and Austin, Texas that individual property rights are severely limited because the local governments have adopted United Nations Agenda 21 policies. However, nothing and I mean nothing, matches the Agenda 21 abuses of individual liberties and private property rights that is going on in the northern counties of California and Southern Oregon.

And true to form for the mainstream media, barely a word of coverage has been broadcast or published for a national audience.

A spokeswoman for the archdiocese declared that “the parish of Cobridge has a long history, but in recent times the number of Catholics in the area has shrunk to such an extent that those attending Mass at St Peter’s were simply no longer able to maintain a priest and the church buildings”. Islam is replacing Christianity as first religion everywhere in Europe.

In France, the country of famous Catholic intellectuals such as Emmanuel Mounier, Georges Bernanos, Francois Mauriac, Jacques Maritain and Teilhard de Chardin, dozens of churches have been razed to make way for mosques, showrooms and malls. The last cases are in Saint Blaise du Breuil, Allier, Saint Pie- X Hérault and Saint Jacques d’Abbeville in the Somme. The Observatory for Religious Heritage claims that “for the first time places of worship are destroyed for no apparent reason and turned into parking lots, restaurants, boutiques, gardens and homes”.

According to the French Senate, 2,800 Christian religious buildings are now at risk of being demolished. France now has just 9,000 priests measured against 40,000 during the last war. Many churches are replaced by mosques.

Network Rail said the damage was "worse than expected," while 130 flights have been cancelled at Heathrow airport. The Met Office said a gust of 99mph (159km/h) was recorded at Needles Old Battery, Isle of Wight, at 05:00 GMT.

Both reactors in Dungeness power station's B units have been automatically shut down after power to the site was cut off. The site's own generators are providing power to the site.

Yet beneath the surface, Washington’s flirtation with a voluntary default has shaken confidence in American political institutions. There may be no immediate rival to the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Markets are more preoccupied by prospects of a delay to the Federal Reserve’s tapering plans. But as John Kerry, US secretary of state, said this week, the world is now monitoring the US to see when it will recover its senses. It cannot afford to make a habit of political recklessness.

There are two further costs to America’s rumbling domestic crisis that are equally hard to measure. As Einstein once quipped, not everything that counts can be counted. The first is to America’s reputation. Bill Clinton observed that the US should lead by the power of its example, rather than the example of its power. By that yardstick, the US is floundering.

Second, the shutdown has further sapped confidence in the US recovery. Last week the delayed jobs figures for September showed that the US labour market looks once again to be stalling. US consumer confidence also dipped to its lowest level in almost a year. And the shutdown has shaved at least 0.25 per cent from US fourth-quarter growth forecasts.

The world continues to hang on every word of the Fed, which remains the only functional economic game in town. The chances are that it will delay tapering until March after Janet Yellen, the nominee to replace Ben Bernanke, has taken over.

If Capitol Hill does not block her confirmation, Ms Yellen will quickly need to show she is in the driving seat. It would therefore be a great help to her – and to a warily observant world – if Congress could keep the car on the road between now and then. There is more at stake here than mere reputation. The status of superpower carries responsibility too.

The winds are expected to leave a trail of destruction across a large swathe of the UK, bringing down trees and causing widespread structural damage, leading to power cuts and transport chaos tomorrow morning. Surface water floods could strike much of England as the Met Office predicts 20-40mm of rain could fall within six to nine hours overnight.

Atlantic storms of this type usually develop further west across the ocean, losing strength by the time they reach the UK and Ireland. But this is expected to appear much closer to land, potentially moving across the country while in its most powerful phase.

The Met Office said it was increasingly confident that the ferocious weather would cut a swathe from Wales to the Humber, bringing down trees and causing structural damage, though officials were still not sure of the exact course of the storm.

There were 108,592,000 people in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2011 who were recipients of one or more means-tested government benefit programs, the Census Bureau said in data released this week. Meanwhile, according to the Census Bureau, there were 101,716,000 people who worked full-time year round in 2011. That included both private-sector and government workers.

That means there were about 1.07 people getting some form of means-tested government benefit for every 1 person working full-time year round.

“The carbon tax is bad for the economy and it doesn’t do any good for the environment,” Abbott told The Washington Post. “Despite a carbon tax of $37 a ton by 2020, Australia’s domestic emissions were going up, not down. The carbon tax was basically socialism masquerading as environmentalism, and that’s why it’s going to get abolished.”

“If the Labor Party wants to give the people of Australia a Christmas present, they will vote to abolish the carbon tax. It was damaging the economy without helping the environment. It was a stupid tax. A misconceived tax,” Abbott added. The carbon tax increased taxes on 2.2 million people and did nothing to decrease carbon dioxide emissions, according to a study by Dr Alex Robson, economist at Australia’s University of Brisbane.

The paradox was uncovered by the Palestinian Media Watch group, which compared the speech Abbas made at the UN on September 27, to remarks he prepared for an event on the same day that celebrated the life of Ahmad Abu-Sukar, a notorious terrorist best known for his 1975 “refrigerator bomb” attack that killed 15 and injured 77.

In his UN General Assembly speech, Abbas said that the goal of the current talks going on between Israel and the PA “is to achieve a permanent agreement that will include all the core issues and allow us to declare an end to the conflict. The purpose of the talks is to achieve an independent Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem.” In the speech, Abbas said that he wanted to establish a PA state that would live “side by side with Israel.”

A number of Israeli politicians, including Labor head Shelly Yachimovich, were impressed. The speech, she said, “gives cautious hope that we are facing a new era of dialogue which may lead to an agreement.” The speech was a marked improvement over “the outrageous speech Abbas delivered a year ago at the UN,” with this year's speech consisting of “moderate comments.”

But as Abbas was making his UN speech, PMW said, another speech, prepared by Abbas and read out by PA top terrorist Jibril Rajoub at an event in Abu-Sukar's memory, called the terrorist a “hero,” a “legend,” and a “trailblazer” who showed PA Arabs the proper attitude to Israel.

"We have made it crystal clear – in all possible forums, that Israel will not stand by and watch Iran develop weaponry that will put us, the entire Middle East and eventually the world, under an Iranian umbrella of terror," Danny Danon, Israel's deputy defense minister told USA TODAY. Iran is developing and installing new and advanced centrifuges that enable Iran to enrich even low-enriched uranium to weapons grade uranium needed for nuclear weapons within weeks, Danon said.

"This speedy enrichment capability will make timely detection and effective response to an Iranian nuclear breakout increasingly difficult," he said. "Breakout" refers to the time needed to convert low-enriched uranium to weapons-grade uranium. On Thursday, the Institute for Science and International Security issued a report stating that Iran could reach that breakout in as little as one month based in part on Iran's own revelations about its nuclear program.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has said his country has no interest in nuclear weapons but that producing nuclear fuel is Iran's right. However, Iran has blocked international inspectors from some suspected nuclear facilities, making it impossible to determine whether it is complying with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it has signed.

United Nations inspectors say they have found evidence of a weapons program in violation of Iran's commitment under the treaty. The USA and the UN Security Council have implemented economic sanctions on Iran to persuade it to abide by its obligation and verify it is not developing a bomb.

Asked by moderator Rabbi Shmuley Boteach whether the US should negotiate with Iran if it were to cease its uranium enrichment program, Adelson retorted, “What are we going to negotiate about?” Adelson then imagined what might happen if an American official were to call up an Iranian official, say “watch this,” and subsequently drop a nuclear bomb in the middle of the Iranian desert.

“Then you say, ‘See! The next one is in the middle of Tehran. So, we mean business. You want to be wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position and continue with your nuclear development. You want to be peaceful? Just reverse it all, and we will guarantee you that you can have a nuclear power plant for electricity purposes, energy purposes’,” Adelson said.

“So a tremendous demonstration of American strength?” Boteach clarified. “So that they would get the message?”

“It’s the only thing they understand,” Adelson said.

“And do you see the current negotiations as a sign of weakness?” Boteach asked.

“Absolutely,” Adelson said.

Yogev’s letter came as Israeli leaders plan to release more terrorists, as part of an ongoing raft of "goodwill gestures" by the Israeli government to the Palestinian Authority. Abbas has strongly pushed for all terrorists in Israeli prisons to be freed.

Abbas’ concern for terrorists is a red flag, Yogev warned. “Is Abu Mazen Abbas a peace partner? Or perhaps an enemy in a time of war?” he asked. Yogev, who heads the Judea and Samaria Affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, warned that material that has reached the committee proves that PA officials are “encouraging terrorism.”

Terrorism is praised in the official PA school system, at cultural events, in the media and by religious leaders, he said. “The incitement in the Palestinian Authority reflects a deep unwillingness to recognize the state of Israel as a Jewish state, or to see us as legitimate at all,” he warned.