A statement from Ashton's office said she reaffirmed support for the PA’s state-building efforts and for the need for the factions to reconcile "as an important element for the unity of a future Palestinian state and for reaching a two-state solution."

Hamas violently took control of Gaza in 2007, setting up its own government there and cracking down on Fatah officials who reside in the territory, leading to the long-standing rivalry between the two factions. Fatah and Hamas signed a reconciliation deal in Cairo in 2011, pledging to set up an interim consensus government of independents that would pave the way for legislative and presidential elections within 12 months.

Hamas opposes the appointment of prime minister Rami Hamdallah, choosing instead to recognize its own Haniyeh, and also no longer recognizes the legitimacy of Abbas, whose four-year term as PA Chairman ended in 2009, and new elections have not been held since.

A day earlier, Abbas warned that Israel would be to blame if ongoing peace talks collapsed over its demand to keep military forces in the Jordan Valley. "We will not accept it, and if they (the talks) collapse, they (Israelis) will be the reason for the collapse, not us," he said in an interview with the Baltic News Service.

Ministry of Religious Affairs Chairman, Elhanan Glatt, revealed during the meeting that clear instructions had been given to the female bath attendants not to question women who visit the mikve as to their personal status. “If a woman wants to enter the mikve in order to go up the Temple Mount, and even if there may be a halachic (Jewish law) issue involved, it is not within an attendant’s purview to prevent it,” Glatt stated.

Some ritual baths permit only married Jewish women to immerse themselves, in accordance with the standard practice in many modern-day Jewish communities. Other communities allow unmarried women to immerse as well.

The question of Jewish ascension to the Temple Mount continues to be controversial. The Temple Mount is the holiest place on earth according to Jewish tradition, and was the site of the First and Second Temples. As such, some rabbis say Jews should be encouraged to visit and pray at the holy site. However, other rabbis say that Jews should not enter the Temple Mount until ancient practices have been brought back that would ensure they are in a state of ritual purity before stepping foot on the holy site.

There were no immediate signs of serious damage or injury from the tsunami and people were being warned to stay away from the coast. The tsunami hit around an hour after the strong quake. Workers at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant were "ordered to evacuate from the waterfront", news agency Kyodo reported, though no new abnormalities had been found at the power station.

The earthquake struck at a depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) at 2:10am (Saturday) local time, 327 kilometers southeast of Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture, according to the US Geological Survey.

In light of revelations that the National Security Agency hacked German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone, in addition to recording information about 124 billion phone calls during a 30-day period earlier this year, the fallout against the NSA has accelerated. Brazil is set to finalize a 34,000-kilometre undersea fiber-optic cable by 2015 that will run from Vladivostok, Russia to Fortaleza, Brazil, via Shantou, China, Chennai, India and Cape Town, South Africa.

The project will create, “a network free of US eavesdropping,” which via legislative mandates will also force the likes of Google, Facebook and Yahoo to store all data generated by BRICS nations locally, shielding it from NSA snooping.

“The BRICS countries have the muscle to pull this off,” notes Washington’s Blog. “Each of the BRICS countries are in the top 25 largest economies in the world. China has the world’s second largest economy, India is 3rd, Russia 6th, Brazil 7th, and South Africa 25th.” Other entrepreneurs are also fighting back against NSA surveillance.

Tech maverick John McAfee recently announced that he was to fund a $100 gadget named Decentral that would sync up with a modem to thwart NSA spying and provide total anonymity.

Asked what he would do if the US government banned the product, McAfee responded, “I’ll sell it in England, Japan, the Third World. This is coming and cannot be stopped.”

Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief is vowing that the kingdom will make a 'major shift' in relations with the United States to protest perceived American inaction over Syria's civil war as well as recent US overtures to Iran, a source close to Saudi policy said on Tuesday. Prince Bandar bin Sultan told European diplomats that the United States had failed to act effectively against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was growing closer to Tehran, and had failed to back Saudi support for Bahrain when it crushed an anti-government revolt in 2011, the source said.

'The shift away from the US is a major one,' the source close to Saudi policy said. 'Saudi doesn't want to find itself any longer in a situation where it is dependent.' It was not immediately clear whether the reported statements by Prince Bandar, who was the Saudi ambassador to Washington for 22 years, had the full backing of King Abdullah.

The growing breach between the United States and Saudi Arabia was also on display in Washington, where another senior Saudi prince criticized Obama's Middle East policies, accusing him of 'dithering' on Syria and Israeli-Palestinian peace. In unusually blunt public remarks, Prince Turki al-Faisal called Obama's policies in Syria 'lamentable' and ridiculed a US-Russian deal to eliminate Assad's chemical weapons. He suggested it was a ruse to let Obama avoid military action in Syria.

In Bahrain, home of the US Fifth Fleet, a simmering pro-democracy revolt by its Shi'ite majority has prompted calls by some in Washington for US ships to be based elsewhere. Many US economic interests in Saudi Arabia involve government contracts in defense, other security sectors, health care, education, information technology and construction.

The linchpin of this system is the petrodollar. For decades, if you have wanted to buy oil virtually anywhere in the world you have had to do so with US dollars. But if one of the biggest oil exporters on the planet, such as Saudi Arabia, decided to start accepting other currencies as payment for oil, the petrodollar monopoly would disintegrate very rapidly.

For years, everyone assumed that nothing like that would happen any time soon, but now Saudi officials are warning of a "major shift" in relations with the United States. In fact, the Saudis are so upset at the Obama administration that "all options" are reportedly "on the table". If it gets to the point where the Saudis decide to make a major move away from the petrodollar monopoly, it will be absolutely catastrophic for the US economy.

The biggest reason why having good relations with Saudi Arabia is so important to the United States is because the petrodollar monopoly will not work without them. For decades, Washington DC has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the Saudis happy. But now the Saudis are becoming increasingly frustrated that the US military is not being used to fight their wars for them.

What all of this means is that the US government and the Federal Reserve are systematically destroying the financial system that has enabled us to enjoy such a high standard of living for the past several decades. Yes, the US economy is not doing well at the moment, but we haven't seen anything yet. When the monopoly of the petrodollar is broken, it is going to be absolutely devastating.

The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), has been struggling to keep radiation under control ever since the nuclear disaster that took place March 11, 2011, when three of the plant’s reactors were hit by a tsunami, which was triggered by an underground earthquake off the coast of Fukushima. The damaged power plant has been accumulating radioactive water since, but TEPCO is running out of space quickly.

To avert a new disaster triggered by the typhoon, TEPCO proposes to move the contaminated water into underground storage pools previously deemed unsafe because of leaks, Japan’s NHK reported Thursday. There seems to be no alternative, as the typhoon is fast approaching. The three underground pools proposed for storage have a total capacity of 9,000 tons. TEPCO stopped using similar models in April, after the discovery of leaks.

The need for the November operation is increasingly urgent, even critical: any light tremor – let alone a full-on earthquake – could trigger a series of catastrophic leaks, possibly resulting in the world’s most severe radiological disaster yet. Recently, as it became clear that nuclear containment costs and a battered economy were taking their toll on finances, the government was forced to step in with funds to try and get the cleanup back on track.

A 20 kilometer no-go zone is currently imposed around the Fukushima plant.

Ms Merkel spoke to the US President regarding the allegations last night and her Government has today summoned the US ambassador John B Emerson to Berlin for talks. It is thought that the scandal could see European leaders lose their zeal to discuss a mooted free trade agreement between the EU and the US which had looked likely to be in place next year.

European leaders are likely to be looking for clarification over the relationship between Europe and the States before any such deal. Angela Merkel's government yesterday said it took the allegations ‘extremely seriously’ after media reports said the National Security Agency had hacked into her mobile phone ‘for years’.

A two day EU summit in Brussels, which has begun this afternoon, looks likely to have been hijacked by the controversy, with French President Francois Hollande and Ms Merkel wanting to talk about how Europe will 'co-ordinate a response' to the scandal.

President Dilma Rousseff has ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the US National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company’s network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to US tech companies such as Facebook and Google.

“The global backlash is only beginning and will get far more severe in coming months,” said Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Institute at the Washington-based New America Foundation think-tank. “This notion of national privacy sovereignty is going to be an increasingly salient issue around the globe.”

Most of Brazil’s global internet traffic passes through the United States, so Ms Rousseff’s government plans to lay underwater fiber optic cable directly to Europe and also link to all South American nations to create what it hopes will be a network free of US eavesdropping. Ms Rousseff is urging Brazil’s Congress to compel Facebook, Google and other US companies to store all data generated by Brazilians on servers physically located inside Brazil in order to shield it from the NSA.

If that happens, and other nations follow suit, Silicon Valley’s bottom line could be hit by lost business and higher operating costs.

In the same vein, other left-wing commentators say the building of homes and business beyond the Green Line is a severe blow to Israeli-EU relations. All of this is nonsense and it feeds the tired narrative that the Jewish settlements are the main obstacle to peace with the Arab world. But there is something to be said about the way the Jewish settlements are perceived by the international community. In other words, it is perception and not reality that is the real existential threat to Israel.

Despite a major petition bearing the signatures of more than 1,000 lawyers, scholars, jurists and diplomats from around the world – all of whom agree the Jewish settlements are legal and that the concept of “1967 lines” does not exist in international law – the European Union remains stubbornly committed to the delegitimization of Israeli communities beyond the Green Line. A spokesperson for EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton (who was the recipient of the petition) has proclaimed that EU policy towards Israel remains unaltered.

How is it that Europe, which is responsible for extermination of one-third of world Jewry, has the audacity to dictate policy to a tiny country that is home to the descendants of Holocaust survivors? I cannot be the only person in Europe who is repulsed by this hypocrisy. Or has Europe fallen so low that nobody even notices the EU’s selfish duplicity?

[Ambassador Alan Baker, a leading international law expert served as Legal Counsel and Deputy Director General of Israel’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs. He was ambassador to Canada and is presently the Director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and heads the international action division of the Legal Forum for Israel wrote a response to the directive:] "This directive illustrates an inherent bias by the EU against Israel and as such prejudices any aspiration by the EU that it can continue, with clean hands, to be involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Thus, I thought it urgent to issue a widely supported legal opinion explaining why the directive should be revoked, as it is incorrect, wrongly based and in violation of the EU’s status in the peace process.

By its persistence in referring to the pre-1967 lines, the EU is undermining future negotiation on this issue by predetermining its outcome. Another major point was that the territory of Judea and Samaria has never been determined in any agreement or formal document, to be Palestinian territory. The EU itself is signatory as witness to the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement (1995). In that text, the parties agreed to negotiate the fate of the territories. Hence the EU assumption undermines this negotiating process.

It’s been almost a week since Congress reached a temporary deal to suspend the US government’s debt ceiling and the Treasury department has already wasted no time by adding another $375 billion in new debt. Suspension of a cap on US debt, which was previously fixed at $16.69 trillion, means the Treasury department, headed by Jack Lew, can effectively spend whatever amount of money it needs or wants.

How much debt can the US government rack up by the next debt ceiling deadline on February 7, 2014? At the current spending pace of $375 billion per week, US public debt would reach $22.70 trillion. Numerous times, we’ve written extensively about how the US Treasury had been using accounting shenanigans to avoid going over the previous legal debt limit.

We also made the point that any corporation or corporate executive that attempted to use the US Treasury’s same accounting tactics would be charged with fraud. Others too have caught on to the US Treasury’s financial games. "When you are the largest economy in the world, when you are the safe haven in all circumstances, as has been the case, you can't go into that creative accounting business," said International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde in an interview with NBC News' Meet the Press. What does the bond market have to say about this?

Since Mandela’s was elected South Africa’s first black president in 1994 after spending 27 years in prison for actively opposing the segregationist policies of apartheid in the country, Afrikaners say over 3,000 white farmers have been murdered in revenge for the suppression enforced by its own National Party. Afrikaners say the government has never shown much desire to investigate the deaths.

And now as Mandela is in and out of hospital at age 95, Afrikaners and their supporters are preparing for the worst upon his death. Last year, South African President Jacob Zuma antagonized Afrikaners when he sang a song referencing revenge against whites in a public sing-along. “You are a Boer (white man), we are going to hit them….” Zuma sang, with a group.

All the while, they’ve told us that everything is getting better. But anyone who’s paying attention knows that nothing of the sort has happened. We continue to shed jobs. Hundreds of thousands of people are still losing their homes. Personal debt is rapidly approaching 2007 levels. The US government has borrowed more money than what we can ever hope to repay. We are still in the middle of it and it’s only going to get worse.

As for the international scene… the whole thing is collapsing. That’s our forecast. We are saying that by the second quarter of 2014, we expect the bottom to fall out… or something to divert our attention as it falls out.

Make no mistake. It’s coming. And when it hits, it’ll make the crisis of 2008 look like a picnic. We survived that one, barely, but it took trillions of dollars just to stabilize, not fix, the system. This time around, our creditors and the people as a whole may well lose confidence. And once that is lost, look out, because as Gerald Celente notes, the happenings at Walmart when the EBT system crashed were just a prelude.

Imagine that next time around it happens to not just EBT cards, but ATM’s and bank accounts, or that the US dollar itself crashes to such an extent that it is no longer feasible as a mechanism of exchange. In such a scenario you can fully expect disruptions to food supplies and the normal flow of commerce.

The four men were sentenced October 6 after being arrested in a house church last December and charged with consuming alcohol in violation of the theocracy's strict laws, according to Christian Solidarity Worldwide. They were among several Christians punished for their faith in a nation where converting from Islam to Christianity can bring the death penalty. According to a new October UN report by Ahmed Shaheed, UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, such persecution is common, despite new President Hasan Rouhani's pledge to be a moderate.

“At least 20 Christians were in custody in July 2013," Shaheed wrote. "In addition, violations of the rights of Christians, particularly those belonging to evangelical Protestant groups, many of whom are converts, who proselytize to and serve Iranian Christians of Muslim background, continue to be reported.”

Iran’s regime has made stopping the spread of Christianity a cornerstone of its crackdown on religious freedom. There are estimated to be as many as 370,000 Christians in Iran, according to the most recent US State Department report. The clerical rulers see Christianity as a threat to Iran’s majority ultra-orthodox Shiite Islamic religion.