But Ocean Grove’s crown jewel, an ornate and beautiful 6,250-seat auditorium, built in 1894, survived. It only had a third of its roof torn off. The auditorium’s foundation was intact and, most important, its 11,561-pipe organ was unscathed by the wind and rain. So despite everything, the residents of Ocean Grove counted themselves lucky. That is, until they had to deal with the federal government. Ocean Grove has been denied rebuilding funds from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

In one sense, this denial is part of the Obama administration’s quiet campaign against religion in the public square. Yet the story of FEMA’s conflict with Ocean Grove is about more than just Barack Obama. It’s the story of modern America’s rebellion against its religious foundations, rendered in miniature.

In the late 1860s, a Methodist preacher named William Osborn assembled a small group of pastors from around Philadelphia to purchase a patch of land at the shore in central New Jersey. On July 31, 1869, they christened their one square mile of paradise “Ocean Grove.”

“This is a disappointment not just for the EU but, we believe, for the people of Ukraine,” EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said in a statement, claiming that “the most ambitious” pact ever offered to a partner by the EU would have helped the country’s economy.

The decree signed by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov's government on Thursday orders the “halt of the process of preparing the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the European Union.” The decision was taken to “ensure the national security of Ukraine” and “restore lost trade volumes with the Russian Federation” after considering the effects on trade relations with Moscow, legislators said.

Russia welcomed Ukraine's decision to actively develop ties with Moscow, while President Putin said he wasn't completely against Ukraine's association with EU. But trilateral trade talks should take place before Ukraine signs an agreement with the EU.

Western diplomats played down the prospect of a pending breakthrough in the talks that began on Wednesday after a November 7-9 round in which the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany came close to winning concessions they count on to reduce the risk of an Iranian nuclear weapon. They said some progress had been made during the first two days and the number of disagreements reduced. But Iran's insistence that the six powers explicitly acknowledge its right to enrich uranium - a process which can yield both electricity and nuclear bombs - was proving a major political obstacle.

Under discussion is an Iranian suspension of some sensitive nuclear activities, above all medium-level uranium enrichment, in exchange for modest sanctions relief. That would involve releasing some Iranian funds frozen in foreign bank accounts and allowing trade in precious metals and petrochemicals. The United States may also agree to relax pressure on other countries not to buy Iranian oil. Tehran has made clear it is most interested in resuming oil exports and getting respite from international sanctions on Iranian banking and financial transactions that have shackled the oil-dependent economy.

The US delegation at the talks has said no country has an inherent right to enrich uranium, but also indicated that some kind of compromise on the issue could be devised. But the US ability to be flexible is limited, especially in light of skepticism in US Congress about cutting a deal with Tehran.

Speaking at an event hosted by the New York City Bar Association on Tuesday, US District Judge Jed Rakoff of Manhattan said the DoJ’s “unconvincing” excuses for not prosecuting individuals were “technically and morally suspect.” “Not a single high level executive has been successfully prosecuted in connection with the recent financial crisis, and given the fact that most of the relevant criminal provisions are governed by a five-year statute of limitations, it appears very likely that none will be,” Rakoff said.

While the DoJ has not said that all the top executives are innocent in the lead-up to the financial crisis, it “has offered one or another excuse for not criminally prosecuting them — excuses that, on inspection, appear unconvincing,” the Financial Times reports Judge Rakoff as saying. Ultimately, “the failure of the government to bring to justice those responsible for such a massive fraud speaks greatly to weaknesses in our prosecutorial system that need to be addressed,” he said.

And “to federal judges who take an oath to apply the law equally to the rich and the poor, this excuse, sometimes labeled the ‘too big to jail excuse,’ is mindboggling in what it says about the department’s disregard of fundamental legal principles,” he continued. Rakoff’s statements echo the calls of many banking reform advocates who have charged that real accountability will only come when executives are prosecuted and sent to jail for illegal activity.

The revelation came Tuesday during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on the possible security risks surrounding healthcare.gov. “The committee’s been reviewing materials that indicate that some parts of healthcare.gov were not completed before the launch, as we’ve discussed here,” Representative Cory Gardner (Republican for Colorado) said. “What portion of the website remained to be created when you launched on October 1st?”

“I don’t have an exact percentage,” said Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “I look at it in terms of overall marketplace systems. I think it was a set of priority functions that needed to be in place,” Chao added.

“Well, how much do we have to build today?” Gardner pressed.

“Just an approximation, we’re probably sitting somewhere between 60 and 70 percent,” Chao said.

“Sixty to 70 percent that needs to be built still?” Gardner said.

“We still have to build the payment systems to make payments to issuers in January,” the Obamacare official said before adding, “the online application, verification, determination, plan compare, getting enrolled, generating enrollment transaction – that’s 100 percent there.”

“But the entire system is 60 to 70 percent away from being complete,” Gardner said.

Also, evidence of broader behavioral issues across the intercontinental ballistic missile force, including sexual assaults and domestic violence. The study, provided to the AP in draft form, says that court-martial rates in the nuclear missile force in 2011 and 2012 were more than twice as high as in the overall Air Force. Administrative punishments, such as written reprimands for rules violations and other misbehavior, also were higher in those years.

These indicators add a new dimension to an emerging picture of malaise and worse inside the ICBM force, an arm of the Air Force with a proud heritage but an uncertain future. Concerned about heightened levels of misconduct, the Air Force directed RAND Corp, the federally funded research house, to conduct a three-month study of work conditions and attitudes among the men and women inside the ICBM force. It found a toxic mix of frustration and aggravation, heightened by a sense of being unappreciated, overworked, micromanaged and at constant risk of failure.

Remote and rarely seen, the ICBM force gets little public attention. The AP, however, this year has documented a string of missteps that call into question the management of a force that demands strict obedience to procedures.

Traders in London were left scratching their heads on Wednesday morning when a rapid-fire 10-second spell of selling sent gold prices quoted on a Bloomberg monitor down suddenly by about $10 (£6) to trade near $1,260 an ounce. IG Markets commented that the fall came suddenly following a 2,000-contracts sell order hitting the market, but the incident shows how markets don't always comply to the logic of traders reacting to big news events that are publicly disclosed and that we all know about.

It also illustrates the challenges facing the FCA in investigating alleged rigging of heavily traded commodities or asset classes such as gold and currency, where prices can often shift on the slightest rumour or sniff of bearish sentiment. Traders I spoke to in London this morning were themselves lost for an explanation over the gold price other than to say the drop was triggered by electronic trading, which kicks in when a price crosses a key support level as it did today.

Evidence of collusion and coordinated strategies to fix prices by traders is clearly wrong and should be sanctioned but is it really such a surprise, or indeed a cardinal sin, that traders exchange often unsubstantiated market banter via electronic messenger services to make a buck? The alternative is a market entirely run by computers, which clinically execute trades based on meta-data or programmed triggers. We could then blame the computer, not the human, when mutual funds fail to return the expected 10 percent annual return on your investments.

Hundreds of supporters of the ruling Socialist Party cheered outside the National Assembly as the so-called Enabling Law was passed, while a recording of Maduro's late predecessor, Hugo Chavez, singing Venezuela's anthem rang out inside the hall.

The power to pass laws without congressional approval gives Maduro a political victory in the run-up to December 8 municipal elections, although he still faces a severely distorted economy with embarrassing product shortages and inflation surging to nearly 55 percent.

"I want to thank the majority of patriotic and socialist lawmakers for approving this law that will let us advance, over the next 12 months, in defeating the economic war being waged against our people," Maduro said.

“The cloud” is one of my least favourite internet neologisms. It suggests something fluffy, white and weightless: a global atmosphere within which our email, social network profiles, images and shared files innocently drift. All of which sounds delightful – but the reality is that every cloud is composed of a vast infrastructure of bunker-like rooms, filled with rack upon rack of servers. And the moment you decide to upload something into this global data warehouse – be it photos of your family or precious documents – you give up many of your rights to ownership.

This summer, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak added his voice to the chorus of those alarmed by the implications of the cloud. “I think it’s going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be horrible problems in the next five years,” he opined on a trip to Washington. “With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away… the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.”

Rights – and content creators’ lack of them – lie at the heart of cloud storage’s worst dangers, something connected in turn to the underlying nature of cloud storage. In the words of Douglas Heaven, writing in New Scientist, “a digital file exists as a state of matter… rather than matter itself.” Your information is not a piece of property in any legal sense. It’s merely the electrical state of a disk owned by somebody else; or, more likely, the state of a large number of different disks scattered across the world, each containing part or all of what may be numerous copies of your information, backed up and accessed and reproduced as necessary to ensure server-side efficiency.

Unfortunately for investors, demographically much of the developed world is in trouble. Japan, Europe and even the United States have seen declining fertility rates in recent decades. Today, all three regions are well below the 2.05 children per woman needed to sustain, let alone grow population. This same issue affects the developing world too. And China is the clear leader for a potential demographic crisis in the coming years.

Today China produces only 1.6 children per woman across the board. If you want to focus on the wealthier segments of the Chinese population, using Hong Kong as a proxy, the numbers are even worse. It is not coincidence that China intends to further loosen its “one child” policy and is also considering the closing of labor camps. Both are welcome developments even if the latter may not be a “done deal.” And both are designed to help boost China’s population.

China needs to produce, on average, 2.05 children per woman to maintain its population and support its ageing citizens. Anything lower then this means a slowdown economically in the future (no matter how much China improves productivity).

This issue also comes with geopolitical consequences. China is surrounded by large regional competitors with much higher fertility rates (India, Pakistan, etc). China has had conflict with one in the past (India). The other (Pakistan) is currently an economic and military ally of China owing to proximity and a common rival (India). But Pakistan’s government is hardly in control of its population which is growing rapidly. Throw Indonesia (also growing rapidly) into the mix and there are going to be a LOT MORE people competing for limited resources in and around China.

Productivity can boost an economy, but in the end you need new people and a new child today takes at least 20 years to become a productive worker and form a new household.

In addition, France has sided with Israel on several important issues, such as demanding that Iran's nuclear weapons program be halted, at all costs. However, according to NGO Monitor, the French government also funds many groups whose stances contradict its own tenets – radical leftist groups that actively demonize Israel, spreading incitement against Israelis and even advocating terror attacks.

In one case, a French court ruled against an NGO that sued French companies that were working on the Jerusalem Light Rail, claiming that the companies were violating French and international law by “abetting the occupation.” The court ruled against the Association France Palestine Solidarité (AFPS) – which had funded the lawsuit with money it received from none other than the French government.

Several French NGOs, including AFPS, CFD-Terre Solidaire, Secours Catholique, and others receive millions of dollars from the French government, which they distribute to groups in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Nearly all these groups are radically anti-Israel, advocating a complete withdrawal of Israel from all of Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem, the full repatriation of descendants of Arabs who fled Israel in 1948, reparations to the PA for “six decades of suffering,” and so on.

The influence of anti-Israel groups on the French government has been substantial, judging from the actions of French officials in Israel in recent months.

AFP reports that Khamenei told commanders of the Islamist Basij militia force in Tehran: "the Zionist regime (Israel) is a regime whose pillars are extremely shaky and is doomed to collapse." Responding to Israeli concerns over Iran's nuclear weapons program, Khamenei called Israel "the rabid dog of the region" and claimed Israel poses a threat to the world, not Iran. The Basij crowd responded with cries of "Death to Israel" and "Death to America."

Khamenei had insults for Israeli officials as well. Deputy Foreign Minister Ze'ev Elkin (Likud) on Tuesday backed previous statements that Israel could militarily act alone to defend itself from the Iranian nuclear threat.

Perhaps in response, Khamenei said "the title of human is not worthy of the leaders of the Zionist regime," adding that the Iranian response to a military action would be "a slap in the face they will never forget." Khamenei further said in a live state television broadcast that "any phenomenon that is created by force cannot endure," referring to Israel's numerous defensive wars fought to ensure the country's existence.

The Western alliance claims this is to test the members’ capability and teamwork, mainly for reasons of matching America’s commitment to the alliance, as well as keeping their edge after the Afghan mission is over. The upcoming series of war games comes amid widespread military spending cutbacks throughout NATO, in the wake of the expensive military interventions in places such as Libya and Afghanistan, which were a great drain on resources.

Rainer Rupp, a former German intelligence officer with the HVA, believes that the current exercises should be examined against the background of the Afghan experience and that the upcoming games have little to do with European security or keeping everyone ready for whatever scenarios may come.

There, he explains, NATO “could test its interoperability” just as well. However, now, “with NATO countries – especially the United States – leaving Afghanistan beaten like a dog with the tail between its legs, they need to project and show the world that they still have their claws sharpened.” Rupp sees the games as nothing more than “part of a continued effort of… intimidating nations that don’t follow voluntarily the US and European lead.”

Footage showed clouds of heavy smoke, billowing steam and waters roiling over the newly-formed crater. The newly-formed land is off the coast of Nishinoshima, a small, uninhabited island in the Ogasawara chain. It is within the seismically active Pacific "ring of fire".

Jim Dobbin, chairman of Parliament’s All Party Group on Gibraltar, said the heightened tensions in the Mediterranean meant it would only take a trigger-happy “madman” on either side to spark serious retaliation.

He highlighted an “extremely serious” armed standoff earlier this month when a Spanish patrol boat breached a security cordon in Gibraltar’s territorial waters then “rammed a Naval Police Vessel escorting a British Navy ship”.

As Mr Dobbin was issuing the warning, a Spanish survey ship was defying Royal Navy orders to leave Gibraltar's territorial waters. Gibraltar's government has asked London to make a protest to Madrid, and the Spanish Ambassador has been summoned to the Foreign Office. The Spanish boat has now left the Gibraltar waters.