Amid reading excerpts from a lengthy decision of more than 140 pages, United States Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes announced during Tuesday morning’s historic hearing that he approved of Detroit’s Chapter 9 filing, in turn authorizing the largest municipal bankruptcy ever in the US to proceed.

Detroit — once the automobile manufacturing capital of the world and an icon of Americana — has fallen heavily into debt during the last few decades, so much so that Governor Rick Snyder hired bankruptcy expert Kevin Orr to man the helm of the city in March and assume the role of emergency manager. Four months later, though, Orr’s attempt to salvage the city proved to be futile, and Detroit filed for Chapter 9 protection this past July.

In order to decide if Detroit could be awarded protection from creditors, Judge Rhodes was forced to find the city insolvent and agree that it was authorized to file for bankruptcy in the first place. Additionally, Rhodes had to find that city officials either negotiated with creditors in “good faith” or that those negotiations were impractical.

"The court finds that Detroit was and is insolvent,” Rhodes said around one hour into the hearing, Detroit Free Press journalist Nathan Bomey reported from the city’s Levin Courthouse. Moments later, according the Free Press’ Brent Snavely, Rhodes ruled that the court “finds that this case was filed in good faith and should not be dismissed,” allowing the city to begin restructuring plans immediately.

The Prime Minister said he would concentrate on the ‘facts and figures’ showing rapidly increasing Chinese investment in Britain, rather than the excoriating article in the Beijing-based Global Times. The piece accused Mr Cameron of acting provocatively in meeting the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama last year, an encounter which plunged Sino-British relations into a deep freeze from which they are only now recovering. It also took Mr Cameron to task for comments backing expanded democracy in former British colony Hong Kong.

The Global Times, which is owned by the official Communist Party People’s Daily newspaper, said: ‘The Cameron administration should acknowledge that the UK is not a big power in the eyes of the Chinese.’ The timing of the attack was particularly awkward, with Mr Cameron in the country and Downing Street basking in Chinese president Xi Jinping’s description of the ‘indispensable relationship’ between his country and the UK.

The editorial added: ‘We’ve discovered that Britain is easily replaceable in China’s European foreign policy. Moreover, Britain is no longer any kind of “big country”, but merely a country of old Europe suitable for tourism and overseas study, with a few decent football teams.’ Its sneering conclusion said: ‘We wish Prime Minister Cameron and his delegation a pleasant visit to China.’

It was also the first time in almost 40 years that more than half of Americans have viewed their nation’s global standing in such a pessimistic way. Back in 2004 the figure was a mere 20 percent.

America is also less respected globally than it was in the past, say 70 percent of the people surveyed, which nearly matches the level of 71 percent reached in May 2007 in the late months of President George W Bush’s second term.

Accordingly, the US public’s support for meddling in foreign affairs is almost at a historic low, with 52 percent of Americans saying that the country should “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own,” as opposed to just 38 percent who disagree with the statement. The balance is the most lopsided in favor of the isolationistic world view in nearly 50 years, the Pew report says.

The Obama administration’s handling of foreign crises is viewed with criticism by 56 percent of those polled, while 34 percent said they approve of it more than disapprove. Terrorism is the only major issue where approval surpasses disapproval.

The deployment, planned before China last month established an air defense zone covering islands controlled by Japan and claimed by Beijing, includes six aircraft to be delivered to Kadena air base on Okinawa this month.

The first arrived on Sunday, a spokesman for the US Navy told Reuters. The mission in the waters west of Japan’s main islands will be the new aircraft’s first anywhere. The jet, built by Boeing Co based on its 737 passenger plane, has been built to replace the aging propeller-powered Lockheed Martin P-3 Orion patrol aircraft, which has been in service for 50 years. Packed with the latest radar equipment and armed with torpedoes and anti-ship missiles, the P-8 is able to fly further and stay out on mission longer than the P-3.

While taking no position on the sovereignty of the islands known to the Japanese as the Senkakus and to the Chinese as the Daioyu, it does recognize Japanese control and therefore part of territory it would defend under a security pact with Japan.

Germany on Tuesday made a fresh attempt to outlaw the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany as the country's 16 regional governments filed a motion with the Federal Constitutional Court. But doubts persist whether the court will rule in their favor, and whether a ban would significantly curb right-wing extremism in Germany. The states argue that the NPD espouses a racist, violent ideology similar to that of Hitler's Nazi party and that it wants to overthrow the democratic order through militant action.

"The ideology and the whole NPD party is xenophobic, inhuman, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic," said the interior minister of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, Roger Lewentz of the center-left Social Democrats. The motion cites an NPD brochure for party officials which states: "An African, Asian or Oriental can never be a German, because handing out printed documents … doesn't change their biological heritage. Members of other races will therefore … always remain foreign bodies regardless of how long they live in Germany."

The party also indirectly glorifies Nazi leaders including Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess, and trivializes Nazi crimes, say the backers of the motion. The NPD refers to Allied bombing raids on Nazi Germany as the "Bomben-Holocaust," or the bombing Holocaust. Its leader, Holger Apfel, is on record saying the Holocaust memorial in Berlin should be razed to the ground.

Hajo Funke, a leading analyst of the far-right scene, said the NPD is even more radical than the fledgling Nazi party when it comes to repatriating immigrants. "It is a neo-Nazi party, it's racist, it's oriented towards violence, it needs civil war to get to the Fourth Reich," Funke told Spiegel Online.

He said that the precedent set by Obama could eventually lead to an armed revolt against the federal government. On Tuesday, Michael Cannon, Cato Institute’s Director of Health Policy Studies, testified before a congressional committee about the dangers of the president’s legal behavior.

“There is one last thing to which the people can resort if the government does not respect the restrains that the constitution places on the government,” Cannon said. “Abraham Lincoln talked about our right to alter our government or our revolutionary right to overthrow it.”

“That is certainly something that no one wants to contemplate,” he continued. “If the people come to believe that the government is no longer constrained by the laws then they will conclude that neither are they.”

“That is a very dangerous sort of thing for the president to do, to wantonly ignore the laws,” Cannon concluded, “to try to impose obligation upon people that the legislature did not approve.”

The Obama administration has drawn a dubious distinction between whistleblowing that reveals bureaucratic waste or fraud, and leaks to the news media about unexamined secret government policies and activities; it punishes the latter as espionage.

Every disclosure to the press of classified information now triggers a leak investigation, said Washington Post national news editor Cameron Barr. “Investigations can be done electronically. They don’t need to compel journalists to reveal sources.” The Post’s Justice Department reporter, Sari Horwitz, said a Justice official told her that “access to e-mail, phone records and cellphones make it easier to do now.”

After the New York Times published a 2012 story by David E Sanger about covert cyberattacks by the United States and Israel against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, federal prosecutors and the FBI questioned scores of officials throughout the government who were identified in computer analyses of phone, text and e-mail records as having contact with Sanger.

“A memo went out from the chief of staff a year ago to White House employees and the intelligence agencies that told people to freeze and retain any e-mail, and presumably phone logs, of communications with me,” Sanger said. As a result, longtime sources no longer talk to him. “They tell me: ‘David, I love you, but don’t e-mail me. Let’s don’t chat until this blows over.”

Sanger, who has worked for the Times in Washington for two decades, said, “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.”

But you don't have to be a Nobel Prize winner to see what is happening. It should be glaringly apparent to anyone with half a brain. The financial markets have been soaring while the overall economy has been stagnating. Reckless injections of liquidity into the financial system by the Federal Reserve have pumped up stock prices to ridiculous extremes, and people are becoming concerned.

In fact, Google searches for the term "stock bubble" are now at the highest level that we have seen since November 2007. Despite assurances from the mainstream media and the Federal Reserve that everything is just fine, many Americans are beginning to realize that we have seen this movie before. We saw it during the dotcom bubble, and we saw it during the lead up to the horrible financial crisis of 2008. So precisely when will the bubble burst this time?

Nobody knows for sure, but without a doubt this irrational financial bubble will burst at some point. Remember, a bubble is always the biggest right before it bursts.

Since being at the bottom of the market in 2009, the Dow has jumped 143 percent, the S&P 500 is up 165 percent and the Nasdaq has risen an astounding 213 percent. This does not reflect economic reality in any way, shape or form.

“Let's be honest with ourselves,” Hayden told Fox News Sunday. “We have accepted Iranian uranium enrichment. There's no question about that. That's a different red line than we used to have.”

“It says in the agreement that we will come to an agreement with regard to their right to enrich, which is very different from the UN Security Council resolutions to date, which say that they do not have a right to enrich.”

“At the end of the day, Iran's going to be a nuclear threshold state,” he told host Chris Wallace. “What we have to do is push that threshold back as far as possible. That would... define whether this was a good idea or a bad idea.”

“Right now, the Iranians are far too close to a nuclear weapon,” he said. “We have hit the pause button. Now we've got to negotiate hitting the delete button with them.”

During the last year, the biggest global banks have been found guilty of rigging benchmark lending rates and manipulating the world's interest rates derivatives market that involves trading in contracts that have a total notional value of tens of trillions of dollars.

It is not surprising that after finding out that banks rig Libor benchmark rates, Euribor benchmark rates, settlement values for currencies and a number of reference prices in the energy sector, regulators suspect that the banks may manipulate the gold and silver markets. BaFin spokesman mentioned that the German regulator is not alone in its suspicions and that there are similar investigations taking place in the United Kingdom and the US, without providing further details.

During the last several years, a number of NGOs and market participants have come up with allegations that the big investment banks are actively manipulating the benchmark rates for gold and silver. NGOs like the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee have repeatedly tried to make regulators investigate the gold markets but they had no success until the Libor scandal broke out.

Rarely has an international agreement triggered such widely divergent reactions as the Iran deal reached in Geneva, with proponents touting it as a solution to the world's problems while opponents paint doomsday scenarios. Still, it is only a temporary, six-month deal.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called it a "breakthrough." United States President Barack Obama said that for the first time in years "we have halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear program. And key parts of the program will be rolled back." German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle called the deal "a turning point."

An enthusiastic crowd all but crushed chief negotiator Mohammad Zarif upon his return to Tehran, after a deal had been reached with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany. The foreign minister deserved a gold medal for his diplomatic skills, the Iranian newspaper Arman Daily wrote enthusiastically, noting that the world had come a step closer to global peace "without Iran having to abandon its principles."

The deal evoked a completely different reaction in Saudi Arabia and Israel. Abdullah al-Askar, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the influential Shura Council, spoke darkly of what he called Iran's "evil agenda." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fumed that the deal was a "historic mistake," saying: "the most dangerous regime in the world has taken a significant step toward attaining the most dangerous weapon in the world."

The case provoked a wave of anger from MPs and patient pressure groups, with one MP describing social workers as ‘dictators who are unaccountable and out of control’. The treatment of the 35-year-old Italian, who arrived in Britain last summer and then fell into an episode of serious mental ill health, was condemned as extraordinary and totalitarian.

It will raise questions of how secret justice in Britain could impose an invasive medical procedure on a foreign citizen and then seize her child, apparently without contacting the authorities in her own country. The girl, born last August, is now close to being adopted by a British couple, despite a court hearing that her mother had recovered and was giving clear and articulate evidence as she pleaded to keep her.

Douglas Carswell, the Tory MP for Clacton, said: ‘As an Essex MP, I have serious concerns about Essex children’s services. They are unaccountable and out of control. These people are dictators who abuse their powers. They are arrogant bullies and people are frightened of them. They operate in secret, they have great powers, and they are unaccountable.’

The success of the spacecraft, scheduled to orbit Mars by next September, would carry India into a small club, which includes the United States, Europe and Russia, whose probes have orbited or landed on Mars.

India's venture, called Mangalyaan, faces more hurdles on its journey to Mars. Fewer than half of missions to the planet are successful. "Given its cost-effective technology, India is attractive," said Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, an expert on space security at the Observer Research Foundation think-tank in Delhi.

India's low-cost Mars mission has a price tag of 4.5 billion rupees ($73 million), just over one-tenth of the cost of NASA's latest mission there, which launched on November 18.

The Chang'e-3 rocket carrying the Jade Rabbit rover blasted off around 1:30 am (Sunday 1730 GMT) into the dark sky, the CCTV official broadcaster showed in live footage from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the southwest of the country. The probe is due to land on the moon in mid-December to explore its surface and look for natural resources.

It is the world's third lunar rover mission following those by the United States and former Soviet Union decades earlier. China's military-led space programme aims to establish a permanent space station by 2020 and eventually send someone to the moon. Since 2003 it has sent 10 astronauts into space and launched an orbiting space module, Tiangong-1. It also sent probes to orbit the moon in 2007 and 2010.

How could it not be wrong to deliberately dim and dull your senses? If you don’t like the world as it is, then change it. Don’t numb yourself into apathy. I have to say that when I told him to get out, I thought I was expressing a pretty conventional opinion. It only dawned on me later just how out of tune I was with the times.

Drug abuse, you see, isn’t just a minor fringe activity. It is the secret vice of the whole British Establishment. I wonder how many government and media buildings would get through a thorough search for traces of cocaine, for instance. Fearing personal exposure if they act or speak against drugs, our political class let this man-made plague rage through our society, fuelling all kinds of crime, driving young people mad and debasing our whole society.

I suggest we offer our ruling elite an amnesty. All crimes confessed to within a set time to be forgiven – on condition they now enforce the laws they were elected to preserve, protect and defend.