“Saudi spy chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and director of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency Tamir Bardo sent their representatives to a meeting in Vienna on November 24 to increase the two sides' cooperation in intelligence and sabotage operations against Iran’s nuclear program,” an anonymous source close to the Saudi secret services told Fars over the weekend.

The source noted that one of the major methods discussed was “the production of a malware worse than…Stuxnet.” Stuxnet, a computer worm discovered in 2010, formed the basis of a cyberattack that sabotaged Iran’s uranium enrichment program. Its complexity prompted researchers to claim that it could only have been developed by a nation state.

It was generally believed to have been developed by the US and Israel, with former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden only confirming their covert roles in an interview this July. The intention behind the development of the new malware would be “to spy on and destroy the software structure of Iran’s nuclear program.” The source expressed a desire to remain anonymous on account of the sensitivity of information being shared.

The plan would need a great deal of time and funding, with a rough figure of US $1 million being given as an estimate. It was apparently welcomed by Saudi Arabia with open arms.

The Corbi family doesn’t need keys (thanks to biometric recognition software), doesn’t fear earthquakes (thanks to steel-reinforced concrete caissons that burrow 30 feet into the private hilltop) and sleeps easily inside a 2,500-square-foot home within a home: a ballistics-proof panic suite that Corbi refers to as a “safe core.”

Paranoid? Perhaps. But also increasingly commonplace. Futuristic security technologies – many developed for the military but sounding as though they came straight from James Bond’s Q – have made their way into the home, available to deep-pocketed owners whose peace of mind comes from knowing that their sensors can detect and adjust for, say, a person lurking in the bushes a half-mile away.

“If you saw this stuff in a movie you would think it is all made up,” says Corbi, whose fortress-like abode doubles as the demonstration house for his firm, Strategically Armored & Fortified Environments (SAFE). It’s not hard to see why such cutting-edge technologies would appeal to high-profile homeowners. “We had an assessment done three years ago from a private security company,” says John Paul DeJoria, billionaire founder of John Paul Mitchell Systems. “They said … that every now and again you get a real kook, and what if they came to your home and tried to do something stupid?” Now his main residence has security “similar to that of the White House.”

He’s far from the only one. Chris Pollack, president of Pollack+Partners, a design and construction advisor based in Purchase, New York, says that while security has always been a given in building homes for his ultra-high-net-worth clients, the spending for home defense has increased markedly over the last five years.

A pregnant woman has had her baby forcibly removed by caesarean section by social workers. Essex social services obtained a High Court order against the woman that allowed her to be forcibly sedated and her child to be taken from her womb. The council said it was acting in the best interests of the woman, an Italian who was in Britain on a work trip, because she had suffered a mental breakdown.

The baby girl, now 15 months old, is still in the care of social services, who are refusing to give her back to the mother, even though she claims to have made a full recovery. The case has developed into an international legal row, with lawyers for the woman describing it as “unprecedented”.

The case, reported by Christopher Booker in his column in The Sunday Telegraph today, raises fresh questions about the extent of social workers’ powers.

During the visit, Netanyahu is also due to meet his Italian counterpart Enrico Letta, and will hold a joint session with the Italian cabinet, it said. On Monday, he will be granted his first audience with Pope Francis, who took over as the worldwide head of the Catholic Church in March.

Six weeks ago, Netanyahu's office had said he would meet the pope during a visit to Rome in late October, but the meeting never happened - with a diplomatic source telling AFP it would not happen because it had not been coordinated in advance with the Vatican.

When the two meet on Monday, they are likely to discuss the Iranian nuclear issue and the ongoing peace talks with the Palestinians. And they are also expected to discuss the pope's planned visit to the Holy Land early next year. Although no date has been made official, sources on both sides say it is likely to take place on May 25-26.

The papal visit will reportedly begin in Jordan, a senior Vatican official said on Saturday, according to Jordanian state news agency Petra. One of the most delicate questions involves access by Catholic worshippers to a site on Mount Zion in Jerusalem called the Cenacle, where Christians believe Jesus held the Last Supper the night before he was crucified. In June, the sides agreed to step up negotiations over the outstanding issues.

How is it that a putative nuclear deal with Iran can be welcomed as a “historic” opportunity in Washington and Tehran, but as a “historic mistake” in Jerusalem and “more dangerous than 9/11” in Riyadh, in the phrase of one leading Saudi Arabian commentator?

At the very least, the breadth of variance in those responses points to the immense stresses being placed on an old geopolitical framework, while inviting the question: is the world a safer place? And will it be safer tomorrow?

Listen to the American and British governments, and the answer to both questions is an emphatic “yes”, and there is indeed an impressive-sounding list of achievements to support that assertion. Iran’s nuclear programme is now frozen; Syria’s chemical weapons are being destroyed; al-Qaeda leadership is decimated and on the run; Somalia and Mali are reclaimed from Islamist militants; piracy attacks have been stamped out; Europe is stable; relations with China are functional; and the US economy is in recovery.

The new American pragmatism may make us feel safer today, but it is not yet clear that it will yield a more stable and prosperous tomorrow.

Sadly, as all of this happens, the one fundamental that has historically driven stock prices higher — corporate earnings — is missing from the equation. In these pages, I have often harped on about how companies in key stock indices are buying back their shares at a record pace. I consider this “financial engineering,” because at the very core, what a stock buyback does is make corporate earnings per share look better.

If there is even a single investor out there who believes the fundamentals are no longer important — that corporate earnings growth isn’t needed for the stock market to rise — they are fooling themselves. At this point, the house of cards can fall at any time.

The parliament says the use of tablets will contribute to "cost reduction, reduction of the organisation's own carbon footprint, improved mobility and increased productivity". The cost, which includes helpdesk support and maintenance, has been criticised at a time of sweeping austerity measures in many eurozone countries.

But former European Commission chief accountant and Conservative budgetary control spokesman Marta Andreasen said, "Staff are clearly getting an early Christmas present this year. With €1,360 to spend on each tablet you can bet the Parliament won't be buying bargain basement products. This is a costly extravagance that staff simply do not need."

"Lavishing hugely expensive tablets on its staff just proves, yet again, how removed the European Parliament bureaucracy feel they are from the financial crisis. "They preach the need for austerity to everyone but themselves. Trying to dress up this move as an attempt to increase productivity and reduce their carbon footprint is treating taxpayers as fools," added the MEP.

Contaminated soil gets washed away by the high winds and rain and deposited in streams and rivers, a joint study by France's Climate and Environmental Science laboratory (LSCE) and Tsukuba University in Japan showed. An earthquake-sparked tsunami slammed into the Fukushima plant in March 2011, sending reactors into meltdown and sparking the worst atomic accident in a generation.

After the accident a large number of radioactive particles were flung into the atmosphere, dispersing cesium particles which typically cling to soils and sediment. Studies have shown that soil erosion can move the radioactive varieties of cesium-134 and 137 from the northern mountains near Fukushima into rivers, and then out into the Pacific Ocean.

"There is a definite dispersal towards the ocean," LSCE researcher Olivier Evrard said Wednesday. The typhoons "strongly contribute" to soil dispersal, said Evrard, though it can be months later, after the winter snow melts, that contamination actually passes into rivers.

From 1962, when John F Kennedy instituted PAL encoding on nuclear weapons, until 1977, the combination to fire the devastating missiles at the height of the Cold War was just 00000000. This was chosen by Strategic Air Command in an effort to make the weapons as quick and as easy to launch as possible, as reported by 'Today I Found Out'.

The Permissive Action Link (PAL) is a security device for nuclear weapons that it is supposed to prevent unauthorized arming or detonation of the nuclear weapon. JFK signed the National Security Action Memorandum 160 in 1962 that required all nuclear missiles to be fitted with a PAL system.

But nuclear experts claim the military was worried about the possibility of command centers or communication lines being destroyed in real nuclear war, stopping soldiers getting the codes or authorization to launch missiles when they were actually needed. So they simply left the security code for the weapons as eight zeros, getting around the security safeguards.

Officers assigned to the store were alerted to a dispute in the parking lot between two women. An on-duty Linden Fire Department captain on scene monitoring the crowd situation told an officer that one of the women had a stun gun.

Police spoke to a victim, a 42 year old from Staten Island, who told officers that she and another woman were having an argument over a shopping cart when the other woman pulled out a stun gun and activated it in a threatening manner.

Police say the woman with the stun gun, Latosha Mathis, 34, of Elizabeth, New Jersey was arrested after officers found the TW-11 stun gun in her purse. She was charged with illegal possession of a stun gun, and is due back in court on December 6, 2013. She faces up to 18 months in jail and a $10,000 fine.

Upset with the United States, senior Saudis have hinted at a range of possibilities, from building strategic relations with other world powers to pushing a tougher line against Iranian allies in the Arab world and, if world powers fail to foil Tehran's nuclear ambitions, even seeking its own atomic bomb.

While Jordan was a senior diplomat in the administration of President George W Bush, some Saudi analysts also say the kingdom is well aware of what major foreign policy shifts would involve - particularly any pursuit of nuclear weapons.

This could end up casting Saudi Arabia as the international villain, rather than its regional arch-rival Iran, and Riyadh has no appetite for the kind of isolation that has forced Tehran to the negotiating table. "Saudi Arabia doesn't need to become a second Iran," said a Saudi analyst close to official thinking. "It would be a total reversal of our traditional behaviour, of being a reliable member of the international community that promotes strategic stability and stabilizes oil markets."

Sharyn Mittelman, senior analyst at Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, noted in the Canberra Times that the UN General Assembly by the end of its annual legislative session is expected to enact 22 resolutions condemning Israel, as opposed to 4 on the rest of the world combined. Bishop's spokesman criticized the UN resolutions, saying Australia's abstention "reflected the (Australian) government's concern that Middle East resolutions should be balanced."

UN condemnation of Israel has reached the point that recently a UN interpreter was caught on an open mic expressing shock at the excessive criticism. The interpreter said "I mean, I think when you have five statements, not five, like a total of ten resolutions on Israel and Palestine, there's gotta be something, c'est un peu trop, non? [It's a bit much, no?] I mean I know... There's other really bad stuff happening [around the world], but no one says anything, about the other stuff."

Ed Miliband buries his head in the sand and won't say what he thinks about our national destiny. Nick Clegg desperately brands Brexit supporters as "unpatriotic". The national mood is understandably angry. The prospect of the imminent arrival of thousands of Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants after January 1 when border restrictions are lifted will rapidly concentrate political minds.

Amid all the opinion polls on the next wave of EU immigration, one finding, from the Harris/Daily Mail survey earlier this month, leaped out. A stunning 64 per cent of the public want David Cameron to go further: to refuse the Romanians and Bulgarians entry to the UK even if it means defying the full majesty of EU law, to which the UK is now subservient.

Whatever happens over immigration, Britain is rapidly moving closer to the exit. We are already being taken to the European Court of Justice over the modest conditions we currently attach to benefits for EU migrants. We cannot go on like this.

I don't know how long we will remain an increasingly recalcitrant member of the European club. But I do know how we got into this predicament and I believe I do know how we can thrive again as an independent nation state outside the EU.

The four-nation survey of attitudes to Europe carried out by Opinium shows British people regard the EU much more negatively than citizens of other countries.

Research from Germany, France and Poland also suggests citizens of other countries think Britain brings few benefits to the union. According to the study, more people on the continent seem happy to see Britain leave than seem keen for the UK to stay.

It is a day when the rest of the world makes fun of Americans for behaving like "rabid animals" and "zombies" as we indulge in a tsunami of greed. It truly is a shameful orgy of materialism for a morally bankrupt nation.

It is being projected that approximately 140 million Americans will participate in this disgusting national ritual this year. Sadly, most of them have absolutely no idea that they are actively participating in the destruction of the economic infrastructure of the United States. If you don't understand why this is true, please be sure to read this entire article all the way to the end.

The amount of merchandise that is purchased on Black Friday is absolutely staggering. For example, just consider how much stuff is sold at Wal-Mart alone... Wal-Mart said it recorded more than 10 million register transactions between 6 pm and 10 pm Thursday in its stores and nearly 400 million page views that day on walmart.com. It sold 2.8 million towels, 2 million televisions, 1.4 million tablets, 300,000 bicycles and 1.9 million dolls. Big-ticket electronics like big-screen TVs and new videogame consoles were among the top sellers.

At the beginning of this article, I stated that those who go shopping on Black Friday "are actively participating in the destruction of the economic infrastructure of the United States". How could that possibly be? Aren't they helping the economy by spending their money? Actually, it isn't that simple. Just think about it for a moment. Where are most of the "advertised specials" that people go crazy over on Black Friday actually made?

If you guessed "China", you would be correct. In fact, it is very difficult to find any "Black Friday specials" that are actually made in the United States. When you buy stuff made in China, you support workers and businesses in China. As I mentioned in a recent article, the US economy loses approximately 9,000 jobs for every 1 billion dollars of goods that are imported from overseas. Overall, the US has run a total trade deficit with the rest of the world of more than 8 trillion dollars since 1975. So when you look around and see lots of unemployed people, it should not be a surprise to you.

And every single American that went shopping on Black Friday and bought Chinese-made goods actively participated in the ongoing destruction of the US economy. Good job America. You are a nation that is utterly consumed by materialism and greed, and you don't even realize that you are destroying yourself with your own foolishness.