When it comes to “followers,” the pope does have an enormous head start, as leader of the 1.2 billion-member Roman Catholic Church. He also inspires unmatched curiosity and attention globally among many millions from other faiths and no faiths. Francis comments most effectively through compelling gestures. The public sees him kissing the bare foot of an imprisoned Muslim woman, or the illness-ravaged face of a man he is blessing. When a child jumps to his side or grabs his papal skull cap, the pope is attentive, undistracted.

Less instantaneous, but still revealing, gestures find him riding public buses, driving his own old car, living in humble quarters or sneaking off in the night to minister to the homeless. Minority factions, Catholic and “other,” sputter criticisms. Months ago they were surprised at the election of this Argentinean Jesuit to lead the Catholic Church. Now they charge that he restricts himself to what they dismiss as mere gestures, mere symbols, mere ceremonies.

On every level, though, the gestures of this pope serve as defining visual instruments of his papacy. Some commentators and critics have studied them to question his sincerity, which the wrong gestures and symbols could obscure. Near the end of his first year, however, the consensus now confirms that the pope we see is indeed authentic.

Will Francis misstep? Or wear out his welcome? Few signs of that as yet appear. But the old cautions remain: Francis has to take on drastic reform within the Vatican and its operations, where positive gestures and symbols will not always help him. What some see as his honeymoon of 2013 will certainly be clouded when opponents regain their footing and organize resistance. Whatever happens, however, we can be assured that we already have on hand the candidate for “the best-known person in the world” in 2014.

The total value of the returned gold is estimated at 1.1 billion euro, the head of Bundesbank, Jens Weidemann told the Bild newspaper. Weidemann explained it is part of a program to increase the reserves held in Frankfurt, and there was no doubt on the security of the gold held in America and France.

“The gold reserves of the country will be stored in Frankfurt because it has a special storage with the corresponding equipment,” said Carl-Ludwig Thiele, a Bundesbank board member. A large part of the German gold is held in foreign banks, primarily in New York and Paris. At the beginning of this year the Bundesbank said it intended to repatriate 700 tons of gold worth 27 billion euro by 2020.

Once completed, a half of the Federal republic’s gold reserves, or about 3,400 tons will be stored within the country. During the Cold War fearing a Soviet invasion the German government shipped two-thirds of its gold reserves to the UK, France and US. Recently, the Bundesbank has been criticised for not holding its reserves in Frankfurt, so it has decided that some should be brought back to Germany.

The MKs expressed concern over two issues in particular: poor storage of ancient wooden wall segments believed to date back to the time of the First Temple, and the heap of rubble and antiquities at the eastern part of the Temple Mount. The rubble, with its valuable historic artifacts, has been sitting on the mount for years, they noted, and has been the subject of Supreme Court rulings.

The Temple Mount is controlled by the Muslim Waqf. The Waqf has been accused of waging a deliberate campaign to destroy Jewish history at the site, as well as to harass Jewish visitors in an attempt to make them feel uncomfortable and avoid visiting.

Feiglin [Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and member of Likud] opened [his speech] by emphasizing the historic, emotional and archaeological importance of the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site and the previous site of the First Temple and Second Temple. “Throw a stone anywhere in Jerusalem and you’ll hit an archaeological site. But the Temple Mount is the mother of them all, the foundation of our existence,” he said. “Our roots are buried there.”

Infidel violence against or hatred of Muslims is a mere drop in the bucket. Muslim-on-Muslim violence is a pandemic and indigenous feature of Muslim-Muslim relationships, beginning with the endless religious feuds between Sunni and Shiia Muslims.

Today, Muslims are torturing, exiling, and blowing each other up in Egypt, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan — to name only a few Muslim-majority countries. While the West may be imperfect, mea culpa, mea culpa, Islam has a very long and bloody history of imperialism, colonialism, anti-Black racism, conversion via the sword, slavery, and the above mentioned apartheid.

Jesus was not a “Palestinian.” He was a Jew, some say he was a rabbi, and that the Last Supper was a Pesach seder. The attempt to appropriate Jesus as a victimized “Palestinian” by the very Muslims who are slaughtering Christians all over the Middle East and who have driven Arab Christians out of Bethlehem is typical, disgusting, and must continually be exposed.

Israel may not be a perfect nation but its Arab citizens, both Muslim and Christian, are the only Arabs in the Arab world who enjoy religious freedom, can vote and express themselves freely, and who have been peacefully elected to Parliament. As Hamad Amar, a Druze citizen of Israel and the Speaker of Israel’s Knesset has written in The Hill, an American Congressional blog: “In our whole region consisting of over 350 million Arabs, there are only 1,658,000 Arabs who have complete political and religious freedom and have the right to vote in full democratic elections. It is no coincidence that all of these Arabs live as full and equal citizens in the one Jewish State.”

"Any time there is a Santa Ana, it raises the fire danger due to low relative humidity and areas of wind," AccuWeather.com Western Forecasting Expert Ken Clark said. Southern California is in the grips of a severe drought, so there is plenty of dry vegetation that can act as fuel for any fires that ignite. Gusty winds could fan the flames.

Through early this week, Downtown Los Angeles has only received 3.60 inches of rain in 2013, according to the National Weather Service. This may go down as the driest calendar year on record.

One major US bank fears that the thieves would be able to crack the encryption code and make fraudulent withdrawals from consumer bank accounts, said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the data breach is still under investigation.

Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder said "no unencrypted PIN data was accessed" and there was no evidence that PIN data has been "compromised." She confirmed that some "encrypted data" was stolen, but declined to say if that included encrypted PINs. "We continue to have no reason to believe that PIN data, whether encrypted or unencrypted, was compromised. And we have not been made aware of any such issue in communications with financial institutions to date," Snyder said by email. "We are very early in an ongoing forensic and criminal investigation."

The Number 3 US retailer said last week that hackers stole data from as many as 40 million cards used at Target stores during the first three weeks of the holiday shopping season, making it the second-largest data breach in US retail history.

“I don’t believe in God because there’s no evidence that he exists,” I told him. “In the absence of any evidence, I can’t bring myself to believe in something so unlikely.”

“Because you can’t see him?” he asked, trying to get his head around this.

“Well, yes, that’s one reason,” I said.

“So does that mean you don’t believe in Father Christmas?”

So that was why he wanted to have this conversation on today of all days. Why hadn’t I seen that coming? I immediately did a reverse ferret.

“Er, no, I do believe in Father Christmas,” I said. “Definitely. A hundred per cent.”

“So you've seen him?”

“Well, no…” “So why do you believe in him?”

It was a good question.

“Come on, Freddie, of course there’s a Father Christmas,” I said, giving him a wink. “Who do you think fills your stocking on Christmas night? Now run along and be a good boy or Santa will bring you a lump of coal.”

There are 14 million Christians throughout the Holy Land [Middle East] but they are a rapidly dwindling minority. Many of them are so desperately vulnerable that they feel they have no choice now but to emigrate. In Iraq alone, since the fall of Saddam, a startling two-thirds have fled. Since 2003 at least a million have left. Most of them went to Syria. Now they face a second wave of displacement as they are no longer protected there.

There have been reports of rape, murder and attacks directed at them and the Christian community lives in terror. When they feel they have to run for their lives they head for Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. It is said that the ancient Syrian Armenian community has all but gone.

Egypt has seen churches being burnt and anti-Coptic rioting. In Gaza and on the West Bank, Christians are caught up in chaotic uncertainty. To be Christian in the Holy Land, the birthplace of Jesus, is to live in fear. The Vatican has confirmed as credible the estimate that 100,000 Christians are killed every year for their beliefs.

Historian Tom Holland has noted how deeply ironic it is, that two devoutly Christian leaders, George W Bush and Tony Blair, brought about, inadvertently, the final demise of Christianity in the Middle East by invading Iraq. Now the Arab Spring has proven the final knell, as Christians are all too easy targets for extremists and are living in dire jeopardy.

The latest leader of China, Xi Jinping, shows every sign of applying that lesson. A month after assuming power in November last year, Xi visited the province of Guangdong on his first major political tour. Of the five days he spent there, three were at a military base, according to official coverage of his trip.

The son of a Communist revolutionary commander, Xi built his career as a friend of the army, and at times an official in it. But he still feels compelled to ask his generals for something in return: loyalty. “First, we must keep in mind that the military must unswervingly adhere to the party’s absolute leadership and obey the party’s orders,” he said on one of his many military inspection tours.

Xi’s injunction that the party comes first is a sign of the insecurity modern Chinese leaders feel at the top of their nation’s huge and increasingly powerful armed forces, military experts say. As it grows mightier, the People’s Liberation Army is growing trickier to govern.

Xi has to win over the force that keeps the Communist Party in power. But he must do so at a time when the PLA is more self-confident than ever, mounting the first serious challenge to the naval dominance of the United States since the end of the Cold War.

For now, China’s sprawling defense industries and research laboratories are relying on a high-tech short cut. In a vast and carefully coordinated effort, China is scouring the globe for know-how that can be coupled with domestic innovation to produce strategic weapons and equipment.

A year ago this month, technicians at a maker of satellite navigation gear in the Belgian town of Leuven worked over the year-end holidays to test one such breakthrough. The Belgians loaded their receivers with a technical code for a new satellite-navigation system called Beidou, or Big Dipper.

The signal from the new Chinese system provided a surprisingly accurate position fix. “It was certainly better than you would expect from somebody doing this for the first time,” says Jan Van Hees, sales manager for privately owned Septentrio, which plans to sell civilian equipment that can use Beidou’s signal.

Beidou is one of the most striking examples of China’s global quest to buy, copy or steal the technology it needs to close the gap with the United States and other leading military powers. Highly accurate satellite navigation is fundamental to modern warfare. Aerospace experts say European and US know-how and equipment have been indispensable for China to design, build, launch, position, test and operate its navigation network and other satellites.

Seven months had passed since they’d launched an undercover operation against a suspected Chinese arms-trafficking network - one of scores operating in support of Beijing’s ambitious military expansion into outer space. The agents had allowed a Colorado manufacturer to ship a type of technology that China covets but cannot replicate: radiation-hardened microchips. Known as rad-chips, the dime-sized devices are critical for operating satellites, for guiding ballistic missiles, and for protecting military hardware from nuclear and solar radiation.

It was a gamble. This was a chance to take down an entire Chinese smuggling ring. But if He succeeded in trafficking the rad-chips to China, the devices might someday be turned against US sailors, soldiers or pilots, deployed on satellites providing the battlefield eyes and ears for the People’s Liberation Army.

Entering He’s office at 2:30 that December morning, the agents looked inside the FedEx boxes. The microchips were gone. The supervisor on the case, Greg Slavens, recoiled. “There are a bunch of rad-chips headed to China,” Slavens recalls thinking, “and I’m responsible.”

In late October, flotillas of Chinese warships and submarines sliced through passages in the Japanese archipelago and out into the western Pacific for 15 days of war games. The drills, pitting a "red force" against a "blue force," were the first in this area, combining ships from China's main south, east and north fleets, according to the Chinese military. Land-based bombers and surveillance aircraft also flew missions past Japan to support the navy units.

In official commentaries, senior People's Liberation Army (PLA) officers boasted their navy had "dismembered" the so-called first island chain - the arc of islands enclosing China's coastal waters, stretching from the Kuril Islands southward through the Japanese archipelago, Taiwan, the Northern Philippines and down to Borneo.

Named Manoeuvre 5, these were no ordinary exercises. They were the latest in a series of increasingly complex and powerful thrusts through the first island chain into the Pacific.

For the first time in centuries, China is building a navy that can break out of its confined coastal waters to protect distant sea lanes and counter regional rivals.

China's Lieutenant-General Ren Haiquan took the podium in a room overlooking the Yarra River last October 29 and began diplomatically enough. But as he neared the end of his speech, he went on the offensive. "Some people" had ignored the outcome of World War Two and were challenging the post-war order, he told counterparts from 15 other nations. It was a pointed reference to Japan's claim over islands in the East China Sea that Beijing insists are Chinese.

"One should never forget history and (should) learn from history," Ren said, according to a copy of his speech. "Flames of the war ignited by fascist countries engulfed the whole region, and many places, including Darwin in Australia, were bombed."

In a jarring coincidence, say officers in the audience, fireballs belched into the sky as he spoke, part of the casino's hourly fireworks display. Visibly displeased at the dig, the senior Japanese officer present, army Lieutenant General Yoshiaki Nakagawa, left with his fellow officers as soon as the speeches concluded, people in the audience said.

“The US needs to recognize that China will not tolerate US military presence in its waters just as the United States will not tolerate Chinese naval ships off the coast of Atlantic City in New Jersey,” Madsen said in a phone interview with Press TV on Wednesday.

Washington and Beijing have been trading barbs since USS Cowpens and a Chinese warship “nearly collided” in the South China Sea earlier in December. “With President Obama’s ‘pivot’ to Asia where he has redirected a lot of US military assets to East Asia, we’re going to see a lot more confrontations like the one we recently saw between a US Navy cruiser and a Chinese aircraft carrier,” Madsen said.

In his tour of the region on Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the United States would increase maritime security assistance to China’s neighbors amid rising tensions with Beijing.

At the time, Shalit did not provide a reason for his resignation. Washington asserted that his authorization of the sale of a miniature cooling system for missiles was in direct violation of Israel’s preexisting obligations to the United States.

The conflict came as a result of differing interpretations of defense agreements between Israel and the US, according to the report. Israel claimed that the highly sensitive part was actually sold to a European company as part of a separate deal, but the Americans contended that the fact that it ultimately wound up in China is a breach of long-standing arrangements between Washington and Jerusalem.

Furthermore, there is fear among the Americans that this advanced technology has found its way from China to Iran.