The March 2011 tsunami forced hundreds of thousands in the Fukushima area to flee at a moment’s notice. RT’s Aleksey Yaroshevsky reports that many refugees living in quickly-erected 30-square-meter homes in Koriyama were initially promised that conditions would eventually improve, yet most seem to have long abandoned any semblance of better prospects or redeeming what once was.

“When the tsunami hit, we were told to pack only the necessary things and run away,” one refugee told RT. “They said it would be only for two, three days. Now, living in this cage of a house, returning to our old house is a dream which we know won’t ever come true. We are being fed with promises of a bigger house, but that’s as far as it gets: promises.”

Yaroshevsky reports that there are hundreds of such makeshift camps around the region, accommodating over 300,000 people. One man living there told RT that his once profitable job is long gone, and that the broken promises are still very real. “I had a $100,000-a-year business producing honey, now it’s destroyed forever, just like my life,” he said. “On top of all that, I’m offered neither financial compensation nor any job. That’s why I’m taking TEPCO to court.”

And, as everyone knows, month after month the Fed and the BOJ diligently create $85 billion and $75 billion in new outside money out of thin air (that this "credit" ends up in the stock market is a different topic).

Basically, while everyone focuses on the breakneck money creation by the Fed and the BOJ, what happened in the past month is that China quietly created some 20% more money. Perhaps most importantly, between these three entities, nearly $400 billion in liquidity was created de novo in one month! Because when the entire world is a credit-fuelled ponzi scheme, these are the kind of numbers that matter.

So how long before the developed and developing world "have" to create $1 trillion or more in money supply each month to keep the house of cards from toppling?

Once feared as the Black Death – the rodent-borne disease that wiped out a third of the world's population in the Middle Ages – bubonic plague has killed 20 villagers in Madagascar in one of the worst outbreaks globally in recent years, health experts have confirmed.

The confirmation that bubonic plague was responsible for the deaths last week near the north-western town of Mandritsara follows a warning in October from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that the island nation was at risk of a plague epidemic.

The Pasteur Institute of Madagascar revealed on Tuesday that tests taken from bodies in the village last week showed that they had died of bubonic plague. The institute added it was concerned the disease could spread to towns and cities where living standards have declined since a coup in 2009.

The Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) was originally created to oversee the government bailout of the auto and financial industries. But it has used its congressional authority to pursue bank executives who misused bailout funds. To date, SIGTARP has gone after 107 senior bank officers, most of whom have been sentenced to prison, according to The Washington Post. Its work also has produced $4.7 billion in restitution paid to victims and the government.

What it lacks in size it makes up for in terms of criminal authority authorized by Congress. Unlike regulators, SIGTARP can issue search warrants, seize property and even make arrests. But those targeted by SIGTARP have run community banks, not the national institutions that dominate Wall Street.

Mark Williams, a former bank examiner who teaches finance at Boston University, told the Post that it’s been less difficult for SIGTARP to go after the small fish. “The amount of direct evidence of banker wrongdoing in these smaller bank cases is easier to show,” he said. Williams added that SIGTARP’s work nonetheless sets “an important precedence that bad banker behavior will not be tolerated and [will be] aggressively prosecuted.”

In a landmark judgment, five Supreme Court Justices redefined religion in law in order to enable the group to conduct weddings. It follows a five-year legal battle by Louisa Hodkin, a 25-year-old scientologist, who was seeking the right to get married at the Church of Scientology chapel in central London, which she attends.

Miss Hodkin and her fiancé Alessandro Calcioli, who were at court to hear the judgment handed down, hailed the decision as a victory for freedom of worship. But ministers voiced alarm that it could open the way for the group to claim lucrative tax breaks worth hundreds of thousands of pounds a year and other legal privileges.

With volcanoes also awakening around the entire world, have we entered into an entirely new phase of earth changes? Over the course of the past 48 hours, December 7th, through December 9th 2013 - a series of moderate sized earthquakes has struck directly along the edge of the North American Craton.

This newest craton edge earthquake swarm consists of upper 3.0 magnitude and mid 4.0 magnitude earthquakes occurring just south of Yellowstone National Park (supervolcano). Still well within the newly defined perimeter of the underground magma chamber(s) associated with past eruptions. This Yellowstone swarm is on top of yesterday's 4.5 magnitude event in Oklahoma, and the ADDITIONAL 3.7 magnitude event in Northeast Texas (both at fracking operation earthquake swarm locations).

A team found the cavern stretches for more than 90km (55 miles) and contains 200-600 cubic km of molten rock. The findings are being presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco. Professor Bob Smith, from the University of Utah, said: “We’ve been working there for a long time, and we’ve always thought it would be bigger... but this finding is astounding.” If the Yellowstone supervolcano were to blow today, the consequences would be catastrophic.

The last major eruption, which occurred 640,000 years ago, sent ash across the whole of North America, affecting the planet’s climate. Now researchers believe they have a better idea of what lies beneath the ground. It is unclear when the Yellowstone supervolcano will erupt again.

The team found that the magma chamber was colossal. Reaching depths of between 2km and 15km (1 to 9 miles), the cavern was about 90km (55 miles) long and 30km (20 miles) wide. It pushed further into the north east of the park than other studies had previously shown, holding a mixture of solid and molten rock. “To our knowledge there has been nothing mapped of that size before,” added Dr Farrell.

BlackRock, which manages funds worth $4.1 trillion, said the global system is still in the doldrums and far from achieving sustainable recovery. “The eurozone, Japan and emerging markets are all trying to export their way out of trouble. Who is going to buy all this stuff? The maths does not work. Not everybody’s currency can fall at once,” it said.

The report said Wall Street is not in a bubble yet but BlackRock’s risk indicator - measuring “enterprise value” against earnings, adjusted for volatility - is almost as high as it was just before the dotcom bust. “The ratio of the two is the key. High valuations combined with low volatility can make for a lethal mix. This market gauge sounded the alarm well before the Great Financial Crisis,” it said.

“It’s not a question of personalities but of policies. The aim is to transform enemies into friends,” said the president, whose role in Israeli politics is largely symbolic with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the more influential position.

Peres also stated that “there was a time that we did not meet, for example, with [Palestinian leader] Yasser Arafat,” until his Palestine Liberation Organisation recognized Israel. “We must concentrate all our efforts on making sure Iran does not become a nuclear danger for the rest of the world,” he told journalists. Israel accuses Iran of working to develop a nuclear bomb, a charge denied by the Islamic republic.

Israel slammed the breakthrough deal struck between Tehran and world powers in Geneva to curb Iran’s nuclear drive saying it was a “bad deal” as Tehran had obtained “what it wanted.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said: “This is a bad agreement that gives Iran what it wanted: the partial lifting of sanctions while maintaining an essential part of its nuclear program,” according to Agence France-Presse.

Tehran does not recognize the Jewish state while Israel has warned of military action to prevent a nuclear Iran that it says would pose an existential threat.

Iranian foreign ministry spokeswoman, Marzieh Afkham, said her country would never recognize the Jewish state or change its stance, and claimed Peres's offer was aimed at easing Israeli isolation in the world. "There has not been nor will there be any change on Iran's stance and views regarding the Zionist regime," Afkam said. "Iran does not recognize Israel. Our position regarding this oppressive and occupationist regime - which is completely illegitimate and has been created to occupy the lands of the Palestinians - is clear," she added. On Sunday, Peres said in an interview he would have no problem meeting with Rouhani.

“Why not?” he said in an interview with CNN’s Richard Quest at the Globes Israel Business Conference in Tel Aviv. Israel and Iran are not enemies, he added. The important factor was not the man in question, but his policies, and the goal was to turn enemies into friends, the president said. Peres compared the decision to Israel’s choice to meet with deceased Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat ahead of the Oslo Peace agreements.

The fact that structural players in Iran opposed Rouhani’s perspective complicated the matter, Peres said. “If it was only him I’d take it with greater assurance, but there are other structures, other people,” he said. “The Iranian Revolutionary Guard, half army and half organization, spreads terror all over the world and I’m not so sure they support the president. We have to see the balance of the situation.”

"Rarely has a new player on the world stage captured so much attention so quickly - young and old, faithful and cynical," she added. "In his nine months in office, he has placed himself at the very centre of the central conversations of our time: about wealth and poverty, fairness and justice, transparency, modernity, globalisation, the role of women, the nature of marriage, the temptations of power," Ms Gibbs wrote.

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said it was "a positive sign" that one of the international media's most prestigious recognitions had been given to "a person who proclaims... spiritual, religious and moral values and speaks out forcefully in favour of peace and greater justice".

Many news organizations reported that some of the terrorists were linked to the Saudi royals and that they even may have received financial support from them as well as from several mysterious, moneyed Saudi men living in San Diego. Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied any connection, and neither President George W Bush nor President Obama has been forthcoming on this issue.

But earlier this year, Representatives Walter B Jones, Republican for North Carolina, and Stephen Lynch, Democrat for Massachusetts, were given access to the 28 redacted pages of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry (JICI) of 9/11 issued in late 2002, which have been thought to hold some answers about the Saudi connection to the attack. "I was absolutely shocked by what I read," Jones told International Business Times. "What was so surprising was that those whom we thought we could trust really disappointed me. I cannot go into it any more than that. I had to sign an oath that what I read had to remain confidential. But the information I read disappointed me greatly."

Former Senator Bob Graham, Democrat for Florida, told IBTimes that based on his involvement in the investigation and on the now-classified information in the document that his committee produced, he is convinced that “the Saudi government without question was supporting the hijackers who lived in San Diego… You can't have 19 people living in the United States for, in some cases, almost two years, taking flight lessons and other preparations, without someone paying for it. But I think it goes much broader than that. The agencies from CIA and FBI have suppressed that information so American people don't have the facts."

Clearly Wall Street does not like it when their supply of monetary heroin is interrupted. The Federal Reserve has tricked the American people into supporting quantitative easing by insisting that it is about "stimulating the economy", but that has turned out to be a massive hoax. In fact, I just wrote an article that contained 37 statistics that prove that things just keep getting even worse for ordinary Americans.

But quantitative easing has been exceptionally good for Wall Street. During QE1, the S&P 500 rose by about 300 points. During QE2, the S&P 500 rose by about 200 points. And during QE3, the S&P 500 has risen by about 400 points. The S&P 500 is now in unprecedented territory, and stock prices have become completely and totally divorced from reality. In essence, we are in the midst of the largest financial bubble this nation has ever seen. So what is going to happen when the Fed starts pulling back the monetary crack and the bubble bursts?

A lot of people out there are claiming that the Federal Reserve will never end this round of quantitative easing. They are suggesting that the Fed may hint at tapering from time to time, but that when push comes to shove they will just keep printing more money.

There is just one big problem with that theory. The rest of the world is watching, and they are very troubled by quantitative easing. Therefore the Fed must end it at some point because they desperately need the rest of the world to keep playing our game. Our current economic prosperity greatly depends upon the rest of the planet using our dollars as the reserve currency of the world and lending trillions of dollars to us at ultra-low interest rates. If the rest of the world decides to stop going along with the program, the system would come crashing down very rapidly.

Citing a Chinese-language piece written by Zukang for the the pro-regime Global Times, a report in the China Times says that Zukang warned of the futility of going to war over “those two tiny rocks,” a reference to the disputed islands which have become the center of a geopolitical tug of war between China and Japan, with the United States and South Korea also becoming embroiled.

“If China started a war with Japan, it would be much larger than both the Sino-Japanese War and World War II,” said Sha. “The United States and Japan should cooperate with China to maintain regional peace,” states the report.

Zukang’s rhetoric sounds somewhat alarmist but it is not that different in tone from sober analysts such as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who warned that the escalating crisis represents a “watershed moment for the world” and means “Asia is on the cusp of a full-blown arms race.”

US Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel has assured Gulf states that the agreement struck between major powers and Iran on November 24 will not affect the presence of some 35,000 US troops in the region. But in a speech at the Manama Dialogue security forum in Bahrain, Saudi Assistant Foreign Minister Nizar Madani said "Gulf countries should no longer depend on others to ensure their safety."

The oil-rich monarchies "must unite under one political entity in order to face internal and external challenges," said the minister. Riyadh has called for an enhanced union with fellow Gulf Cooperation Council states Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which together account for 40 percent of the world's oil reserves and a quarter of its natural gas.

"All countries have realised that blind dependence on a foreign power is no longer acceptable. GCC countries must decide their own futures," said Madani.