Two other BAE shipyards in Govan and Scotsoun on the Clyde in Scotland are expected to remain open and continue shipbuilding, in what is being seen as a victory for Alex Salmond.

The Royal Navy has never commissioned a warship from a shipyard outside the UK and sources say that the Portsmouth site could be restarted if there is a "yes" vote in Scotland in ten months time to ensure that this continues to be the case.

Downing Street sources confirmed that the Portsmouth yard will close "by and large" with a few functions being retained. "The future of Royal Navy shipbuilding will be Clyde based," they said.

“We will discuss this question next week,” said EU economics chief Olli Rehn after releasing the commission’s Autumn report. The text said Germany’s current account surplus will remain far above tolerable levels into the middle of the decade.

Mr Rehn said Berlin had been told by EU leaders at a summit in June that Germany has a duty to help boost demand and “create sustained conditions” for German wage rises. This would help rebalance the EMU system and lift pressure off the crisis states in the South.

The report said Germany’s surplus will narrow slightly from 7 percent of GDP this year to 6.6 percent in 2014 and 6.4 percent in 2015, but this still breaches the EU’s new “macro-imbalances” rules. It could ultimately lead to sanctions, with a vote taken by a qualified majority of EU states. Such a dispute would in effect be a court of judgment on Germany by EU peers.

While a confrontation is unlikely, the tougher talk from Brussels raises the political temperature in Europe. An attempt to indict Germany would prompt fury in Berlin, where politicians rejected US criticism last week that the country was acting as a free-rider on scarce global demand and creating a “deflationary bias” for the whole world. Berlin has called such attacks “incomprehensible”, insisting that export success helps the whole of Europe and should be prized.

As one friend of mine put it, "Whatever those morons put aside for settlements, they'd better double it." There's a huge mess involving possible manipulation of the world currency markets. This scandal is already drawing comparisons to the last biggest-financial-scandal-in-history (the Financial Times wondered about a "repeat Libor scandal"), the manipulation of interest rates via the gaming of the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor. The foreign exchange or FX market is the largest financial market in the world, with a daily trading volume of nearly $5 trillion.

One gets the feeling that governments in all the major Western democracies would like to sweep these manipulation scandals under the rug. The only problem is that the scale of the misdeeds in these various markets is so enormous that even the most half-assed attempt at regulation will cause a million-car pileup.

There's simply no way to do a damage calculation that won't wipe out the entire finance sector when you're talking about pervasive, ongoing manipulation of $5-trillion-a-day markets. That's the problem – there's no way to do a slap on the wrist in these cases. If they're guilty, they're done.

The facility, allegedly sited on the roof of the British Embassy in Berlin, is supposedly operated by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the UK’s largest intelligence agency.

Germany took the unusual step of requesting Simon McDonald, the British ambassador, to attend a meeting at the foreign ministry. The German diplomat responsible for relations with European countries “asked for an explanation of current reports in British media and indicated that tapping communications from a diplomatic mission would be a violation of international law”.

Documents leaked by Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the US National Security Agency (NSA), appeared to disclose the GCHQ listening post in Berlin, according to The Independent. The British Embassy is only a few hundred yards from the US mission, where the NSA was running an eavesdropping centre that targeted the mobile phone of Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor.

But thanks to the continued miniaturization of technology, snooping devices and those designed to disrupt wireless operations are proliferating at an unbelievable pace. According to Britain's Daily Mail, Russian investigators say they have discovered hidden microchips in Chinese-made household appliances that have been imported into the country, designed to transmit spam and other malware into wireless networks.

The paper said officials in St Petersburg claim to have discovered 20 to 30 kettles and irons that contained "spy chips that send some data to the Foreign Service," Russian media reported. It's not been a good year for Russia and espionage; word of the Chinese chips comes as the European Union launched an investigation into claims that Moscow had bugged gifts it sent to delegates at last month's G20 summit, in a bid to steal data from computers and cell phones.

Other appliances have been causing concern to privacy advocates - among them, so-called "smart TVs." Techies have warned that the TVs are vulnerable to hacking, just like a laptop or other Wi-Fi device, and, as such, could be used to steal your personal data or even "watch you."

Five million tons of wreckage - the remains of homes, boats, and other remnants of shattered lives in eastern Japan - were swallowed by the ocean that day in March, and more than one million tons of flotsam continues to head towards the west coast of the US.

While the first documented debris from the tragedy has already been found in California, scientists fear these new findings mean there could be a lot more to come and it might arrive all at once. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) released its updated findings last week, which show the huge island floating northeast of the Hawaiian Islands. NOAA scientists add that a larger and less-concentrated debris field stretches from Alaska to the Philippines.

The software company has said it is appalled how Google uses “private information for profit” and found the majority of people think scanning emails is “an invasion of privacy. “ In a series of new adverts, Microsoft explains how Google reads every email users send, picking up on key words to target advertising in a bid to make more cash.

In a survey Microsoft found 83 per cent of people felt scanning emails was an invasion of privacy and 93 per cent said they thought users should be allowed to opt out of the service – it is not currently possible to do this as a Gmail user.

Microsoft, which makes most of its money by selling software, has set up a website called keepyouremailprivate.com which includes examples of how Google uses emails to make more money.

Having learned about high frequency trading a few years ago my faith in the stock market was rattled. Then the Crash hit. Then the Fed started pouring money into the world markets. My faith in the stock market, even as it rose was completely shaken.

When I realized what all the new fiat money, coupled with the power of quants meant for the economy I became (and remain) very concerned about the razor edge the world lives on and how far our stock markets have detached from actual real live investing.

It’s not even close to fair for most people in the market. There is a quiet war going on in the ribbons of fiber optics which stretch between Wall Street, Greenwich Connecticut, and beyond. The new masters of the universe write code. They are programmers.

Almond nuts and milk are a vital ingredient for confectioners and cereal-makers around the world with the global market worth around $5 billion (approximately £3.1 million). Almond orchards in California, which account for 80 per cent of the world's crop, require 1.5 million beehives every year for pollination making honey bees vital to crop production. But almond farmers have seen the price of renting bees hives for pollination triple in the last decade which is having a knock-on effect on the wholesale cost.

It now costs on average $150 (£94) to hire a single hive with some farmers to pay up to $200 (£125), the Financial Times reports. This has seen the wholesale price of almonds reach an eight year high with the figure expected to continue rising as honey bee populations decrease. As Californian almond prices set a benchmark for the industry, the increasing cost of hiring beehives in America has also had an impact in Europe.

The operation is scheduled to start in the beginning of November and be completed by around the end of 2014. Under normal circumstances, the operation to remove all the fuel would take about 100 days. TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Co) initially planned to take two years, but reduced the schedule to one year in recognition of the urgency, as even a minor earthquake could trigger an uncontrolled fuel leak.

During this period TEPCO plans to carefully remove more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies, packing radiation 14,000 times the equivalent of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb, from their cooling pool. The base of the pool where the fuel assemblies are situated is 18 meters above ground and the rods are 7 meters under the surface of the water. TEPCO’s first task is to remove the debris from the Reactor Number 4 fuel pool.

Then, one by one, the fuel rods will be removed from the top store of the damaged building using a crane suspended above the crippled reactor. Previously a computer-controlled process, this time it has to be done completely manually. And this is what makes this removal operation extremely dangerous. The fuel rods must be kept submerged and must not touch each other or break.

In the worst-case scenario, the pool could come crashing to the ground, dumping the rods together into a pile that could fission and cause an explosion many times worse than in March 2011. “The worst-case scenario could play out in death to billions of people. A true apocalypse,” Consolo said. Reactor Number 4 contains 10 times more Cesium-137 than Chernobyl did. [As a result] scientists warn that in case of another nuclear disaster, it will be the beginning of the ultimate catastrophe of the world and the planet.

As part of this effort to suppress information which would reveal the government’s hypocrisy, the American government – like the British government – is treating journalists as terrorists. Journalism is not only being criminalized in America, but investigative reporting is actually treated like terrorism.

The government admits that journalists could be targeted with counter-terrorism laws. For example, after Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and others sued the government to enjoin the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans – the judge asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys.

The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge. After the government’s spying on the Associated Press made it clear to everyone that the government is trying to put a chill on journalism, the senior national-security correspondent for Newsweek tweeted: Serious idea. Instead of calling it Obama’s war on whistleblowers, let’s just call it what it is: Obama’s war on journalism.

Nine generals and flag officers have been relieved of duty under Obama just this year – widely viewed as an extraordinary number – and several sources put the total number of senior officers purged during the five years of the Obama administration as close to 200.

In response, prominent retired generals – ranging from Army Major General Paul E Vallely, a Fox News senior military analyst, to Lieutenant General William G Boykin, a founder of the Army’s elite Delta Force, to Medal of Honor recipient Major General Patrick Henry Brady – have all gone on the record with WND, characterizing Obama’s actions as nothing less than an all-out attack on America’s armed forces.

Retired Navy Captain Joseph John refers to a “bigger picture” in which some “135 senior officers have been purged.” “The ‘bigger picture,’” John told WND, “is that the US Armed Forces have been under relentless attack by the occupant of the Oval Office for five years.”

Here's just one example: Yum Brands owns KFC and Taco Bell. The company was a spin-off of Pepsi. All Yum Brands restaurants sell only Pepsi products because of a lifetime deal with the soda-maker. $84 billion company Proctor & Gamble owns companies that produce everything from detergent to toothpaste. Unilever produces everything from Dove soap to Klondike bars.

It's not just the products you buy and consume, either. In recent decades, the very news and information that you get has bundled together: 90% of the media is now controlled by just six companies, down from 50 in 1983, according to a Frugal Dad infographic from last year.

It gets even more macro, too: 37 banks have merged to become just four - JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and CitiGroup in a little over two decades, according to a Federal Reserve map. The nation's 10 largest financial institutions hold 54% of our total financial assets; in 1990, they held 20%. As MotherJones reports, the number of banks has dropped from more than 12,500 to about 8,000.

The new US plan represents a remarkable shift for Obama, whose administration trumpeted the 2011 withdrawal of the last US troops from Iraq as a major achievement and has since shifted its attention to other regional challenges, such as Syria, Egypt and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After a White House meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Obama said he shares al-Maliki’s fears about militants’ growing foothold in Iraq’s western province and will join the Iraqi leader’s effort to crack down. Administration officials said this would include growing intelligence support and new weaponry.

“We had a lot of discussion about how we can work together to push back against that terrorist organization that operates not only in Iraq, but also poses a threat to the region and to the United States,” Obama said.

Closer cooperation also marks an abrupt turnaround for al-Maliki, who openly opposed reaching a deal to keep even a limited number of US soldiers in Iraq after 2011, insisting the country could take care of itself.

After nine years of US occupation, the prospect of closer US military ties remains deeply unpopular with the Iraqi public. But violence in Iraq last month surged to the highest level since 2008, with 964 Iraqis killed, and some fear the country is slipping back into civil war.

Maria Miller insisted women are not ‘an optional part of the labour force’. She said more companies must be ‘fit’ for working parents and those which offer flexible hours must not lose out, but are more ‘resilient’ as people want to stay in their jobs for longer.

But her comments angered stay-at-home mothers who said it was more important to get unemployed young people into work than coaxing mothers into leaving their young children at home. Mrs Miller was launching a Government-commissioned study to probe discrimination against pregnant women and mothers at work. ‘Women aren’t an optional part of the labour force,’ the minister said. ‘If we’re going to have the sort of economic recovery we need, women are at the heart of it.’

Lynne Burnham, of campaign group Mothers At Home Matter, said: ‘It just makes no sense. What we need is to get our youngsters into work. Why such an almighty push to get mothers into work, leaving their children as young as six months? It’s feminism gone mad. The mother-child bond is paramount and it’s absolutely crucial babies have that time with their primary carer.’