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.

“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.