“As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed's first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I've come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.

From the trenches, several other Fed managers also began voicing the concern that QE wasn't working as planned. Our warnings fell on deaf ears. In the past, Fed leaders — even if they ultimately erred — would have worried obsessively about the costs versus the benefits of any major initiative. Now the only obsession seemed to be with the newest survey of financial-market expectations or the latest in-person feedback from Wall Street's leading bankers and hedge-fund managers. Sorry, US taxpayer.

Even when acknowledging QE's shortcomings, Chairman Bernanke argues that some action by the Fed is better than none (a position that his likely successor, Fed Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen, also embraces). The implication is that the Fed is dutifully compensating for the rest of Washington's dysfunction. But the Fed is at the center of that dysfunction. Case in point: It has allowed QE to become Wall Street's new "too big to fail" policy.”

While the user may have an encrypted connection to the website, the internal data flows were not encrypted and allowed the NSA to obtain millions of records each month, including both metadata and content like audio, video and text.

This is not part of the PRISM collection under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act or the business records program under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, but a separate program called MUSCULAR under what appears to be Executive Order 12333.

The new article comes off of another recent Washington Post report on another piece of data the NSA collects about innocent Americans: contacts from their address books and buddy lists. The information is in addition to Americans' calling records, phone calls, emails, and any other information publicly available on the Internet. And it's yet another sign that the NSA will stop at nothing to collect innocent Americans' information — all in the name of protecting us from foreign threats.

Unspecified malware has even reached the International Space Station, according to the boss of Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab. Eugene Kaspersky said he heard about the nuclear infection from a "friend of mine" at the unnamed nuclear plant. The unnamed staffer "sent a message their nuclear plant network which was disconnected from the internet ... was badly infected by Stuxnet," Kaspersky said, SC Magazine reports.

The malware apparently got into the air-gapped network of the nuke plant on an infected USB stick. Kaspersky told the anecdote during a recent presentation to the Canberra Press Club during which he spoke about cybercrime, cyber-espionage and attacks against infrastructure systems to members of the mainstream press in Australia.

The charismatic securityware businessman went on to claim that even machines on the International Space Station had been affected by malware, after - unnamed - cyber nasties were carried there on removable media by Russian astronauts.

As essential supplies dwindled, tensions rose. Since the storm hit the islands five days ago, residents have broken into homes, shops and warehouses, where they have drained shelves of food, water and other vital goods. In the latest incident, Philippines security forces exchanged fire with armed looters in the village of Abucay, part of the worst-hit Tacloban in Leyte province, local ANC television reported on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, eight people were crushed to death after thousands of typhoon survivors stormed a government rice warehouse. Police and soldiers were helpless when the looting took place, National Food Authority spokesman said. The looters in Alangalang municipality carted away over 100,000 sacks of rice.

Warehouses owned by food and drinks company Universal Robina Corp and drug company United Laboratories in the storm-hit town of Palo, along with a rice mill in Jaro, were also ransacked. "The looting is not criminality. It is self-preservation," Tacloban city administrator John Lim told Reuters. Tacloban, the principal city in Leyte province which has also become the main relief hub, currently lies in ruins, with communications and transport cut off in many areas.

Nicola Gratteri, 55, a state prosecutor in the southern Italian region of Calabria, where the ‘Ndrangheta is most active, said the pope’s effort to reform the church is making the ‘Ndrangheta “very nervous.” The organization is considered by experts in Italy to be the most dangerous, most unified and most difficult to penetrate mafia-type organization in the country.

“I cannot say if the organization is in a position to do something like this, but they are dangerous and it is worth reflecting on,” Gratteri warned. “If the godfathers can find a way to stop him, they will seriously consider it. Those who have up until now profited from the influence and wealth drawn from the church are getting very nervous,” he added. “For many years, the mafia has laundered money and made investments with the complicity of the church. But now the pope is dismantling the poles of economic power in the Vatican, and that is dangerous.”

Gratteri noted that in southern Italy organized crime figures have strong and high-profile relationships with local church leaders, who help give the crime figures legitimacy. He also said most Italian mobsters are practicing Catholics, despite their violent activities. “A gunman from the ‘Ndrangheta will pray and kiss his rosary before shooting someone,” said Gratteri, who has been under police protection against the mob since the 1980s.

Mikhail Degtyarev, the lawmaker who proposed the bill, compared the dollar to a Ponzi scheme. He warned that the government would have to bail out Russians holding the US currency if it collapsed. “If the US national debt continues to grow, the collapse of the dollar system will take place in 2017,” said Mr Degtyarev, a member of the nationalist Liberal Democrat Party who was a losing candidate in Moscow’s recent mayoral election.

“The countries that will suffer the most will be those that have failed to wean themselves off their dependence on the dollar in time. In light of this, the fact that confidence in the dollar is growing among Russian citizens is extremely dangerous.” The bill would partially revive a Soviet-era ban on the dollar. It would prohibit Russians from holding dollars in the country’s banks, and banks also would be unable to carry out transactions in the dollar.

A bankruptcy filing by Desert Hot Springs, a city of 26,000 about 110 miles east of Los Angeles, would make it the third California city along with San Bernardino and Stockton to seek court protection from creditors. San Bernardino and Detroit - the biggest US city to seek Chapter 9 protection - are likely to set precedent on whether retirees or Wall Street bondholders suffer the most when a city goes broke.

The problems in Desert Hot Springs came to light last week when a new finance director reviewed the city's records and discovered a $3 million shortfall in its budget of $13.5 million. Amy Aguer, the interim director of finance, did not have details on how the shortfall occurred but said it was the result of higher-than-expected pension and salary costs, especially in the police department, and overly optimistic estimates of revenue.

"I believe that supporting the recovery today is the surest path to returning to a more normal approach to monetary policy," she said in remarks prepared for delivery to the US Senate Banking Committee on Thursday.

In one of his strongest-worded homilies since he was elected in March, the Argentinean pontiff said Christians who lead “a double life” by giving money to the Church while stealing from the state are sinners who deserve to be punished. Quoting from the Gospel of St Luke in the New Testament, he said “Jesus says: It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea.”

While he did not allude directly to corruption within the Catholic Church, his remarks come just days after a scandal erupted inside an ancient religious order linked to the Vatican, and as he forges ahead with a determined effort to root out cronyism within the Holy See and financial irregularities in the scandal-tainted Vatican bank.

The Pope described people engaged in corruption as “whitewashed tombs”, explaining that “they appear beautiful from the outside, but inside they are full of dead bones and putrefaction.” A life based on corruption is “varnished putrefaction”, the Pope said.

The Jesuit Pope may have been hailed for adopting a softer, more inclusive stance on sensitive subjects such as homosexuality and divorce since his election in March, but his sermons and homilies often include stern, fire-and-brimstone language and references to the Devil. It was the second time in just a few days that he had targeted the evils of corruption.

In October of 2012, Apple had replaced the iPad 3 with the iPad 4, much to the chagrin of many new iPad 3 users who has only just purchased that tablet earlier in March of that year.

I’ve long suspected that tech companies and manufacturers participate in planning the phasing out of old products by deliberately limiting the functionality of new ones and effectively slowing them down and forcing users to upgrade over time. An example of this planned obsolescence can be seen with the iPad 1. The first gen iOS tablet was introduced in 2010 and after only 3 years, it has largely become a slow and virtually obsolete device. In fact, it can only be upgraded as far as iOS 5. Most users now complain that the iPad 1 is barely usable for certain tasks beyond basic web browsing and watching movies.

Just consider how well older desktop computers (and I’m including laptops) hold up over the years, new mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones seem to not fare quite as well.

When a consumer purchases an iOS or Android handset, it seems as if the product life cycle is only about 12 months before they fall behind the technical curve and are suddenly unable to run the latest games and software. For desktop computers this is usually a longer period, perhaps 2–3 years in some cases. One has to wonder if this constant progress and rampant consumerisation is caused by the speed by which the mobile market is developing and how quickly manufacturers are innovating.

It adds: "The global currency wars are heating up again as central banks embark on a new round of easing to combat a slowdown in growth. The European Central Bank cut its key rate last week in a decision some investors say was intended in part to curb the euro after it soared to the strongest since 2011. The same day, Czech policy makers said they were intervening in the currency market for the first time in 11 years to weaken the koruna. New Zealand said it may delay rate increases to temper its dollar, and Australia warned the Aussie dollar is “uncomfortably high.”

For the most part Bloomberg's account is accurate, although it has one fundamental flaw: currency wars never left, but were merely put on hiatus as the liquidity tsunami resulting from the BOJ's [Bank of Japan] mega easing lifted all boats for a few months. And now that the world has habituated to nearly $200 billion in new flow every month (and much more when adding China's monthly new loan creation), the time to extract marginal gains from a world in which global trade continues to contract despite the ongoing surge in global liquidity, central banks are back to doing the one thing they can - printing more.

The moves threaten to spark a new round in what Brazil Finance Minister Guido Mantega in 2010 called a “currency war,” barely two months after the Group of 20 nations pledged to “refrain from competitive devaluation.”

Based on average monthly outgoings of £1,500 they would only last five days before running out of funds but, for a quarter of people, it would be almost immediate as they have no savings at all to fall back on. It is difficult to find any spare cash to save in the current climate when incomes are dropping and bills keep rising but it is important to try and build up a fund as a financial cushion.

The general rule is to have a minimum of three months’ salary to see you through any unexpected financial glitches in life. Getting into the habit of putting even small amounts into a regular saver account makes good financial sense and will mean you gradually build up a safety net – and don’t risk having to resort to building up debt.

If there were a synoptic map for diplomatic storms, the National Weather Service would be putting out a hurricane warning right now. The winds are blowing cold, tensions are on the rise and tempers are beginning to flare in the Bermuda triangle of relations between Israel, the US and the American Jewish community.

There is an obstacle in the path of the relations between Israel and the United States; one that could crack, if not smash, those relations. The harshest manifestation of the deep dispute between the two governments was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unbridled response to US Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts vis-à-vis Iran on the nuclear issue.

With the parties on the threshold of signing a groundbreaking agreement in Geneva, which could pave the way to a reduction of Iran’s nuclear threat, Netanyahu continues to view the very diplomatic move itself as an existential threat, because it will leave Iran with a nuclear capability that could be transformed within a short period into bomb-making capability. “Israel is not obliged by this agreement” Netanyahu said, nudging Israel toward the status of a country that is threatening the international consensus.

This consensus could indeed be mistaken. There is still no assurance that Iran does not seek to attain a nuclear weapon; it is possible that agreements achieved in Geneva, at least in the first phase, will leave Iran quite a bit of room to continue enriching uranium, while weakening the sanctions against it.

And yet, it would be a historic mistake to seal the diplomatic channel in a way that does not allow full exploration of an end to the crisis without resorting to a military option, the chances and implications of which are impossible to predict.

Jews across the world must ratchet up pressure on their governments to stand in the way of an impending "bad deal" on Iran's nuclear program, Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett wrote Saturday night. In a letter sent to AIPAC, Jewish Federations of North America, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Russian Jewish Congress, and other groups, and later posted on his Facebook page, Bennett said that "the Free World stands before a fork in the road."

Bennett warned that easing of international sanctions against Iran now is a mistake that will allow the Islamic Republic to develop nuclear weapons in the near future. "It would be dangerous to lift the sanctions and accept a deal which allows Iran to retain its entire uranium-production line," Bennett wrote. "When Iran launches a nuclear missile at Rome or Tel Aviv, it will have happened only because a Bad Deal was made during these defining moments."

Bennett's letter comes as world powers and Iran meet in Geneva where they reportedly are near an agreement by which Iran will freeze uranium enrichment in return for a lifting of certain financial and trade restrictions on Iran. Israel-US relations are already strained after public disagreements on the proposed deal with Iran. Israel believes the United States is making too many concessions in the negotiations with the Islamic Republic.