The country disclosed the fleet - one of its most secretive military programs - for the first time in four decades as a sign of its growing strength and confidence. In a ceremony yesterday, seamen performed a number of displays on the nuclear-armed submarines off the coast of Qingdao in east China's Shandong province.

The country's PLA (People's Liberation Army) is devoting increasing resources to its naval forces to safeguard its maritime interests and assert its territorial claims. However, the US has expressed concern over China's military developments - particularly since the country started operating within America's exclusive economic zone in June.

Russian soldiers used T 72 Tanks and Infantry Combat Vehicles also known as the BMP which were originally made in Russia and currently used by the Indian Army. Russian Army Lieutenant General Alexey V Zovizion and Indian Army General Officer Commanding, 10 Corps Lieutenant General N S Ghei oversaw the exercise. Exercise GangNeva, saw both Indian and Russian mechanized troops capture a notional rebel strong point by fire assault of attack helicopters, tanks and BMPs.

“If they don’t do what needs to be done, if they keep skimping on costs and manipulating information, they can never be trusted,” Niigata Prefecture Governor Hirohiko Izumida told Reuters on Monday, adding that these limitations need to be overcome before the plant is restarted.

Izumida suggested that TEPCO should be fully stripped of responsibility for decommissioning the destroyed Fukushima reactors, and the company subjected to a taxpayer-funded bankruptcy program. Presently, the company remains primarily concerned with funding the process, along with the frequently-occurring and very immediate issue of contaminated water leaking rather than overall nuclear safety.

The decommissioning of the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi plant itself will be a long and arduous process – expected to take 30 years – and has already sparked controversy in the country.

At least seven people died in Germany while there were four deaths in Britain and fatalities in the Netherlands, Denmark and France as the storm brought down trees, blew roofs off houses and turned over trucks, causing chaos across much of the region. In Germany, falling trees killed several drivers, at least one man drowned and a 66-year-old woman died when a wall collapsed on her, German media reported.

The storm had barrelled in overnight, with gusts of up to 99 mph, leaving a trail of damage across parts of southern Britain, before heading eastwards into mainland Europe. Some 486,000 properties in Britain were left without power, UK Power Networks said, in one of the worst storms to hit England since the 1987 "Great Storm", which killed 18 people and felled around 15 million trees. By mid-afternoon, 115,000 properties were still without power.

While the Reactor 4 building itself did not suffer a meltdown, it did suffer a hydrogen explosion, is now tipping and sinking and has zero ability to withstand another seismic event.

The Japan Times explained: To remove the rods, TEPCO has erected a 273-ton mobile crane above the building that will be operated remotely from a separate room. Spent fuel rods will be pulled from the racks they are stored in and inserted one by one into a heavy steel chamber while the assemblies are still under water. Once the chamber is removed from the pool and lowered to the ground, it will be transported to another pool in an undamaged building on the site for storage.

Under normal circumstances, such an operation would take little more than three months, but TEPCO is hoping to complete the complicated task within fiscal 2014. A chorus of voices has been sounding alarm over the never-been-done-at-this-scale plan to manually remove the 400 tons of spent fuel by TEPCO, who so far has been responsible for mishap after mishap in the ongoing crisis at the crippled nuclear plant.

As long-time anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman explained, the spent fuel rods must be kept cool at all times. If exposed to air, their zirconium alloy cladding will ignite, the rods will burn and huge quantities of radiation will be emitted. Should the rods touch each other, or should they crumble into a big enough pile, an explosion is possible. “In the worst-case scenario,” RT adds, 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.

Wasserman says that given the gravity of the situation, the eyes of the world should be upon Fukushima: “This is a question that transcends being anti-nuclear. The fate of the earth is at stake here and the whole world must be watching every move at that site from now on. With 11,000 fuel rods scattered around the place, as a ceaseless flow of contaminated water poisoning our oceans, our very survival is on the line.”

His efforts to reassure President François Hollande of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany seem to have been as incomplete as the explanations the administration has given to the American public about the agency’s excessive domestic surveillance.

The German government learned this week that the newsmagazine Der Spiegel had new evidence (presumably via information leaked by Edward Snowden) that the NSA had monitored Ms Merkel’s cellphone. On Monday, Le Monde reported that the agency had gathered data on more than 70 million phone calls and messages inside France within one 30-day period, suggesting a surveillance program that went well beyond any legitimate tracking of international terrorists.

Such surveillance undermines the trust of allies and their willingness to share the kind of confidential information needed to thwart terrorism and other threats. When the NSA violates French or German law, law enforcement agencies in those nations cooperate with the agency at their own risk. There is also the more subtle damage done by the feeling that the United States plays by its own rules and respects neither the sovereignty nor the political sensibilities of some of its closest democratic allies.

It's a prime site, a diplomat's dream. Is there any better location for an embassy than Berlin's Pariser Platz? It's just a few paces from here to the Reichstag. When the American ambassador steps out the door, he looks directly onto the Brandenburg Gate. When the US ambassador receives high-ranking visitors, they often take a stroll out to the roof terrace, which offers a breathtaking view of the Reichstag and Tiergarten park. Even the Chancellery can be glimpsed. This is the political heart of the republic, where billion-euro budgets are negotiated, laws are formulated and soldiers are sent to war. It's an ideal location for diplomats - and for spies.

The mere suspicion that one of Merkel's cell phones was being monitored by the NSA has led in the past week to serious tensions between Berlin and Washington. Last Wednesday Merkel placed a strongly worded phone call to US President Barack Obama. Sixty-two percent of Germans approve of her harsh reaction, according to a survey by polling institute YouGov. A quarter think it was too mild. In a gesture of displeasure usually reserved for rogue states, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle summoned the new US ambassador, John Emerson, for a meeting at the Foreign Ministry.

The NSA affair has shaken the certainties of German politics. Even Merkel's CDU, long a loyal friend of Washington, is now openly questioning the trans-Atlantic free trade agreement. At the Chancellery it's now being said that if the US government doesn't take greater pains to clarify the situation, certain conclusions will be drawn and talks over the agreement could potentially be put on hold.

"Spying between friends, that's just not done," said Merkel on Thursday at a European Union summit in Brussels. "Now trust has to be rebuilt."

A high-ranking official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared in an interview with PBS that the age of antibiotics has come to an end. 'For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about "The end of antibiotics, question mark?"' said Dr Arjun Srinivasan. 'Well, now I would say you can change the title to "The end of antibiotics, period."'

The associate director of the CDC sat down with Frontline over the summer for a lengthy interview about the growing problem of antibacterial resistance. Srinivasan, who is also featured in a Frontline report called 'Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria,' which aired Tuesday, said that both humans and livestock have been overmedicated to such a degree that bacteria are now resistant to antibiotics.

‘We're in the post-antibiotic era,' he said. 'There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can’t.’

With bacteria constantly evolving and developing resistance to conventional antibiotics, doctors have been forced to ‘reach back into the archives’ and ‘dust off’ older, more dangerous cures like colistin. ‘It’s very toxic,’ said Srinivasan. ‘We don’t like to use it. It damages the kidneys. But we’re forced to use it in a lot of instances.’

He expressed skepticism that the Obama administration would be able to force Iran to comply with demands that it show its nuclear program is peaceful. Asked if military action against Iran was “inevitable,” Cheney said he had “trouble seeing how we’re going to achieve our objective short of that.”

Cheney faulted the Obama White House’s handling of Middle East politics, saying the US presence in the region had been “significantly diminished” in recent years. “I think our friends no longer count on us, no longer trust us and our adversaries don’t fear us,” he said.

Republican leaders, under pressure from Tea Party-backed conservatives, said the bill was needed because the food stamp program, which costs nearly $80 billion a year, had grown out of control. They said the program had expanded even as jobless rates had declined with the easing recession.

“This bill eliminates loopholes, ensures work requirements, and puts us on a fiscally responsible path,” said Representative Marlin Stutzman, Republican of Indiana, who led efforts to split the food stamps program from the overall farm bill. “In the real world, we measure success by results. It’s time for Washington to measure success by how many families are lifted out of poverty and helped back on their feet, not by how much Washington bureaucrats spend year after year.”

But even with the cuts, the food stamp program would cost more than $700 billion over the next 10 years. The measure has little chance of advancing in the Senate, and Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan and the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, called it “a monumental waste of time.”

If violent crime keeps increasing at this rate, it will approximately double in just six years. When the next major economic downturn strikes it will probably greatly accelerate the growth of the crime rate in this country. Desperate people do desperate things, and there are people out there that are already stealing entire truckloads of food.

In the future, when people are extremely hungry or crazy for their next drug hit, they won't think twice about invading your home or pulling you out of your vehicle. The rise in crime that we are witnessing right now is just the beginning. It is going to get a lot worse than this.

As economic conditions continue to deteriorate, I actually expect that we will start seeing armed guards on food trucks in a few years. Desperate people do desperate things, and as food prices continue to rise I believe that food trucks will become highly prized targets. America is rapidly changing, and not for the better.

Israel severed ties with the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council in March 2012, after it announced it would investigate how the Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria would affect the rights of local Arabs.

This year, on January 29, Israel became the first country to boycott the UNHRC review, which is mandatory for every United Nations member country, after facing increasing criticism for building more Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria. The move, a protest measure against the UN directive stating that Israel's actions are to be reviewed at every UNHRC council meeting, created a media and political hullabaloo with rumors of a full Israeli pullout from the United Nations.

In a personal letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Westerwelle warned that Israel's failure to attend the periodic evaluation - a review infamous for its anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian measures - would alienate Israel's allies and cause "severe diplomatic damage", Haaretz reports.

And two of the counties have entered the civil disobedience phase with a vengeance as their County Board of Supervisors have voted to secede from the state of California. As I read their local community’s media accounts, accompanied by their reasons for secession, I feel like I’m reading an old United States history textbook in which we could substitute the state of South Carolina for the seceding California counties of Siskiyou and Modoc. Emotions are running very high as the residents lifestyles and livelihoods are facing total obliteration.

Over the years, many rural residents have been frustrated by federal environmental laws restricting logging and other forestry activities. The timber industry is dead. The mining industry is dead. The entire region is being deindustrialized and many residents and local leaders have stated that becoming a state would finally allow them to push the federal government to alter the onerous restrictions on government-owned land as well to forsake the private property rights restrictions being imposed upon them.

I have been aware of Agenda 21 abuses in places like Fort Collins, Colorado, where the courts steal the children from parents who protest against draconian Agenda 21 policies. I’m also aware that in places like Santa Cruz, California and Austin, Texas that individual property rights are severely limited because the local governments have adopted United Nations Agenda 21 policies. However, nothing and I mean nothing, matches the Agenda 21 abuses of individual liberties and private property rights that is going on in the northern counties of California and Southern Oregon.

And true to form for the mainstream media, barely a word of coverage has been broadcast or published for a national audience.

A spokeswoman for the archdiocese declared that “the parish of Cobridge has a long history, but in recent times the number of Catholics in the area has shrunk to such an extent that those attending Mass at St Peter’s were simply no longer able to maintain a priest and the church buildings”. Islam is replacing Christianity as first religion everywhere in Europe.

In France, the country of famous Catholic intellectuals such as Emmanuel Mounier, Georges Bernanos, Francois Mauriac, Jacques Maritain and Teilhard de Chardin, dozens of churches have been razed to make way for mosques, showrooms and malls. The last cases are in Saint Blaise du Breuil, Allier, Saint Pie- X Hérault and Saint Jacques d’Abbeville in the Somme. The Observatory for Religious Heritage claims that “for the first time places of worship are destroyed for no apparent reason and turned into parking lots, restaurants, boutiques, gardens and homes”.

According to the French Senate, 2,800 Christian religious buildings are now at risk of being demolished. France now has just 9,000 priests measured against 40,000 during the last war. Many churches are replaced by mosques.

Network Rail said the damage was "worse than expected," while 130 flights have been cancelled at Heathrow airport. The Met Office said a gust of 99mph (159km/h) was recorded at Needles Old Battery, Isle of Wight, at 05:00 GMT.

Both reactors in Dungeness power station's B units have been automatically shut down after power to the site was cut off. The site's own generators are providing power to the site.