The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), has been struggling to keep radiation under control ever since the nuclear disaster that took place March 11, 2011, when three of the plant’s reactors were hit by a tsunami, which was triggered by an underground earthquake off the coast of Fukushima. The damaged power plant has been accumulating radioactive water since, but TEPCO is running out of space quickly.

To avert a new disaster triggered by the typhoon, TEPCO proposes to move the contaminated water into underground storage pools previously deemed unsafe because of leaks, Japan’s NHK reported Thursday. There seems to be no alternative, as the typhoon is fast approaching. The three underground pools proposed for storage have a total capacity of 9,000 tons. TEPCO stopped using similar models in April, after the discovery of leaks.

The need for the November operation is increasingly urgent, even critical: any light tremor – let alone a full-on earthquake – could trigger a series of catastrophic leaks, possibly resulting in the world’s most severe radiological disaster yet. Recently, as it became clear that nuclear containment costs and a battered economy were taking their toll on finances, the government was forced to step in with funds to try and get the cleanup back on track.

A 20 kilometer no-go zone is currently imposed around the Fukushima plant.

Ms Merkel spoke to the US President regarding the allegations last night and her Government has today summoned the US ambassador John B Emerson to Berlin for talks. It is thought that the scandal could see European leaders lose their zeal to discuss a mooted free trade agreement between the EU and the US which had looked likely to be in place next year.

European leaders are likely to be looking for clarification over the relationship between Europe and the States before any such deal. Angela Merkel's government yesterday said it took the allegations ‘extremely seriously’ after media reports said the National Security Agency had hacked into her mobile phone ‘for years’.

A two day EU summit in Brussels, which has begun this afternoon, looks likely to have been hijacked by the controversy, with French President Francois Hollande and Ms Merkel wanting to talk about how Europe will 'co-ordinate a response' to the scandal.

President Dilma Rousseff has ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the US National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company’s network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to US tech companies such as Facebook and Google.

“The global backlash is only beginning and will get far more severe in coming months,” said Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Institute at the Washington-based New America Foundation think-tank. “This notion of national privacy sovereignty is going to be an increasingly salient issue around the globe.”

Most of Brazil’s global internet traffic passes through the United States, so Ms Rousseff’s government plans to lay underwater fiber optic cable directly to Europe and also link to all South American nations to create what it hopes will be a network free of US eavesdropping. Ms Rousseff is urging Brazil’s Congress to compel Facebook, Google and other US companies to store all data generated by Brazilians on servers physically located inside Brazil in order to shield it from the NSA.

If that happens, and other nations follow suit, Silicon Valley’s bottom line could be hit by lost business and higher operating costs.

In the same vein, other left-wing commentators say the building of homes and business beyond the Green Line is a severe blow to Israeli-EU relations. All of this is nonsense and it feeds the tired narrative that the Jewish settlements are the main obstacle to peace with the Arab world. But there is something to be said about the way the Jewish settlements are perceived by the international community. In other words, it is perception and not reality that is the real existential threat to Israel.

Despite a major petition bearing the signatures of more than 1,000 lawyers, scholars, jurists and diplomats from around the world – all of whom agree the Jewish settlements are legal and that the concept of “1967 lines” does not exist in international law – the European Union remains stubbornly committed to the delegitimization of Israeli communities beyond the Green Line. A spokesperson for EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton (who was the recipient of the petition) has proclaimed that EU policy towards Israel remains unaltered.

How is it that Europe, which is responsible for extermination of one-third of world Jewry, has the audacity to dictate policy to a tiny country that is home to the descendants of Holocaust survivors? I cannot be the only person in Europe who is repulsed by this hypocrisy. Or has Europe fallen so low that nobody even notices the EU’s selfish duplicity?

[Ambassador Alan Baker, a leading international law expert served as Legal Counsel and Deputy Director General of Israel’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs. He was ambassador to Canada and is presently the Director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and heads the international action division of the Legal Forum for Israel wrote a response to the directive:] "This directive illustrates an inherent bias by the EU against Israel and as such prejudices any aspiration by the EU that it can continue, with clean hands, to be involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Thus, I thought it urgent to issue a widely supported legal opinion explaining why the directive should be revoked, as it is incorrect, wrongly based and in violation of the EU’s status in the peace process.

By its persistence in referring to the pre-1967 lines, the EU is undermining future negotiation on this issue by predetermining its outcome. Another major point was that the territory of Judea and Samaria has never been determined in any agreement or formal document, to be Palestinian territory. The EU itself is signatory as witness to the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement (1995). In that text, the parties agreed to negotiate the fate of the territories. Hence the EU assumption undermines this negotiating process.

It’s been almost a week since Congress reached a temporary deal to suspend the US government’s debt ceiling and the Treasury department has already wasted no time by adding another $375 billion in new debt. Suspension of a cap on US debt, which was previously fixed at $16.69 trillion, means the Treasury department, headed by Jack Lew, can effectively spend whatever amount of money it needs or wants.

How much debt can the US government rack up by the next debt ceiling deadline on February 7, 2014? At the current spending pace of $375 billion per week, US public debt would reach $22.70 trillion. Numerous times, we’ve written extensively about how the US Treasury had been using accounting shenanigans to avoid going over the previous legal debt limit.

We also made the point that any corporation or corporate executive that attempted to use the US Treasury’s same accounting tactics would be charged with fraud. Others too have caught on to the US Treasury’s financial games. "When you are the largest economy in the world, when you are the safe haven in all circumstances, as has been the case, you can't go into that creative accounting business," said International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde in an interview with NBC News' Meet the Press. What does the bond market have to say about this?

Since Mandela’s was elected South Africa’s first black president in 1994 after spending 27 years in prison for actively opposing the segregationist policies of apartheid in the country, Afrikaners say over 3,000 white farmers have been murdered in revenge for the suppression enforced by its own National Party. Afrikaners say the government has never shown much desire to investigate the deaths.

And now as Mandela is in and out of hospital at age 95, Afrikaners and their supporters are preparing for the worst upon his death. Last year, South African President Jacob Zuma antagonized Afrikaners when he sang a song referencing revenge against whites in a public sing-along. “You are a Boer (white man), we are going to hit them….” Zuma sang, with a group.

All the while, they’ve told us that everything is getting better. But anyone who’s paying attention knows that nothing of the sort has happened. We continue to shed jobs. Hundreds of thousands of people are still losing their homes. Personal debt is rapidly approaching 2007 levels. The US government has borrowed more money than what we can ever hope to repay. We are still in the middle of it and it’s only going to get worse.

As for the international scene… the whole thing is collapsing. That’s our forecast. We are saying that by the second quarter of 2014, we expect the bottom to fall out… or something to divert our attention as it falls out.

Make no mistake. It’s coming. And when it hits, it’ll make the crisis of 2008 look like a picnic. We survived that one, barely, but it took trillions of dollars just to stabilize, not fix, the system. This time around, our creditors and the people as a whole may well lose confidence. And once that is lost, look out, because as Gerald Celente notes, the happenings at Walmart when the EBT system crashed were just a prelude.

Imagine that next time around it happens to not just EBT cards, but ATM’s and bank accounts, or that the US dollar itself crashes to such an extent that it is no longer feasible as a mechanism of exchange. In such a scenario you can fully expect disruptions to food supplies and the normal flow of commerce.

The four men were sentenced October 6 after being arrested in a house church last December and charged with consuming alcohol in violation of the theocracy's strict laws, according to Christian Solidarity Worldwide. They were among several Christians punished for their faith in a nation where converting from Islam to Christianity can bring the death penalty. According to a new October UN report by Ahmed Shaheed, UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, such persecution is common, despite new President Hasan Rouhani's pledge to be a moderate.

“At least 20 Christians were in custody in July 2013," Shaheed wrote. "In addition, violations of the rights of Christians, particularly those belonging to evangelical Protestant groups, many of whom are converts, who proselytize to and serve Iranian Christians of Muslim background, continue to be reported.”

Iran’s regime has made stopping the spread of Christianity a cornerstone of its crackdown on religious freedom. There are estimated to be as many as 370,000 Christians in Iran, according to the most recent US State Department report. The clerical rulers see Christianity as a threat to Iran’s majority ultra-orthodox Shiite Islamic religion.

Retired generals and current senior commanders that have spoken with TheBlaze say the administration is not only purging the military of commanders they don’t agree with, but is striking fear in the hearts of those still serving. The timing comes as the five branches of the US armed forces are reducing staff due to budget cuts, and as US troops are expected to withdraw from Afghanistan next year.

“I think they’re using the opportunity of the shrinkage of the military to get rid of people that don’t agree with them or not tow the party line. Remember, as (former White House chief of staff) Rahm Emanuel said, never waste a crisis,” a senior retired general told TheBlaze on the condition of anonymity because he still provides services to the government and fears possible retribution.

“Even as a retired general, it’s still possible for the administration to make life miserable for us. If we’re working with the government or have contracts, they can just rip that out from under us,” he said. Retired US Army Major General Paul Vallely, an outspoken critic of the Obama administration, said the White House fails to take action or investigate its own, but finds it easy to fire military commanders “who have given their lives for their country.”

“Obama will not purge a civilian or political appointee because they have bought into Obama’s ideology,” Vallely said. “The White House protects their own. That’s why they stalled on the investigation into fast and furious, Benghazi and Obamacare. He’s intentionally weakening and gutting our military, Pentagon and reducing us as a superpower, and anyone in the ranks who disagrees or speaks out is being purged.”

The common feature of means-tested assistance programs is that they are graduated based on a person’s income and, in contrast to programs like Social Security or Medicare, they are a free benefit and not paid into by the recipient," says the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee.

"The enormous sum spent on means-tested assistance is nearly five times greater than the combined amount spent on NASA, education, and all federal transportation projects over that time ($3.7 trillion is not even the entire amount spent on federal poverty support, as states contribute more than $200 billion each year to this federal nexus — primarily in the form of free low-income health care).

In total, the Census Bureau estimated, 151,014,000 Americans out of a population then estimated to be 306,804,000 received benefits from one or more government programs during the last three months of 2011.

Those 151,014,000 beneficiaries equalled 49.2 percent of the population. This included 82,457,000 people - or 26.9 percent of the population - who lived in households in which one or more people received Medicaid benefits. When Obamacare is fully implemented on January 1, 2014, Americans earning up to 400 percent of the poverty level will qualify for a federal subsidy to buy health insurance.

The breach became dramatic over the past week. Last Friday, Saudi Arabia refused to take its seat on the United Nations Security Council, in what Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi intelligence chief, described as “a message for the US, not the UN,” according to the Wall Street Journal. On Tuesday, Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former head of Saudi intelligence, voiced “a high level of disappointment in the US government’s dealings” on Syria and the Palestinian issue, in an interview with Al-Monitor.

What should worry the Obama administration is that Saudi concern about US policy in the Middle East is shared by the four other traditional US allies in the region: Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Israel. They argue (mostly privately) that Obama has shredded US influence by dumping President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, opposing the coup that toppled Morsi, vacillating in its Syria policy, and now embarking on negotiations with Iran — all without consulting close Arab allies.

Saudi King Abdullah privately voiced his frustration with US policy in a lunch in Riyadh Monday with King Abdullah of Jordan and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the UAE, according to a knowledgeable Arab official. The Saudi monarch “is convinced the US is unreliable,” this official said. “I don’t see a genuine desire to fix it” on either side, he added.

In the most significant protest by a world leader since Edward Snowden began leaking details of the US’s global surveillance network, Mrs Merkel called Barack Obama and demanded his personal assurances she was not being monitored. The president promised his German counterpart that US intelligence “is not monitoring and will not monitor” her communications but the White House did not explicitly rule out the possibility she had been bugged in the past.

German diplomatic sources said they were still not satisfied with the White House’s explanation and would demand further clarification over the “completely unacceptable” allegations. The row comes two days after France summoned the US ambassador to Paris to demand an explanation to reports that America swept up 70 million French telephone records in a month including those of politicians and business leaders.

“Today President Obama and Chancellor Merkel spoke by telephone regarding the allegations that the US National Security Agency intercepted the communications of the German chancellor,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary. “I can tell you that the president assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor.”

Mr Carney did not answer a question about whether the NSA may have intercepted Mrs Merkel’s communications as part of a broader eavesdropping sweep. He also did not rule out the possibility that the US had in the past monitored her telephone, a nuance that was picked up by German diplomats.

The Strasbourg based parliament voted 280 in favor, with 254 against, with 30 abstentions, and called for a suspension of US access until a full enquiry clarifies the situation. “We need full transparency, especially with all the NSA revelations. Europe cannot accept that the data of private citizens is being accessed without anyone knowing about it", Guy Verhofstadt, the leader of the Liberals in the European Parliament, told Reuters.

EU lawmakers are concerned that the US is covertly using information from the SWIFT database following leaked US documents aired by Brazil’s biggest television network Globo, which indicated that the US has secretly tapped into SWIFT. Under current agreements the US has limited access to the SWIFT database. The deal is part of transatlantic cooperation following the September 2001 attacks, and allows certain data from SWIFT to be shared with the US treasury.

The idea was that by sharing on a limited basis the millions of financial messages that take place across the world every day, it would help combat terrorism.