"The German Federation of Journalists recommends journalists to avoid until further notice the use of search engines and e-mail services from Google and Yahoo for their research and digital communication," the union said in a statement.

It cited "scandalous" reports of interception of both companies' web traffic by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain's GCHQ. "The searches made by journalists are just as confidential as the contact details of their sources and the contents of their communication with them," said Michael Konken, head of the union which represents about 38,000 journalists. He said there were safe alternatives for both searches and email.

And while in the US having one's dirty laundry is almost perceived as a status symbol by a culture that encourages online exhibitionism via Facebook and other social media (so what if some bureaucrat in Virginia knows more than what is public), in Germany privacy is actually taken seriously.

The Revolutionary Guards, the elite Iranian regime's army, said Saturday they are committed to the slogan "Death to America," chanted at official ceremonies, just days before the 34th anniversary of the storming of the American Embassy in Tehran.

"The slogan Death to America is the symbol of strength and determination of the Iranian nation against the dominance of the United States, which is an oppressive and untrustworthy nation," said the Revolutionary Guards on their official website.

In recent weeks, a debate was launched in Iran on the merits of continuing to chant "Death to America " during official ceremonies, while some relaxation occurred in relations between Tehran and Washington since the election in June of moderate President Hassan Rohani.

On Monday, leading media outlets including China Central TV, the People’s Daily, the Global Times, the PLA Daily, the China Youth Daily and the Guangmin Daily ran identical, top-headlined reports about the “awesomeness” of the People's Liberation Army navy’s strategic submarine force.

Chinese calculations for nuclear attacks on the US are chillingly macabre. “Because the Midwest states of the US are sparsely populated, in order to increase the lethality, [our] nuclear attacks should mainly target the key cities on the West Coast of the United States, such as Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego,” the Global Times said.

“If we launch our DF 31A ICBMs over the North Pole, we can easily destroy a whole list of metropolises on the East Coast and the New England region of the US, including Annapolis, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Portland, Baltimore and Norfolk, whose population accounts for about one-eighth of America’s total residents,” the Global Times said.

All the state-run press reports stressed the point that the PLA’s missile submarines are now on routine strategic patrol, “which means that China for the first time has acquired the strategic deterrence and second strike capability against the United States.”

Spilling out through the open door of the 400-year-old church came voices united in a rendering of Queen's Don't Stop Me Now. Inside, a couple of hundred people - average age about 35 - clapped rhythmically, swaying in the venerable pews.

But for the choice of music it was just like a certain sort of church. There was an overhead projector, a small team to lead the singing and a charismatic figure using his rangy body to urge on the congregation. He is one of two stand-up comedians who co-founded the Sunday Assembly - Sanderson Jones.

The event is a brazen copy of a church service. As well as emotional and uplifting songs, there was a talk from a woman who had turned her life around by volunteering, another from a scientist about the human propensity to misperceive reality and a minute's silent reflection. During a rendering of Dire Straits' Walk Of Life a collection was taken. "We both wanted to do something like church but without God and we just nicked the order of service," admits Mr Jones.

An Obama administration official told AP that the attack happened overnight on Thursday, but provided no details. Another security official told the news agency that it took place in the Syrian port city of Latakia, and that the targets were Russian-made SA-125 missiles.

Another US official told CNN that the Israelis believed the base near Snobar Jableh, south of Latakia, had sensitive and sophisticated missile equipment that may have been transferred to the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah. Earlier, Dubai-based broadcaster al-Arabiya reported two attacks carried out by the Israeli Air Forces – one in Latakia and the other one in Damascus.

Neither the Syrian nor Israeli governments have commented on the alleged attacks. No casualties have been reported. In the past, Damascus has threatened to strongly retaliate against such attacks.

A day after a US Treasury Department report bluntly denounced Germany's economic model, accusing it of hampering the euro zone recovery and hurting global growth, Germany called the conclusions "incomprehensible" and challenged the US to "analyze its own economic situation."

The Treasury's semiannual currency report criticized Germany's overreliance on exports, a high current-account surplus and weak domestic demand. These factors "have hampered rebalancing at a time when many other euro-area countries have been under severe pressure," the report concluded, citing budget tightening in the euro periphery. "The net result has been a deflationary bias for the euro area, as well as for the world economy."

The German Economics Ministry responded in a statement with equally harsh words, saying that Germany's surplus is "a sign of the competitiveness of the German economy and global demand for quality products from Germany."

“It would be wrong of me not to admit that headcount reductions and pay restraint have impacted adversely on morale,” Lord Astor said, speaking in the House of Lords. Thousands of soldiers have been fired and others have accepted voluntary redundancy under Ministry of Defence plans to shrink the regular Army from 102,000 troops to 82,000 by 2020.

The admission came as peers accused the Government of behaving like Robert Maxwell, the late newspaper tycoon, for firing soldiers days before they become entitled to a full pension. The MoD is accused of targeting redundancies at soldiers who are within touching distance of generous lifelong pay outs.

In one case exposed in the Daily Telegraph, a 40-year-old sergeant serving in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers was sacked when he was only three days away from serving 22 years and qualifying for an immediate pension pot worth £108,000. He will now have to wait until he is 65 to receive the pension. In other cases, officers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan were fired weeks short of serving 16 years, at which point they would get an immediate annual stipend of around £12,000.

"Not since the notorious crook Robert Maxwell plundered his employees' pensions have we seen an employer, in this case Her Majesty's Government, so contrive a redundancy package to deny a small group who have put their lives on the line for Britain their rightful pension,” he told peers.

The ranks of the jobless swelled by 60,000 to a record 19.45 million, according to Eurostat, the European Union's statistics agency. Though the unemployment rate remained steady at 12.2 percent, the previous month was revised up from 12 percent.

"The latest figures put a dent in hopes that the labor market may have reached a turning point," said analyst Ben May of Capital Economics. A sharp and unexpected drop in inflation also cast doubts over the recovery of the eurozone, which just emerged from recession, and put pressure on the European Central Bank to act. The euro dropped sharply, from above $1.3700 before the news to about $1.3615 in afternoon trading.

A particularly gloomy stat was on youth unemployment - it rose to 24.1 percent from 24 percent in August. It was lowest in Germany and Austria, with 7.7 percent and 8.7 percent, and highest in Europe's southern economies, which have been hit hard by the debt crisis and government austerity measures. They were around 57 percent in Greece and 56 percent in Spain.

Revised Bank of England data on Thursday showed that unsecured consumer credit rose by £864 million in September. This was the highest monthly level in 2013, and up from an increase of £680 million in August.

A Bank of England error meant the figure was reported as £411 million earlier this week. "This release was reissued on 31 October 2013 due to an error in implementing a change to the reporting population for September 2013," the Bank said in a statement on Thursday.

The revised figure also means unsecured lending rose to an annualised rate of 5.8 percent in the third quarter, a pace not seen since April 2008.

Demonstrators also attacked an armored vehicle and attempted to break a police barricade, as police pushed back activists on their way to the regional affairs ministry. At least six people, including four police officers, were hospitalized with injuries and about a dozen received medical help on the site, reports Italian La Stampa daily. Several protesters were detained.

The rally on Thursday was organized by activists from the movement ‘For Housing’ who are demanding that local authorities stop evictions in Rome and use more public funds to help people without homes or those who cannot pay their rent. Similar protests against evictions have taken place in many cities across Italy.

Barclays confirmed it is reviewing its trading going back several years as part of the international inquiry. Chief executive Antony Jenkins, who took the helm 14 months ago after the bank was fined £290 million for rigging Libor interest rates – used for inter-bank loans – said he was unable to comment on the ‘ongoing discussions’.

‘From time to time these legacy issues will arise and will have to be dealt with,’ he said. ‘We are in the process of changing the culture of Barclays. I’ve said it will take five to ten years to deeply embed that cultural change, and we are on track.’

The news comes as Barclays revealed a slump at its ‘casino’ bank – the investment arm – helped drag down profits by 26 per cent to £1.4 billion in the three months to the end of September. Chris Leslie, Labour’s shadow Treasury minister, said yesterday it would be a ‘devastating blow’ if more wrongdoing is discovered at the High Street giant.

Plans for the harmonised euro-flush will be tabled by the European Commission as part of an "Ecolabel" acting as a gold standard for officially approved lavatories aimed at cutting water use.

Martin Callanan MEP, the leader of the Conservative bloc in the European Parliament and Tory spokesman on EU environment measures, condemned the proposals. He accused the commission of breaking a promise made by its president José Manuel Barroso, in a Telegraph article last week, to cut red tape by not meddling in "small things".

"There seems to no limit whatsoever to the commission's self-conferred licence to interfere," he said. "It makes a mockery of Barroso last week supporting our call for less unnecessary red tape! He needs to get a grip of his own bureaucracy."

The EU standard follows almost three years of work by civil servants and difficulties in the workability of a one-size-fits-all rule for drains that vary greatly from London to Bucharest or from Berlin to Vilnius.

Millions of others are seeing the size of their health insurance premiums absolutely explode, and this new law is going to result in massive numbers of jobs being lost. It is almost as if Obamacare was specifically designed to wreck the US economy.

Not that what we had before Obamacare was great. In fact, I have long argued that the US health care system is a complete and total train wreck. But now Obamacare is making everything that was bad about our system much, much worse. Americans are going to pay far more for health care, the quality of that care is going to go down, they are going to have to deal with far more medical red tape, and thousands upon thousands of US employers are considering getting rid of the health plans that they offer to employees altogether due to Obamacare.

If the US health care system was a separate nation, it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet, and now Obamacare is going to absolutely cripple it. To say that Obamacare is an “economic catastrophe” would be a massive understatement.

Gone is the healthy water storage that floated California through two dry years. Major reservoirs around the state need gully-washing storms this winter. "Whatever the storms bring this winter, that's what we will have to cope with next summer," said Steve Haugen, watermaster at the Kings River Water Association, which closely monitors Pine Flat Reservoir.

Northern reservoirs face similar challenges, though water storage is not as low as Pine Flat. Shasta, Oroville, Trinity, New Melones, Don Pedro and Exchequer are hovering at one-third to one-half of capacity, far lower than average for late October. Dwindling reservoirs should be a wake-up call to Californians, said Mark Cowin, director of the state Department of Water Resources. "January through May 2013 were California's driest in about 90 years of recordkeeping," Lucero said.

San Luis Reservoir, which gets water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, is only 22% of its historical average for this time of year. Dry weather was not the whole story. Delta environmental restrictions early this year resulted in pumping cutbacks and the loss of nearly 1 million acre-feet of water at San Luis.

The United States could possibly become "embroiled in a direct hegemonic conflict with China over the Asia Pacific region," which "most likely would include military involvement." Germany is also increasingly participating in the arming and training of the West's allies in Eastern and Southeastern Asia.

An "intensification of the security competition" in the Pacific region can, in any case, be expected, even if it does not escalate into war, one political scientist at the Bundeswehr University in Munich reaffirms. Last June, the Federal College for Security Studies, the German government's central military policy think tank, examined China's arms buildup and discussed military conflict scenarios involving China.

For quite awhile, eventual military confrontations with China have been discussed in the West in light of the People's Republic's decades of uninterrupted economic upswing. China is about to replace the United States as the world's most important trading power. Experts expect that the Chinese GDP will bypass that of the USA in the foreseeable future.

China's significantly growing economic influence is accompanied by a steady growth of its political power. At the same time, the West "is less and less capable of solving its own problems (...) due to the 2009 global financial crisis," according to a recent study by the CSU-affiliated Hanns Seidel Foundation. As the financial crisis has shown, China has even "assumed the role of a fire department to extinguish global crises." With "China's increasing involvement in the World Bank," the USA is threatened with a loss of "its control." According to the Seidel Foundation, the question must slowly, but surely be raised: "Has China's system possibly become superior to that of the West?"