But it turns out that the benefits of printing all that new money may have been negligible. According to a new study by two senior US economists, America's second programme of quantitative easing, nicknamed "QE2", boosted economic output by just 0.04 percent. Simply telling the markets that interest rates would remain low was more effective, adding 0.09 percent to growth, said Vasco Curdia, senior economist at the San Francisco Federal Reserve, and Andrea Ferrero, his opposite number at the New York Fed.

These experts did not calculate the equivalent figures for the British economy, of course. But it's not unreasonable to assume that the story here would be similar. If so, it follows that the enormous pain suffered by Britain's savers and pensioners at the hands of QE has been for nothing. That pain includes annuity rates falling to record lows and inflation being allowed to eat away at fixed incomes. The total cost to savers has been estimated at many tens of billions of pounds.

Containing radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima 68 years ago, more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies packed tightly together need to be removed from a building that is vulnerable to collapse, should another large earthquake hit the area.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) is already in a losing battle to stop radioactive water overflowing from another part of the facility, and experts question whether it will be able to pull off the removal of all the assemblies successfully. "They are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods," said Arnie Gundersen, a veteran US nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy Education, who used to build fuel assemblies.

The operation, beginning this November at the plant's Reactor Number 4, is fraught with danger, including the possibility of a large release of radiation if a fuel assembly breaks, gets stuck or gets too close to an adjacent bundle, said Gundersen and other nuclear experts. That could lead to a worse disaster than the March 2011 nuclear crisis at the Fukushima plant, the world's most serious since Chernobyl in 1986.

No one knows how bad it can get, but independent consultants Mycle Schneider and Antony Froggatt said recently in their World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2013: "Full release from the Unit-4 spent fuel pool, without any containment or control, could cause by far the most serious radiological disaster to date."

At issue is by far the worst environmental disaster in history. It's multiples worse than Chernobyl. It's an unprecedented catastrophe. It's reason enough to abolish nuclear power. Tokyo Electric (TEPCO) says water's getting over and around "chemical walls." It can't be stopped. Three Fukushima reactors suffered meltdowns. A fourth was badly damaged.

The worst fear remains. Unit Four's structural integrity was seriously undermined. It contains hundreds of tons of highly radioactive water. If an earthquake or other natural disaster occurs, its fuel rods almost certainly will catch fire. Radioactive emissions will follow. They'll compound what's already disastrous. Epidemic cancer levels are certain. And not just in Japan. In early July, Fukushima's former chief operator, Masao Yoshida, died of esophogeal cancer. He was 58. Tepco lied saying his death was unrelated to radiation exposure. Japanese children are experiencing a shocking 40% rise in thyroid irregularities. Experts expect much higher numbers ahead. Fukushima's an ongoing disaster. It persists. It's not ending. It'll continue for decades.

According to Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) president Arjun Makhijani, he doesn't know how Tepco can handle the problem. It's uncontrollable. "It's very, very unclear to me how they are going to be able to get at this molten fuel, extract it from the bottoms of these highly damaged buildings and package it for safer or less dangerous storage or disposal. This is an accident that's shockingly not stopping." It's certain to worsen. It's unchartered territory.

In a stunning admission contained in a brief filed recently in federal court, lawyers for Google said people should not expect privacy when they send messages to a Gmail account. Consumer Watchdog said that people who care about their email correspondents' privacy should not use the Internet giant's service.

Google's brief said: "Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient's assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their emails are processed by the recipient's [email provider] in the course of delivery. Indeed, a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties."

"Google has finally admitted they don't respect privacy," said John M Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's Privacy Project director. "People should take them at their word; if you care about your email correspondents' privacy don't use Gmail."

But this explanation raises two key questions. Why did private lenders, whose job it was to assess credit risk, make those loans? And why did the army of financial regulators, with massive enforcement powers, allow 28 million high-risk loans to be made?

There’s a strong case that the answers can be traced to September 12, 1992. On that day presidential candidate Bill Clinton proposed, in his campaign book “Putting People First,” using private pension funds to “invest” in government priorities, such as affordable housing, to “generate long-term, broad based economic benefits.” Seldom has such a radical proposal been so ignored during a campaign only to later lead to such devastating consequences.

The Royal Gibraltar Police said that queues to enter Gibraltar on Tuesday had been around three hours, although many travellers reported five hour blockages. There were no delays leaving. A spokesperson said: “The FCO will be protesting to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the unacceptable delays seen this morning at the Spanish border with Gibraltar.”

Officials are still considering whether to mount a legal challenge to Spain over its imposition of additional border controls in the latest diplomatic spat between the two countries over the Rock. Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish prime minister, on Friday defended the border controls. "The government of Spain has not taken any illegal steps," he said.

Downing Street has described the controls as "politically motivated and disproportionate" - putting Spain at odds with EU laws on the freedom of movement. The European Commission plans to send a team of investigators to the Gibraltar border in the next couple of weeks to observe the new controls, following complaints from several MEPs and EU citizens about the long delays.

Falling self-sufficiency means Britain produces less than two-thirds (62%) of the food the country consumes, down from 75% in 1991, the National Farmers' Union said. If all the food produced in the UK in a year were stored and eaten from January 1, the “cupboard” would be bare by August 14, the NFU has calculated. Farmers are calling for support from politicians, the public and food industry to back British farming and help them produce more.

NFU president Peter Kendall said the UK could not simply go around the world chasing the cheapest deal on food. “To think that today's date would signal the time when our domestic food supply runs out is frankly alarming. It says to me that we must act,” he said.

One prominent example of this is the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Gardasil, which mainstream media outlets have repeatedly touted as safe and effective using mounds of fraudulent, misinterpreted, and sometimes never-even-looked-at "safety" data. Recently, a surveillance study evaluating the potential autoimmune side effects of Gardasil was used by the mainstream media as "evidence" that the vaccine is supposedly not linked to such conditions, and is thus safe, even though the study did not actually come to this conclusion.

As reported by Dr Chandler Marrs, PhD, from HormonesMatter.com, the study itself was poorly conducted, it contains obvious statistical skewing, it did not include a matched case control group, and it truly did not come to any meaningful conclusions about Gardasil's safety. But this did not stop the mainstream media from running wildly deceptive headlines like "No increase in autoimmune conditions from use of HPV vaccine" and "HPV vaccine unlikely triggered autoimmune disease," which were designed to trick the public into thinking that "science" somehow supports the safety of Gardasil.

The fact that dishonest researchers were willing to craft such a specious study and pass it off as valid suggests that there truly are many potential dangers associated with Gardasil that the medical establishment is trying to hide from public view. "By imputing the control group, [the researchers] guaranteed that they would not find differences between the unvaccinated and vaccinated group," writes Dr Marrs about one of the major flaws with this particular study. "Poking through the statistical shenanigans, if we look only at the raw numbers from the abridged case pool, there appeared to be a high rate of Hashimoto's, rheumatoid and other autoimmune conditions" caused by Gardasil, he adds.

So much for Gardasil not being linked to autoimmune disease. As usual, all the mainstream media babbling about the alleged safety of Gardasil as supposedly illustrated by this latest study was erroneous - the study actually suggests that Gardasil is unsafe and a potential cause of autoimmune disease!

Was it just cheaper to mock up the documents than to provide the real ones? Did banks figure they simply had enough power over regulators, politicians and the courts to get away with it? (They were probably right about that one.)

A newly unsealed lawsuit, which banks settled in 2012 for $95 million, actually offers a different reason, providing a key answer to one of the persistent riddles of the financial crisis and its aftermath. The lawsuit states that banks resorted to fake documents because they could not legally establish true ownership of the loans when trying to foreclose. This reality, which banks did not contest but instead settled out of court, means that tens of millions of mortgages in America still lack a legitimate chain of ownership, with implications far into the future.

We are just 93 million miles from a star that, while mostly well-behaved, occasionally has temper tantrums that could bring our civilisation to its knees. Our solar system is home to a swarm of comets, rocks, boulders and flying mountains, tens of thousands of which are big enough to wipe out anything from a small city to the entire biosphere. And further out lurk delinquent stars whose death explosions are the largest since the Big Bang. If one of these went off nearby, it would be curtains for all of us.

It is not just rocks we have to worry about. Japanese scientists have uncovered evidence from the study of tree rings that in the year 775 the Earth was hit by a colossal solar flare. The scientists found a spike in radioactive carbon-14, taken up by the ancient cedar trees they were studying. In Finland, Ilya Usoskin and his colleagues found an identical spike on the other side of the world. One theory is that this was caused by a nearby exploding star – a supernova – showering the Earth with radiation.

The trouble, says Usoskin, was that they could see no sign in the skies of a supernova remnant within the required distance. So the scientists turned to the historical record to see if there were any clues. The handful of supernovae that have burst into existence in historical times have often been well-recorded. But, 1,238 years ago, there were reports not of a brilliant “new star” but – as one English chronicler, Roger of Wendover, put it – of the skies themselves catching fire: “Fiery and fearful signs were seen in the heavens after sunset; and serpents appeared in Sussex, as if they were sprung out of the ground, to the astonishment of all.”

Will Ross, BBC News, Lagos reports: If this was Boko Haram, it might appear baffling. Many churches have been bombed but why would a group that wants to impose Islamic law across Nigeria open fire on worshippers at a mosque?

In fact this would not be the first time Boko Haram has targeted a mosque - Muslim clerics have also been killed because of their views. The gunmen may have known that amongst the worshippers were members of the vigilante groups that have sprung up to help the army defend the population.

Three months ago the military campaign was launched. But the Islamist militants have not been defeated - over the past month more than 160 people have been killed in attacks on boarding schools, army and police bases as well as a Christian-dominated area of Kano City. Other attacks go unreported. So what is the way forward?

One Borno State official suggests the only solution is to deploy more vigilante groups.

Britain thinks tighter checks by Spanish officials at the frontier of the contested British overseas territory are "politically motivated and totally disproportionate", the spokesman told reporters. "Clearly the Prime Minister is disappointed by the failure of Spain to remove the additional border checks this weekend. We are now considering what legal action is open to us," the spokesman said. "This would be an unprecedented step so we want to consider it carefully before a making a decision to pursue."

Spain responded to the statement by saying it would not abandon checks at its border. "What we say is that the measures, the controls, are legal and proportionate. We are obligated to do them under Schengen. We can't renounce them," a foreign ministry spokesman said in reference to the EU's borderless travel zone, which Britain does not belong to.

Spain is considering taking its claims to global bodies such as the United Nations and International Court of Justice at The Hague, a foreign ministry spokesman said on Sunday.

In joint interviews with five European newspapers, Mr Cameron today argued the EU has “overreached itself with directives and interventions and interferences”. Asked whether there will be treaty change, Mr Cameron said he is “absolutely convinced that there will be the need to reopen at some stage these treaties, not least to solve the problem of the eurozone”.

He said, “I don't want to give you a shopping list. I think this should be a discussion across Europe about how we make the EU more flexible, and how we make clear that powers can flow back to nation states as well as flow forward to the EU.” He added, “We need to recognise that consent for Britain's membership of the EU and all the ways that it's changed has become wafer-thin in Britain. Politicians, if they do their job properly have to recognise this fact rather than try and brush it under the carpet.”

Just this week, there have been stories about police killing a baby deer at an animal shelter, about police killing a 95-year-old World War II veteran in a retirement home, and about police using legal technicalities to “legally” steal massive amounts of money from innocent citizens. Why are police acting like this? Why have police in America turned into such ruthless thugs? In the case of the baby deer that was killed, 13 armed agents stormed the animal shelter up in Wisconsin where it was being cared for.

Is this really the kind of country that we want our children to grow up in? A country where Bambi is hunted down by armed thugs working for the government? Sadly, the story about that deer is not an isolated incident. The truth is that police all over the country kill animals every single day. In fact, police in Chicago have shot 488 animals since 2008. No wonder people are so afraid to have the police come to their homes.

Increasingly, police departments all over the United States are being transformed into military-style units. The police culture in America has fundamentally changed. In the old days, most police officers were extremely helpful and would give you directions or help you get your cat out of a tree.

But if you stop and ask a police officer for help today, you will be lucky if all you get is some dirty language. These days, police all over the nation are actually being trained to bark orders at you and to respond to the least bit of resistance with overwhelming force.

Joe diGenova, whose wife Victoria Toensing – a former deputy assistant attorney general – also represents Benghazi witnesses and others with knowledge of the terror attack, told WMAL radio that the loss of those missiles is also one of the reasons the US State Department shut down 19 embassies across the Middle East last week.

'A lot of people have come forward to share information with us,' he said during the radio station's 'Mornings On The Mall' program Monday morning. 'We have learned that one of the reasons the administration is so deeply concerned' is that 'there were 400 surface-to-air missiles stolen, and that they are ... in the hands of many people, and that the biggest fear in the US intelligence community is that one of these missiles will be used to shoot down an airliner. 400 missiles, surface-to-air missiles, taken from Libya.'

Asked if the missiles are now 'in the hands of al-Qaeda operatives,' DiGenova replied, 'That is what these people are telling us.'