This follows the visit of the Russian warship, “Varyag,” which arrived in Alexandria earlier this month according to Ahram Online, two days before Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Cairo.

Egypt’s moves to improve relations with Russia and Saudi Arabia are seen as a way to counter US pressure and the recent partial aid freeze. The freeze was implemented as a result of the military coup and crackdown on former president Mohamed Morsi and his supporters.

Saudi Arabia has been flexing its military might in the midst of regional sectarian tensions and worry about Iran’s nuclear program. Saudi Arabia is currently holding a drill on its soil with French forces, focusing on mountain warfare.

The decision by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) to open itself to a possible future alliance with the Left Party has unsettled coalition talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives, and is a ticking time bomb that could topple her third government before the next general election, in 2017.

The SPD has until now ruled out forming a national government with the left-wing Left Party because it regards the latter's policy pledges as unrealistic. For example, the ultra-pacifist party, which has its roots in the communist SED party that ruled the former East Germany, wants an end to all foreign military missions, a ban on weapons exports, the withdrawal or destruction of all US nuclear missiles still stationed in Germany, and the dissolution of NATO.

For the SPD, the grand coalition is the last stage before what it hopes will be the biggest shake-up in German politics since the SPD-Green government came to power in 1998, which ended 16 years of calcifying conservative rule under former Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Even though many leading SPD members are trying to play down the importance of last week's decision, it will affect the everyday working of the upcoming coalition.

Yet Merkel has more reason to be worried than her triumphant election win on September 22 would have suggested. Her coalition with the SPD will have an overwhelming parliamentary majority, but her fate will be chained to an SPD leader who is already preparing the ground for the end of the Merkel Era.

They held signs outside the doors of more than 200 mainstream outlets like ABC, FOX, NBC and the BBC, urging viewers to get information from alternative news sources and challenging them to actually cover the protests. There was virtually no MSM reporting on the protests.

“March Against Mainstream Media is more than just a protest,” the organization’s website reads, “It is an attack against the credibility of the mainstream media in an attempt to steer its viewers away from its lies and towards alternative media sources.”

Its goal was not only to draw attention to the omissions of the mainstream media; it was to confront them directly. With thousands protesting the media right outside its doors, would it report the event? Or would it willingly leave the majority of the population completely unaware?

“The news source that is not showing the protests is the news source you have to stop getting your news from. And the news source that IS showing the protests is where you should look for news from now on,” says the site. All but one traditional outlet chose to ignore the protest. The Seattle Times did report the event, though it simply said that a small group of protesters had gathered with flags, signs and megaphones and shouted slogans. Unsurprisingly, new media has covered the story extensively.

The civil settlement would mark the end of weeks of tense negotiations between JPMorgan Chase, the largest US bank, and government agencies that are under pressure to hold banks accountable for wrongdoing that led to the housing crisis.

For JPMorgan, the deal resolves some of the welter of investigations it is dealing with now. But even after the settlement, the bank faces at least nine other government probes, covering everything from its hiring practices in China to whether it manipulated the Libor benchmark interest rate.

JPMorgan said last month that it has set aside $23 billion to cover litigation expenses. Its share price rose 0.9 percent to $56.22. For this settlement, JPMorgan took the unusual step of acknowledging that its employees knowingly sold loans to investors that were shakier than the bank claimed.

Due diligence firms that reviewed those loans for JPMorgan in 2006 and 2007 deemed that 27 percent of them were failing, but the bank still packaged at least half of those into mortgage securities, the government said.

So far, Gaza media outlets have not reported casualties as a result of the attack. The airstrike came in response to a mortar shell attack this morning. Gaza terrorists fired on IDF soldiers near the Gaza security barrier. "The IDF will not tolerate attempts to harm citizens of the state of Israel," an IDF statement said.

Last Saturday marked one year since the Pillar of Defense counter-terror operation in Gaza. Gaza terrorist groups commemorated the battle as a “success over the Zionist enemy.” Hamas and other Gaza terrorist groups suffered losses in the fighting, and their arsenal took a severe hit. However, Hamas managed to fire rockets on central Israel and Jerusalem for the first time.

In a series of interviews with top bank executives, new details emerged about the extent of the contingency planning that was undertaken before and during the 16-day government shutdown and as a potential default loomed.

The planning for worst-case scenarios didn't come cheap. JPMorgan alone has spent more than $100 million on contingency planning for US budget crises in recent years including this one, sources close to the bank say. It has reviewed and analyzed thousands of trading contracts, updated computer systems to handle fiscal emergencies, hired consultants, and built new models to figure out what might happen to securities prices.

It may not go to waste. The temporary budget agreement that President Barack Obama signed shortly after midnight on October 17 to end the shutdown and lift the default threat, authorizes government spending through January 15 and eases enforcement of the debt limit until February 7, creating the potential for another budget crisis early next year, even as some Republicans vow they will avoid it.

With each crisis, the once-unthinkable scenario of a US default becomes a little more real, bank executives said.

House Armed Services Committee Chair Howard “Buck” McKeon (Republican for California) and Readiness Subcommittee Chairman Rob Wittman (Republican for Virginia) were present at the briefing, one in a series in the coming weeks to urge members of Congress to oppose defense cuts, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

After the briefing McKeon said "one of the things that really concerns me, all of these cuts we’re having, the first thing that gets hit is readiness. So the troops that are preparing for Afghanistan, remember we are still at war, are not getting the training they got a year ago." Wittman highlighted the dangers of the current situation, saying, "reality tells us that our forces will be unprepared to deploy, they will face increased risk, their safety will be jeopardized, their missions compromised, and there will be an increased likelihood that more Americans will be killed carrying out their constitutional duty, both on the battle field and in training, if cuts to our national security are allowed to continue."

Unnerved by Icahn's prognosis, investors pushed stocks lower. The S&P 500, which was trading near unchanged before Icahn spoke, closed down 0.4 percent."I am very cautious on equities today. This market could easily have a big drop," Icahn said.He said share buybacks are driving results, not profitability.

"Very simplistically put, a lot of the earnings are a mirage," Icahn told the Reuters Global Investment Outlook Summit. "They are not coming because the companies are well run but because of low interest rates." The 77-year-old investor's views on markets and individual companies are widely followed in light of the strong returns he has generated.

Icahn said that in the last five years, investors who bought shares of companies in which his firm took seats on the board of directors and held the shares as long as an Icahn representative stayed on those boards would have earned 28 percent on an annualized basis.

Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy’s books with the US Treasury’s - a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies.

And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. “A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate,” Woodford says. “We didn’t have the detail … for a lot of it.”

The data flooded in just two days before deadline. As the clock ticked down, Woodford says, staff were able to resolve a lot of the false entries through hurried calls and emails to Navy personnel, but many mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take “unsubstantiated change actions” - in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called “plugs,” to make the Navy’s totals match the Treasury’s.

Because of its persistent inability to tally its accounts, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with a law that requires annual audits of all government departments. That means that the $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996, the first year it was supposed to be audited, has never been accounted for.

The Pacific Alliance, a network of four Pacific bordering Latin American nations, has a neo-liberal orientation and is closely allied with the EU and the USA through free trade agreements. It is currently growing rapidly stronger and could possibly also threaten Brazil's standing as the subcontinent's most powerful economic power.

However, it is mainly aimed at Latin America's Venezuela-inspired ALBA alliance, struggling for autonomous development, which includes strong socially oriented policies. "The strategy of the Pacific Alliance" is "not just commercial," it is more "a political and military strategy [seeking] to reinstall the Washington Consensus," according to a minister of ALBA member Bolivia.

At the beginning of the month, Germany obtained observer status at the Pacific Alliance, with which the German industry is expanding its trade relations. Alongside its increasing tensions on the Latin American continent, the alliance is helping the West prepare for the conflict of the century - between China and the USA.

The kingdom, which is Iran's chief regional rival, "has no relations or contacts with Israel of any kind or at any level," said a foreign ministry spokesman, quoted by state news agency SPA.

Under the headline "Two old foes unite against Tehran," Britain's Sunday Times newspaper said Israel and Saudi Arabia were working together on "contingency plans for a possible attack on Iran if its nuclear program is not significantly curbed." "As part of the growing cooperation, Riyadh is understood already to have given the go-ahead for Israeli planes to use its airspace in the event of an attack on Iran," it said.

Both Israel and Saudi Arabia fear that talks between the Western powers and Iran in Geneva will yield an agreement that relaxes sanctions on Iran without effectively curbing Iran’s nuclear program. Talks are set to resume this Thursday, November 21.

Authorities estimate more than 3,900 people were killed when Typhoon Haiyan, one of the largest ever recorded, made landfall in the central Philippines and the sea surged ashore. Philippine authorities, the US military and international agencies face a mounting humanitarian crisis, with the number of people displaced by the catastrophe estimated at four million, up from 900,000 late last week.

Bernard Kerblat, UN High Commissioner for Refugees representative for the Philippines, said the agency was still facing coordination problems and bottlenecks. "As of now, personally, I am not so sure that we've reached every single portion of the territory where people are in need of aid," he said. "And, in fact, I wouldn't be surprised that unfortunately that there might still be, as I'm speaking to you, day 11 of this disaster, there might be still very isolated islands."

Orla Fagan, a spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said it was a "logistical nightmare" to get relief supplies out at all. "The size, the quantity of people that have been affected by this, this is massive, between 10 and 12.9 million people have to be assisted to recover from this. This is absolutely huge. It's like taking the whole of Belgium and trying to assist."

“We must break the taboos and make sanitation for all a global development priority,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declared. The UN estimates that 1.1 billion people – including around half of India’s population – defecate in the open, which is both a symptom and a cause of unsanitary conditions. More than 800,000 children under five die from diarrhoeal diseases that could be easily prevented each year.

The problem, already prevalent in some of the world’s poorest countries, has a cruelly disproportionate impact on the most impoverished. In total, inadequate sanitation robs the world’s economy of $260 billion worth of productivity annually. A lack of private toilets also particularly affects women, who generally suffer more infections, spend more time looking for available spots, and leave themselves more open to assault when they do find them.

He was quoted by an official website as telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that they could "complicate the process towards a win-win agreement". The Kremlin said Mr Putin had stressed there was a "real chance" of a deal.

Representatives from Iran and the P5+1 group of nations will begin a new round of negotiations in Geneva on Wednesday. Three days of high-level talks earlier this month failed to achieve a breakthrough. US Secretary of State John Kerry said Iran been unable to accept a deal "at that particular moment", while Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif blamed divisions between Western powers and appeared to single out France for "gutting over half" of a US draft deal.

Some reports said France's delegation had wanted to place tight restrictions on the heavy-water reactor being built at Arak; others that the Iranian government's insistence on formal recognition of its "right" to enrich uranium had been the major obstacle.

The worst-hit area appears to be in and around the north-eastern city of Olbia. Prime Minister Enrico Letta has declared a state of emergency, speaking of a "national tragedy". Mr Letta announced that 20 million euros (£16.8 million, $27 million) would be allocated immediately to emergency relief efforts, with soldiers deployed in the region.

"We are focusing on essential operations: saving human lives, assisting displaced people and clearing road access," he said after an emergency cabinet meeting on Tuesday. "We haven't seen a situation as extreme as this, perhaps for decades - especially because it's been across the whole island."