The lawsuit filed at the District Court of Manhattan is against Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse Group, Deutsche Bank AG, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Rabobank, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS AG, claiming they artificially lowered the rate from 2007 to 2010, the Washington Post reported.

In the filing Fannie Mae said it lost about $800 million on “swaps, mortgages, mortgage-backed securities and other variable rate transactions” tied to Libor. The London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) serves as a standard interest rate for loans between banks and is a benchmark for the estimated $360 trillion in lending to businesses and consumers.

The biggest US mortgage firm stood at the roots of the 2007 financial collapse and now has joined a long list of pension funds and asset managers suing the big lenders for rigging Libor and causing billions in losses. By lowering the rate banks created the impression they were financially stronger than they really were during the crisis.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue a report next March on how global warming is already affecting the way people live and what will happen in the future, including a worldwide drop in income. A leaked copy of a draft of the summary of the report appeared online Friday on a climate skeptic's website. Governments will spend the next few months making comments about the draft.

"We've seen a lot of impacts and they've had consequences," Carnegie Institution climate scientist Chris Field, who heads the report, told The Associated Press on Saturday. "And we will see more in the future." Cities, where most of the world now lives, have the highest vulnerability, as do the globe's poorest people.

Despite all that, a number of high-profile — mostly technology — stocks are soaring. The heady advances are making shareholders of these companies big money, but they're also raising serious questions among some analysts about whether the unusual trading is a troublesome sign for the overall market.

Last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average set a record on Tuesday, but closed up just 0.29% for the week. The Standard & Poor's 500 stock index also set a record and rose 0.11%. So far this year, the Dow has climbed 19%, the S&P 500 24% and the Nasdaq 30%.

Rising stocks usually create smiles on Wall Street, but these gains are also making some nervous. When a select group of speculative stocks trading at huge multiples of their earnings — due to high expectations for future earnings — leads the market, it can be harder to sustain the gains than in a bull market led by companies with more dependable earnings.

Although the Saudis and others in the region have been supplying weapons to the rebels since the fighting in Syria began more than two years ago and have cooperated with a slow-starting CIA operation to train and arm the opposition, officials said they have largely given up on the United States as the leader and coordinator of their efforts.

Instead, the Saudis plan to expand training facilities they operate in Jordan and increase the firepower of arms sent to rebel groups that are fighting extremist elements among them even as they battle the Syrian government, according to gulf officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve comity with the United States. What officials described as a parallel operation independent of US efforts is being discussed by the Saudis with other countries in the region, according to officials from several governments that have been involved in the talks.

Unhappiness over Syria is only one element of what officials said are varying degrees of disenchantment in the region with much of the administration’s Middle East policy, including its nuclear negotiations with Iran and criticism of Egypt’s new government.

“Israel, I think, now faces the fateful decision whether it will allow Iran to get nuclear weapons, thus constituting a true existential threat to Israel,” he said.“Or whether they will strike as the Israelis have done twice before against nuclear programs in the hands of hostile states,” Bolton told WABC Radio’s Aaron Klein.

“I don’t think Israel has much time,” Bolton continued. “Frankly, they should have done this years ago because we all know intelligence is imperfect and Iran may have a more developed capacity than we know about, perhaps in cooperation with North Korea.” Bolton spoke amid US outreach to Iran and amid reports Iran’s Revolutionary Guard announced Saturday they are committed to the slogan, “Death to America.”

The former UN ambassador reacted to a statement by former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who said Thursday that while US has “implemented unprecedented sanctions and pressure on Iran, we may very well have to use military force to back up our policy.” Bolton retorted: “If there is anybody left in Israel who thinks that the US will use military force against Iran’s program, they really need to seriously re-examine their basic values. It isn’t going to happen under the Obama administration. I’ll just say it again. It isn’t going to happen.”

The former US defense secretary and CIA director made the remarks while addressing around 600 people at the Anti-Defamation League’s 100th annual meeting. Panetta, who was receiving the ADL’s William and Naomi Gorowitz Institute Service Award, said the US needs to “maintain a healthy skepticism” when negotiating to suss out Iran’s true level of commitment to negotiations over its nuclear program.

“It is the Supreme Leader [Ali Khamenei] who is key, and he is not likely to give up [uranium] enrichment,” Panetta warned. “We have to remain strong. We have to remain consistent.” Panetta reiterated the American line that the US has “no friend, no better ally in the world than Israel,” but he expressed concern over the “growing sense of isolationism in this country [the US]” over the last 10 years of fighting two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the shifting power dynamics among world leaders.

“The fact remains that we live in a very dangerous world,” he said. “We continue to have threats from North Korea as they test nuclear weapons. We have instability and fragility in the Middle East. All of this happens at a time when we are imperiled by gridlock in Washington.”

Dr Alfonso Rodriguez of Dallas, Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit against the state last year, asserting that Act 13 of 2012 forces medical professionals to enter “a vague confidentiality agreement” that prevents them from having a completely honest dialogue with patients.

Hydraulic fracking involves drilling through underground shale rock with the help of chemicals - many of them toxic - to release natural gas. Earlier this month, a research team out of Duke University examined Pennsylvania wastewater and found what they described as “alarmingly” high levels of radioactivity, salts, metals, and other potentially harmful sediments.

Yet the “medical gag rule” forbids doctors like Rodriguez from going into depth about the health problems that chemicals from fracking can cause. Critics have said the bill’s passage, and the court’s refusal to grant Dr Rodriguez the right to speak freely with his patients, is an indication of just how entrenched the oil and gas lobby is in state politics.

Rodriguez specializes in renal diseases, hypertension, and advanced diabetes. He “has recently treated patients directly exposed to high-volume hydraulic fracturing fluid as the result of well blowouts,” including a patient “with a complicated diagnosis with low platelets, anemia, rash and acute renal failure that required extensive hemodialysis and exposure to chemotherapeutic agents,” the complaint stated, as quoted by Courthouse News.

For fulfilling his true responsibility as a doctor, though, Rodriguez allegedly risks violating the American Medical Association’s Principles of Medical Ethics, an infraction that could cost him his medical license.

But the longer-term story isn’t the rollout and its many severe glitches. No one recalls whether the first batch of Social Security checks was sent on time in the late 1930s. The story that will matter, and linger, is that the Affordable Care Act was the first major law implemented almost entirely online. It’s the template for the future, and rather than using its launch as an excuse to renew attacks on the law, we need to learn what we can because, like this bill or not, it is part of the next wave of government.

The past two weeks have been filled with various individuals testifying to Congress about the design and implementation of Healthcare.gov, the web portal that allows individuals to access the new health plans and exchanges. The tenor of these hearings, convened by the Republican-controlled House, is that the design of the website exposed the fundamental failings of the law and government incompetence. But what’s actually been exposed is that the US government has not yet made the transition to a digital age.

While the administration could have and should have done far better, the reasons for its failure are less about a flawed process than a system currently ill-designed for this type of legislation.

Do you believe in conspiracy theories, do you believe that we are living in the “end times” or do you ever visit alternative news websites (such as this one)? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you are a “potential terrorist” according to official US government documents. At one time, the term “terrorist” was used very narrowly.

The government applied that label to people like Osama bin Laden and other Islamic jihadists. But now the Obama administration is removing all references to Islam from terror training materials, and instead the term “terrorist” is being applied to large groups of American citizens. And if you are a “terrorist”, that means that you have no rights and the government can treat you just like it treats the terrorists that are being held at Guantanamo Bay.

So if you belong to a group of people that is now being referred to as “potential terrorists”, please don’t take it as a joke. The first step to persecuting any group of people is to demonize them. And right now large groups of peaceful, law-abiding citizens are being ruthlessly demonized.

The concept of "peak food," that the production will reach an apex that can't be topped, is more a function of population than of agricultural limits. The world should be able to produce enough food to feed everyone when the human numbers peak late this century, says José Graziano da Silva, director general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). However, the strains on the global pantry are real. While the Earth has plenty of natural inputs - land, nutrients and water - humans face a growing challenge to manage them.

The human population is headed to 9.3 billion by 2050, with the middle class expanding from 1.8 billion to 4.9 billion consumers, according to estimates by the UN and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Global farm output must rise 70 percent by 2050 to nourish everyone, as more people seek a higher calorie count every day, according to the FAO. “We need to improve production," Graziano da Silva said.

"The problem is how to do that without destroying the natural reserves, as we are doing now, wasting water, erosion of soils, destroying forests." For the last five years, assurances by agriculture specialists that food production will hold up were overshadowed by surging food bills, price swings and shortages, caused mostly by drought and flooding, that prompted social unrest. During the food price spike in 2007-2008, more than 60 food riots occurred from Haiti to Egypt. Anger over food prices fueled the Tunisian unrest that toppled dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011.

Three of the world's greatest rivers, the Colorado in the US, the Nile in Egypt and the Yellow River in China, have been so depleted by cities, farms, factories and dams along their banks that they often no longer reach the sea. Growth in the desert city of Las Vegas, which depends on Colorado River water contained by the Hoover Dam, has been stunted not only by a spectacular real estate crash, but by a 46 percent drop in the amount of water in Lake Mead, behind the dam. Simply put, there's no more water to be taken.

"It's not that the world is running out of water," says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, an environmental research organization in San Francisco. "It’s that there's not enough water where it's needed, and it can't be easily transported. There are limits to how much water we can get and use, and how we use it and where we use it," Gleick said. "People think of water as a renewable resource, and mostly it is. But there are very important nonrenewable stocks of water that society depends on."

Gleick coined the term "peak water" and in 2010, with colleague Meena Palaniappan, laid out the case that much of the world - the US especially - may have already passed its greatest possible rate of consumption. Citizens, government and business must realize that the taps are about to slow.

Enrico Letta said the growing popularity of Britain's UK Independence Party, France's National Front (FN) - as well as Italy's anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) - was the 'most dangerous phenomenon' facing the EU and could scupper hopes of an economic recovery. He said if they manage to harness 25 per cent of the vote in parliamentary elections next May a 'very negative' effect could befall Brussels.

As president of the Food Bank for New York City, Margaret Purvis expects those cuts will draw even more people to organizations that already provide 400,000 meals a day to hungry city folks. "Our members are panicking," she said as time wound down before the benefit decreases go into effect. "We're telling everyone to make sure that you are prepared for longer lines."

Needy Americans who receive food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are expected to suffer an average loss of $36 a month from a $275.13 per household benefit. There are a near-record 47.6 million Americans, representing 23.1 million households, on the program. The cost of the program will hit $63.4 billion in 2013.

SNAP allocations built into President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill are coming to an end, leading to the cuts. Over the past few years, a bipartisan group of Democrats and Republicans have voted in favor of the cuts in exchange for increased education funding and school nutrition programs. Benefit cuts to food stamp recipients kick in Friday, a move by Congress that will siphon $5 billion off a program that helps one in seven Americans put breakfast, lunch and dinner on the table.

The spike in deaths for October has created an atmosphere of anxiety and fear amongst the population since most of last month’s victims were civilians, according to government figures. A total of 855 civilians, 65 policemen and 44 soldiers were killed, according to information from the Iraqi ministries of health, interior and defense, released on Friday.

According to data gathered by iraqbodycount.org, an independent organization that tracks the death toll in the country, the preliminary death toll in Iraq for October is 1,095 – the highest since April 2008, when 1,273 people were killed.

Of the 1,600 people who sustained injuries, 1,445 were civilians, while just 67 were soldiers, and 88 policemen. The data also showed that 33 fighters were killed and 167 arrested. The grim data was released as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is in Washington for a meeting with President Barack Obama on Friday. The two leaders are expected to discuss the disturbing spike in Iraqi violence during his White House visit.

Israel, which had refused to comment on the strike, is fuming behind the scenes and accusing the US – which gives Israel $3 billion in funding annually – of not behaving like a proper ally: Israel’s Channel 10 TV on Friday night quoted Israeli officials branding the American leak as “scandalous.” For Israel’s ally to be acting in this way was “unthinkable,” the officials were quoted as saying.

This “leaked” anger from officials within Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government is quite rich. After all, the Netanyahu government – which receives more US aid than any other government in the world – routinely, embarrasses the United States, despite all the financial and military support it receives from their American allies.