The new US plan represents a remarkable shift for Obama, whose administration trumpeted the 2011 withdrawal of the last US troops from Iraq as a major achievement and has since shifted its attention to other regional challenges, such as Syria, Egypt and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After a White House meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Obama said he shares al-Maliki’s fears about militants’ growing foothold in Iraq’s western province and will join the Iraqi leader’s effort to crack down. Administration officials said this would include growing intelligence support and new weaponry.

“We had a lot of discussion about how we can work together to push back against that terrorist organization that operates not only in Iraq, but also poses a threat to the region and to the United States,” Obama said.

Closer cooperation also marks an abrupt turnaround for al-Maliki, who openly opposed reaching a deal to keep even a limited number of US soldiers in Iraq after 2011, insisting the country could take care of itself.

After nine years of US occupation, the prospect of closer US military ties remains deeply unpopular with the Iraqi public. But violence in Iraq last month surged to the highest level since 2008, with 964 Iraqis killed, and some fear the country is slipping back into civil war.

Maria Miller insisted women are not ‘an optional part of the labour force’. She said more companies must be ‘fit’ for working parents and those which offer flexible hours must not lose out, but are more ‘resilient’ as people want to stay in their jobs for longer.

But her comments angered stay-at-home mothers who said it was more important to get unemployed young people into work than coaxing mothers into leaving their young children at home. Mrs Miller was launching a Government-commissioned study to probe discrimination against pregnant women and mothers at work. ‘Women aren’t an optional part of the labour force,’ the minister said. ‘If we’re going to have the sort of economic recovery we need, women are at the heart of it.’

Lynne Burnham, of campaign group Mothers At Home Matter, said: ‘It just makes no sense. What we need is to get our youngsters into work. Why such an almighty push to get mothers into work, leaving their children as young as six months? It’s feminism gone mad. The mother-child bond is paramount and it’s absolutely crucial babies have that time with their primary carer.’

Baroness Sally Morgan believes that a ‘big, bold, brave’ move is needed to tackle the under-achievement of under-fives from the poorest areas across the country. Currently most children in England go to nursery at the age of three or four before starting school in the September following their fourth birthday. Legally all children living in England have to be in full-time education by the term after their fifth birthday.

But Baroness Morgan told an education seminar held in London that schools ‘could be two to 18 as far as I’m concerned’. She added: ‘If you could get them coming into school at a different level then it would save time and be transformative.’

The move comes amid complaints from teachers that too many children who are arriving at reception classes are still in nappies, unable to speak properly and lacking basic skills.

The analysis, based on three years of data collected by NASA's now-idled Kepler space telescope, indicates the galaxy is home to 10 billion potentially habitable worlds. The number grows exponentially if the count also includes planets circling cooler red dwarf stars, the most common type of star in the galaxy.

"Planets seem to be the rule rather than exception," study leader Erik Petigura, an astronomy graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, said during a conference call with reporters on Monday.

Petigura wrote his own software program to analyze the space telescope's results and found 10 planets one- to two-times the diameter of Earth circling parent stars at the right distances for liquid surface water. Of the 3,538 candidates, 104 are at the right distance from their parent stars for water, he said.

"I expect that it will be possible soon to make decisions on the applications that have come in. One of them is from India. We believe that this application must be satisfied, we support it. The SCO would benefit if countries such as India and Pakistan joined it," Lavrov told a news conference in Moscow. Pakistan has also asked to join the SCO, he said.

Asked about the possibility of the SCO's enlargement, Lavrov said: "We believe that the right time has come, the leaders of the SCO member states have passed decisions to that effect, and instructions have been given to prepare a set of regulatory documents that would contain criteria for membership."

The US wants to modernize B61 nuclear bombs more fully than previously admitted. The new variant will replace all previous nuclear bombs, even large-scale strategic weapons - and be stationed in Germany (Google translation).

“Did Harry Reid get a flu shot?” the Larkspur, California, resident asked in a recent broadcast. “Did Barack Obama take a flu shot? Did Barack Obama’s lovely family take a flu shot? Did Joe Biden take a flu shot? Which of the mandarins took a flu shot?” So far, there’s been no response from the mandarins. Very suspicious. If the CDC is going to urge Americans to get vaccinated, the White House could at least say whether Sasha and Malia got their shots.

The flu vaccine contains formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, Savage says. Totally true. Getting a flu shot might not be the same as eating FEMA trailer insulation, but you are having formaldehyde injected into your body. Same with thimerosal, a mercury-laced organic compound used as a preservative in some flu shots. Thimerosal has been linked by some to autism.

Now the pro-flu shot lobby will tell you that the negligible quantities of formaldehyde and thimerosal in the vaccine are harmless, even for young children. It will remind you that side effects are very rare, that you can’t get the flu from getting vaccinated and that the new “combined” shots, which protect against both H1N1 and seasonal flu, are made the same way as the old flu shots.

But, says Dr Savage, suppose you do get a shot and years pass “and you get ALS or Alzheimer’s disease or MS, or you watch your kid develop seizures, or your kid becomes autistic, God forbid, what are you going to say?” You’ll say, “I shouldn’t have gotten that flu shot back in 2013,” that’s what! Unless you get Alzheimer’s. So listen to Dr Savage and refuse to submit to the pro-flu shot lobby’s disease-eradicating agenda. After all, when was the last time any government-recommended vaccine containing formaldehyde did any good?

Down in Texas, cattle thieves can get up to $1,500 per head of cattle, and cattle rustling was up nearly 40 percent last year. Cargo hijacking is also becoming much more sophisticated, and it is being estimated that losses from cargo thefts will total about $216 million this year alone. And for some reason, Tide laundry detergent has become a very hot commodity among common criminals all across America.

In fact, it is being reported that some grocery stores are "losing $10,000 to $15,000 a month" as a result of Tide thefts. So why is all of this happening? Well, as I have written about previously, crime is on the rise in the United States, and poverty is absolutely exploding. In fact, according to the latest numbers from the US Census Bureau, 49.2 percent of all Americans are receiving benefits from at least one government program each month.

Over the past five years, we have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of people that cannot take care of themselves without help from the government. Millions upon millions of Americans that have been forced into poverty are becoming increasingly angry, frustrated and desperate. And what we are watching right now is only just the beginning - all of this is going to get a whole lot worse.

So will we see riots as a result of these food stamp cuts? No, I do not believe that we will see riots yet. But the volcano of anger, frustration and desperation that is simmering just below the surface of this country continues to get hotter. Someday it will explode.

The public outrage that the NSA has spawned could be more damaging to the transatlantic relationship than the Iraq war was a decade ago. If it was all up to leaders, Shafer might be right. But governments — along with their intelligence services — are increasingly boxed in by public opinion. It’s not the spying or the lying that European citizens find more hurtful. It is the perception that US agencies are as oblivious to the rights of allies as they are scrupulous at upholding the rights of their own citizens.

Seen from Europe, the NSA saga is another episode in the long-running story about the asymmetry of power across the Atlantic. A decade ago, the fight was about Iraq. In an influential essay, author Robert Kagan saw Europe and America as archetypes for power and weakness. “Americans come from Mars and Europeans from Venus,” he said. But President Bush’s invasion of Iraq did not “shock and awe” the rest of the world into submission. It was, in fact, a graphic illustration of the limits of American power, accelerating the arrival of what Fareed Zakaria called a “Post-American World.”

One of the few unwritten laws in international politics is when a country reaches a level of power that is out of control, other countries will come together and balance it. Now two European institutions — the unelected European Commission and the unloved European Parliament — have the power and the incentive to try to take on the region’s closest ally.

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.”