The Prime Minister, who has described Ukip supporters as “fruitcakes”, said that he was prepared to introduce legal safeguards before the end of the current parliament to guarantee that a referendum takes place after the general election. Previously he has promised to call a vote only if he is re-elected in 2015. The legislation would be designed to demonstrate that he is committed to calling an in-out vote by 2018 after Ukip and other sceptics claimed that his pledge was meaningless.

The introduction of the legislation in the coming months, which also follows demands from Conservative back-bench MPs, would throw down the gauntlet to Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, who would have to make their position clear on a referendum. Ukip is expected to enjoy another surge in support on Thursday in local government elections taking place in many English shires.

Groundwater is pouring into the plant’s ravaged reactor buildings at a rate of almost 75 gallons a minute. It becomes highly contaminated there, before being pumped out to keep from swamping a critical cooling system. A small army of workers has struggled to contain the continuous flow of radioactive wastewater, relying on hulking gray and silver storage tanks sprawling over 42 acres of parking lots and lawns. The tanks hold the equivalent of 112 Olympic-size pools.

But even they are not enough to handle the tons of strontium-laced water at the plant — a reflection of the scale of the 2011 disaster and, in critics’ view, ad hoc decision making by the company that runs the plant and the regulators who oversee it. In a sign of the sheer size of the problem, the operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, plans to chop down a small forest on its southern edge to make room for hundreds more tanks, a task that became more urgent when underground pits built to handle the overflow sprang leaks in recent weeks.

A leaked internal briefing from Angela Merkel's coalition partners refers to President Francois Hollande as "meandering" and draws attention to France's "highly regulated labour market and highly developed social security system". Details of the briefing note were published alongside an internal assessment from the German economics ministry, which listed the French economy's failings.

The ministry's paper said: "French industry is increasingly losing its competitiveness. The relocation of companies abroad continues. Profitability is meagre." Relations between France and Germany are chilly after Mr Hollande's Socialist party accused Mrs Merkel of "egotistical intransigence" and called for "democratic confrontation" with Berlin.

The French Socialists' attack on the German chancellor, which was toned down after a draft was leaked to the press, brought accusations from the French centre-right that Mr Hollande's party had been gripped by Germanophobia.

Bank balance sheets groaning under the weight of too many bad loans are not the preserve of Europe’s periphery – no matter how much the continued focus on Spain and previously Ireland might suggest this. In mid-October Spain’s economy ministry announced a €90 billion limit on the size of the bad bank that the country is to establish to deal with the fallout from its soured real estate boom (a total of €180 billion in bad real estate assets sits on the balance sheets of Spain’s banks).

Contrast the situation with that of the country that is pivotal to Spain’s fiscal fortunes – Germany. In Germany €273 billion of assets have already been transferred to bad banks from just two lenders: WestLB and Hypo Real Estate. And there could be much more to come.

Even as banks elsewhere in the region come under growing pressure to shrink their balance sheets those in Germany show little sign of addressing the problem, short of transferring billions of euros worth of assets into state-owned bad banks. It is of little surprise that the country is so reluctant to see any pan-European bank regulator gain supervision over any other than its largest banks.

“Germany’s banking system isn’t in great shape and it doesn’t also want the burden of supporting other countries’ banks,” one banker told Euromoney last month. “It has a network of co-operative and savings banks that sustain each other through a complex system of cross-guarantees and there is limited appetite to surrender supervision of this or to insure the deposits of other national banking systems.”

In the game of Italian prime ministers: the Trilateral Commission’s European Chairman Mario Monti is out; and Trilateral Commission Member Enrico Letta is in. Long live the Trilateral Commission! It seems that there is just nothing any country in the West can do to free itself from the shackles of the Global Power Masters and their Megabankers.

No matter what elections are held; no matter what mass demonstrations bring citizens on to the streets; no matter how many signs are shown on millions of TV screens accusing the Megabankers of being the worst crooks, the truth is there for all to see: the Global Power Masters have taken over governments in country after country, enslaving all nations to their Megabankers.

The mainstream media broadcast it; the alternative media point out the sheer inhumanity of it all, even in the European Union where double-digit unemployment is rampant, banks are fraudulently ‘bailed-in’ by stealing account holders’ money, and millions of workers’ houses are foreclosed on. There just does not seem to be anything anybody anywhere can do about it.

This is not a ‘conspiracy theory’ or any such rubbish. This is something that’s right before our eyes. All you need to do is look in the right places, see who are running this ‘greatest show on Earth’, and then think with your own commonsense mind instead of letting CNN or Rupert Murdoch do the ‘thinking’ for you.

Amateur and professional illustrators and photographers alike will find themselves ensnared by the changes, the result of lobbying by Silicon Valley and radical bureaucrats and academics. The changes are enacted in the sprawling Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act which received Royal Assent last week, and it marks a huge shift in power away from citizens and towards large US corporations.

How so? Previously, and in most of the world today, ownership of your creation is automatic, and legally considered to be an individual's property. That's enshrined in the Berne Convention and other international treaties, where it's considered to be a basic human right. What this means in practice is that you can go after somebody who exploits it without your permission - even if pursuing them is cumbersome and expensive.

UK coalition government's new law reverses this human right. When last year Instagram attempted to do something similar, it met a furious backlash. But the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act has sailed through without most amateurs or semi-professionals even realising the consequences.

Despite fierce lobbying by the chemicals industry and opposition by countries including Britain, 15 of the 27 member states voted for a two-year restriction on neonicotinoid insecticides. That gave the European Commission the support it needed to push through an EU-wide ban on using three neonicotinoids on crops attractive to bees.

Tonio Borg, the EC's top health official, said they planned to implement the landmark ban from December. "I pledge to do my utmost to ensure that our bees, which are so vital to our ecosystem and contribute over €22 billion annually to European agriculture, are protected," he said.

The culprit behind this silent killer is lead. And vinyl. And formaldehyde. And asbestos. And Bisphenol A. And polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). And thousands more innovations brought to us by the industries that once promised “better living through chemistry,” but instead produced a toxic stew that has made every American a guinea pig and has turned the United States into one grand unnatural experiment.

Today, we are all unwitting subjects in the largest set of drug trials ever. Without our knowledge or consent, we are testing thousands of suspected toxic chemicals and compounds, as well as new substances whose safety is largely unproven and whose effects on human beings are all but unknown. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) itself has begun monitoring our bodies for 151 potentially dangerous chemicals, detailing the variety of pollutants we store in our bones, muscle, blood, and fat.

None of the companies introducing these new chemicals has even bothered to tell us we’re part of their experiment. None of them has asked us to sign consent forms or explained that they have little idea what the long-term side effects of the chemicals they’ve put in our environment — and so our bodies — could be. Nor do they have any clue as to what the synergistic effects of combining so many novel chemicals inside a human body in unknown quantities might produce.

The so-called 'bail-in' forces savers to foot the bill for the recapitalisation of Cyprus' biggest bank, after it was hit by massive losses from its exposure to debt-crippled Greece. Bank of Cyprus said it had converted 37.5 percent of deposits exceeding €100,000 into "class A" shares, with an additional 22.5 percent held as a buffer for possible conversion in the future.

Another 30 percent would be temporarily frozen and held as deposits, the bank said.

The bail-in is part of attempts by Cyprus to find €13 billion - a figure nearly double the island's original bill - to shore up its economy. Other measures include a possible sell-off of the nation's gold reserves. The European Union and the International Monetary Fund are providing a further €10 billion to the island, one of the eurozone's smallest economies.