Three of the world's most powerful central bankers launched their careers in a building known as "E52," home to the MIT economics department. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and ECB President Mario Draghi earned their PhDs there in the late 1970s. Bank of England Governor Mervyn King taught briefly there in the 1980s, sharing an office with Mr Bernanke.

Many economists emerged from MIT with a belief that government could help to smooth out economic downturns. Central banks play a particularly important role in this view, not only by setting interest rates but also by influencing public expectations through carefully worded statements. While at MIT, the central bankers dreamed up mathematical models and discussed their ideas in seminar rooms and at cheap food joints in a rundown Boston-area neighborhood on the Charles River.

Over Sunday dinners in Basel, which often stretch to three hours, they now talk of pressing, real-world problems with authority. The meals are part of two-day meetings held six times a year at the BIS [Bank of International Settlements]. Dinner guests include leaders of the Fed, ECB, Bank of England and Bank of Japan, as well as central bankers from India, China, Mexico, Brazil and a few other countries.

The punch line: a handful of people from MIT, deeply steeped in economic theory (not practice), the same people whose actions incidentally were responsible for the first great financial crisis, and who wield more power than any potentate in the history of the world - people who, as the ECB showed in the case of Berlusconi, can take down presidents and PMs with the flick of a switch, meet in private.

No transcripts or butlers are allowed. In other words, they are accountable to absolutely nobody. Which is to be expected: after all they are conducting the greatest experiment in monetary, geopolitical and social history. If they fail... when they fail, everyone loses.

And BIS (Bank for International Settlements) recently explained that it is necessary to write down the debt to the amount that can be paid – and to undertake structural reforms to prevent the Bubble Economy from recurring. The Federal Reserve is largely responsible for destroying the economy. Indeed, many current and former high-level Fed officials and other top economic officials have slammed the Fed as well … and the Fed is thoroughly corrupt.

Millions of Americans shop at Walmart, but that doesn’t mean that they all know what they’re getting as they check out in shopping centers across the country. The retail giant says they won't advertise which of their products are made with genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, which could become a big problem very soon.

Zack Kaldveer explains in an editorial published by the California Progress Report this month that Walmart will soon sell a special factory-made corn manufactured by Monsanto, which while it will allow most of Americans more easy access to affordable food, will also fill them with unknown insecticides: the very GMO crop Walmart will be selling has been genetically engineered to include chemicals right inside the corn.

Gavin Hewitt, BBC Europe editor wrote:

In the middle of the night, Europe's finance ministers took another major step towards closer integration. The ECB will have sweeping new powers and ultimately it will allow the EU's main rescue fund to channel aid directly to struggling banks.

For countries like Spain this could prove a significant lifeline. For these measures are not just about oversight, they are about breaking the loop where the failures of banks ended up on the books of governments, so increasing national debt. This deal represents another significant transfer of authority away from national governments to a European institution. It is yet a further example of how the eurozone crisis is carving out a new Europe less from choice but more by the need to survive.

The US central bank had never before set a formal target for the level of unemployment or inflation, but did so Wednesday with a near-unanimous vote of its rate-setting panel, the Federal Open Market Committee. Other global central banks typically have a formal inflation target, but few have also established such a goal for jobs.

Fed Chairman Ben S Bernanke said in a news conference that the 6.5 percent jobless rate is actually a threshold at which the Fed will consider raising interest rates, and is not the central bank’s formal “target” for reducing unemployment. He said the Fed’s real target — the so-called “full employment” rate where joblessness lands in a fully recovered economy — is actually between 5.2 percent and 6 percent, but the Fed wants to stop easing before that level is achieved so as not to risk an uptick in inflation.

Under the new program approved Wednesday, the Fed said it will print money to purchase $45 billion a month of long-term Treasury securities in the open market — reviving a highly controversial technique for propping up the economy. The Treasury purchases will be in addition to the $40 billion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage bond purchases the Fed is making each month.

The Fed said its goal with the “quantitative easing” or “QE” programs is to “maintain downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, support mortgage markets, and help to make broader financial conditions more accommodative.” In his lengthy press briefing, Mr Bernanke warned Congress and the White House that the budget standoff at the “fiscal cliff” already is having a marked effect on the economy, and will get a lot worse if the impasse continues into the new year.

In his reflections, Cardinal Koch stressed the importance of maintaining the goal of full, visible unity of the Churches as the only way of providing a credible witness of Christian faith in today’s increasingly secular societies.

Cardinal Koch also stressed the essential role of prayer in the search for Christian unity: just as Jesus prayed at the Last Supper that his disciples “be one so that the world may believe”, in the same way, all Christians today must increase both prayer and practical action to reconcile and restore the unity of the one Body of Christ.

He told Voice of Israel public radio that Europe had turned a blind eye to a speech by Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal this past week, in which he said the Palestinians would not "cede an inch" of what it calls historic Palestine, meaning virtually all of Israel.

"Once again, Europe has ignored calls for Israel's destruction," [Mr] Lieberman told Israeli public radio. "We've already seen this at the end of the 1930s and at the beginning of the 1940s when Europe knew what was happening in the concentration camps and didn't act. Terrorism attacks Jews but it targets all countries and Western values. Israel is just an hors d'oeuvre," Foreign Minister Lieberman added.

The comments, by former Defense Secretary Liam Fox, underline the extent to which policy toward the union has become an ideological battleground in Mr Cameron’s Conservative Party, where an increasing number of lawmakers want a more arms-length relationship with Continental allies.

At the heart of arguments made by British euro-skeptics is the notion that, when Britain joined the forerunner of the European Union, almost 40 years ago, voters believed they were joining a free trade area, known as the Common Market. “I for one hope to see ‘Back to the Common Market’ as the Conservative slogan on Europe at the next general election,” Mr Fox said.

He was also fiercely critical of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the union. “As the unelected bureaucrats bask in their reflected glory in Oslo they might want to spare a thought for the millions of Europeans, especially young Europeans, who find themselves with no other prize to show for the EU project than unemployment and fear for the future,” he said.