Instead of the originally-expected $250 million cut, US foreign aid to Israel will drop by $150 million, Washington sources allegedly told Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz. The sources said the cut was unavoidable, given the across-the-board slash, down from eight percent to five percent, in the nation’s budget.

Numerous Israeli firms that provide products and services to the US government, including those in the military industries, are expected to be affected by the reduction. However, newly-confirmed Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said Tuesday that any cuts would not affect US funding for Israel’s rocket and missile defense programs.

“Secretary Hagel expressed his strong commitment to Israel’s security, including maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge and continued US support for missile and rocket defense systems, in spite of fiscal constraints,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said in a statement. A separate defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Hagel “is committed to working with members of Congress to ensure that there is no interruption of funding for Iron Dome, Arrow, and David’s Sling rocket and missile defense systems, despite the fiscal uncertainly due to Congressional inaction.”

He spent more than three years investigating the science of junk food for his new book, Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. His findings make unpalatable reading. Moss uncovered numerous tricks of the trade - from changing the physical shape of salt to altering the chemical make-up of sugar and even giving crisps a more noisy crunch - all of which can tempt us into buying foods that are often extremely unhealthy.

And, after talking to executives and scientists at multi-nationals such as Pepsi, Kraft, Unilever, Mars and Kellogg, he discovered that at the heart of corporate strategies is that unholy trinity of salt, sugar and fat. Moss found just how far the industry will go to harness their seductive powers. Results from MRI-scanning studies are used by companies to study the sensory power of food - for example, how sugar lights up our brains the same way it does after someone has taken cocaine.

Manufacturers want to achieve a perfect link between food and joy in consumers’ brains to make us come back for more, so the industry has become obsessed with hitting this “bliss point”. With sugar, the bliss point is the precise amount of sweetness that makes food and drink most enjoyable. It means scientifically testing thousands of customers’ preferences, constructing intricate mathematical formulae, and surveying populations for cultural and demographic differences.

Junk foods at fast food restaurants as well as processed foods at grocery retailers represent the largest sources of sodium intake from refined salts. Many low-fat foods rely on salt - and lots of it - for their flavor. One packet of KFC’s Marzetti Light Italian Dressing might only have 15 calories and 0.5 grams fat, but it also has 510 mg sodium-about 1.5 times as much as one Original Recipe chicken drumstick. Feel like you’re having too much of a good thing? You probably are.

Bread is the Number 1 source of refined salt consumption in the American diet, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Just one 6-inch Roasted Garlic loaf from Subway - just the bread, no meat, no cheeses, no nothing - has 1,260 mg sodium, about as much as 14 strips of bacon.

Dr Hendel believes too few minerals, rather than too much salt, may be to blame for health problems. It's a view that is echoed by other academics such as David McCarron, of Oregon Health Sciences University in the US. He says salt has always been part of the human diet, but what has changed is the mineral content of our food. Instead of eating food high in minerals, such as nuts, fruit and vegetables, people are filling themselves up with "mineral empty" processed food and fizzy drinks.

“We must leave the austerity cage,” he told leaders of his Democrat Party (Pd), responding to Italy’s electoral earthquake by tearing up his pre-election programme. “A change of course is absolutely necessary given that five years of austerity and attacks on workers have pushed up public debt levels across Europe,” he said.

“The vicious circle between belt-tightening and recession is putting representative government at risk and making it impossible to govern. The immediate emergency is the real economy and joblessness,” he said. The pledge puts Mr Bersani on a collision course with the ECB, which is constrained from helping to shore up the Italian bond market unless Rome complies with Europe’s austerity agenda.

“Italian voters may have effectively voted away the ECB safety net,” said Christian Schulz from Berenberg Bank. The central bank cannot activate its bond purchase programme (OMT) unless Italy requests a rescue from the EMU bail-out fund, and that in turn requires a vote in Germany’s Bundestag. “The ECB cannot – and will not want to – do anything to help Italy after the inconclusive election result, even if borrowing costs spiral out of control,” he said.

Mr Bersani said Italy should mobilize its EU voting weight to push for an EU-wide change of course. He has natural allies in Paris. French finance minister Pierre Moscovici warned EMU colleagues on Monday that current policies “risk a loss of social and political confidence across Europe. We must not pile austerity on top of recession”.

French officials are deeply alarmed by the relentless upward rise in France’s unemployment rate to 10.6 percent, or 26.9 percent for youth. President Francois Hollande’s popularity ratings have crashed from 55 percent to 30 percent since his election in May, the fastest decline ever recorded for a French leader. Italy, France, and Spain toyed with a Latin bloc alliance last year to confront Germany over EMU’s contractionary policy mix, but the initiative faded.

International media describe Grillo as a comic, which on one level he is, but the man who jointly created and leads the party that in just three years has become the largest in Italy is much more than that. Behind his tirades against the political and business elite is a shrewd mind, a hugely influential alter ego and the desire to win complete power in the euro zone's third largest economy.

"The left and right will govern together on the ruins they've created, it will last a year at most, then our movement will change the world," Grillo said after his party's triumphant performance in last week's election. "Unless the other parties change their leaders and somehow get back in touch with ordinary people he can certainly keep on growing," said Elisabetta Gualmini, politics professor at Bologna University and a close observer of Grillo's movement.

Grillo and Casaleggio understood Italians' need for something different. And everything about 5-Star is different. It is the only party that refuses state financing and its elected representatives have all voluntarily slashed their salaries. Its members never appear on television talk shows, it communicates almost exclusively through Grillo's blog (www.beppegrillo.it), and it refuses to form alliances with other parties.

Grillo aims to appeal to left and right. He attacks the old "zombie" parties and business fat cats but also the trade unions who he says no longer represent workers' interests. And it's not all vitriol. He also offers the positive message that politics can be clean and different, constantly citing the movement's local councilors who have given up most of their salaries to provide cheap credit to small businesses.

North Korea has accused the United States of using military drills in South Korea as a launch pad for a nuclear war and has scrapped the armistice with Washington that ended hostilities in the 1950-53 Korean War.

North Korea, which has one major ally, neighboring China, threatens the United States and its "puppet", South Korea, on an almost daily basis. "Since the United States is about to ignite a nuclear war, we will be exercising our right to preemptive nuclear attack against the headquarters of the aggressor in order to protect our supreme interest," the North's foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency.

North Korea conducted a third nuclear test on February 12, in defiance of UN resolutions, and declared it had achieved progress in securing a functioning atomic arsenal. It is widely believed the North does not have the capacity to deliver a nuclear strike on the mainland United States. The North's unnamed foreign ministry spokesman also said it would be entitled to take military action as of March 11 when US-South Korea military drills move into a full-scale phase as it had declared the truce invalid.

“It’s not my choice to stop this, but I don’t know how we can put our citizens at jeopardy and cost our city and our citizens a lot of money,” said Jensen, who met with the association upon the advice of the city attorney. The invocation complaint was lodged by Longview resident Dan L Smith, 69, who describes himself as a “very comfortable atheist.” Smith has emailed council members for years, saying that people of other faiths or no faith shouldn’t have to endure a Christian prayer at a government meeting.

He didn’t want to take the case to court, even though he “would undoubtedly win” based on prior court decisions, he wrote. “All I am asking is that you remove … the invocation from the council’s agenda and that you sever any council ties with the (ministerial association’s) responsibilities for the delivery of the invocation,” Smith wrote in a March 2012 email, which he copied to the city attorney. “I do fully realize that this may not be a popular thing for you to do, but as an elected public official it is the right thing to do.”

But researchers working with a campaign group say DNA tests cannot provide accurate information about ancestry. Ancestry companies insist they are able to provide a valuable service. An increasing number of companies are offering to profile the genetic history of individuals based on a DNA sample for around £200.

But in a public guide, published by Sense About Science, Professors David Balding and Mark Thomas of University College London warn that such histories are either so general as to be "personally meaningless or they are just speculation from thin evidence". The scientists say that genetic profiles cannot provide accurate information about an individual's ancestry.

They say "the genetic ancestry business uses a phenomenon well-known in other areas such as horoscopes, where general information is interpreted as being more personal than it really is". They also highlight uncritical media coverage of the issue. Professor Balding, says that news items about famous people being related to historical figures often come from PR material provided by genetic testing companies. Professor Thomas says that the idea that we can read our ancestry directly from our genes is "absurd". "This is business, and the business is genetic astrology," he said.

The official position of the ROC was stated by the chairman of the Department for External Church Relations (DECR) of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokalamsk. He suggested that, in the face of serious challenges requiring new stimuli, the pope is naturally giving way to a younger and more dynamic successor.

"Pope Benedict XVI's decision to resign can be regarded as an act of personal courage and humility," read the statement issued by the head of the DECR. "The Orthodox Church is grateful to the outgoing pontiff for his understanding of the obstacles that lie in the way of fully normalized relations between the Orthodox and Catholic churches, especially in western Ukraine."

On the eve of the announcement of the pope's abdication, Metropolitan Hilarion aptly noted the positive trend in relations between the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches that had taken place following the ascension of Ratzinger to the Holy See. "It is hoped that his successor will continue along the same path, so that the relationship between Orthodox and Catholic Christians further develops for the common good of all Christendom," said the metropolitan.