Kids Company, a charity for disadvantaged children, believes that as many as one million children are living with ‘food insecurity’ and are unsure where their next meal is coming from. These children typically each just ten meals each week - 11 short of the 21 meals a week needed for children to stay healthy.

The charity highlighted a series of cases including a hungry child who stole frozen meat and ate it raw and another who drew pictures of food on a paper plate and tried to eat them. One mother was forced to continue exclusively breast-feeding her son until the age of 18 months since she could not afford food. The charity said some parents were ‘just not managing to have food in the house’.

The number of children who rely on Kids Company services for their main meal of the day has more than doubled from 30 a week last year to 70 in 2012. The average age of these children is just ten but many bring younger siblings and even babies. The charity highlighted a series of recent surveys, including a poll of 515 teachers by the Prince’s Trust, which suggest that about half of staff regularly see pupils suffering malnutrition or showing signs of not having eaten enough.

This means that between half a million and a million UK children are affected - or two in every class at school, it was claimed. A separate survey of 1,116 parents by Netmums found that 62 per cent knew local families where children are going hungry because their parents cannot afford to buy all the food they need. More than half - 56 per cent - were aware of parents not feeding children because they are abusing drugs or alcohol. Rising poverty levels and poor parenting are thought to lie behind the trend.

China, which has agreed to the transaction in principle, would also build a base of operations near Riyadh for the new Saudi purchases.

As we reported last year, Saudi Arabia has struck a deal with Pakistan for the availability on demand of a nuclear warhead from Islamabad’s arsenal for fitting onto a ballistic missile. Riyadh owns a direct interest in the two most active Middle East issues: Iran and Syria.

He then spoke via phone to Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, confirming: “Yes, I believe that we will end up in a war with Iran because I think [Mr] Obama views that as politically good for him. I have said for a year and a half that in the end, somewhere before the election we will end up in a form of war with Iran, and I think he’s doing it for political reasons.”

Moneyval, the Council of Europe department that evaluates how effectively member states are fighting money-laundering, will give the Vatican one month to respond to the report before it is made public. The Vatican has been trying to join a so-called "white list" of states that comply with Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development standards on financial transparency. The Moneyval report, based on consultations and meetings with inspectors, is expected to be a key step along the way.

Much of the damage to the power grid was blamed on last weekend's rare "derecho," a big, powerful and long-lasting wind storm that blew from the Midwest to the Atlantic Ocean. Violent weekend storms and days of record heat have killed at least 23 people in the United States since Friday.

This appears to be very similar to what happened in America. As noted last year: The Tarp Inspector General has said that [then-Secretary of the Treasury Hank] Paulson misrepresented the big banks’ health in the run-up to passage of TARP. This is no small matter, as the American public would have not been very excited about giving money to insolvent institutions. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson warned Congress that there would be martial law unless the Tarp bailouts were approved.

And the “financial reform” laws passed in the wake of the crisis have, in some ways, actually weakened regulation of the financial markets, allowed the big banks to get a lot bigger, and have intentionally allowed fraudulent accounting.

Likewise, the “stress tests” in both Europe and America have been a total scam … a naked attempt to put lipstick on a pig to cover up the fact that the big banks are insolvent. By choosing the big banks over the little guy – and failing to rein in the fraud which caused the crisis in the first place – the governments on both sides of the Atlantic are dooming both the financial system and the people to failure.

At least, "a battle has been won," writes the Spanish press. This partial victory in the battle against the German austerity dictate could only be accomplished under the imminent threat that the Euro zone could collapse. Berlin had already announced that it does not intend to cede any further ground. The ESM "bailout funds" will certainly not be permitted to become "a self-service shop," declared the chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group. Paris will now fulfil one of Berlin's principal demands: The French president has announced his intentions to have France ratify the Fiscal Stability Treaty - without renegotiations, as the precondition he had insisted upon during his electoral campaign.

Berlin had been able to impose several restrictions. The participating countries are obligated to fulfil the conditions of the Fiscal Stability Treaty - particularly, the strict, Germany imposed, austerity policy. Merkel's dictum "accountability and control belong together" - has laid the basis for the summit resolution on a European banking supervision, which is to be created by the end of the year. Only when this control agency, with participation of the European Central Bank (ECB), is functional, will the ESM be able to provide banks with direct recapitalization resources.

German government coalition politicians were quick with reassurances that the new rules still permit an intensive German control over the crisis countries. "The Bundestag always has the last say," declared conservative whip Volker Kauder.

Last week's crisis summit has only postponed for a short period, the dynamics of the crisis. With its 500 billion Euros, the ESM is clearly too small to permanently stabilize the European financial sector and to maintain the southern European countries' interests at a low level. The shifting of the political power constellation to Berlin's disadvantage can be seen as the summit's most important result.

Government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou said in a television interview Tuesday that the data would demonstrate that the current austerity program was counterproductive. Greece is relying on rescue loans from its partners in the eurozone and the International Monetary Fund to avoid bankruptcy. In exchange, it has made painful austerity cuts, such as tax hikes and cuts to public sector jobs, pensions and salaries. Along with uncertainty over the country's finances, those austerity measures have hit the economy hard — it is in a fifth year of recession, with unemployment topping 22 percent, roughly double the eurozone average.

The Greek government will argue that it cannot withstand the current pace of austerity terms. Debt inspectors from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF are due in Athens Wednesday. "We will present information that is astounding. It is alarming in terms of the recession and unemployment, and it shows beyond any doubt that the current policy does not bring results. It brings the opposite results," Kedikoglou told private Antenna television.

But the truth is that messing with the building blocks of life is going to have some very serious consequences. Scientists claim that they are making our crops stronger, more productive and less vulnerable to insects. Scientists claim that they can alter our animals so that they are more "useful" to us. Scientists claim that genetic modification is only going to "enhance" humanity.

But what if something goes seriously wrong? For example, what if we learn that eating genetically modified food is really, really bad for us? Well, at this point more than 70 percent of the processed foods sold in the United States contain at least one ingredient that has been genetically modified. It would be kind of hard to go back now.

Scientists all over the world seem to have no problem messing with our animals either. Recently it was revealed that scientists in China have genetically modified 300 cows to produce milk that has many of the same qualities that human breast milk does. So how did they do this? Well, they inserted human genes into the cows. So those cows are now essentially part human and part cow.

Are you disturbed yet?

You should be.

Sadly, now even human babies are being genetically modified. Recently it was reported that scientists have created babies that have three parents. The following is from a recent Daily Mail article... "The world's first genetically modified humans have been created, it was revealed last night. The disclosure that 30 healthy babies were born after a series of experiments in the United States provoked another furious debate about ethics. So far, two of the babies have been tested and have been found to contain genes from three 'parents'."

We have rushed ahead and have created hordes of freakish genetic monsters without ever seriously considering the consequences. Someday, future generations may look back on us and wonder how we could have ever been so incredibly foolish.

"The main aim of this drill is to demonstrate the Iranian nation's political resolve to defend vital values and national interests," Revolutionary Guards Deputy Commander Hossein Salami was quoted by Press TV as saying. He said the tests were in response to Iran's enemies who talk of a "military option being on the table". On Sunday, Iran threatened to wipe Israel "off the face of the earth" if the Jewish state attacked it.

“There remains a strong resentment among large parts of the British people that they voted for one thing and were delivered into another”, said Fox. “Worse, there is a suspicion that those who persuade them to do so were all too aware of this deception. Not only were they sold a pup but they were intentionally sold a pup”, he added.

The declaration implies that farmers would have to quarantine and slaughter the infected birds. Contaminated products are to be destroyed, while unaffected poultry are to be vaccinated. With poultry farming making up 40 per cent of the country’s total livestock production, the economic loss from the epidemic “is and will be irreparable,” the agriculture ministry stated.

The "super derecho" storm that pounded the Washington DC area on Friday night with hurricane-force winds is being called unprecedented. But the truth is that there are other events that could happen that would be far more damaging to our power grid. For example, a substantial EMP burst over a major US city would fry virtually all of the electronics in the city and take the power grid in the area down indefinitely.

A gigantic EMP burst over the entire country (caused by a massive solar storm or a very large nuclear explosion high in the atmosphere) could theoretically take down the entire national power grid. Hopefully this latest storm has reminded Americans about how vulnerable our power grid really is and about how close we really are to being knocked back to the late 1800s.