He will say European judges must be more in touch with public opinion, accept more UK court rulings and let countries protect their own citizens and stop interfering in 'petty' cases. His tough stance follows fury over the court's ruling last week that Qatada, described as Osama Bin Laden's 'right-hand man in Europe', cannot be deported to face terrorism charges in Jordan because evidence obtained by torture could be used against him.

Mr Cameron is determined to take advantage of the UK's chairmanship of Europe's Council of Ministers, which oversees the court, to force through a shake-up. The Prime Minister believes the court must reflect public opinion and take into account the cultural, historic and other differences between Strasbourg and individual nations. He is understood to support a cut in the total of 47 judges - one from each member nation. And he wants new rules to ensure they are more in touch with public opinion.

At present, the judges are picked by the Council of Europe from a list of three names proposed by governments. Last year, a think-tank backed by Mr Cameron said that MPs should nominate judges to the court. Any judge who wanted to sit would have to say whether they believed the court had too much power and explain 'their outlook and judicial philosophy'.

CNN: "The number of people living on food stamps has reached an all-time high."

FOX: "More and more people are going hungry."

MSNBC: "One in three Americans lives in or near poverty."

ABC: "...and suffering hunger in this land of plenty."

In this land of plenty, roughly 2.7 million tons of food are reportedly raised and grown each year. The same country that has such a love of consuming calories also loves to waste them. Gio Andollo is a dumpster diver. Instead of paying for food, he rummages through garbage bags on the streets of New York City, where tons of edible food are thrown out each night. The 27-year-old musician makes his way from the bakery to the deli, relying on supermarket trash for his essential vitamins.

"There's hot food here... which probably comes from a hot food bar," he comments while going through the bags. "Even without opening the bag, I can see an orange, apple, parsnip, some greens." What we and others crowding around Gio see, is that in a country where more than 40 million people struggle daily to get enough to eat, millions of meals are literally being thrown away. "This food, as you can see, is perfectly edible," Gio explains. "There's no sense it should be wasted and thrown away. Otherwise it would end up on top of a landfill somewhere."

An estimated 30 to 50 per cent of US food produced for consumption ends up in landfills each year. This comes at an annual cost of more than $1 billion. Simultaneously, food prices continue to rise, leaving millions more in line at soup kitchens, and ultimately searching though trash.

Some are driven by a fear of imminent societal collapse, others are worried about terrorism, and many have a vague concern that an escalating series of natural disasters is leading to some type of environmental cataclysm. They are following in the footsteps of hippies in the 1960s who set up communes to separate themselves from what they saw as a materialistic society, and the survivalists in the 1990s who were hoping to escape the dictates of what they perceived as an increasingly secular and oppressive government.

Tegeler, 57, has turned her home in rural Virginia into a "survival center," complete with a large generator, portable heaters, water tanks, and a two-year supply of freeze-dried food that her sister recently gave her as a birthday present. She says that in case of emergency, she could survive indefinitely in her home. And she thinks that emergency could come soon. "I think this economy is about to fall apart," she said. A wide range of vendors market products to preppers, mainly online. They sell everything from water tanks to guns to survival skills. Conservative talk radio host Glenn Beck seems to preach preppers' message when he tells listeners: "It's never too late to prepare for the end of the world as we know it."

"Unfortunately, given the increasing complexity and fragility of our modern technological society, the chances of a societal collapse are increasing year after year," said author James Wesley Rawles, whose Survival Blog is considered the guiding light of the prepper movement. A former Army intelligence officer, Rawles has written fiction and non-fiction books on end-of-civilization topics, including "How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It," which is also known as the preppers' Bible.

"We could see a cascade of higher interest rates, margin calls, stock market collapses, bank runs, currency revaluations, mass street protests, and riots," he told Reuters. "The worst-case end result would be a Third World War, mass inflation, currency collapses, and long term power grid failures." "Most people have a gut feeling that something has gone terribly wrong, but that doesn't mean that they understand what is happening," he said. "A lot of Americans sense that a massive economic storm is coming and they want to be prepared for it."

The pope, in a meeting January 19 with an ecumenical group of Catholic and Lutheran leaders from Finland, said that differences among Christians regarding the "proper understanding of human nature and its dignity" had grown in recent years. He urged coming together to reach "a profound agreement" on anthropological questions so that society and policy-makers could be guided in their decisions regarding the important areas of human behavior, the role of the family and sexuality.

The pope told the group, an ecumenical delegation on their annual pilgrimage to Rome, that the common witness between Catholics and Lutherans should be reinforced to face the challenges posed by a world that "lacks true direction and longs to hear the message of salvation."

Opening with a dire assessment of the state of American society, the pope told the bishops that "powerful new cultural currents" have worn away the country's traditional moral consensus, which was originally based on religious faith as well as ethical principles derived from natural law. Whether they claim the authority of science or democracy, the pope said, militant secularists seek to stifle the church's proclamation of these "unchanging moral truths." Such a movement inevitably leads to the prevalence of "reductionist and totalitarian readings of the human person and the nature of society."

The pope drew an opposition between current "notions of freedom detached from moral truth" and Catholicism's "rational perspective" on morality, founded on the conviction that the "cosmos is possessed of an inner logic accessible to human reasoning." Using the "language" of natural law, he said, the church should promote social justice by "proposing rational arguments in public square."

Coming at the start of an election year, Pope Benedict's words were clearly relevant to American politics, a connection he made explicit by mentioning threats to "that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of religion."

Asked by University of Chicago whether a return to the gold standard would lead to price-stability and employment outcomes that "would be better for the average American," 100 percent of respondents said no. Republican candidate Ron Paul has long advocated a return to the gold standard - which was abandoned by the United States in 1971 and decades before by the rest of the world - but his competitors have also warmed to the idea.

Campaigning in South Carolina on Tuesday Newt Gingrich called for a "gold commission" to look at how to get back to "hard money," according to CNN. Even that less than full-throated support was not shared by poll respondents. "A gold standard regime would be a disaster for any large advanced economy. Love of the (gold standard) implies macroeconomic illiteracy," said Chicago Booth's Anil Kashyap.

Other objections were more specific. "Since gold has supply and demand dynamics of its own, for reasons unrelated to its use as a store of value, Americans would be exposed to risk," said Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University.

What constitutes a fair society is no longer just a matter for academic theorists. Suddenly it's the hottest subject in politics. The reason is simple: growing public revulsion at a new class of super-rich who seem to be immune from the restraints that govern the lives of ordinary people. Senior bankers, private equity moguls and hedge fund managers appear cut off from the rest of us. They often pay little or no tax, increasingly live in heavily guarded enclaves, and some have little or no real allegiance to Britain.

The sources of their wealth are often mysterious, and appear unrelated to merit. These feral rich pose, in their way, every bit as much of a danger to society as the rioters who stole and pillaged London streets last August. Taxpayers spent 60 billion pounds bailing out City bankers to save them from bankruptcy. Yet, rather than displaying contrition or gratitude, these bankers continue to pay themselves multi-million pound salaries, unimaginable sums of money to most of us.

The injustice is glaring - all the more so in a time of grinding national austerity, when living standards are falling and unemployment is rising. No wonder that, this week, David Cameron - who loves to claim that "we're all in this together" - entered the fray with a speech trying to define what he called "responsible capitalism". He senses that this is an issue where the Right is hugely vulnerable, as the experience of Mitt Romney, the leading Republican presidential candidate, proves.

Romney made a fortune of an estimated $250 million dollars out of financial engineering and private equity, while benefiting from tax breaks, during his business career. He paid a reported 15 per cent tax on his profits - a rate considerably lower than most Americans.

It was obtained by combining 2011 figures from Italy's accounting court Corte dei Conti, a special commission set up by Italy's previous government to study the black economy, and a region-by-region look at data from Italy's UIL trade union. It also compared figures from Italy's real economy, consumption, and real estate holdings against what is actually reported in tax returns. The 119.6 billion euro figure adds up to 28 per cent of Italy's total tax revenue, the paper said.

Italy's most-evaded tax was IRPEF - or income tax - with a 'hole' of 49.5 billion euros (41.3 billion pounds) not paid in 2009, or 25.8 per cent of the total revenue.

Italy's ongoing woes emerged as France and Spain today sailed through their first bond market tests since Standard & Poor's downgraded their credit ratings last week. The news is a sign that politicians and central bankers have at least temporarily stemmed the spread of Europe's debt crisis.

Last year Chicago saw fewer murders than in 2010 except for the Englewood neighborhood. Police recorded 419 murders, down from 437 in 2010, reports NBC.

Englewood saw a 40 percent increase with 56 people killed in 2011. Chicago has one of the highest crime rates in America, but Newark, St Louis and New Orleans still remain the nation's murder capitals.

Foreign Secretary William Hague sought to play down the escalating row during a pre-planned visit to Brazil by insisting the UK was eager to open a 'new chapter in history' with Latin America. But he risked inflaming tensions in the region after revealing Prince Harry would attend an event on Rio de Janeiro's iconic Sugar Loaf mountain in March - the month before the April 2 landmark of Argentina invading the Falklands. Meanwhile, Prince William is being posted to the islands as an RAF search-and-rescue helicopter pilot next month - a move denounced as 'provocative' by Argentina.

Mr Cameron raised the political stakes during Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday when he delivered a 'strong message' to counter Argentine sabre-rattling. He said the Armed Forces had drawn up contingency plans for combating any threat to the archipelago. Downing Street was warned at a recent security summit that Argentine fishermen may plant their national flag on the islands in a campaign of intimidation.

Argentina, Mr Cameron said, was behaving like colonialists because 'the people want to remain British and the Argentinians want something else'.

His remarks drew a furious response from Buenos Aires. Amado Boudou, acting leader while president Cristina Kirchner recovers from an operation, raged: 'It's very sad to hear this fallacy. We believe it's a clumsy, historically misinformed and inappropriate thing to say. We're astonished by such ignorance. Maybe he should re-read his history books to understand what colonialism is.'

Britain is the European leader when it comes to children being raised by just one parent. Children who grow up in one-parent homes are more likely to suffer poor health, do badly at school and fall into crime or drug abuse when they are teenagers. The latest figures show that the number of single parent families with dependent children in the UK went up from 1,745,000 in 2001 to 1,958,000 last year.

Over the same period, the number of co-habiting couples went up from 2.1 million to 2.9 million. By contrast, the number of married couples dropped from 12.3 million to 12 million. The increase in co-habitation has been blamed for the rise in single-parent families because co-habitees are three times more likely to split up than married couples. Some 62 per cent of dependent children live in a married couple family, down from 68 per cent ten years ago.

Author and researcher on family life Jill Kirby said: 'It has looked for some time as if we are catching up with the United States as the country with the highest proportion of single parent families. We are far ahead of European countries. Single parent families are nearly always led by a mother. Millions of children are missing the experience of having a committed father. We have seen a very big increase in single parent families over the past 20 years.'

While some of the latest damage reflects forced selling of Portuguese debt after Standard & Poor's cut the country's credit rating to junk status last Friday, there are deeper worries that sharp fiscal cuts by the free-market government of Pedro Passos Coelho may prove self-defeating. Mr Passos Coelho has been praised by EU leaders and the International Monetary Fund for delivering on austerity, but the risk is that severe tightening - without offsetting monetary and exchange stimulus - will push Portugal into the same downward spiral that has already engulfed Greece.

Jurgen Michels, Europe economist at Citigroup, said Portugal's economy will contract by a further 5.8 per cent this year and by 3.7 per cent in 2013, a far sharper decline than official forecasts. The peak-to-trough collapse would be 13 per cent, a full-fledged depression. "As this gets worse it is going to be extremely difficult to go ahead with more austerity measures: political contagion will start to come through," he said.

While all eyes are on Greece, it is the slower drama in Portugal that will ultimately determine the fate of the eurozone.

The migrants, who can claim unemployment, housing and incapacity benefit, are costing taxpayers billions of pounds a year. In other countries, many would have had to return home after their visas expired or their employment ended. But Chris Bryant, shadow immigration minister, today blamed the Government and said the situation would only get worse due to lax border controls, rising migration and increasing unemployment. He said: "Tory ministers are resorting to rhetoric and misinformation to hide the reality of their failures on immigration and unemployment."

"Far from strengthening immigration control the Government is returning fewer illegal migrants and net migration has continued to increase. And at the same time increasing numbers of people born here and abroad are on out-of-work benefits because the government's failure on the economy has pushed unemployment up. Ministers should get a grip on rising unemployment and weaker border controls rather than trying to hide behind questionable figures which include people who have been British citizens for many years, and don't take account of British citizens claiming benefits abroad."

Lieutenant Commander of the Iranian Army's Self-Sufficiency Jihad Rear Admiral Farhad Amiri hailed the Iranian submarines as "the best electronic diesel vessels in the world, noiseless and able to easily evade detection as they are equipped with sonar-evading technology," the country's semi-state Fars news agency reported. The Iranian military official said the vessels can fire missiles and torpedoes simultaneously, underlining that the submarines' superiority was not just due to their arms and equipment, but also "the tactical issues are very important", given the geographical specifications of the waters surrounding the country.

A submarine of this type sitting on the seabed can easily target and hit an aircraft carrier traversing nearby regions, hinting at the US aircraft carriers deployed in the Persian Gulf. Ghadir submarines are equipped with cutting edge military and technological equipment and are capable of firing Hoot supercavitating rocket torpedoes, allegedly reverse-engineered from the Russian VA-111 Shkval. Most analysts agree that it is not a matter of if a war between the US and Iran will break out, but when. US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Wednesday that America is "not making any special steps" to build-up for a possible military conflict with Iran because the US is already "fully prepared to deal with that situation."

Both sides are well prepared for a confrontation, and despite its relatively inferior military power in comparison with the US, Iran dominates the northern gulf and the Strait of Hormuz with its strategic geography. Besides submarines, Iran has enough domestically-produced smart munitions, light attack craft, mines and ballistic missiles to effectively counteract other military powers and strike vessels within its waters.

This is General Dempsey's first visit to the country since he was appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff four months ago. He is scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, military chief of staff Lieutenant General Benny Gantz and President Shimon Peres. The Iranian nuclear program is expected to be a top issue on the table, and Israeli officials involved in preparing for the meetings told AP they expected Dempsey to urge restraint as the US tries to rally additional international pressure on Iran.

Both the US and Israel insist Iran is building nuclear weapons - and maintain that such a program threatens both of them. However, they differ on what actions should be taken to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Israel may be considering military strikes on Iran - which it has previously mentioned on several occasions - saying an attack could be used if other measures failed. While the US says military force is a possible option, it would only be a last resort, after talks and sanctions. And currently, the US views its existing economic sanctions as sufficient.

The toughening Iran issue could cast a shadow on Obama's re-election prospects this year if he gets caught in the middle of an Iran-Israeli conflict. Higher tensions could bring higher oil and gasoline prices, angering American consumers, while Republicans push the President to escalate action against Iran.