Jamel is an example of the far-right problem that has plagued Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania for years. The rural region, once part of communist East Germany, has a poor reputation in this regard - the NPD, which glorifies the Third Reich, has been in the state parliament since 2006 and neo-Nazi crimes are part of daily life. In recent months, a series of attacks against politicians from all the democratic parties has shaken the state. Sometimes hardly a week goes by without an attack on another electoral district office, with paint bombs, right-wing graffiti and broken windows.

Norbert Nieszery, leader of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the state parliament, calls it an "early form of terror." Nieszery's own office windows have been smashed twice. State Interior Minister Lorenz Caffier of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) says he has registered a "new level" of right-wing extremist violence. He believes the NPD is trying to raise its profile through aggressive behavior ahead of state parliament elections in September.

One local mayor requested police protection after receiving repeated right-wing threats. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, has warned that the NPD is becoming increasingly influential in local municipalities and that the neo-Nazis are trying to entrench themselves in daily life.

Nowhere have they succeeded as well as in Jamel. If the right-wing extremists left, the village would be empty. Jamel is no longer just a problem at the regional or federal state level - even Berlin is growing concerned about the situation. Jamel has come to symbolize the fact that there are places in Germany where right-wing extremists can do virtually whatever they want.

The discovery has fuelled fears that urban foxes are hunting new prey after getting bigger and bolder as they gorge themselves on leftovers, including treats put out for them by animal lovers. The animals' rise was highlighted last year after twin babies were mauled in their east London home. Nine-month-old Lola and Isabella Koupparis were left scratched and scarred after a fox jumped into their cot in the night, leading to calls for the animals to be culled as pests.

The new giant was caught by vet Keith Talbot at his parents' home in Maidstone, Kent, on Boxing Day after they told him they believed a fox had killed their black and white pet cat, Amber. Mr Talbot, 28, who works in Scotland, went to stay with his parents for Christmas and put down a trap to try to catch the offender. On the first night, he caught a 14lb fox and the next night the giant specimen, which weighed 26.5lb. Both were humanely destroyed.

Mr Talbot said: 'I'm not against foxes, I think everything in nature has a place. But there is a limit and when something like that happens and they start eating cats, it probably tells you that the balance of nature has been upset by humans feeding them and that it's time for controls to come in.' The worrying aspect is that the urban fox's behaviour is changing. 'They are getting bigger because some people feed them because they like to see them in their gardens. With the additional size comes added confidence and then they start taking on new prey - and once they find an easy food source they will capitalise on it.'

The system, made up of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, can transmit live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements. It can send up to 65 different images to different users; by contrast, Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a "soda straw" area the size of a building or two.

With the new tool, analysts will no longer have to guess where to point the camera, said Major General James O Poss, the Air Force's assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. "Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything."

The Air Force is exponentially increasing surveillance across Afghanistan. The monthly number of unmanned and manned aircraft surveillance sorties has more than doubled since last January, and quadrupled since the beginning of 2009.

The document, dated November 15, 2009, was quoted Sunday in Norwegian by Oslo-based daily Aftenposten, which said it had obtained WikiLeaks' entire cache of 251,187 leaked US embassy cables. "The rocket threat against Israel is more serious than ever. That is why Israel is putting such emphasis on rocket defence," Ashkenazi told the US delegation led by Democrat Ike Skelton, the cable showed.

The army chief lamented that Iran has some 300 Shihab rockets that can reach Israel and stressed that the Jewish state would have only between 10 and 12 minutes warning in case of an attack. However, it was Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon that posed the most acute threat, he cautioned. According to the quoted cable, Hezbollah is thought to have more than 40,000 rockets, many of which are believed capable of reaching deep into Israel.

US officials meanwhile reportedly estimate the militant group has acquired an arsenal of around 50,000 rockets. And in his comments made nearly a year after Israel on December 27, 2008 launched the deadly Gaza war, Ashkenazi said "Israel is on a collision course also with Hamas, which rules Gaza. Hamas will have the possibility to bombard Tel Aviv, with Israel's highest population concentration," he was quoted as saying.

"When you hand out $1 trillion in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) just before this president came in, most of it unspent, $1 trillion nearly in stimulus, that this president asked for, plus this huge expansion in health care and government, it has a corrupting effect," Issa said on CNN's "State of the Union."

Although TARP - the program passed in 2008 intended to strengthen the financial sector by purchasing assets from financial institutions - was passed by Congress under the Bush administration, Issa said the unregulated funds were used by Obama like "presidential earmarks."

But the California Republican also admitted Congress shares some of the blame.

"All of that would not have been possible if Congress had done its job," Issa told CNN Chief White House Correspondent Ed Henry. "Instead what happened was we gave President Bush (the money and) President Obama inherited $800 billion worth of walking-around money with no guidelines."

And a woman seriously hurt on Friday near the south-east Missouri town of Rolla died in hospital on Saturday. Several other people in Arkansas and Missouri were injured. The tornado in Cincinnati caused damage near a local highway in the town's centre and points west of Washington County in Arkansas, county dispatcher Josh Howerton said, adding that there were "lots of injuries".

"It sucked me out of my house and carried me across the road and dropped me," Chris Sizemore, a resident of Cincinnati, told the Associated Press news agency. The tornado hit the town, located about 20 miles (32km) west of the city of Fayetteville, around 0610 local time (1210GMT) on Friday, said Joe Sellers, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oklahoma.

Emergency responders were experiencing difficulties early on Friday in reaching damaged areas in the region because of power lines that had been knocked down, Rick Johnson, the deputy emergency manager for Washington County, said. The Arkansas Department of Emergency Management said that power was out throughout Washington County. A local airport cancelled flights due to debris on its runway in Benton County, a region near the Arkansas state lines with Oklahoma and Missouri, Matt Garrity, the county's manager of emergency services, told the CNN news network.

Authorities have now confirmed three deaths caused by flood waters in the past few days. Officials have said that the crisis could last another month. "Given the scale and size of this disaster and the prospect that we'll see waters sitting for potentially a couple of weeks," said Queensland Premier Anna Bligh. "We will continue to have major issues to deal with throughout January."

Rockhampton has already been badly hit, with many people being forced to flee. Rockhampton's airport, a major regional hub, was closed to commercial traffic due to flooded runways, while many main roads and railways into the town have been cut off, and power supplies disrupted.

"Today we'll see resupply of Rockhampton by military aircraft taking supplies into Mackay and then road transporting them down to Rockhampton," the state's emergency coordinator, police Deputy Commissioner Ian Stewart, said on Monday. "That will continue until such time as the road is cut." Flood waters are expected to reach nine metres (30 feet) on Monday and peak at 9.4 metres on Wednesday, threatening as many as 4,000 homes.

Hundreds of people in coastal areas fled to higher ground for fear of a tsunami, but no alert was issued. An 8.8-magnitude quake in the same area last February caused huge destruction. Chile's national emergency agency (Onemi) said there was no danger of a tsunami. "Up until now we don't have any reports of injuries, there's no damage, just overloaded telephone lines and some partial power cuts," said Onemi's director, Vicente Nunez.

"We've told people to go back to their houses because there's no tsunami alert." The quake hit at 1720 (2020 GMT) and was centred about 600 kilometres (370 miles) southwest of the capital, Santiago. Chile is still rebuilding after February's massive quake, which smashed infrastructure and triggered a tsunami that devastated several coastal towns, killing more than 400 people.

One major risk facing the world economy at the moment is related to a slow transition of economic power from the West to the East. The rise of the emerging world, in particular China, and the coinciding weakening of the West, in particular the US, has resulted in a "collapse of consensus of how the global monetary system should be run", Mr Ward continues.

In simple terms, China favours tight controls of the economy whereas the US prefers free market solutions, "hence the volatility here", he says. The tension has resulted in a currency war, where major economies seek to devalue their own currency in order to boost their own competitiveness; China through central controls, the US by way of "printing money on a scale we've never seen before".

In turn, this has made life tough for small countries, which have responded by introducing capital controls. Add a high risk of deflation in the US, which could result in more quantitative easing (essentially printing money) and thus more pressure towards currency wars and capital controls, and there are reasons to be concerned about whether the world economy can cope, Mr Ward reasons.

"The European crisis is yet another source of concern for us," Mr Ward agrees. "Spain is the really big one, and it is really sick as well," he says. "If Spain wobbles and collapses, it'll be very bad news for everyone, not just in Europe but all over the world," reasoning that it could result in the collapse of the euro. "If the euro did collapse, it would make Lehman Brothers look like a tea party.

Banks alone must refinance about 400 billion euros (343 billion pounds) of debt in the first half of the year, but add in the more than 500 billion euros European governments must replace over the same period, as well as further hundreds of billions of euros of mortgage-backed debt maturing and there is the potential for chaos in the credit markets.

"What we are looking at here clearly has the potential to become a second credit crunch. However, this time it would be much worse than before," said Celestino Amore, founder of IlliquidX, which specialises in trading hard-to-price debt. "Governments have been able to slow down the process, but the problems did not go away. There remains trillions of dollars of debt that must be refinanced or sold."

Mr Amore predicts a rush to sell assets, much like that which kicked off the first credit crunch in the summer of 2007. However, many fund managers and other large institutional investors are looking to reduce their exposure to bonds, leading to warnings that there will not be enough demand to buy all the debt banks and governments will need to sell.

Last week the Centre for Economic and Business Research said a new eurozone crisis was its top prediction for 2011, pointing out that Spain and Italy alone must refinance more than 400 million euros of bonds in the spring. "I think you're going to see everyone rush to sell bonds very early in January, because no one wants to take the chance of missing whatever funding window is available," said the banker.

* AB 119 prevents insurance companies from charging different rates for men and women for identical coverage.

* SB 782 prevents landlords from evicting tenants who are victims of domestic or sexual abuse or stalking.

* AB 1844 informally known as 'Chelsea's Law' and authored by local Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher - will increase penalties, parole provisions and oversight of sex offenders, including a "one-strike, life-without-parole penalty" for some.

* AB 1871 allows people to lease out their cars when they are not being used - alleviating the need to purchase additional insurance.

And so the list goes on and on... California now has over 57,000 laws on the books.

North Korea's holiday message - scrutinized by officials and analysts in neighboring countries for policy clues - comes after its November 23 artillery attack on a front-line South Korean island near the countries' disputed western sea border, the first attack on a civilian area since the 1950-53 Korean War.

That barrage, which followed an alleged North Korean torpedoing of a South Korean warship in March, sent tensions between the Koreas soaring and fueled fears of war during the last weeks of 2010. Also Saturday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon vowed to help improve tense relations between South and North Korea. Ban spoke with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak by telephone and said the world body would closely consult with Seoul, Lee's office said in a statement posted on its Web site.

Ban, a former South Korean foreign minister, made the pledge as Lee called for the UN's cooperation in improving ties between South and North Korea. Lee called the 2011 as an "important year for the South-North relations," Lee's office said, without elaborating. The Korean peninsula remains technically in a state of war because the 1950s conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty.

"The danger of war should be removed and peace safeguarded in the Korean peninsula," said the message, which was also read by a North Korean anchorwoman, wearing traditional Korean dress, in a state television broadcast monitored in Seoul. "If a war breaks out on this land, it will bring nothing but a nuclear holocaust."

The switch from Estonia's old currency, the kroon, comes after a dreadful year for the eurozone economies which saw two members - Greece and Ireland - require emergency bailouts, with other nations on the precipice. Many feel that the inclusion of Estonia, whose $19 billion economy is dwarfed by the euro's total annual output of approximately $12.5 trillion, holds symbolic importance.

Germany's deputy foreign minister Werner Hoyer said: 'Estonia's accession to the eurozone is an encouraging sign for Europe as a whole because it shows the attractiveness of our common currency.' But Estonia could be the last new entrant for several years as fears about the strength of the single currency deter others.

State Treasurer Andrew Fraser said that on top of recovery costs, the state would receive less income because of damage to the mining sector. There are concerns that damage could cost billions of Australian dollars to repair.

"In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions," he told journalists in the flood-hit town of Bundaberg. "The cost to the state will be huge - both in direct costs such as rebuilding roads, and other damaged infrastructure and providing relief payments to families - but also in lost income, while the mining, agriculture and tourism sectors recover," he said.

The floods have affected about 200,000, thousands of whom have been evacuated. An estimated 22 towns have been left isolated or inundated by the rising waters over an area larger than France and Germany. In some areas the waters have been receding, but around Rockhampton they are still rising. Rockhampton Mayor Brad Carter said about 40% of the city could be affected when the Fitzroy River reaches its expected peak next week.

After the explosion, angry Christians clashed with police and local Muslims, reportedly throwing stones and targeting a nearby mosque. Protesters went into the mosque, throwing books out onto the street, the Associated Press news agency reported. The mayor of Alexandria, General Adel Labib, said on Egyptian TV that there had been recent threats of attacks on churches, though he tried to play down any possible sectarian motive for Saturday's bombing.

Christians from the Coptic Orthodox Church make up about 10% of Egypt's predominantly Muslim population. The rise of political Islam and the failure of the government to address Coptic claims of discrimination have fuelled divisions, analysts say. Al-Qaeda in Iraq has also been conducting a campaign against Christians, following the reported conversion to Islam by two Egyptian Christian women in order to divorce their husbands. The group said the women were being held against their will by the Coptic Church.

Alexandria, Egypt's second-largest city with a population of about four million, has seen sectarian violence in the past.