“At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”

The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric Schmidt once argued that the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amounts to only five exabytes.

It shows that the NSA is not just pursuing terrorism, as it claims, but ordinary citizens going about their daily communications. “The NSA is mass-collecting on everyone”, Binney said, “and it’s said to be about terrorism but inside the US it has stopped zero attacks.”

The so-called Thomas fire, one of several burning around the state, has burned over 900 structures, at least 700 of them homes. Another 18,000 buildings are under threat. 

It has stretched across nearly 370 square miles of territory, consuming 236,000 acres, making it the fifth largest in state history. It is now over five times the size of the District of Columbia, which is 68 square miles. Over 7,800 firefighters are working to hold back the blaze, which has now been 25 per cent contained. 

The fire straddling Santa Barbara and Ventura counties has burned for ten days, with the cause still being investigated. Yesterday, firefighters finally eked out progress on the titanic task of cutting fire lines around the gigantic conflagration.  But the wildfire is still raging, threatening thousands of homes and stranding tens of thousands of evacuees. 

A report in Science Magazine estimates that 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been produced to date. Of this, 6.3 billion tonnes of plastic are now waste – a majority of which, some 79 per cent, is in landfill or the natural environment. 

Plastic will outweigh fish by 2050.

David Attenborough warned in this week's Blue Planet that "the oceans are under threat now as never before in human history". Looking at the data, it's hard to come to a different conclusion. It is estimated that there is now a 1:2 ratio of plastic to plankton and, left unchecked, plastic will outweigh fish by 2050.

A nappy will be on Earth five times as long as the baby it helps. Many of us would forget about a nappy the second it gets put into a bin – but that nappy will stay on Earth for 450 years.

For every 100 miles of British beach, there are over 200 plastic or polystyrene items.

We are selling 20,000 more bottles every second. One of the biggest contributors to plastic pollution is drinks bottles. Some 480 billion plastic bottles were sold globally in 2016 – more than one million per minute. 

“He is evil, he’s not like mist. He’s not a diffuse thing, he is a person. I’m convinced that one must never converse with Satan - if you do that, you’ll be lost,” he told TV2000, a Catholic channel, gesticulating with his hands to emphasise his point. “He’s more intelligent than us, and he’ll turn you upside down, he’ll make your head spin.

“He always pretends to be polite - he does it with priests, with bishops. That’s how he enters your mind. But it ends badly if you don’t realise what is happening in time. (We should tell him) go away!” he said. He uses various terms to refer to the Prince of Darkness, including Satan, the Evil One, the Seducer, Beelzebub and the Great Dragon.

"It's a Jesuit thing. He's a Jesuit who is deeply imbued with the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, which allow people to discern the movements of the good and bad spirit," said Austen Ivereigh, a Vatican analyst and the author of The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope.

Germany is in charge of the establishment of a European Medical Command, considered an indispensable element of future EU military operations, alongside the European Air Transport Command, which has existed since 2010. Berlin is also establishing logistical structures that would facilitate rapid interventions. The German Bundeswehr is also active in both fields within the NATO framework.

The operational preparation for future military missions is influenced by a fierce power struggle between Germany and France. According to the German ministry of defense, the military union is not only aimed at reaching more "independence" from the United States, but also at advancing EU "integration," which is difficult to achieve with civilian means.

For a long time Trump has referred to a comprehensive peace treaty in the Middle East as “the ultimate deal”, and he seems absolutely determined to get something done.  The key was going to be getting the Saudis on his side, and this appears to have happened.  Last month, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas made a trip to Riyadh, and what was said during his meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman has sent shockwaves throughout the Middle East. 

According to the New York Times, the crown prince pushed for Abbas to accept a plan for peace that is much different than any plan that we have ever seen before… The New York Times is also reporting that President Abbas was warned that if he did not accept the terms of this new peace plan that he would be forced to resign…

According to Palestinian, Arab and European officials who have heard Mr Abbas’s version of the conversation, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman presented a plan that would be more tilted toward the Israelis than any ever embraced by the American government, one that presumably no Palestinian leader could ever accept.

The Palestinians would get a state of their own but only noncontiguous parts of the West Bank and only limited sovereignty over their own territory. The vast majority of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which most of the world considers illegal, would remain. The Palestinians would not be given East Jerusalem as their capital and there would be no right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

Adding to the shock for Palestinians, according to Palestinian officials from Fatah and Hamas, as well as a senior Lebanese official and several other people briefed on the matter, was the claim that Prince Mohammed had told Mr Abbas that if he would not accept the terms, he would be pressed to resign to make way for a replacement who would.

If the Saudis completely pulled their support from Abbas, it is hard to imagine a way that he would be able to stay in power. So if a threat was made, it would definitely have some power to it.

“Trump‘s move will hasten the destruction of the Zionist regime [Israel] and will double unity among Muslims,” Brigadier General Hatami told a meeting of senior military officials Monday, as cited by various Iranian media outlets.

Washington’s “anti-security decision,” which has drawn widespread condemnation from Muslim nations and the international community, is ratcheting up tensions in the region, he said.  Denouncing the move as “provocative and unwise,” Hatami said the declaration could possibly mean the Middle East descending into bloodshed.

While slamming Tel Aviv and Washington for taking unilateral steps in the face of world opposition, Hatami pledged support to the Palestinians, noting that Iran has always stood against their oppression and for “stability and security of the region.”

The general went on to accuse “global arrogance” – possibly referring to the West – of sowing discord between regional powers and fomenting a brewing conflict between Shia and Sunni Muslims to create “permanent” hostility.

“The infrastructure that underpins the internet – these undersea cables – are clearly vulnerable,” said Rishi Sunak, a British member of Parliament and champion of more vigorous action to protect submarine networks. “They underpin pretty much everything that we do.” Undersea cables conduct nearly 97 percent of all global communications, and every day an estimated $10 trillion in financial transfers and vast amounts of data pass through the seabed routes.

Satellites, once crucial but now limited in speed and bandwidth, handle only a tiny percentage of global communications. As reliance on the underwater cables soars, a growing list of countries – and even companies – have the expertise to deploy unmanned vehicles to ocean depths to access them.

The optical strands inside the cables have extraordinary capacity to transmit data, millions of phone calls per fiber. The cables that house bundled fiber optics are no thicker than a human wrist. Failures along cable routes are rare, numbering on average barely 200 a year along the estimated 650,000 miles of active international commercial cables laid along sea beds.

“Pyongyang’s resources presently include a rudimentary biotechnology infrastructure,” the report by the director of national intelligence explained.

A decade later, the technical hurdles appear to be falling away. North Korea is moving steadily to acquire the essential machinery that could potentially be used for an advanced bioweapons program, from factories that can produce microbes by the ton, to laboratories specializing in genetic modification, according to US and Asian intelligence officials and weapons experts.

Meanwhile, leader Kim Jong Un’s government also is dispatching its scientists abroad to seek advanced degrees in microbiology, while offering to sell biotechnology services to the developing world.

Christians are quite mindful of Muhammad and Islam during the Christmas season. Tis the season of jihad, rivaled only by Ramadan in the spike in Islamic terror attacks. Yes, Prince Charles, Christians remember Muhammad while their churches are burned, their children kidnapped and forcibly converted and their villages burned — all in the cause of Allah.

We remember Muhammad at the Christmas markets that were attacked, the Christmas parties in San Bernardino, the canceled Christmas festivals, and in Berlin, who could forget? We remember Muhammad when we see the concrete barriers, the hole in the NYC skyline, the endless travel lines, the security protocols just to get into a NYC building — oh, yes, we remember Muhammad.

“I ascribe great importance to Europe. While I respect Europe, I am not prepared to accept a double standard from it,” he said. “I hear voices from there condemning President Trump’s historic statement but I have not heard condemnations of the rockets fired at Israel or the terrible incitement against it.” “I am not prepared to accept this hypocrisy, and as usual at this important forum, I will present Israel’s truth without fear and with head held high,” Netanyahu added.

Some countries expressed support for the move. Czech President Milos Zeman on Saturday blasted European countries for being “cowards” in their response to Trump’s declaration, and further accused the Palestinian leadership of being a terrorist movement.

“The European Union, cowards, are doing all they can so a pro-Palestinian terrorist movement can have supremacy over a pro-Israeli movement,” said Zeman. Last week, Zeman said he was in favor of moving his country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The law, passed in 2005, denies Taiwan's statehood and outlines Beijing's methods to make the unification of the two Chinas a reality. But the bill also mentions "non-peaceful action" (that being warfare) if China believes that all possibility of a bloodless unification has been lost.

To Li, the deployment of US Navy vessels would signal just such a thing. "The day that a US Navy vessel arrives in Kaohsiung is the day that our People's Liberation Army unifies Taiwan with military force," Li told Chinese media, referring to Taiwan's largest port.

"Li's words have sent a warning to Taiwan and drew a clear red line. If Taiwan attempts to hold an independence referendum or other activities in pursuit of de jure 'Taiwan independence,' the PLA will undoubtedly take action."

Global warming has not accelerated temperature rise in the bulk atmosphere in more than two decades, according to a new study funded by the Department of Energy.

University of Alabama-Huntsville climate scientists John Christy and Richard McNider found that by removing the climate effects of volcanic eruptions early on in the satellite temperature record it showed virtually no change in the rate of warming since the early 1990s.

“We indicated 23 years ago — in our 1994 Nature article — that climate models had the atmosphere’s sensitivity to CO2 much too high,” Christy said in a statement. “This recent paper bolsters that conclusion.”