On September 6, Republican Governor Rick Snyder signed into law a new lifetime limit of 48 months for receiving cash welfare benefits in the state of Michigan.

It is estimated that 12,600 families, including 11,188 adults and 29,707 children, will be affected immediately. These families will lose an average of $515 a month beginning October 1.

"Since cash assistance is the source of income for some families and is how they pay for rent, they will have to find a different place to live," Judy Putnam, communications director for the Michigan League for Human Services, told the media. "We're very fearful that many families will be left homeless."

London Philharmonic Orchestra punishes cellist and violinists who wanted Proms appearance by Israeli players cancelled

The London Philharmonic Orchestra has suspended four musicians for nine months for using its name when they called unsuccessfully for the cancellation of a concert by an Israeli orchestra at the Proms.

The move follows the indefinite suspension of an unnamed LPO violinist after she allegedly launched an anti-Israel "rant" when Israeli musicians appeared at the Royal College of Music before the concert at the Royal Albert Hall earlier this month.

In a statement, Tim Walker, the LPO's chief executive, and Martin Hohmann, its chairman, said the suspensions sent "a strong and clear message that their actions will not be tolerated ... the orchestra would never restrict the right of its players to express themselves freely, however such expression has to be independent of the LPO itself.

The intractable Middle East conflict threatens to overshadow Prime Minister Stephen Harper's trip to the United Nations next week. Harper is travelling to the large General Assembly gathering ostensibly for meetings on Libya and child and maternal health. On Friday, the Prime Minister was drawn into the brewing showdown over the Palestinian bid for statehood recognition at the UN. "We view this unilateral action on behalf of the Palestinian Authority to be not helpful," Harper said during a stop in Saskatoon.

"No unilateral actions like this are helpful in terms of establishing a long-run peace in the Middle East. Canada views the action as very regrettable and we will be opposing it at the United Nations."

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, who will be accompanying Harper to New York, has already expressed Canada's opposition to the Palestinian plan. Canada supports a two-state solution to the conflict but only after a negotiated settlement between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

The Prime Minister is not expected to address the General Assembly, and will leave that duty to Baird the following week.

Bedouins in the Negev continue to be targeted by Israeli efforts to displace them. The Israeli government has now approved a plan that would uproot 30,000 Palestinians and place them in "recognized villages."

The situation of Palestinians inside the green line is bleak, especially when compared to the hopeful atmosphere sparked throughout the region by the Arab Spring. Plans are underway to forcibly relocate tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouins to designated towns that are in a deplorable condition.

The relocation scheme was among the recommendations of the Prawer Report, which called for relocating more than 30,000 Arab Bedouins in the Siaj section of the Negev to housing compounds elsewhere in the desert region south of the country.

Israeli military bulldozers demolished three homes and water cisterns in 'Aqaba village in the northern West Bank on Thursday morning, leaving 22 people, including 12 children, homeless.

Since the beginning of the year, over 750 Palestinians in the West Bank have been displaced after their homes were demolished by the Israeli military, nearly five times more than in the same period last year, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The bulldozers destroyed the homes of Khaled Sbeih, Basem Sbeih and Abdel Nasser Sbeih, leaving the three families with a few salvaged belongings on the street.

"This happened without warning. We had received a letter informing us that we had no permit to build, but there was no date for a demolition or anything like that," Khaled Sbeih told Amnesty International.

"We woke up in the morning and the children went to school. When they came back we had no home. I don't know how to explain it to them," he said.

Israeli army bulldozers also dug up more than two kilometres of main road in the area of the village.

It was an unprecedented visit designed to spur the euro zone into action. But Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's high-profile trip to Europe left some European officials more dumbstruck than starstruck.

Geithner's decision to travel to the small city of Wroclaw to discuss the sovereign debt problems of Greece, Ireland, Italy and the wider euro zone was the clearest indication yet of the severity of the near two-year-old crisis, which now threatens the global economy not just the single currency bloc.

Officials said Geithner was coming to propose how the region might try leveraging its emergency bailout fund -- the 440 billion euro European Financial Stability Facility -- to better tackle the crisis, much as the United States used leverage to handle the fallout from the subprime collapse.

One of the West Bank's largest illegal Israeli settlements, Ofra, is now going to be legitimized and upheld by the state of Israel regardless of the fact that much of it was built on privately owned Palestinian land.

Does this represent the state of Israel spitting in the face of the Palestinian people in preparation for their bid for UN statehood? Is this a warning of what is to come if the Palestinians will not back down and kowtow to their Israeli occupiers?

We can't be sure, but we do know that this is yet another instance of Israel flouting international law without hesitation.

The most popular national political figure in America today is one who was rejected by her own party three years ago: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans hold a favorable view of her and one-third are suffering a form of buyer's remorse, saying the U.S. would be better off now if she had become president in 2008 instead of Barack Obama.

The finding in the latest Bloomberg National Poll shows a higher level of wishful thinking about a Hillary Clinton presidency than when a similar question was asked in July 2010. Then, a quarter of Americans held such a view.

"Looking back, I wonder if she would have been a stronger leader, knowing the games and the politics and all that goes on," said Susan Dunlop, 50, a homemaker in New Port Richey, Florida. "I don't think she would have bent as much."

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Friday made light of the sex scandals surrounding Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, saying critics were simply jealous of his sexual prowess.

"However much they nag Signor Berlusconi for his special attitude to the beautiful sex, and by the way they nag him mainly because of jealousy, he has shown himself as a responsible statesman," Putin said at an international investment forum in Sochi, quoted by the state RIA Novosti news agency.

He was speaking in praise of Berlusconi's financial belt-tightening to battle Italy's economic woes.

Berlusconi is facing charges of paying for sex with a 17-year-old girl and eight people were charged Thursday with procuring prostitutes for his parties in an attempt to curry favour.

There are two mainstream market assumptions that, in my mind, prevail over all others. The continuing function of the Dow, the sustained flow of capital into and out of the banking sector, and the full force spending of the federal government are ALL entirely dependent on the lifespan of these dual illusions; one, that the U.S. Dollar is a legitimate safe haven investment and will remain so indefinitely, and two, that China, like many other developing nations, will continue to prop up the strength of the dollar indefinitely because it is "in their best interest". In the dimly lit bowels of Wall Street such ideas are so entrenched and pervasive, to question their validity is almost sacrilegious. Only after the recent S&P downgrade of America's AAA credit rating did the impossible become thinkable to some MSM analysts, though a considerable portion of the day-trading herd continue to roll onward, while the time bomb strapped to the ass end of their financial house is ticking away.

The debate over the health and longevity of the dollar comes down to one very simple and undeniable root pillar of economics; supply and demand. The supply of dollars throughout the financial systems of numerous countries is undoubtedly overwhelming. In fact, the private Federal Reserve has been quite careful in maintaining a veil of secrecy over the full extent of dollar saturation in foreign markets in order to hide the sheer volume of greenback devaluation and inflation they have created. If for some reason the reserves of dollars held overseas by investors and creditors were to come flooding back into the U.S., we would see a hyperinflationary spiral more destructive than any in recorded history. As the supply of dollars around the globe increases exponentially, so too must foreign demand, otherwise, the debt machine short-circuits, and newly impoverished Americans will be using Ben Franklins for sod in their adobe huts. As I will show, demand for dollars is not increasing to match supply, but is indeed stalled, ready to crumble.