Eurocrats sparked fury last night by ordering the UK to double dole payments.

The Council of Europe claims the handouts given to Britain's jobless are 'manifestly inadequate'.

Ministers have been told they are in violation of the European Social Charter - potentially opening the door for claimants to take the Government to court to get more money.

But ministers say obeying the diktat from the Council, which oversees the controversial European Court of Human Rights, would cost the UK billions of pounds and plunge efforts to reduce the deficit into chaos.

To comply, Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) would have to be hiked by £71, from £67 to £138 a week.

Last night Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith accused the Council of Europe of 'lunacy'.

US congressman Michael Grimm threatens to throw a journalist off a balcony after being asked about campaign finance allegations on Tuesday. The Republican, who represents Staten Island in New York, is answering questions from NY1 political reporter Michael Scotto. But when Scotto asks him about the arrest this month of one of his fundraisers, Grimm storms off, then returns and threatens Scotto

The 10 Worst States for Taxes in 2014

For upper middle income earners, high net-worth individuals, retirees, and certainly the "one percent" - where you live can make a huge difference in how much of your money you get to keep at the end of the year and how much you need to fork over to your state.

To help individuals and businesses make an informed choice, the Tax Foundation collects data on more than 100 tax provisions for each state and then ranks them to create its annual State Business Tax Climate Index. The 10 worst states on the list all levy complex, non-neutral taxes that favor some economic activities over others and have comparatively high individual and corporate tax rates.

Smoking in a car that is carrying children could be banned within days after the Lords threw its weight behind a controversial plan to outlaw the practice.

Peers last night unexpectedly backed the Labour move, which would give ministers the power to make it a criminal offence in England, punishable by a fine or points on a motorist's licence.

The Government had argued this would be very difficult to enforce, and might risk infringing on civil liberties. They favour an awareness campaign to highlight the dangers of smoking around children.

But Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, Labour health spokesman, persuaded colleagues it was a matter of child protection and crucial for the future.

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, a former president of the Royal Society of Medicine, said: 'A child in the back seat is effectively imprisoned in the vehicle for their own safety. Whatever adults do they have no control over.'

The Pentagon has begun investigations of American generals and admirals accused of emotionally brutal behavior, a report says.

The affliction of abusive leadership has recently even infected some civilian leaders at the Pentagon, according to military documents obtained by The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act.

As an example, according to the paper, Army officers described the working atmosphere under Joyce E. Morrow, a powerful civilian official at Army headquarters, as "toxic," corrosive" and "like you were in a prisoner of war camp."

Most of the world is not aware of what is going on in France at this moment. This brief video presents a concise picture:

The author is a former U.S. Army Corporal who spent 12 months in Iraq, starting with the invasion in March 2003. He is a co-founder of March Forward! and a member of the Board of Directors of Veterans For Peace.

Before President Obama even began the State of the Union address, two people I knew in the audience, from two defining points in my life, were much more significant to me. I thought their presence reflected the "State of the Union" better than anything the President could have said.

Rights groups says move to indict 20 employees of news channel marks escalation in state's campaign against foreign media

Egyptian prosecutors say they will charge 20 al-Jazeera journalists, including two Britons, an Australian and a Dutch citizen, with fabricating news and tarnishing Egypt's reputation abroad. The 16 local defendants are also accused of belonging to former president Mohamed Morsi's now-banned Muslim Brotherhood.

The journalists include the Australian former BBC correspondent Peter Greste, and the al-Jazeera's Canadian-Egyptian bureau chief Mohamed Fahmy, who has worked for CNN and the New York Times. The identities of the other defendants, including the two Britons, are not stated, and some of them are understood to have been accused in absentia.

In a statement, prosecutors said the defendants aimed "to weaken the state's status, harming the national interest of the country, disturbing public security, instilling fear among the people, causing damage to the public interest, and possession of communication, filming, broadcast, video transmission without permit from the concerned authorities".

Toronto mayor accused of arranging beating of Scott MacIntyre, his sister's ex-boyfriend, over threat to expose illicit behaviour

The embattled Toronto mayor, Rob Ford, is being sued by his sister's ex-boyfriend for allegedly conspiring to have the man beaten in jail to prevent his own illicit behaviours becoming public.

A lawsuit submitted on Wednesday by Scott MacIntyre alleges the mayor was behind an assault at a Toronto jail in March 2012 that was intended to keep MacIntrye quiet about Ford's abuse of alcohol and drugs.

The lawsuit alleges MacIntrye was threatened with "dire consequences" if he did not remain quiet. He was in jail after being charged with threatening the mayor, for saying he would expose his "unsavoury activities", the lawsuit says.

MacIntrye alleges Ford conspired with Payman Aboodowleh, who coached football with Ford, to have a jailed former player of theirs beat MacIntyre up.

A tectonic shift may be taking place throughout the global markets, but you wouldn't know it from watching CNBC. When the tremors start, there'll be a rush to safe haven, which begs that fundamental question: paper or metal?

The Cycles Roll On

On an almost predictable, totally certain cyclic basis, financial market crises throw up one pat question, with only one pat answer. What does the survival of our current finance, monetary and economic system depend on? It depends on people preferring fiat money more than gold.

From the moment in 1971 when US president Nixon "broke the link with gold", the dollar floated free and made the cyclic attempts to demonetize gold a permanent feature of the financial market system, and the collateral cause of its regular and cyclic crises. To be sure, the banksters operating this permanent rearguard action fighting reality are not going to tell us when the next "reset" will happen - but it will be soon.

After the dollar was taken off the gold standard in 1971, bankers had to run harder and faster to keep fiat money assets performing better than precious metals, and during the cyclic crises they have to take off the gloves to beat down the rising value of gold against declining fiat money. Usually presented as a permanent struggle to only bolster and save the US dollar, it in fact concerns all fiat moneys and all financial assets and instruments. Related parts of the struggle include the permanent need to lie about inflation and "positively influence inflation expectations" now featuring the prevention of deflation from eating away confidence, on the other side of the mirror.

UK Gold Dump
As we know, extreme and laughable action is regularly taken, during cyclic crisis periods, to "destroy gold and save fiat". The UK's Gordon Brown, when finance minister at the turn of the century in 1999-2002 embarked on a no-holds-barred and officially proclaimed selling spree of UK gold reserves, when gold prices were at their lowest in 20 years. Brown was following the US Fed's strategy of pushing down gold prices by announcing the sales. There was no interest in "getting a good price" for gold, only the intention of bringing down its price as low as possible.

In less than 3 years over 17 auctions, Brown dumped about 400 tons of gold.

This was the trigger moment for a long and rabid growth of equity and commodity prices, in fact of any financial asset that could be invented and traded. The "historic low" for gold at the turn of the century ran back-to-back with what Wall Street veteran financial lawyer Jim Rickards called the "derivatization of financial markets", the creation of untold massive quantities of tradable paper which as Rickards says are "used to manipulate underlying physical markets such as oil, copper and gold" as well as equities, currencies, interest rates and anything else which can be traded. Soon, the market became much too big to beat, but also asphyxiated and drowned itself in paper.

As Rickards has many times described along with other experts, saving fiat and destroying gold opened the door to an exponential growth of both the size and variety pf what are politely called "off-balance-sheet instruments" hidden by all the major banks and impossible to quantify let alone monitor. And at all times able to implode.