The German government is fiercely promoting an aggressive imperialist foreign policy. At the beginning of the year, it declared an end to the previous policy of military restraint. Shortly thereafter, it announced plans to develop a new strategy for Africa.

Last Wednesday, this was followed by the announcement that the German Navy was to be sent to the Mediterranean to fulfill a "robust mandate". Official statements revealed that the frigate Augsburg is to aid in securing the destruction of Syrian chemical weapons on a US vessel, Cape Ray. The use of combat forces is not ruled out in the operation.

This decision is in line with US President Barack Obama's announcement that he reserves the right to militarily intervene in Syria. At a joint press conference with French President François Hollande in Washington on Tuesday, Obama stressed that a military option in Syria was not off the table.

At the same time, Berlin is toughening its foreign policy offensive in the Ukraine. In his first official visit to Moscow last week, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Social Democratic Party, SPD) warned the Russian government against escalating the Ukrainian power struggle. "Nobody should seek to ignite the fuse to that powder keg", said Steinmeier.

Viviane Reding calls for full fiscal and political union for 18 eurozone countries but says UK should remain apart

A celebrated call by Winston Churchill for the creation of a "United States of Europe" was revived on Monday by a leading member of the European commission who said the 18 eurozone countries should form a full fiscal and political union.

Viviane Reding, a vice-president of the commission, told Cambridge University's law faculty that "bold reforms" were needed to avoid tensions across Europe as new governance arrangements were introduced to stabilise the single currency.

Delivering the Mackenzie Stuart Lecture, named after the first British judge to serve as president of the European court of justice, the European justice commissioner endorsed Churchill's view in a famous speech in Zurich in 1946 that Britain should remain apart from the United States of Europe.

Hundreds of children were taken from island territory in official scheme to boost French rural population in 1960s and 70s

Jean-Jacques Martial was six years old when he arrived at Orly airport in Paris one November morning wearing flip-flops and shorts. He had been removed from his grandmother's care in the French island territory of Réunion as part of an official scheme to help boost the falling population in the rural heart of the mother country. He had only one idea in his head: "I was going to cultivate myself and I would denounce what had happened to me," he said.

Martial went on to do just that, and on Tuesday the French national assembly will address this shameful chapter of its history for the first time when members vote on a motion to formally recognise the state's role in the scandal of Réunion's "stolen children". From 1963 to 1982 a total of 1,615 children were forcibly dispatched from the Indian Ocean territory, whose population was exploding, in order to repopulate rural areas.

"They took babies who were only six months old," said Ericka Bareigts, one of the territory's deputies who is behind the initiative. Poor and illiterate families were informed that their children would be sent to France, "and of course they imagined Paris and the Eiffel tower," she said. "They were promised a home, schooling, and told they would succeed. The families were told the children would return for the holidays. But it was all a lie."

The nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) are back this Tuesday in Vienna. The stakes couldn't be higher. It will be a long and winding road. Hidden agendas on both sides badly want the talks to fail - and will spare no effort towards that goal.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei could be interpreted as a stony realist, when he said that the talks will go nowhere. It's as if the Supreme Leader had read Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, a crucial book by Martha Gellhorn Prize winner Gareth Porter which is being launched today in New York. In the book, Porter thoroughly debunks the whole narrative of the Iran nuclear dossier as sold to the world by the George W Bush administration, assorted neo-cons and the Israeli Likud.

Banks are no longer just financing heavy industry. They are actually buying it up and inventing bigger, bolder and scarier scams than ever.

Call it the loophole that destroyed the world. It's 1999, the tail end of the Clinton years. While the rest of America obsesses over Monica Lewinsky, Columbine and Mark McGwire's biceps, Congress is feverishly crafting what could yet prove to be one of the most transformative laws in the history of our economy - a law that would make possible a broader concentration of financial and industrial power than we've seen in more than a century.

But the crazy thing is, nobody at the time quite knew it. Most observers on the Hill thought the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 - also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act - was just the latest and boldest in a long line of deregulatory handouts to Wall Street that had begun in the Reagan years.

Wall Street had spent much of that era arguing that America's banks needed to become bigger and badder, in order to compete globally with the German and Japanese-style financial giants, which were supposedly about to swallow up all the world's banking business. So through legislative lackeys like red-faced Republican deregulatory enthusiast Phil Gramm, bank lobbyists were pushing a new law designed to wipe out 60-plus years of bedrock financial regulation. The key was repealing - or "modifying," as bill proponents put it - the famed Glass-Steagall Act separating bankers and brokers, which had been passed in 1933 to prevent conflicts of interest within the finance sector that had led to the Great Depression. Now, commercial banks would be allowed to merge with investment banks and insurance companies, creating financial megafirms potentially far more powerful than had ever existed in America.

Can Utah shut down the new NSA data center by turning off the water?

A bill proposed by state Rep. Marc Roberts seeks to do just that.

Based on model legislation drafted by a transpartisan coalition organized by the Tenth Amendment Center (TAC) and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) called the OffNow Coalition, the Fourth Amendment Protection Act would prohibit state material support, participation, or assistance to any federal agency that collects electronic data or metadata without a search warrant "that particularly describes the person, place and thing to be searched or seized."

This puts contracts that provide the 1.7 million gallons of water a day necessary to cool the NSA computers at its Bluffdale facility in the crosshairs.

The Sochi Winter Olympic Games open amid a flurry of superlatives. They are the most expensive Games to date - at a cost of $50 billion; they are the first ever Winter Olympics to be hosted by Russia; and the official torch relay to start to event is the longest in history, covering over 40,000 miles and involving the participation of some 14,000 torch bearers.

Another superlative is that no other sporting event has attracted so much lurid and negative media coverage, emanating largely from the Western corporate news outlets...

Over the past weeks, Western media have sought to highlight all manner of alleged problems awaiting the Sochi Games, ranging from the grimly serious to the sublimely ridiculous. This week, ahead of the Games' official opening, under the auspices of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Western media carried reports that the US government was warning airlines heading to the Black Sea resort on the risk of explosives being secreted by terrorists in toothpaste tubes.

Venezuela gave three U.S. diplomats 48 hours to leave the country on Monday, accusing them of conspiring against the government to incite protests that were the OPEC nation's most serious violence since President Nicolas Maduro's April election.

Foreign Minister Elias Jaua said the three consular staff used visa visits to universities as cover for promoting student-lead protests.

The demonstrations, which have energized the opposition but show few signs they can oust Maduro, continued on Monday with rowdy protests around Caracas and various provincial cities. On Wednesday, the protests turned deadly and three people were fatally shot.

"They have been visiting universities with the pretext of granting visas," said Jaua, who often faced off against police during his own days as a student demonstrator.

"But that is a cover for making contacts with (student) leaders to offer them training and financing to create youth groups that generate violence," he told reporters.

Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee lambasted the nation's top intelligence chiefs on Wednesday, complaining of lies about gathering the phone records of Americans and failing to cooperate with Congress in an investigation of the CIA's controversial interrogation programs.

Committee members grilled Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan at the first intelligence committee hearing since President Barack Obama proposed reforms to the spy program.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told them an ongoing "culture of misinformation" has undermined the public's trust in America's intelligence leadership.

"That trust has been seriously undermined by senior officials' reckless reliance on secret interpretations of the law and battered by years of misleading and deceptive statements senior officials made to the American people," Wyden said.

He said the deception didn't help the fight against terror, but instead hid bad policy choices and violations of civil liberties. Wyden singled out Clapper's testimony to Congress last March that the National Security Agency does not collect data on millions of Americans, an assertion proved false by leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Clapper has since apologized, suggesting he misspoke. But five members of Congress, led by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., called this week for the White House to fire Clapper for misleading Congress.

Mining giant Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) is losing about R100-million a day because of a strike by the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), which entered its fourth week on Monday.

"The company is losing 4 000oz, amounting to R100-million in revenue daily," said Amplats spokesperson Mpumi Sithole.

Amplats on Saturday said it was suing Amcu for damages and losses suffered over their work stoppage.

Amplats was seeking R591-million but this could rise if damages continued, said Sithole.

"The provisional quantum of the damages claim is about R591-million, although as Amcu's wrongful conduct is continuing, the damages will continue to accrue," she said.