“Saturday is a big day of action against Monsanto. We took our lights out to a local cornfield. Monsanto is bad for our food and bad for our planet,” the March against Monsanto’s movement posted on its Facebook page.

The rallies, which come four days ahead of World Food Day on October 16, will call on millions of activists to boycott “Monsanto’s predatory business,” genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and other harmful pesticides, which threaten “health, fertility and longevity.”

On October 5, Movement against Monsanto launched a global 'Twitter storm' asking people to tweet and post certain hashtags as frequently as possible.

Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has also recently called for a new round of debt relief for his country. "What is important to me is not to procrastinate too much for a solution," he said. But the German government in particular rejects a writedown of Greek government debt. At most, it wants to discuss lower interest rates and longer loan maturities - measures that many economists do not regard as being sufficient to solve the problems.

On the other hand, French insistence on war reparation payments after World War I led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis: "The Golden Dawn in Greece is a similar development." If German Chancellor Angela Merkel does not change her policies towards Europe, Soros said, then her victory in last month's election would be a mere "Pyrrhic victory".

He added: "The situation that emerged from the crisis is neither tolerable nor stable... The current situation is not the result of an evil German plot. But Germany cannot escape the responsibilities and liabilities that go with that role. Germany must learn to act as a benign hegemon. Doing so would earn Germany the lasting gratitude of the other countries that are currently subordinated to it, just as the United States earned the lasting alliance of Europe with the Marshall Plan." Failure to do so, he warned, would lead to the disintegration and eventual breakdown of the European Union.

As Jürgen Todenhöfer (CDU), a former member of the Bundestag, explains, he conveyed Teheran's negotiating proposal for solving the nuclear dispute to Washington already in the spring of 2010. At the time, the Iranian government had proposed that the German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, serve as mediator.

Catherine Ashton, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and her German deputy, Helga Schmid, are playing key roles in the current talks on Iran's nuclear program. Prior to her EU position in Brussels, Schmid had made a career in the German Foreign Ministry as chief of staff for Foreign Minister Joseph Fischer. Iran's President Hassan Rohani, in return, is promoting Germany's prominent role in his country's EU policy.

Berlin welcomes the new rapprochement between the West and Iran. German Middle East experts point out that, if this rapprochement should be successful, it would also lead to far-reaching geo-strategic shifts, initially affecting Syria.

But now that political dysfunction in Washington is accelerating, the downsizing of the world’s only remaining superpower, all you hear is whining. “The American self-blockade is shocking,” Karl-Georg Wellmann, a foreign-policy expert for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party, complained to the business daily Handelsblatt. “The position as the West’s leading power will be affected.”

Europeans are particularly unhappy that the government shutdown in Washington has led to a postponement of talks on a new trade agreement with the European Union due to take place this week.

Asians also were unhappy that President Barack Obama canceled his appearance this week at two summits in that region, leaving a Pacific trade agreement twisting in the wind and giving China an opportunity to win friends and influence people.

German editorialist Hubert Wetzel bewailed the “self-destruction of one of the world’s oldest democracies.” This newspaper editor goes on: “No one knows whether the country will still be solvent in three weeks. The bitter truth is: America is already politically bankrupt.”

So sad. The end of the American gravy train really is in sight. That mighty hegemon Europeans love to hate is growing smaller before our very eyes. Europeans might have to finally start shouldering their fair share of maintaining security in the world.

Earlier today, the Israeli Defense Forces (who have been quite active on Twitter) put out a tweet commemorating the famed Yom Kippur war of 1973, in which Israel bombed Syria: Oct. 10 #YomKippur73: Israel Air Force bombards airports in Syria to prevent Soviet weapons reaching the Syrian Army http://t.co/tKnMzYjgFF— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) October 10, 2013

The tweet may have been somewhat ill-timed, and poorly thought-out, given the current "heightened tensions" with Syria. Either way, apparently some oil traders either skipped over or didn't understand the hashtag reference to "YomKippur73" (and the reference to the Soviet Union - a country that hasn't existed in decades) and interpreted the tweet to mean that Israel was bombing Syria today. And, in response they started bidding up the price of oil. Because twitchy commodities dealers apparently do their pricing based on tweets.

Of course, the article notes that traders eventually realized their mistake... but the price of oil stayed up, rising over a dollar from $110.40 a barrel to $111.50 a barrel, and then continuing to rise a bit (though more slowly) after the mistake was understood. Isn't it great that key pieces of the global economy can change based on some people totally misreading a tweet? Makes me feel so comfortable about the state of the world today.

In the five years before the 2008 crash, only 10 banks failed in the United States. Let me repeat that: ten banks went belly up in the entire period between January 2003 through December 2007.

Since January 2008 through today, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation shows 487 banks have failed, with 22 failures just so far this year. With an average of two bank failures per year in the five years before the crash, that means banks are still failing at 10 times the pre-crash rate. But the numbers get worse from there.

While the FDIC shows 487 banks have failed, other data at the FDIC show that a total of 1,306 banks have disappeared since March 31, 2009, along with $1.5 trillion in deposits. The difference is that 819 banks or savings associations have merged, typically to survive.

Complete and utter incompetence on the part of the government drones in California. So these idiots have been under-reporting for a month? None of the government furloughs are included in these numbers. The MSM won’t tell you that the economy is in recession and companies have begun to lay off people due to poor sales and the Obamacare debacle. Retail and restaurant sales are collapsing.

The average American is barely getting by on their low wage part time jobs. Now Obamacare has arrived to crush whatever momentum the economy had. Claims will be headed higher as the recession deepens.

Republicans will meet Mr Obama, who is a Democrat, later on Thursday. Officials have warned the US risks default on 17 October if the nation's borrowing limit is not increased.

Mr Boehner told reporters on Thursday: "What we want to do is to offer the president today the ability to move a temporary increase in the debt ceiling in agreement to go to conference on the budget for his willingness to sit down and discuss with us a way forward to reopen the government."

"It's time for leadership," the Ohio Republican said. "It's time for these negotiations and this conversation to begin."

Ms Yellen said if confirmed by the Senate she would do her utmost "to promote maximum employment, stable prices and a stable financial system". She said more needed to be done to strengthen the US economy although progress had been made recently. The president praised Ms Yellen's ability to build consensus and listen to competing views.

He added that she was "committed to increasing employment and understands the human costs when Americans can't find a job". If the nomination is confirmed by the US Senate, Ms Yellen, 67, would replace Ben Bernanke, who has held the post for eight years. She has been his deputy for the past two years, and would become the first woman to head the Federal Reserve.

The Fed will be looser for longer. The FOMC will continue to print money until the US economy creates enough jobs to reignite wage pressures and inflation, regardless of asset bubbles, or collateral damage along the way. No Fed chief in history has been better qualified. She is a glaring contrast to Alan Greenspan, a political speech writer for Richard Nixon, who never earned a real PhD (it was honorary) or penned an economic paper of depth.

She has pedigree. Her husband is Nobel laureate George Akerlof, the scourge of efficient markets theory. She co-authored "Market for Lemons", the paper that won the prize.

So there we have it. The next chairman of the Fed is going to track the labour participation rate. Money will stay loose. Markets have been spared again. The Brics can breathe easier. This leaves me deeply uneasy. We are surely past the point where we can keep using QE to pump up asset prices.

Yet curiously, even though the US government’s completely ridiculous, untenable fiscal situation is a front page embarrassment for the entire world to see, markets have barely budged. Stocks and bonds haven’t moved because nobody cares what’s happening in the US government anymore. And that’s because every serious investor understands that the US government long since abdicated any economic power to the banking sector.

Everyone knows that the Fed is going to keep printing money, ergo they’re going to keep sending markets higher. The US government and the incompetent elected officials are just giant stooges in this deeply flawed monetary system.

And this debt ceiling charade only proves it. The secret is out there in the open. And now it’s completely obvious who’s really in charge.

Shadow banking loans are estimated to have reached $15 trillion in the US. And among them is a particularly hot category: lending to highly leveraged companies with junk credit ratings. Sophisticated investors with a big appetite for risk who know how much yield to demand to compensate them for these risks might see these “leveraged loans” as an opportunity. But the NY Fed found that these loans are increasingly issued in a loosey-goosey manner, with low underwriting standards. And issuance has soared.

In 2007, issuance of these “leveraged loans” peaked at $680 billion but then totally collapsed in 2008. Since 2009, according to NY Fed, “it has rebounded very quickly, and is now at record levels of volume, projected to be larger than $1 trillion in 2013.”

A dozen nearly new C-27J Spartans from Ohio and elsewhere have already been taken out of service and shipped to the so-called boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. Five more are expected to be built by April 2014, all of which are headed to the boneyard unless another use for them is found.

The Air Force has spent $567 million on 21 C-27J aircraft since 2007, according to purchasing officials at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Sixteen had been delivered by the end of September.

The Air Force almost had to buy more of the planes against its will, the newspaper found. A solicitation issued from Wright-Patterson in May sought vendors to build more C-27Js, citing Congressional language requiring the military to spend money budgeted for the planes, despite Pentagon protests.

When asked by the public, the agency is notifying beneficiaries that “Unlike a federal shutdown which has no impact on the payment of Social Security benefits, failure to raise the debt ceiling puts Social Security benefits at risk,” according to a person familiar with the agency directive.

The warning was assembled after the agency consulted with the Treasury Department, which would play a lead role in determining how the government handles payments if the borrowing limit isn’t raised soon.

Its first role following WWII was the establishment of the German Army during the Korean War and joined NATO in 1955 soon after Stalin’s death and the armistice in the Korean War. The new army met widespread public protests of “Ohne Mich” (Without me) public sentiment. Opposition to the formation of Bundeswehr, a critical problem for a conscription army, was widespread; protestors disrupted swearing-in ceremonies and domestic terrorists attacked both the German and American military forces, especially during the Vietnam War. In the end, the argument that every country has an army, either its own or a foreign one was accepted.

Its second mission, at the end of the 1989 democratic revolution and the unification of Germany, the country had two armies, and General Joerg Schoenbohm was charged with forging a single Bundeswehr out of the existing West German Bundeswehr, and what once was the East-German National Volksarmee, while Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President George H W Bush negotiated with President Mikhail Gorbachev to allow the united Germany to remain in NATO.

Now in its Third incarnation, NATO and the German Army now must define a new common purpose to meet a challenging international environment: One that meets the US pivot to Asia to deal with the rise of China that has shifted the geopolitical role of the United States; the withdrawal of the US permanently stationed Forces in Europe, and the many 21st century borderless threats. These changes call for re-thinking the role the Bundeswehr plays in NATO.