The fast-moving fire raged out of control for a second day through heavily wooded rolling hillsides on the Northeastern outskirts of Colorado Springs, devouring more houses into the evening as winds sent flames doubling back into areas already burned, authorities said.

Latest Update: 15,000 acres burned; 38,000 people evacuated; no containment details.

360 homes are a total loss, the most in Colorado history.

No reported deaths or injuries.

Something snapped in the Italian psyche last week after the European Central Bank offered nothing to combat the credit crunch asphyxiating small business, and more broadly washed its hands of Euroland’s incipient deflation crisis and catastrophic wastage of its youth. The next day ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi called for a showdown, or “Braccio di Ferro”, with northern powers before it loses it chemical, car and steel industries altogether.

Mr Berlusconi told Il Foglio that Italy’s government - which his Liberty Party keeps in office - is complicitly serving forces that are destroying Italy. It must instead confront the north, “and particularly Angela Merkel’s Germany”, with a stark choice: either they call a halt to fiscal and monetary contraction, and opt instead for full-blown reflation; or they must expect the victims to snatch back their own destinies.

The battle must be waged quietly, but implacably. Italy cannot let its productive base atrophy further, or allow itself to be sidelined by the “hegemonic methods” of those with the upper hand. “That is what I mean by a showdown. We must find our own national or regional solutions, breaking up euro mechanisms."

Eisenhower managed to partner with Congress on three balanced budgets out of eight, but the era after his would start us on massive deficit spending as a habit rather than something to be employed only in an emergency. We have, as Eisenhower predicted, "mortgaged the material assets of our grandchildren," and it remains to be seen whether that has risked "the loss of their political and spiritual heritage."

Most famously, Eisenhower warned the country about the rise of what he called the "military-industrial complex," a force that would eventually erode liberty and public policy choices. "In the councils of government," Eisenhower said, "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." The wealth that got spent on the defense sector would create enormous influence and power inside and outside of government, which would eventually pervert a free society into perpetual warfare for the sake of maintaining power, unless a free nation exercised exceptional vigilance.

Fifty years later, Eisenhower's valediction looks less like a political speech and more like prophecy. In the NSA controversies, both with the continuous telecom metadata haul (since at least 2006) and the PRISM/BLARNEY efforts to sniff through massive amounts of content on the internet, we have examples of exactly what Ike foresaw. In fact, this looks much like a marriage between the military-industrial complex and what we could call the intelligence-industrial complex, both based on predicates of never-ending war in the age of terror.

“The first discovery of the new NSA access system was made two years ago by British researcher Dr Nicko van Someren [an expert in computer security]. But it was only a few weeks ago when a second researcher rediscovered the access system. With it, he found the evidence linking it to NSA…

“According to Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym, the result of having the secret key inside your Windows operating system “is that it is tremendously easier for the NSA to load unauthorized security services on all copies of Microsoft Windows, and once these security services are loaded, they can effectively compromise your entire operating system. The NSA key is contained inside all versions of Windows from Windows 95 OSR2 onwards…”

“Given the complicated situation in Golan Heights we could replace the Austrian contingent leaving this region, on the disengagement line between Israeli troops and the Syrian armed forces,” Mr Putin was quoted as telling newly appointed Russian officers in remarks in Moscow carried by the Interfax news agency. “But this will happen, of course, only if the regional powers show interest, and if the UN secretary general asks us to do so.”

Mr Weidmann said the bond scheme, known as Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT), blurs the line between fiscal and monetary policy and encroaches on the terrain of parliaments. It leaves the ECB with the task of carrying out rescue operations that is the proper responsibility of the euro bail-out fund and compromises the bank’s independence.

The two-day hearings at the constitutional court in Karlsruhe will investigate the legality of the OMT, the “game-changer” that defused the EMU debt crisis last July and has been so successful that no country has yet needed to use it. The case stems from complaints by 37,000 citizens, including the Left Party, More Democracy and eurosceptic professors, most arguing that the ECB is financing bankrupt states.

While the court has no jurisdiction over the ECB, it could prohibit the Bundesbank from taking part in bond purchases. This amounts to the same thing, since the OMT would collapse if Germany stepped aside. The court may defer any decision until after Germany’s elections in September.

"The economic situation is worsening from month to month, and unemployment has reached a level that puts democratic structures ever more in doubt," he said. "The Germans have not yet realised that southern Europe, including France, will be forced by their current misery to fight back against German hegemony sooner or later," he said, blaming much of the crisis on Germany's wage squeeze to gain export share.

Mr Lafontaine said on the parliamentary website of Germany's Left Party that Chancellor Angela Merkel will "awake from her self-righteous slumber" once the countries in trouble unite to force a change in crisis policy at Germany's expense. His prediction appeared confirmed as French finance minister Pierre Moscovici yesterday proclaimed the end of austerity and a triumph of French policy, risking further damage to the tattered relations between Paris and Berlin.

"Austerity is finished. This is a decisive turn in the history of the EU project since the euro," he told French TV. "We're seeing the end of austerity dogma. It's a victory of the French point of view."

The move will allow the EU to join a related complaint filed by Japan against Chinese duties in December. The EU complaint would seek to overturn Chinese duties on exports of seamless stainless steel tubes made by firms such as Spain's Tubacex SA (TUBA.MC) and Germany's Salzgitter AG (SZGG.DE), the sources said. The sources asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the case.

It took China less than one day to retaliate. What's worse the retaliation is aimed at Europe's already weakest - the PIIGS [Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain] - by targeting not hard German machinery exports but something far more prosaic: French, Spanish and Italian wine.

Reuters reports that "in a step targeting southern European states such as France and Italy that back the duties but largely sparing north European opponents such as Germany, Beijing said it launched an anti-dumping and anti-subsidy probe into sales of European wine. The Chinese ministry said the government had begun the probe into EU wines at the request of Chinese wine makers.

The EU now has 31 ongoing trade investigations, 18 of them involving China. The largest to date is that into 21 billion euros of imports from China of solar panels, cells and wafers. The EU says it has evidence that Chinese firms are selling solar panels below cost - a practice known as dumping. But the initial duty of 11.8 percent announced on Tuesday by European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht was far below the average 47 percent that had been planned.

The commander, Nie Haisheng, and his crew, Zhang Xiaoguang and Wang Yaping, plan to spend just under two weeks at the orbiting Tiangong space lab. Wang is China's second female astronaut and she will beam the country's first lesson from space to students on Earth.

The crew's capsule was ejected from the upper-stage of the rocket about nine minutes after lift-off. It should take just over 40 hours to raise the craft's orbit to the operating altitude of Tiangong some 335km (208 miles) above the planet's surface.

This mission, the fifth manned mission by China and slated to be the longest, is designated Shenzhou-10. It is the latest step in China's plan to eventually put a permanently manned station above the Earth.

China has had trade, religious and cultural exchanges with South Asian countries by way of the “Southern Silk Road” since ancient times, Dilip Barua, Minister for Industries of Bangladesh, said at the ongoing 8th China-South Asia Business Forum in Kunming, capital of southwest China’s Yunnan province.

T M Murtozaa Reza Chowhury, additional secretary of the Ministry of Commerce of Bangladesh said at the China-South Asia Business Forum that China and South Asian countries are neighbors with glorious history, splendid culture and long-standing relationships established 2,500 years ago thanks to the ancient “Southern Silk Road.”

Bangladesh always underscores the need for cooperation as an effective tool for social and economic development of the countries of the region, he said.

Britain has gone to the European Court of Justice to overturn powers allowing a Paris-based regulator to ban short-selling as part of a campaign of legal challenges to rein in growing EU powers over financial regulation. The European Securities and Markets Authority, or Esma, was given the unprecedented powers to ban short-selling after losing a battle over it in a council of EU finance ministers last year.

Jemima Stratford QC, the barrister representing the Government in the Luxembourg court challenge, insisted that the power, which is unique among Europe's regulatory agencies, was an illegal power grab in breach of the EU's treaties. "There is a short point at the heart of this case. It is that the extensive discretion given to Esma is contrary to the institutional balance laid down in the treaties," she told the ECJ.

"This would be a fundamental change. It cannot be right that it crept in under the radar." Short-sellers seek to profit on declining markets by selling borrowed shares or bonds, on the belief their price will fall, then replacing them with securities bought at a lower price.