For over three months, even state agencies have been providing free fodder to those most vulnerable to a shortfall in India's annual monsoon - farmers who eke a living out of small landholdings and the milk provided by cattle. India is heavily dependent on the capricious annual monsoon, which brings about 75 percent of the rainfall that the country receives, to irrigate crops and fill its reservoirs.

Just over halfway through this season, the rains are 17 percent below normal, and the weather office has forecast that the El Nino weather pattern will bring more disappointment in the few weeks that remain. The drought, India's first since 2009, will not bring a shortage of staples as the nation's grain stores are overflowing with rice and wheat, and sugar output is set to exceed demand for a third straight year.

But it will deal a devastating blow to grain crops used for animal feed. That would badly hit the vast majority of the country's farmers who - with cattle and small landholdings their only assets - struggle to survive at the best of times.

As testing began, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had chalked up "a significant improvement" in its home front defence capabilities, mentioning its highly-vaunted anti-missile systems such as Iron Dome and Arrow 2.

"There has been a significant improvement in our level of defence capacity on the home front: with Iron Dome, with the Arrow, in terms of protection and shelters, in advanced warning systems and in other areas," he said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting. "But all the threats which are directed towards the Israeli home front are dwarfed by another threat - different in both its scope and its essence. And so I repeat: Iran must never be allowed to get nuclear weapons."

Israel is widely suspected to have the region's sole, if undeclared, nuclear arsenal.

"I hope that we have a real European constitution and that there will also be a referendum on it," he told the Sunday edition of Germany's biggest-circulation newspaper, Bild. The idea to hold a referendum on what Chancellor Angela Merkel sees as the only way out of the crisis - the formation of a true "political union" - has gained momentum in Germany.

"We need a political union. That means we have to give up further competencies to Europe, step by step, in an ongoing process," she told ARD public television earlier this month. Politicians both in the ruling coalition and in the opposition in recent weeks have said this is the only way to legitimise new transfers of power to EU institutions, which would go beyond what the current German constitution allows.

German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble, from Merkel's own Christian-Democratic Union was the first to float the idea in June. He was followed by Bavarian Conservatives and now members of the liberal Free Democratic Party, Merkel's junior coalition member.

Tony Blair warned that this would happen if too many powers were transferred to Brussels without democratic legitimacy. Prime Minister David Cameron has supported the possibility of a referendum on EU membership - a thing which the Daily Express has long campaigned for.

He said last month it was a "perfectly honourable position" to call for an immediate referendum on Britain's EU membership but that he would never campaign for an "out" vote because leaving the EU would not serve British interests.

Blair told Die Zeit newspaper that it was clear the eurozone crisis had had a negative effect on people's perceptions of the EU in Britain and that the crisis would lead to a 'powerful political change' which would see Brussels claim more power over the nations belonging to it.

The European Central Bank is preparing to print “whatever it takes” to save Spain and Italy. Markets are pricing in an 80 per cent chance of yet more printing by the US Federal Reserve in September or soon after. There is no doubt that the three superpowers acting in concert can launch a mini-cycle of growth early next year - assuming they deliver on their rhetoric - but the twin headwinds of debt-leveraging and excess manufacturing plant across the globe cannot easily be conjured away.

The world remains in barely contained slump. Industrial output is still below earlier peaks in Germany (-2), US (-3), Canada (-8) France (-9), Sweden (-10), Britain (-11), Belgium (-12), Japan (-15), Hungary (-15) Italy (-17), Spain (-22), Greece (-27), according to St Louis Fed data. By that gauge this is proving more intractable than the Great Depression.

Some date the crisis to August 9 2007, the day it became clear that Europe’s banks were up to their necks in US housing debt. The ECB flooded markets with €95 billion of liquidity. It seemed a lot of money then. The term “trillion” was still banned by the Telegraph style book in those innocent days. We have since learned to swing with the modern dance music from central banks.

Germany is still running a surplus of 5.2 per cent, down from 7.4 per cent in 2007. The North has refused to offset the demand squeeze in Club Med. Indeed, Germany legislated its own internal squeeze through a balanced budget law and imposed this curse on the rest of Euroland. The effect is to trap Euroland in chronic slump, at least until the victims rebel and take matters into their own hands.

Mr Mursi also said a constitutional declaration by the military aimed at curbing his powers had been cancelled. The generals assumed presidential powers after the fall of Hosni Mubarak. "The decisions I took today were not meant ever to target certain persons, nor did I intend to embarrass institutions, nor was my aim to narrow freedoms," Mr Mursi said during a speech to mark the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

"I did not mean to send a negative message about anyone, but my aim was the benefit of this nation and its people," he said. The president also praised the armed forces, saying they would now focus "on the holy mission of protecting the nation".

At issue is an article in the respected Small Wars Journal titled “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A ‘Vision’ of the Future.” It was written by retired Army Colonel Kevin Benson of the Army's University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Jennifer Weber, a Civil War expert at the University of Kansas. It posits an “extremist militia motivated by the goals of the ‘tea party’ movement” seizing control of Darlington, South Carolina, in 2016, “occupying City Hall, disbanding the city council and placing the mayor under house arrest.”

The rebels set up checkpoints on Interstate 95 and Interstate 20 looking for illegal aliens. It’s a cartoonish and needlessly provocative scenario. The article is a choppy patchwork of doctrinal jargon and liberal nightmare. The authors make a quasi-legal case for military action and then apply the Army’s Operating Concept 2016-2028 to the situation. They write bloodlessly that “once it is put into play, Americans will expect the military to execute without pause and as professionally as if it were acting overseas.”

They claim that “the Army cannot disappoint the American people, especially in such a moment,” not pausing to consider that using such efficient, deadly force against US citizens would create a monumental political backlash and severely erode government legitimacy.