In addition to increasing US naval activity in the region, Washington is also preparing to intensify economic sanctions against Iran’s oil industry, the New York Times reported. The US – along with 25 other countries – will conduct extensive joint minesweeping exercises in the Persian Gulf in October. The move aims to increase pressure on Iran and prevent it from closing the Strait of Hormuz.

“It will not be the case that the south will get the so-called wealthy states to pay. Because then Europe would fall apart.” Thus spoke Horst Köhler, former German president, finance secretary and IMF head, almost two decades ago.

[Mr] Köhler’s remarks are worth pondering. A series of multi-billion-euro bail-outs – and more to come – have now planted a north-south political divide at the heart of the European project. Taxpayers in Europe’s north resent underwriting their southern neighbours, while voters in the south are equally frustrated at having austerity imposed upon them from abroad. As has been noted repeatedly, this is the greatest tragedy of this crisis: a project that was meant to bring people together, now risks driving them further apart. Alas, events in the eurozone this autumn could further exacerbate this tension.

There are at least five key stand-offs to watch over the next few months:

Greece v Germany: Greece managed narrowly to escape running out of money today by raising almost 4 billion euros in short-term debt. But Athens will face an excruciating autumn. On almost every count, Greece is miles away from meeting its EU-mandated austerity targets, which raises the question of whether Germany – or the IMF – will pull the plug on the country in October when its next progress report is due.

Spain v the North: Amid continued problems, Spain could possibly request EU cash as early as September. But the country is simply too big for a Greece-style bail-out, while Madrid would not accept having its economic policies fully decided in Brussels and Berlin. Instead a third way must be found involving less money and softer conditions, probably with heavy and controversial ECB involvement.

The bail-out funds v national democracy: On September 12, Germany’s constitutional court will rule on whether the eurozone’s permanent bail-out fund – the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) – is compatible with the country’s “basic law’, following a host of complaints. Though unlikely, should it strike it down, the markets will go absolutely crazy.

The Dutch v Europe: September 12 will also see another example of national democracy reasserting itself: the Dutch elections. Geert Wilders, leader of the super-populist PVV, is seeking to turn the campaign into a referendum on Europe, hoping to tap into the Dutch anti-bail-out mood. At the same time, the Dutch socialists – currently leading in the polls – have vowed to resist both the EU fiscal treaty and further transfers of power to the EU without approval in referendums.

Germany v France: This autumn will also see negotiations over whether the eurozone will take the next big leap towards an economic union, with an October EU summit tasked with providing a “road map” for more integration. Ideas include a banking union (with a single supervisor and joint backstop) and collective government borrowing in the form of eurobonds. The issues are tremendously complicated, subject to a cobweb of disagreements and will take years to clear away. But importantly, this could widen the gap between Germany and France, with the two disagreeing fundamentally on the order of events.

The last severe ENSO occurred between 1997 and 1998. Severe rain in South America destroyed crops in Ecuador and flooded copper mines in Chile and Peru. However, before we get any indication of whether this will be a mild or strong ENSO event, we have the annual hurricane season to contend with. There are no signs yet of curbs on grain. Indeed, Russia, which has also been experiencing a drought that has slashed grain yields by about a quarter, has been at pains to say it will not be restricting shipments.

On Friday, Nikolai Fedorov, the country's agriculture minister, reiterated that there will be no curbs in the current growing season. However, there is a big question mark over the weather for the rest of the year. Oil is the commodity most affected by these weather systems, as the Gulf of Mexico is a significant producer of oil and gas. However, at the end of last week soybean prices surged to a record level on fears that Hurricane Isaac would damage crops and delay harvesting in parts of the US, which is the world's largest producer of the grain.

Significantly, the World Bank also cited an oil price shock, which would cause energy prices to leap, as one of the negative factors that could make things worse. Prices have been creeping higher as Western sanctions on Iran have resulted in a loss of about 1 million barrels per day in crude exports. So the weather is the critical factor behind the abrupt global food price increases in July and there could be more bad weather to come for the world's farmers. We should not panic about a food crisis just yet. We must, however, keep one eye on which way the wind is blowing.

According to the report, the US sent the message to Iran in order to avoid an Iranian military response that would target US installations in the Gulf region. The message was reportedly conveyed to Iran through two European countries that serve as a conduit of communication between Iran and the US in times of crisis.

Nationalist newspaper Makor Rishon has accused Yediot Aharonot of working with the Obama Administration against the Netanyahu government's planned strike on Iran. According to the New York Times, senior US officials have argued that Israel is "trying to corner" [Mr] Obama into a military commitment that he does not yet need to make.

[Mr] Netanyahu's remarks suggested a growing impatience with Israel's main ally, the United States, and other countries that have been pressing him to give diplomacy and sanctions more time to work and hold off on any go-it-alone strike on Iran. Recent heightened Israeli rhetoric has stoked speculation that Israel might attack Iran before the US elections in November, believing that President Barack Obama would give it military help and not risk alienating pro-Israeli voters.

"I believe the truth must be stated: The international community is not placing a clear red line for Iran and Iran does not see international resolve to stop its nuclear programme," [Mr] Netanyahu told his cabinet. "Unless Iran sees this clear red line and this clear resolve it will not stop moving forward with its nuclear programme, and Iran must not have nuclear weapons," he said, repeating his view that sanctions so far have not curbed Tehran's atomic ambitions.

Although [Mr] Netanyahu did not single out [Mr] Obama in his criticism, Israeli officials have said they hope for stronger language from the president about possible US military action. [Mr] Obama, who has had a frosty relationship with [Mr] Netanyahu, has insisted he will not allow Iran to build atomic weapons and that all options are on the table.

Among 1,278 patients who were resistant to two or more first-line tuberculosis drugs in Estonia, Latvia, Peru, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, South Korea and Thailand, 43.7 percent showed resistance to at least one second-line drug, according to a study led by Tracy Dalton at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The findings were published in the Lancet medical journal today.

About 1.4 million people died from TB, the second-deadliest infectious disease globally after AIDS, and 650,000 cases were multi-drug resistant in 2010, according to the World Health Organization. Rising infection rates prompted the UK to announce in May it will require pre-entry tuberculosis screening for migrants from 67 countries seeking to enter the country for more than 6 months.

“The global emergence of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis heralds the advent of widespread, virtually untreatable tuberculosis,” the study's authors said in the published paper.

The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano made the announcement together with an official admission that there have been "grave acts of disloyalty”. The "Vatileaks" scandal, as it is known, has filled Italian media. It has dominated the columns of Italian newspapers and magazines and been the subject of TV programmes, the BBC's David Willey in Rome reports. The leak of a string of highly sensitive internal documents from inside the Vatican's Secretariat of State, including personal letters to Pope Benedict XVI, are an evident embarrassment to the pope, our correspondent says.

The leaked documents include a letter to Pope Benedict by the Vatican's current ambassador to Washington alleging cronyism, nepotism and corruption among the administrators of Vatican City. Others concern poison pen memos criticising Carinal Tarcisio Bertone, the pope's number two, and the reporting of suspicious payments by the Vatican Bank.

Martini, once tipped as a future pope, urged the Church to recognise its errors and to embark on a radical path of change, beginning with the Pope. Thousands of people have been filing past his coffin in Milan, where he was archbishop for more than 20 years.

The widely respected cardinal - a member of the Jesuit religious order - was often outspoken in his writings and comments on Church teaching, says the BBC's David Willey in Rome. He was a courageous and outspoken figure during the 22 years he headed Europe's largest Catholic diocese, our correspondent says.

What they found was the widespread use of sophisticated, off-the-shelf computer espionage software by governments with questionable records on human rights. While the software is supposedly sold for use only in criminal investigations, the two came across evidence that it was being used to target political dissidents.

The software proved to be the stuff of a spy film: it can grab images of computer screens, record Skype chats, turn on cameras and microphones and log keystrokes. The two men said they discovered mobile versions of the spyware customized for all major mobile phones. But what made the software especially sophisticated was how well it avoided detection. Its creators specifically engineered it to elude antivirus software made by Kaspersky Lab, Symantec, F-Secure and others.

The software has been identified as FinSpy, one of the more elusive spyware tools sold in the growing market of off-the-shelf computer surveillance technologies that give governments a sophisticated plug-in monitoring operation. Research now links it to servers in more than a dozen countries, including Turkmenistan, Brunei and Bahrain, although no government acknowledges using the software for surveillance purposes.

The market for such technologies has grown to $5 billion a year from “nothing 10 years ago,” said Jerry Lucas, president of TeleStrategies, the company behind ISS World, an annual surveillance show where law enforcement agents view the latest computer spyware.

What was revealed in the audit was startling:

$16,000,000,000,000.00 had been secretly given out to US banks and corporations and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland. From the period between December 2007 and June 2010, the Federal Reserve had secretly bailed out many of the world's banks, corporations, and governments. The Federal Reserve likes to refer to these secret bailouts as an all-inclusive loan program, but virtually none of the money has been returned and it was loaned out at 0% interest.

Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious - the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs.

Americans should be swelled with anger and outrage at the abysmal state of affairs when an unelected group of bankers can create money out of thin air and give it out to megabanks and supercorporations like Halloween candy. If the Federal Reserve and the bankers who control it believe that they can continue to devalue the savings of Americans and continue to destroy the US economy, they will have to face the realization that their trillion dollar printing presses will eventually plunder the world economy.

The list of institutions that received the most money from the Federal Reserve can be found on page 131of the GAO Audit and are as follows.

Citigroup: $2.5 trillion ($2,500,000,000,000)

Morgan Stanley: $2.04 trillion ($2,040,000,000,000)

Merrill Lynch: $1.949 trillion ($1,949,000,000,000)

Bank of America: $1.344 trillion ($1,344,000,000,000)

Barclays PLC (United Kingdom): $868 billion ($868,000,000,000)

Bear Sterns: $853 billion ($853,000,000,000)

Goldman Sachs: $814 billion ($814,000,000,000)

Royal Bank of Scotland (UK): $541 billion ($541,000,000,000)

JP Morgan Chase: $391 billion ($391,000,000,000)

Deutsche Bank (Germany): $354 billion ($354,000,000,000)

UBS (Switzerland): $287 billion ($287,000,000,000)

Credit Suisse (Switzerland): $262 billion ($262,000,000,000)

Lehman Brothers: $183 billion ($183,000,000,000)

Bank of Scotland (United Kingdom): $181 billion ($181,000,000,000)

BNP Paribas (France): $175 billion ($175,000,000,000)

and many many more including banks in Belgium of all places.

GreenMedInfo, claiming to be the world’s most widely referenced, evidence-based natural medicine resource, posted an August 23 an article revealing the result of the findings of farmers and crop and pesticide management experts. The website specializes in posting abstracts (brief summaries of research articles or in-depth analyses of particular subjects) of scientific findings and academic papers. Dr Bruce Potter, University of Minnesota professor and farmer Charlie Sandager concluded that the primary corn pest rootworm has developed resistance to the proteins in the GMO (genetically modified organisms) Bt Corn that was designed to kill the pests.

Bt corn is a type of GMO and the subject of the recent investigation into the rootworm outbreak. One effect of the pest’s presence is that it prevents corn roots from absorbing water, especially serious given this year’s drought. Pest experts suggest that the primary reason for the rootworm-infested crops is that rootworms have become resistant to the Bt protein, resulting in strong and larger rootworm populations.

But not only are corn plants unable to absorb water, the plants become unstable and can easily topple over. Sandager said, “Strong wind came up and it just tipped the corn plants over like a big old tree.” Indeed, RawStory reported that last fall, the EPA warned of the problem. Bt corn, engineered a decade ago by Monsanto specifically to ward off the rootworm, is losing its battle. Even the EPA wondered if the company’s monitoring was “inadequate and likely to miss early resistance events.” With this year’s drought, corn crops hardly have a chance.

- When kippah-wearing Jews and non-Jews march in Sweden to show that they have no fear, I know fear.

- When anti-Semitism is again the most common currency of politics in Europe, I know fear.

- When the Chief Rabbi of Lyon receives death threats with menacing photos, I know fear.

- When a rabbi and his daughter are assaulted in the middle of Berlin, I know fear.

- When guards patrol the streets near Rome’s Jewish school with metal detectors, searching for explosives, I know fear.

- When I, a non-Jew, receive letters saying “dear feces eating insect, scratch around the Zionist dung as it’s natural for you” and my name appears in the list of the “mafia ebraica”, I know fear.

- When Bruxelles debates the criminalization of “Islamophobia” like the Soviet Union did with “deviationism”, I know fear.

- When circumcision is persecuted in Germany, like during the Shoah when the Jewish ritual could bring with it a death sentence, I know fear.

- When Hizbullah officials speak at the Sorbonne University, I know fear.

- When cartoonists’ houses are protected as bunkers with cameras, I know fear.

- When in Tolouse Jews are gunned down and nobody cares anymore, I know fear.

Today, fear dominates the heart of the very few writers and journalists who are willing to say the truth. When many of them are put on trial because of their ideas, I know fear. Because Jews and journalists are like the canary in the coalmine. If Europe fails to protect them, it must be feared that soon nobody will feel safe in Europe.