Armed ships from China and the Philippines have been confronting each other in a naval standoff for more than a month just a couple of hundred nautical miles off Filipino land.

The US has been building up the Philippines’s military and security forces, offering funding and weapons in exchange for greater American presence in the country. Greater US involvement with the Philippines and surrounding areas are part of a broader imperial plan to counter China’s regional influence, a provocation which could escalate to armed hostilities.

Washington’s 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty with the Philippines states, “Each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on either of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common dangers in accordance with its constitutional processes.” The treaty essentially obligates the US to confront China to defend the Philippines, a reality which has only intensified the antagonism over the disputed territory.

The conservative Nea Dimokratia will probably receive only about 20 percent and the social democratic Pasok hardly more than 14 percent of the votes. In Athens, even before the elections, it was being forecast that it would be impossible to create a stable government with a small majority, and that within a few months, new elections would have to be held, which would jeopardize EU and IMF financial aid. This would mean that, to obtain promises of dubious financial assistance, Greece, which has been forced to downsize its economy into an abyss, will be faced with utter ruin.

The social situation is desolate. The number of unemployed, as well as of those dependent on food allocations has dramatically grown, just as the number of suicides. German enterprises, whose profitable business in Greece has contributed to the development of Athens' debt crisis, are now seeking to exploit the crisis for lucrative business opportunities. The dramatic aggravation of the situation is also flanked by a rise of the extreme right.

The neo-Nazi Chrysi Avgi Party, with estimated electoral results of 6.8 percent, has achieved entry into the Greek national parliament. Head of the party, Nikolaos Michaloliakos had already been elected to the City Council of Athens in November 2010, where he is known for his occasional Nazi salutes. In the Greek parliament, the Chrysi Avgi Party has replaced the extreme right LAOS Party, which until the beginning of this year, had even been in the government coalition.

Chrysi Avgi is known for its militants' violent racist attacks on migrants, for its demands to annex territories of neighboring countries, and for its cooperation with France's Front National and Germany's NPD. Its electoral success is an intermediate result of the ultimate right's radicalization in Greece under the impression created by the incessantly escalating crisis.

As I have written about previously, the United States actually has plenty of oil. If we would simply use the resources that we already have, we would never have to import a single drop of foreign oil. But instead, we continue to be the largest importer of oil on the planet and we are allowing China to rapidly buy up oil and gas deposits inside the United States. This is fundamentally wrong and it is a serious threat to our national security. But apparently everything is for sale in the United States today, and that includes our precious energy resources. The Chinese government is using two giant corporations to buy up these energy resources.

The first is the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC). According to Wikipedia, this corporation is 100 percent owned by the Chinese government... CNOOC Group is a state-owned oil company, fully owned by the Government of the People's Republic of China, and the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) performs the rights and obligations of shareholder on behalf of the government.

The second is Sinopec Corporation. Sinopec Group is the largest shareholder (about 75% of the shares) in Sinopec Corporation. And as the Sinopec website tells us, Sinopec Group is owned by the Chinese government... Sinopec Group, the largest shareholder of Sinopec Corp, is a super-large petroleum and petrochemical group incorporated by the State in 1998 based on the former China Petrochemical Corporation. Funded by the State, it is a State authorized investment arm and State-owned controlling company.

So wherever you see CNOOC or Sinopec you can replace those names with the Chinese government. The Chinese government essentially runs both of those companies. So thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars will continue to leave the United States and go to China. And China will continue to use some of the money they are getting from us to buy up pieces of America.

Does anyone else out there see something very, very wrong with all of this?

However unlikely, the speculation is an indication of Europe’s plight in a world with little growth and every government looking at exports as a way to grow. A cheap currency giving an artificial boost to competitiveness is more palatable than austerity. The euro remains relatively strong for a variety of reasons. Despite domestic tensions, Europeans are not taking their money out of Europe, they are just moving it to safer homes within the region. Moreover, European banks continue to sell off dollar assets and bring the proceeds home. In addition, central banks in emerging countries continue to hold the euro as something of a reserve currency.

Meanwhile, the Americans and Chinese prefer to see the euro remain strong since exporters on both sides of the Pacific compete against Europeans. To the extent that the euro does drop, pressure will increase on the Fed to consider another round of quantitative easing to keep the dollar relatively depressed. If the euro collapses that will be especially bad news for China though, since 18 per cent of China’s exports go to Europe. In April, Chinese exports to the euro zone were down 2.4 per cent from a year ago, according to broker CLSA. Some of those exports were from German makers in China itself. For example, Pakistani textile mills have recently imported capital equipment from Siemens plants on the mainland. But if the euro sinks, German manufacturers will export from home rather than from their Chinese factories.

Some analysts suspect that China has been trying to support the euro and indeed, data from BNY Mellon suggests that as the growth in Chinese reserves slows, the euro falls. Meanwhile, the liquidity from the excess printing of money especially in the US continues to spill over into the rest of the world. Since the crisis, once again liquidity stemming from the US has driven commodity prices up and helped stoke credit booms in many emerging markets such as in Brazil.

Some 40 companies in East London are pressing ahead with a group legal action against Locog, the London 2012 organiser.

They include two garages, RA Autos and MV Motors in Queen’s Yard, Hackney Wick. Their depots are only 50 yards from the Olympic Park’s main media gate and they say they had no work during last week’s official opening of the main stadium because customers were stuck in the ensuing traffic jams. Mick Vallance, who owns MV Motors, said: “That was just for a test event.”

“Imagine the real thing. They’ve told us to work night shifts to avoid the traffic but they don’t seem to understand customers still have to get their vehicles to us.” The traders say while Lord Coe plans to spend £80 million on stunts to impress VIPs, he is refusing to help keep traders afloat. “All we want is for them to cover our overheads, about £2,000 a week, for a few weeks ,” said Mr Vallance. “The Olympic values are meant to be excellence, friendship and respect. They have shown none to us.”

The election in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), a western German state with a bigger population than the Netherlands and an economy the size of Turkey, was held 18 months before a national election in which Merkel is expected to fight for a third term. She remains popular in Germany for her steady handling of the euro zone debt crisis, but the sheer scale of her party's defeat leaves her vulnerable at a time when a backlash against her insistence on fiscal discipline is building across Europe.

According to first projections, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) won 38.8 percent of the vote and will have enough to form a stable majority with the Greens, who scored 12.2 percent. The two left-leaning parties had run a fragile minority government for the past two years under popular SPD leader Hannelore Kraft, whose decisive victory on Sunday could propel her to national prominence. Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) saw their support plunge to just 25.8 percent, down from nearly 35 percent in 2010, and the worst result in the state since World War Two.

"This is not a good evening for Merkel," said Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at Berlin's Free University. "The SPD is strengthened by this election, which will stir things up in Berlin." The blow comes only two days before France's new president, Socialist Francois Hollande, is due to visit Berlin and press Merkel for a shift away from austerity and more emphasis on growth-oriented measures in Europe. Other big countries like Italy also want Merkel to take a more balanced approach to the debt crisis and an election in Greece last week showed massive public resistance to tough austerity.

The main beneficiary of the election, the hard-Left Syriza coalition, came a startling second on a promise to tear up the deal, which promises EU loans to keep massively-indebted Greece afloat, but demands crippling spending cuts in return. Germany, the principal lender, has said it will stop payments if Greece breaks its promises on spending.

Mr Pangalos warned: "There is a school of thought that says the Germans are bluffing. They need Greece and will never throw us out of the eurozone. But what will happen, which is almost certain, is they will not give us the money to pay our debts. We will be in wild bankruptcy, out-of-control bankruptcy. The state will not be able to pay salaries and pensions. This is not recognised by the citizens. We have got until June before we run out of money."

"We have been spending the future for half a century. What [the anti-bailout forces] are really asking from the EU is not just to pay our bills, but also to pay for the deficit which we are still creating. I'm sure the Germans don't want Greece to leave the euro. What I don't know is how much they're willing to pay. It depends on the German man on the street. Is he willing to pay his taxes to save Greece? I doubt it." The deputy prime minister also warned that chaos could boost the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party, which won an unprecedented seven per cent of the vote, and 21 seats, in Sunday's election.

"In the places where the police voted, the fascists got 25 per cent," he said. "They are a serious threat. They have used violence already – you don't know where it will stop. You know how it happened in Germany – it started with the Jews, then the Communists, then everybody – it could happen here. This is the country, after the Soviet Union and Germany itself, with the biggest percentage of [Second World War] casualties in its population."

Voters punished New Democracy and Pasok at last Sunday's polls for backing tough EU terms for bailing out Greece. Polls show a new vote could sweep anti-bailout parties to power, threatening Greece's membership of the euro. European central bankers have already begun openly discussing the possibility of Greece leaving the eurozone.

Mr Papoulias's office said the president would meet initially with New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras, Syriza's Alexis Tsipras and Pasok's Evangelos Venizelos at noon (09:00 GMT) on Sunday. As the parties that won the most votes in last Sunday's election, they have all been allowed to try to form a government.

But none have managed to cobble together a coalition that creates a majority in Greece's 300-seat parliament. The stumbling block appears to have been Syriza's insistence that any new government must cancel austerity measures agreed in return for EU-IMF loans worth €130 billion ($170 billion; £105 billion).

At a meeting this coming Wednesday, the four cardinals of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which oversees Catholic Church doctrine, plan to agree a proposal for reuniting the society with the Catholic Church, and will submit it to the pope.

The Swiss-based SSPX, rejects some of the reforms made at the historic 1962 Second Vatican Council. It defied Rome in 1988 by illegally consecrating four bishops, which led to their excommunication by the late Pope John Paul. The Vatican said last month that it had received an answer SSPX to the Holy See's ultimatum that the group clarify its doctrinal position or risk a painful break with Rome. "The response is encouraging, it is a step forward," said Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi.

Radio Vatican recently cited Lombardi as saying the pope's top priority this year is "to successfully conclude the dialogue with the Priest Brotherhood Pius X and thereby to overcome a painful rift."

The ruling came in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from a public interest group, which said the public has a right to know about any spying on citizens. The appeals court agreed that the NSA can reject the request, and does not even have to confirm whether it has any arrangement with the Internet giant.

"Any information pertaining to the relationship between Google and NSA would reveal protected information about NSA's implementation of its information assurance mission," Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote in the appeals opinion. The non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a formal request to make public documents related to the dealings, and said much of the information had already been in news media. The request stemmed from a January 2010 cyber attack on Google that primarily targeted the Gmail email accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Up to 600 people denouncing the Bank of England rallied in London and a Reuters witness said scuffles broke out between some demonstrators and police, with at least 12 arrests. The Indignados and the offshoot Occupy and Take the Square movements had called for a global day of action against anti-debt austerity policies and the widening gap between rich and poor, but nowhere were protests as large as in Spain.

A year after tens of thousands set up a month-long camp in Madrid's central Puerta del Sol square, drawing international attention, indignant Spaniards have even more to be angry about. Unemployment has soared to over 24 percent, over half the country's youth is out of work, the economy has dipped back into recession and one of its largest banks has been nationalized.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's conservative government has passed painful austerity measures that have hit once-sacred public health and education spending in an effort to appease international markets and avoid a Greek-style bailout. "We have to stand up and say enough is enough! They pull our hair telling us we're lazy so they can dismantle social welfare and take away health and education and now they're bailing out the bankers," said Gloria Bravo, 48, a civil servant.

Rescue money for banks, crippled after a 10-year building bubble burst four years ago, is a touchy subject for Spaniards, especially after the government took a stake in lender Bankia on Wednesday. "They bail out banks but not people," banners read in Cantabria, northern Spain, home to Spain's biggest bank Santander. Demonstrators gathered in more than 80 cities across Spain, chanting the slogan that has become a mantra at protests over the past year: "They say it's democracy but it's not."

The three nations are major traders, and together accounted for 19.6 percent of global gross domestic product and 18.5 percent of exports in 2010, according to a feasibility study that the governments issued last year on the proposed trade pact. But they are divided by political distrust, trade barriers and diverging investment policies.

"In response to a slow economic recovery and rising trade protectionism around the world, many countries are seeking to strengthen regional economic integration to expand their market share and raise their competitiveness," China's Wen told reporters after talks in Beijing with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak.

"Northeast Asia is the most economically vibrant region in the world," Wen said. "The establishment of an FTA will unleash the economic vitality of our region and give a strong boost to economic integration in east Asia."

The small, upstart party known as the Pirates has the political establishment sitting up and taking notice. Analysts attribute the Pirates’ success, in part, to many voters’ feelings of alienation from traditional center-left and center-right parties. “The party is something that people are projecting their hopes onto at the moment,” said Stephan Kletcha, a political science researcher at Erlangen’s Friedrich Alexander University.

In September, the Pirates won 15 seats in the Berlin Senate. The unprecedented win was a surprise even for party members, officials said, but it gave them the momentum to win seats in the western state of Saarland in March, led by 22-year-old former Goth model Jasmin Maurer.

On May 6, voters in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein gave the Pirates six seats in parliament. Polls forecast the Pirates will win more Sunday in the legislature of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia. Now, some of these “swashbucklers” are eyeing real power as part of state coalition governments.

“I’d like a new political system in which [lawmakers] vote according to conscience rather than party,” said Daniel Schweighofer, who administers Liquid Feedback, and who acknowledged that he holds on to some of his old anarchist ideals. “The Pirate Party isn’t important. What is crucial are our goals.”

"This union could start with two or three" members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, she told AFP, adding that the proposal for a Gulf union put forward by Saudi King Abdullah was "backed by Bahrain." Unlike most other Gulf countries ruled by Sunni dynasties, Bahrain was hit last year by a wave of protests inspired by the Arab Spring and led by its Shiite majority. The tiny neighbour of the Gulf heavyweight continues to see frequent confrontations between police and protesters despite a brutal crackdown on mass protests in mid-March last year, a day after Saudi forces rolled into Bahrain to help quell the uprising.

On Friday, a top Gulf official who requested not to be named also said Gulf leaders will "discuss the idea of a union between Saudi Arabia and Bahrain." The GCC, which was formed in 1981, also includes Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the UAE. Rajab declined to elaborate on the nature of the proposed union, saying only that it could follow the "European Union model." "In Bahrain, we support setting up a Gulf union to protect us from the threats facing the region on the political, economic, security and military fronts," she said.

King Abdullah told his fellow Gulf leaders in December that the GCC should move from the "phase of cooperation to a phase of union within a single entity." A joint committee comprising three representatives of each member state is tasked with thinking the proposal through and should present its findings to Monday's summit.

US media reports say that market regulators have already begun an investigation into the losses. According to the New York Times, the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at JP Morgan's accounting practices and the way it updated the markets about the loss making trades. Credit rating agency Fitch said the scale of the loss was "manageable". But it also said the size of the trade and the fact the situation was ongoing, implied that was proving difficult for JP Morgan to fix the problem.

As a result Fitch downgraded JP Morgan's debt from A plus to AA minus and said that another downgrade could be possible in the next six months. JP Morgan's losses undermined confidence in other US banking shares. Citigroup closed 4.2% lower, Goldmans Sachs fell 3.9% and Morgan Stanley lost 4.2%. US politicians have called for action.

The strategy taken at the CIO unit, run by Ina Drew in New York and Achilles Macris in London, had been "riskier, more volatile and less effective" than previously believed, Mr Dimon said. "These were egregious mistakes," he said. "They were self-inflicted and this is not how we want to run a business. It could get worse," he warned. "This could go on for a little bit." He said the risky hedging strategy could cost the bank an additional $1 billion.