USA - People have such short memories. Even though we are repeating so many of the same patterns that we witnessed in 2000-2001 and 2007-2008, most people do not think that another financial crash is coming. In fact, with the stock market setting record high after record high lately, I have been taking quite a bit of criticism for my relentless warnings about the coming financial storm. Of course these critics never offer any hard evidence that I have been wrong about anything. They just assume that since the stock market has soared to unprecedented heights that all of us "bears" must have been wrong.

UK - A sharp rise in the number of UK school leavers going on to university is failing to translate into higher levels of basic skills, according to a major international study. Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show the majority of students are completing higher education courses without good levels of literacy. In a report, it was revealed that just a quarter of UK graduates had top-level reading and writing skills compared with at least a third of those in some other developed nations such as Japan, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Australia.

NICARAGUA - A meteorite that landed "like a bomb", narrowly missing Nicaragua's main airport, has raised concerns over scientists' ability to track space objects on potential collision courses with Earth. Officials said they "thanked God" there were no injuries as the rock landed in Managua, a sprawling city of 1.2 million people, where it left a crater 40ft wide and 16ft deep. The object was believed to have been a small part of the asteroid 2014 RC, nicknamed "Pitbull", which astronomers had been monitoring as it passed the planet. Nasa currently tracks more than 11,000 asteroids that come relatively close to Earth but 2014 RC, which is the size of a large house, was only discovered on August 31.

UK - David Cameron is under growing pressure to ask the Queen to speak out in support of the Union as another opinion poll confirms a surge in support for Scottish independence. Senior MPs have suggested an intervention from Her Majesty could “make all the difference” as a TNS poll shows the Yes and No campaigns running neck and neck. The pound crashed to a 10-month low on Monday and £2.3 billion was wiped off the value of the six FTSE-100 companies based in Scotland on the first day of trading since a weekend poll put the Yes campaign ahead for the first time. The Prime Minister has been warned by his own MPs that his job may depend on the outcome of the Scottish referendum on September 18. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader — who would lose more than 40 MPs if Scotland votes for independence — would also come under pressure to resign if Scots vote to separate.

ISRAEL - A former head of Mossad said he doesn’t envision any joint effort between US and Iran in dealing with the Islamic State group, despite their mutual interest in halting the jihadist group’s advances across Iraq and Syria. Israel, he said, must also be on the alert, not so much because of the IS forces battling the Syrian army for control of areas right along Israel’s border in the Golan, but rather due to supporters of the group within its borders. “There are indications of sympathy for IS among Israeli citizens,” he said. “When there is a background of sympathy, there are usually also individuals who go on to broader activities.” Last week, Israel’s Channel 10 broadcast what it said was footage from a recent “Islamic State gathering” on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The report said the gathering underlined that the Islamic State intends to focus on Israel in the future.

USA - Barclays Plc, Bank of America Corp, Citigroup Inc and 10 other banks were accused in a lawsuit of conspiring to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark used to set rates for interest rate derivatives and other financial instruments. The Alaska Electrical Pension Fund sued yesterday in Manhattan federal court, claiming the banks colluded to set ISDAfix at artificial levels that allowed them to manipulate payments to investors in the derivatives. The banks’ actions affected trillions of dollars of financial instruments tied to the benchmark, the pension fund said. The banks communicated using electronic chat rooms and other means of private communication, typically submitting identical rate quotes beginning at least in 2009, the Alaska fund said.

INDIA/PAKISTAN - Rescue teams are battling to retrieve hundreds of thousands of people stranded by damaging floods in India and Pakistan. The province of Punjab, where rivers are bursting their banks, is the worst-hit area in Pakistan. In Indian-administered Kashmir, the capital Srinagar is submerged with many residents waiting for rescue on rooftops. One week of flooding has left at least 280 people dead in both countries. Army and air force troops worked overnight to rescue marooned residents, officials in Indian-administered Kashmir said. There are fears that heavy rains and flooding could spread south to Pakistan's Sindh province over the next week.

UK - The Scots are on the verge of an act of self-mutilation that will trash our global identity. Right: it’s time to speak for Britain. If these polls are right, then we are on the verge of an utter catastrophe for this country. In just 10 days’ time we could all be walking around like zombies – on both sides of the Scottish border.

UK - The first Scottish referendum poll to see a Yes vote take the lead since the start of 2014 has unnerved traders, seeing sterling tumble. Growing momentum for the pro-independence campaign has alarmed investors, who until now had not believed there was more than an outside chance of a Yes win. “Until recently the polls showed a done deal”, said Michael Saunders, head of European economics at Citi. Valentin Marinov of Citi said that there is a “clear risk of further downside correction”, as sterling could drop further still. Confidence in the pound has been knocked, as a Yes vote "could easily derail the UK economic recovery", said Deutsche Bank analysts.

EUROPE - Despite unveiling a package of interest rate cuts and a new stimulus scheme, the ECB has failed to prevent a "collapse" in euro area investor confidence. A key gauge of euro area confidence saw a "collapse" this month, as efforts to revive the currency bloc failed to excite investors. Falling to its lowest level in over a year, both components of the Sentix Investor Confidence index - assessing the current situation and investors’ six-month expectations - were both in negative territory. The headline reading dropped to 2.7 to -9.8 in September, while analysts had expected to see just a slip in confidence, to 2.0. Sebastian Wanke, senior analyst at Sentix, said that “this constellation signals a renewed recession for the eurozone”. Eurozone growth ground to a halt in the second quarter, statiscians confirmed on Friday.

EUROPE - A new controversy over Germany's austerity dictate has flared up on the eve of the Wales NATO summit. At the occasion of a high-ranking meeting last week, the President of the European Central Bank (ECB) Mario Draghi, characterized Berlin's austerity policy as fatal. However, the German chancellor immediately rejected his call for a change. The French minister of the economy was forced to resign, because of his public criticism of the austerity dictates, which, since the beginning of the year have aggravated the crisis in France.

MIDDLE EAST - Violent turmoil in the Middle East could indirectly lead to millions of people starving from food shortages, research suggests. Scientists have found that the highest concentration of wild crop plants needed to produce new food varieties lie in an area known as the Fertile Crescent. However, this area is also at the centre of a number of civil wars that are placing valuable crop species at risk of extinction. The Fertile Crescent is an ancient area of fertile soil arcing around the Arabian desert from Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and ending in Iraq and Iran. It has the largest diversity of 'crop wild relatives' (CWRs) - species closely related to our crops which are needed to create future 'super crop' varieties. These wild relatives of crops grow naturally outside mainstream agriculture and possess a number of useful traits including drought tolerance, yield improvement, and resilience to pests and diseases.

TURKEY - Recep Tayyip Erdogan is making his mark as Turkey’s first directly elected president barely a week after taking the oath of office. The former prime minister is already shifting Turkey away from customs acquired over the nine decades since the end of the Ottoman Empire, a period in which largely secularist elites held sway. In the most symbolic break with the past, Mr Erdogan announced last week that he would not work out of the Cankaya Palace, the seat of the presidency since the era of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded the modern Turkish state. Meanwhile, Turkish newspapers report that thousands of children whose parents preferred secular institutions have been allocated places at Islamic schools. Mr Erdogan has set out a goal of “raising a religious generation” and pushed through legislation in 2012 that allowed children from the age of 10 to attend state religious schools.

AUSTRALIA - Investigative journalist Frank Walker’s Maralinga is a must-read true story of the abuse of our servicemen, scientists treating the Australian population as lab rats and politicians sacrificing their own people in the pursuit of power. During the Menzies era, with the blessing of the Prime Minister, the British government exploded twelve atomic bombs on Australian soil.

UK - A Peter Pan pantomime in Bournemouth is being used as part of a sophisticated hacking attack from Eastern Europe that is targetting thousands of British businesss. An email claiming to be a £145 invoice for nine tickets to a performance of Peter Pan at the Bournemouth Pavilion theatre contained an attachment that if opened installs a virus onto the receipent's computer. The malware, which the email claims are the tickets for the pantomime performance, captures highly sensitive personal and commericial information including passwords and is almost "undetectable" by current anti-virus software. The email has been targeted at businesses around the UK, breaching firm's electronic defences and spam filters.