The crossing is formally under the control of UNDOF, an international peacekeeping force, which too is falling apart as contingents are recalled by their governments. Damascus hit back at the rebels Thursday, August 28, by sending the Syrian air force to destroy the new rebel positions. This was a flagrant contravention of Israel-Syrian armistice agreements. The Israeli air force might have been justified in scrambling to combat the Syrian air incursion, but was not ordered to do so.

This appeared to contradict a fact which Israel has kept very dark: The 30 or so Syrian rebel offensive to wrest Quneitra would have stood no chance without Israel’s aid - not just in medical care for their injured, but also in limited supplies of arms, intelligence and food. Israel acted as a member, along with the US and Jordan, of a support system for rebel groups fighting in southern Syria. Their efforts are coordinated through a war-room which the Pentagon established last year near Amman. The US, Jordanian and Israeli officers manning the facility determine in consultation which rebel factions are provided with reinforcements from the special training camps run for Syrian rebels in Jordan, and which will receive arms.

Wednesday night, at his news conference to sum up that war, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu included in his list of Israel’s diplomatic successes, the winning over of world opinion to the perception that Hamas and Al Qaeda belong to the same family of terrorists and share the same fundamentalist ideology, which must be fought. As he spoke, Al Qaeda fighters, intermingled with Syrian rebel factions, fetched up just yards from Israel’s northern border fence.

DEBKAfile’s military sources say that Washington, Amman and Jerusalem can expect to keep the embarrassing fact fairly quiet only until the first black Al Qaeda flag is raised over a rebel position at the Quneitra crossing or a captured Syrian post opposite the line of Israeli positions on the Golan. Israel will then face a new dilemma on this sensitive front, which will take some explaining.

The US Department of Justice has the power to investigate and overhaul problematic police departments. Ferguson has not yet been investigated, but it's a likely candidate. "Police misconduct is not usually just caused by one rotten apple. It is caused by a rotten barrel," says Stephen Rushin at the University Of Illinois College Of Law in Champaign. "A lot of people would argue that you're seeing that in Ferguson."

For the US public, an investigation would not be enough. A petition to the White House has called for a "Mike Brown Law", requiring all police to wear an on-body camera while on duty. It garnered more than 100,000 signatures, which obliges the White House to respond to the request.

There are no known cases of illness from the amoeba. But officials warned residents to take precautions against getting water in their nasal passages, which is how the amoeba can move to the brain. "Families can take simple steps to protect themselves from exposure to this amoeba, the most important being to avoid allowing water to go up your nose while bathing or swimming in a pool," state health officer Jimmy Guidry. "It is important to remember that the water is safe to drink; the amoeba cannot infect an individual through the stomach."

The St John public school system has ordered water fountains turned off at all schools and was taping them up, school system spokeswoman Jennifer Boquet said. St John is now under an emergency order to perform a 60-day free chlorine burn on the water system, in which the water lines are infused with free chlorine. That is a stronger, faster-acting disinfectant than the normal infusion of chloramines, a combination of chlorine and ammonia.

The handout comes just weeks after it was revealed more than £20 billion of EU funds will be spent on tackling unemployment in Portugal. Rory Broomfield, director of the eurosceptic Better Off Out campaign group, said: “The UK taxpayer is being asked to spend billions of pounds to countries throughout the EU on projects that it may not directly support or see a benefit from.

“It makes a mockery of the UK if it is expected to give the EU funds to support fishing industries in landlocked countries such as the Czech Republic. The fisheries sector, which accounts for just 0.04 per cent of the Czech Republic economy, will benefit from at least £24 million of ring-fenced money. As a result, the UK taxpayer is being taken for a ride and there seems to be little political support in Government to end this practice."

The vulnerability of this network, known as Signaling System #7, isn’t news to security researchers. A German engineer named Tobias Engel first publicized the potential abuse of SS7’s location-tracking abilities at a Chaos Computer Club conference in 2008, and commercial services now offer tools that can query SS7 for the rough location of a cellphone or cellular-capable device from almost anywhere in the world.

While intelligence agencies have been shown to possess similar capabilities now for years, commercially available surveillance software used to perform such queries is becoming more accessible, and more precise, according to a recent report in the Washington Post, for anyone willing to pay.

Nine foot high steel fencing is being put around key parts of the Celtic Manor Resort where the summit is being held and at venues in Cardiff city centre. Police are also setting up checkpoints and entry gates to screen people as they enter the cordon. The operation is one of the biggest ever police deployments. More than 9,000 police officers will be drafted in to protect 180 VIPs including 60 heads of state and senior ministers.

Kim Howells, a former foreign office minister and chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, warned earlier this week that the summit was a prime target for jihadist terrorists. He said: "It will be a target, there is no question about it, that is why the security measures taken are so intense. With a Nato summit there is going to be a raised expectation or raised awareness that there might be an attack – that is why all the special measures have been taken.”

Although the law, SB 962, applies only to California, it undoubtedly will affect other states, which often follow the Golden State’s lead. It also seems unlikely phone manufacturers would exclude the feature from phones sold elsewhere. And although the legislation allows users to opt out of the feature after they buy the phone, few likely will do so.

The law raises concerns about how the switch might be used or abused, because it also provides law enforcement with the authority to use the feature to kill phones. And any feature accessible to consumers and law enforcement could be accessible to hackers, who might use it to randomly kill phones for kicks or revenge, or to perpetrators of crimes who might — depending on how the kill switch is implemented — be able to use it to prevent someone from calling for help.

“It’s great for the consumer, but it invites a lot of mischief,” says Hanni Fakhoury, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which opposes the law. “You can imagine a domestic violence situation or a stalking context where someone kills [a victim's] phone and prevents them from calling the police or reporting abuse. It will not be a surprise when you see it being used this way.”

"Unfortunately, I think it could come on a crash similar to what happened in 2007," she told CNBC. "You can see that the entire bull market trend over the past five years has started to reverse. When you see that kind of gyration around the trend, typically it suggests you're going to see some severe volatility. As scary as it is, I think that we could see possibly a 50 percent or 60 percent correction - an equal and opposite reaction to all these unusual policy moves."

America's central bank has kept short-term interest rates near zero since the end of 2008, as it battled to fuel growth after the financial crisis, and has indicated it may not raise them until the middle of 2015. Its decision not to raise rates despite the economy improving, as well as a blast of quantitative easing that is slowly being wound down, has seen stock markets soar.

However, Ms Doolittle does not believe that this upward trend will continue. "As high as these stocks markets go, I've become bearish because the underlying technicals from the long-term really support this view," she said. "It's tough to know what the exact catalyst will be. But that's the very nature of that kind of sell-off. They start slowly and then happen very suddenly."

“A reading of the documents of Vatican II shows clearly that the bishops meeting in Rome did not deviate from the belief that there is only one Church of Jesus Christ and identified that Church with the Catholic Church in communion with the successor of Peter,” said Monsignor Keith Newton, whose ordinariate is headquartered in London.

“So much ecumenical work is about dialogue and reports which, though important in themselves, cannot be a substitute for something actually happening to restore full communion,” he continued. “The full corporate unity of the Church is the will of Christ for which all Christians must work and pray. The ordinariate, far from making ecumenical relations more difficult, holds out a vision for a means by which the goal of unity might be realized.”