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.”

But according to the report's author: 'several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist'. Professor Alexis Jay, who wrote the report, condemned the 'blatant' collective failures by the council's leadership, concluding: 'It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered.'

The landmark report which exposed widespread failures of the council, police and social services revealed:

• Victims were doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, terrorised with guns, made to witness brutally-violent rapes and told they would be the next if they spoke out;

• They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated;

• One victim described gang rape as 'a way of life';

• Police 'regarded many child victims with contempt';

• Some fathers tried to rescue their children from abuse but were arrested themselves;

• The approximate figure of 1,400 abuse victims is likely to be a conservative estimate of the true scale of abuse.

The lack of reports was partly down to a fear of being racist, Prof Jay wrote, as the majority of the perpetrators were described as 'Asian men', and many were said to be of Pakistani origin. One young person told the inquiry that 'gang rape' was a usual part of growing up in the area of Rotherham where she lived.

Critics say there’s a reason for the discrepancy in media coverage: race. Mr Brown was black and the officer who shot him was white. Mr Taylor wasn’t black — he’s been described as white and Hispanic — and the officer who shot him August 11 outside a 7-Eleven in South Salt Lake wasn’t white.

The perceived double standard is fueling resentment and talk of double standards on conservative talk radio and social media, where the website Twitchy has compiled a list of Twitter comments asking why Mr Brown’s death has been front-page news for weeks while Mr Taylor’s was a footnote at best.

Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh blamed the discrepancy between the two cases on “the liberal world view” that portrays whites as oppressors and blacks as victims. In the current climate in the United States, a black person can never be the oppressor, and a white person can never be a victim,” said Mr Limbaugh on his national radio show last week.

A study by China’s Ministry of Water Resources found that approximately 55% of China’s 50,000 rivers that existed in the 1990s have disappeared. Moreover, China is over-exploiting its groundwater by 22 billion cubic meters per year; yet its per-capita water consumption is less than one third of the global average.

This is astounding data. More than 400 major cities in China are short of water, with some 110 facing “serious scarcity”. Beijing and other northern cities get most of their water from underground aquifers. Over the last five decades, China has had to drill increasingly deeper to gain access to water.

Another challenge China faces is logistics. More than 60% of China’s water is in the southern part of the country, but most of the usage is in the north and along the coastlines. When you consider that this is a country that has almost one fifth of the world’s population and is soon to become the world’s biggest economy, this is rapidly becoming a global problem.

Water availability has enormous political, military, economic, and social implications. And it’s foolish to simply sweep this reality under the rug.

But the rise of Islamic extremism across the Middle East, America’s growing willingness to deal with Iran and lingering leadership succession issues amongst member states are now unpicking the ties that have bound the GCC together in a tectonic shift that could have profound implications for the security of the world’s largest oil fields.

Earlier this year, state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation agreed a landmark deal with Abu Dhabi’s government to help exploit energy resources in the emirate. Traditionally, Gulf states have held close relationships with Western oil companies but experts say these deals will challenge the historic status quo further.

Exacting a heavy toll in Palestinian lives and property, Israel said it dealt a strong blow to Hamas, killing several of its military leaders and destroying the group's cross-border infiltration tunnels. But Israel also faced persistent rocket fire for nearly two months that caused an exodus from some border communities and became part of daily life in its commercial heartland. Minutes before the Egyptian-brokered truce began at 1200 ET, a rocket fired by Palestinian militants killed one person in an Israeli kibbutz, or collective farm, near the Gaza frontier, police said.

Following the signing of this agreement, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine ratified the agreement and allowed for the participation of Malaysian staff in the investigation. International experts admit that the survey of the wreck Malaysian Boeing 777 will take several weeks.

The second phase will involve searches pertaining to the remains of the victims of the crash of flight MH17. Thus, it is safe to assume the results of the investigation are actually classified and the final expert opinion will not be released (or only after a few years, when the political causes of the disaster will lose their relevance). The conclusion is simple – the intermediate results of the investigation directly prove the innocence of Russia and/or the Donesk militia.