The 15-nation council has been split on Syria since 2011. Russia, President Bashar al-Assad's ally, and China have vetoed three resolutions condemning Assad and calling for punitive steps against his government. But the United States has intervened in conflicts before without Security Council backing, most notably in the Kosovo War in 1999, and could do so again.

Any strike by the United States, Britain, France and others without a clear UN mandate would likely infuriate Russia, which could be expected to denounce it as illegal. Richard Haas, president of the US Council on Foreign Relations think tank, rejected the idea - suggested by Russia - that a Western attack on Syria would need UN approval.

"The UN Security Council is not the sole or unique custodian about what is legal and what is legitimate, and, as many have pointed out, it was bypassed at the time of Kosovo," he told reporters in a conference call. Legitimacy for a strike on Syria, Haas said, could come from a "coalition of the willing" of individual countries that support retaliation against Assad to demonstrate that the use of weapons of mass destruction will not be tolerated. That coalition could include Arab countries and have formal backing from NATO or other institutions, he said.

Last week Barack Obama had convened an emergency meeting to discuss the violent crackdown against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, only for the US president to find himself confronted with an even more dramatic challenge – a chemical weapon attack in Syria. Both events pose obvious and immediate policy challenges. Should American aid to Egypt be cut off? Should the US make military strikes against Syria? The case for military action against Bashar al-Assad’s regime is gathering international momentum: Britain, France and Germany have all indicated support for military [intervention].

How America responds will, in part, be dictated by how firmly Mr Obama decides to stick to his foreign policy strategy: he wants to lessen American involvement in the Middle East, so allowing him to concentrate on domestic reforms, addressing the rise of China and the perfection of his golf swing.

Where possible, Mr Obama has preferred to let allies take more of the strain of unfolding events in the region. He let Britain and France take the lead in military operations in Libya – albeit with indispensable American help. Ideally, he would also like to respond to turmoil in the Middle East in concert with a group of like-minded regional allies. But there is a big problem with that strategy. Traditionally, US policy in the region rested on strong relations with five crucial players: Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and the Gulf states. Whatever their differences on the surface, all these nations were status quo powers.

However, the old status quo in the Middle East no longer exists – and America’s traditional allies are now all pulling in different directions. The result is that the Obama administration will find it extremely difficult to forge a common regional approach to the turmoil. The situation in Egypt, more than Syria, has created irreconcilable differences between the US’s partners.

Speaking to an Arabic-language radio station operated by the United States, Syria's Deputy Information Minister Halaf Al-Maftah said that Israel would face not only Syria in the event that the US, Britain and France attempted to unseat Bashar al-Assad. A coalition consisting of Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria would respond to any attack against Assad with a response against Israel. In addition, terrorist groups in Syria and Lebanon would attack Israel with full force.

Al-Maftah added that Syria has “strategic weapons” that it would use in its attack on Israel. He did not specify what those weapons were. “Syria is ready to deal with all scenarios,” said Al-Maftah. “We consider these declarations of a possible attack as a form of psychological warfare and pressure on Syria. We are not worried about them. We hope that those threatening us will listen closely to what we are saying. We believe that the only solution for the Syrian issue is a political one,” he added.

In recent days, the US has sent warships off Syria's coast, with the assumption being that they were waiting for word from the White House to attack Syria and remove Assad from power. Over the weekend, the US Navy expanded its presence in the Mediterranean Sea with a fourth cruise-missile-armed warship.

"Using force without UN Security Council backing is a blatant violation of international law that will only worsen the situation on the ground," Lavrov told reporters in Moscow. Russia would not allow itself be drawn into a fight, he said. "Look at our position over the last years", he said, referring to Libya, Yugoslavia and Iraq, where Moscow did not offer a directly military response.

Mr Lew said that in such a case it will be unable to meet obligations such as pensions, military salaries and Medicare payments. The country's borrowing limit is currently capped at $16.7 trillion (£10.7 trillion). "Extraordinary measures are projected to be exhausted in the middle of October," Mr Lew said in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner and other lawmakers.

"At that point, the US will have reached the limit of its borrowing authority, and Treasury would be left to fund the government with only the cash we have on hand on any given day," he said. The cash balance at that time is forecast to be about $50 billion, which Mr Lew said, would be "insufficient to cover net expenditures for an extended period".

He warned that a delay in raising the limit "would cause irreparable harm to the American economy". He explained that if investors become unwilling to loan to the United States, the country could face an immediate cash shortfall. "Such a scenario could undermine financial markets and result in significant disruptions to the economy," he said.

The Daily Treasury Statement released today showed the status of the government’s accounts as of the close of business on Friday, August 23. Because the Treasury does no business over the weekend, the federal government’s debt did not change on Saturday or Sunday.

The statement for August 23 said the federal debt subject to the legal limit set by Congress was $16,699,396,000,000 — or $25 million below the current limit of $16,699,421,000,000. Every Daily Treasury Statement since May 17 has also shown the legally limited debt at $16,699,396,000,000, or $25 million below the limit. During the 100-day period from Friday, May 17 to Sunday, August 25, according to the Treasury, the legally limited debt of the federal government did not change.

On May 17, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew sent House Speaker John Boehner a letter indicating that the Treasury was then hitting the legal limit on the debt and that he would begin using “extraordinary measures” to allow the government to continue borrowing money without exceeding that limit.

The market for dollar-denominated junk-rated debt has expanded more than eightfold since the end of 1997 from $243 billion, according to Morgan Stanley. That compares with a quadrupling of the investment-grade market to $4.2 trillion as tracked by the Bank of America Merrill Lynch US Corporate Index.

While Federal Reserve policies have pushed investors toward riskier investments to generate high yields, allowing even the neediest companies that might otherwise default to access capital markets, concern is rising that missed payments may soar when benchmark rates begin to increase. Martin Feldstein, a past president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, said last week that low rates should be allowed to rise because they’re driving investors into risky behavior.

“The growth in the market, and volume of supply is less important than quality of issuance,” Adam Richmond, a credit strategist at Morgan Stanley in New York, said in a telephone interview. “When we see a heavy volume of lower-quality deals, that’s when you need to worry a little bit.”

This from a 2010 Genie Energy press release: Claude Pupkin, CEO of Genie Oil and Gas, commented, “Genie’s success will ultimately depend, in part, on access to the expertise of the oil and gas industry and to the financial markets. Jacob Rothschild and Rupert Murdoch are extremely well regarded by and connected to leaders in these sectors. Their guidance and participation will prove invaluable.”

“I am grateful to Howard Jonas and IDT for the opportunity to invest in this important initiative,” Lord Rothschild said. “Rupert Murdoch’s extraordinary achievements speak for themselves and we are very pleased he has agreed to be our partner. Genie Energy is making good technological progress to tap the world’s substantial oil shale deposits which could transform the future prospects of Israel, the Middle East and our allies around the world.”

Hedge funds, meanwhile, are also dumping Monsanto stock, most likely due to sharply increased "negative sentiment." This means people increasingly don't like Monsanto, and that's a direct result of all the growing realizations about the dangers of GMOs, Monsanto's predatory business practices, the company's dangerous experiments that have already unleashed genetic pollution, and the fact that GM corn has been experimentally found to cause widespread cancer tumors in rat studies.

Just the fact that Monsanto's GE wheat trials got out of control and contaminated a wheat field in Oregon - causing Japan and South Korea to ban U.S. wheat imports - has resulted in 150 groups now demanding the USDA keep a tighter lid on Monsanto's GMO experiments. These groups are fed up with seeing the market value of their crops destroyed by sloppy "open field" experiments being conducted by Monsanto that spread genetic pollution across the country and contaminate non-GMO crops.

The use of chemical weapons is beyond the pale, we’re told, and must be met with force to show Assad and the world that it is unacceptable. But it’s important to remember that Washington doesn’t view the use of chemical weapons as unacceptable always and everywhere. The US supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its war against Iran throughout the 1980s, even as they knew Saddam was deploying chemical weapons on a scale far more devastating than anything seen in Syria to date.

Indeed, it isn’t enough to say that we supported Hussein while he was deploying chemical weapons; we supplied him with intelligence about what Iranian targets to hit with the expectation that he would attack with chemical weapons. We then proceeded to block Iranian attempts to bring a case against Iraq to the United Nations.

From 2004 to 2007, the Bush administration persuaded the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to define massive, overwhelmingly innocent clusters of communications data as terrorism-related “facilities” subject to authorized US surveillance. In 2009, US officials labeled the Fort Hood shooter a “terrorist” for killing fellow US military personnel. In 2010, the CIA designated the fatal bombing of its drone-war operators in Afghanistan as a “terrorist attack.”

Now the United Kingdom has pushed the definition one step further. It detained David Miranda, the domestic partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, for nine hours at Heathrow Airport - threatening him, interrogating him, and confiscating his laptop and other storage devices - under an anti-terrorism law.

According to the UK, this statute authorizes detention and confiscation because Miranda’s documents expose sweeping government surveillance methods and therefore, if released, might help terrorists evade that surveillance. Counterterrorism now justifies the use of force to prevent the exposure of domestic spying.

The Rim Fire is now raining ash on a key reservoir that supplies water and hydro-electric power to San Francisco. City officials say they are moving water to lower reservoirs and monitoring supplies for contamination. The blaze is also threatening thousands of homes and some of California's renowned giant sequoia trees.

On Monday officials said the fire was 15% contained after burning for more than a week - up from 2% containment on Friday. Strong winds are making the fires more difficult to control. "This fire has continued to pose every challenge that there can be on a fire," said Daniel Berlant of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The blaze began on 17 August in the Stanislaus National Forest but the cause is still unknown.

‘The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand began with a cavalcade of automobiles and a squad of suicide bombers: the young men who gathered in Sarajevo with bombs on 28 June 1914 had been told by their handlers to take their own lives after carrying out their mission, and received phials of potassium cyanide to do it with,’ he says in a London Review of Books essay.

‘Behind the outrage at Sarajevo was an avowedly terrorist organisation with a cult of sacrifice, death and revenge: extra-territorial, secretive, scattered in cells across political borders, its links to any sovereign government were oblique.’ Sound familiar?

Al Qaeda stokes the ire of Muslims angry at what they see as the defilement of their lands by the oil-seeking, infidel West. Our retaliation for its September 2001 attack on America with hijacked passenger jets, killing more than 3,000, was to invade Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, costing more than 100,000 Islamic lives on top of our own sad audit of dead and maimed. But 9/11, as Americans call it, did not trigger the Third World War. On the contrary, for a brief moment — before the retaliation began — Americans enjoyed the sympathy of most of the world.

Now, it’s different. America, urged by its European allies, considers action against the ruling Assad regime in Syria, which stands accused of using poison gas to kill hundreds of its people. The West is drawing up a list of targets for Cruise missile strikes aimed at crippling the Assad regime. How will Syria’s main allies, Russia and Iran, respond?

"America knows the limitation of the red line of the Syrian front and any crossing of Syria’s red line will have severe consequences for the White House," said Massoud Jazayeri, deputy chief of staff of Iran's armed forces, reacting to statements by Western officials regarding the possibility of military intervention in Syria, according to Fars.

Although there have been lawsuits against wedding industry businesses that refuse to serve gay couples, attorneys promoting the bylaw changes say they don't know of any lawsuits against churches. Critics say the changes are unnecessary, but some churches fear that it's only a matter of time before one of them is sued.

“I thought marriage was always between one man and one woman, but the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision said no,” said Gregory S Erwin, an attorney for the Louisiana Baptist Convention, an association of Southern Baptist churches and one of several groups advising churches to change their bylaws. "I think it's better to be prepared because the law is changing. America is changing." In a June decision, the US Supreme Court struck down a provision of the federal Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage as between a man and a woman for purposes of federal law. A second decision was more technical but essentially ushered in legal gay marriage in California.

The bylaw changes are coming at a time when many churches are wrestling with gay marriage in general and are working hard to be more welcoming to gays and lesbians. "It's probably one of the most difficult issues our churches are facing right now," said Doug Anderson, a national coordinator with the evangelical Vineyard Church. "It's almost an impossible situation to reconcile what's going on in our culture, and our whole theology of welcoming and loving people, versus what it says in the Bible."