Total global military spending in 2012 amounted to $1.7 trillion; NATO partners account for $1 trillion. Developing countries are increasing their defense expenditures but their role is relatively small compared with their total population. USA’s share of global military expenditure in 2012 is 39%, China’s 9.5%, Russia’s 5.2%, UK’s 3.5%, and Japan’s 3.4%. The US spends more than the next top ten countries, on its military budget.

The US is therefore expected to have the capacity for Full Spectrum Dominance over the world. Since military might leads to geopolitical supremacy, the aim of the West and NATO for “complete and total military domination of the world,” is not a far-fetched one.

David Miranda brought a legal challenge against the UK police after it seized his property at Heathrow airport. The high court granted him a limited injunction to prevent the police "inspecting, copying or sharing" the data stored on the property.

The police are allowed to examine the data for national security purposes or if they are investigating whether or not Miranda is himself involved in the commission, instigation or preparation of an act of terrorism. The court also heard that the Metropolitan Police has launched a criminal investigation after analysing the seized data. The investigation is being carried out by SO15, the group within the Met charged with investigating terrorist or extremist actions.

Police analysing the data stores on a laptop and phone seized from Miranda on Sunday had discovered "tens of thousands" of documents and if this "highly sensitive material" was released it would be "gravely injurious to public safety." The documents were found on a laptop, two memory sticks, two DVDs, his phone, a Sony games console, a smartwatch and a hard drive. Steven Kovats QC, who represents home secretary Theresa May, also briefed the court in relation to the documents found. He said the cache of data contains tens of thousands of classified UK intelligence documents "disclosure of which would risk lives."

The ‘Great Transformation’ occurred exclusively from above, organized by the upper echelons of the civil and military bureaucracy under the direction of the Executive and his National Security Council. The ‘Great Transformation’ was not a single event but a process of the accumulation of powers, via executive fiats, supported and approved by compliant Congressional leaders.

At no time in the recent and distant past has this nation witnessed the growth of such repressive powers and the proliferation of so many policing agencies engaged in so many areas of life over such a prolonged period of time (a time of virtually no internal mass dissent). Never has the executive branch of government secured so many powers to detain, interrogate, kidnap and assassinate its own citizens without judicial restraint.

Police state dominance is evident in the enormous growth of the domestic security and military budget, the vast recruitment of security and military personnel, the accumulation of authoritarian powers curtailing individual and collective freedoms and the permeation of national cultural and civic life with the almost religious glorification of the agents and agencies of militarism and the police state as evidenced at mass sporting and entertainment events.

The drying up of resources for public welfare and services is a direct result of the dynamic growth of the police state apparatus and military empire. This could only take place through a sustained direct attack against the welfare state – in particular against public funding for programs and agencies promoting the health, education, pensions, income and housing for the middle and working class.

India’s rupee and Turkey’s lira both crashed to record lows on Thursday following the US Federal Reserve releasing minutes which signalled a wind-down of quantitative easing as soon as next month.

Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, held an emergency meeting on Thursday with her top economic officials to halt the real’s slide after it hit a five-year low against the dollar. The central bank chief, Alexandre Tombini, cancelled his trip to the Fed’s Jackson Hole conclave in order “to monitor market activity” amid reports Brazil is preparing direct intervention to stem capital flight.

The country has so far relied on futures contracts to defend the real – disguising the erosion of Brazil’s $374 billion reserves – but this has failed to deter speculators. “They are moving currency intervention off balance sheet, but the net position is deteriorating all the time,” said Danske Bank’s Lars Christensen.

A string of countries have been burning foreign reserves to defend exchange rates, with holdings down 8 percent in Ecuador, 6 percent in Kazakhstan and Kuwait, and 5.5 percent in Indonesia in July alone. Turkey’s reserves have dropped 15 percent this year. “Emerging markets are in the eye of the storm,” said Stephen Jen at SLJ Macro Partners. “Their currencies are in grave danger. These things always overshoot.”

“And now, in a document full of claptrap, its Defense Department suggests that the Founding Fathers, and many conservative Americans, would not be welcome in today’s military, ...and it is striking that some the language in this new document echoes the IRS targeting language of conservative and Tea Party investigations. After reviewing this document, one can’t help but worry for the future and morale of our nation’s armed forces.”

This is not the first ludicrous mislabelling of pro-freedom individuals or groups in US federal government papers. A 2012 study funded by the Department of Homeland Security characterizes Americans who are “reverent of individual liberty,” and “suspicious of centralized federal authority” as “extreme right-wing” terrorists.

Grave concern should be haunting the United States from coast to coast over these revelations.

"Wall Street got drunk" was George W Bush's typically incisive take on the main cause of the emerging financial crisis in July 2008. Two years later the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, explained in his Mansion House speech that "the role of a central bank in monetary policy is to take the punch bowl away just as the party gets going" (something that he admitted had not occurred). But perhaps the wrong intoxicant was being blamed. The controversial former drug tsar David Nutt told the Sunday Times this weekend that cocaine-using bankers with their "culture of excitement and drive and more and more and more ... got us into this terrible mess".

I'm inclined to agree. Cocaine is (I'm reliably informed) a drug that results in intense bouts of over-exuberance as well as a tendency to talk extremely convincingly about stuff you know nothing about. Everyone accepts that a credit bubble occurred in the mid-noughties and that it was a direct result of what the former US Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan has referred to as "irrational exuberance".

It could also be argued that traders would be better able to sell absurdly complicated financial weapons of mass destruction after taking a confidence-boosting narcotic such as cocaine. Furthermore, surely only cocaine-ravaged buffoons would actually buy billions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities when they were so clearly doomed to explode the minute the property boom stalled.

Dr Chris Luke, an A&E specialist based at Cork University Hospital, Ireland, who has studied the effects of cocaine on bankers, has stated that "prominent figures in financial and political circles made irrational decisions as a result of megalomania brought on by cocaine usage". He concludes that "people were making insane decisions and thinking they were 110% right … which led to the current chaos."

Writing for The Telegraph, Mr Johnson calls on the Government to open its doors to an unlimited number of Australian immigrants by setting up a “bilateral Free Labour Mobility Zone”. He says that the UK must have a “truly global perspective” and not think of itself as “little Europeans run by Brussels”.

“We betrayed our relationships with Commonwealth countries such as Australia and New Zealand, and entered into preferential trading arrangements with what was then the European Economic Community,” Mr Johnson says. He adds: “We need to raise our eyes beyond Europe, forging and intensifying links with countries that are going to be growing in the decades ahead — countries that offer immense opportunities for British goods, people, services and capital.”

The White House said the president would meet Saturday with his national security team to consider possible next steps by the United States. Officials say once the facts are clear, Obama will make a decision about how to proceed.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel declined to discuss any specific force movements while saying that Obama had asked the Pentagon to prepare military options for Syria. US defense officials told The Associated Press that the Navy had sent a fourth warship armed with ballistic missiles into the eastern Mediterranean Sea but without immediate orders for any missile launch into Syria.

Obama also cited the need for the US to be part of a coalition in dealing with Syria. America's ability by itself to solve the Arab country's sectarian fighting is "overstated," he said.

The security council met on Wednesday night after calls by Britain and other western countries for a response to the attack in the eastern suburbs in which hundreds and possibly more than 1,000 civilians died.

There were no marks or signs of blood on their bodies and chemical weapons experts said they showed telltale signs of being poisoned by organophosphate based nerve agents.

But after earlier versions of a statement were watered down by China and Russia, which have consistently rejected international action against President Bashar al-Assad, the final version did not even call for UN inspectors, already in Damascus, to investigate. Instead, it called for further "clarity" about what happened.

Russia went so far as to call the incident a deliberate "provocation" by the rebels themselves.

Raising the ante in the confrontation with the Assad regime and its international supporters, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius this week called for the use of force in Syria. Across the Rhine Valley in Berlin, however, his German equivalent Guido Westerwelle urged caution: "Before speaking of consequences we must first have clarification." French daily newspaper Le Monde ran the outsized headline "Toxic Gas Massacre in Damascus". Most German newspapers that day led with the Bradley Manning verdict.

While French leaders were declaring that "all hopes for a political solution or a political transition in Syria are destroyed" and considered unilaterally arming the opposition in March, German ministers were doing their best to get the parties to the negotiating table. "As long as the logic of violence and military victory is in place, there can be no lasting peace and stability for Syria," Westerwelle said in May.

The post-reunification "German Question" has time and again challenged Germany's partners to reconcile the federal republic's economic power with its reticence to contribute to collective security. The oddity of an unaligned behemoth at the heart of NATO has begun to harden into reality, even as allies refuse to allow Germany to slip into Swedish-style neutrality.

Al Arabiya, the origin of the story, is not a neutral in the Syrian conflict. It was set up in 2002 by the Saudi Royal Family in Dubai. It is majority-owned by the Saudi broadcaster, Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC). Saudi Arabia is a major financial backer of the attempt to topple Syria’s government. That is a matter of record. So on first glance Saudi-owned media reporting such an inflammatory anti-Assad allegation might be taken with a dose of salt.

The story gets even murkier. Further in the text of the article we read that the “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said dozens of people were killed, including children, in fierce bombardment.” Now the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) has been the source of every news report negative against the Syrian Assad government since the war began in 2011. More curious about the humanitarian-sounding SOHR is the fact, as uncovered by investigative journalists, that it consists of a sole Syrian refugee who has lived in London for the past 13 years named Rami Abdul Rahman, a Syrian Sunni muslim who owns a clothing shop and is running a Twitter page from his home. Partly owing to a very friendly profile story on the BBC, he gained mainstream media credibility. He is anything but unbiased.

The other aspect of the suspicious reports is the “convenient” fact they coincide with the arrival two days earlier of an official UN weapons inspection team, allowed by the government, to investigate allegations of chemical weapons use in the Syrian war. It begs the most obvious question: What conceivably would Bashar al Assad stand to gain from using banned chemical weapons just at the time he has agreed to let a UN chemical weapons team into Syria?

The protesters marched west of the capital on Friday, protesting against the stringent new laws that prohibit public dissent. “Down with Hamad”, the crowd chanted as it walked with national red-and-white flags and banners that called for King Hamad bin Isaa al-Khalifa and Prime Minister Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa to go. King Hamad has been in power since 1999.

Two-and-a-half years have gone by since Bahrain’s own February 2011 Spring, when a Shiite-led uprising against the [minority] Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty resulted in security forces crushing the revolt and killing at least 35 people in the process. Sporadic unrest has been going on since. In July Bahrain's parliament passed strict new laws to curb opposition activities, including banning protests in the capital and giving authorities the right to strip citizenship from those convicted of violence.

Bahrain sits in the midst of a battle for Gulf influence between neighboring Shiite Iran and a Sunni Saudi Arabia. The country is home to the US Navy’s 5th Fleet, as well as being the Pentagon’s main base to counter Iran’s expanding military presence in the Gulf and protect oil shipping lanes through the Gulf of Hormuz.

It would be “hypocritical” of the 103-year-old movement to expect to use church premises after abandoning its core beliefs, Rev Paul Williamson of St George's Church in Feltham, Middlesex, said. “If the Guide promise does not mention God, I cannot see why they should be on Church premises,” he added.

“The Girl Guide Association does not realise what it’s done. It has not thought through the consequences and has made itself look ridiculous.” The organisation has been plunged into an atheist row after announcing that it is to scrap the traditional oath, replacing references to "God" and "country" with a pledge to "be true to myself" and serve the "community". A group in Harrogate this week became the first to openly defy the movement by vowing that it would be "sticking with the previous Promise".

Rev Brian Hunt, minister of the church where Harrogate Guides have met for around 50 years, supported their stance, indicating that the unit could not possibly expect to use the facilities otherwise. “My church allows the Guides to use my premises for free,” he said. “And we do that because they’ve always tried to look after the whole person – body, mind and soul – and we encourage that. I don’t think, in fairness, that Girl Guides can expect churches to provide premises for free when they don’t believe in God.”

Germans seem to have already made up their mind. With just under a month to go before the general election, Angela Merkel's conservatives are well ahead in the polls and the chancellor herself likewise remains extremely popular. Change, even should she be re-elected for a third term, isn't likely to be forthcoming, pundits say. But Germans aren't the only ones with interests at stake. Across the Atlantic, the United States is watching too - and Washington is hoping that, once the campaign is history, Germany will take on a greater global leadership role on issues like trade, the euro crisis and international security.

Daniel Hamilton, director of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University, calls it the "expectation gap." "I think the assumption Americans have is that Germany should always step up and take responsibility commensurate with its weight in the world," he says. Americans, he suggests, always expect slightly more from Germany than Germany is willing to give.

Those issues, from Washington's perspective, tend to boil down to a consistent message: The US wants Germany to increase its involvement and leadership when it comes to global affairs. As Europe's strongest economy and its largest country, the US believes there's more Germany could do to pull its weight.

The blaze has forced scores of tourists to flee during peak season and is threatening thousands of homes. More than 2,000 firefighters have been tackling the flames in difficult terrain. It is just 2% contained. California Governor Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency for San Francisco 150 miles away as the blaze is threatening power lines that bring electricity to the city.

Two of three hydroelectric power stations serving the city have been shut down. The city's water supplies could also be hit if a reservoir, four miles from the fire, is affected. A spokeswoman for the US Forest Service said 4,500 homes, hotels, businesses and several campsites were under threat as of Friday, up from 2,500 the day before.

Lee Bentley of the US Forest Service told CBS News earlier this week: "We've got a monster on our hands. This fire is making its own weather. It's going every which direction. This is one of the worst I've ever been on. I've been doing it for quite a few years." The area's steep hills and rugged terrain are hampering firefighters' efforts, officials say.

The 'Beaver Creek' fire in Idaho has destroyed some 45,000 hectares near the ski resort of Sun Valley. Meanwhile, five wildfires in Yellowstone National Park have scorched about 18 square miles of mostly remote areas.