Another 500 children aged 9 or under were hospitalised due to obesity, figures show. It is the latest evidence of an obesity epidemic among young people. Health minister Jane Ellison said there were 22 gastric bypasses, 18 gastric bands, two gastric bubble or balloon procedures and three stomach staples on youngsters from April 2007 to March 2012.

The figures also show people living in the more deprived 10% to 20% of the country recorded the most admissions requiring surgery, 3,792, compared with a low of 1,156 for patients in the least deprived 10% of England.

Dagong lowered its ratings for US local and foreign currency credit from A to A-, maintaining a negative outlook, the agency said in a statement. The announcement came after the US Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed a bill that extends the nation's borrowing authority and ends a two-week government shutdown.

"The fundamental situation that the debt growth rate significantly outpaces that of fiscal income and gross domestic product remains unchanged," Dagong said in the statement, adding Washington's solvency was vulnerable as old debts were still repaid through raising new debts.

"Hence the government is still approaching the verge of default crisis, a situation that cannot be substantially alleviated in the foreseeable future," it said. China's official news agency Xinhua said Thursday in a bylined commentary that US politicians had held the rest of the world hostage in the crisis.

The president kept things short, speaking for only three minutes on Wednesday night to praise the debt compromise reached by Congress. After he finished, a reporter called after him: "Mr President, will this happen again in a couple of months?" Barack Obama, who was on his way out the door, turned and answered sharply, "No."

But such optimism has proven to be unrealistic in the past. With his re-election in 2012, Obama thought he could break the Republican "fever." Instead, the conservatives paralyzed the government and risked a federal default just so they could stop Obama's signature project: health care reform. And this despite the fact that "Obamacare" had been approved by a majority of both houses of Congress, was upheld by the US Supreme Court, and was endorsed by the American people in the voting booths.

No, the democratic process cannot reduce this "fever," and probably won't during the next fight, either. On the contrary, the political crisis has turned out to be a systemic crisis. America's 237-year-old democracy is approaching its limits.

This time around the US has just barely avoided testing out such crazy theories. But as the system limps along, the next crisis already has a deadline: January 15, 2014, when the bill agreed to on Wednesday expires.

“It is a truce, not a peace,” said Stephen Lewis from Monument Securities. The US government will run out of funds by January 15th. The new debt ceiling will expire by February 7, at which point $200 billion of special tricks may keep the US Treasury afloat until March.

The festering political conflict will hang over America and the world like a Sword of Damocles. “The reprieve will be short. The stage is set for another showdown,” said Paul Edelstein from IHS Global Insight.

The Republican climb-down on Capitol Hill ends the two-week government shutdown, but damage has already been done. Consumer confidence has suffered the worst slump since the Lehman crash in 2008. Investment has been delayed. Issuance of oil and licences has been frozen, and export finance held up.

Standard & Poor’s said the shutdown has shaved 0.6 percent off fourth-quarter growth. The country will now remain in limbo for another four months, with no solution in sight to the ideological war over the size and role of the US government.

Hours after signing the legislation that ended Washington’s latest budget stand-off, Mr Obama said Republicans who had “pushed for the shutdown” had succeeded only in creating a spectacle of poor governance that had tarnished America’s credibility in the world.

“It’s encouraged our enemies, it’s emboldened our competitors, and it’s depressed our friends, who look to us for steady leadership,” he said. Mr Obama said the crisis had caused “completely unnecessary” damage to the economy, claiming it had slowed growth, seen households cut back on their spending and worsened the deficit. “Let’s be clear. There are no winners here,” he said. “The American people are completely fed up with Washington.”

Marine Le Pen, buoyed by a weekend by-election triumph in southern France, criticised the EU as a “global anomaly” and pledged to return the bloc to a “cooperation of sovereign states”. She said Europe’s population had “no control” over their economy or currency, nor over the movement of people in their territory.

“I believe that the EU is like the Soviet Union now: it is not improvable,” she said. “The EU will collapse like the Soviet Union collapsed.” Ms Le Pen, 45, will next month travel to Holland to chart a joint campaign with Geert Wilders, whose anti-Islamic Freedom Party (PVV) currently tops national opinion polls for May’s European elections.

Together they aim to establish a pan-European, far-Right parliamentary grouping that would run on an anti-immigrant, anti-integration platform. Once in office its overriding aim would be to be as disruptive as possible. Even ardent European federalists now concede that as much as 30 per cent of the new parliament will comprise Euro-sceptics capitalising on economic misery and record levels of unemployment across Europe.

The clearest indicator of growing Israeli concerns, according to defense officials, is the recent large-scale Israeli air force drill Tuesday in the northern part of the country. The exercises along the northern border and over the Mediterranean were considered unusually large. Additionally, Israeli air forces conducted long-range fighter exercises last week involving in-flight refueling practice.

An Israeli defense source told Israel’s Walla! news outlet: “Changes have recently occurred in the Middle East. The [Israeli Defense Force] is preparing for those changes in both the closer and more distant perimeters, and yesterday’s exercise was intended to signal the IDF’s serious intention of dealing with those problems and thwarting them.”

Israeli Minister of Strategic and Intelligence Affairs Yuval Steinitz, a confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Wednesday that Israel would welcome an agreement to end Iran’s nuclear arms program. But Israel remains concerned that “Geneva 2013 could become Munich 1938,” Mr Steinitz said, referring to the agreement appeasing Nazi Germany’s seizure of Czech territory in the months before the outbreak of World War II.

Labour leader Eamon Glimore has long been grumbling that EU ideologues treat his country like "some type of economic experiment for austerity hawks". He has prevailed. Dublin will drain a further 1.5 percent of GDP from the economy in fiscal cuts and taxes over the next year, not 1.8 percent as demanded. Finance minister Michael Noonan told the Dail this week that the nation can take no more. "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart," he said, quoting WB Yeats from Easter 1916.

US investor Franklin Templeton made a fortune buying up a tenth of Ireland's debt stock in the dark days, and so have others. Ireland's 10-year yields are down to 3.67 percent. Kudos to them, but Moody's still rates Irish debt as "junk", citing the risk of economic stagnation for the debt trajectory.

Household debt is still 200 percent of income (IMF), while the assets that underpin it are greatly shrunken after a 57 percent fall in house prices. Mortgages in arrears by 180 days are at a record 17 percent. Nothing is written in stone. Whether Ireland or any other EMU victim state can claw its way back to viability depends on the actions of the ECB. If Frankfurt reflates aggressively, Ireland can undoubtedly make it, and perhaps Spain as well in an ideal world. If it continues to let debt-deflation run its course, even the poster child is doomed.

In a statement the FCA responded to mounting speculation that it had launched a probe, admitting it had started “gathering information from a wide variety of sources including market participants”. “Our investigations are at an early stage and it will be some time before we conclude whether there has been any misconduct which will lead to enforcement action,” said a spokesman for the FCA.

The statement follows an article by Bloomberg that highlighted alleged currency manipulation by banks. According to the newswire, British regulators have looked at instant messages written by US investment bank JP Morgan’s chief London-based dealer, Richard Usher.

Last year, Barclays became the first bank to settle claims over its attempts to rig Libor. Since then RBS, UBS and ICAP have all reached similar settlements. An international investigation is also underway into the potential manipulation of the ISDAfix benchmark that is used to price hundreds of trillions of dollars of derivatives.

One man has died while trying to protect his home. Prime Minister Tony Abbott visited Winmalee in the Blue Mountains, one of the areas worst-hit by the fires, around 70km (45 miles) west of Sydney. Correspondents say bushfires are common in Australia but they have come earlier than normal this year, sparking concerns of further problems to come.

Deputy New South Wales (NSW) Rural Fire Service Commissioner Rob Rogers said the fire situation was the worst he had seen in more than a decade and the threat was unlikely to ease for some time. "We've got thousands of kilometres of fire front that we are faced with trying to deal with," he told local media.

On Wednesday, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), the plant’s operator, said it had detected high levels of radiation in a ditch leading to the Pacific Ocean, and that it suspected heavy rains had lifted contaminated soil.

Workers say that Strontium-90 – a radioactive isotope of the alkaline earth metal strontium produced by nuclear fission – along with other isotopes that emit beta rays measuring 1,400 becquerels (Bq) per liter were detected in the ditch, which is located about 150 meters from the ocean, The Asahi Shimbun reported.

Earlier this month, TEPCO announced 430 liters of polluted water had spilled from a tank as the company’s employees tried to remove rainwater dumped at the plant by recent storms. It is unknown how much of the contaminated water flowed into the sea.

A study for the Christian think tank Theos recorded 77% as believing some things could not be explained by science or any other means. Among the other findings, 8% said they or someone they knew had experienced a miracle, while one in four expressed a belief in angels. ComRes surveyed just over 2,000 people.

"The study appears to confirm that, despite a steady decline in congregations and in formal religious belief, a sense of the spiritual remains strong in Britain," said the BBC's religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott.

Only a quarter of those questioned thought spiritual forces had no influence on Earth. And almost two-thirds of those who identified themselves as Christians thought such spiritual forces could influence people's thoughts or the natural world. More than a third of the non-religious shared that belief.

The letter reads;

"Dear Business Customer, Starting November 17, 2013: You will no longer be able to send international wire transfers. You will still be able to send domestic wires and receive both domestic and international wires. We’ll cancel any international wire transfers, including reccurring ones, you scheduled to be sent after this date.

Your cash activity limit for these accounts(s) will be $50,000 per statement cycle, per account. Cash activity is the combined total of cash deposits made at branches, night drops and ATMs and cash withdrawals made at branches (including purchases of money orders) and ATMs. These changes will help us more effectively manage the risks involved with these types of transactions."

Another letter received by Peak to Peak Charter School, an Elementary School in Colorado, states that the option to send both international and domestic wire transfers has been withdrawn from Chase business savings account holders.

Chase is obviously very keen to make it hard for their customers to have any kind of control over their savings and is trying to prevent them from sending dollars abroad, prompting concerns that Cyprus-style account gouging could occur in America. Why has Chase announced such a ludicrous and restrictive policy change? Speculation is rife that the bank is preparing for some kind of economic crisis by “locking down” its customers’ money.

In cases where the corner didn’t get resealed fast enough and too much of the reek spread, the whole bank collapsed, only to be bailed out by taxpayers, often in other countries; it’s easier that way. The only thing known about the holes in the balance sheets of these black boxes, left behind by assets that have quietly decomposed, is that they’re deep. But no one knows how deep. And no one is allowed to know – not until Eurocrats decide who is going to pay for bailing out these banks.

How do we know? ECB President Mario Draghi said that on Friday in Washington. And today, the Eurogroup of 17 finance ministers had a huddle in Luxembourg to try to decide that issue. The IMF, which can only sniff around the surface of the banks, determined that the Spanish and Italian banks alone would have to recognize an additional €230 billion ($310 billion) in losses over the next two years. As we have seen time and again, bank losses are always much larger when the truth finally seeps out, and that doesn’t happen until after the bank collapses and someone from the outside counts what’s left over.

Additionally, these banks have already written off a mountain of bad assets. In both countries, banks have collapsed and been bailed out, some twice – in Spain at the expense of taxpayers in other Eurozone countries. Next year will be a moment of truth, so to speak, when the ECB is to become the regulator of the 130 largest banks in its bailiwick. Imbued with new powers, it will subject them to a somewhat realistic evaluation, rather than the “stress tests” of yore that were nothing but banking agitprop – assuming certain banks in Italy and Spain can be kept upright until then.

“The effectiveness of this exercise will depend on the availability of necessary arrangements for recapitalizing banks ... including through the provision of a public backstop,” Mario Draghi explained on Friday to set the mood for today’s meetings. “These arrangements must be in place before we conclude our assessment.”

Meaning: The truth shall not be known until after the Eurocrats decided who would have to pay for the bailouts. And the bank examinations won’t be completed until then, because if any of it seeped out – Draghi forbid – the whole house of cards would collapse, with no taxpayers willing to pick up the tab as its magnificent size would finally be out in the open!

“Building a de-Americanised world”: this statement would have raised a smile a few years ago. At most it would have passed for provocation by Hugo Chavez. But when we are seeing the United States’ bankruptcy in real-time and it’s an official Chinese press agency that says so, the impact isn’t the same. In reality, it’s describing out loud a process which is already well underway: simply, it’s now allowed to speak about it in public. At least US government deadlock has the merit of loosening tongues. Let there be no mistake, this analysis hasn’t appeared in the Chinese media by chance, and it reflects Beijing’s hardening tone.

In fact, if the whole world is holding its breath before this pathetic game of the US elite; it’s not out of compassion, it’s to avoid being swept away in the fall of the world’s first power. Everyone is trying to free itself from American influence and let go of a United States permanently discredited by recent events over Syria, tapering, shutdown and now the debt ceiling. The legendary US power is now no more than a nuisance and the world has understood that it’s time to de-Americanise.

This perspective and speaking the unspeakable is finally freeing-up a whole range of solutions which, until now, were simply signs, even still repressed by some. These solutions are speeding-up the construction of the world afterwards and opening on a multipolar world organised around major regional blocs.