The United States could possibly become "embroiled in a direct hegemonic conflict with China over the Asia Pacific region," which "most likely would include military involvement." Germany is also increasingly participating in the arming and training of the West's allies in Eastern and Southeastern Asia.

An "intensification of the security competition" in the Pacific region can, in any case, be expected, even if it does not escalate into war, one political scientist at the Bundeswehr University in Munich reaffirms. Last June, the Federal College for Security Studies, the German government's central military policy think tank, examined China's arms buildup and discussed military conflict scenarios involving China.

For quite awhile, eventual military confrontations with China have been discussed in the West in light of the People's Republic's decades of uninterrupted economic upswing. China is about to replace the United States as the world's most important trading power. Experts expect that the Chinese GDP will bypass that of the USA in the foreseeable future.

China's significantly growing economic influence is accompanied by a steady growth of its political power. At the same time, the West "is less and less capable of solving its own problems (...) due to the 2009 global financial crisis," according to a recent study by the CSU-affiliated Hanns Seidel Foundation. As the financial crisis has shown, China has even "assumed the role of a fire department to extinguish global crises." With "China's increasing involvement in the World Bank," the USA is threatened with a loss of "its control." According to the Seidel Foundation, the question must slowly, but surely be raised: "Has China's system possibly become superior to that of the West?"

He insisted that the use of six Tornado jet fighters in reconnaissance missions that would call in airstrikes on the Taliban would violate international law. Six years on, he fears his fellow Germans are falling back into the once-disastrous practice of just following orders. “There's a silent change in the minds of the people,” he says.

His fears have been prompted by a comprehensive overhaul of the military over the last two years — including scrapping the draft to create a so-called professional army — that he says represents a creeping return to the militarism that plunged Germany and its neighbors into two world wars.

After World War II, what was then West Germany reluctantly formed a fighting force to support NATO in the event of a Soviet invasion. However, Germany's post-war leaders took strong measures to ensure that no military government like the Nazi “state within a state” would ever rise again.

The army's mandate was restricted to defending Germany from attack. Generals were placed under the control of a civilian defense ministry and a new type of soldier was created. Guided by a concept called “Innere Führung” (“inner conscience”), their duty was not to blindly follow orders but question them. Over the past 15 years, however, serious cracks have emerged in two of the three pillars the post-war architects viewed as essential to creating a morally superior army. Skeptics counter that it's no coincidence the military has been involved in three “wars of aggression” — in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq — since this rethinking began.

The chancellor's foreign policy adviser and Germany's intelligence co-ordinator will hold talks at the White House. The head of US intelligence has defended the monitoring of foreign leaders as a key goal of operations. The US is facing growing anger over reports it spied on its allies abroad.

Stephen Evans BBC News, Berlin, reports: The measure of how seriously Chancellor Merkel takes the matter is that she has sent two of the most important people in her immediate circle of advisers: her foreign policy adviser, Christoph Heusgen, and the German government's intelligence coordinator, Guenter Heiss.

Next week, the heads of the actual spying agencies go to meet their opposite numbers in Washington. This week's meetings are more about how to rebuild trust, while next week's agenda will be more about the detail of how the two countries' agencies might or might not work more in harmony.

It is rare for intelligence officials to speak in any public detail about liaison arrangements with foreign spy agencies because such relationships are so sensitive. Even more unusual is for the United States to point fingers at partners. But that is what NSA Director General Keith Alexander did at a public congressional hearing on Tuesday when, attempting to counter international complaints about the agency's alleged excesses, he said its sources for foreign telecommunications information included "data provided to NSA by foreign partners."

Alexander's disclosure marked yet another milestone in NSA's emergence from the shadows to defend its electronic surveillance mission in the wake of damaging revelations by former agency contractor Edward Snowden. "It is true that in general we stay close-mouthed about intelligence liaison relationships and we only speak in the most general terms about sharing things with our friends and allies," said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst. But, he said, there was nothing wrong in correcting information that was out in public, even though Alexander probably "created or exacerbated some political problems" for a number of European allies with his comments.

"Given the hypocrisy being exhibited by the Europeans in saying they are 'shocked, shocked' that these sorts of things go on - allies spying on allies - I don't think we should feel much compunction about having them feel a little bit of domestic political heat if that is necessary to set the story straight in one of our own congressional hearings," Pillar said.

The American spy agency monitored telephone calls made to and from the residence in Rome where the then Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio stayed during the conclave, the secret election at which cardinals chose him as pontiff on March 13.

The claims were made by Panorama, an Italian weekly news magazine, which said that the NSA monitored the telephone calls of many bishops and cardinals at the Vatican in the lead-up to the conclave, which was held amid tight security in the Sistine Chapel.

The information gleaned was then reportedly divided into four categories — “leadership intentions”, “threats to financial system”, “foreign policy objectives” and “human rights”. At that time, Benedict XVI was Pope, suggesting that the Vatican may also have been monitored during the last few weeks of his papacy.

Unlike the American Patriot system, the Chinese system, produced by China Precision, is not easily compatible with existing NATO air defense systems, and China Precision is even under US sanctions for selling technologies that the US government says could help Syria (Turkey’s new nemesis), Iran, and North Korea develop unconventional weapons.

One would think that Turkey would have made sure its primary security guarantor – the United States – was happy, given that a civil war is raging in neighboring Syria and occasionally spilling into its territory. Yet the US quest to be "Big Man on Campus" and retain "influence" in Europe after the Cold War has allowed its NATO allies to get away with even more than they did back then.

During the Cold War, the United States subsidized its allies’ defense while they got rich. Instead of building up their own defenses to counter the Soviet Union – a much more likely threat to Europe and East Asia than to the United States – they were able to divert scarce resources into their civilian economies to compete with US commercial industries.

Despite the United States heavily subsidizing their security, many allies failed to fully open their markets to US products. In some case, the United States had to accept allied protectionism as the price for stationing protection forces in allied nations! And all this sacrifice from American taxpayers to maintain the "influence" of the American foreign policy elite in allied countries. What exactly does this influence get the taxpayer? Not much apparently.

Thirty-eight percent of children under the age of two have used a mobile device, such as a tablet or smartphone, according to the report fromCommon Sense Media. That’s up from 10% only two years ago.

“This is quite an extraordinary shift for our young children,” James Steyer, chief executive and founder of Common Sense Media, told Agence France-Presse (AFP). “The media children consume can have a profound impact on their learning, social development, and behavior, and the only way to maximize the positive impact — and minimize the negative — is to have an accurate understanding of the role it plays in their lives. These kids are true digital natives,” Steyer said.

Games constituted the most common mobile media activity among young children, 63% of parents reported.

The so-called war on terrorism has actually increased terrorism around the world. Whenever the United States government announces that they are launching a war on something we get more of what they are waging a war on. The war on poverty resulted in more poverty, the war on drugs resulted in more drug use and now we can definitively say the same thing about the war on terrorism.

If the goal of the so-called war on terrorism was to reduce the amount of terrorism in the world it has failed miserably. Anyone with any sort of common sense would look at this study and realize that a policy change is in order.

James Madden, forecaster for Exacta Weather, said: “Another period of very stormy weather and potentially damaging winds may also develop later in the week and into next weekend.”

“This storm may also have the potential to become more widespread than the St Jude storm that we have just experienced. It will begin to turn much cooler than of late as we progress throughout this week, with the risk of ground frosts in parts of the North by midweek.”

In Waltham, an algorithm developed by a startup company called Affectiva performed what is known as facial coding: it tracked the panelists’ raised eyebrows, furrowed brows, smirks, half-smirks, frowns, and smiles. When this face data was later merged with real-world sales data, it turned out that the facial measurements could be used to predict with 75 percent accuracy whether sales of the advertised products would increase, decrease, or stay the same after the commercials aired.

By comparison, surveys of panelists’ feelings about the ads could predict the products’ sales with 70 percent accuracy. Although this was an incremental improvement statistically, it reflected a milestone in the field of affective computing. While people notoriously have a hard time articulating how they feel, now it is clear that machines can not only read some of their feelings but also go a step farther and predict the statistical likelihood of later behavior.

Critics say the measure - which seeks to force the national governments of all 28 EU member states to establish "special administrative units" to monitor any individual or group expressing views that the self-appointed guardians of European multiculturalism deem to be "intolerant" - represents an unparalleled threat to free speech in a Europe where citizens are already regularly punished for expressing the "wrong" opinions, especially about Islam.

The proposed European Framework National Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance was recently presented to members of the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, the only directly-elected body of the European Union.

According to European Dignity Watch, a civil rights watchdog based in Brussels, “the principles of freedom of contract and the freedom to live according to one's personal moral views are in danger of being superseded by a newly developed concept of 'equality.' It would undermine freedom and self-determination for all Europeans and subject the private life of citizens to legal uncertainty and the control of bureaucrats. It is about governmental control of social behavior of citizens. These tendencies begin to give the impression of long-passed totalitarian ideas and constitute an unprecedented attack on citizens' rights.”

Plans changed over the last week. A steady stream of news reports on how the Americans had been spying on the German political class, including now three-term Chancellor Angela Merkel, pinpointed the top floor of the embassy. “We knew the spy news this summer, but it’s reached a new magnitude when you learn they’ve been spying on the chancellor,” he said. “It’s clear now that something has to be done, and so you want to see where it’s based.”

When the new American embassy opened here five years ago, there was more than a little grousing. The building was boring, critics argued, and looked to be more about keeping the rest of the world away than projecting an image. But there was little talk about the top floor of the embassy, and the antennas atop it. Until now. This weekend, the latest issue of the German magazine Der Spiegel has a cover photo with a creepy Cold War feel to it of what’s atop the embassy, under the headline “Das Nest.”

The magazine analyzes the top floor of the building. It focuses on the gray box-like rooms on the top that appear to have stone-colored windows. The magazine found experts and journalists who postulated that such an appearance is likely hiding highly sensitive spy equipment. They note that documents indicate the embassy’s top floors are home to a joint National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency spy program.

The United States is considered such a staunch and worthy ally. But then the spy scandal erupted with the release by former NSA worker Edward Snowden of records that indicated the United States was sweeping up hundreds of millions of electronic communications. The documents he released indicated the NSA was studying emails with key words or phrases and recording so-called “metadata” from smart phones, information tracking the movement and actions of phone owners. The embassy became the focus of an occasional protest, the slogan “United Stasi of America” projected from across the street onto its walls.

The 1998 agreement has come under criticism time and again because of the lax data privacy laws in the US. Although the Safe Harbor agreement provides for a level of protection for the transferred data according to EU standards, data protection advocates often voiced doubts about how seriously it was being implemented.

The concerns grew in Brussels by the time former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the secret monitoring program of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US, and it became known that companies like Facebook and Google had provided data to the NSA. EU Justice Minister Viviane Reding has called the Safe Harbor agreement a "loophole," rather than a "protection of our citizens." For years, audits have revealed serious breaches of the Safe Harbor rules by US companies.

So far, the German government has not pushed at the EU level for the agreement to be renegotiated or cancelled. But that is now changing. Manfred Weber, a member of the European Parliament from Chancellor Angela Merkel's sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), is now calling for a radical restructuring of the relationship between the EU and the US as it relates to data.

"The US and US companies must, with respect to EU citizens and the European market, finally play by our rules," Weber told Spiegel Online. A member of the executive board and steering committee of the CSU and vice-chairman of the conservative European People's Party (EPP) faction in the European Parliament, Weber said he favors an end to the agreement. "The Europeans should terminate the Safe Harbor agreement," he said.

Margarette Purvis, the president and CEO of the Food Bank for New York City, told Salon.com that the expiration of stimulus funds, which will see the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program reduced by $5 billion dollars, will have an “immediate impact” and represent a recipe for civil unrest.

“If you look across the world, riots always begin typically the same way: when people cannot afford to eat food,” said Purvis, adding that families face the “daunting” prospect of losing a whole week’s worth of food every month.

The nationwide cut will take 76 million meals off the table of poverty-stricken New Yorkers alone, equating to about 16 meals a month for a family of three. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has labeled the cut to the SNAP program “unprecedented” in “depth and breadth.”

As we previously highlighted, even the mainstream media is invoking the threat of riots that could ensue as a result of the food stamp cut, with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto linking the issue to the Department of Homeland Security’s recent $80 million dollar outlay on armed guards to protect government buildings in upstate New York. “November 1st could be a very very iffy kind of a day… this could be all hell breaks loose day,” warned Cavuto.

“I believe the European Council in December will express its position on the future of EU Battlegroups. I expect strong political message that will echo the current level of ambition in committing to use EU Battlegroups,” the Lithuanian Minister of National Defence said.

The Minister underscored that Lithuania had always attached great importance to the Battlegroups issue.“We are taking part in the Battlegroup programme with less than two year intervals. While one of our contingent is on standby within the current UK-led Battlegroup, the other one is already starting its preparations for the next rotation in 2015 within the Nordic Battlegroup,” Olekas said.

As the presiding EU country, Lithuania seeks to increase the flexibility of EU Battlegroups, facilitate conditions for their deployment and enhance training of the Battlegroups.