Urgent calls were made to the White House last night soon after the government defeat amid claims by one Whitehall official that Britain had ‘handed back its deputy sheriff badge’. Chancellor George Osborne warned Britain must undertake ‘national soul-searching’ about its place in the world as Defence Secretary Philip Hammond warned the special relationship was now under ‘strain’.

Diplomatic experts also voiced deep concerns that the repercussions for Britain’s standing on the world stage would be long-lasting. The Henry Jackson Society said last night's Commons vote has damaged Britain's reputation as a major global power and also sent a worrying message to dictators, while the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) said it was an embarrassment.

Former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown said the defeat in the Commons had left the UK a ‘hugely diminished country’. The influential Tory grassroots website Conservative Home said Mr Cameron had suffered 'the worst foreign policy defeat in modern times'. Mr Cameron had promised Mr Obama he would stand shoulder to shoulder with the US in taking military action against the Assad regime after the devastating chemical weapons attack in Damascus last week.

The Prime Minister recalled Parliament to stage an emergency vote to endorse UK involvement in missile strikes. But MPs voted by 272 votes to 285 to reject Mr Cameron’s motion backing British intervention in principle. It is the first time that Parliament has voted against the government on a matter of war and peace since 1782, and raises the prospect of the US having to go it alone.

A secret budget request obtained by The Washington Post from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden lumps Israel alongside US foes Iran and Cuba as “key targets” for US counterintelligence efforts. The document suggests Israel does not believe US assurances that its interests are aligned with Israel's on crucial issues such as Iran and peace talks with the Palestinians.

“To further safeguard our classified networks, we continue to strengthen insider threat detection capabilities across the Community,” reads the FY 2013 congressional budget justification for intelligence programs. “In addition, we are investing in target surveillance and offensive CI [counterintelligence] against key targets, such as China, Russia, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and Cuba.”

The White House and the Israeli Embassy did not respond to requests for comment.

The country’s oil ministry said production has slumped to an average of 300,000 barrels per day (b/d) in August, down by more than four-fifths from its peak after the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime two years ago. “Militia groups are behaving like terrorists, using control over oil as political leverage to extract concessions,” said Dr Elizabeth Stephens, head of political risk at insurers Jardine Lloyd Thompson.

Port closures and strikes have compounded the damage but the deeper story is the disintegration of political authority. Libya is the most extreme example of political mayhem around the world disrupting output and causing a chronic shortfall in oil supply. Production has slumped in Iraq, Nigeria, Iran, Yemen and Syria itself, each for different reasons.

This has cut daily global supply by 1.1 million over the past year to 92 million, explaining why Brent crude prices have remained stubbornly high despite the slump in Europe and China’s slowdown. To compound the problem, Libya’s oil is some of the highest quality produced in the Middle East and the kind preferred by European refiners. Jitters over Syria have already pushed Brent to $115, near levels that typically erode confidence and inflict serious economic damage.

Today, the wheels came off the war wagon altogether.

AP reports: An intercept of Syrian military officials discussing the strike was among low-level staff, with no direct evidence tying the attack back to an Assad insider or even a senior Syrian commander, the officials said. So while Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that links between the attack and the Assad government are “undeniable,” US intelligence officials are not so certain that the suspected chemical attack was carried out on Assad’s orders, or even completely sure it was carried out by government forces, the officials said.

Another possibility that officials would hope to rule out: that stocks had fallen out of the government’s control and were deployed by rebels in a callous and calculated attempt to draw the West into the war.

In other words, the US hasn’t yet ruled out that possibility … but only hopes to.

The government motion was defeated 285 to 272, a majority of 13 votes, as MP’s were shouting ‘resign, resign’ in the House of Commons. Cameron lamented, “The British parliament does not want to see military action. I get that and the government will act accordingly.”

Oddly enough, feuding over the last 24 hours between Tory/Lib Dem coalition, and the Labour opposition, may have just saved the planet from ‘a step towards World War 3′…

The draft resolution — if it were to be put to a vote — would almost certainly be vetoed by Russia and China, which have blocked past attempts to sanction President Bashar Assad's regime. Late Wednesday, Britain's mission to the UN said no decision had been made on moving forward with its resolution, CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk reports from UN headquarters in New York.

The Wall Street Journal reveals that the US is citing claims from Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency fed to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a repeat of the fabrications that led up to the Iraq War, the Libyan War, and have been used now for 3 years to justify continued support of extremists operating within and along Syria’s borders.

Wall Street Journal’s article, “US, Allies Prepare to Act as Syria Intelligence Mounts,” states: One crucial piece of the emerging case came from Israeli spy services, which provided the Central Intelligence Agency with intelligence from inside an elite special Syrian unit that oversees Mr Assad’s chemical weapons, Arab diplomats said. The intelligence, which the CIA was able to verify, showed that certain types of chemical weapons were moved in advance to the same Damascus suburbs where the attack allegedly took place a week ago, Arab diplomats said.

Both Mossad and the CIA are clearly compromised in terms of objectivity and legitimacy. Neither exists nor is expected to provide impartial evidence, but rather to facilitate by all means necessary the self-serving agendas, interests, and objectives of their respective governments.

"It's very alarming," said Joe Spencer, an insect behaviourist with the Illinois Natural History Survey who is researching the issue. Evidence gathered from fields in two Illinois counties suggests that pest problems are mounting as the rootworms grow ever more resistant to efforts to fight them; including crop rotation combined with use of the biotech corn, according to the report issued by Michael Gray, a professor of crop sciences at the University of Illinois, in conjunction with Spencer.

Farmers across "a wide swath of Illinois" could face formidable challenges protecting corn crops from the hungry insects, Gray said in the August 27 report.

According to a report in Vice.com, researchers at Japan’s Nihon University estimate that about 8.1 percent of the country’s students are addicted to the internet, meaning that more than half-a-million kids between the ages of 12-and-18 in the nation as a whole suffer from this affliction.

Such a condition leads to various psychological problems, including insomnia, eating disorders, poor academic performance, depression, and even deep vein thrombosis – the formation of blood clots arising for spending lengthy amounts of time in the same posture. A government study found that up to 15 percent of Japanese students spend as much as five hours online everyday and even more time on the internet on weekends.

As a result, the Tokyo government’s education ministry will introduce “web fasting camps” to help young people disconnect from their PCs, laptops, mobile phones and hand-held devices.

Mothers from Romania moved into the top ten at ninth position, replacing China, with 4,406 live births. And Romanian-born fathers also entered to top ten in ninth position, with 3,867, supplanting Ghana. The figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that the proportion of babies born in Britain to foreign-born mothers rose slightly overall to 25.9 per cent.

The top nationality for foreign-born mothers was Poland with 21,156, followed by Pakistan with 19,091. In all there were 189,079 births to non-UK born mothers last year, up from 184,529 in 2011.

Mark Harper, the Immigration Minister, said: "We are working across government to protect public services and ensure our welfare system is not open to abuse. The Immigration Bill, which will be introduced later this year, will make it easier to remove people who have no right to be in this country.”

Much of the media, particularly the BBC, colludes in the fiction that what this country does during these crises is decisive. Britain is mentioned in the same breath as the US. Maps are produced signifying British fire-power on which there are almost as many Union Flags as Stars & Stripes. Our leading politicians adore it all. Tony Blair was in seventh heaven when able to present himself almost as an equal of President George W Bush before the Iraq War. His ecstatic reception in Congress a few months after the invasion was the apotheosis of his dreams.

David Cameron, though more measured, also relishes the role of international statesman. We are informed every time he has a phone conversation with President Obama. His spin doctors have revealed that over the weekend one call lasted an entire 40 minutes! Meanwhile, we have created the grandiosely named National Security Council, after the American version. The difference is that while the US President commands a huge, world-wide navy and other formidable military assets, we have a dwindling Royal Navy, RAF and Army.

And dwindling even faster because of this Government’s defence cuts, which have left us without a proper aircraft carrier, the most basic entry-level possession for any aspiring world power. Yet Mr Cameron continues where Tony Blair, a much wilder fantasist, left off. Painful though it is for me to say it, what happens in today’s debate on Syria in the House of Commons is pretty much irrelevant to the outcome. Whether or not we join in, the US will attack Syria. If we’re part of the mission, Royal Navy ships will fire one or two missiles to America’s hundred. If we’re not there, the US navy will fire them all.

It was the same story before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Weeks before that took place, President Bush told Mr Blair there would be no hard feelings if our army didn’t show up. It wasn’t really needed. But Mr Blair’s vanity was pricked. Our soldiers had to join in — and some of them had to die. Britain was admittedly useful to America before the invasion in supplying political and diplomatic cover. It’s the same now. Our diplomats scurry about at the United Nations dreaming up resolutions that suit America while freeing it from the charge that it is acting alone. We are a handy bag carrier, not a world power.

Archbishop Welby, who as a young priest once opposed allowing gay couples to adopt children, said the church now had to face up to what amounted to one of the most rapid changes in public attitudes ever. While insisting that he did not regret voting against same-sex marriage in the House of Lords, he admitted that his own mind was not yet “clear” on the wider issues which he was continuing to think about.

And he admitted that, despite its strong official opposition to allowing same-sex couples to marry, the Church is still “deeply and profoundly divided” over gay marriage. The Archbishop, who comes from the evangelical wing of the Church, which takes a more traditional interpretation of the Bible, publicly opposed the Government’s Same-sex Marriage Act while it was being debated earlier this year.

Asked later whether this meant that he regretted voting against gay marriage, he said he stood by his vote because he did not believe “rewriting the nature of marriage” was the best way to end discrimination against gay people.

He said: “The Bill was clearly, quite rightly, trying to deal with issues of homophobia in our society and ... the Church has not been good at dealing with homophobia ... in fact we have, at times, as God’s people, in various places, really implicitly or even explicitly supported it. And we have to be really, really repentant about that because it is utterly and totally wrong.”

The Prime Minister has now said he will wait for a report by United Nations weapons inspectors before seeking the approval of MPs for “direct British involvement” in the Syrian intervention. Downing Street said the decision to wait for the UN was based on the “deep concerns” the country still harbours over the Iraq War. MPs had been recalled to vote on a motion on Thursday expected to sanction military action. Instead, after a Labour intervention, they will debate a broader motion calling for a “humanitarian response”.

A second vote would be required before any British military involvement. This could now take place next week. In a statement on Wednesday night Downing Street said that it only wanted to proceed on a “consensual basis” and was now wary about becoming embroiled in another divisive conflict in the Middle East in the wake of Iraq.

Senior sources had previously suggested that Britain would take part in strikes as soon as this weekend which meant an emergency recall of Parliament was necessary on Thursday. However, following Labour threatening not to support the action and senior military figures expressing concerns over the wisdom of the mission, the Prime Minister on Wednesday night agreed to put British involvement on hold.

The Obama administration is pledging that the strikes will be "limited", but what happens when the Syrians fight back? What happens if they sink a US naval vessel or they have agents start hitting targets inside the United States?

Then we would have a full-blown war on our hands. And what happens if the Syrians decide to retaliate by hitting Israel? If Syrian missiles start raining down on Tel Aviv, Israel will be extremely tempted to absolutely flatten Damascus, and they are more than capable of doing precisely that. And of course Hezbollah and Iran are not likely to just sit idly by as their close ally Syria is battered into oblivion. We are looking at a scenario where the entire Middle East could be set aflame, and that might only be just the beginning.

Russia and China are sternly warning the US government not to get involved in Syria, and by starting a war with Syria we will do an extraordinary amount of damage to our relationships with those two global superpowers. Could this be the beginning of a chain of events that could eventually lead to a massive global conflict with Russia and China on one side and the United States on the other?

Of course it will not happen immediately, but I fear that what is happening now is setting the stage for some really bad things.

Emerging markets are now big enough to drag down the global economy. As Indonesia, India, Ukraine, Brazil, Turkey, Venezuela, South Africa, Russia, Thailand and Kazakhstan try to shore up their currencies, the effect is ricocheting back into the advanced world in higher borrowing costs. Even China felt compelled to sell $20 billion of US Treasuries in July. "They are running down reserves by selling US and European bonds, leading to a self-reinforcing feedback loop," said Simon Derrick from BNY Mellon.

We are told that emerging markets are more resilient than in past crises because they have $9 trillion of reserves. But any use of that treasure to defend the exchange rate entails monetary tightening, and therefore inflicts a contractionary shock on countries already in trouble.

Mirza Baig from BNP Paribas advises them to embrace devaluation, calling it futile to defend quasi-pegs. "The costs of fighting are spiralling out of control," he said. Mr Baig said foreigners bear 90 percent of the currency risk in Malaysia, 81 percent in Thailand, 79 percent in Korea and 74 percent in India. So let them take the haircut. Should these countries take that course, they will inflict a deflationary trade shock on the West. The eurozone is in no fit state to handle that. Nor is Britain.

We are in entirely uncharted waters.