‘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."

He said: "I think we're losing the plot actually. I think we haven't really noticed what's happened in Britain." He added: "If people work for the maximum possible benefit for themselves then we will not have trust in industry, in economics, in financial institutions, we will not see marriages last."

He also said institutions, including marriage, broke down "when you begin to lose faith and society becomes very, very secularised". In the interview he argued that the breakdown of marriage had exacerbated child poverty in the UK, "so children get to be the victims". Although he said he had no desire to be "prescriptive" about potential solutions, he offered: "I think a situation where children grow up in stable association with the parents who bought them into being is probably the biggest influence on the eventual shape of a society."

In an article for the Times newspaper, Lord Sacks recently urged ministers to do more to encourage marriage and support stay-at-home mothers. The government "should certainly recognise marriage in the tax system", he wrote. Chancellor George Osborne has already promised a tax break for married couples in his Autumn Statement but his coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, are opposed to the move.

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?