Russia last month completed the first land link that North Korea’s Stalinist regime has allowed to the outside world since 2003. Running between Khasan in Russia’s southeastern corner and North Korea’s rebuilt port of Rajin, the 54-kilometer rail link is part of a project President Putin is pushing that would reunite the railway systems of the two Koreas and tie them to the Trans-Siberian Railway.

That would give Putin partial control over links to European train networks 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) away. The route is as much as three times faster than shipping via Egypt’s Suez Canal, which handles 17,000 ships a year, accounts for about 8 percent of maritime trade - and is increasingly beset by pirates and political instability in Egypt and Syria.

“Shipping companies face higher costs to secure their cargo,” said Thomas Straubhaar, director of the Hamburg Institute of International Economics, in an e-mailed response to questions. “The rail route will get attractive if Russia increases efforts to ensure a secure and reliable transport on the long stretch between Asia and Europe. Customers don’t want their Porsche to be stolen along the way.”

Not an all-out ban like Human Rights Watch or the International Committee for Robot Arms Control are pushing for, mind you — just the suggestion to cool it for a bit and make sure the development of lethal machines isn't going to lead to, you know, the destruction of the human race. Yet a couple reports suggest the Pentagon has no intention of slowing its forward charge toward robot warfare.

Most recently, Computerworld reported that US Army leaders were testing out remote-controlled robots with machine guns. A handful of private companies that are developing weaponized robots modeled their products for the military last week at Fort Benning in Georgia, to judge how they could be used in combat. Lieutenant Colonel Willie Smith said at the event that he hopes to unleash the killing machines onto the battlefield within five years — not as weapons their own right, but as trusted members of the squad.

As the Guardian noted back in May, the Pentagon spends about $6 billion a year to research and develop autonomous machines, but has claimed the autonomous weapons will only be used for "non-lethal" purposes. Drones were intended to be for surveillance and reconnaissance only — not offensive warfare. But the spy-planes are so useful as a weapon of war, it's as if the Pentagon can't help itself.

Earlier this year, it was claimed that Gladstone Primary School in Peterborough was the only one without a single native English speaker, but four more have been found in figures obtained by Sky News. Two schools, including Gladstone Primary, each had more than 400 pupils speaking a bewildering 20 languages.

Education experts yesterday said the influx of immigrant children often had a positive influence on British-born pupils because of their strong work ethic. But they warned teachers risked being swamped. Professor Alan Smithers, an education expert at the University of Buckingham, said: ‘It is a growing phenomenon because of the large scale of immigration, which is putting a great deal of pressure on our school system.’

Chris McGovern, of the Campaign for Real Education, said: ‘Immigrant children bring a good work ethic to schools. The problem is they will have an impact on children who do speak English as a first language because teachers’ time will be taken up helping them.’

British children were being “harvested” by foreign abusers who were getting access to children in their homes over the internet. He told MPs in the House of Commons: “It is not uncommon to encounter situations where offenders in one country will target and harvest victims in a completely different part of the world.”

Mr Davies said that half of all online child sexual exploitation was taking place over social networks, and suggested they could do more to stop to abuse. He said: “At the moment we are seeing half of this kind of activity, online child sexual exploitation, taking place through social networking sites.”

Traders’ salaries are low relative to the potential for seven figure bonuses. When you offer a trader a pink slip for failure and a princely bonus for success, traders tend to minimize losses and inflate successes. Traders can’t make huge gains without having a huge source of funds to finance high-risk speculation. Thanks to the largesse of US taxpayers and lax regulation at US banks, we’ll continue to see speculation and manipulation in all markets. Banks are “rogue trader” factories.

JP Morgan has recently been probed for a number of problems including the US and British LIBOR-rigging scandal, the “London whale” credit derivatives losses, energy manipulation, mortgage loan origination, and foreclosure fraud. The bank is in the news again after hiring Richard Usher, a currency trader being probed for his activities at RBS, his former employer. No one has been accused of any wrongdoing in the ongoing investigation of potential alleged currency manipulation.

Their bill must also pass the House, where a small group of Republicans are expected to join Democrats to send the bill to President Barack Obama. The bill extends the federal borrowing limit until 7 February and funds the government to 15 January. It comes just a day before the deadline to raise the $16.7 trillion (£10.5 trillion) limit.

On the floor of the US Senate, Democratic leader Harry Reid called the legislation "historic", saying it would provide time for Congress to work toward a long-term budget agreement. The plan would create a conference committee of Senate and House members tasked with drawing up a budget deal beyond the short-term spending bills that have served as the ad-hoc US budget for the past several years.

"Our country came to the brink of disaster," Senator Reid said. "This legislation ends a stand-off that ground the work of Washington to a halt." Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senator Reid's negotiating partner, said he was "confident" the government would reopen and avoid default under the proposed bill.

If you say so, Mr Secretary. Both politicians and pundits here in the country's capital seem to underestimate how difficult it will be to undo the damage that's being done to the reputation and standing of the United States by the federal government 'shutdown' that began on 1 October.

The world is laughing at America. Not since Fidel Castro and Robert Mugabe offered to send observers to help with US presidential elections, in the wake of Florida's 'hanging chad' debacle in 2000, has it been this easy to poke fun at the most powerful nation on earth. Yes, the United States. The richest economy on the globe. The planet's proudest democracy. The world's only superpower. And it doesn't have a functioning government. Out of choice.

The result? A political system, they say, that is "grievously hobbled at a time when the country faces unusually serious problems and grave threats. The country is squandering its economic future and putting itself at risk because of an inability to govern effectively."

In fact congress, plus John Kerry, should all brush up on their Arnold Toynbee, as well as Ornstein and Mann. "Civilisations," wrote the legendary English historian of empire, "die from suicide, not murder." Congress, it seems, is bent on proving Toynbee right.

This law which forces people to buy health insurance or face a fine is one of the dumbest ideas ever conceived but it is the implementation of it that has been even dumber. The implementation has been so horrible that one has to question if this was done intentionally to plunge the entire healthcare system into chaos. This might sound counterintuitive but it really isn’t.

The reason for the Obama regime to do something like this is that it would give them the pretext to justify a complete government takeover of America’s healthcare system. This would be presented as the false solution to a problem that they created in the first place. If this wasn’t part of a broader conspiracy, the only other explanation for the poor implementation is that the Obama regime put mentally retarded criminals in charge of its drafting, planning and execution.

There are so many facets to this but the Affordable Care Act should really be called the Unaffordable Care Act because it is actually increasing the cost for existing insurance policies. The amount of regulations, taxes and fees the law requires insurance companies to comply with forces them to pass on additional costs to customers. Both individuals and businesses have been severely impacted by this. Since the law has gone into effect it has caused businesses to hire more part time workers and less full time workers.

This is because the law only forces businesses to provide health insurance for full time workers but not part time workers. By mandating that businesses shell out more money to provide health insurance for full time workers it discourages them from bringing in more full time help. Many businesses simply can’t afford these additional costs and especially not with Obamacare dramatically increasing the cost of health insurance.

Simply put, any law that forces a business or an individual to buy a product or face consequences is morally wrong.

"Although Fitch continues to believe that the debt ceiling will be raised soon, the political brinkmanship and reduced financing flexibility could increase the risk of a US default," Fitch wrote in a release Tuesday afternoon. The agency said the US Treasury, though it could still make some obliged payments after October 17, may be exposed to "volatile revenue and expenditure flows" based on the impasse in Washington.

"The US risks being forced to incur widespread delays of payments to suppliers and employees, as well as social security payments to citizens - all of which would damage the perception of US sovereign creditworthiness and the economy," Fitch wrote.

Halted talks on raising the debt ceiling risk "undermining confidence in the role of the US dollar as the preeminent global reserve currency, by casting doubt over the full faith and credit of the US," Fitch went on. "This 'faith' is a key reason why the US 'AAA' rating can tolerate a substantially higher level of public debt than other 'AAA' sovereigns."

"The announcement reflects the urgency with which Congress should act to remove the threat of default hanging over the economy," a US Treasury spokesperson said. In August 2011, credit rating agency Standard & Poor's downgraded the US credit rating from 'AAA' (outstanding) to 'AA+' (excellent) amid a similar stalemate in Washington on raising the debt ceiling.

Data from the International Monetary Fund shows that China’s budget deficit reached 9.7 percent of GDP last year if regional spending is included and one-off land sales are stripped out. This is higher than previously thought and above levels in the US, India, or Southern Europe’s debt-stricken crisis states.

Zhiwei Zhang from Nomura said it is disturbing that “massive stimulus” on this scale has not stopped China’s growth rate from slowing sharply since 2010, describing the latest rebound as “unhealthy” and likely to wither over coming months as Beijing is forced to tighten policy. “The economic recovery is unsustainable,” he said.

Fitch Ratings warns that the pace of loan growth over the last five years takes China into uncharted waters, with debt jumping from $9 trillion to $23 trillion, or 200 percent of GDP. The economic “efficiency” of debt has collapsed. Each extra yuan of debt now yields just 0.18 yuan of GDP growth.

The European Union ministers gave their final approval for the ECB's regulatory role nearly 1-1/2 years after the idea was first floated, with Britain dropping opposition to a plan it feared might threaten its control of London's financial centre. Tuesday's decision endorsed an earlier European Parliament vote to give the ECB powers supervisory powers over the euro zone's 6,000 banks. However, such a role would lose much of its influence without a body to deal with troubled banks.

Germany, Europe's biggest economy, put the brakes on discussions about how to pay for rescuing or winding up any bank that gets into trouble. With just 10 working weeks until the end of the year and their self-imposed deadline, talks are running into trouble because Germany fears such a scheme will leave it liable to pick up the bill.

In recent years, though, some Israelis have been going the other direction, migrating back to Europe or to the United States. That development has sparked particular concern in Israel about losing some of its highly educated, entrepreneurial citizens – the sort who helped drive the economic miracle.

That anxiety was crystallized for Israel with this year's list of Nobel Prize laureates. The chemistry prize went to three Americans, two of whom were born in Israel but had immigrated to the United States. It's felt like a reversal of the natural order for Israel, which prides itself on attracting other countries' talent. The Nobel was a symbol of that: Of Israel's 11 Nobel laureates, six had been born in other countries before immigrating.

Even more telling than the outflow of these Israelis to the United States, a nation that, after all, does have lots of money and research universities, is that many are also leaving for a country that Jews fled in droves not so long ago: Germany. The German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung says that Israelis are increasingly relocating there; 17,000 live in Berlin alone. That prompted Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid to speak out against Israelis "who are prepared to throw away the only homeland the Jews possess simply because life is more comfortable in Berlin."

If US lawmakers don’t reach a budget consensus and raise the debt ceiling by Thursday October 17, the US will become the first Western power to default since Nazi Germany in 1933, and will send markets into uncharted territory.

The rest of the world is bracing itself for what would happen if the bill is rejected, and the US inches closer to defaulting on its debts, which are largely foreign-held in the form of US Treasury Bonds. Central banks have begun preparing for the worst-case scenario if US does fault, which would result in a serious devaluation of Treasury bonds, delayed payments, and a more large-scale version of the current government shutdown.

“Because in the past it’s always been sorted out is absolutely not a reason to fail to do the contingency planning,” Jon Cunliffe, who will become the Bank of England’s deputy governor for financial stability in November, told UK lawmakers. “I would expect the Bank of England to be planning for it [US default]. I’d expect private-sector actors to be doing that, and in other countries as well,” said Cunliffe, who acknowledged a default as “the main risk to the [global] financial system”.

The European Central Bank and the People’s Bank of China (PBC) have struck a deal that moves both banks farther from the dollar orbit. The two banks agreed to ‘swap’ $56 billion worth of yuan for $60.8 billion worth of euros.

You would hope — and expect — that the process would be strictly analytical and scientific, uncontaminated by outside commercial interests. In at least one recent case, you would be wrong. As reported by the Washington Post, a panel that shaped the government’s policy for testing the safety and effectiveness of painkillers was subsidized by pharmaceutical companies that paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for, essentially, access. They wanted to influence the thinking of the FDA, according to emails secured through a public records request.

The emails show that the companies paid as much as $25,000 to attend a meeting of academics intended to provide advice to the FDA on how to analyze evidence from clinical trials. The communications suggest that the regulators had become too cozy with the companies who profit in the $9 billion US painkiller market. FDA officials who regulate these meds also served on the steering committee of the panel, which met in private, and co-wrote papers with employees of pharmaceutical companies.

“Instead of protecting the public health, the FDA has been allowing the drug companies to pay for a seat at a small table where all the rules were written.” Craig Mayton, the attorney who made the public records request, told The Post.

Mark Williams and Qinwei Wang from Capital Economic called the rise "astonishing". They estimate that China's central bank must have bought $70 billion of foreign bonds last month in a frantic bid to hold down the currency. We won't know for a while where the money went, but a big chunk must have gone into US Treasuries. So bear that in mind when you read the Xinhua claims that the US debt ceiling fight "has again left many nations' tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community highly agonised."

Or when it says: A new world order should be put in place, according to which all nations, big or small, poor or rich, can have their key interests respected and protected on an equal footing. To that end, several corner stones should be laid to underpin a de-Americanised world.

Talk, talk, talk. China's soaring reserves expose the truth. (And no, excess reserves are not a sign of strength, they are a sign of a deformed economy). Beijing is not in fact opening up its capital accounts and preparing to let the market decide the exchange rate.