Officials of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said on Friday they detected 400,000 becquerels per liter of beta ray-emitting radioactive substances - including strontium - at the site, a level 6,500 times higher than readings taken on Wednesday, NHK World reported.

The storage tank leaked over 300 tons of contaminated water in August, some of which is believed to have found its way into the sea through a ditch. The well in question is about 10 meters from the tank and was dug to gauge leakage.

TEPCO said the findings show that radioactive substances like strontium have reached the groundwater. High levels of tritium, which transfers much easier in water than strontium, had already been detected. Officials at TEPCO said they will remove any contaminated soil around the storage tank in an effort to monitor radioactivity levels of the water around the well.

The news comes after it has been reported a powerful typhoon which swept through Japan led to highly radioactive water near the crippled nuclear power plant being released into a nearby drainage ditch, increasing the risk of it flowing into the sea.

What JP Morgan is alleged to have done was sell the mortgage-backed assets knowing full well that many of the home loans were in fact very risky. The mortgage-backed assets are widely thought to have played a central role in the near collapse of the banking system when banks realised in 2007 that many of their assets were worth a fraction of their official book value.

A tentative deal is believed to have been reached in talks with senior US justice department officials. The sale of overvalued mortgage-backed securities was blamed for the near-collapse of the banking system in 2007. Last month, JP Morgan was fined almost $1 billion in a separate case over the "London Whale" trading debacle. The scandal arose from disastrous trades by former bank employee Bruno Iksil, who made big bets on the financial markets.

JP Morgan has found itself overwhelmed by mounting legal troubles lately. Once the darling of Washington and Wall Street, it reported a rare quarterly earnings loss last week, mostly due to legal costs totalling $9.2 billion. The bank lost $380 million during the quarter, compared with a profit of $5.7 billion in the same period last year. JP Morgan says it has set aside a fund of $23 billion to deal with mounting legal costs.

From their Los Angeles headquarters, the group slammed the court ruling as "an affront to justice and religious liberty," in a statement that accused the French government of "anti-religious extremism". "The Court failed to address the fundamental violations of the human rights of each of the defendants that infected every level of this case," said the Scientology church, vowing to pursue the matter "at the international level".

The group has previously indicated it will appeal the conviction to the European Court of Human Rights. The Church of Scientology said in its statement that the involvement in the trial of UNADFI, a French anti-cult association, "polluted the proceedings, transforming it into a heresy trial."

Founded in 1954 by US science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard, the Church of Scientology is recognised as a religion in the United States. It claims a worldwide membership of 12 million, including 45,000 followers in France.

On Thursday, the pope also met at the Vatican with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who invited him to visit Palestine as well. Israeli President Shimon Peres had already extended an invitation to the pope to visit the Holy Land shortly after the pontiff's election in March. Following the invitation from Mr Abbas, "we can now start thinking in a more concrete way regarding the planning of the visit," said Vatican spokesman Rev Federico Lombardi, adding that it could take place in 2014.

A papal trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories would follow in the footsteps of Pope Francis's predecessors, Benedict XVI and John Paul II. Both sought to promote Christian reconciliation with Judaism as emphasized in the key 1962-65 Second Vatican Council and do away with any vestiges of anti-Semitism after centuries of ambiguity within the church.

A visit by Pope Francis, who has so far made only one overseas trip since his appointment, could advance that dialogue. "We can see the steady and ongoing commitment of the Catholic Church on improving Catholic-Jewish relations," said Chad Pecknold, assistant professor of theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington DC.

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.