The illustration on the cover of German business daily Handelsblatt on Wednesday morning fairly well encapsulates the way the US federal government shutdown is being perceived across the Atlantic. The Statue of Liberty stands bound in chains, her torch hand hanging listlessly by her side. Across it reads the headline: "The Blocked World Power."

Many Germans have found it hard to understand American lawmakers' inability to resolve their budget disagreements in time to prevent a shutdown of all nonessential government services, which went into effect at midnight on Monday night. "What Washington currently offers up is a spectacle, but one in which the spectators feel more like crying," writes the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

"Because Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, Congress and president could not agree on a stop-gap budget, hundreds of thousands of federal employees were sent on involuntary leave and many agencies were forced to shut down," continues the editorial. "The main actors in this dispute, which brings together many factors, both ideological and political, took a huge risk and, unhindered, proceeded to validate everyone who ever accused the political establishment in Washington of being rotten to the core - by driving the world power into a budgetary state of emergency. The public is left wondering how things could have been allowed to get to this point and why there is so much poison in the system."

Munich's national Süddeutsche Zeitung offers a slightly more depressing take, pointing blame at all sides. "What has already been apparent in America for a few years now is the self-destruction of one of the world's oldest democracies. And the great tragedy here is that this work of destruction isn't being wrought by enemies of democracy, greedy lobbyists or sinister major party donors. America's democracy is being broken by the very people who are supposed to carry and preserve it: the voters, the parties and the politicians."

"At the moment, Washington is fighting over the budget and nobody knows if the county will still be solvent in three weeks," the paper concludes. "What is clear, though, is that America is already politically bankrupt."

For example, temperatures throughout the world have remained relatively constant over the past 15 years. Also, the population of polar bears — the poster animals of climate disaster — has reportedly been growing in the Arctic.

Nevertheless, much of the media lined up in lockstep with the doomsayers as the United Nations‘ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its first report in six years, its fifth since 1988. “Most aspects of climate change will persist for many centuries even if emissions of CO2 are stopped. This represents a substantial multicentury climate change commitment created by past, present and future emissions of CO2,” states the report, which was released Friday.

Nigel Lawson, a former British energy minister and a conservative member of the House of Lords, writes about the “mumbo-jumbo” of the methods and conclusions of the UN report. “Presenting itself as the voice of science in this important issue, it is a politically motivated pressure group that brings the good name of science into disrepute,” he writes in the London Telegraph.

Mr Lawson, along with others, notes the way the UN reports that mean temperatures have not increased significantly in recent years, an inconvenient fact for global warming activists. “This is brushed aside as a temporary blip,” he says.

If true, the implementation of Obamacare is going to be a whole lot more draconian than Americans have been led to believe. Will Sheehan claims that when he tried to sign up for Obamacare and then register to opt out, he received an ominous warning.

Sheehan’s full Facebook post reads;

“I actually made it through this morning at 8am. I have a preexisting condition (Type 1 Diabetes) and my income base was 45K-55K annually I chose tier 2 “Silver Plan” and my monthly premiums came out to $597.00 with $13,988 yearly deductible!!! There is NO POSSIBLE way that I can afford this so I “opt-out” and chose to continue along with no insurance.

I received an email tonight at 5pm informing me that my fine would be $4,037 and could be attached to my yearly income tax return. Then you make it to the “REPERCUSSIONS PORTION” for “non-payment” of yearly fine. First, your drivers license will be suspended until paid, and if you go 24 consecutive months with “Non-Payment” and you happen to be a home owner, you will have a federal tax lien placed on your home. You can agree to give your bank information so that they can easy “Automatically withdraw” your “penalties” weekly, bi-weekly or monthly! This by no means is “Free” or even “Affordable.”

The federal government has consistently denied that any fines pertaining to Obamacare non-compliance could be seized from bank accounts, despite reports last year that the IRS had hired 16,500 new agents to harass citizens who attempt to evade the new law.

The bank, which has been plagued by scandals since it was founded in 1942 but is now undergoing a radical clean-up, revealed that its earnings for 2012 were €86.6 million (£72.3 million) - more than four times higher than in 2011. Around €50 million of the profit was used to fund charitable works approved by the Pope.

The massive increase in earnings was largely due to a sharp rise in the value of Italian government debt held by the Holy See institution - a result of confidence-boosting measures taken by the European Central Bank and the appointment in November 2011 of Mario Monti as technocrat prime minister of Italy. “You don’t often see that kind of big swing,” Max Hohenberg, the bank’s spokesman, told The Daily Telegraph. “It reflects dramatic developments in the eurozone during that period.”

The 100-page report shows that the bank, which is housed in a medieval stone tower formerly used as a prison for the Vatican’s enemies, owns a wide range of assets, including more than €41 million worth of gold, precious coins and medals.

However, the true significance of the crisis is that it is symptomatic of how America has become, in many senses, ungovernable. Heavily gerrymandered congressional districts, and a wider, decades-long process of social polarisation, have produced an electoral system that packs Congress with partisans who have no incentive to reach accommodation with the other side. Moreover, even if the current impasse can be resolved, there is a much darker cloud on the horizon: later this month America hits the ceiling on its debt limits.

This could provoke an economic as well as a constitutional crisis: in a worst-case scenario, the nation would be forced to default on its borrowing, plunging the global financial system into a chaos to eclipse that seen in 2008. It seems inconceivable that the politicians on Capitol Hill would allow such a disaster to unfold, but nothing can be ruled out, given the obduracy on display.

It is to be hoped that the current shutdown prompts a serious attempt to reach a grand bargain between the parties that puts America’s finances on a more sustainable footing. But given the dysfunction and lack of direction in Washington, it is probably wise to prepare for the worst.

According to allegations made by historian Arnulf Baring in his keynote address at this year's "Homeland Day" ceremonies of the German League of Expellees (BdV), last Saturday, "the Germans" are suffering at the moment from a collective "psychological impairment," residing in a lack of perception of a grievous loss inflicted upon the "German soul," by the relinquishment of former German eastern regions of the German empire.

BdV President Erika Steinbach praised Bavaria and Hesse for recently declaring a day of commemoration for German "expellees" and reiterated her demand for a national commemoration day. She also dwelled on the progress made in the struggle for compensating resettled Germans, with the example of Romania and Serbia, which have included German "expellees" in their restitution legislations.

In view to Poland and the Czech Republic, the BdV President explained that only "an absolute minority of countries is still seeking to evade their historical responsibility for having expelled the Germans."

A new course, devised by a group of bishops and theologians, is to be offered in parishes across England in an attempt to “re-teach” the nation the basic tenets of Christianity amid fears they are increasingly being forgotten.

They hope the “Pilgrim” course, which has the backing of the Archbishop of Canterbury the Most Rev Justin Welby, will be run in every parish in the country. It will be based specifically around a handful of classic Christian texts which large sections of the population would once have known well including the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, the Apostles' Creed and the 10 Commandments.

The Bishop of Stockport, the Rt Rev Robert Atwell, another of the authors, said that widespread ignorance of once familiar texts had deprived a generation of people of a source of strength to help them cope at times of trauma. “People are losing their memory of these things.” “We are losing our capacity to lament as a nation because we don't have the spiritual resources, we don't have the language, we are groping around because we have not got this fundamental insight,” he said.

Mr Abe’s goal is for Japan to be able to exercise the right to collective self-defense. This, however, is a dangerous move that could eventually lead to the involvement of the Self-Defense Forces in overseas conflicts. Even if the change of the interpretation of Article 9 does not immediately lead to such a situation, it will raise suspicions about Japan’s intentions in the international community, especially in Northeast Asia, and increase frictions with neighboring countries. In short, rather than enhance Japan’s security, exercising the right to collective self-defense would likely undermine it.

To pave the way for changing the traditional interpretation of Article 9, Mr Abe in August appointed Ambassador to France Ichiro Komatsu — who share’s Mr Abe’s outlook — as the new head of the Cabinet Legislation Bureau. It is believed that after a private advisory body on the reconstruction of the legal basis of security issues a report in this fall, Mr Abe will adopt a constitutional interpretation that allows Japan to exercise the right to collective self-defense and include the new interpretation in the defense program outline, a guideline for long-term defense capabilities improvement to be adopted by the end of this year.

Japan’s defense-only defense posture helped it regain the trust of the international community in the postwar period, which in turn set the stage for it to become a leading economic power. If that posture is abandoned, there is a strong possibility that Japan will be forced to engage in military operations that will erode rather than bolster its diplomatic and security assets.

Equally worrisome is the way in which Mr Abe is attempting to effectively revise the Constitution without following strict constitutional procedures that are designed to prevent imprudent revisions of the nation’s basic law.

Preliminary official results show Chancellor Werner Faymann's center-left Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) as the strongest in parliament, with 27.1 percent of votes. Its coalition partner, the center-right Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) scored 23.8 percent of the vote. The right-wing populist Freedom Party (FPÖ) has once again secured its slot as the third biggest party in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, with 21.4 percent of the vote.

By securing seats in parliament, the right-wing populists have emerged as the big winners in the Austrian vote, particularly the FPÖ under party leader Heinz-Christian Strache. The FPÖ set the tone for the right-wing camp with its anti-foreigner sentiment. The camp also includes the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ) and to some extent Team Stronach. Altogether, these parties secured more than 30 percent of all votes.

Thanks to President Barack Obama's obduracy over his flagship healthcare policy, Democrats and Republicans have failed to reach agreement in Congress on the federal budget, forcing the US Government to close down for the first time in 17 years, with around 700,000 federal workers being placed on indefinite leave.

While the White House insists that essential areas of the government, such as the military, will continue to function, the shut down represents yet a further blow to the prestige of the Obama administration at a time when it is still reeling from its inept handling of the recent Syrian crisis. There was a time not so long ago when the world looked to America for both political and economic leadership. But now that can no longer be taken for granted thanks to Mr Obama's inability to provide decisive leadership on either front.

Republicans rightly argue that by pressing ahead with Obamacare before the implications of the programme have been properly assessed risks adding to America's debt mountain at a time when the American economy is still recovering from the biggest economic crisis in recent history. The emergence of Russia, meanwhile, as the main power broker in the Syria crisis has severely damaged America's standing as a major global player.

In short, the longer the Obama presidency continues, the more America's status as a superpower ebbs away.

The White House and Congressional Republicans spent Monday locked in a stand-off over stop-gap measures to keep the government running, after the Republicans said they would only agree a deal if President Barack Obama delays his flagship healthcare programme by a year.

It is the third time since Mr Obama took power that budget negotiations have gone to the wire in this way, and many investors - jaded by previous stand-offs - were feeling confident that the Congress would reach some sort of eleventh-hour agreement.

However, that confidence has started to wane over the past week. Wall Street has started to bet on a long-term stand-off. Meanwhile, treasury officials are pessimistic about the odds of a US government default, which, they fear, would knock America back into recession.

The shutdown began after the two houses of Congress failed to agree a budget. The dollar index, which tracks the US currency against a basket of six major currencies, fell to 79.864, its lowest level since February. Previously US government shutdowns have lasted anywhere between a day and a month.

The economic impact will depend on how long the deadlock lasts, but Goldman Sachs estimates a three-week shutdown could shave as much as 0.9% from US GDP this quarter. Mike van Dulken, head of research at Accendo Markets, said the bigger worry was US politicians not being able to agree on lifting the so-called "debt ceiling", when the US government will reach the limit at which it can borrow money to pay its bills.

"The longer this goes unresolved, the closer it takes us to the 17 October debt ceiling, when there is no money to pay bills including sovereign debt - debt default is an altogether different issue," he said. There are also concerns that markets will be affected by a possible delay in the release of key US economic data.

The cardinals, who were appointed in April by Pope Francis and will confer with him for the first time at the Vatican on October 1-3, were briefed to revise the constitution, known as Pastor Bonus, drawn up in 1988 by Pope John Paul, in a bid to give a great voice to bishops around the world. But Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, the group’s leader, said as the meeting loomed they were planning to go much further than just changing “this and that.”

“No, that constitution is over,” he said in a TV interview. “Now it is something different. We need to write something different,” he added.

Cardinals gathering in Rome before Francis was elected in March complained Vatican officials had become a self serving elite indifferent to the needs of dioceses around the world. Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga said his group had received suggestions on Vatican reform from around the world, including 80 pages of suggestions from Latin America. The convergence on a few main themes suggested God’s will was at work, he said.

The report is the result of six years’ work by UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is seen as the world authority on the extent of climate change and what is causing it – on which governments including Britain’s base their green policies. But leaked documents seen by the Associated Press, yesterday revealed deep concerns among politicians about a lack of global warming over the past few years. Germany called for the references to the slowdown in warming to be deleted, saying looking at a time span of just 10 or 15 years was ‘misleading’ and they should focus on decades or centuries. Hungary worried the report would provide ammunition for deniers of man-made climate change.

The United States delegation even weighed in, urging the authors of the report to explain away the lack of warming using the ‘leading hypothesis’ among scientists that the lower warming is down to more heat being absorbed by the ocean – which has got hotter. The last IPCC ‘assessment report’ was published in 2007 and has been the subject of huge controversy after it had to correct the embarrassing claim that the Himalayas would melt by 2035.

The move comes as the US secretary of state, John Kerry, and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, examine Moscow's plan to place Syrian chemical weapons under international control. Both Russia and the US have been beefing up their naval presence in the Med over the past several weeks.

The destroyer Smetlivy left a naval base in Sevastopol, Ukraine, on Tuesday on a mission to the Syrian coast, a military source told the state news agency Interfax on Thursday. The source said the Smetlivy would travel to the Mediterranean with the amphibious assault ship Nikolai Filchenkov, which left Novorossiysk on Monday carrying unidentified supplies for the Damascus government.

The missile cruiser Moskva, the flagship of Russia's Black Sea fleet, is also on its way to the Syrian coast to lead the Russian force there. The ship is reportedly known as a "carrier-killer" because it is outfitted with Vulkan missiles, that are designed to destroy large ships.