"The president has made a decision about providing more support to the opposition that will involve providing direct support to the [Supreme Military Council]. That includes military support," Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communication Ben Rhodes told reporters.

President Obama has repeatedly said that the use of chemical weapons is a "red line" that, if crossed, would be a "game changer" for more US involvement in the Syrian civil war. "The President has been clear that the use of chemical weapons - or the transfer of chemical weapons to terrorist groups - is a red line for the United States," said Rhodes in a separate written statement.

He added, meanwhile, that no decision has been made about enforcing a no-fly zone over Syria. "A no-fly zone... would carry with it open-ended costs for the international community," Rhodes said. "Furthermore, there's not even a clear guarantee that it would dramatically improve the situation on the ground."

The structure on Mount Zion, the highest point of Jerusalem, is known as the Cenacle, where the Last Supper is believed to have taken place, and according to the deal which will be signed in the coming months, it will become open to Catholic worship once again. The Vatican asks Israel to allow the Church to build a passageway through the Diaspora Yeshiva, which takes care of the area known as David's Tomb, and to enable thousands of Christian worshipers to access the Last Supper Room more easily.

The area has strategic value, since it is a few hundred yards from the Temple Mount, so the Catholic Church will turn it into the international center for Catholics all around the world. As the New Sanhedrin stated in 2009, those in the Vatican who initiated the concept of the “Holy Basin”, which is pivotal in this agreement, intended to remove exclusive Jewish sovereignty from the Temple Mount and the Old City and - in effect - aimed at "the total removal of Jewish sovereignty".

Those who will be in charge of the Cenacle on Mount Zion have been among the most ardent partisans of a Palestinian Arab State. There is the risk that the new church on Mount Zion will be used to foment a political war on the rest of Jewish Jerusalem.

‘And in a weird way, probably was talked about more when Superman was created than it is now. It’s one of those things mythologically you take for granted, a little bit.

When you talk about mythology, you want to make a point about the importance of a character, or the relevance of a moment, to be able to draw from peoples’ collective experiences. What is personal to you or to someone who sees a Christ story or someone who doesn’t, it might affect the way they see the movie in a different way, or it may make the events in the film more personal, or make the mythological points of the film more intense.’

Fed currently spends $85 billion a month to buy US treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities. This has enabled it to keep mortgage rates low and reinvigorate the real estate market. Merely a hint from Bernanke that the Fed could "take a step down" has caused 30-year mortgage rates to rise from 3.35 percent in early May to almost 4 percent recently. Rates on 10-year Treasury notes went from 1.7 to 2.1 percent.

Although these numbers are still very low compared to historical rates, the development scares bankers like JPMorgan Chase Chairman Jamie Dimon, who said last week that while normalization is a good thing, it's also "going to be scary."

Bernanke is familiar with these fears, which is why he added that a restriction on bond purchases is not automatically the end of a relaxed monetary policy. It was his way of bringing calm to the markets while preparing them for harsher policies in the future.

Stocks, bonds, commodities and the dollar were all caught in the selling. There were tentative signs markets were leveling off ahead of US trading, although Wall Street was also expected to open in the red. The slide has been triggered by comments from policymakers at the US Federal Reserve, which meets next Tuesday and Wednesday, about when to start scaling back its huge bond-buying program.

"If you look at it historically, there has never been a period when the Fed has started to take back stimulus that has left the markets untouched," said Hans Peterson, global head of investment strategy at Swedish bank SEB. Emerging market assets have been particularly hit over the last few weeks as the uncertainty about central bank stimulus has driven a global dash back to cash and core economies.

President Mohammed Morsi gathered a group of politicians last week who thought they were speaking privately at a parliamentary meeting. But as seen in an Egyptian television video of the meeting — excerpts of which were later translated by the Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI) — they were actually on live television, cringingly discussing secret ways to stop Ethiopia’s Nile River dam project which threatens water flowing to Egypt.

The New York Times blog reports: Unaware that their words were being broadcast live on a state-owned television channel, many of those seated around the table said the dam was in fact a secret American and Israeli plot to undermine Egypt that must be stopped at all costs.

The participants learned they were on live TV only after Magdi Ahmad Hussein, chairman of the Islamic Labor Party, suggested that all present vow not to leak any information to the media. Before being told he was on television, Hussein described the US as an enemy: “I’m very fond of battles. With the enemies, of course – with America and Israel, but this battle must be waged with maximum judiciousness and calm. Even though this is a secret meeting, we must all take an oath not to leak anything to the media, unless it is done officially by sister Pakinam [el-Sharkawy, a Morsi aide]. We need an official plan for popular national security, even if we…”

The viewer sees him being handed a note, which presumably points out that his words are not confined to the room. Hussein laughs, then continues with the anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric: “Okay… Fine… The principles behind what I’m saying are not really secret… Our war is with America and Israel, not with Ethiopia. Therefore, engaging in a war… This is my opinion…”

Middle East analyst Barry Rubin of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) tells The Blaze, “Here we have possibly the most embarrassing open microphone scandal in history.”

The mass exodus, which has been limited only by leftist President Cristina Fernandez's capital controls, is threatening to undermine Latin America's No. 3 economy even further by leaving it short of hard currency and new jobs.

The underlying problems range from Fernandez's hostile treatment of the private sector, to severe financial distortions such as a parallel exchange rate, to the general feeling that Argentina is due for one of the periodic spasms that have racked the country every 10 years or so going back to the 1930s.

Some say such worries are overblown, arguing that Argentina has defied doomsday predictions for the past decade, which was by some measures its best economic run since World War Two. Yet for many, the feeling is of a gathering storm.

The fast-moving fire raged out of control for a second day through heavily wooded rolling hillsides on the Northeastern outskirts of Colorado Springs, devouring more houses into the evening as winds sent flames doubling back into areas already burned, authorities said.

Latest Update: 15,000 acres burned; 38,000 people evacuated; no containment details.

360 homes are a total loss, the most in Colorado history.

No reported deaths or injuries.

Something snapped in the Italian psyche last week after the European Central Bank offered nothing to combat the credit crunch asphyxiating small business, and more broadly washed its hands of Euroland’s incipient deflation crisis and catastrophic wastage of its youth. The next day ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi called for a showdown, or “Braccio di Ferro”, with northern powers before it loses it chemical, car and steel industries altogether.

Mr Berlusconi told Il Foglio that Italy’s government - which his Liberty Party keeps in office - is complicitly serving forces that are destroying Italy. It must instead confront the north, “and particularly Angela Merkel’s Germany”, with a stark choice: either they call a halt to fiscal and monetary contraction, and opt instead for full-blown reflation; or they must expect the victims to snatch back their own destinies.

The battle must be waged quietly, but implacably. Italy cannot let its productive base atrophy further, or allow itself to be sidelined by the “hegemonic methods” of those with the upper hand. “That is what I mean by a showdown. We must find our own national or regional solutions, breaking up euro mechanisms."

Eisenhower managed to partner with Congress on three balanced budgets out of eight, but the era after his would start us on massive deficit spending as a habit rather than something to be employed only in an emergency. We have, as Eisenhower predicted, "mortgaged the material assets of our grandchildren," and it remains to be seen whether that has risked "the loss of their political and spiritual heritage."

Most famously, Eisenhower warned the country about the rise of what he called the "military-industrial complex," a force that would eventually erode liberty and public policy choices. "In the councils of government," Eisenhower said, "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." The wealth that got spent on the defense sector would create enormous influence and power inside and outside of government, which would eventually pervert a free society into perpetual warfare for the sake of maintaining power, unless a free nation exercised exceptional vigilance.

Fifty years later, Eisenhower's valediction looks less like a political speech and more like prophecy. In the NSA controversies, both with the continuous telecom metadata haul (since at least 2006) and the PRISM/BLARNEY efforts to sniff through massive amounts of content on the internet, we have examples of exactly what Ike foresaw. In fact, this looks much like a marriage between the military-industrial complex and what we could call the intelligence-industrial complex, both based on predicates of never-ending war in the age of terror.

“The first discovery of the new NSA access system was made two years ago by British researcher Dr Nicko van Someren [an expert in computer security]. But it was only a few weeks ago when a second researcher rediscovered the access system. With it, he found the evidence linking it to NSA…

“According to Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym, the result of having the secret key inside your Windows operating system “is that it is tremendously easier for the NSA to load unauthorized security services on all copies of Microsoft Windows, and once these security services are loaded, they can effectively compromise your entire operating system. The NSA key is contained inside all versions of Windows from Windows 95 OSR2 onwards…”

“Given the complicated situation in Golan Heights we could replace the Austrian contingent leaving this region, on the disengagement line between Israeli troops and the Syrian armed forces,” Mr Putin was quoted as telling newly appointed Russian officers in remarks in Moscow carried by the Interfax news agency. “But this will happen, of course, only if the regional powers show interest, and if the UN secretary general asks us to do so.”

Mr Weidmann said the bond scheme, known as Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT), blurs the line between fiscal and monetary policy and encroaches on the terrain of parliaments. It leaves the ECB with the task of carrying out rescue operations that is the proper responsibility of the euro bail-out fund and compromises the bank’s independence.

The two-day hearings at the constitutional court in Karlsruhe will investigate the legality of the OMT, the “game-changer” that defused the EMU debt crisis last July and has been so successful that no country has yet needed to use it. The case stems from complaints by 37,000 citizens, including the Left Party, More Democracy and eurosceptic professors, most arguing that the ECB is financing bankrupt states.

While the court has no jurisdiction over the ECB, it could prohibit the Bundesbank from taking part in bond purchases. This amounts to the same thing, since the OMT would collapse if Germany stepped aside. The court may defer any decision until after Germany’s elections in September.