"The economic situation is worsening from month to month, and unemployment has reached a level that puts democratic structures ever more in doubt," he said. "The Germans have not yet realised that southern Europe, including France, will be forced by their current misery to fight back against German hegemony sooner or later," he said, blaming much of the crisis on Germany's wage squeeze to gain export share.

Mr Lafontaine said on the parliamentary website of Germany's Left Party that Chancellor Angela Merkel will "awake from her self-righteous slumber" once the countries in trouble unite to force a change in crisis policy at Germany's expense. His prediction appeared confirmed as French finance minister Pierre Moscovici yesterday proclaimed the end of austerity and a triumph of French policy, risking further damage to the tattered relations between Paris and Berlin.

"Austerity is finished. This is a decisive turn in the history of the EU project since the euro," he told French TV. "We're seeing the end of austerity dogma. It's a victory of the French point of view."

The move will allow the EU to join a related complaint filed by Japan against Chinese duties in December. The EU complaint would seek to overturn Chinese duties on exports of seamless stainless steel tubes made by firms such as Spain's Tubacex SA (TUBA.MC) and Germany's Salzgitter AG (SZGG.DE), the sources said. The sources asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the case.

It took China less than one day to retaliate. What's worse the retaliation is aimed at Europe's already weakest - the PIIGS [Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain] - by targeting not hard German machinery exports but something far more prosaic: French, Spanish and Italian wine.

Reuters reports that "in a step targeting southern European states such as France and Italy that back the duties but largely sparing north European opponents such as Germany, Beijing said it launched an anti-dumping and anti-subsidy probe into sales of European wine. The Chinese ministry said the government had begun the probe into EU wines at the request of Chinese wine makers.

The EU now has 31 ongoing trade investigations, 18 of them involving China. The largest to date is that into 21 billion euros of imports from China of solar panels, cells and wafers. The EU says it has evidence that Chinese firms are selling solar panels below cost - a practice known as dumping. But the initial duty of 11.8 percent announced on Tuesday by European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht was far below the average 47 percent that had been planned.

The commander, Nie Haisheng, and his crew, Zhang Xiaoguang and Wang Yaping, plan to spend just under two weeks at the orbiting Tiangong space lab. Wang is China's second female astronaut and she will beam the country's first lesson from space to students on Earth.

The crew's capsule was ejected from the upper-stage of the rocket about nine minutes after lift-off. It should take just over 40 hours to raise the craft's orbit to the operating altitude of Tiangong some 335km (208 miles) above the planet's surface.

This mission, the fifth manned mission by China and slated to be the longest, is designated Shenzhou-10. It is the latest step in China's plan to eventually put a permanently manned station above the Earth.

China has had trade, religious and cultural exchanges with South Asian countries by way of the “Southern Silk Road” since ancient times, Dilip Barua, Minister for Industries of Bangladesh, said at the ongoing 8th China-South Asia Business Forum in Kunming, capital of southwest China’s Yunnan province.

T M Murtozaa Reza Chowhury, additional secretary of the Ministry of Commerce of Bangladesh said at the China-South Asia Business Forum that China and South Asian countries are neighbors with glorious history, splendid culture and long-standing relationships established 2,500 years ago thanks to the ancient “Southern Silk Road.”

Bangladesh always underscores the need for cooperation as an effective tool for social and economic development of the countries of the region, he said.

Britain has gone to the European Court of Justice to overturn powers allowing a Paris-based regulator to ban short-selling as part of a campaign of legal challenges to rein in growing EU powers over financial regulation. The European Securities and Markets Authority, or Esma, was given the unprecedented powers to ban short-selling after losing a battle over it in a council of EU finance ministers last year.

Jemima Stratford QC, the barrister representing the Government in the Luxembourg court challenge, insisted that the power, which is unique among Europe's regulatory agencies, was an illegal power grab in breach of the EU's treaties. "There is a short point at the heart of this case. It is that the extensive discretion given to Esma is contrary to the institutional balance laid down in the treaties," she told the ECJ.

"This would be a fundamental change. It cannot be right that it crept in under the radar." Short-sellers seek to profit on declining markets by selling borrowed shares or bonds, on the belief their price will fall, then replacing them with securities bought at a lower price.

A Chilean website, Reflection and Liberation, which discusses liberation theology, first reported Francis' comments, though CNN said a Vatican spokesman refused to comment on the report. "In the Curia," Francis said, "there are holy people. But there is also a stream of corruption," adding, "The 'gay lobby' is mentioned, and it is true, it is there. We need to see what we can do."

According to the Religious Information Service of Ukraine (RISU), Cardinal Kurt Koch focused on the discussion of one of the most painful and key issues of Orthodox-Catholic relations – the primacy of the bishop of Rome. Cardinal Koch explained that "from the Orthodox point of view, the church is present in every local church that celebrates the Eucharist, so each Eucharistic community is a complete church".

"Instead, from the Catholic point of view, a separate Eucharistic community is not a complete church. Therefore, a basis of the Catholic Church is the unity of separate Eucharistic communities with each other and the bishop of Rome. That is, the Catholic Church lives in the mutual intersection of local churches in one universal church."

According to the cardinal, "the most important thing is not to lose sight of the goal of ecumenical dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, which, at least from the Catholic point of view, can consist only in the restoration of a visible communion of churches."

In the frankest admission yet that banks and other corporations are quite literally above the law, the US Department of Justice recently announced that big companies couldn’t be indicted because it might damage the US or world economy. Indeed, as Matt Taibbi reported in The Rolling Stone, the US Attorney General Eric Holder is now saying that not only can they not indict the companies, but they cannot even indict any of the individual criminals at the companies. In other words, the department ostensibly responsible for delivering justice in the US is now running a protection racket and its clients include the employees and executives of the country’s largest law breakers.

But just when you thought that the enlightened concept of universal justice was dead and buried, a courageous Spanish judge by the name of Elpidio José Silva has done what virtually no other judge in the Western world, bar Iceland, has dared to do: He has refused to grant bail to a former senior banker, sending him to prison before facing trial for his alleged role in the lead-up to the financial crisis.

The ex-banker in question, Miguel Blesa, is the former president of Caja Madrid, now part of the too-big-to-fail (but-almost-certainly-too-big-to-save) banking group Bankia. He stands accused of a number of felonies including involvement in irregularities in Caja Madrid’s purchase of City National Bank, financial fraud and the wrongful “appropriation of funds” – legalese for white-collar theft.

What happens in the coming weeks and months will determine whether or not justice prevails in Spain, and whether or not the Blesa case serves as an example for independently-minded judges of other countries to follow. For in the face of the wholesale betrayal of the public by the executive and legislative branches, the rare principled stance taken by activist judges like Silva represents one of our last remaining hopes of justice ever returning to this dark, lawless world.

This is what sticks in my throat. For many years there has been a spectrum of Muslim belief in this country ranging from unobtrusive Islamic observance to terrorist totalitarianism. The "problem" is that young British Muslims, some of them converts, are even now being propelled towards the terrorist end of the spectrum by preachers who embedded themselves here under the government of Tony Blair.

Academics close to the New Labour project emitted flatulent platitudes while universities threw open their facilities to repulsive demagogues; prisons became recruiting grounds for extremists while their simpering chaplains said nothing; meanwhile, Blair's ministers and their courtiers in the police poured countless millions of pounds into subsidising some of the very Islamists whose influence they needed to contain.

Please, Mr Blair, return to the Middle East, where your mission as a "peace envoy" is yielding what might politely be described as modest results. You've done enough damage here.

Libertarians and conspiracy theorists of both Left and Right will never forget this moment. Already we have Glenn Beck hailing Snowden on Twitter: Courage finally. Real. Steady. Thoughtful. Transparent. Willing to accept the consequences. Inspire w/Malice toward none.#edwardsnowden

Snowden will be a Right-wing hero as well as a Left-libertarian one. Why? First, he thought carefully about what he should release, avoiding (he says) material that would harm innocent individuals. Second, he's formidably articulate. Quotes like the following are pure gold for opponents of Obama who've been accusing the President of allowing the Bush-era "surveillance state" to extend its tentacles even further:

NSA is focussed on getting intelligence wherever it can by any means possible… Increasingly we see that it's happening domestically. The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone, it ingests them by default, it collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time … While they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so. Any analyst at any time can target anyone…

Suddenly the worse-than-Watergate rhetoric doesn't seem overblown. And I do wonder: can a president who's presided over, and possibly encouraged, Chinese-style surveillance of The Land of the Free honestly expect to serve out his full term?

Shortly before US President Barack Obama's visit to Berlin, Germans are troubled by questions regarding the extent to which the United States monitors Internet traffic worldwide. Is it true, as the media claim, that the United States can access and track virtually every form of communication on the Internet at the source? The Guardian and the Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) could gain direct access to and read user data with the so-called "Prism" program. An unnamed intelligence officer was quoted by the Washington Post as saying that the NSA could "quite literally … watch your ideas form as you type."

Internet giants like Facebook and Google were quick to issue denials, saying that they do not release any information without a court order. But doubts remain. These reports are deeply disconcerting. When viewed in its entirety, this massive effort to acquire information, if it is true, would be dangerous.

On the weekend, President Obama reacted by saying that it is impossible to have 100 percent security and 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. I don't share this view. The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is. In a democratic constitutional state, security is not an end in itself, but serves to secure freedom.

Berkshire sold roughly 19 million shares of Johnson & Johnson, and reduced his overall stake in “consumer product stocks” by 21%. Berkshire Hathaway also sold its entire stake in California-based computer parts supplier Intel. With 70% of the US economy dependent on consumer spending, Buffett’s apparent lack of faith in these companies’ future prospects is worrisome. Unfortunately Buffett isn’t alone.

Fellow billionaire John Paulson, who made a fortune betting on the subprime mortgage meltdown, is clearing out of US stocks too. During the second quarter of the year, Paulson’s hedge fund, Paulson & Co, dumped 14 million shares of JPMorgan Chase. The fund also dumped its entire position in discount retailer Family Dollar and consumer-goods maker Sara Lee. Finally, billionaire George Soros recently sold nearly all of his bank stocks, including shares of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs. Between the three banks, Soros sold more than a million shares.

So why are these billionaires dumping their shares of US companies? It’s very likely that these professional investors are aware of specific research that points toward a massive market correction, as much as 90%.

In the interview for his latest blockbuster Aftershock, Wiedemer says the 90% drop in the stock market is “a worst-case scenario,” and the host quickly challenged this claim. Wiedemer calmly laid out a clear explanation of why a large drop of some sort is a virtual certainty. It starts with the reckless strategy of the Federal Reserve to print a massive amount of money out of thin air in an attempt to stimulate the economy.

“These funds haven’t made it into the markets and the economy yet. But it is a mathematical certainty that once the dam breaks, and this money passes through the reserves and hits the markets, inflation will surge,” said Wiedemer. “Once you hit 10% inflation, 10-year Treasury bonds lose about half their value. And by 20%, any value is all but gone. Interest rates will increase dramatically at this point, and that will cause real estate values to collapse. And the stock market will collapse as a consequence of these other problems.”

But since it was first spotted in Houston in 2002, it has spread to some 21 counties in Texas, 20 counties in Florida and a few locations in Mississippi and Louisiana. University of Texas researcher and co-author of a study on the creatures Ed LeBrun said the omnivorous ants attack and kill other species as well as monopolizing food sources to the detriment of the entire ecosystem.

The insects, bizarrely, are attracted to electrical wiring and components and in one year alone caused $146.5 million in damages in Texas, ABC reported. The devastation occurs when one ant discovers the transformer then gets electrocuted when it touches it, and 'waves its abdomen in the air' omitting a certain scent.

The scent lures ants to the scene and they too are electrocuted, again sending the scent into the air to attract their friends. Eventually, there are so many dead ants that the electric switches get stuck or the insulation fries and the system shuts down.