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.

A study for the Christian think tank Theos recorded 77% as believing some things could not be explained by science or any other means. Among the other findings, 8% said they or someone they knew had experienced a miracle, while one in four expressed a belief in angels. ComRes surveyed just over 2,000 people.

"The study appears to confirm that, despite a steady decline in congregations and in formal religious belief, a sense of the spiritual remains strong in Britain," said the BBC's religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott.

Only a quarter of those questioned thought spiritual forces had no influence on Earth. And almost two-thirds of those who identified themselves as Christians thought such spiritual forces could influence people's thoughts or the natural world. More than a third of the non-religious shared that belief.

The letter reads;

"Dear Business Customer, Starting November 17, 2013: You will no longer be able to send international wire transfers. You will still be able to send domestic wires and receive both domestic and international wires. We’ll cancel any international wire transfers, including reccurring ones, you scheduled to be sent after this date.

Your cash activity limit for these accounts(s) will be $50,000 per statement cycle, per account. Cash activity is the combined total of cash deposits made at branches, night drops and ATMs and cash withdrawals made at branches (including purchases of money orders) and ATMs. These changes will help us more effectively manage the risks involved with these types of transactions."

Another letter received by Peak to Peak Charter School, an Elementary School in Colorado, states that the option to send both international and domestic wire transfers has been withdrawn from Chase business savings account holders.

Chase is obviously very keen to make it hard for their customers to have any kind of control over their savings and is trying to prevent them from sending dollars abroad, prompting concerns that Cyprus-style account gouging could occur in America. Why has Chase announced such a ludicrous and restrictive policy change? Speculation is rife that the bank is preparing for some kind of economic crisis by “locking down” its customers’ money.

In cases where the corner didn’t get resealed fast enough and too much of the reek spread, the whole bank collapsed, only to be bailed out by taxpayers, often in other countries; it’s easier that way. The only thing known about the holes in the balance sheets of these black boxes, left behind by assets that have quietly decomposed, is that they’re deep. But no one knows how deep. And no one is allowed to know – not until Eurocrats decide who is going to pay for bailing out these banks.

How do we know? ECB President Mario Draghi said that on Friday in Washington. And today, the Eurogroup of 17 finance ministers had a huddle in Luxembourg to try to decide that issue. The IMF, which can only sniff around the surface of the banks, determined that the Spanish and Italian banks alone would have to recognize an additional €230 billion ($310 billion) in losses over the next two years. As we have seen time and again, bank losses are always much larger when the truth finally seeps out, and that doesn’t happen until after the bank collapses and someone from the outside counts what’s left over.

Additionally, these banks have already written off a mountain of bad assets. In both countries, banks have collapsed and been bailed out, some twice – in Spain at the expense of taxpayers in other Eurozone countries. Next year will be a moment of truth, so to speak, when the ECB is to become the regulator of the 130 largest banks in its bailiwick. Imbued with new powers, it will subject them to a somewhat realistic evaluation, rather than the “stress tests” of yore that were nothing but banking agitprop – assuming certain banks in Italy and Spain can be kept upright until then.

“The effectiveness of this exercise will depend on the availability of necessary arrangements for recapitalizing banks ... including through the provision of a public backstop,” Mario Draghi explained on Friday to set the mood for today’s meetings. “These arrangements must be in place before we conclude our assessment.”

Meaning: The truth shall not be known until after the Eurocrats decided who would have to pay for the bailouts. And the bank examinations won’t be completed until then, because if any of it seeped out – Draghi forbid – the whole house of cards would collapse, with no taxpayers willing to pick up the tab as its magnificent size would finally be out in the open!

“Building a de-Americanised world”: this statement would have raised a smile a few years ago. At most it would have passed for provocation by Hugo Chavez. But when we are seeing the United States’ bankruptcy in real-time and it’s an official Chinese press agency that says so, the impact isn’t the same. In reality, it’s describing out loud a process which is already well underway: simply, it’s now allowed to speak about it in public. At least US government deadlock has the merit of loosening tongues. Let there be no mistake, this analysis hasn’t appeared in the Chinese media by chance, and it reflects Beijing’s hardening tone.

In fact, if the whole world is holding its breath before this pathetic game of the US elite; it’s not out of compassion, it’s to avoid being swept away in the fall of the world’s first power. Everyone is trying to free itself from American influence and let go of a United States permanently discredited by recent events over Syria, tapering, shutdown and now the debt ceiling. The legendary US power is now no more than a nuisance and the world has understood that it’s time to de-Americanise.

This perspective and speaking the unspeakable is finally freeing-up a whole range of solutions which, until now, were simply signs, even still repressed by some. These solutions are speeding-up the construction of the world afterwards and opening on a multipolar world organised around major regional blocs.

Many Americans see the reality in front of them: their country is bankrupt. Consequently, is it better to postpone the confrontation with reality, at the risk of amplifying the problems, or is it better to resolve them now? The majority of the population don’t take a dim view of a payment default. Besides, what other solution is there ultimately? Is there no desire amongst Republicans to precipitate the crisis? It’s the ideal situation because they can blame the Tea Party which has stated unequivocally that “no agreement is better than a bad agreement”. What we mean is that, this time, or probably on another occasion in the near future, they might well be tempted to cut the Gordian knot.

Likewise, a strategic recovery certainly took place when the Fed backtracked on reducing its quantitative easing. Why did it let everyone believe right up to the last minute that it would reduce QE3 without doing so in the end? It’s the first time that it has taken investors by surprise, all 100% convinced of a tapering given in the forward guidance, a well-established principle. Is there no connection between the gross insider trading proved to have taken place at the time of the Fed’s announcement, which had to be worth billions of dollars to the perpetrators?

All this supports our theory of desperate US financial institutions which must be bailed out discreetly by such operations, at the risk of undermining the Fed’s credibility. Again, short-term solutions which make the situation worse but which push back the fatal deadline a little further. We are no longer the only ones to ring the alarm bell on these American banks: the Bank of England is expecting major banks to fail which, according to it, have lost the status of “too big to fail”. We therefore repeat our warning on this subject.

Like a boxer, all these blows that the country has taken has made it groggy and it only lacks the last one to floor it. If it doesn’t come from a US payment default in October, it will be another deadline which has been pushed back which, this time, won’t yield.

“Well, of course, I voted against [Obamacare], and I have not read all the rules and regulations,” Fleming told CNSNews.com earlier this month at the Capitol. “They’re extremely complex. An average person even with a law degree or a medical degree like me can’t understand them,” Fleming said. “They’re incomprehensible.”

When asked if he was surprised by the large number of pages of regulations, Fleming said he thought the number would get bigger. “I don’t think that 10,000 pages is going to end,” Fleming said. “I think it’s going to grow over time as long as this bill continues to be in place.”

That means unelected federal officials have now written 30 words of regulations for each word in the law. What is commonly known as the Obamacare law includes both the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (HCERA).

Since these bills were signed into law by President Barack Obama in March 2010, various agencies in the administration have published 109 final regulations spelling out how they are to be implemented. These 109 final regulations account for a combined 10,535 pages in the Federal Register, where the government officially published them.

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.”