The much anticipated "financial correction" is rapidly approaching, and investors are starting to race for the exits. We have not seen so many financial trouble signs all come together at one time like this since just prior to the last major financial crisis. It is almost as if a "perfect storm" is brewing, and a lot of the "smart money" has already gotten out of stocks and bonds.

Could it be possible that we are heading toward another nightmarish financial crisis? Could we see a repeat of 2008 or potentially even something worse? Of course a lot of people believe that we will never see another major financial crisis like we experienced in 2008 ever again.

A lot of people think that this type of "doom and gloom" talk is foolish. It is those kinds of people that did not see the last financial crash coming and that are choosing not to prepare for the next one even though the warning signs are exceedingly clear. Let us hope for the best, but let us also prepare for the worst and right now things do not look good at all.

The extremist group could plant explosives on trains and tunnels or sabotage tracks and electrical cabling, said Bild, Europe's most widely read daily. Bild said the information came from the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, which had listened in to a conference call involving top Al-Qaeda operatives. The attacks on Europe's rail network was a "central topic" of this call, Bild said.

Authorities in Germany have responded to the threat with discrete measures such as deploying plain-clothed police officers at key stations and on main routes, according to the daily. According to US media reports, intelligence services intercepted a conference call earlier this month between Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and more than 20 operatives from across the group's global network.

Iran and Hezbollah, it warned, were continuing their “global terror campaign” against Israeli and Jewish targets. It noted that Iran remained bent on avenging alleged Israeli responsibility for the killing of Hezbollah terror chief Imad Mughniyeh in a Damascus car-bombing in 2008, and the deaths of three Iranian nuclear scientists.

It said its information indicated that Israeli businessmen and ex-government officials were prime potential targets for assassination and/or kidnapping. With all that in mind, the bureau reconfirmed that Israelis are barred altogether from travel to Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, where the “concrete” terror threat was “very high.” Generally, it urged Israelis traveling worldwide to take extra precautions, such as avoiding unexpected meetings or out of the way places, and to change regular travel routes.

There is a curious and bizarre reversal of the natural at Fukushima: a looking-glass world inversion. Unlike the standard marine catastrophe, for example the Titanic, where the need is to manically pump water out of the ship to stop it sinking, at Fukushima the game is to madly pump water in, in order to stop it melting down and exploding.

Probably because it is now clear that the saturation of the ground from all the pumping water for cooling the several reactors and spent fuel pools has destabilized the foundations of the buildings, TEPCO is bringing forward its operation to try and deal with what is perhaps the most dangerous of the four sites, the spent fuel pond of Reactor 4. For this pond contains a truly enormous amount of radioactive material: 1,331 spent fuel grids amounting to 228.3 tons of Uranium and Plutonium buried inside a swimming pool which has already dried out once and exploded.

That explosion blasted a significant, but unknown, quantity of lethally radioactive bits and pieces of fuel element around the site (where I heard they were bulldozed into the ground - who knows?), but it also blew the top off the building, covered the fuel elements under the water with rubble and pieces of crane machinery, and no doubt twisted and melted a large proportion of the remaining spent fuel.

Of course, to make the game more interesting, they are not just sitting there like they were when the tank was being used. They are under water (sea water), covered in debris, corroded, busted, twisted, intertwined and generally impossible to deal with. And here is the really scary thing: if you manage to bust a fuel element, the best outcome is that huge amounts of radioactivity escape into the air and blow over Japan, just like before. The worst outcome is when two of these things get too close, perhaps because in pulling one out it breaks and falls against another one in the tank. Because then you suddenly have lots of fission, a lot of heat, a meltdown, possibly a big blast like before, and the destruction of the entire cooling pond. Or else the water boils off and the whole thing catches fire.

Then what happens? Not quite Armageddon, but as far as Japan is concerned, almost. I bet they have contingency plans to evacuate the northern island to Korea, China, anywhere. A lot of this radiation will end up in the USA, a long way downwind, admittedly, but then there is an awful lot of radioactivity involved.

As more evidence emerges from this ghastly inadvertent Fukushima experiment, we will see more and more that we have governments and radiation agencies who are wielding unsafe and incorrect scientific assessments of reality. Additionally, we have what might become one of the most serious global public health events of human history being overseen by a private profit-making company, TEPCO, with no good track record of competence or believability. And appropriately, in this looking-glass world, in a bizarre echo of these two inversions of justice and democracy, we have a sinking ship that can only be saved by pumping water into it.

A spokesman for the Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said on Tuesday that 300 tons of highly radioactive water has leaked from a stainless steel tank on the territory of the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority has classified the leak as a Level One incident, the second lowest on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) for radiological releases, a spokesman informed Reuters.

The incident is the first Level One since the actual catastrophe at Fukushima in March 2011 when Japanese authorities issued an INES rating. Level One means that the incident is classified as anomalous situation that exceeds limits of safe functioning of an installation. The most dangerous, Level Seven, has only been applied twice: for the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986 and the meltdown of three reactors at Fukushima plant itself.

TEPCO has to keep the melted uranium fuel rods of three destroyed reactors awash with water using a jerry-rigged system only to keep the melted debris cool and relatively stable. To establish a closed cycle of the process, the operator stores huge amounts of radioactive water at Fukushima nuclear facility.

It is believed that overall there are more than 350,000 tons of radioactive water stored at the Fukushima plant in special tanks and the drainage system, and without special protection in the basements of the devastated facility. At the beginning of 2013, TEPCO drained most of the basement galleries, pumping radioactive water into newly delivered tanks.

RT was one of the few to report that the Egyptian military’s removal by force of Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi and his entire government was undertaken with the firm, secret backing of Saudi Arabia and several Gulf oil states, directly in defiance of Washington’s agenda. Now Saudi King Abdullah has confirmed this in an open declaration of support for Egypt’s military action against what the King called “terrorists.”

It is the most open declaration to date that there is a huge and deepening rift between Washington and the Saudis of a scale perhaps unprecedented since the 1945 agreements between US President Roosevelt and then King Ibn Saud. In his official August 16 statement, King Abdullah declared, “The people and government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia stood and still stand today with our brothers in Egypt against terrorism, extremism and sedition, and against whoever is trying to interfere in Egypt's internal affairs…” So much for Obama’s call for “dialogue” between the army and the Brotherhood.

The Saudi support for Army head and Defense Minister General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi was immediately backed by Jordan and the Emirates. It came after several days of violent protests by Muslim Brotherhood supporters in several Egyptian cities, which resulted in hundreds of deaths in clashes between the military and Brotherhood backers demanding Morsi’s return. NATO governments, led by Washington, have at the same time have tried to increase pressure on the provisional government to reinstate Morsi and the “democratically elected” government.

The EU is hardly eager to inflame Saudi leaders into another oil embargo, as was done in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. Now the open backing by Saudi King Abdullah for the military crackdown creates an entirely new dimension to the crisis.

The US government has decided privately to act as if the military takeover of Egypt was a coup, temporarily suspending most forms of military aid, despite deciding not to announce publicly a coup determination one way or the other, according to a leading US senator.

In the latest example of its poorly understood Egypt policy, the Obama administration has decided to temporarily suspend the disbursement of most direct military aid, the delivery of weapons to the Egyptian military, and some forms of economic aid to the Egyptian government while it conducts a broad review of the relationship. The administration won’t publicly acknowledge all aspects of the aid suspension and maintains its rhetorical line that no official coup determination has been made, but behind the scenes, extensive measures to treat the military takeover of Egypt last month as a coup are being implemented on a temporary basis.

The office of Senator Patrick Leahy (Democrat for Vermont), the head of the Appropriations State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee, told The Daily Beast on Monday that military aid to Egypt has been temporarily cut off. “[His] understanding is that aid to the Egyptian military has been halted, as required by law,” said David Carle, a spokesman for Leahy.

Europe's main stock markets opened down 1 percent following a fourth straight day of falls on both Wall Street and in Asia to leave MSCI's global index .MIWD00000PUS, which tracks shares in 45 countries, at its lowest level since July 12. Wednesday's minutes from the most recent Fed meeting could offer fresh hints on when the US central bank will start winding down its $85 billion-a-month support program, a tricky process markets have been nervous about for months.

The uncertainty has broadly driven up bond market borrowing costs in recent weeks. The upward pressure on US government bonds eased overnight, leaving the benchmark 10-year Treasury just off a 2-year high at 2.83 percent.

Ramin Nakisa, a global macro strategist for UBS in London, said market turbulence was bound to pick up as the Fed starts to switch the direction of its policy. "We expect volatility... people will start to wonder whether there is anything in the fixed-income world that really is safe," he said adding that there was also likely to be another short selloff in share markets.

The army and emergency workers have set up 166 temporary shelters across three regions, providing drinking water, hot food and medical supplies, RIA Novosti news agency reports. But Russian Vesti TV reports that many people do not want to be evacuated. The Amur and Khabarovsk regions, near the Chinese border, are worst affected.

Experts suggest the flooding will not get any worse over the next few days, but the weather forecast promises more rain later this month, says BBC Russian's Yuri Maloveryan in Blagoveshchensk. But the flood waters are not expected to fully recede until September, our correspondent adds. The deluge has also caused widespread flooding in neighbouring provinces of China, prompting mass evacuations.

"Eighty percent, if not 90%, of the people have no knowledge of economics whatsoever," said Mr Lucke, a professor of economics and head of upstart political party Alternative for Germany. "The situation is very dangerous for Germany and the European Union."

Such unvarnished talk has become a hallmark for the party, known as the AfD, which was founded early this year and is making waves as it stands for its first national election in September. The party is adding a wrinkle to Chancellor Angela Merkel's election plans by agitating for something virtually no mainstream politician has dared suggest: breaking up the euro zone by forcing financially troubled Southern European countries out.

"It would be best if the entire 'Club Med' left the euro," Mr Lucke told supporters during a recent rally.

That, and the downturn in emerging markets that many only recently embraced in the hunt for yield caused by those near-zero rates. It’s easy to identify the date that things changed: May 22, the day that the Federal Reserve first alerted markets that it might soon start “tapering” the $85 billion in monthly asset purchases it has been making since December to juice the economy. And soon looks to be getting even sooner.

A steady improvement in US employment figures — unemployment fell from 7.6 percent in June to 7.4 percent in July — has brought into focus the 6.5 percent unemployment target the Fed set as a prerequisite for raising short-term interest rates. On Thursday, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released yet another piece of good news on the employment front: New applications for unemployment benefits sank to their lowest levels in six years in July.

That’s great news for Americans who happen to be landing new jobs, but not as pleasant for bond investors worried about rising rates.

Spain is willing to restart a dialogue with Britain and it will accept the creation of ad hoc forums that include Gibraltar and the neighbouring Spanish province Andalusia for issues relating to residents on both sides of the border, Garcia-Margallo said.

"But as Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy observed earlier this month to his British counterpart David Cameron, it is first necessary for the UK to show that it intends to undo the damage that has already been caused, in particular by removing the concrete blocks." The Gibraltar government says the concrete reef in the Bay of Gibraltar will regenerate marine life and argues that the Spanish raked for shellfish there illegally in its waters.

But Garcia-Margallo said Spain had "no doubt" about its sovereignty over the waters, arguing that they were never included in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht under which Spain ceded Gibraltar to Britain in perpetuity.

Mr Hague said the situation in Egypt was "very bleak" and there was only a limited amount Western powers like Britain could do to help resolve it. "We have to do our best to support democratic institutions" without taking sides, he added. He is to meet fellow EU foreign ministers later to discuss Egypt.

Hundreds of people have died in five days of violence between supporters of ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi and the Egyptian military. Egyptian security officials have said that more than 20 police officers have been killed in an attack in the north of the country. At least 36 Muslim Brotherhood prisoners have died while trying to escape during their transfer to a prison outside Cairo.

European Union ambassadors are preparing for a meeting to discuss the crisis in Egypt. On Sunday, European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso and European Council president Herman Van Rompuy issued a rare joint statement warning that the EU would "urgently" review its relations with Egypt in the coming days.

"We will not achieve anything through threats," Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, told reporters through an interpreter during a visit to Paris. The prince spoke after meeting French President Francois Hollande, who on Thursday called for a swift end to a state of emergency imposed by Egypt's military authorities.

EU foreign ministers meet in Brussels this week to review what steps to take following a bloody crackdown since Wednesday on supporters of Mursi, deposed by the military on July 3. More than 800 people have died in the violence.

"If the situation calms down, very good. If on the contrary violence continues, then we can and we probably must take decisions," France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told France 2 television on Sunday. He said cutting aid would be difficult, as EU money allowed "Egyptians to eat and receive medical treatment". However, "loans are easier to cut," he added.

Riyadh was a close ally of Egypt's former leader Hosni Mubarak, toppled by a popular uprising in 2011 that brought Mursi's Muslim Brotherhood to power, and has long feared the spread of the Islamist group's ideology to the Gulf monarchies. On Friday, Saudi King Abdullah called on Arabs to stand together against "attempts to destabilize" Egypt, in a message of support for Egypt's military and clear attack on the Brotherhood.

The classrooms were then burned to the ground and the women taken away, attracting a crowd of abusive onlookers. Police told Sister Manal that the nuns had been targeted by hardline Islamists, convinced that they had given Muslim children an inappropriate education. ‘We are nuns. We rely on God and the angels to protect us,’ she said. ‘At the end, they paraded us like prisoners of war and hurled abuse at us as they led us from one alley to another without telling us where they were taking us.’

Siblings Wardah and Bedour, two Christian women employed by the school, also found themselves having to fight their way through the mob while being groped, hit and insulted by the extremists. So far two Christians have been killed since the military-backed government moved against protesters calling for former president Mohamed Morsi’s reinstatement. And dozens of churches, homes and businesses owned by Christians have been attacked and razed to the ground.

‘I am terrified and unable to focus,’ said Boulos Fahmy, the pastor of a Catholic church a short distance away from Manal’s school. ‘I am expecting an attack on my church any time now.’ And Bishop Ibram, head of the local Coptic Orthodox church, said he had instructed Christians and clerics not to resist the mobs of Islamists to try and avoid any loss of life.