Writing in the Daily Telegraph, he said he wanted all of the UK to benefit from shale gas drilling - "north or south". The prime minister moved to allay concerns about the technique, insisting it was safe if properly regulated.

Environmentalists fear it can cause small earth tremors, water contamination and environmental damage. Fracking - short for "hydraulic fracturing" - involves drilling deep underground and releasing a high-pressure mix of water, sand and chemicals to crack rocks and release gas stored inside.

Mr Cameron said a study of 11 counties alone had found about 1,300 trillion cubic feet of shale gas "lying underneath Britain at the moment". "To put that in context, even if we just extract a tenth of that figure, that's still the equivalent of 51 years' gas supply," he said. And he insisted fracking could create more than 70,000 jobs.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which is responsible for decommissioning the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, on Saturday said the protective barriers that were installed to prevent the flow of toxic water into the ocean are no longer coping with the groundwater levels, Itar-Tass reports. The contaminated groundwater, which mixes with radioactive leaks seeping out of the plant, has already risen to 60 cm above the barriers – the fact which TEPCO calls a major cause of the massive daily leak of toxic substances.

Earlier on Friday, the company announced it started pumping out contaminated groundwater from under Fukushima, and managed to pump out 13 tons of water in six hours on Friday. TEPCO also said it plans to boost the pumped-out amount to some 100 tons a day with the help of a special system, which will be completed by mid-August. This will be enough to seal off most of the ongoing ocean contamination, according to TEPCO’s estimates.

However, Japan’s Ministry of Industry has recently estimated that some 300 tons of contaminated groundwater have been flowing into the ocean daily ever since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that triggered the disaster.

Spanish foreign minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo will use a trip to Buenos Aires next month to raise the possibility of forging a joint diplomatic offensive with the South American country over the disputed territories, sources told Spain's El Pais newspaper. Spain's foreign ministry was also discussing whether to take its complaints over Gibraltar to the United Nations, the newspaper reported on Sunday.

The sources did not specify whether Spain would ask the UN to back a request for Britain to give up sovereignty or just adhere to certain agreements. It could take its petition to the Security Council or take up the matter with the UN General Assembly. Spain is also considering the option of denouncing Gibraltar to the International Court of Justice in the Hague for its "illegal occupation" of the isthmus - the strip of land connecting the peninsula to the mainland that was not included in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht.

Mr Margallo, who has threatened retaliatory measures against the Rock that include a 50 euro border tax and the closure of Spanish airspace to Gibraltar traffic, will meet with his Argentine counterpart to discuss a new alliance. Last week Mrs Kirchner renewed her country's demand for talks on the sovereignty of the [Falkland] islands at the UN Security Council. The Argentine president said: "This is not a fanciful stance. We simply want the United Nations resolution to be enforced and for our two countries to sit down and discuss this."

Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy vowed on Friday to take "every legal step to necessary" to protect his country's interests over Gibraltar. His threat came a day after it emerged Britain was sending naval warships to the area as "part of a routine deployment".

She made the assertion during a talk at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales on Wednesday. She said that radicalizing ideologies may soon be viewed not as being of personal choice or free will but as a category of mental disorder. She said new developments in neuroscience could make it possible to consider extremists as people with mental illness rather than criminals.

She told The Times of London: "One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated. Someone who has for example become radicalized to a cult ideology - we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance."

Taylor admits that the scope of what could end up being labelled "fundamentalist" is expansive. She continued: "I am not just talking about the obvious candidates like radical Islam or some of the more extreme cults. I am talking about things like the belief that it is OK to beat your children. These beliefs are very harmful but are not normally categorized as mental illness. In many ways that could be a very positive thing because there are no doubt beliefs in our society that do a heck of a lot of damage, that really do a lot of harm."

What is not being reported is that Russia has been warning its citizens and institutions since last March’s Cyprus bail-in to divest assets out of western banks.

Recent Western self-inflicted wounds have opened the Pandora’s box for China and Russia as well as other BRIC nations to pressure hard for non-dollar settlement of trade, and in particular oil. I submit that this agenda and the G20 meeting September 5-6 in St Petersburg is the venue for this to be revealed. THAT should be the real concern for the US, and it ties directly into my earlier article, ‘China Maneuvers to take Away US’ Dominant Reserve Currency Status’.

He greeted Muslims around the world during his Sunday blessing of pilgrims gathered in St Peter's Square in Rome. He said that "our brothers'' the Muslims had just concluded their holy month of Ramadan, dedicated to fasting, prayer and alms-giving.

The Pope spoke from his studio window overlooking the square. The BBC's David Willey in Rome says Pope Francis, who has made caring for the poor the landmark theme of his pontificate, addressed tens of thousands of pilgrims gathered in scorching summer heat.

It is such an astounding amount of debt that it is hard to even get your mind around it. The government debt to GDP ratio in Japan will reach 247 percent this year, and the Japanese currently spend about 50 percent of all central government tax revenue on debt service. Realistically, there are only two ways out of this overwhelming debt trap for the Japanese. Either they default or they try to inflate the debt away. At this point, the Japanese have chosen to try to inflate the debt away. They have initiated the greatest quantitative easing experiment that a major industrialized nation has attempted since the days of the Weimar Republic.

Over the next two years, the Bank of Japan plans to zap 60 trillion yen into existence out of thin air and use it to buy government bonds. By the time this program is over, the monetary base in Japan will have approximately doubled. But authorities in Japan are desperate. They know that the Japanese debt bomb could set off global panic at any time, and they are trying to find a way out that will not cause too much pain.

Unfortunately, the only way that this bizarre quantitative easing program will work is if investors in Japanese bonds act very, very irrationally. You see, the only way that Japan has been able to pile up this much debt in the first place is because they have been able to borrow gigantic piles of money at super low interest rates.

Right now, the yield on 10 year Japanese bonds is sitting at an absurdly low 0.76%. But even with such ridiculously low interest rates, the central government of Japan is still spending about half of all tax revenue on debt service. If interest rates go up, the game is over. Sadly, the truth is that every financial bubble eventually bursts, and this global debt bubble will be no exception.

It is quite an achievement for the one remaining superpower to appear as ineffectual and wrong-footed as the United States has managed to do in the past week. But there it is. The president’s global strategy in his second term was based on two resounding premises. First, al Qaeda was “on the run” having been smashed by the killing of Osama bin Laden and the successful US drone operations in Pakistan: in May, Mr Obama gave a triumphal speech in which he declared the War on Terror officially over.

That was then. This is now: over the past week, 19 US embassies in the Middle East and North Africa had to be closed for a week, and diplomatic staff evacuated from Yemen because of “specific terrorist threats”. So who exactly is on the run? When the embarrassing contrast between this mass exit of the American presence and the “War on Terror (End of)” speech was pointed out, White House spokesmen clarified – as government spokesmen like to call it – what the president had said: it was al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan that had been all but defeated, not its franchise in Yemen, which was clearly still alive and kicking.

The questions remain: is the US “at war” with global jihad or isn’t it? It is now engaged in drone attacks on Yemen, whose government is repeatedly declaring victory over the local al-Qaeda branch. What precisely is America’s role in this, if not as part of an international “War on Terror”? When Barack Obama first ran for the presidency, he committed himself to the war in Afghanistan (rather than Iraq) and refused to rule out the possibility of invading Pakistan. Does he now have any clear, coherent objectives or is his White House simply reacting to events?

But there must be at least a glimmering of doubt even in Europe – where the Obama presidency has been given an absurdly easy ride – that America, too, is adrift in the post-Cold War landscape: that it no longer has any clear conception of its global role. Mr Obama, who talks constantly about his hopes for the future, seems to have very little interest in the new demands this new landscape might make on his country.

“Its drum has seized,” he said, sadly. Foolishly, I thought a seized drum sounded as if there was still hope. Seizing, surely, suggests a temporary condition. Couldn’t the drum be released? It appeared not. “If you do that you’ll have to change the bearings,” he said. “And it won’t be worth your while.”

I grasped the nettle. I’m not the sort of person who just throws ailing white goods on the scrapheap without a few questions, after all. How much would it actually cost, I asked, to liberate the frozen drum? “Four or five hundred pounds,” he said. I began to see his point. Well, how much time could I expect from a new machine, I asked. At the lower price range, three or four years, he estimated; at the middle to high end, eight or nine.

I thought of my parents’ ancient, clanking workhorse of a washing machine, still going strong after 30 years’ hard labour. Their repairman told them they don’t make them like that any more; it seems he was right.

I've been taking another look at the new 7 per cent unemployment target, and I'm ever more convinced that this really doesn't change anything, and is certainly no guarantee of near zero interest rates for the next three years.

Currency and bond markets have already made up their minds. Though the movements are quite marginal, they've actually brought forward the point at which they think bank rates will begin to rise, rather than pushed it back. This is because most City pundits believe the 7 per cent unemployment target will be reached before three years are up, though this doesn't chime with either Bank or Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts.

The team of researchers looked at 451 voluntary notices manufacturers sent the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) between 1997 and 2012 that vouch for the safety of a specific additive, such as caffeine or a sweetener. A GRAS determination means that there is “a reasonable certainty in the minds of competent scientists that the substance is not harmful under the intended conditions of use."

In none of those cases was the safety assessment made by an outside panel, the researchers report; rather, "financial conflicts of interest were ubiquitous in determinations that an additive to food was GRAS." The researchers write that 22.4% of the safety assessments were made by an employee of an additive manufacturer, 13.3% by an employee of a consulting firm selected by the manufacturer, and 64.3% by an expert panel selected by either a consulting firm or the manufacturer.

It will hardly come as a surprise to anyone that [Russia,]in the aftermath of yesterday's dilettante mistake by Obama which alienated Putin from the western world (and its subservient states such as Saudi Arabia of course), has just said no. It will certainly come as no surprise because as we explained previously, the biggest loser from Russia abandoning Syria (something we predicted would never happen) would be none other than Russia's most important company - Gazprom - which would lose its energy grip over Europe as Qatar replaced it as a natgas vendor.

What is shocking in all of this is that Saudi Arabia was so stupid and/or naive to believe that Putin would voluntarily cede geopolitical control over the insolvent Eurozone, where he has more influence according to some than even the ECB, or Bernanke. Especially in the winter.

Brin's lab meat isn't the only high-profile food innovation Silicon Valley is serving up at the moment, though it's probably the most expensive. Convention-thwarting food products and ideas have won headlines in recent months, from that stem cell hamburger to meat-hacking conferences to Soylent, the internet-famous food replacement serum. Part of the reason that these products are garnering so much media attention is surely because they're being "hacked" by Silicon Valley's bigwigs and aspirants alike.

Last March, Bill Gates wrote that "the time was ripe for food innovation" in a piece published on Mashable. Mr Brin evidently shares the sentiment. "It's really just proof of concept right now, we're trying to create the first cultured beef hamburger," the Google co-founder explained in a short film made for his lab burger's debut. "From there I'm optimistic that we can really scale by leaps and bounds." That language should sound familiar.

"The food industry is prime for technological disruption," Diane Gould, the founder of Food+Tech Connect said last June. Gould had organized the Hack/Meat Silicon Valley conference held at Stanford that month, and convened food-enthusiast tech entrepreneurs from around the nation.

“The heinous crime committed by Germany against the Jews, the betrayal of all civilized values that was the Shoah, will always be present and we can shape the future of the resulting special relationship between Germany and Israel in awareness of that,” Merkel said in an interview published in the most recent issue of Jewish Voice from Germany.

“That means that we’ll never be neutral and that Israel can be sure of our support when it comes to ensuring its security,” she said. “That’s why I also said that Germany’s support for Israel’s security is part of our national ethos, our raison d’être.”

In the interview Merkel, who is believed likely to win her third term as chancellor next month, repeated her past criticisms of Israel’s settlement policies, but also blasted anti-Zionism. Germany has for years been Israel’s lead advocate in the European Union, which is Israel’s largest trade partner.

His comments sparked fury on the social network where he was accused of disguising his ‘bigotry’ as atheism. But last night the 72-year-old best-selling author of ‘The God Delusion’ refused to apologise for his remarks. The row broke out after he commented: ‘All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge.’ He responded to the barrage of ensuing criticism by telling his 782,000 followers: ‘A statement of simple fact is not bigotry. And science by Muslims was great in the distant past.’

In response to one Twitter user who pointed out that Muslims had been responsible for algebra and ‘alchemy’, Professor Dawkins replied: ‘Indeed, where would we be without alchemy? Dark Age achievements undoubted. But since then?’ Writer Owen Jones told the professor: ‘How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment.’

But some users noted that the criticism of Professor Dawkins was in marked contrast to that when he has made comments about Christianity. One wrote: ‘Dawkins spent the best part of 10 years attacking Christianity and not raising an eyebrow. He now turns that same eye on Islam and uproar.’