High frequency trading is a catch-all term that describes the practice of firms using high-powered computers to execute trades at very fast speeds – sometimes thousands or millions of trades per second. These systems have developed over the past ten years, and began to really dominate Wall Street over the last five. For example, a high-frequency trader might try to take advantage of miniscule differences in prices between securities offered on different exchanges: ABC stock could be offered for one price in New York and for a slightly higher price in London. With a high-powered computer and an “algorithm,” a trader could buy the cheap stock and sell the expensive one almost simultaneously, making an almost risk-free profit for himself.

Emory University accounting professor Ilia D Dichev argues that while some high-frequency trading can be beneficial, the scope of high-frequency activity in the market today — which accounts for up to 70% of all trades by some estimates — has drowned out the input from more traditional investors who partake in good-old-fashioned “fundamental” analysis of companies, ie the analysis of financial statements and business plans.

When only a small minority of market participants are trading on actual information about the companies they are buying and selling, and the rest are trading on what computer programs think about those participants actions, the market can become unmoored from fundamentals, more volatile and less efficient.

Italy, the eurozone's third largest economy, has been in recession since the middle of 2011 and unemployment is currently running at more than 12%. S&P said it expects the Italian economy to contract by 1.9% this year, much worse than its previous forecast. The agency said that a lack of reform is partly to blame for Italy's poor performance.

"In our view, the low growth stems in large part from rigidities in Italy's labour and product markets," S&P said in a statement. It supported that view with European Union data that showed Italy's labour costs have risen more than any other eurozone nation. Commenting on the downgrade on Italian television, Prime Minister, Enrico Letta said: "It's proof that the situation is still complex and Italy remains under special observation."

The European Court of Human Rights agreed that a “whole life” tariff, which forces murderers to die in jail, was “inhuman and degrading” after an appeal was brought by Jeremy Bamber, who killed five members of his family in 1985.

The court proposed that those serving life with no possibility of parole should have their cases reviewed after 25 years, following which they could be freed. The decision means that prisoners serving whole life tariffs, including some of Britain’s most notorious killers such as Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, and Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer, could be granted permission to seek parole.

The ruling prompted a furious reaction from the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Justice Secretary. But ministers have no right of appeal against the ruling and the Government has six months to act upon the decision. David Cameron said that he was “very, very disappointed” and “profoundly disagrees” with the court’s decision.

A new report by the GM Contamination Register has disclosed US Department of Agriculture findings from 2006 and 2007, which show that the department detected traces of unapproved GM rice in over 30 countries. At the time, all of the Bayer CropScience varieties discovered had not been approved for cultivation or consumption abroad, and only one of the three types had been approved for domestic cultivation.

The USDA believes that the source of the contamination is field trials which occurred between the mid 1990s and early 2000s.The genetically modified LLRICE62, LLRice601 and LLRICE604 varieties are herbicide resistant. The trials were terminated in 2002 and none of these varieties ever made it onto the US market. But years later, traces of these strands were found worldwide.

The USDA report said the agency was unable to conclude whether pollen from the trials escaped and contaminated other fields or mechanical mixing was to blame. When experimental crop strains escape into general seed supplies, it is difficult to keep them contained, prompting some countries to pull US rice off their shelves.

Though the use of chemical pesticides has always been a source of contention, the advent of corn hybrid plants by biotech companies like Monsanto allowed farmers to cut back on their use. These new hybrids had been specifically designed using genes from a bacteria called Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which provided a formidable defense against corn rootworm.

Throughout parts of the midwest, however, farmers are now discovering rootworms that are immune to the genetically modified corn. In parts of Illinois, Minnesota and Nebraska, where rootworm has made a comeback, farmers have now returned to using chemical pesticides.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, two thirds of all corn grown in the US is of a hybrid variety, carrying the Bt gene that targets the rootworm. Though traditional pesticides may help in evening out the odds, there are other alternatives to combat rootworm despite its adaptation to the corn hybrid. Steiner, for one, has advocated “starving” the rootworm by depriving it of its food source, and advising farmers to rotate their crops from corn.

Crop rotation, however, is not likely to prove popular among farmers who take advantage of some $5 billion in government subsidies per year, doled out regardless of crop prices or yields.

Most of the corn, soybeans and cotton cultivated in the US stems from Roundup Ready seeds. While the genetically modified crops were meant to be resistant to application of the weed-killing Roundup herbicide, farmers are now increasingly having to deal with Roundup-resistant "superweeds."

The techniques are a key pillar of the ‘Insider Threat Program’, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.

Federal employees and contractors are asked to pay particular attention to the lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors – like financial troubles, odd working hours or unexplained travel – of co-workers as a way to predict whether they might do “harm to the United States.” Managers of special insider threat offices will have “regular, timely, and, if possible, electronic, access” to employees’ personnel, payroll, disciplinary and “personal contact” files, as well as records of their use of classified and unclassified computer networks, polygraph results, travel reports and financial disclosure forms.

But even the government’s top scientific advisers have questioned these techniques. Those experts say that trying to predict future acts through behavioral monitoring is unproven and could result in illegal ethnic and racial profiling and privacy violations.

The vote of 98-49 came after a full day of sometimes emotional debate. Before the measure can head to the state Senate, it needs a final vote from the House, which is expected on Wednesday. The House approved the same proposal during a previous special session of the legislature, but it failed to pass in the Senate after Democratic Senator Wendy Davis staged an 11-hour filibuster that gained national attention.

Planned Parenthood, the country's largest provider of abortions, says the proposed stricter standards for clinics could cause all but six of the 42 abortion facilities in Texas to shut down. Bill author Republican Jodie Laubenberg said no facility would be forced to close.

Texas Governor Rick Perry, a Republican who opposes abortion, called lawmakers back to Austin for a second special session to reconsider the proposal. Most lawmakers in the Republican controlled Senate favor the bill.

"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, once a stark symbol and source of grievance in the Arab world, is now almost a sideshow in a Middle East consumed by sectarian strife (and) economic misery… And yet Mr Kerry, backed by Mr Obama, still believes that tackling the problem is worth the effort," The New York Times said.

In the few months since he entered office, the American secretary of state has visited the region more times than his predecessor Hillary Clinton had during her entire term. Seemingly, this has to do with Kerry's personal scheduling problems, but actually the frequency of his visits is indicative of a severe problem on a federal level.

The vast amount of energy Kerry is investing in an attempt to conquer the Sisyphean challenges here is placing American foreign policy in a ridiculous light. The US cannot make peace between Arabs and other Arabs, yet it believes it can make peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Washington has repeatedly failed to grasp the situation in Egypt and Syria, but thinks it has a good understanding of the situation in Jerusalem and Ramallah.

Is it possible that John Kerry is more talented than all the American mediators who came before him? Not at all. He exposed his ignorance in Middle Eastern affairs when, as a senior senator, he insisted on welcoming Assad back into the family of nations, met with the Syrian leader twice in Damascus and showered him with compliments. Kerry's mediation skills are limited to pressuring Israel to make dangerous concessions for the sake of negotiations that will lead nowhere.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the President of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, told Vatican officials in a 2007 letter that the transfer offered "improved protection of these funds from any legal claim". Cardinal Dolan, who is now the Archbishop of New York, has been credited with helping to root out a serious sexual abuse scandal in his previous archdiocese of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

However, he has long insisted that he never deliberately sought to protect church funds from victims of abuse by clergy in the archdiocese, which he led as Archbishop between 2002 and 2009. Yet on June 4 2007 he proposed moving the assets to "an autonomous pious foundation", which he had established a month earlier, intended to fund the upkeep of cemeteries in the archdiocese.

The letter was published among more than 6,000 pages of documents released as part of a settlement between the archdiocese and lawyers for 570 people with lawsuits pending against it.

The UN's Committee on the Rights of the Child released its demands for information from the Holy See on Tuesday. The committee said that "in the light of the recognition by the Holy See of sexual violence against children committed by members of the clergy, brothers and nuns in numerous countries around the world, and given the scale of the abuses", the Vatican should provide detailed information on all cases of child sexual abuse committed by clergy.

The Vatican was told to show whether it had implemented measures "to ensure that no member of the clergy currently accused of sexual abuse be allowed to remain in contact with children," amid claims from around the world that bishops often moved abusive priests from one parish to another.

The UN committee demanded to know about specific cases in which bishops or other Catholic leaders had failed to report suspected abuse to the police. Geoffrey Robertson QC, the human rights lawyer, who has strongly criticised the Catholic Church's cover-up of sex abuse scandals around the world, said: "The committee's enquiries will inevitably lead it to conclude that the Vatican has broken multiple articles of the convention on a huge scale in many countries. The result in human suffering is incalculable."

The former admitted that he had underestimated how deeply his spending cuts would bite into overall economic output and therefore of tax revenues. The latter leads one of the parties in the governing coalition and in his departing speech said that the austerity imposed by Portugal's eurozone partners couldn't go on.

The Irish economy is back in recession after a brief period of hope. New car registrations in May were down 11 percent on the previous year and the bad loans ratio is 25 percent, the same as in Greece. The release of tape recordings of Irish bankers, boasting to each other of the way they had tricked the government into bailing them out, has soured the public mood, already depressed after five years of crisis.

And the bill is mounting. Adding together the direct bailouts of Greece and the packages issued to Ireland and Portugal, plus purchases of Spanish and Italian bonds and bank support package for Spain, the total is now $870 billion.

And there is no end in sight.

The vessel, known as the Akademik Lomonosov, is intended to be the first of many floating nuclear power plants, that Russia will put into mass production and then use to provide energy to remote areas, and to export to other countries around the world. The 21,500 tonne ships will have a crew of 69, and each carry two KLT-40 naval propulsion reactors which will produce a combined 70MW of electricity, enough to power a small city of 200,000 people.

As Thierry Meyssan wrote on July 8 in, “Does Morsi’s fate foreshadow that of the Muslim Brotherhood?”: “It was not the street, but the United States that drove out Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and General Hosni Mubarak. And it is still the United States who installed the Muslim Brotherhood to succeed them.”

The failure of the Muslim Brotherhood to be inclusive and represent all Egyptians was totally predictable. King Abdullah of Jordan called the Muslim Brotherhood a “Masonic cult” in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg back in March. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that cults and democracies don't mix, especially when it is a contest between a mature fascist cult and a baby democracy.

F William Engdahl wrote about the Nazi roots of the Muslim Brotherhood in an article written last September called, “Salafism+CIA: The winning formula to destabilize Russia, the Middle East”: “During the Third Reich, Hitler's Germany had supported the Muslim Brotherhood as a weapon against the British in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. After the defeat of Germany, British Intelligence moved in to take over control of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ultimately, for financial and other reasons, the British decided to hand their assets within the Muslim Brotherhood over to their CIA colleagues in the 1950s.”

It is for the good that the Egyptian people kicked these rascals out of power. The shame belongs to those in Washington and other capitals who support the Muslim Brotherhood's thuggish tactics and terrorism against Christians, Sufis, Shiites, Jews, etc.