“Russia is analyzing the situation,” [Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin] said. “We are creating a weapon that could be called a superweapon. This is a weapon that will allow us to see the enemy sooner than he will see us and to inflict a blow on him, in retaliatory measures, that will be irreversible for him.” He did not elaborate.

Moscow’s new high-technology arms program includes “fundamentally, new type” weapons, Mr Rogozin said. “We are moving to robotics we are moving to principles of fighting when one serviceman can fight for five people by using robotics and automated hardware.” Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 20 also disclosed that Russia, following the Chinese military, is building state-of-the-art space weapons that would “guarantee [for] Russia the fulfillment of space defense tasks for the period until 2020.”

“It includes systems of missile and air attack warning, means of target detection and destruction,” Mr Putin said. “Creating such a system needs detailed designing, effective construction and a careful analysis of threats and development plans for means of attack. And, of course, efficient coordination with other arms and services of the armed forces.”

By contrast, the Pentagon’s new guidance on nuclear weapons issued last week appears to ignore the growing Russian strategic nuclear threat. The guidance states that although Russia is modernizing its nuclear forces, “Russia and the United States are no longer adversaries.”

It also believes demand for energy may not fall as much as originally expected, as fewer households are insulating their lofts and switching to green appliances than predicted. Ministers are so concerned that factories and large businesses may be asked to switch off their power during energy emergencies in return for compensation from bill-payers.

"Without timely action there would be risks to security of supply,” Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary admitted. "If we didn't do anything, if we allowed this supply crunch to happen, we would see spikes in power prices and that would be very damaging for the consumer. This intervention is meant to keep the lights on, which it will, but it's also meant to protect consumers from those price spikes.”

The supply crunch is the result of Britain forcing old coal and oil plants to switch off in favour of new green wind farms and nuclear plants. Ministers are trying to encourage companies to spend more than £100 billion on new green energy infrastructure by offering huge subsidies. However, the new power stations will not have arrived in time to avert the possible squeeze in 2015.

Speaking on LBC 97.3 Radio, he sounded a much more tentative note about the idea of GM crops in Britain than either the Prime Minister or Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary. “I think what you have got to do on this very vexed issue is just always be led by the science,” he said. “Be cautious, take cautious steps, don't obviously take risks, particularly where people have concerns about contamination between GM crops and non-GM crops. It is like a lot of these dilemmas, it is about getting the right balance.”

“I take a science-based precautionary approach. I would never say 'no' forever to new technologies - I don't think we should do that in life generally - but you have got to approach it cautiously.” Mr Clegg's answers suggest the Liberal Democrats are not entirely convinced about Mr Paterson's enthusiasm for expanding the growth of GM crops in Britain.

The Environment Secretary is currently battling to persuade officials in the European Union to lift current rules which only allow one type of GM maize to be grown in the UK. He wants EU regulators to approve a long list of new GM crops, including herbicide-tolerant maize and sugar beet. In a speech last week, Mr Paterson said GM crops are probably safer than conventional food and offer "wonderful opportunities to improve human health".

Asked if he “would feed his children a GM tomato” he said: “Yes of course – because they are bound to have eaten it already. There is nothing new about the idea of a GM tomato because it is available as tomato paste, as derivatives that have got into some soya products which will almost certainly have had GM in them. Millions of British citizens will got to the supermarket in the course of this week, they will buy products where the animal has been fed GM feed.”

The occasion was the big PE [Private Equity] shindig in Los Angeles, the Milken Institute conference. The heavy hitters were there, and they let fly some pungent words during a panel discussion.

“We think it’s a fabulous environment to be selling,” said Leon Black, CEO of PE giant Apollo Global Management. With stock markets having more than doubled since their 2009 lows, average prices for leveraged buyouts have jumped to nine times earnings, he said. His firm had already dumped about $13 billion in assets over the last 15 months. “We’re selling everything that’s not nailed down,” he said.

The smart money pointed out the reason at the conference: “overvaluation in all traditional asset classes,” is how Apollo’s Joshua Harris phrased it. Whereupon Wilbur Ross, one of the world’s billionaires, retorted, “Sometimes it is better to hide.”

And yet – in very heartening news – a new poll by Rasmussen shows that the American public understands much of what is really going on: The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 72% of Likely US Voters think it is at least somewhat likely that the NSA has monitored the private communications of Congress, military leaders and judges. That includes 45% who believe it is Very Likely.

The United States was founded on a belief that governments are created to protect certain unalienable rights. Today, however, more voters than ever (56%) view the federal government as a threat to individual rights rather than a protector of those rights.

“Industrial Society and its Future” was published on September 19, 1995 by The New York Times and The Washington Post, to comply with Kaczynski’s demand, in exchange for him stopping the bombings. Kaczynski, who is still alive, wrote that the increasing industrialization of America and the world, and our increasing reliance on technology, would end up short-circuiting the ability of human beings to think for themselves and act on their own ideas and abilities.

Kaczynski must wonder what it will take for Americans to wake up to the fact that their individuality and autonomy is under siege. He saw the political “left” as embracing these technologies with special fervor, because they were in keeping with the “leftist” ideology that centralized power was the way to govern men.

He saw these “leftists” as psychologically disordered — seeking to compensate for deep feelings of personal disempowerment by banding together and seeking extraordinary means of control in society. Well, Kaczynski, while reprehensible for murdering and maiming people, was precisely correct in many of his ideas.

Up to 50% of animal tissues, bones, and the like are “wasted” in the meat processing industry. These proteins are usually composted or burned because there simply isn’t anything else that can be done with them. Until now. Researchers have been looking for ways to minimize this waste and are in the process of developing protein-rich powders and products that can be reintroduced into the food marketplace.

While it isn’t in circulation yet, it’s only a matter of time. And one has to wonder if we’ll be made aware of the presence of these meat-leftovers in our foods or if our next venture into a new ice cream flavor will have us ignorant to the tendons, fat, and organs that made it possible.

It has set off an emerging market shock and risks "blowback" from a fresh spasm of the eurozone debt crisis, and it is letting all this happen at the same time, before the US economy is safely out of the woods. It has violated its own counter-deflation strategy, tightening monetary policy even though core PCE inflation has fallen to the lowest levels in living memory and below levels deemed dangerous enough in the past to warrant a blast of emergency stimulus. It is doing so even though the revival of bank lending has faded.

The entire pivot by the Federal Open Market Committee is mystifying, almost amateurish, and risks repeating the errors made by the Bank of Japan a decade ago, and perhaps repeating a mini-1937 when the Fed lost its nerve and tipped the US economy into a second leg of the Great Depression. "It’s all about tighter policy," was the lonely lament by St Louis Fed chief James Bullard.

This is not just a debate over whether or not to reverse QE, or whether markets have become addicted to Fed amphetamines. It is whether we still know what on is going in the heads of those who command our destiny...

The report suggests one in five cash-strapped households would have to cut essential spending or work longer hours if rates went up just 2 per cent. The base rate has been 0.5 per cent since March 2009. If it rose to 2.5 per cent, still low by the standards of previous decades, the Bank estimates households accounting for a fifth of Britain’s £1.3 trillion mortgage debt would need to take action.

A family with an average £160,000 mortgage would see their monthly repayments go from £805 to £987, a hike of £182, or nearly £2,200 a year. This calculation is based on a lifetime tracker mortgage, which ‘tracks’ the base rate of interest. Its current rate of 3.55 per cent would rise to 5.55 per cent. David Hollingworth, of mortgage broker London & Country, said: ‘With base rates at such a low for four years, people are budgeting as if it’s the norm. ‘They could and should be preparing for a rise in interest rates.’

Right now, bonds are being absolutely slaughtered, and this is only just the beginning. Over the last several years, reckless bond buying by the Federal Reserve has forced yields down to absolutely ridiculous levels. For example, it simply is not rational to lend the US government money at less than 3 percent when the real rate of inflation is somewhere up around 8 to 10 percent. But when he originally announced the quantitative easing program, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that he intended to force interest rates to go down, and lots of bond investors made a lot of money riding the bubble that Bernanke created.

But now that Bernanke has indicated that the bond buying will be coming to an end, investors are going into panic mode and the bond bubble is starting to burst. One hedge fund executive told CNBC that the "feeling you are getting out there is that people are selling first and asking questions later". And the yield on 10 year US Treasuries just keeps going up. Today it closed at 2.59 percent, and many believe that it is going to go much higher unless the Fed intervenes. If the Fed does not intervene and allows the bubble that it has created to burst, we are going to see unprecedented carnage.

Markets tend to fall faster than they rise. And now that Bernanke has triggered a sell-off in bonds, things are moving much faster than just about anyone anticipated...

The Federal Reserve may not listen to the American people, but there is one institution that the Fed listens to very carefully - the Bank for International Settlements. It is the central bank of central banks. And the BIS has just come out with its annual report. In that annual report, the BIS says that central banks "cannot do more without compounding the risks they have already created", and that central banks should "encourage needed adjustments" in the financial markets. In other words, the BIS is saying that it is time to end the bond buying...

As a result, most Americans are simply not prepared for the massive storm that is heading our way. Most American families are living paycheck to paycheck, most of them are not storing up emergency food and supplies, and only a very small percentage of them are buying gold and silver for investment purposes. They seem to have forgotten what happened back in 2008.

When the financial markets crashed, millions of Americans lost their jobs. Because most of them were living on the financial edge, millions of them also lost their homes. Unfortunately, most Americans seem convinced that it will not happen again. Right now we seem to be living in a "hope bubble" and people have become very complacent. For a while there, being a "prepper" was very trendy, but now concern about a coming economic crisis seems to have subsided.

What a tragic mistake. As I pointed out yesterday, our entire financial system is a giant Ponzi scheme, and there are already signs that our financial markets are about to implode once again. Those that have not made any preparations for what is coming are going to regret it bitterly.

After seven hours of late-night talks, finance ministers from the bloc's 27 countries emerged with a blueprint to close or salvage banks in trouble. The plan stipulates that shareholders, bondholders and depositors with more than 100,000 euros ($132,000) should share the burden of saving a bank.

The deal is a boost for EU leaders, who meet later on Thursday in Brussels, and can show that they are finally getting to grips with the financial crisis that began in mid-2007 with the near collapse of Germany's IKB. "For the first time, we agreed on a significant bail-in to shield taxpayers," said Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, referring to the process in which shareholders and bondholders must bear the costs of restructuring first.

The rules break a taboo in Europe that savers should never lose their deposits, although countries will have some flexibility to decide when and how to impose losses on a failing bank's creditors. "They can affect German savers just as well as they can affect any other investor in the world," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said after the meeting.

Taxpayers across much of Europe have had to pay for a series of deeply unpopular bank rescues since the financial crisis that spread across the bloc to threaten the future of the euro.

The decision does not grant marriage rights across the US but gives gay couples in the 13 states that allow same-sex marriage equal standing to their straight peers. The court also dismissed a case on California's ban on gay marriage, effectively reinstating marriage rights for gays and lesbians in America's largest state.

The two rulings were greeted by chaotic scenes of celebration from the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington to the streets of San Francisco, the gay capital of the United States. By overturning the Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA), the Supreme Court struck down more than 1,000 regulations preventing gay married couples from receiving equal treatment on tax, property and immigration issues.

The biggest impact will be for couples where one partner is a foreigner, allowing them to apply for permanent residence in the US like any straight couple.

The five hours of talks between US and Russian officials centered on who would be allowed to attend the peace talks, which are a bit short on attendees anyhow since the US-backed rebels have repeatedly ruled out showing up. But Iran might. Or at least they’re open to attending, though the US is holding up the talks saying any appearance by Iran is unacceptable. Russia is pushing to either allow Iran or to exclude third party nations backing the rebels.

People hate the country that’s terrorizing them. That’s not a surprise. Just consider the way we react to acts of terror. That’s the way other people react to American acts of terror.

Chomsky is right. Experts agrees that indiscriminate drone strikes are war crimes. The US is not only killing people whose identity it doesn’t even know, but it is also killing children. And it is using the justifiably-vilified Al Qaeda tactic of killing people attending funerals of those killed – and targeting people attempting to rescue people who have been injured by our previous strikes. Chomsky has previously extensively documented US terrorism.

The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan – Lieutenant General William Odom - noted: “Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today’s war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.”