"Iran has ambitious ballistic missile and space launch development programs and continues to attempt to increase the range, lethality, and accuracy of its ballistic missile force," the report says. "Iran could develop and test an ICBM capable of reaching the United States by 2015."

A source at Russia's Federal Guard Service (FSO), which is in charge of safeguarding Kremlin communications and protecting President Vladimir Putin, claimed that the return to typewriters has been prompted by the publication of secret documents by WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website, as well as Edward Snowden, the fugitive US intelligence contractor.

The FSO is looking to spend 486,000 roubles – around £10,000 – on a number of electric typewriters, according to the site of state procurement agency, zakupki.gov.ru. The notice included ribbons for German-made Triumph Adlew TWEN 180 typewriters, although it was not clear if the typewriters themselves were this kind.

The service declined to comment on the notice, which was posted last week. However an FSO source told Izvestiya newspaper: “After scandals with the distribution of secret documents by WikiLeaks, the exposes by Edward Snowden, reports about Dmitry Medvedev being listened in on during his visit to the G20 summit in London, it has been decided to expand the practice of creating paper documents.”

Unlike printers, every typewriter has its own individual pattern of type so it is possible to link every document to a machine used to type it.

And here is yet more proof. This true story will astound you. Waking up on the organ harvesting table... A woman named Colleen Burns recently opened her eyes to find herself on an operating table in a hospital in Syracuse, New York. Looking around, she noticed that she was the subject of the operation. It turns out doctors were about to harvest her organs and send them to other waiting surgeons who would transplant them into other patients.

This is not fiction. It was covered by ABC News and several other news sources. It really happened. And how did it happen? Doctors falsely pronounced her dead by fraudulently claiming she had suffered "cardiopulmonary arrest" and "irreversible brain damage." This gave them the medical justification to start slicing away even while the woman's heart was still beating.

Organ transplants are a hugely profitable industry - largely because they get the organs for free. Patients who are killed by these doctors are never paid for their organs. The fact that they "donate" them actually means they are donating their immensely valuable organs to a for-profit system that's going to earn potentially millions of dollars off the organs of a single donor.

The proposal was met with hostility in Germany, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert saying, “In our view the Commission proposal gives the Commission a competence which it cannot have based on the current treaties.”

Dr Gunther Dunkel, President of the influential VÖB (the German Association of Public Banks) also criticised the plan saying, “It is not up for discussion for us, that funds gained through the work of German banks are used to contribute to the rescue of banks in other Member States”.

Open Europe published a flash analysis in response to the plan, which concluded, “The eurozone is yet to face up to the fundamental problem of reconciling the economic realities within the existing legal and political limits – this proposal is another example of attempting to circumvent them in another ad-hoc way.”

The analysis was cited on the Telegraph live blog and the Guardian live blog. Writing on his Telegraph blog, Open Europe’s Mats Persson describes the Commission’s plan as “a legal stretch” and argues, “The more the line between the eurozone and the single market is blurred, the more likely the UK is to leave.”

The protests this summer, vast and angry, is the Brazilian parallel to the 2011 Arab spring. It is a leaderless movement organized through social networks, which is its strength. It may not be able to shape politics, but it can certainly exert pressure. It can mobilize the street.

It began in São Paulo on June 6 with a march of only 500 people protesting against an increase in bus fares. Since then, however, it has grown into a conflagration of discontent. On June 17, 200,000 people protested in Rio de Janeiro, Belém and about 20 other cities, and by June 20 some 1.4 million protesters had taken to the streets in more than 120 cities. Protesters danced on the roof of the congress building in the capital Brasília, creating images that have since been broadcast around the world. They are the tour dates of a popular uprising that newspapers are presenting as proudly as they do the victories of the Seleção. The people are agitated, and the political world is afraid.

Almost 200 members of the National Congress are under investigation. One lawmaker, who is accused of murder, allegedly dismembered his political rival with a chainsaw. Another moved $10 million earmarked for a road construction project to an overseas bank account. A third politician is thought to have ordered the abduction of three priests who had campaigned on behalf of the landless.

Tens of thousands of union members marched throughout the country, blocking roads and grinding traffic to a crawl in dozens of cities. Bus drivers, metal workers and other unionized workers took to the streets as part of a one-day strike. Labor leaders are pushing for workers’ rights to take center stage in the national debate which emerged after huge protests rocked the country last month, Reuters reported.

Brazil’s unions, which represent around one-tenth of the country’s workforce, appear to be trying to give the protests direction while they fight for political and social goals. Union strikers and other demonstrators partially or completely blocked 40 interstate and intercity highways across 14 states during Thursday’s “Day of Struggle,” AP reported. Protesters also set tires ablaze on a freeway outside of Rio.

Since mass demonstrations began across the country, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has sought to defuse the situation with several new policy proposals. One of his plans includes an investment of $23 billion on public transportation projects - a major source of contention in cities like Sao Paulo. Brazil’s government has also responded by pledging to funnel oil wealth into education and medical services, including importing thousands of doctors from abroad to work in underserved regions of the country.

In one of the unpublished studies, researchers made a human artificial chromosome in the laboratory from chemical building blocks rather than chipping away at an existing human chromosome, indicating the increasingly powerful technology behind the new field of synthetic biology.

The development comes as the Government announces today that it will invest tens of millions of pounds in synthetic biology research in Britain, including an international project to construct all the 16 individual chromosomes of the yeast fungus in order to produce the first synthetic organism with a complex genome.

A synthetic yeast with man-made chromosomes could eventually be used as a platform for making new kinds of biological materials, such as antibiotics or vaccines, while human artificial chromosomes could be used to introduce healthy copies of genes into the diseased organs or tissues of people with genetic illnesses, scientists said.

Thanks to the mindless Rambo-ing up, the “surrounding threats” are now mostly the once-peaceable, now angry residents who, in a letter from Democratic legislators, blast the company’s “confrontational and incendiary step that will clearly do more to intimidate local citizens and increase local tensions than it will to make you, your staff, or your equipment any safer.”

“Some of the local people are wondering what the heck? It’s come to a sad situation when you’ve got to have a machine gun to protect a business that people around here don’t want.”

Dr Nick Striegel, assistant state veterinarian for the Colorado Department of Agriculture, said Wednesday the Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus, also known as PED, was thought to exist only in Europe and China, but Colorado and 14 other states began reporting the virus in April, and officials confirmed its presence in May. The virus causes severe diarrhea, vomiting and severe dehydration in pigs, and can be fatal.

"It has been devastating for those producers where it has been diagnosed. It affects nursing pigs, and in some places, there has been 100 percent mortality," he said.

The figure has risen from 25 per cent in 1988 and just 11 per cent in 1979. The figures also show that one in four new mothers were born outside the UK in 2012, compared to 17.7 per cent a decade earlier. If the trend continues at the current rate, the majority of children will be born to parents who are not married by 2016. Conservative MPs and experts warned that the stark decline of marriage is likely to lead to more family breakdowns and damage children's prospects.

Tim Loughton, the former Children's minister, called on the government to introduce tax breaks for married couples to help stop the decline. He said: "If people are prepared to make a public declaration to each other in front of their friends and family they are more likely to stay together. Without marriage people drift in and out of relationships very easily.

"In families where parents break up children do less well at school, are more likely to suffer mental health problems and are more likely to have substance abuse problems."

The Single Resolution Mechanism would ensure that – not withstanding stronger supervision - if a bank subject to the SSM faced serious difficulties, its resolution could be managed efficiently with minimal costs to taxpayers and the real economy.

Commission President José Manuel Barroso said: "With this proposal, all the elements are on the table for a banking union to put the sector on a sounder footing, restore confidence and overcome fragmentation in financial markets. We have already agreed common European supervision for banks in the euro area and other Member States who wish to take part. Today's proposal complements that with a strong and integrated single system for dealing with failing banks.

We cannot eliminate the risk of future bank failures, but with the Single Resolution Mechanism and the Resolution Fund it should be banks themselves – and not European taxpayers – who should shoulder the burden of losses in the future."

Stephen King warned that the widening wealth gap and sense of “entitlement” between older generations and cash-strapped youths had echoes of the conditions which led to the 1381 uprising of British peasants against the aristocrats who ruled them. Then, the country had just been savaged by the plague, which robbed farmers of their workforces as well as their loved ones by killing an estimated 1.5 million people. However, the wealthy ruling classes refused to modify their behaviour, leaving the poorer farm workers to bear the brunt of the economic downturn.

“In those days, public spending was about warfare … resources had been severely curtailed as a consequence of the Black Death,” said Mr King. “The nobility wanted to continue as they had done previously. They did not change their ways even though there had been this terrible disease come through … there was an attempt to try and clamp down on tax evasion which led to the Plantagenet equivalent of men with baseball bats coming along to raise funds.”

“Those entitlements the Boomer generation are stuck to are imposing a significant cost to the younger generation … which over the long term is very disruptive to the performance of economies.” He said the Occupy movement and the London riots two years ago were the beginnings of what could develop into more widespread protests by youths, who feel they have been short-changed.

These documents include meeting reports, emails and a letter, all of which the EC had sent to large corporate lobby groups. Lobby watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) had argued that information could not suddenly become confidential, which it did, when a public interest group asked for it. The EU-India (and EU-US) free trade talks raise two key questions.

• Is it right that the EU is negotiating free trade treaties in secret, while the public is kept in the dark?

• Is it right that big corporations are being given privileged access to negotiations?

Little wonder that the EC does not want us to know about the negotiations.

None of Euroland’s key actors seems willing to admit that the current strategy is untenable. They hope to paper over the cracks until the German elections in September, as if that is going to make any difference. A leaked report from the European Commission confirms that Greece will miss its austerity targets yet again by a wide margin. It alleges that Greece lacks the “willingness and capacity” to collect taxes. In fact, Athens is missing targets because the economy is still in freefall and that is because of austerity overkill. The Greek think-tank IOBE expects GDP to fall 5 percent this year. It has told journalists privately that the final figure may be -7 percent. The Greek stabilisation is a mirage.

Italy’s slow crisis is again flaring up. Its debt trajectory has punched through the danger line over the past two years. The country’s €2.1 trillion (£1.8 trillion) debt – 129% of GDP – may already be beyond the point of no return for a country without its own currency. Standard & Poor’s did not say this outright when it downgraded the country to near-junk BBB on Tuesday. But if you read between the lines, it is close to saying the game is up for Italy.

Spain’s crisis has a new twist. The ruling Partido Popular is caught in a slush-fund scandal of such gravity that it cannot plausibly brazen out the allegations any longer, let alone rally the nation behind another year of scorched-earth cuts. El Mundo says a “pre-revolutionary” mood is taking hold.

Portugal is slipping away. Professor João Ferreira do Amaral’s book - Why We Should Leave The Euro – has been a bestseller for months. He accuses Brussels of serving as an enforcer for Germany and the creditor powers. Like Greece before it, Portugal is chasing its tail in a downward spiral.

Markets have reacted insouciantly so far to these gestating crises across Club Med. They remain entranced by the “Draghi Put”, the ECB’s slowly fraying pledge to backstop Italian and Spanish debt, forgetting that the ECB can only act under strict conditions, triggered first by a vote in the Bundestag. These conditions can no longer be fulfilled. The politics have curdled everywhere. Sooner or later, this immense bluff must surely be called.

Images analysed by experts at IHS Jane's Intelligence Review has revealed a hitherto undisclosed surface-to-surface missile base deep in the Saudi desert, with capabilities for hitting both countries. Analysts who examined the photos spotted two launch pads with markings pointing north-west towards Tel Aviv and north-east towards Tehran. They are designed for Saudi Arabia's arsenal of lorry-launched DF 3 missiles, which have a range of 1,500-2,500 miles and can carry a two-ton payload.

The base, believed to have been built within the last five years, gives an insight into Saudi strategic thinking at a time of heightened tensions in the Gulf. While Saudi Arabia does not have formal diplomatic relations with Israel, it has long maintained discreet back channel communications as part of attempts to promote stability in the region.

The two countries also have a mutual enemy in Iran, though, which has long seen Saudi Arabia as a rival power in the Gulf. Experts fear that if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia would seek to follow suit. The Chinese-made missiles, which date back to the 1980s, are not remotely-guided and therefore have to be positioned in the direction of their target before firing. "One appears to be aligned on a bearing of approximately 301 degrees and suggesting a potential Israeli target, and the other is oriented along an azimuth (bearing) of approximately 10 degrees, ostensibly situated to target Iranian locations," said the IHS Jane's article, which is published on Thursday.

Oil-rich Saudi Arabia considers itself one of the pre-eminent powers in the Gulf region, but its Sunni Islam leadership has long been at loggerheads with the Shia mullahs of Iran. The ongoing conflict in Syria, in which Saudi Arabia has backed the Sunni-dominated rebels and Iran has backed the Shia-dominated regime of President Bashar al-Assad, has heightened fears of a wider sectarian conflict.