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.

According to the report, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to discuss alternatives to the weapons deal, which would provide Syrian President Bashar Assad with the S-300 missiles within weeks, not in the middle of next year, as Moscow had previously told Jerusalem.

The newspaper said that Russian President Vladimir Putin last month offered to send 380 Russian soldiers to replace the Austrian forces who withdrew from the Golan buffer zone, following fighting in the area between the Syrian regime and the rebel forces seeking to oust Assad.

But, the paper added, the UN had rejected Putin's offer, saying the disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria following the 1973 Yom Kippur War bars troops from the Security Council permanent member states from joining peacekeeping forces.

Around half of Fed policymakers wanted to bring its massive fiscal stimulus package to a relatively rapid halt this year, instead of phasing it out slowly by the middle of 2014, according to the minutes of its June meeting, published on Wednesday. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said immediately after the meeting that it would start tapering this year and stop it by next summer, as long as economic data showed the US was recovering as hoped.

However, the minutes revealed he faced considerable opposition. “About half” of the 19-member Federal Open Market Committee said “it likely would be appropriate to end asset purchases late this year”, the minutes read. “A few” wanted to slow or stop the purchases at the June meeting. The revelation will heighten expectations on Wall Street that the Fed is eager to start winding down the $85 billion-a-month bond buying programme as soon as it thinks it can do so.

The German government wanted to get its hands on as much data as possible, but citizens insisted on privacy. People from different social backgrounds took to the streets to voice their anger and refused to share their data - and that was back in 1983, when the government wanted to take stock and carry out a census. All German adults were supposed to respond to questionnaires detailing their living situation, marital and employment status.

But disclosing this sort of personal information is not even worth mentioning compared to the recent revelations of Edward Snowden. If the statements of the former NSA contractor turn out to be true, authorities are able to find out more by tapping phone calls and emails than what would have ever been possible with simple surveys. And the US intelligence agency doesn't only target Americans when snooping around - it also listens in on Germany and other EU countries.

Merkel should put her foot down, say Germans. According to a recent poll, four out of five respondents in Germany say that Chancellor Angela Merkel shouldn't continue to accept this kind of behavior from the US.

But when you look deeper at the numbers, another story emerges. Last month, the US economy actually lost 240,000 full-time jobs. Overall, the US economy has only added 130,000 full-time jobs in 2013, but it takes about 90,000 full-time jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. So we are losing quite a bit of ground as far as full-time jobs are concerned.

Meanwhile, the US economy has added more than 500,000 part-time jobs so far this year. Unfortunately, there are very, very few part-time and temp jobs that can be considered "breadwinner jobs". Part-time jobs are great for teenagers, university students and elderly people that only want to work a limited number of hours, but what most Americans need are good paying full-time jobs with benefits that will allow them to take care of their families. Unfortunately, those jobs are continually becoming a smaller part of our economy.

As David Stockman has noted, the US economy has only regained 200,000 of the 5.6 million breadwinner jobs that were lost during the last recession...

However, with the passage of time, more and more people went "mobile", and as a result the NSA had to adapt. And adapt they have: as Bloomberg reports, "The NSA is quietly writing code for Google’s Android OS [Operating System]."

Is it ironic that the same "don't be evil" Google which went to such great lengths in the aftermath of the Snowden scandal to wash its hands of snooping on its customers and even filed a request with the secretive FISA court asking permission to disclose more information about the government’s data requests, is embedding NSA code into its mobile operating system, which according to IDC runs on three-quarters of all smartphones shipped in the first quarter? Yes, yes it is.

Google spokeswoman Gina Scigliano confirms that the company has already inserted some of the NSA’s programming in Android OS. "All Android code and contributors are publicly available for review at source.android.com." Scigliano says, declining to comment further.

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.