“Given the complicated situation in Golan Heights we could replace the Austrian contingent leaving this region, on the disengagement line between Israeli troops and the Syrian armed forces,” Mr Putin was quoted as telling newly appointed Russian officers in remarks in Moscow carried by the Interfax news agency. “But this will happen, of course, only if the regional powers show interest, and if the UN secretary general asks us to do so.”

Mr Weidmann said the bond scheme, known as Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT), blurs the line between fiscal and monetary policy and encroaches on the terrain of parliaments. It leaves the ECB with the task of carrying out rescue operations that is the proper responsibility of the euro bail-out fund and compromises the bank’s independence.

The two-day hearings at the constitutional court in Karlsruhe will investigate the legality of the OMT, the “game-changer” that defused the EMU debt crisis last July and has been so successful that no country has yet needed to use it. The case stems from complaints by 37,000 citizens, including the Left Party, More Democracy and eurosceptic professors, most arguing that the ECB is financing bankrupt states.

While the court has no jurisdiction over the ECB, it could prohibit the Bundesbank from taking part in bond purchases. This amounts to the same thing, since the OMT would collapse if Germany stepped aside. The court may defer any decision until after Germany’s elections in September.

"The economic situation is worsening from month to month, and unemployment has reached a level that puts democratic structures ever more in doubt," he said. "The Germans have not yet realised that southern Europe, including France, will be forced by their current misery to fight back against German hegemony sooner or later," he said, blaming much of the crisis on Germany's wage squeeze to gain export share.

Mr Lafontaine said on the parliamentary website of Germany's Left Party that Chancellor Angela Merkel will "awake from her self-righteous slumber" once the countries in trouble unite to force a change in crisis policy at Germany's expense. His prediction appeared confirmed as French finance minister Pierre Moscovici yesterday proclaimed the end of austerity and a triumph of French policy, risking further damage to the tattered relations between Paris and Berlin.

"Austerity is finished. This is a decisive turn in the history of the EU project since the euro," he told French TV. "We're seeing the end of austerity dogma. It's a victory of the French point of view."

The move will allow the EU to join a related complaint filed by Japan against Chinese duties in December. The EU complaint would seek to overturn Chinese duties on exports of seamless stainless steel tubes made by firms such as Spain's Tubacex SA (TUBA.MC) and Germany's Salzgitter AG (SZGG.DE), the sources said. The sources asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the case.

It took China less than one day to retaliate. What's worse the retaliation is aimed at Europe's already weakest - the PIIGS [Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain] - by targeting not hard German machinery exports but something far more prosaic: French, Spanish and Italian wine.

Reuters reports that "in a step targeting southern European states such as France and Italy that back the duties but largely sparing north European opponents such as Germany, Beijing said it launched an anti-dumping and anti-subsidy probe into sales of European wine. The Chinese ministry said the government had begun the probe into EU wines at the request of Chinese wine makers.

The EU now has 31 ongoing trade investigations, 18 of them involving China. The largest to date is that into 21 billion euros of imports from China of solar panels, cells and wafers. The EU says it has evidence that Chinese firms are selling solar panels below cost - a practice known as dumping. But the initial duty of 11.8 percent announced on Tuesday by European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht was far below the average 47 percent that had been planned.

The commander, Nie Haisheng, and his crew, Zhang Xiaoguang and Wang Yaping, plan to spend just under two weeks at the orbiting Tiangong space lab. Wang is China's second female astronaut and she will beam the country's first lesson from space to students on Earth.

The crew's capsule was ejected from the upper-stage of the rocket about nine minutes after lift-off. It should take just over 40 hours to raise the craft's orbit to the operating altitude of Tiangong some 335km (208 miles) above the planet's surface.

This mission, the fifth manned mission by China and slated to be the longest, is designated Shenzhou-10. It is the latest step in China's plan to eventually put a permanently manned station above the Earth.

China has had trade, religious and cultural exchanges with South Asian countries by way of the “Southern Silk Road” since ancient times, Dilip Barua, Minister for Industries of Bangladesh, said at the ongoing 8th China-South Asia Business Forum in Kunming, capital of southwest China’s Yunnan province.

T M Murtozaa Reza Chowhury, additional secretary of the Ministry of Commerce of Bangladesh said at the China-South Asia Business Forum that China and South Asian countries are neighbors with glorious history, splendid culture and long-standing relationships established 2,500 years ago thanks to the ancient “Southern Silk Road.”

Bangladesh always underscores the need for cooperation as an effective tool for social and economic development of the countries of the region, he said.

Britain has gone to the European Court of Justice to overturn powers allowing a Paris-based regulator to ban short-selling as part of a campaign of legal challenges to rein in growing EU powers over financial regulation. The European Securities and Markets Authority, or Esma, was given the unprecedented powers to ban short-selling after losing a battle over it in a council of EU finance ministers last year.

Jemima Stratford QC, the barrister representing the Government in the Luxembourg court challenge, insisted that the power, which is unique among Europe's regulatory agencies, was an illegal power grab in breach of the EU's treaties. "There is a short point at the heart of this case. It is that the extensive discretion given to Esma is contrary to the institutional balance laid down in the treaties," she told the ECJ.

"This would be a fundamental change. It cannot be right that it crept in under the radar." Short-sellers seek to profit on declining markets by selling borrowed shares or bonds, on the belief their price will fall, then replacing them with securities bought at a lower price.

A Chilean website, Reflection and Liberation, which discusses liberation theology, first reported Francis' comments, though CNN said a Vatican spokesman refused to comment on the report. "In the Curia," Francis said, "there are holy people. But there is also a stream of corruption," adding, "The 'gay lobby' is mentioned, and it is true, it is there. We need to see what we can do."

According to the Religious Information Service of Ukraine (RISU), Cardinal Kurt Koch focused on the discussion of one of the most painful and key issues of Orthodox-Catholic relations – the primacy of the bishop of Rome. Cardinal Koch explained that "from the Orthodox point of view, the church is present in every local church that celebrates the Eucharist, so each Eucharistic community is a complete church".

"Instead, from the Catholic point of view, a separate Eucharistic community is not a complete church. Therefore, a basis of the Catholic Church is the unity of separate Eucharistic communities with each other and the bishop of Rome. That is, the Catholic Church lives in the mutual intersection of local churches in one universal church."

According to the cardinal, "the most important thing is not to lose sight of the goal of ecumenical dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, which, at least from the Catholic point of view, can consist only in the restoration of a visible communion of churches."

In the frankest admission yet that banks and other corporations are quite literally above the law, the US Department of Justice recently announced that big companies couldn’t be indicted because it might damage the US or world economy. Indeed, as Matt Taibbi reported in The Rolling Stone, the US Attorney General Eric Holder is now saying that not only can they not indict the companies, but they cannot even indict any of the individual criminals at the companies. In other words, the department ostensibly responsible for delivering justice in the US is now running a protection racket and its clients include the employees and executives of the country’s largest law breakers.

But just when you thought that the enlightened concept of universal justice was dead and buried, a courageous Spanish judge by the name of Elpidio José Silva has done what virtually no other judge in the Western world, bar Iceland, has dared to do: He has refused to grant bail to a former senior banker, sending him to prison before facing trial for his alleged role in the lead-up to the financial crisis.

The ex-banker in question, Miguel Blesa, is the former president of Caja Madrid, now part of the too-big-to-fail (but-almost-certainly-too-big-to-save) banking group Bankia. He stands accused of a number of felonies including involvement in irregularities in Caja Madrid’s purchase of City National Bank, financial fraud and the wrongful “appropriation of funds” – legalese for white-collar theft.

What happens in the coming weeks and months will determine whether or not justice prevails in Spain, and whether or not the Blesa case serves as an example for independently-minded judges of other countries to follow. For in the face of the wholesale betrayal of the public by the executive and legislative branches, the rare principled stance taken by activist judges like Silva represents one of our last remaining hopes of justice ever returning to this dark, lawless world.

This is what sticks in my throat. For many years there has been a spectrum of Muslim belief in this country ranging from unobtrusive Islamic observance to terrorist totalitarianism. The "problem" is that young British Muslims, some of them converts, are even now being propelled towards the terrorist end of the spectrum by preachers who embedded themselves here under the government of Tony Blair.

Academics close to the New Labour project emitted flatulent platitudes while universities threw open their facilities to repulsive demagogues; prisons became recruiting grounds for extremists while their simpering chaplains said nothing; meanwhile, Blair's ministers and their courtiers in the police poured countless millions of pounds into subsidising some of the very Islamists whose influence they needed to contain.

Please, Mr Blair, return to the Middle East, where your mission as a "peace envoy" is yielding what might politely be described as modest results. You've done enough damage here.

Libertarians and conspiracy theorists of both Left and Right will never forget this moment. Already we have Glenn Beck hailing Snowden on Twitter: Courage finally. Real. Steady. Thoughtful. Transparent. Willing to accept the consequences. Inspire w/Malice toward none.#edwardsnowden

Snowden will be a Right-wing hero as well as a Left-libertarian one. Why? First, he thought carefully about what he should release, avoiding (he says) material that would harm innocent individuals. Second, he's formidably articulate. Quotes like the following are pure gold for opponents of Obama who've been accusing the President of allowing the Bush-era "surveillance state" to extend its tentacles even further:

NSA is focussed on getting intelligence wherever it can by any means possible… Increasingly we see that it's happening domestically. The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone, it ingests them by default, it collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time … While they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so. Any analyst at any time can target anyone…

Suddenly the worse-than-Watergate rhetoric doesn't seem overblown. And I do wonder: can a president who's presided over, and possibly encouraged, Chinese-style surveillance of The Land of the Free honestly expect to serve out his full term?