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.

Simultaneously, the country is becoming a tinderbox for militant labour unrest, peasant rebellion and indigenous resistance. After 500 years of domination by imperial powers, the population of Indonesia is organizing and resisting the ‘new order’ of global corporate colonization. Much like Brazil and Turkey, Indonesia has been praised by the imperial powers as a “model democracy” and the IMF hails its progress as an “emerging economy.”

The illusions of Turkish and Brazilian state-capitalist ‘democracy’ have been revealed by massive urban uprisings. The conditions are present for Indonesia to become home to its own national uprising, the only question may be: what will be the spark?

The demolition of a park in Istanbul sparked the urban uprising in Turkey, and the plan to raise bus fares sparked the urban uprising in Brazil. So perhaps the question is not if Indonesia will experience similar circumstances, but rather: when, and what will be the spark? Only time will tell, and no doubt, the Indonesians will let us know when it has happened.

On the 18th of May, a couple in Philadelphia gave birth to a baby that came from an embryo that was selected thanks to a cutting edge procedure known as “next-generation sequencing”. This procedure allows scientists to read every letter of the human genome very rapidly and very cheaply. So will millions of parents soon be lining up to check their potential offspring for “genetic abnormalities”? Has the era of genetically pure “Gattaca babies” now begun?

This new technology is being heralded as a great “breakthrough” in the field of human fertility. According to the Guardian, the scientists that helped develop this new procedure are promoting it as a way to help couples produce a much higher percentage of “healthy” babies…

So what happened to the less desirable embryos? That is a very good question. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.

From its beginnings, the Occupy movement was of considerable interest to the DHS, the FBI, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, while true terrorists were slipping past the nets they cast in the wrong places. In the fall of 2011, the DHS specifically asked its regional affiliates to report on “Peaceful Activist Demonstrations, in addition to reporting on domestic terrorist acts and ‘significant criminal activity’.”

Aware that Occupy was overwhelmingly peaceful, the federally funded Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), one of 77 co-ordination centers known generically as “fusion centers,” was busy monitoring Occupy Boston daily. As the investigative journalist Michael Isikoff recently reported, they were not only tracking Occupy-related Facebook pages and websites but “writing reports on the movement’s potential impact on ‘commercial and financial sector assets.’”

It was in this period that the FBI received the second of two Russian police warnings about the extremist Islamist activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the future Boston Marathon bomber. That city’s police commissioner later testified that the federal authorities did not pass any information at all about the Tsarnaev brothers on to him, though there’s no point in letting the Boston police off the hook either. The ACLU has uncovered documents showing that, during the same period, they were paying close attention to the internal workings of… Code Pink and Veterans for Peace.

• The government is spying on virtually everything we do

• The government’s mass spying doesn’t keep us safe

• NSA spying did not prevent a terror attack on Wall Street

• There is no meaningful oversight of the spying programs by either Congress or the courts

• We can keep everyone safe without violating the Constitution … more cheaply and efficiently than the current system

• A high-level intelligence source says “we hack everyone everywhere”

• Spying started before 9/11 … and may have stemmed from an emergency program only meant to be activated in the case of a nuclear war

• Governments and big corporations are doing everything they can to destroy anonymity

• Mass spying creates an easy mark for hackers

• Polls show that the public doesn’t believe the NSA

• Surveillance can be used to frame you if someone in government happens to take a dislike to you

• An NSA whistleblower says that the NSA is spying on – and blackmailing – top government officials and military officers

• High-level US government officials have warned for 40 years that mass surveillance would lead to tyranny in America

• Government spying has always focused on crushing dissent … not on keeping us safe

• Top constitutional experts say that Obama is worse than Nixon … and the Stasi East Germans

Francis paid tribute to pope emeritus Benedict XVI in the encyclical, saying that the ex-pontiff had "almost completed" the text before stepping down in a historic resignation this year and that he himself had merely added "further contributions."

The 82-page text stresses that there is no contradiction between the Catholic faith and the modern world and calls for more dialogue with scientists, other religions and non-believers. It also restates the Catholic Church's position on marriage saying it should be a "stable union of man and woman."

In a deliberate echo of Harold MacMillan’s 1950 speech which attacked apartheid in South Africa, the Archbishop warned church leaders that they needed to reassess their own attitudes to gay people – even if they do not “like it”.

While insisting he had no immediate plans to change policy on issues such as gay marriage, he announced a major campaign to curb anti-gay bullying in the Church of England’s more than 5,000 schools. He is understood to have approached Stonewall, which led the campaign in favour of gay marriage, to invite it into church schools to teach up to a million children about homosexuality. “We may or may not like it but we must accept that there is a revolution in the area of sexuality,” the Archbishop said.

On the morning of April 24, 2013, at about 8:45 am, the Rana Plaza, a nine-storey building housing factories and offices, collapsed in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka. More than 3,500 people were in the building at the time, and 1,129 died in the wreckage. Mainuddin Khandaker, a senior official at the Ministry of Home Affairs, began his investigation that evening.

In the last few years, he has investigated more than 40 cases of factories that either collapsed or burnt down. But none of those accidents approached the scale of Rana Plaza, the biggest industrial accident in the country's history. The 493-page report Khandaker wrote contains witness statements, photos and structural engineering calculations. It will probably remain under lock and key. An investigative report on the textile industry has never been published in Bangladesh, he says.

Khandaker goes into the next room and returns with a stack of paper, the summary. He eats a berry from the bowl and carefully spits the seed onto the saucer. "Time pressure, lots of money, a lack of scruples and greed - everything came together on that day," he says.

Some of Canada’s largest banks, insurance companies and pension funds met with government representatives and the Bank of Canada in Toronto on June 21 to discuss establishing a yuan trading hub, according to the Toronto Financial Services Alliance, an industry group that set up the meeting. Representatives of Chinese banks also attended the meeting, the group said, declining to name them.

The moves to set up a trading hub in Canada come as an organization representing Frankfurt’s financial industry predicts the European Central Bank is nearing a deal with China that will help the German financial center become a European yuan trading hub.

The Bank of England signed a similar but smaller agreement last month, joining other recent additions like Australia, Turkey, Brazil and South Korea as China pushes for greater use of its currency outside the mainland. To have a trading hub, a country’s central bank must have an agreement with China’s central bank to swap its currency for yuan.

The initial reactions will be a spike in equities and a fall-off in the valuations of the Pound and the Euro to the Dollar. These, however, are first blush reactions as the color fades from the bloom.

It may well be, as Europe is in much worse financial condition than the United States, that there is a policy reason for the European positions but it may well also be a calculated move to devalue the major European currencies. Whatever the actual reasons, the European statements have certainly sounded the trumpet that the “Currency Wars” have reignited.