The Al-Azhar cleric institution said in a statement: "Vigilance is required to ensure we do not slide into civil war," blaming "criminal gangs" who attacked mosques for street violence. Clashes linked to the political tensions have killed five and wounded scores in recent days in Egypt. The Brotherhood said all those killed were Morsi supporters, though this could not be independently verified.

The ancient Cairo academy, which traditionally maintains a distance from the political establishment, also urged opponents of Islamist President Morsi to accept his offer of dialogue rather than pressing on with plans for demonstrations. Opposition leaders dismissed Mr Morsi's offer as a repeat of suggestions they say have gone nowhere because the Brotherhood refuses to dilute its power.

Mr Morsi and the Brotherhood accuse loyalists of the old regime of being behind violence and of thwarting their efforts to reform an economy hobbled by corruption. Opponents accuse the Islamists, who have won a series of elections against a diffuse opposition, of seeking to entrench their power and impose Islam.

In three days of protests against him around the Nile Delta, gunmen have killed at least five Brotherhood members and set fire to several of its offices. The use of firearms is becoming more common on all sides. Activists who once chanted, “Peaceful, peaceful,” now joke darkly about the inevitability of violence: “Peaceful is dead.”

With a new wave of protests scheduled for Sunday, Egypt’s pre-eminent Muslim religious authority, Al Azhar, warned in a statement this weekend of potential “civil war.”

It revealed that this rate is much faster than the standard measure of inflation – recorded by the consumer price index – which increased by just 17%. The research found that families are having to cope with an "unprecedented erosion of household living standards" as the gap widens between the rising cost of goods and services, and their stagnant wages.

According to the report, in 2008 a single person earning £13,000 would have reached the minimum they needed to get by. If their wage had risen in line with average increases, they would now be earning £14,000 – which is roughly three thousand short of the £16,850 salary needed to cover the same basic standard of living today. A working couple with two children will now need to earn £19,400 each in order to maintain adequate living standards, the report found, while a single parent would need earnings of around £25,600.

Donald Hirsch, author of the report, said there is a "growing gulf" between what people expect their living standards to be, and their ability to achieve it. He added: "This year's report demonstrates how the price of a basket of goods needed for an acceptable living standard has risen far faster than average inflation. This has combined with low pay increases to create a widening gap between income and needs."

The landmark change is contained in the fine print of new official legal guidance drawn up for MPs and peers as the Government’s same-sex marriage bill is debated. It comes as part of a Government initiative to “clarify” what words will mean when gay marriage becomes law.

But critics described it as the vocabulary of “cloud cuckoo land”. It follows claims by opponents of the redefinition of marriage that universally understood terms such as father and mother might be simply deleted by bureaucrats on official forms. They condemned the system adopted in some countries such as Spain – where parents are sometimes referred to as “Progenitor A” and “Progenitor B” – as “Orwellian”.

A spokesman for the Coalition for Marriage, which campaigns against the change, said: “We always knew the Government would tie itself in knots trying to redefine marriage, and this shows what a ridiculous mess they’ve created. “This mangling of the English language shows what happens when politicians meddle with marriage. They’re in cloud cuckoo land.”

The Chinese-made transporter-erector launchers were first displayed at a military parade in Pyongyang last year as part of North Korea’s newest long-range strategic nuclear missile, the road-mobile KN-08 missile.

“On the basis of the information currently available, the panel considers it most likely that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea deliberately breached the end-user guarantee that it officially provided to China‘s Wuhan and converted the WS51200 trucks into transporter-erector launchers,” says the annual report of a UN panel of analysts, dated June 11.

Other analysts say the disguised launcher transfers are typical of Chinese covert arms proliferation efforts. Mr Fisher [a specialist on the Chinese military] said China has been promoting the “falsehood” that the trucks were sold for use in hauling lumber.

“The Sanjiang Group of the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. designed the 16-wheel truck that was sold to North Korea for the specific purpose of transporting, erecting and launching large missiles,” Mr Fisher said. “That a North Korean nuclear missile that can reach Anchorage, Alaska, is being carried by a Chinese made TEL is not the result of some ‘violation’ of a contract, but of a deliberate Chinese policy to help North Korea become a nuclear missile state.”

“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...