Stocks, bonds, commodities and the dollar were all caught in the selling. There were tentative signs markets were leveling off ahead of US trading, although Wall Street was also expected to open in the red. The slide has been triggered by comments from policymakers at the US Federal Reserve, which meets next Tuesday and Wednesday, about when to start scaling back its huge bond-buying program.

"If you look at it historically, there has never been a period when the Fed has started to take back stimulus that has left the markets untouched," said Hans Peterson, global head of investment strategy at Swedish bank SEB. Emerging market assets have been particularly hit over the last few weeks as the uncertainty about central bank stimulus has driven a global dash back to cash and core economies.

President Mohammed Morsi gathered a group of politicians last week who thought they were speaking privately at a parliamentary meeting. But as seen in an Egyptian television video of the meeting — excerpts of which were later translated by the Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI) — they were actually on live television, cringingly discussing secret ways to stop Ethiopia’s Nile River dam project which threatens water flowing to Egypt.

The New York Times blog reports: Unaware that their words were being broadcast live on a state-owned television channel, many of those seated around the table said the dam was in fact a secret American and Israeli plot to undermine Egypt that must be stopped at all costs.

The participants learned they were on live TV only after Magdi Ahmad Hussein, chairman of the Islamic Labor Party, suggested that all present vow not to leak any information to the media. Before being told he was on television, Hussein described the US as an enemy: “I’m very fond of battles. With the enemies, of course – with America and Israel, but this battle must be waged with maximum judiciousness and calm. Even though this is a secret meeting, we must all take an oath not to leak anything to the media, unless it is done officially by sister Pakinam [el-Sharkawy, a Morsi aide]. We need an official plan for popular national security, even if we…”

The viewer sees him being handed a note, which presumably points out that his words are not confined to the room. Hussein laughs, then continues with the anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric: “Okay… Fine… The principles behind what I’m saying are not really secret… Our war is with America and Israel, not with Ethiopia. Therefore, engaging in a war… This is my opinion…”

Middle East analyst Barry Rubin of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) tells The Blaze, “Here we have possibly the most embarrassing open microphone scandal in history.”

The mass exodus, which has been limited only by leftist President Cristina Fernandez's capital controls, is threatening to undermine Latin America's No. 3 economy even further by leaving it short of hard currency and new jobs.

The underlying problems range from Fernandez's hostile treatment of the private sector, to severe financial distortions such as a parallel exchange rate, to the general feeling that Argentina is due for one of the periodic spasms that have racked the country every 10 years or so going back to the 1930s.

Some say such worries are overblown, arguing that Argentina has defied doomsday predictions for the past decade, which was by some measures its best economic run since World War Two. Yet for many, the feeling is of a gathering storm.

The fast-moving fire raged out of control for a second day through heavily wooded rolling hillsides on the Northeastern outskirts of Colorado Springs, devouring more houses into the evening as winds sent flames doubling back into areas already burned, authorities said.

Latest Update: 15,000 acres burned; 38,000 people evacuated; no containment details.

360 homes are a total loss, the most in Colorado history.

No reported deaths or injuries.

Something snapped in the Italian psyche last week after the European Central Bank offered nothing to combat the credit crunch asphyxiating small business, and more broadly washed its hands of Euroland’s incipient deflation crisis and catastrophic wastage of its youth. The next day ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi called for a showdown, or “Braccio di Ferro”, with northern powers before it loses it chemical, car and steel industries altogether.

Mr Berlusconi told Il Foglio that Italy’s government - which his Liberty Party keeps in office - is complicitly serving forces that are destroying Italy. It must instead confront the north, “and particularly Angela Merkel’s Germany”, with a stark choice: either they call a halt to fiscal and monetary contraction, and opt instead for full-blown reflation; or they must expect the victims to snatch back their own destinies.

The battle must be waged quietly, but implacably. Italy cannot let its productive base atrophy further, or allow itself to be sidelined by the “hegemonic methods” of those with the upper hand. “That is what I mean by a showdown. We must find our own national or regional solutions, breaking up euro mechanisms."

Eisenhower managed to partner with Congress on three balanced budgets out of eight, but the era after his would start us on massive deficit spending as a habit rather than something to be employed only in an emergency. We have, as Eisenhower predicted, "mortgaged the material assets of our grandchildren," and it remains to be seen whether that has risked "the loss of their political and spiritual heritage."

Most famously, Eisenhower warned the country about the rise of what he called the "military-industrial complex," a force that would eventually erode liberty and public policy choices. "In the councils of government," Eisenhower said, "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." The wealth that got spent on the defense sector would create enormous influence and power inside and outside of government, which would eventually pervert a free society into perpetual warfare for the sake of maintaining power, unless a free nation exercised exceptional vigilance.

Fifty years later, Eisenhower's valediction looks less like a political speech and more like prophecy. In the NSA controversies, both with the continuous telecom metadata haul (since at least 2006) and the PRISM/BLARNEY efforts to sniff through massive amounts of content on the internet, we have examples of exactly what Ike foresaw. In fact, this looks much like a marriage between the military-industrial complex and what we could call the intelligence-industrial complex, both based on predicates of never-ending war in the age of terror.

“The first discovery of the new NSA access system was made two years ago by British researcher Dr Nicko van Someren [an expert in computer security]. But it was only a few weeks ago when a second researcher rediscovered the access system. With it, he found the evidence linking it to NSA…

“According to Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym, the result of having the secret key inside your Windows operating system “is that it is tremendously easier for the NSA to load unauthorized security services on all copies of Microsoft Windows, and once these security services are loaded, they can effectively compromise your entire operating system. The NSA key is contained inside all versions of Windows from Windows 95 OSR2 onwards…”

“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.