Martini, once tipped as a future pope, urged the Church to recognise its errors and to embark on a radical path of change, beginning with the Pope. Thousands of people have been filing past his coffin in Milan, where he was archbishop for more than 20 years.

The widely respected cardinal - a member of the Jesuit religious order - was often outspoken in his writings and comments on Church teaching, says the BBC's David Willey in Rome. He was a courageous and outspoken figure during the 22 years he headed Europe's largest Catholic diocese, our correspondent says.

What they found was the widespread use of sophisticated, off-the-shelf computer espionage software by governments with questionable records on human rights. While the software is supposedly sold for use only in criminal investigations, the two came across evidence that it was being used to target political dissidents.

The software proved to be the stuff of a spy film: it can grab images of computer screens, record Skype chats, turn on cameras and microphones and log keystrokes. The two men said they discovered mobile versions of the spyware customized for all major mobile phones. But what made the software especially sophisticated was how well it avoided detection. Its creators specifically engineered it to elude antivirus software made by Kaspersky Lab, Symantec, F-Secure and others.

The software has been identified as FinSpy, one of the more elusive spyware tools sold in the growing market of off-the-shelf computer surveillance technologies that give governments a sophisticated plug-in monitoring operation. Research now links it to servers in more than a dozen countries, including Turkmenistan, Brunei and Bahrain, although no government acknowledges using the software for surveillance purposes.

The market for such technologies has grown to $5 billion a year from “nothing 10 years ago,” said Jerry Lucas, president of TeleStrategies, the company behind ISS World, an annual surveillance show where law enforcement agents view the latest computer spyware.

What was revealed in the audit was startling:

$16,000,000,000,000.00 had been secretly given out to US banks and corporations and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland. From the period between December 2007 and June 2010, the Federal Reserve had secretly bailed out many of the world's banks, corporations, and governments. The Federal Reserve likes to refer to these secret bailouts as an all-inclusive loan program, but virtually none of the money has been returned and it was loaned out at 0% interest.

Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious - the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs.

Americans should be swelled with anger and outrage at the abysmal state of affairs when an unelected group of bankers can create money out of thin air and give it out to megabanks and supercorporations like Halloween candy. If the Federal Reserve and the bankers who control it believe that they can continue to devalue the savings of Americans and continue to destroy the US economy, they will have to face the realization that their trillion dollar printing presses will eventually plunder the world economy.

The list of institutions that received the most money from the Federal Reserve can be found on page 131of the GAO Audit and are as follows.

Citigroup: $2.5 trillion ($2,500,000,000,000)

Morgan Stanley: $2.04 trillion ($2,040,000,000,000)

Merrill Lynch: $1.949 trillion ($1,949,000,000,000)

Bank of America: $1.344 trillion ($1,344,000,000,000)

Barclays PLC (United Kingdom): $868 billion ($868,000,000,000)

Bear Sterns: $853 billion ($853,000,000,000)

Goldman Sachs: $814 billion ($814,000,000,000)

Royal Bank of Scotland (UK): $541 billion ($541,000,000,000)

JP Morgan Chase: $391 billion ($391,000,000,000)

Deutsche Bank (Germany): $354 billion ($354,000,000,000)

UBS (Switzerland): $287 billion ($287,000,000,000)

Credit Suisse (Switzerland): $262 billion ($262,000,000,000)

Lehman Brothers: $183 billion ($183,000,000,000)

Bank of Scotland (United Kingdom): $181 billion ($181,000,000,000)

BNP Paribas (France): $175 billion ($175,000,000,000)

and many many more including banks in Belgium of all places.

GreenMedInfo, claiming to be the world’s most widely referenced, evidence-based natural medicine resource, posted an August 23 an article revealing the result of the findings of farmers and crop and pesticide management experts. The website specializes in posting abstracts (brief summaries of research articles or in-depth analyses of particular subjects) of scientific findings and academic papers. Dr Bruce Potter, University of Minnesota professor and farmer Charlie Sandager concluded that the primary corn pest rootworm has developed resistance to the proteins in the GMO (genetically modified organisms) Bt Corn that was designed to kill the pests.

Bt corn is a type of GMO and the subject of the recent investigation into the rootworm outbreak. One effect of the pest’s presence is that it prevents corn roots from absorbing water, especially serious given this year’s drought. Pest experts suggest that the primary reason for the rootworm-infested crops is that rootworms have become resistant to the Bt protein, resulting in strong and larger rootworm populations.

But not only are corn plants unable to absorb water, the plants become unstable and can easily topple over. Sandager said, “Strong wind came up and it just tipped the corn plants over like a big old tree.” Indeed, RawStory reported that last fall, the EPA warned of the problem. Bt corn, engineered a decade ago by Monsanto specifically to ward off the rootworm, is losing its battle. Even the EPA wondered if the company’s monitoring was “inadequate and likely to miss early resistance events.” With this year’s drought, corn crops hardly have a chance.

- When kippah-wearing Jews and non-Jews march in Sweden to show that they have no fear, I know fear.

- When anti-Semitism is again the most common currency of politics in Europe, I know fear.

- When the Chief Rabbi of Lyon receives death threats with menacing photos, I know fear.

- When a rabbi and his daughter are assaulted in the middle of Berlin, I know fear.

- When guards patrol the streets near Rome’s Jewish school with metal detectors, searching for explosives, I know fear.

- When I, a non-Jew, receive letters saying “dear feces eating insect, scratch around the Zionist dung as it’s natural for you” and my name appears in the list of the “mafia ebraica”, I know fear.

- When Bruxelles debates the criminalization of “Islamophobia” like the Soviet Union did with “deviationism”, I know fear.

- When circumcision is persecuted in Germany, like during the Shoah when the Jewish ritual could bring with it a death sentence, I know fear.

- When Hizbullah officials speak at the Sorbonne University, I know fear.

- When cartoonists’ houses are protected as bunkers with cameras, I know fear.

- When in Tolouse Jews are gunned down and nobody cares anymore, I know fear.

Today, fear dominates the heart of the very few writers and journalists who are willing to say the truth. When many of them are put on trial because of their ideas, I know fear. Because Jews and journalists are like the canary in the coalmine. If Europe fails to protect them, it must be feared that soon nobody will feel safe in Europe.

On Channel 1 State TV, analyst Ari Shavit noted that given the US’s publicly stressed disinclination to act, “Israel is being pushed into a corner, in a way that is really dangerous. If all these moderate players, in the US and Europe, are so concerned about a dangerous Israeli action [against Iran], why haven’t they taken any meaningful action?” he asked.

Why, for instance, Shavit went on, did the US not condemn the Non-Aligned Movement gathering in Tehran. And why, asked Shavit, didn’t [Mr] Obama “respond in his own voice to the IAEA report, which essentially said, ‘Mr Obama, you have failed’?”

Regional analyst Oded Granot said on the same program that Iran “does not think [Mr] Obama will act” by force to stop its nuclear program. On Channel 2, diplomatic reporter Udi Segal said comments like [General] Dempsey’s might be bolstering the sense in the Israeli leadership that “maybe there’s no-one else who’s going to help us.”

Esmaili said that the maneuver will include all of the Iranian army’s air defense systems, as well as Iranian air force fighter jets, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iranian state news agency Press TV reported. According to Press TV, “one of the initiatives in the drill will be… preparing the air defense personnel for the management of crisis.”

Reuters quoted Esmaili telling Iranian newspaper Hamshahri on Friday, “Today our systems are prepared in a serious way for modern air threats, such that the performance of the systems compared to the previous profile has improved.”

The announcement of Iran’s air defense drill comes amid rising tensions between Iran and the West over its unsanctioned nuclear program. The scheduling of the military drill, the second major exercise in two months, coincides with the speculated timetable of a possible Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities before the US presidential elections in November.

According to the report, which The Jerusalem Post could not independently verify, the showdown took place as [Mr] Netanyahu met with [Mr] Shapiro and Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, who visited Israel earlier in the week. A source that participated in the meeting said that a particularly angry and stressed [Mr] Netanyahu began a tirade against the US president, attacking him for not doing enough on Iran. "Instead of pressuring Iran in an effective way, [Mr] Obama and his people are pressuring us not to attack the nuclear facilities," the source quoted [Mr] Netanyahu as saying.

Angered about continued US rhetoric that diplomacy needs more time to work, [Mr] Netanyahu said flatly: "Time has run out," Yediot reported. The American ambassador is said to have responded politely but firmly, telling [Mr] Netanyahu that he was distorting [Mr] Obama's position. [Mr] Obama promised not to allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, he explained, and left all options on the table, including military options.

At that point, diplomatic sources told the paper, "sparks flew" in an escalating shouting match between [Mr] Netanyahu and [Mr] Shapiro as the stunned congressman watched. [Mr] Netanyahu and [Mr] Obama may meet face-to-face on the sidelines of September's United Nations General Assembly meeting.

The exercise was rescheduled for late October, and appears likely to go forward on the cusp of the US presidential election. But it won’t be nearly the same exercise. Well-placed sources in both countries have told TIME that Washington has greatly reduced the scale of US participation, slashing by more than two-thirds the number of American troops going to Israel and reducing both the number and potency of missile interception systems at the core of the joint exercise.

“Basically what the Americans are saying is, ‘We don’t trust you,’” a senior Israeli military official tells TIME. US commanders privately revealed the scaling back to their Israeli counterparts more than two months ago. The official explanation was budget restrictions. But the American retreat coincided with growing tensions between the Obama and Netanyahu administrations on Israel’s persistent threats to launch an airstrike on Iran. The Islamic Republic would be expected to retaliate by missile strikes, either through its own intermediate range arsenal or through its proxy, the Hizballah militia, which has more than 40,000 missiles aimed at Israel from neighboring Lebanon.

In the current political context, the US logic is transparent, says Israeli analyst Efraim Inbar. “I think they don’t want to insinuate that they are preparing something together with the Israelis against Iran – that’s the message,” says Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. “Trust? We don’t trust them. They don’t trust us. All these liberal notions! Even a liberal president like [Mr] Obama knows better.”

Inside Israel, reports persist that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense chief Ehud Barak are determined to launch a strike, and American officials continue to urge restraint. Israeli analysts say [Mr] Netanyahu wants [Mr] Obama to send a letter committing to US military action by a specific date if Iran has not acceded to concessions, but the US administration does not appear to be complying.