Raub, a 26-year-old decorated military veteran that served two tours overseas, was visited by agents with the US Secret Service, the FBI and local law enforcement on August 16 after statements he made on his personal Facebook page raised the eyebrows of authorities. Posts calling for a political revolution and even lyrical excerpts from rap songs placed his social networking profile on the government’s radar, and after briefly questioning him at his house two weeks ago, Raub was handcuffed and hauled off.

One week later he was released from custody, but Raub and his attorney say that not only was no crime committed, but that the Marine still has yet to be charged with a crime. “The idea that a man can be snatched out of his property without being read his rights, I think should be very alarming to all Americans,” Raub says in an interview this week conducted by his attorney, the Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead.

“It made me scared for my country,” Raub says to Whitehead, adding that only a few years after volunteering himself to protect the United States, recent events like the one he had to encounter himself have made him question a government he gave his life to.

“It’s a government that I loved,” Raub says. Now, though, he equates it to more of a mirror image of what George Orwell wrote about in 1984 than what the framers of the Constitution had hoped for. “Originally I never imagined that the there’d be problems to the degree that we have or things going on that are easy to find if you’re told to go look for them,” Raub tells Whitehead, specifically calling “the rampant abuse of Executive Orders” one of the biggest issues occurring in the country today.

“I think that if the average American were to sit down and be told, ‘Hey, do you know that the federal government is saying that they have the power to take your property, to seize control of industry in this country, to seize control of communications, of media [and] now the internet. It reeks of 1984,” Raub says.

"Today, over 120 countries are in Tehran, saluting a regime that not only denies the Holocaust but pledges to annihilate the Jewish state, brutalises its own people, colludes in the murder of thousands of innocent Syrians and leads millions in chanting 'Death to America, death to Israel'," he said. "So many in the international community appear to have learned nothing. I think this is a disgrace and a stain on humanity," Netanyahu said in a statement.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon, in Tehran for the summit of the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement that opens on Thursday, told Iranian leaders on Wednesday that their anti-Israel comments were "offensive and inflammatory," a UN spokesman said.

Ban "strongly objected" to the remarks in talks with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has called Israel a "cancerous tumor," and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has doubted its right to exist, UN spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters from Tehran.

Ban travelled to the summit despite US and Israeli criticism of his attendance, along with 36 heads of state or government who Iran says have confirmed they will take part.

Iran is hoping the summit of leaders from around the world will boost its position on the international stage. On the agenda are finding a solution to the crisis in Syria, human rights and nuclear disarmament. The event has already upset the US - which has imposed tight sanctions on Iran because of its nuclear programme - after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced his attendance. The two-day summit, which caps a week of meetings in Tehran, involves delegates and leaders from 50 countries of the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement (Nam).

Non-Aligned Movement

Formed in 1961, originally an alliance of newly independent Afro-Asian states.

Currently 120 members, comprising nations ostensibly unaligned with the major world powers.

Aims to represent the political, economic and cultural interests of the developing world.

57,000 tons of food meant for the devastatingly poor of the Uttar Pradesh region is sat in a government storage facility five football fields long. The 'theft' has blunted the nation's only weapon against mass starvation and as Supreme Court commissioner Naresh Saxena notes: "What I find even more shocking is the lack of willingness in trying to stop it," as the Minister for Food, who stands charged with attempted murder, kidnapping, armed robbery and electoral fraud, has diverted more than 80 percent of the food.

This scam, like many others involving politicians in India, remains unpunished. A state police force beholden to corrupt lawmakers, an underfunded federal anti-graft agency and a sluggish court system have resulted in five overlapping investigations over seven years - and zero convictions.

Up to 20,000 people are expected to attend the Friday prayers and Jibril Hough, a spokesman for the Bureau of Indigenous Muslim Affairs (BIMA), said the purpose of the event is to hold political parties accountable for the issues faced by Muslim-Americans. In particular, the event will target the Patriot Act, the NYPD, the National Defense Authorization Act, and anti-Shariah sentiment.

When an imam like Siraj Wahhaj says “it his duty and our duty as Muslims to replace the US Constitution with the Quran… we need to speak up!” Dr Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim and the Founder and President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, reiterated in response, adding that Americans “should be concerned” if this is who the DNC is “consorting with.” Robert Spencer [author and blogger best known for Criticism of Islam and research into Islamic terrorism and jihad] speculates that the Democrat National Committee is simply so “in thrall to multiculturalism” that “few, if any” are even aware of the radical connections.

“To raise any concerns about such a speaker would be ‘Islamophobic,’ violating every rule of the anti-American, anti-Western ethos that prevails among so many Democrats today,” Spencer writes.

The tools: political pressure, fake moral outrage, and ridicule. And not just in Germany. NPR announced on Sunday that only some “hardliners” in Germany were standing in the way of the world being saved by the ECB and German taxpayers.

The pressure comes from all sides: Chancellor Angela Merkel should forcibly shut up these unruly, inconvenient, sound-bite-hungry “hardliners” that make so much sense to the people who’ll have to pay for it all. Prime target: Alexander Dobrindt, General Secretary of the CSU, Bavaria’s sister party to [Mrs] Merkel’s CDU. His exasperation with successive Greek governments, their lies and broken promises, their extortion efforts and demands for ever more money has bled through. So he told the tabloid Bild that he sees “Greece out of the Eurozone by 2013.”

After which it would get a Marshall Plan, he said. And rumors that the ECB would soon buy potentially unlimited amounts of sovereign bonds incited him to call its President Mario Draghi “the counterfeiter of Europe.”

He “is playing with fire in the European house,” warned Andrea Nahles, General Secretary of the opposition SPD. This must be forbidden; [Mrs] Merkel’s reminders to tone down the rhetoric and wait for the big Troika report simply weren’t enough, she warned. Thus has begun the process of strangling democratic discussion on an expensive and risky engagement for taxpayers.

Exports, Germany’s sacred cow, are already being slaughtered, and the country is awash in layoff talk. Friday, it seeped out that Opel, GM’s bleeding subsidiary, had a “secret strategy” of cutting 30% of its workforce — which the company hastily denied. Earlier last week it emerged that Siemens, Germany’s third largest employer, was planning to cut jobs to counteract orders that had collapsed by 43% in the first three quarters! Retailers like Karstadt announced layoffs. Steel conglomerate ThyssenKrupp is cutting hours.

Four US Army soldiers from the Fort Stewart base in southeast Georgia are charged with killing a former comrade and his girlfriend in a bid to prevent the couple from informing on a militia group of which they were all members. One of the soldiers has agreed to cooperate with the prosecution in exchange for a lesser charge, while the rest are charged with malicious murder, felony murder, criminal gang activity, aggravated assault and using a firearm while committing a felony.

The case's prosecutors paint a vivid picture of the group’s plans and actions. Taking over the sprawling Fort Stewart base, bombing a fountain in nearby Savannah, bombing a dam and poisoning the apple crop in Washington State, and, eventually, toppling the US government and killing the president – these were the goals of the group, which called itself FEAR, an acronym for Forever Enduring Always Ready.

“This domestic terrorist organization did not simply plan and talk,” said prosecutor Isabel Pauley. “Prior to the murders in this case, the group took action. Evidence shows the group possessed the knowledge, means and motives to carry out their plans.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday reprimanded a politician from her coalition for saying European Central Bank President Mario Draghi was on the way to becoming the "currency forger of Europe" and that a Greek exit from the euro zone was unavoidable. "We're in a very decisive phase in the fight against the euro debt crisis at the moment," [Mrs] Merkel told public broadcaster ARD on Sunday. "My request: everyone should weigh their words very carefully."

It was a swipe at Alexander Dobrindt, the general secretary of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to [Mrs] Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU). [Mr] Dobrindt had told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper in an interview published on Sunday: "I'm convinced that there is no way to avoid a Greek exit from the euro zone." He added: "I see Greece outside the euro zone in 2013."

He criticized [Mr] Draghi's proposal to set an upper limit for bond yields of ailing euro-zone nations, saying it was an attempt to "finance debt countries through the back door" and accusing him of misusing the ECB as a "bucket wheel" to shift "money from the stable north of Europe to the deficit-ridden south."

While nobody was injured - and as seismologists stress it does not increase the risk of a massive earthquake the region has long feared - it has inevitably fuelled anxiety. On Sunday, quakes could be felt as far away as San Diego on the West Coast and inland east into Arizona, as well as Orange County further north towards Los Angeles. In Brawley itself there was minor damage to town center buildings, while products were knocked from shelves in some stores and amateur video showed the alarming jolt of the biggest shakes.

Seismologists say the latest quake cluster is the biggest in 30 years. A 2005 swarm peaked with a 5.1-magnitude shake, whereas the largest judder on Sunday reached 5.5 on the Richter scale. The town at the epicenter of the shaking has a quake phenomenon named after it: the Brawley Seismic Zone. It sits between the San Andreas and Imperial faults.

Net farm income will reach $122.2 billion in 2012, the highest-ever nominal profit and the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms after 1973, the US Department of Agriculture said in its first forecast since drought spread across the corn belt.

Intense summer heat and dry soils dramatically worsened the outlook for this year’s US corn and soyabean harvest, propelling prices to all-time highs. Farms in northern plains states that escaped the worst conditions, such as North Dakota, will earn 39 per cent more this year, the department said.

“Essentially, you have a situation where the increase in prices offsets the reduction in the quantity produced and sold during the year,” said Mitch Morehart, a USDA economist. Many farmers in the drought-hit areas abandoned crops and will file insurance claims to cover losses. “Insurance indemnities are forecast to offset the impacts of declining yields associated with the drought,” the forecast said.