On Tuesday evening, the Times of Israel reported:

Large numbers of Turkish troops — including at least 15 long-range artillery pieces and tanks – moved to the Syrian frontier from the eastern city of Diyarbakir. A video published by the Turkish Cihan News Agency showed Turkish tanks being transported by carrier trucks toward the frontier.

Following the shoot-down of a Turkish warplane over Syrian territory, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his military will respond to any future incident. “As awe-inspiring as Turkey’s friendship is, Turkey’s wrath is equally awe-inspiring,” Erdogan said in a speech delivered before parliament.

A criminal investigation has been launched against Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, founder of the Temple Institute. Ariel was informed of the ban last week after attempting to visit the site. Although an official reason was not given at the time, the Rabbi was told by police officers that he was banned indefinitely.

A spokesman for the Jerusalem Police told the Jewish Press that the rabbi conducted himself in a manner which is not in compliance with the law and a criminal investigation has been launched against him. Rabbi Chaim Richman, International Director of the Temple Institute, wrote an email in response to a Jewish Press inquiry, saying: "The Israel Police’s recent shift of policy towards Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount is a throwback to the dark ages of totalitarian rule."

"The draconian, illegal suppression of Jewish presence, prayer and identification is a stain on this great country’s record of democracy. While on the one hand, the State of Israel champions human rights and pluralism, the treatment of Jews on the Temple Mount bespeaks utter contempt, insensitivity to religious feelings, and a brutal quashing of the most basic human rights."

Rabbi Chaim Richman added that "it is inconceivable that Jews are treated as criminals for expressing a desire to pray at their holiest site. It is equally unconscionable that Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, who served with the paratroopers that liberated the Temple Mount in the 1967 Six Day War, risking his life and burying his comrades for the sake of the Jewish sovereignty of the Temple Mount, should be served with an order distancing him from the Temple Mount indefinitely.

In response to the ban, Likud MK Tzippy Hotovely released a statement today calling for the convening of an urgent Interior Committee meeting in the Knesset to discuss freedom of Jewish prayer on Temple Mount. "This is a fatal blow to freedom of worship, and has no place in the state of Israel," MK Hotovely said.

In 2007, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu - who practices Kabbalah - called for mass slaughter of Palestinians in order to deter rocket fire from Gaza, while defending a ruling by his late father, Mordechai Eliyahu, the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, who advocated that Israel was permitted to indiscriminately kill civilians.

“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand,” Eliyahu advised, adding, “And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.”

Eliyahu has also called for a "religious" Prime Minister of Israel, and has stated that earlier prime ministers had been "without faith... without credibility... [and] without values."

Two days before a crucial European Union summit, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy released a seven-page report on closer fiscal and banking union envisaging a euro zone treasury that would issue common debt in the medium term.

Merkel immediately stamped on the idea of mutualising debt - favored by France, Italy and Spain - at a meeting of lawmakers from her Free Democratic coalition partners in Berlin, according to people who attended the closed-door session."I don't see total debt liability as long as I live," she was quoted as saying, a day after branding the idea of euro bonds "economically wrong and counterproductive".

Neither Merkel nor Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who insisted on that treaty clause to make private bondholders take first losses in any future debt restructuring by bailed-out states, spoke out in favor of such a move, the sources said. The provision has scared investors off buying Spanish debt since Madrid was promised a bailout of up to €100 billion ($125 billion) for its debt-stricken banks, since they fear a possible "haircut", driving bond yields up to alarm levels.

He suggested it could be held sooner than anyone expected – despite the fact that Germany largely outlawed referendums after Hitler’s misuse of them to manipulate public opinion in the 1930s. Mr Schaeuble’s outburst in a German newspaper, ahead of this week’s crucial summit of EU leaders in Brussels, has led to widespread surprise in Germany.

They also sparked renewed calls at home for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. Mr Schaeuble said: “Those who want a strong Europe also have to be willing to surrender decisions to Brussels.” He admitted this could strain Germany’s constitutional law and said such a change would require the German people to decide.

Asked directly if the country could soon hold an EU referendum, he replied: “I assume that it’ll happen sooner than I would have thought a few months ago. I would have said, ‘In five years? Never!’ But now I’m not so sure.” Tory MP Douglas Carswell said last night: “If Germany can have a referendum despite tough rules limiting such votes, then why ...can’t we?”

The general rule of thumb is to have enough cash saved to cover at least six months of expenses. However, only 25 percent of Americans have saved that amount and 17 percent have three to five months' expenses saved, while 28 percent have no emergency savings and 21 percent have less than three months' expenses saved.

"Incomes are largely stagnant, so it's difficult for people to make significant headway on savings when household expenses are creeping higher but incomes are not," Greg McBride, senior financial analyst for Bankrate.com, tells CNNMoney. "Prolonged unemployment has also depleted the savings of many people who at one time had a more appropriate cushion."

"The biggest barrier to saving is not being in the habit of saving," McBride says. "By establishing that habit, even if an unplanned expense comes up and wipes out what you've accumulated, you're only one paycheck away from restarting the saving process."

But no nation on earth has ever been able to expand debt much faster than national output indefinitely. All debt bubbles eventually burst. Right now, we are living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world. All of this debt has fueled a "false prosperity" which has enabled many Americans to live like kings and queens. But no nation (or household) can pile on more debt forever. At some point the weight of the debt becomes just too great. It is amazing that the United States has been able to pile up as much debt as it has.

Over the years, many authors have predicted that US government finances would collapse long before the US national debt ever got to this level. So the mountain of debt that we have accumulated is quite an "achievement" if you want to look at it that way. But the clock is ticking on this debt bubble and when it collapses we will say "bye bye" to our vastly inflated standard of living and we will discover that we have destroyed the economy for all future generations of Americans.

Most Americans still believe that we are experiencing "temporary" economic problems that will eventually go away. Most Americans still believe that even greater prosperity is still ahead. Sadly, what the mainstream media and the two major political parties are telling them is a bunch of lies. We have enjoyed the greatest prosperity that we will ever see in the United States, and when the debt bubble bursts there is going to be an immense amount of pain. That is a very painful truth, but it is better to come to grips with it now than be blindsided by it later.

Although the mosquitoes released are still GM, they aren’t exactly the same as the more well-known mosquitoes developed my Oxitec. Oxitec is a British company responsible for the creation of the genetically engineered mosquitoes containing a gene designed to kill themselves unless given an antibiotic known as tetracycline. The company created this internally manipulated insect to help control agricultural pests and reduce insect-borne diseases like dengue fever and malaria.

These new mosquitoes released in Australia, however, are developed with a slightly different strategy. A bacterium named Wolbackiapipientis infects numerous insects species, and harnesses the ability to alter it’s hosts reproductive ability. When this happens, entire populations become infected within generations, and when the bacterium infects mosquitoes, the mosquitoes’ ability to pass on the dengue virus vanishes.

Needless to say, numerous scientists, researchers, and many individuals have expressed concern regarding the release of genetically engineered mosquitoes. The first mosquito release by Oxitec took place in the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean in 2009, only for a second trial to occur in 2010, where 6,000 mosquitoes were released in Malaysia for further experiments. Now, 10-20 thousand mosquitoes were released in Australia, drilling the environment with even more genetically modified creations. As mentioned, many people are not happy about this.

The truth is that we have no idea what the future holds for genetic modification and the potential impacts it has on the environment and public health. We know that the genetically engineered mosquitoes are equipped with a lethal gene designed to lower the mosquito population, but what does that really mean for humans? We simply do not know the potential outcomes that could arise from such creations.

In his most frank public comments to date on the subject, the Archbishop accepted that the Church was in a “tangle” over homosexuality. On one hand many Christians may themselves be “wrestling” with their own sexuality while others appeared to display only strong feelings of revulsion, he said. “What’s frustrating is that we still have Christian people whose feelings about it are so strong, and sometimes so embarrassed and ashamed and disgusted, that that just sends out a message of unwelcome, of lack of understanding, of lack of patience. So whatever we think about it, we need, as a Church, to be tackling what we feel about it.”

The issue of women bishops – due to come to a head at the Church of England’s General Synod in York next week – was another matter which helped give the impression that sex was “the only thing the Church is interested in”, he remarked. His comments came during a discussion day for a group of Christian teenagers at Lambeth Palace.

Video published by activists recorded heavy gunfire and explosions in suburbs of Damascus. A trail of fresh blood on a sidewalk in the suburb of Qudsiya led into a building where one casualty was taken. A naked man writhed in pain, his body pierced by shrapnel. Syria's state news agency SANA said "armed terrorist groups" had blocked the old road from Damascus to Beirut.

The declaration that Syria is at war marks a change of rhetoric from Assad, who had long dismissed the uprising against him as the work of scattered militants funded from abroad. "We live in a real state of war from all angles," Assad told a cabinet he appointed on Tuesday in a speech broadcast on state television. "When we are in a war, all policies and all sides and all sectors need to be directed at winning this war." The rambling speech - Assad also commented on subjects as far afield as the benefits of renewable energy - left little room for compromise. He denounced the West, which "takes and never gives, and this has been proven at every stage".

The United Nations accuses Syrian forces of killing more than 10,000 people during the conflict, which began with a popular uprising and has built up into an armed insurgency against four decades of rule by Assad and his father. The UN peacekeeping chief said it was too dangerous for a UN observer team, which suspended operations this month, to resume monitoring a ceasefire. The truce, part of a peace plan backed by international envoy Kofi Annan, has long since been abandoned in all but name.

After stalling in the Gulf for two days, the large and ragged storm finally began moving eastward. The center crossed the shore late Tuesday afternoon near Steinhatchee, in the Big Bend area where the Panhandle joins the peninsula. Most of the thunderstorms and rain were northeast of the storm center and had already dumped 2 feet of rain over parts of Florida.

Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center said Debby could bring another 4 to 8 inches of rain - and possibly tornadoes - to north Florida and southeast Georgia in the next two days. Emergency managers in Pasco County on Florida's central Gulf Coast ordered a mandatory evacuation for 14,000 to 20,000 people living between the Anclote and Pithlachascotee Rivers. The Anclote rose from 9 feet before Debby's approach to more than 27 feet, well above major flood level, said Pasco County spokesman Eric Keaton. The storm was piling up coastal waters and pushing them inland, preventing the rainwater from draining out to sea.

Nearly 20 inches of rain has fallen in two days on Wakulla County, a Gulf Coast county famed for its natural springs. Roads were under water in many parts of the surrounding area. Debby was the first tropical storm of 2012 to disrupt US energy operations in the Gulf of Mexico. Shutdowns peaked on Monday, when more than 44 percent of daily oil production and a third of daily natural gas production were closed.

From the vantage point of a command post about 10 miles from the path of advancing flames, the entire community of Mountain Shadows, a northwest subdivision, appeared to be enveloped in an orange glow after dark. "This is a fire of epic proportions," Colorado Springs Fire Chief Rich Brown said as ash drifted down on the city, sirens wailed and the thick smell of smoke permeated the air.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper flew into the city Tuesday night by helicopter to meet with fire commanders and tour the fire zone first-hand. He noted that the blaze was one of at least a dozen burning throughout the state. Four people have died in Colorado wildfires so far this year. "This is the worst fire season in the history of Colorado," he said during an impromptu news conference, adding that from the air he saw many homes destroyed in a glowing landscape that looked "surreal." The Waldo Canyon Fire, which has roared through at least 6,200 acres of dry timber since Saturday, has grabbed attention for days because of its proximity to landmarks like the famed mountaintop of Pikes Peak and the Air Force Academy.

The blaze claimed its first property losses on Tuesday as wind-driven flames swept over containment lines into Colorado's second-most populous city, consuming an unknown number of homes on the town's outskirts as authorities hurried to evacuate residents. El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa said 32,000 people had been evacuated.

Coupled with other biometrics, it could soon allow security systems to grant or deny access from a distance, without requiring users to stop and scan a fingerprint, swipe an ID card, or otherwise lose a moment dealing with technology. Currently IDair’s primary customer is the military, but the startup wants to open up commercially to any business or enterprise that wants to put a layer of security between its facilities and the larger world.

A gym chain is already beta testing the system (no more using your roommate’s gym ID to get in a free workout), and IDair’s founder says that at some point his technology could enable purchases to be made biometrically, using fingerprints and irises as unique identifiers rather than credit card numbers and data embedded in magnetic strips or RFID chips.

The technology works much in the same way satellites process terrain imagery, using a lot of edge detection and image sharpening to turn a fingerprint captured at a distance into a usable and identifiable image. Since users don’t have to touch a fingerprint scanner, there’s no problem with the imaging surface becoming fouled. And of course, additional layers of security like facial recognition can be piled on to make up a more robust, complete biometric profile of a person that provides that individual with access without the need for a key or passcode, either of which can be lost, stolen, or shared without authorization.

The document, released ahead of Thursday's EU summit, said greater fiscal union could lead to common debt being issued by eurozone countries. There would also be banking union, with a single European banking regulator and a unified deposit guarantee scheme. The document was released by European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and was drawn up with the presidents of the European Commission, the Eurogroup and the European Central Bank.

Mr Van Rompuy said it was "not meant to be a final blueprint", but that he expected "to reach a common understanding amongst us on the way forward" at Thursday and Friday's summit. Mr Barroso said the guiding principle was that "greater solidarity and greater responsibility must go hand in hand".

Proposals in the report included:

• Limits on the amount of debt individual countries can take on

• Annual national budgets can be vetoed if they are likely to mean a country exceeding its debt limits

• The eurozone borrowing money collectively "could be explored"

• A European treasury office to be set up to control a central budget and keep an eye on national ones

• A single European banking regulator and a common scheme guaranteeing bank deposits

• Common policies on employment regulations and levels of taxation

• Joint decision-making with national parliaments to give it "democratic legitimacy".

Earlier, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble also called for there to be a European finance minister, with the power to veto national budgets as well as an elected president of Europe. French, German, Spanish and Italian finance ministers are meeting on Tuesday to discuss closer union.

French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici has said Thursday's EU summit should, "lay the groundwork for the second phase of the euro".

The spotlight is on Germany, France, Italy and Spain, the euro area's four biggest economies, wrestling over proposals for a banking union, joint euro zone bonds and handing more control over national budgets and economic policy to the European Union. But Europe's Babel features 27 often fierce national debates in member states, each of which has the power to block any change to EU treaties, including 10 countries which are not members of the currency.

Each national argument uses a different political vocabulary and historical context, making them hard to reconcile at the best of times and harder still when the going gets tough. While investors are looking for quick, bold solutions to restore confidence in the euro, Europe's patchwork politics make rapid strides fearsomely difficult, if not impossible. Each major step is subject to ratification by national parliaments or referendums, which can easily trip the project up.

How the debate is framed may determine the outcome.

In Germany, it is a morality play about making profligate "deficit sinners" atone and do their "homework", instilling a "stability culture" (low inflation, low debt) and enforcing a "savings policy" (austerity). It is no accident that "Schulden", the German for debt, doubles as the word for "guilt". To Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose frugal caution is lauded at home as embodying the virtues of a "Swabian housewife", the key to the euro's survival is to enforce the rules of budget discipline strictly and make Europe more competitive through economic reforms, not to dilute responsibility by sharing debt.

In France, it is all about "saving the euro" by showing more "solidarity" with southern countries, seen largely as "victims" of "speculation" rather than as fiscal villains. Europe's economic crisis has accelerated a splintering of the political landscape that makes it harder to form a coherent government in countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. That could make ratifying any new EU treaty a nightmare.