Worse, even if your prediction is true to the current assessment of Israeli military planners, the timing of an operation is affected by factors that are not entirely in their control: the diplomatic and media environment, American preparations, Iranian countermeasures, Arab cooperation, the weather. Military strategy is not wedding planning. You don’t set a date and work backwards. Even if you were right when you made the prediction, you might turn out to have been wrong by the time the predicted date rolls around.

So what kind of idiot would take the plunge and make such a prediction? My only defense is that I think it makes sense. I’ve never offered a prediction for an attack in the past, because no single date ever made overwhelming sense. It does now. So, caveats aside, here it is: Israel is preparing to deploy military assets to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program in October of 2012. Israel cannot resort to military action while the entire Western world is committed to negotiating. If, however, nothing comes of new talks and sanctions by October, an assault becomes easier to explain.

Which brings us to the most important factor in the October timing of an Israeli strike: the November 2012 presidential elections in the United States. [Mr] Netanyahu sees a moment of opportunity that will likely not be repeated for years to come. From late September to early November, White House decision-making will be driven by President Obama’s electoral needs — not his diplomatic policy. The mullahs are unloved in America, and many American pundits and politicians are on record supporting Israel’s right to defend itself militarily against an Iranian threat. If Israel goes ahead with a strike, can [Mr] Obama afford to be seen as trying to prevent it, effectively protecting the mullahs of Teheran in the process?

Israel might even hope that a credible Israeli threat of a strike just before the elections could lead to the best of all scenarios from Israel’s perspective – an American strike. While the White House seems to imply at regular intervals that Israel should not expect this. [Mr] Obama is surely asking himself if he wouldn’t rather control the confrontation than be dragged into it. If he can achieve meaningful results without incurring heavy losses in American blood or treasure, he would go into election day a wartime president.

The abrupt pulse of electromagnetic radiation from a large explosion, such as that produced by a nuclear weapon high above the earth, produces rapidly changing electric and magnetic fields. They generate surges in voltage and current inside electronic equipement - burning out microchips and circuitry. A nuclear electromagnetic pulse produces three waves of energy. The first is a very fast-moving, brief and intense electromagnetic field. It is created when gamma radiation from the nulcear explosion knocks electrons out of atoms in the earth's upper atmosphere. These electrons start moving downward and interact with the earth's magnetic field - creating a very large, brief pulse.

The second wave is generated by scattered gamma rays. It is similar to the pulses caused by lightning strikes and as such tends to be less damaging to equipment. The third wave is a very slow pulse, lasting tens to hundreds of seconds, caused by the nuclear detonation driving the earth's magnetic field out of the wave, followed by the field returning to its natural place. It can induce currents in long electrical conductors such as power lines, causing damage to substations and transformers.

The scale of the damage depends on the height of the explosion. A detonation at an altitude of 30 miles is calculated to cause damage for 480 miles around. At an altitude of 300 miles, the damage would radiate to 1470 miles - a field that would cover much of North America or Europe. The strength of the pulse depends on the distance of the explosion from the earth's equator. It is also possible to produce electromagnetic pulses without the use of nuclear weapons. Such devices have been fitted into bombs and missiles, but their range is far more limited because the explosion is far less powerful.

European governments are furiously thinking through the various scenarios, while still urging Athens to stick to its agreements on austerity and reform. If those hopes are dashed and Greece goes, what happens next? Opinion polls showing 80 per cent of Greeks in favour of staying in the euro combine with the election result to offer a scene of confusion.

Greece’s European partners say Athens cannot have it both ways. But the siren call from the radical left coalition Syriza, that Greece is safe in the eurozone with its creditors poised to ease the harsh bailout, is music to the ears of hard-pressed citizens.

Popular anger is running high at the prospect of three more years of austerity while Athens implements the rest of the reform programme agreed with the EU and International Monetary Fund. “We desperately need a break... If my pension is cut again, I might as well commit suicide,” says Angelos Syrigos, 85, whose modest income has been slashed by 30 per cent in the two years since the bailout began.

Middle-aged Greeks are afraid of a eurozone exit, fearing a further collapse in property values, the crumbling of the banking system and high unemployment. “The gravity of the situation isn’t appreciated. Some people believe Syriza will change its tune, others that the Europeans make empty threats,” says Takis Michas, a political commentator. “The only thing that will focus minds is when the money to pay pensions and salaries just doesn’t arrive.”

Tina Brown, who edits the magazine and its sister website The Daily Beast, is known for her love of controversial covers to help boost public interest and sales. The article accompanying the cover was written by the news magazine's regular blogger, Andrew Sullivan, who is an openly gay self-titled conservative political pundit. 'When you step back a little and assess the record of [Mr] Obama on gay rights, you see, in fact, that this was not an aberration. It was an inevitable culmination of three years of work,' Mr Sullivan said in a statement about the article.

He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family,' he wrote, describing the similarities between Mr Obama and the gay community. There was little doubt that Newsweek would be covering the President's historic announcement that he supports same-sex marriage after he had a sit-down television interview confirming what many already believed to be the case. This was, however, the first time that a sitting President had done so, and the magazine asserts that such a move was a calculated one that had been thoroughly planned.

'It’s easy to write off President Obama’s announcement of his support for gay marriage as a political ploy during an election year. But don’t believe the cynics,' representatives from the news magazine told Politico in a statement about the article. President Obama's announcement came several days after Vice President Joe Biden said that he was 'absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and men and women marrying are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.'

Republicans, the majority of whom are against gay marriage, said that Mr Obama simply made his historic announcement in an effort to gain support among liberal voters in the lead up to the general election. 'While President Obama has played politics on this issue, the Republican Party and our presumptive nominee Mitt Romney have been clear,' Republican national committee chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. 'We support maintaining marriage between one man and one woman and would oppose any attempts to change that.' Mr Romney re-affirmed his opposition to gay marriage in a speech to graduates of evangelical Liberty University in Virginia last week. He described marriage as an 'enduring institution' and said that it should be 'a relationship between one man and one woman'.

What is striking when you compare Europe's policies on agriculture, monetary union and climate change is the similarity of the way the EU keeps bolting on patches and extra wiring to try to fix problems created by its own solutions. Over the last five decades, the EU has set out to achieve a set of worthy goals by regulating markets - self-sufficiency in food, currency stability, fighting climate change.

Each of these policies created perverse incentives or what economists call "moral hazard", causing unintended consequences such as grain mountains and wine lakes, real estate bubbles and debt overhangs, and the collapse of the carbon price. When things go off the rails, the EU reflex is never to question or scrap the policy, since political dogma, vested interests and institutional inertia rule out going back on what in Eurospeak is called the "acquis" - European achievements.

The default response is always "more Europe", although not necessarily the most straightforward solution, which is often fenced around with political vetoes. "In political science, it's called 'past dependence'," says Helen Wallace of the London School of Economics, an authority on European governance. "You are so locked in by what you have done before that you end up doing a version of it again and again."

Government officials have warned that Greece could run out of cash as early as the end of June if it does not have a government in place to negotiate the next aid tranche with its lenders. "The country is up in the air," financial daily Imerisia wrote on its front page, warning in an editorial: "The country is moving to the brink of collapse and hopes for restoring the political stability are fading away."

President Karolos Papoulias must call a new election if he cannot persuade leaders to compromise. After a day of fruitless negotiations on Sunday, he invited politicians from the biggest three parties to return to the presidential mansion at 12:30 pm EDT (1630 GMT) on Monday, along with a small leftist group.

But an official from the second biggest party, the radical leftist SYRIZA, said its 37-year-old leader Alexis Tsipras would not attend. "SYRIZA has paved the way for new elections. And this time, whether we like or not, they will be more like a referendum. We will have set ourselves the question whether we prefer the euro or the drachma," centre-left daily Ethnos wrote in an editorial.

Armed ships from China and the Philippines have been confronting each other in a naval standoff for more than a month just a couple of hundred nautical miles off Filipino land.

The US has been building up the Philippines’s military and security forces, offering funding and weapons in exchange for greater American presence in the country. Greater US involvement with the Philippines and surrounding areas are part of a broader imperial plan to counter China’s regional influence, a provocation which could escalate to armed hostilities.

Washington’s 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty with the Philippines states, “Each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on either of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common dangers in accordance with its constitutional processes.” The treaty essentially obligates the US to confront China to defend the Philippines, a reality which has only intensified the antagonism over the disputed territory.

The conservative Nea Dimokratia will probably receive only about 20 percent and the social democratic Pasok hardly more than 14 percent of the votes. In Athens, even before the elections, it was being forecast that it would be impossible to create a stable government with a small majority, and that within a few months, new elections would have to be held, which would jeopardize EU and IMF financial aid. This would mean that, to obtain promises of dubious financial assistance, Greece, which has been forced to downsize its economy into an abyss, will be faced with utter ruin.

The social situation is desolate. The number of unemployed, as well as of those dependent on food allocations has dramatically grown, just as the number of suicides. German enterprises, whose profitable business in Greece has contributed to the development of Athens' debt crisis, are now seeking to exploit the crisis for lucrative business opportunities. The dramatic aggravation of the situation is also flanked by a rise of the extreme right.

The neo-Nazi Chrysi Avgi Party, with estimated electoral results of 6.8 percent, has achieved entry into the Greek national parliament. Head of the party, Nikolaos Michaloliakos had already been elected to the City Council of Athens in November 2010, where he is known for his occasional Nazi salutes. In the Greek parliament, the Chrysi Avgi Party has replaced the extreme right LAOS Party, which until the beginning of this year, had even been in the government coalition.

Chrysi Avgi is known for its militants' violent racist attacks on migrants, for its demands to annex territories of neighboring countries, and for its cooperation with France's Front National and Germany's NPD. Its electoral success is an intermediate result of the ultimate right's radicalization in Greece under the impression created by the incessantly escalating crisis.

As I have written about previously, the United States actually has plenty of oil. If we would simply use the resources that we already have, we would never have to import a single drop of foreign oil. But instead, we continue to be the largest importer of oil on the planet and we are allowing China to rapidly buy up oil and gas deposits inside the United States. This is fundamentally wrong and it is a serious threat to our national security. But apparently everything is for sale in the United States today, and that includes our precious energy resources. The Chinese government is using two giant corporations to buy up these energy resources.

The first is the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC). According to Wikipedia, this corporation is 100 percent owned by the Chinese government... CNOOC Group is a state-owned oil company, fully owned by the Government of the People's Republic of China, and the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) performs the rights and obligations of shareholder on behalf of the government.

The second is Sinopec Corporation. Sinopec Group is the largest shareholder (about 75% of the shares) in Sinopec Corporation. And as the Sinopec website tells us, Sinopec Group is owned by the Chinese government... Sinopec Group, the largest shareholder of Sinopec Corp, is a super-large petroleum and petrochemical group incorporated by the State in 1998 based on the former China Petrochemical Corporation. Funded by the State, it is a State authorized investment arm and State-owned controlling company.

So wherever you see CNOOC or Sinopec you can replace those names with the Chinese government. The Chinese government essentially runs both of those companies. So thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars will continue to leave the United States and go to China. And China will continue to use some of the money they are getting from us to buy up pieces of America.

Does anyone else out there see something very, very wrong with all of this?

However unlikely, the speculation is an indication of Europe’s plight in a world with little growth and every government looking at exports as a way to grow. A cheap currency giving an artificial boost to competitiveness is more palatable than austerity. The euro remains relatively strong for a variety of reasons. Despite domestic tensions, Europeans are not taking their money out of Europe, they are just moving it to safer homes within the region. Moreover, European banks continue to sell off dollar assets and bring the proceeds home. In addition, central banks in emerging countries continue to hold the euro as something of a reserve currency.

Meanwhile, the Americans and Chinese prefer to see the euro remain strong since exporters on both sides of the Pacific compete against Europeans. To the extent that the euro does drop, pressure will increase on the Fed to consider another round of quantitative easing to keep the dollar relatively depressed. If the euro collapses that will be especially bad news for China though, since 18 per cent of China’s exports go to Europe. In April, Chinese exports to the euro zone were down 2.4 per cent from a year ago, according to broker CLSA. Some of those exports were from German makers in China itself. For example, Pakistani textile mills have recently imported capital equipment from Siemens plants on the mainland. But if the euro sinks, German manufacturers will export from home rather than from their Chinese factories.

Some analysts suspect that China has been trying to support the euro and indeed, data from BNY Mellon suggests that as the growth in Chinese reserves slows, the euro falls. Meanwhile, the liquidity from the excess printing of money especially in the US continues to spill over into the rest of the world. Since the crisis, once again liquidity stemming from the US has driven commodity prices up and helped stoke credit booms in many emerging markets such as in Brazil.

Some 40 companies in East London are pressing ahead with a group legal action against Locog, the London 2012 organiser.

They include two garages, RA Autos and MV Motors in Queen’s Yard, Hackney Wick. Their depots are only 50 yards from the Olympic Park’s main media gate and they say they had no work during last week’s official opening of the main stadium because customers were stuck in the ensuing traffic jams. Mick Vallance, who owns MV Motors, said: “That was just for a test event.”

“Imagine the real thing. They’ve told us to work night shifts to avoid the traffic but they don’t seem to understand customers still have to get their vehicles to us.” The traders say while Lord Coe plans to spend £80 million on stunts to impress VIPs, he is refusing to help keep traders afloat. “All we want is for them to cover our overheads, about £2,000 a week, for a few weeks ,” said Mr Vallance. “The Olympic values are meant to be excellence, friendship and respect. They have shown none to us.”

The election in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), a western German state with a bigger population than the Netherlands and an economy the size of Turkey, was held 18 months before a national election in which Merkel is expected to fight for a third term. She remains popular in Germany for her steady handling of the euro zone debt crisis, but the sheer scale of her party's defeat leaves her vulnerable at a time when a backlash against her insistence on fiscal discipline is building across Europe.

According to first projections, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) won 38.8 percent of the vote and will have enough to form a stable majority with the Greens, who scored 12.2 percent. The two left-leaning parties had run a fragile minority government for the past two years under popular SPD leader Hannelore Kraft, whose decisive victory on Sunday could propel her to national prominence. Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) saw their support plunge to just 25.8 percent, down from nearly 35 percent in 2010, and the worst result in the state since World War Two.

"This is not a good evening for Merkel," said Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at Berlin's Free University. "The SPD is strengthened by this election, which will stir things up in Berlin." The blow comes only two days before France's new president, Socialist Francois Hollande, is due to visit Berlin and press Merkel for a shift away from austerity and more emphasis on growth-oriented measures in Europe. Other big countries like Italy also want Merkel to take a more balanced approach to the debt crisis and an election in Greece last week showed massive public resistance to tough austerity.

The main beneficiary of the election, the hard-Left Syriza coalition, came a startling second on a promise to tear up the deal, which promises EU loans to keep massively-indebted Greece afloat, but demands crippling spending cuts in return. Germany, the principal lender, has said it will stop payments if Greece breaks its promises on spending.

Mr Pangalos warned: "There is a school of thought that says the Germans are bluffing. They need Greece and will never throw us out of the eurozone. But what will happen, which is almost certain, is they will not give us the money to pay our debts. We will be in wild bankruptcy, out-of-control bankruptcy. The state will not be able to pay salaries and pensions. This is not recognised by the citizens. We have got until June before we run out of money."

"We have been spending the future for half a century. What [the anti-bailout forces] are really asking from the EU is not just to pay our bills, but also to pay for the deficit which we are still creating. I'm sure the Germans don't want Greece to leave the euro. What I don't know is how much they're willing to pay. It depends on the German man on the street. Is he willing to pay his taxes to save Greece? I doubt it." The deputy prime minister also warned that chaos could boost the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party, which won an unprecedented seven per cent of the vote, and 21 seats, in Sunday's election.

"In the places where the police voted, the fascists got 25 per cent," he said. "They are a serious threat. They have used violence already – you don't know where it will stop. You know how it happened in Germany – it started with the Jews, then the Communists, then everybody – it could happen here. This is the country, after the Soviet Union and Germany itself, with the biggest percentage of [Second World War] casualties in its population."

Voters punished New Democracy and Pasok at last Sunday's polls for backing tough EU terms for bailing out Greece. Polls show a new vote could sweep anti-bailout parties to power, threatening Greece's membership of the euro. European central bankers have already begun openly discussing the possibility of Greece leaving the eurozone.

Mr Papoulias's office said the president would meet initially with New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras, Syriza's Alexis Tsipras and Pasok's Evangelos Venizelos at noon (09:00 GMT) on Sunday. As the parties that won the most votes in last Sunday's election, they have all been allowed to try to form a government.

But none have managed to cobble together a coalition that creates a majority in Greece's 300-seat parliament. The stumbling block appears to have been Syriza's insistence that any new government must cancel austerity measures agreed in return for EU-IMF loans worth €130 billion ($170 billion; £105 billion).

At a meeting this coming Wednesday, the four cardinals of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which oversees Catholic Church doctrine, plan to agree a proposal for reuniting the society with the Catholic Church, and will submit it to the pope.

The Swiss-based SSPX, rejects some of the reforms made at the historic 1962 Second Vatican Council. It defied Rome in 1988 by illegally consecrating four bishops, which led to their excommunication by the late Pope John Paul. The Vatican said last month that it had received an answer SSPX to the Holy See's ultimatum that the group clarify its doctrinal position or risk a painful break with Rome. "The response is encouraging, it is a step forward," said Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi.

Radio Vatican recently cited Lombardi as saying the pope's top priority this year is "to successfully conclude the dialogue with the Priest Brotherhood Pius X and thereby to overcome a painful rift."