On Wednesday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt over his decision to withhold documents related to the “gun walking” operation – documents that President Obama tried to keep secret by invoking executive privilege. The question of why the Prez intervened in this way will surely hang over the investigation and the White House for many months to come. Be patient, conservatives. It took nearly eight months for the Watergate break in to become a national news story. But when it finally did, it toppled a President.

Here’s what Fast and Furious is all about – and for the uninitiated, be prepared for a shock. In 2009, the US government instructed Arizona gun sellers illegally to sell arms to suspected criminals. Agents working for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were then ordered not to stop the sales but to allow the arms to “walk” across the border into the arms of Mexican drug-traffickers. According to the Oversight Committee’s report, “The purpose was to wait and watch, in hope that law enforcement could identify other members of a trafficking network and build a large, complex conspiracy case… [The ATF] initially began using the new gun-walking tactics in one of its investigations to further the Department’s strategy. The case was soon renamed ‘Operation Fast and Furious’.”

Tracing the arms became difficult, until they starting appearing at bloody crime scenes. Many Mexicans have died from being shot by ATF sanctioned guns, but the scandal only became public after a US federal agent, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, was killed by one of them in a fire fight. ATF whistle blowers started to come forward and the Department of Justice was implicated. It’s estimated that the US government effectively supplied 1,608 weapons to criminals, at a total value of over $1 million. Aside from putting American citizens in danger, the AFT also supplied what now amounts to a civil war within Mexico.

Morgan Stanley, one of the most closely watched firms in the much anticipated review, had its long-term debt rating lowered by just two notches, one level less than had been expected, sending its stock up sharply in after-hours trading. The downgrade left Morgan Stanley more highly rated than Bank of America Corp and Citigroup, but a step below Goldman Sachs Group.

Credit Suisse, which last week was warned about weak capital levels by Switzerland's central bank, was the only bank in the group to suffer a three-notch downgrade. But its new A1 deposit and senior debt ratings still rank higher than many of its peers.

"All of the banks affected by today's actions have significant exposure to the volatility and risk of outsized losses inherent to capital markets activities," Moody's Global Banking Managing Director Greg Bauer said in the announcement.

As the mainland gains, Hong Kong suffers. Global banks are making selective cuts in Hong Kong, especially in equities. Morgan Stanley’s mainland Chinese joint venture already has around 150 staff despite being just a year old, according to a person close to the matter. UBS, the only foreign bank with a Chinese brokerage license, has transferred a managing director from Hong Kong to Shanghai to build an 80-90 person research team.

Fees are dictating the shift. China’s A-share investment banking fees almost quadrupled since 2007 to $2.2 billion, now making up half of overall China-related banking revenue, up from less than a fifth in 2007, according to Thomson Reuters. This trend is even more evident this year. Three mainland exchanges have taken up 66 percent of Asian IPO proceeds, while in Hong Kong, IPO proceeds have fallen 90 percent year on year.

As the markets loosen up, China will get more attractive. Global banks have already been told they can take up to 49 percent stakes in their joint ventures, and can apply for secondary market licenses after two years of operations, versus five years before. Once Shanghai finally opens its new market for foreign companies, global banks will have a new edge against local securities firms.

There are challenges ahead. Deals are smaller in China, and reputational costs can be high. Local bankers may have good connections on the ground but lack technical skills. Transferring talent from abroad is costly, and high taxes and heavy pollution make people less willing to move to China. Still, if the money is to be made in Beijing and Shanghai from now on, banks and bankers have no choice but to adapt.

Writing in the journal Science, they say it would be theoretically possible for these changes to occur in nature.

A US agency has tried unsuccessfully to ban publication of parts of the research fearing it could be used by terrorists to create a bioweapon.

According to Professor Ron Fouchier from the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands, who led the research, publication of the work in full will give the wider scientific community the best possible chance to combat future flu pandemics. "We hope to learn which viruses can cause pandemics and by knowing that we might be able to prevent them by enforcing strict eradication programmes," he told BBC News.

He added that his work might also speed the development of vaccines and anti-viral drugs against a lethal form of bird flu that could spread rapidly among people. The H5N1 virus has been responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of birds and has led to hundreds of millions more being slaughtered to stop its spread. The virus is also deadly to humans but can only be transmitted by close contact with infected birds.

The award, commending the agency for its response during the 2011 wildfire season, is presented annually by the National Interagency Fire Center. It was announced at the Southern Group of State Foresters annual conference in Louisville, Kentucky.

Texas Forest Service Associate Director Mark Stanford said the recognition is an honor for the emergency responders who bravely served Texas during last year’s unprecedented wildfire season. MORE THAN 30,000 WILDFIRES BURNED ALMOST 4 MILLION ACRES, DESTROYING 2,946 HOMES ACROSS THE STATE.

The wildfires were suppressed with assistance from more than 16,000 emergency responders from all 50 states, along with 239 dozers, 954 engines and 246 aircraft. “We accept this award on behalf of all the local, state and interagency firefighters who participated in the 2011 wildfire season,” Stanford said. “They’re the ones who really earned this award.”

Eldad was angered by the arrest of a Jewish visitor to the Temple Mount on Thursday morning, and the police’s decision to ban Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, who heads the Temple Mount institute, from visiting the holy site. “This is an unacceptable escalation of the affront to freedom of worship in Israel, and another step toward abandoning the Jewish people’s holiest place to the Arab enemy and the Waqf,” he charged.

Yehuda Glick said that Rabbi Ariel had been refused entrance to the Temple Mount on Wednesday as he attempted to ascend in honor of Rosh Chodesh, the beginning of the next Jewish month. Police told Rabbi Ariel that he was permanently banned, and would not say why, Glick said. The Jewish man arrested Thursday morning was detained after quoting to his companions from the Mishnah, Glick added. Jews are forbidden to pray on the Temple Mount, but are normally allowed to speak.

Also Thursday, a Jewish visitor to the Temple Mount complained that Islamic Waqf officials had ordered him to remove his kippah because it offended them.

The current government was set to be the first government in Pakistan’s history to actually complete a five-year term in the office. Then, on Tuesday, the Pakistani Supreme Court delivered a blow to this glorious “political stability” Pakistan has been enjoying.

On Tuesday the chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, ruled Prime Minister Gilani was effectively disqualified as a member of parliament on 26 April. "He has also ceased to be the prime minister of Pakistan, with effect from the same date, and office of the prime minister shall be deemed to be vacant accordingly," he said. As soon as Pakistanis recovered from the shock, allegations of a judicial coup were levelled against the Chief Justice. This is Pakistan, after all –where conspiracy theory dances dangerously close with political paranoia.

Just this week, Foreign Policy magazine rated Pakistan among the world’s failed states – a moniker that rankles with many Pakistanis. But the latest political upheaval will not help remedy the perception of Pakistan as a kind of Somalia with nukes. The control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons is a charged issue. In theory, the prime minister should be in control, as chairman of the Nuclear Command Authority (NCA) that handles the command and control of strategic nuclear forces and organisations. But it is the army leaders who have the final say in the use of nuclear weapons if ever they are needed.

As part of efforts to reduce its carbon footprint and burnish its image as an environmentally responsible company, the huge retailer is sending senior employees into the fields for the first time ever, looking for ways to help farmers reduce their use of carbon-intensive fertilizer or improve logistics. "We don't have a lot of visibility in the supply chain, so we started in the field," says Robert Kaplan, a sustainability manager at the Bentonville, Arkansas-based firm. "I hadn't seen a wheat field before and I wanted to find out how we go from a green crop in the fields to flour on our shelves."

This May, Kaplan and a colleague were the first Wal-Mart employees ever to attend the annual crop tour across the Number 1 winter wheat state Kansas, a rite of passage for traders, analysts, academics and buyers for the past 55 years. The aim is simple: use Wal-Mart's commercial muscle to get its Great Value-branded flour and wheat products from field to shelf more efficiently, using less carbon. In the process, however, Wal-Mart may end up initiating transformative changes in the way US farmers grow wheat, lowering costs and improving yields for a crop that has failed to keep pace with the dramatic improvements in sustainability of other commodities such as corn and cotton.

There are some relatively easy wins: convincing more farmers to abandon the practice of plowing their fields after each harvest, and using satellite imagery to optimize fertilizer use. But the challenge is substantial. Wheat is already one of the least-intensive crops in terms of nitrogen fertilizer, using half as much as corn to produce an acre of grain. "Wheat is relatively low input. There are not a lot of corners that can be cut," says Jason Kelley, a wheat and corn extension agronomist at the University of Arkansas.

Tim Robinson, the company's senior buyer of baking commodities, joined Kaplan on the trip. He said that, while it is still in the fact-finding phase of its wheat work, Wal-Mart is likely to promote "precision farming" which uses satellite-guided planting to improve yields and no-till methods which proponents say reduce soil erosion and maintain land quality. Roughly 75 percent of wheat farmers plow, or till, their fields in Arkansas, says Kelley. Abandoning that practice could require them to rotate crops regularly and take greater care in planting to avoid stunting plant growth.

It's another wait-and-see game for the euro, as world leaders wait for euro leaders - in particular German Chancellor Angela Merkel - to come up with further proposals to shore up the common currency. Though there are lots of other economic problems in the world - including the expanding US debt and trade barriers that have yet to fall - the leaders of the industrialized world and key developing countries managed to concentrate nearly exclusively on the euro crisis during the G-20 summit at the Mexican resort of Los Cabos.

Merkel was certainly in the hot seat, once again, as many nations pressed her to do more for the euro - at a time when many Germans feel their country has already done too much. European leaders were also annoyed that their problems consistently grab the headlines, while many other countries have equally serious issues to deal with. THEY WERE QUICK TO POINT OUT THE FINANCIAL CRISIS DID NOT START IN EUROPE, BUT IN THE UNITED STATES.

Financial daily Handelsblatt writes:

"It is rather hypocritical when the Americans and the British, whose own mountains of debt have reached a high point, try to lecture the Europeans. One number is sufficient to reveal what a bad tactic this is. At a time when the budget deficits of the US and Great Britain are about 8 percent, the euro-zone members have almost managed to bring their deficits as a whole down to 3 percent.

When you think of the surveillance state, you usually think of snoopy alphabet-soup government agencies like the FBI, IRS, DEA, NSA, or TSA, or cyber-snoops at Facebook or Google, says Natasha Singer in The New York Times. But there's a company you've probably never heard of that "peers deeper into American life," and probably knows more about you than any of those groups: Little Rock–based Acxiom Corp. Jeffrey Chester at the Center for Digital Democracy has dubbed Acxiom "Big Brother in Arkansas," while Gizmodo's Jamie Condliffe calls it the "faceless organization that knows everything about you."

What is Acxiom Corp, and what does it do?

The company fits into a category called database marketing. It started in 1969 as an outfit called Demographics Inc, using phone books and other notably low-tech tools, as well as one computer, to amass information on voters and consumers for direct marketing. Almost 40 years later, Acxiom has detailed entries for more than 190 million people and 126 million households in the US, and about 500 million active consumers worldwide. More than 23,000 servers in Conway, just north of Little Rock, collect and analyze more than 50 trillion data 'transactions' a year. "In essence, it's as if the ore of our data-driven lives were being mined, refined, and sold to the highest bidder, usually without our knowledge," says The Times' Singer.

What kind of data does it have?

"If you are an American adult," says Singer, "the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on." It does more than collect that information, though. It uses it to pigeonhole people into one of 70 very specific socioeconomic clusters in an attempt to predict how they'll act, what they'll buy, and how companies can persuade them to buy their products. It gathers its data trove from public records, surveys you've filled out, your online behavior, and other disparate sources of information, then sells it to banks, retailers, and other buyers.

The following year, the US Air Force unveiled insect-sized spies 'as tiny as bumblebees' that could not be detected and would be able to fly into buildings to 'photograph, record, and even attack insurgents and terrorists.' Around the same time the Air Force also unveiled what it called 'lethal mini-drones' based on Leonardo da Vinci's blueprints for his Ornithopter flying machine, and claimed they would be ready for roll out by 2015.

That announcement was five years ago and, since the US military is usually pretty cagey about its technological capabilities, it raises the question as to what it is keeping under wraps. The University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab recently showed off drones that swarm, a network of 20 nano quadrotors flying in synchronized formations.

The SWARMS goal is to combine swarm technology with bio-inspired drones to operate 'with little or no direct human supervision' in 'dynamic, resource-constrained, adversarial environments.' However, it is most likely the future of HARD-TO-DETECT DRONE SURVEILLANCE WILL MIMIC NATURE. Researchers have now developed bio-inspired drones with bug eyes, bat ears, bird wings, and even honeybee-like hairs to sense biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

The central bank expanded its "OPERATION TWIST" BY $267 BILLION, meaning it will sell that amount of short-term securities to buy longer-term ones to keep long-term borrowing costs down. The program, which was due to expire this month, will now run through the end of the year. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, speaking at a news conference after a two-day policy meeting, said the central bank was concerned Europe's prolonged debt crisis was dampening US economic activity and employment.

"If we are not seeing sustained improvement in the labor market that would require additional action," he said. "We still do have considerable scope to do more and we are prepared to do more." The Fed slashed its estimates for US economic growth this year to a range of 1.9 percent to 2.4 percent, down from an April projection of 2.4 percent to 2.9 percent. It cut forecasts for 2013 and 2014, as well. In addition, officials said they expect the job market to make slower progress than they did just a couple months ago, with the unemployment rate now seen hovering at 8 percent or higher for the rest of this year. It stood at 8.2 percent in May.

A number of economists said the Fed was likely to eventually launch a more aggressive program to buy bonds outright. It HAS ALREADY PURCHASED $2.3 TRILLION IN DEBT in two earlier bouts of so-called quantitative easing.

Cheap and ready access to the liquid assets that oil the financial markets are under threat from both state-imposed capital controls and flagging confidence in the euro, said Robert Jenkins, a member of the Bank’s Financial Policy Committee. Without easy access to liquidity, markets could seize in a re-run of the credit crunch after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, he warned.

The warning comes after it emerged last night that European leaders are poised to announce a £600 billion deal to bail out Spain and Italy. Two rescue funds are to be used to buy the debts of the troubled economies, the cost of which have reached record highs in recent weeks. Spain and Italy's bond yields eased this morning on the news. Spain's ten-year bond yields were down 14 basis points to 6.8 per cent, after falling below the symbolic 7 per cent barrier. Italian bonds fell ten basis points to 5.79 per cent.

Speaking at the Global Alternative Investment Management conference in Monaco, Mr Jenkins warned: “Those of you who traded asset backed securities in 2008 can testify to the speed with which liquidity can disappear. Yet despite these examples, many continue to assume that ... ‘liquidity’ is free and will be freely available. Short-selling bans in Europe and bond purchase penalties in Brazil are a foretaste of the future. I recommend that you send your best and your brightest to the library to research state intervention in the post war period. It could come in handy. For like clean air and water, market liquidity is no longer limitless and no longer free.”

Back in April, a Brazilian court ruled that Monsanto absolutely was responsible for paying back the exorbitant amounts of cash to the farmers, ordering the company to issue back all of the taxes collected since 2004 — a minimum of $2 billion. Afterwards, Monsanto appealed the decision and the case is now suspended until a further hearing is initiated by the Justice Tribune of the local court stationed in Rio Grande do Sul.

Recently, however, the Brazilian Supreme Court declared that any decision reached in a local court case should apply nationally. The result? Monsanto now faces even larger charges, due to the larger legal application on a national level. Now, the charges total or exceed $7.5 billion. “The values involved could total 15 billion reais ($7.5 billion),” said the Superior Tribunal of Justice on its website.

Lawsuits and criminal charges continue to hit Monsanto, scratching away at the financial foundation of the agricultural behemoth. Monsanto has been found guilty of chemical poisoning in France after their weedkiller product led to neurological problems, and the company has even dished out $93 million to victims of toxic dioxin. As Monsanto continues to be slammed with lawsuits, many of which are from multitudes of affected farmers and individuals, awareness spreads among the general public regarding the corporation’s true acts.

Now speculation that Greece's new leaders could want to renegotiate the country's €130 bilion bailout package with Germany have come to the fore. Greek parties sealed a deal to form a conservative-led coalition but said they would start immediately to form a team to re-negotiate the tough austerity conditions in the international bailout propping up the near-bankrupt economy.

"The Democratic Left insists on policies to gradually disengage from the terms of the bailout that has bled society," one politician said.