Traders told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that Frontier bought all available May Futures contracts on the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (Liffe) in the period running up to the tender date in the last week of April. Feed wheat sets the benchmark price for wheat used in food. In recent weeks, Frontier is believed to have taken physical delivery of approximately 225,000 tonnes of feed wheat now worth in the region of 40 million pounds in what has been described as an attempt to corner the market.

Frontier strongly rejected any suggestion of an attempt to manipulate the market. It did not confirm or deny it made the unusually large trades and refused to reveal its position. The company's trading director, Jon Duffy, stated that all the wheat contracts it took physical delivery for were made to secure enough grain to fulfil customers' orders. "We are not speculators," said Duffy. "We are physical grain traders. We buy about 5 million tonnes of grain. We buy it, move it, transport it and deliver it." The spectacular grain raids, which are not illegal, were confirmed by three leading wheat traders who spoke to the Bureau.

Duffy stresses that Frontier is independent of its powerful shareholders, Cargill and Associated British Foods. Both shareholders own a number of major food processing and biofuel facilities in Britain. This, suggest farming insiders, has the potential for Frontier to exert significant control on farmers and rival grain suppliers.

Anders Breivik's 1,500-page manifesto is nothing if not thorough. Pages and pages of text outline in excruciating detail the ideological underpinnings of his worldview - one which led him to kill 76 people in two terrible attacks in Norway last week.

It is a document which has led many to question Breivik's sanity. But it has also, due to its myriad citations and significant borrowing from several anti-immigration, Islamophobic blogs, highlighted the deeply entwined network of right-wing populist groups and parties across Europe - from the Front National in France to Vlaams Belang in Belgium to the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO).

But recently it has become clear that Europe's populist parties aren't merely content to establish a network on the Continent. They are also looking further east. And have begun establishing tight relations with several conservative politicians in Israel - first and foremost with Ayoob Kara, a parliamentarian with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party who is also deputy minister for development of the Negev and Galilee districts.

The reason for the growing focus on Israel is not difficult to divine. "On the one hand," Strache told Spiegel Online in a recent interview, "we are seeing great revolutions taking place in the Middle East. But one can't be totally sure that other interests aren't behind them and that, in the end, we might see Islamist theocracies surrounding Israel and in Europe's backyard."

In other words, in the battle against what right-wing populists see as the creeping Islamization of Europe, Israel is on the front line.

The dangers are almost as great if the US fails to lift the debt ceiling and avoids default by enacting the most drastic fiscal squeeze in modern history. "Default would be an act of collective insanity," said Willem Buiter, Cititgroup's chief economist. "Even if a default were cured promptly, it would severely dent the credibility of the US as a global financial player and the provider of the world's leading reserve currency. There would be an immediate repricing of the dollar and an increase in medium and long-term nominal and real interest rates. Asset, credit, and funding markets in the US and the world as a whole would likely suffer and a global recession would likely result, centred in the US, but not restricted to it."

Mr Buiter said brinkmanship on the US debt ceiling had reached a point where tail risk had "morphed" into a serious possibility, with a 5 per cent likelihood that Washington will pull the trigger on a technical default. Stephen Roach, head of Morgan Stanley in Asia, said Chinese officials are disgusted by the "astonishing recklessness" of Washington as default looms. "Coming so shortly on the heels of the sub-prime crisis, the debate over the debt ceiling and the budget deficit is the last straw," he said.

Andrew Garthwaite from Credit Suisse said a default would be catastrophic, causing 5 per cent contraction in the US economy and a 30 per cent drop on Wall Street, with "massive" ramifications for the world. "It is almost unthinkable to believe the US would miss a coupon payment [$29 billion are due on August 15]. If the US does default, the repo market would probably cease to work. It is hard to imagine money market funds operating under this scenario. The inter-bank market would freeze up. The fallout would be far worse than after Lehman's default," he said. "It would be horrible to think what happens to the dollar if the Fed hints it would offset the growth damage with QE3."

Mr Garthwaite said it might not be that much better if the US fails to lift the debt ceiling and enacts a draconian fiscal squeeze equal to 11 per cent of GDP (annualised) to stave off default. Such an outcome would at first lead to a 10-15 per cent drop in equities and a fall in 10-year Treasury yields to 2.75 per cent. The dollar would slide. The longer it went on, the worse it would be. Each month would mean fiscal tightening equal to 0.9 per cent of GDP.

Some experts fear that variants of this scenario would spiral out of control. It would drive a string of US states and municipalities into bankruptcy if it lasted more than a few weeks, while the multiplier effect would tip the economy into a self-defeating downward spiral with echoes of 1931.

Following the horrific attacks that left 76 dead in Norway last week, many European leaders have been asking questions about the dangers of right-wing radicalization in the region. In recent years European Union member countries have seen growing support for right-wing populist groups - but the attacks confessed to by Anders Behring Breivik took their anti-Islam, xenophobic ideology to an entirely new and deadly level.

As if to confirm such fears, members of both a British right-wing group and an increasingly populist Italian party bucked the initial trend of rejecting Breivik's ideology, expressed their understanding for certain sentiments. Stephen Lennon, leader of the English Defense League, a far-right British group to which Breivik has claimed ties, said the attacks proved the desperation of those with populist leanings in Europe.

"It's a ticking time bomb," he told news agency AP. "If they don't give that frustration and anger a platform as such - and a way of getting emotion out in a democratic way - it will create monsters like this lunatic." A member of Italy's Northern League Party, the populist junior partner in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government, went as far as praising some of Breivik's ideas. In an interview with an Italian radio station, Mario Borghezio, a member of the European Parliament with the party, said: "Some of the ideas he expressed are good - barring the violence - some of them are great."

France's National Front party, known for its nationalistic, far-right policies, has also shifted into the spotlight. Anti-racism initiative MRAP accused the party of nurturing conditions for such an attack, while the left-wing news magazine Le Nouvelle Observateur said Breivik was the "EMBODIMENT OF A NEW SPIRIT IN EUROPE." National Front politicians denied any role in encouraging terrorism with their policies.

Moody's move to place the Aa2 government bond rating on review cited concerns over growth and said funding costs would continue to be high in the wake of euro zone leaders' bolder moves to curb the Greek crisis last week. That added to a sense that Spain - and Italy - are still firmly in the firing line, and the euro and Spanish bond prices fell in response.

Particular focus rested on Spain's regional governments, many of whom are struggling with burgeoning debt loads after a decade of reckless spending. Analysts fear control over regions' debt loads is slipping out of the central government's grasp.

Regional authorities will miss their collective budget deficit target by up to 0.75 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), Moody's said, hampering the central government's program of austerity to reduce the overall shortfall. "Regional governments' finances may prove difficult to control due to structural spending pressures, particularly in the healthcare sector," Moody's said in a release.

International investors are concerned the euro zone's fourth largest economy, hamstrung by anemic growth rates and high unemployment, will fail to put its fiscal house in order and need a Greek-style bailout. Nerves about that have sent bond yields to their highest level in over a decade. Moody's current rating for Spain is in line with fellow rating agency S&P's AA setting, while Fitch Ratings has the country one notch higher at AA+.

The derelict neighborhood off Michigan Avenue is a sharp contrast to Goldman's bustling skyscraper headquarters near Wall Street, but the two operations share one important element: management by the bank's savvy financial professionals.

A string of warehouses in Detroit, most of them operated by Goldman, has stockpiled more than a million tonnes of the industrial metal aluminum, about a quarter of global reported inventories. Simply storing all that metal generates tens of millions of dollars in rental revenues for Goldman every year. There's just one problem: only a trickle of the aluminum is leaving the depots, creating a supply pinch for manufacturers of everything from soft drink cans to aircraft.

The resulting spike in prices has sparked a clash between companies forced to pay more for their aluminum and wait months for it to be delivered, Goldman, which is keen to keep its cash machines humming and the London Metal Exchange (LME), the world's benchmark industrial metals market, which critics accuse of lax oversight. Analysts question why London's metals market allows big financial players like Goldman to own the warehouses which store huge quantities of metal even as they trade the commodity.

Robin Bhar, a veteran metals analyst at Credit Agricole in London says the conflict of interest is so acute he wants US and European anti-trust regulators to weigh in. "I think it makes a mockery of the market. It's a shame," Bhar said. "This is an anti-competitive situation. It puts (some) companies at an advantage, and clearly the rest of the market at a disadvantage. It's a real, genuine concern. And I think the regulators have to look at it."

Obama has warned that if lawmakers cannot come to an agreement on how to manage the debt issue in the next week - or prior to August 2 - the government will default on its debts and payments will have to be prioritized. Payments on the chopping block will be Social Security benefits, along with military salaries and unemployment benefits. August 3 is the day the government would have to start prioritizing payments.

It also happens to be the day a big set of Social Security checks are scheduled to be mailed out. If the government fails to act on time, 60 million Social Security recipients will fail to receive their checks for the month. Geithner says if the government officially defaults on August 2 as predicted if lawmakers cannot resolve the debt issue, he will no longer have enough money on hand to pay salaries and other bills. This will leave millions of Americans with no income to rely on.

The National Hurricane Center said, "This general motion with an increase in forward speed is expected through Friday. Some strengthening is forecast during the next 48 hours." The Center calls Don a small tropical cyclone and if continued on its projected path the storm could hit land along the southeastern coast of Texas at 1 am Saturday morning. The thousands of oil and gas production platforms in the region are particularly of major concern.

Reuters reports that Shell Oil Co, along with several other offshore energy operators evacuated workers on Wednesday. These companies produce 29 percent of US oil output and over 10 percent of domestically produced natural gas. No measures to shut down production have been reported yet.

The plan, however, is almost certain to fail in the Democratic-led Senate, and the White House has warned of a veto. Congress must raise the US debt limit by a deadline of next Tuesday. The US Treasury has warned the government will run out of money to pay all its bills unless a $14.3 trillion (8.7 trillion pounds) borrowing limit is increased by next Tuesday.

A vote on Mr Boehner's bill was postponed for a few hours late on Thursday, as Mr Boehner and his lieutenants endeavoured to win support among rank and file conservative Republicans.

But eventually Republican Representative Kevin McCarthy announced that there would be no vote on Thursday evening. Some Republicans - including Tea Party supporters who won House seats in 2010 and oppose raising the debt limit under any circumstance - feel the bill did not cut enough from the US budget. Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid predicted that even if the bill passes in the House, it will fail to pass the Senate, where Democrats and independents voting together hold 53 of 100 votes.

Republicans hold 240 of the 433 votes to be cast in the House, and need 216 of their members - plus Speaker Boehner in the event of a tie - to back the bill to pass it. Meanwhile, International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde warned that if the debt ceiling was not increased there could be an impact on the US dollar. "One of the consequences could be a decline of the dollar as a reserve currency and a dent in people's confidence in the dollar," she said.

Does Europe really want to dictate an idea for climate protection to the rest of the world? That's the question being asked by US leaders in Washington, who are throwing their support behind a protest by the American airline industry against an EU climate rule.

The new regulation comes into force in January 2012 and requires airlines to buy certificates for carbon emissions to take off or land at European Union airports. The EU will sell the certificates and allow them to be re-sold. It's a way of bringing the airline industry under the EU's emissions-trading scheme, the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), which has applied to European industry since 2005.

But the Americans don't like it. In fact, the Obama administration is protesting the plan with enough vigor to risk a massive trade dispute. "The European Union is imposing this on US carriers without our agreement," said Wendell Albright, director of the Office of Aviation Negotiations at the State Department, to the New York Times this week. "It is for the US to decide on targets or appropriate action for US airlines with respect to greenhouse gas emissions."

This rift has been growing for months, meanwhile congress is working up defensive measures. Lawmakers in the House of Representatives are forging a bill to forbid any American airline from taking part in the EU ETS. Airlines in the country have also taken action against the rule before the European Court of Justice.

Study co-author Dr Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and US Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA's Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA's Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.

"The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show," Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. "There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."

In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted. The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.

When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a "huge discrepancy" between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are.

The supposedly free democratic nation of Japan, which supposedly values and promotes freedom of speech, has officially issued orders to telecommunication companies and webmasters to remove content from websites that counter the official government position that the disaster is over and there is no more threat from the radiation.

The government charges that the damage caused by earthquakes and by the nuclear accident are being magnified by irresponsible rumors, and the government must take action for the sake of the public good. The project team has begun to send "letters of request" to such organizations as telephone companies, internet providers, cable television stations, and others, demanding that they "take adequate measures based on the guidelines in response to illegal information. The measures include erasing any information from internet sites that the authorities deem harmful to public order and morality."

The Japanese government has moved to crack down on independent reportage and criticism of the government's policies in the wake of the disaster by deciding what citizens may or may not talk about in public. A new project team has been created by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, the National Police Agency, and METI to combat "rumors" deemed harmful to Japanese security in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

The daily schedule of a member of the US Congress has been easy to predict recently. In the morning, the legislators in Washington stand in front of the TV cameras and talk about, one after another, how the country is standing on the edge of the precipice. Then, in the evening they can go back and report that the country did make one small step forward.

Tuesday was no exception. Chaos and internal power struggles ruled, this time within the Republican party. The conservative leaders around John Boehner, the powerful Republican speaker of the House, had wanted to promote their own plan for raising the debt ceiling, but he was forced to postpone a vote on the measure late in the day. If Congress does not raise the debt ceiling by August 2 from its current level of $14.3 trillion, the United States will default on its debt.

Boehner's plan would involve raising the debt ceiling initially by $1 trillion, which is enough to pay off federal debts until the end of the year. That would be offset by spending cuts of $1.2 trillion over the next decade. In addition, a commission would then determine how further spending cuts and adjustments to the tax code could be made. Boehner wanted a vote on his proposal to take place as early as Wednesday in the House of Representatives, but on Tuesday night he had to announce that he was pushing that back at least one day because he did not have a clear majority behind it.

But a compromise is not in sight. Instead, experts in Washington have begun to debate whether or not a deal really needs to be reached by August 2, or if the US has more money left over than originally thought. The consensus is that the government will not run out of money until August 10, writes the New York Times. By then, they must borrow more money in order to send out millions of social security checks. If not, they will become insolvent. August 10 instead of August 2. One doesn't want to think about it: yet another week of collectively marching toward the abyss.

News that Moody's had downgraded Cyprus two notches from A2 to Baa1 due to "fractious politics" and exposure to Greece compounded fears Europe's crisis is far from resolved. The darkening picture in Cyprus raises concerns that a fourth eurozone country might soon need some sort of rescue, exhausting bail-out tolerance in Germany, Holland, Finland and Slovakia, where a wing of the coalition has denounced the EU accord.

"The markets have started to see all the flaws in the summit deal," said David Owen, of Jefferies Fixed Income. "They know there has been no increase in the size of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and that it will not be any position to intervene in the Spanish and Italian markets for quite some time because the changes have to be ratified by all parliaments."

"Unless the European Central Bank (ECB) steps in to buy bonds, this is going to be tested by markets over the summer. EU leaders have sent absolutely the wrong signal by thinking they have done the job and can now go on holiday," he added.

Beijing's defence ministry said the US must discontinue such flights, calling them a "major obstacle" as the two Pacific powers try to put a series of military disputes behind them, China's Global Times reported. The flights "severely harmed" mutual trust, the paper quoted the ministry as saying. "We demand that the US respects China's sovereignty and security interests, and take concrete measures to boost a healthy and stable development of military relations," it added.

The ministry declined immediate comment when contacted by AFP. Washington has said in the past that its reconnaissance flights are conducted in international airspace and will continue. Sino-US military relations have been plagued in recent years by periodic tensions stemming from US plans for arms sales to Taiwan and naval standoffs in the disputed South China Sea. Beijing considers Taiwan part of its territory and refuses to abandon the possibility of taking the self-ruled island by force. The two sides split at the end of a civil war.

The United States recognises Beijing and not Taipei, but provides military support to Taiwan. In the June encounter, one of the Chinese Sukhoi SU-27 fighters crossed over the Taiwan Strait's middle line, widely considered to be the boundary between Taiwan's airspace and that of the Chinese mainland, Taiwanese media have reported. One of the Chinese jets did not leave until two Taiwanese planes were sent to intercept it, the island's United Daily News reported.