Clear signs of the political and social cost of the euro zone crisis sent stock markets tumbling Wednesday as debt-laden Greece faced a crippling 24-hour strike and Spain cleaned up after violent protests Tuesday near the country's Parliament.

Spanish bond yields approached 6 percent for the first time in months, while European stocks and the euro fell sharply, as developments in Greece and Spain sent a new wave of anxiety through the ranks of international investors.

The Euro Stoxx 50, a measure of euro zone blue chips, was down 2.3 percent in afternoon trading Wednesday. National indexes were also down, led by the Ibex in Spain, which was down 3.6 percent, and the MIB in Milan, down 3.1 percent. Stock index futures on Wall Street indicated a mild decline at the opening.

The euro was at $1.2852, its lowest level in two weeks, down from $1.2950 late Tuesday in New York.

Spanish bond yields had fallen back from levels thought unsustainable after the European Central Bank announced a plan Sept. 6 to buy the sovereign bonds of debt-strapped euro countries, like Spain and Italy, in amounts sufficient to bring the cost of servicing their debt down to a manageable level.

Russian authorities temporary suspended the import and sale of Monsanto's genetically-modified corn after a French study suggested it may be linked to cancer.

­The Russia's consumer-rights regulator Rospotrebnadzor asked scientists at the country's Institute of Nutrition to review the study. The watchdog has also contacted to European Commission's Directorate General for Health & Consumers to explain the EU's position on GM corn.

The report prepared by France's University of Caen and published last week, claimed that rats fed over a two-year period with Monsanto's genetically modified NK603 corn, developed more tumors and other pathologies than a test group fed with regular corn. The NK603, sold under the Roundup label, is genetically engineered to withstand glyphosate weed killer.

The company criticized the study, saying it "doesn't meet minimum acceptable standards for this type of scientific research" and the data was incomplete.

Monsanto also said Russia's ban will have little effect on its business as the country import small volumes of corn from the US. Besides that, the Russian government doesn't permit farmers to plant GM crops. "Russia is a net exporter of grain, so the actual impact of their temporary suspension, if any, is likely to be small," the spokesman said in a statement.

Fernando Torres-Vélez waits for samples in the darkness by a helicopter landing pad on Plum Island. Situated 1.5 miles from the eastern tip of Long Island, the island's 840 acres of wildlife surround a handful of high-security laboratories run by the Department of Homeland Security to combat livestock diseases and bioterror threats.
Torres-Vélez, a veterinary pathologist, takes a ferry here five days a week as head of the Foreign Animal Disease 
Diagnostic Lab. But tonight is different. A veterinarian at the New York State Fair has reported a cow with symptoms of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) - a virus that leaves livestock covered with lesions, too emaciated to produce milk or meat, and so contagious that an outbreak would halt all dairy and beef production in the U.S. When the helicopter lands, Torres-Vélez receives the cow's saliva sample and rushes to his lab. Within four hours his team has ruled out FMD.

Plum Island is a biosafety level 3 lab, equipped to deal with diseases that don't infect humans but are contagious and possibly fatal in animals. Vaccines developed here could stop viral outbreaks in the U.S., as well as in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan - nations where FMD still poses a threat.

Given the stakes and the intrigue, Plum Island has gained a reputation for being secretive and covert. That may be deserved. A recent visitor found scientists eager to discuss their work yet careful to abide by public relations rules not to say too much. Photography was restricted unless an escort directed the camera. (Verboten: photographing the ferry dock from the Long Island side.) And yet soon Plum Island may be superseded. Within a decade, the lab is expected to move to a brand-new biosafety level 4 facility in Kansas, where scientists can study Nipah virus encephalitis and other livestock diseases that could be fatal to humans. Plans for the facility are stacked on Torres-Vélez's desk.

Germany's Catholic Church will deny worshipers the right to Holy Communion and religious burials if people do not pay a special church tax.

A newly-enforced German bishops' decree says anyone failing to pay the tax - an extra 8% of their income tax bill - will no longer be considered a Catholic.

All people in Germany must pay this tax if they want to worship in either Catholic or protestant churches, or Jewish synagogues.

Last year millions of files spanning decades were handed over to criminal investigators by all 27 dioceses of the Catholic Church hierarchy in Germany in a bid to get to the heart of child sex abuse by priests.

It was seen as an attempt to staunch the flow of leavers who made it plain the scandal, and the inability or unwillingness to deal with it, was the reason for their departure.

In 2010, 181,000 people left, an increase of 50 percent on the previous year. Last year 126,000 left.

Over the past twenty years, the number of members of Germany's Roman Catholic Church has fallen from 28.3 million to 24.6 million or 30.2 percent of the country's population.

Many parishioners said they were sickened that offending clergy were often simply moved to new jons where they were free to commit more crimes.

Now comes the new hardline from the church which is also partly in response to a test case that has been griding through the courts and due for a decision by a court in Leipzig on Friday.

Lisa Martino-Taylor is a sociologist whose life's work has been to uncover details of the Army's ultra-secret military experiments carried out in St. Louis and other cities during the 1950s and 60s.

She will make her research public Tuesday, but she spoke first to the I-Team's Leisa Zigman.

The I-Team independently verified that the spraying of zinc cadmium sulfide did take place in St. Louis on thousands of unsuspecting citizens. What is unclear is whether the Army added a radioactive material to the compound as Martino-Taylor's research implies.

"The study was secretive for reason. They didn't have volunteers stepping up and saying yeah, I'll breathe zinc cadmium sulfide with radioactive particles," said Martino-Taylor.

Army archive pictures show how the tests were done in Corpus Christi, Texas in the 1960s. In Texas, planes were used to drop the chemical. But in St. Louis, the Army placed chemical sprayers on buildings and station wagons.

Almost every politically-aware person on the planet is puzzled by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's bizarre obsession with Iran. Netanyahu is risking his political career, his reputation, and Israel's future by intervening in the US presidential elections.

He is using all of Zionism's considerable might - including organized crime assets like "Las Vegas Godfather" Sheldon Adelson - to force Obama to attack Iran; or, failing that, to make sure that Obama is defeated by the Zionist puppet Romney. There are even rumors of Israeli-sponsored assassination attempts on Obama.

Even the rabidly pro-Zionist Jewish Daily Forward has editorialized:

"It's difficult to recall a time when an Israeli prime minister has inserted himself into a presidential election campaign in the way that Benjamin Netanyahu has. It's even harder to recall a time when a trusted ally openly urged the American president to undertake a questionable, unpopular and highly risky war. We sure hope Netanyahu knows what he's doing, because the stakes for him - and for the two nations he professes to care about the most - could not be higher."

The Jewish Daily Forward has good reasons to wonder whether Netanyahu knows what he's doing. The editorialist cites polls showing that the American people strongly oppose attacking Iran, even if war breaks out between Iran and Israel and only US intervention could save Israel! These polls show that American voters no longer give a damn whether Israel, which has chosen to live by the sword, finally dies by the sword. As Dave Lindorff observes, Netanyahu's mad obsession with pushing the US into yet another unwanted war for Israel "may have fundamentally undermined the long-standing 'special relationship' between the US and Israel."

Group is member of union which voted to reintroduce boycott of Israeli academics in Britain.

You are being watched. The control freaks that hold power in the United States have become absolutely obsessed with surveillance. They are constantly attempting to convince the American people that we are all "safer" when virtually everything that we do is watched, monitored, tracked and recorded.

Our country is being systematically transformed into a giant surveillance grid far more comprehensive than anything George Orwell ever dreamed of. If you still believe that there is such a thing as "privacy" in this day and age, you are being delusional. Every single piece of electronic communication is monitored and stored.

In fact, they know that you are reading this article right now. But even if you got rid of all of your electronic devices, you would still be constantly monitored. As you will read about below, a rapidly growing nationwide network of facial recognition cameras, "pre-crime" surveillance devices, voice recorders, mobile backscatter vans, aerial drones and automated license plate readers are constantly feeding data about us back to the government.

In addition, private companies involved in "data mining" are gathering literally trillions upon trillions of data points about individual Americans each year. So there is no escape from this surveillance grid. In fact, it has become just about impossible to keep it from growing. The surveillance grid is expanding in thousands of different ways, so even if you stopped one form of surveillance you would hardly make a dent in the astounding growth of this system.

What we desperately need is a fundamental cultural awakening to the importance of liberty, freedom and privacy. Without such an awakening, the United States (along with the rest of the planet) is going to head into a world that will make "1984" by George Orwell look like a cheery story about a Sunday picnic.

The following are 19 signs that America is being systematically transformed into a giant surveillance grid....

The Israeli army's chief of staff states that in the past three years, "US taxpayers have contributed more to the Israeli defense budget than Israeli taxpayers," according to a report in the Jerusalem Post, a prominent Israeli newspaper.

According to the report,Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi made the statement during a speech on September 11th. In it he emphasized: "We must preserve ties with the United States. I believe this is a security necessity."

According to the newspaper the speech was at the Calcalist Conference, which appears to be an annual event in Tel Aviv sponsored by the Calcalist newspaper, an Israeli Hebrew-only daily financial newspaper. It is is part of the group that publishes Yedioth Ahronoth, the largest circulation newspaper in Israel.

American taxpayers give Israel over $3 billion per year (over $8 million per day), more than to any other nation, despite the fact that Israel is smaller than New Jersey and is in the top 30 richest countries in the world.

Abderrauf al-Ayadi, head of the Wafa Party, confirmed that the Israeli Mossad has succeeded in infiltrating the Tunisian Ministry of Interior. In an interview with Al-Khaleej, Ayadi - who defected from the party of the Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki - stated that he defected from the Congress for the Republic (CPR) because he refused to mix between the affairs of the Tunisian state and the party. He wanted to stay loyal to the CPR's main goals and principles.

Moreover, Ayadi condemned [Prime Minister Hamadi] Jebali's government as "a total failure," because it was focused on building a "stronghold" and making appointments on the basis of party affiliations in preparation for the upcoming electoral campaign. Jebali's government does not care at all about the urgent affairs that must be dealt with immediately, and cares even less about the revolution's goals.

The following is Al-Khaleej's interview with Ayadi: