Barclays has made as much as half a billion pounds in two years from speculating on food staples such as wheat and soya, prompting allegations that banks are profiting handsomely from the global food crisis.

Barclays is the UK bank with the greatest involvement in food commodity trading and is one of the three biggest global players, along with the US banking giants Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, research from the World Development Movement points out.

Last week the trading giant Glencore was attacked for describing the global food crisis and price rises as a "good" business opportunity.

The extent of Barclays' involvement in food speculation comes to light as new figures from the World Bank show that global food prices hit an all-time high in July, with poor harvests in the US and Russia pushing up the average worldwide cost of staples by an unprecedented 10 per cent in a month.

Birthmarks, be damned: the FBI has officially started rolling out a state-of-the-art face recognition project that will assist in their effort to accumulate and archive information about each and every American at a cost of a billion dollars.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has reached a milestone in the development of their Next Generation Identification (NGI) program and is now implementing the intelligence database in unidentified locales across the country, New Scientist reports in an article this week. The FBI first outlined the project back in 2005, explaining to the Justice Department in an August 2006 document (.pdf) that their new system will eventually serve as an upgrade to the current Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) that keeps track of citizens with criminal records across America .

"The NGI Program is a compilation of initiatives that will either improve or expand existing biometric identification services," its administrator explained to the Department of Justice at the time, adding that the project, "will accommodate increased information processing and sharing demands in support of anti-terrorism."

"The NGI Program Office mission is to reduce terrorist and criminal activities by improving and expanding biometric identification and criminal history information services through research, evaluation and implementation of advanced technology within the IAFIS environment."

The agency insists, "As a result of the NGI initiatives, the FBI will be able to provide services to enhance interoperability between stakeholders at all levels of government, including local, state, federal, and international partners." In doing as such, though, the government is now going ahead with linking a database of images and personally identifiable information of anyone in their records with departments around the world thanks to technology that makes fingerprint tracking seem like kids' stuff.

Ottawa - The Harper government has closed the Canadian Embassy in Iran and ordered all Iranian diplomats in Canada to leave the country.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird blamed Iran's increasing military assistance to the Syrian government, its refusal to comply with UN resolutions on its nuclear program, its anti-Israel stance and its support for terrorism as among the reasons for the move.

Baird also indicated concern over the safety of Canadian diplomats working in the Islamic Republic.

"Diplomatic relations between Canada and Iran have been suspended," the minister said in a statement. "All Canadian diplomatic staff have left Iran, and Iranian diplomats in Ottawa have been instructed to leave within five days."

The Harper government has repeatedly described Iran as the greatest threat to global security.

It has also levelled heavy sanctions against the Islamic Republic in an attempt to isolate the country's ruling government.

Source: Postmedia News

If political conventions are ranked on a one to ten scale for intelligence, I give the Republican Convention zero and the Democrats one.

How can the United States be a superpower when both political parties are unaware of everything that is happening at home and abroad?

The Republicans are relying for victory on four years of anti-Obama propaganda and their proprietary programed electronic voting machines. For nearly four years Republican operatives have flooded the Internet with portraits of Obama as a non-US citizen, as a Muslim (even while Obama was murdering Muslims in seven countries), and as a Marxist (put in power by the Israel Lobby, Wall Street, and the military/security complex).

Most Republican voters will vote against Obama based on these charges despite the curious fact that no committee in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives held a hearing to determine if Obama is a citizen. If Obama were not a citizen, why would the very aggressive House Republicans not capitalize on it. It would be easy for a Congressional committee to determine if Obama were a citizen. Despite the propaganda, the Republicans in office have shown no interest in the propaganda charges spread by Republican operatives over the Internet.

Richard Manning, author of Against the Grain (2004), discusses the 'Green Revolution' and the end of cheap oil. It's only about 5 minutes, and well worth the time.

Romney is America's first non-Christian presidential nominee. He's a Mormon (aka Latter Day Saints Church member - LDS). Does it matter? More on that below.

Before he entered politics, he spent years as a Massachusetts Mormon leader. He began in the mid-1970s. From 1986 - 1994, he was president of the Boston Stake. It's similar to a Catholic diocese. Before that he was a Belmont and Cambridge bishop. His duties involved organizational work and counseling.

Later he taught Sunday school and oversaw church programs for teenagers. He overstepped by lecturing women on their sex lives and roles as homemakers. A 1994 Boston Phoenix cited an anonymous woman. As bishop, Romney discouraged her from having an abortion vital for health reasons.

The same article mentioned an area professor. She urged him to address domestic abuse. He refused and wouldn't do it. He's an elitist. He surrounds himself in church, business, and political life with powerful white men.

He's insensitive about ordinary popular needs. He doesn't convince people he cares. He calls homosexuality "perverse and reprehensible." His dark side is largely hidden.

He believes in traditional gender roles. Male dominance is fundamental. Women should be child bearers and homemakers.

No matter who ends up occupying the White House in January, many of the forces that have kept unemployment high and jobs growth slow will be beyond his control.

With job growth stuck a slower pace than in any recovery in the last half century, the presidential campaign now turns on which candidate -- President Barack Obama or Gov. Mitt Romney -- has the better plan to boost employment. The latest jobs data will do little to change the debate.

The economy added just 96,000 new jobs in August, well below the roughly 130,000 economists had been expecting. Gains in the prior two months were revised down by a combined 41,000. Manufacturers cut 15,000 jobs last month, while another 7,000 government jobs were lost. Temporary employment fell by almost 5,000 workers.

Other recent employment measures have painted a somewhat better picture. Fewer people applied for unemployment benefits last week, and a private survey by payroll processor ADP found that companies created some 200,000 new jobs in August. Another private report showed that service sector companies, such as hotels, retailers, and financial services firms, expanded at a faster rate last month.

The North Atlantic hurricane season runs from mid-August to October, with a strong peak in storm activity around the middle of September. A less familiar but even more destructive pattern of disturbances is the financial hurricane season, which coincides with the meteorological one almost to the day. Most of the great financial crises of modern history have occurred in the two months from mid-August: the Wall Street crashes of Oct. 22, 1907, Oct. 24, 1929, and Oct. 19, 1987; Britain's abandonment of the gold standard on Sept. 19, 1931; the postwar sterling devaluation on Sept. 19, 1949; the collapse of the Bretton Woods global monetary system on Aug. 15, 1971; the Mexican default that triggered the Third World debt crisis on Aug. 20, 1982; the breakup of the European exchange-rate mechanism on Sept. 16, 1992; the Russian default on Aug. 17, 1998, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on Sept. 15. 2008 - and this list could go on.

The coincidence between financial and meteorological hurricanes may not be entirely fortuitous. The global economy, like the world's atmosphere, is a finely balanced complex system.

In such systems, small perturbations can accumulate to trigger big effects. And just as the meteorological tipping points tend to occur when autumn air circulation starts to disrupt the humid air accumulated in the summer doldrums, something similar seems to happen to financial markets when trading becalmed by the summer holidays returns to normal. The result can be sudden and violent reaction to events accumulated over the summer that markets had seemed to ignore.

The first rule of Fight Club?

You don't talk about Fight Club.

Obama isn't a member of Fight Club; he's a member of Drone Club - which targets individuals in foreign lands, including American citizens and their families, for extrajudicial assassination by drone. And the first rule of Drone Club?

You don't talk about it.

The fastest way to go broke in America is to go to the hospital. These days it seems like almost everyone has an outrageous hospital bill story to share. It is getting to the point where most people are deathly afraid to go to the hospital. All the financial progress that you have made in recent years can literally be wiped out in just a matter of hours. For example, you are about to read about an Arizona woman that was recently charged $83,046 for a 3 hour hospital visit. How in the world is anyone supposed to pay a bill like that? I have a really hard time understanding why a visit to the doctor should ever be more than a couple hundred bucks or why a hospital stay should ever be more than a couple thousand dollars. Outrageous hospital bills are a real pet peeve of mine and I have not even been to the hospital in ages. What makes all of this even more infuriating is that Medicare, Medicaid and the big insurance companies are often charged less than 10 percent of what the rest of us are billed for the same procedures. There is a reason why 41 percent of all working age Americans are struggling with medical debt right now. It is because our health care system has become a giant money making scam. Millions of desperate Americans go into hospitals each year assuming that they will be treated fairly, but in the end they get stuck with incredibly outrageous bills and in many cases cruel debt collection techniques are employed against them if they don't pay.

So why do we have to pay so much for medical care? Back in 1980, less than 10 percent of U.S. GDP went to health care. Today, about 18 percent of U.S. GDP goes toward health care.