A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of capitalism. A vast and highly unstable mixture of debt - trillions of dollars of sovereign, corporate and private borrowing accumulated over decades - is strapped to the advanced Western economies like a suicide bomber's gelignite vest.

The task facing our politicians is somehow to defuse this bomb without inadvertently triggering the sequence of defaults and bankruptcies that would set it off. No wonder they walk around the problem scratching their heads, prodding it gingerly here and there. The horrible truth is dawning that the problem may well not be technically solvable.

For the first time in my life - I am 54 - I get the sense of what it must have been like to have lived in my grandparents' or great-grandparents' generation: in 1913, say, or 1937. One feels a great smash coming ever closer, almost in slow-motion, and yet there seems to be nothing that can be done to avoid it.

How have we got ourselves into this mess? After all, we were supposed to be living in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

Greece will miss a deficit target set just months ago in a massive bailout package, according to government draft budget figures released on Sunday, showing that drastic steps taken to avert bankruptcy may not be enough.

The dire forecasts came while inspectors from the International Monetary Fund, EU and European Central Bank, known as the troika, were in Athens scouring the country's books to decide whether to approve a loan tranche. Without that installment, Greece would run out of cash as soon as this month.

The 2012 draft budget approved by cabinet on Sunday predicts a deficit of 8.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) for 2011, well short of the 7.6 percent target.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office was so seized with controlling public opinion of Canada's shooting war in southern Afghanistan that even Defence Minister Peter MacKay wasn't always in the loop, says a new book about the conflict.

The Savage War, by Canadian Press defence writer and Afghanistan correspondent Murray Brewster, paints a portrait of a PMO keen to preserve its tenuous grip on minority power and desperate to control the message amid dwindling public support for the war.

MacKay, who took over Defence from Gordon O'Connor in August 2007, was blindsided by the Harper government's decision later that year to set up a blue-ribbon panel to review the mission headed by former Liberal cabinet minister John Manley, Brewster writes.

"It wasn't discussed with the broader cabinet, no," the minister says in the interview. "I didn't know all of the specifics."

Jack Layton knew even less. In interviews before his death earlier this year, the late NDP leader confides to Brewster that Harper never once tried to engage him in an in-depth discussion about Canada's deepening involvement in a deadly counterinsurgency effort.

Britain's Home Secretary Theresa May says she would like to see an end to the Human Rights Act in comments that threaten to trigger a row within the coalition government.

"I'd personally like to see the Human Rights Act go because I think we have had some problems with it," she told the Sunday Telegraph.

The Human Rights Act is the piece of regulation that integrates the European Convention on Human Rights into British law; May claims that it prevents the Ministry from easily dealing with what she called foreign criminals and suspects of terrorism.

May's remarks risk dividing the coalition as Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg pledged during the Liberal Democrat party conference last month that they will not allow any major changes in the Act.

"Let me say something really clear about the Human Rights Act. In fact I'll do it in words of one syllable: It is here to stay," he said.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the West created Israel to control the Middle East, condemning the all-out Western Support for the crimes committed by the Zionist regime.

The Iranian president made the remarks at the closing ceremony of the 5th International Conference on the Palestinian Intifada in Tehran on Sunday.

Describing the creation of Israel as the most heinous historical crime, Ahmadinejad said that occupation of Palestine was an international issue and a crime against all humanity.

The Iranian president criticized the West for not tolerating any argument which involves the existence of Israel.

He added that Israel has been so sanctified in the West that any criticism of the Zionist regime is tantamount to being a terrorist.

Iran's supreme leader rejected the Palestinians' U.N. statehood bid on Saturday, saying any deal that accepted the existence of Israel would leave a "cancerous tumor" forever threatening the security of the Middle East.

As leader of a country under a long-standing threat of military action from Israel and the United States, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned the Jewish state and its allies to expect "paralyzing blows" that a NATO missile shield could not prevent.

"Any plan that seeks to divide Palestine is totally rejected," Khamenei told a conference on the Palestinian issue.

"The two-state scheme, which has been clad in the self-righteousness of the acceptance of the Palestinian government and membership at the United Nations, is nothing but a capitulation to the demands of the Zionists or the recognition of the Zionist regime on Palestinian land," he declared.

The law on the use of lethal force by executive order is specific. This assassination broke it - that creates a terrifying precedent

Is this the world we want? Where the president of the United States can place an American citizen, or anyone else for that matter, living outside a war zone on a targeted assassination list, and then have him murdered by drone strike.

This was the very result we at the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU feared when we brought a case in US federal court on behalf of Anwar al-Awlaki's father, hoping to prevent this targeted killing. We lost the case on procedural grounds, but the judge considered the implications of the practice as raising "serious questions", asking:

"Can the executive order the assassination of a US citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organisation?"

Has anyone noticed that the political air is wafting rancid lately? That is the smell of modern barbarism. Modern barbarism is a malodorous umbrella concept. Underneath the umbrella are lots of fetid phobias, isms and behaviors: Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, semi-fascism, scapegoating, stereotyping, bullying, libeling and a growing, aggressive intolerance of everything and everyone who is not to the liking of the modern barbarian. Here are some recent instances of this phenomenon.

Part I - Mistaking the Particular for the General

Michael Quigley, a Democratic Congressman from Chicago, made the New York Times on 24 September 2011. He made it by promoting the virtues of tolerance and diversity and lamenting the suffering that occurs when tolerance fails. Out and about in his Chicago district, he stopped in at a meeting of the American Islamic Conference. He made a short speech to the 100 or so conferees during which he said "discrimination comes in many forms, many shapes and many guises. You have my pledge to work with you to fight them, and I think it is appropriate for me to apologize on behalf of this country for the discrimination you face." Mr. Quigley was correct about the growing levels of Islamophobia that confront Muslim Americans. Islamophobia is a delusional mind-set which mistakes the general for the particular, which condemns an entire group (which happens to have a billion plus members) for the particular actions of a very few. There is no logic to such an overreaching generalization. It is irrational.

In the wake of COINTELPRO and the Watergate scandal, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas sent a letter to a group of young lawyers at the Washington State Bar Association. "As nightfall does not come all at once," he wrote, "neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."[1]

The recent dramatic expansion of intelligence collection at the federal, state and local level raises profound civil liberties concerns regarding freedoms and protections we have long taken for granted. If people generally appear unaware of "change in the air," a large part of the reason is the unparalleled resort to secrecy used by the government to keep its actions from public scrutiny. According to the new American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report, "Drastic Measures Required," under President Obama (who had vowed to create "an unprecedented level of openness in Government" when he first took office), there were no fewer than 76,795,945 decisions made to classify information in 2010 - eight times the number made in 2001.

There are layers of secrecy that cannot even be penetrated by most members of Congress. In the recent debate over the re-authorization of three sections of the USA Patriot Act with sunset provisions, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), who is a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee, declared in the Senate in May 2011 that there was a secret interpretation of Patriot Act powers that he could not even tell them about without disclosing classified information. [2] "When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry," said Wyden. The determination of the Obama administration to imitate its predecessor and maintain a wall of secrecy around anything that could be connected (however tenuously) with "national security" is evident in the zeal with which it has pursued whistleblowers and its use of the state secrets privilege in judicial proceedings, including in the recent court challenge to the FBI use of the informant Craig Monteilh to spy on mosques in Orange County, California.

A French businessman says President Nicholas Sarkozy and Interior Minister Claude Gueant must acknowledge their roles in the kickbacks on the arms deal and illegal funding.

In an interview with French financial newspaper La Tribune published on Saturday, French millionaire arms broker Ziad Takieddine said that he was commissioned by Gueant, Sarkozy's former presidential election campaign head, to conclude arms contracts with former Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"I remember telling Gueant: You know me more than anyone else. Each of my acts amount to an official mission," Takieddine stated.

"I went to see Gaddafi in Libya, and Assad in Syria only on the request and authorization from the president," the Franco-Lebanese businessman added.

The remarks come as Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam had said in March that Libya would publicize all the bank details relating to Sarkozy's campaign funding in 2007.