The downturn in the euro zone's private sector is becoming entrenched and Chinese factories are finding the going increasingly tough, business surveys showed on Thursday, painting a darker outlook for the world economy.

June was the fifth consecutive month that activity across the euro zone has declined, dragging down heavyweights Germany and France and putting pressure on the European Central Bank to take further action to support the economy.

"We are at the point where the economy is increasingly losing traction and it's hard at this stage to see what will give us a lift. The ECB will do more, that will probably involve a rate cut - which is symbolic - but is action," said Peter Dixon at Commerzbank.

With economic recovery showing increased fragility in the United States, the Federal Reserve delivered another round of monetary stimulus on Wednesday and said it was ready to do even more to help if the situation in Europe deteriorated.

Cairo - Hosni Mubarak's move from jail to a Cairo military hospital where officials said he was slipping in and out of a coma on Wednesday created fresh uncertainty for Egyptians as officials delayed the announcement of a presidential election result.

Claims of fraud from both camps fuelled unease in a nation where rigged ballots were the norm under Mubarak and where his fellow generals have moved to curb the power of the new head of state. Now that results will not be announced on Thursday, clarity may not emerge until a full week after polling ended.

The Muslim Brotherhood, whose candidate Mohamed Morsy claimed victory on Monday, threatened to take to the streets if Ahmed Shafik, a former general and Mubarak ally, was declared the winner. However, a leading Islamist told Reuters there would be no violence of the sort that devastated Algeria in the 1990s.

And the Shafik camp, while insisting its data meant it was also confident of victory, called for unity, saying its candidate would offer senior posts to the Brotherhood and, if he lost, would accept defeat and be willing to serve under Morsy.

Julian Assange has spent years on the move, trying to keep ahead of authorities who want to stop his secret-spilling mission.

Now the WikiLeaks founder finds himself confined in the surprising setting of Ecuador's London embassy, where he was holed up Wednesday while diplomats discussed his fate and British police waited outside to arrest him if he leaves.

Assange is seeking political asylum in the South American nation, in a dramatic bid to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning about alleged sex crimes. His supporters say he fears charges in the United States for leaking hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. documents. But some legal experts say it is a desperate and likely futile move.

"He knows he's reached the end of the road in the U.K. He knows he's going to be extradited to Sweden," said Alex Carlile, a senior British lawyer with expertise in extradition matters. "Basically, he has nowhere to go."

The 40-year-old Australian landed himself in legal limbo Tuesday when he took refuge in the embassy a few doors down from the Harrods department store.

British police say Assange has violated the terms of his bail, which include an overnight curfew, and is subject to arrest. But British officials concede he is beyond their grasp as long as he remains in the embassy, which under legal convention is treated as Ecuadorean territory.

In case you haven't heard, Congress wants the TSA to reduce staff and siphon costs. But members took issue Tuesday with a system that's supposed to do just that.

The TSA wants to purchase technology that automatically validates boarding passes and identifies fake documents. Administrators say the system, known in longhand as Credential Authentication Technology - Boarding Pass Scanning Systems, would add extra padding to the agency's risk-based security focus.

But it's not clear whether it would actually work.

While an Illinois Senator, Obama condemned George W Bush's repeated use of privilege power. Now he has used it himself

Barack Obama has asserted his power of executive privilege for the first time in his presidency. But before taking up residence in the White House, Obama, along with his fellow Democrats, was a vocal critic of George W Bush's use of the same tool.

In March 2007, Obama - then an Illinois senator - appeared on CNN's Larry King Show. "You know," he said, "There's been a tendency on the part of this administration to try to hide behind executive privilege every time there's something a little shaky that's taking place ... I think the American people deserve to know what was going on there."

Obama was criticizing Bush's repeated use of executive privilege throughout to prevent senior White House executives from testifying before Congress on the firing of senior federal attorneys. Democrats alleged the firings took place on political grounds.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. -Martin Luther King Jr.

The American public is suffering from an education deficit. By this I mean it exhibits a growing inability to think critically, question authority, be reflective, weigh evidence, discriminate between reasoned arguments and opinions, listen across differences and engage the mutually informing relationship between private problems and broader public issues. This growing political and cultural illiteracy is not merely a problem of the individual, one that points to simple ignorance. It is a collective and social problem that goes to the heart of the increasing attack on democratic public spheres and supportive public institutions that promote analytical capacities, thoughtful exchange and a willingness to view knowledge as a resource for informed modes of individual and social agency. One of the major consequences of the current education deficit and the pervasive culture of illiteracy that sustains it is what I call the ideology of the big lie - which propagates the myth that the free-market system is the only mechanism to ensure human freedom and safeguard democracy.

The education deficit, along with declining levels of civic literacy, is also part of the American public's collective refusal to know - a focused resistance on the part of many members of society to deal with knowledge that challenges common sense, or to think reflectively about facts and truths that are unsettling in terms of how they disturb some of our most cherished beliefs, especially those that denounce the sins of big government, legitimize existing levels of economic insecurity, social inequality and reduced or minimal government intervention in the field of welfare legislation."⁽¹⁾ The decline of civility and civic literacy in American society is a political dilemma, the social production of which is traceable to a broader constellation of forces deeply rooted in the shifting nature of education and the varied cultural apparatuses that produce it, extending from the new digital technologies and online journals to the mainstream media of newspapers, magazines and television. Politics is now held hostage to what the late Raymond Williams called the "force of permanent education," a kind of public pedagogy spread through a plethora of teaching machines that are shaping how our most powerful ideas are formed.⁽²⁾ For Williams, the concept of "permanent education" was a central political insight:

What it valuably stresses is the educational force of our whole social and cultural experience. It is therefore concerned, not only with continuing education, of a formal or informal kind, but with what the whole environment, its institutions and relationships, actively and profoundly teaches.... [Permanent education also refers to] the field in which our ideas of the world, of ourselves and of our possibilities, are most widely and often most powerfully formed and disseminated. To work for the recovery of control in this field is then, under any pressures, a priority. For who can doubt, looking at television or newspapers, or reading the women's magazines, that here, centrally, is teaching and teaching financed and distributed in a much larger way than is formal education.⁽³⁾

The Federal Reserve is ready to take further action - including the purchase of Treasury bonds - "to provide support for the economy," the Chairman of the Fed Ben Bernanke said during a press conference.

Bernanke also said that the members of the Federal Open Market Committee had "marked down" their outlooks on the economy.

Most expect there to be little change in the unemployment rate through the end of the year. The consensus, said Bernanke, is that the Fed expects "slow progress" on unemployment and most opinions are "weighted toward slower growth" on the GDP.

With that outlook - which didn't expect the unemployment rate to dip below 8 percent this year - the chairman was peppered with questions about whether the Federal Reserve's actions have been too timid.

Acting along partisan lines, with a vote of 23 to 17, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted this afternoon to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt. Republicans, who control the committee, say Holder's Justice Department has not turned over all the documents that the committee needs to see as it probes the so-called Fast and Furious gun-trafficking operation.

And they want to know more about why the Justice Department initially told a senator that it had not pursued such an operation.

Now, The Associated Press writes, the contempt citation will go to the full House for a vote - "although House leaders are not required to call it up for a vote. They could instead use the threat of that to pressure for renewed negotiations. Historically, at some point Congress and president negotiate agreements, because both sides want to avoid a court battle that could narrow either the reach of executive privilege or Congress' subpoena power."

Update at 4:35 p.m. ET.: House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican from Ohio, and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Republican from Virginia, said the House will schedule a vote on the matter next week.

"The single-minded concentration on austerity policy (in 1920-30) led to mass unemployment, a breakdown of democratic systems and... to the catastrophe of Nazism," Austrian central bank chief Ewald Nowotny said in comments confirmed by his office on Wednesday. The remarks were initially made at an event on Monday in Vienna.

Confronted with a stumbling U.S. recovery and a financial crisis in Europe, the Federal Reserve decided Wednesday that it would extend a program known as "Operation Twist" aimed at pushing down long-term interest rates and boosting the economy.

The Fed said in a statement that while the economy has been expanding modestly throughout the year, growth in employment has slowed recently and unemployment remains elevated.

The Fed expects economic growth to continue to grow moderately over coming quarters and then to pick up gradually. "Consequently, the Committee anticipates that the unemployment rate will decline only slowly toward levels that it judges to be consistent with its dual mandate," the statement said.

The Fed voted to keep interest rates unchanged at historic lows.