The bond buying will continue until employment improves.

That's the message the Federal Reserve delivered when it announced it will take new steps to boost the sluggish recovery including buying an additional $40 billion of mortgage debt every month for the foreseeable future.

"The employment situation remains a grave concern," Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said at an afternoon news conference to explain the central bank's decisions.

The Fed said the fresh security purchases, which it will start on Friday, would come on top of its so-called Operation Twist program, in which it is selling short-term bonds to buy longer-term Treasury debt.

"These actions, which together will increase the committee's holdings of longer-term securities by about $85 billion each month through the end of the year, should put downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, support mortgage markets, and to help make broader financial conditions more accommodative," the Fed said in a statement.

Cast say they were misled as evidence suggests film was post- dubbed and questions arise over funding and identity of director.

The anti-Islamic video that inflamed mayhem in Egypt and Libya and triggered a diplomatic crisis is at the centre of a growing mystery over whether it is a real film - or was ever intended to be.

Initial reports about The Innocence of Muslims being a $5m production made by an Israeli-American director named Sam Bacile unravelled on Wednesday as ruins of the US consulate in Benghazi continued to smoulder.

Bacile - originally described as a California-based Jewish real estate developer - appeared to be a fake identity, and Hollywood could find no trace of his supposed feature-length attack on the prophet Muhammad. The blasphemous, 13-minute "trailer" posted online - a ramshackle compilation of scenes which depicted Muhammad as an illegitimate, murderous paedophile - was real, but there was growing doubt that a film existed.

The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to extend the government's power to warrantlessly wiretap Americans for another five years by reauthorizing the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Lawmakers in the House agreed from Washington, DC on Wednesday afternoon to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act's Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA), a polarizing legislation that has been challenged by privacy advocates and civil liberties organizations alike around the country. The extension was approved by a vote of 301 to 118.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was first signed into law in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter, but amendments added two decades later under the George W Bush administration provide for the government to conduct widespread and blanketing snooping of emails and phone calls of Americans. The FISA Amendments added in 2008, specifically section 702, specify that the government can eavesdrop on emails and phone calls sent from US citizens to persons reasonably suspected to be located abroad without ever requiring intelligence officials to receive a court order.

If the US Senate echoes the House's extension of the act, the FAA will carry through for another five years until 2017, ensuring the federal intelligence community that they will be able to conduct surveillance on the correspondence of the country's own citizens well into the future. If no action is taken, the FAA is slated to expire at the end of 2012.

Earlier this year, a plea from two US senators to see how many times the FAA has been used was refused by the National Security Administration. Last month, San Francisco's Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit against the US Justice Department for failing to adhere to Freedom of Information Act requests for documents pertaining to the program.

Egyptian security forces are firing tear gas at a crowd of angry protesters near the US embassy in Cairo. Some 30 protesters were injured and 12 arrested, journalists on Twitter quoted the Egyptian Interior Ministry as saying.

Hundreds of protesters are gathering outside the US embassy in Cairo and hurling stones at security personnel, who are retaliating by firing tear gas and warning shots at the crowd.

On Wednesday, several hundred protesters rallied in front of the embassy, chanting "leave Egypt" and demanding that the US apologize for an American-made film that mocks Islam's Prophet Muhammad.

Dozens of riot police were then deployed in the area to contain the demonstrators and divert them into side streets. Clashes continued into the night, with protesters throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at police.

Some of the protesters were injured, state news agency MENA reported. Witnesses wrote on Twitter that as many as several dozen people may have been injured. At least six police officers suffered injuries during the clashes, said Alla Mahmoud, a spokesperson for Egypt's Interior Ministry.

There were speculations before the Olympics that the British government is using the games as an excuse to impose a police state in London that would be otherwise impossible; now that seems to have come true as the 'un-free zones' remain after the sports event.
British councils and police retain powers to single out public spaces and suspend certain freedoms, including handing out leaflets and protesting there that means one will be punished in those zones for doing a perfectly legal thing.

According to a map published on September 11 by Manifesto Club freedom campaign group, there are a dizzying 435 such zones in London that cover almost half of the whole area of the city, mostly in its central parts.

Citizens can be fined or prosecuted in the restricted zones, now also imposed on some other cities, for leafleting, walking a dog, using alcohol, just being there, and in London, for protesting.

There are 110 leafleting zones in London where you should have a license if you want to hand out leaflets -- that is you will not be free to even campaign for a human rights or relief cause unless the government sees it fit.

There are also 32 active "dispersal zones" as well as many inactive ones in the British capital.

Warning: Story contains graphic images

U.S. officials say the Pentagon is moving two warships to the Libyan coast, in the aftermath of the attack in Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador and three others.

Officials say one destroyer, the USS Laboon, moved to a position off the coast Wednesday, and the USS McFaul is en route and should be stationed off the coast within days. The officials say the ships, which carry Tomahawk missiles, do not have a specific mission. But they give commanders flexibility to respond to any mission ordered by the president.

The destroyers have crews totaling about 300. There have been four destroyers in the Mediterranean for some time. These moves will increase that to five. Officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss troop movements.

Protesters angered by an anti-Islam film made in the US have stormed the grounds of the American embassy in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa.

Police shot in the air in an attempt to hold back the crowds, but failed to prevent them gaining access to the compound and setting fire to vehicles.

A number of people were reported to have been injured.

On Tuesday, the US ambassador to Libya was killed in a fire started after the US consulate in Benghazi was stormed.

Security force reinforcements in Sanaa used tear gas, water cannon and live fire to drive back protesters.

They have now regained control of the Sanaa compound, but protests are continuing outside.

Earlier on Thursday, US officials said they were investigating whether the attack in Libya was planned, citing suspicions that a militant jihadist group may have co-ordinated the violence.

Three other US consul staff and several Libyans died in that attack, along with Ambassador J Christopher Stevens, who is believed to have died from smoke inhalation.

On Sept. 11, Pastor Lindsey Williams, former minister to the global oil companies during the building of the Alaskan pipeline, announced the most significant event to affect the U.S. dollar since its inception as a currency. For the first time since the 1970's, when Henry Kissenger forged a trade agreement with the Royal house of Saud to sell oil using only U.S. dollars, China announced its intention to bypass the dollar for global oil customers and began selling the commodity using their own currency.


This announcement by China is one of the most significant sea changes in the global economic and monetary systems, but was barely reported on due to its announcement taking place during the Democratic convention last week. The ramifications of this new action are vast, and could very well be the catalyst that brings down the dollar as the global reserve currency, and change the entire landscape of how the world purchases energy.

America is currently engaged in the most expensive presidential contest in world history. In the United States, money doesn't just talk - it dictates. How can we hope to make progress on the path to sustainability when the road is blocked by barricades of bullion backed by battalions of billionaires? How do we break through the political gridlock?

Dave Brower's wife, Anne, once put a wise spin on this dilemma. "What we need," she said, is "a cure for greedlock."

Earth's richest 1,000 individuals now control as much wealth as the poorest 2.5 billion people on the planet. This super elite uses its vast wealth to control the media, influence politicians, and bend laws to their favor. In the US, the wealthy dominate our government: 47 percent of US representatives are millionaires, as are 67 percent of US senators. The Center for Responsive Politics reports Congressional wealth has increased 11 percent between 2009 and 2011.

Not only is our economy out of balance with nature, our economy is also out of balance with the practical limits of physical and fiscal reality. As the Occupy movement has indelibly framed it, we are now a society divided not only by haves and have-nots, but we are a nation - and a world - divided into the 99 percent and the 1 percent.

Imagine if a tree were engineered like the US economy - with half of its mass centered in the top 10 percent of its height and 40 percent of its mass concentrated in the very topmost branches. Whether redwood or oak, such a tree would not be stable in a windstorm. It would be destined to topple. Of course, nature has better sense.

In David Cronenberg's awesome Cosmopolis (France/Canada, 2012), based on the homonymous novel by Don DeLillo, young billionaire Eric Packer (Robert Pattison) slowly cruises New York in his white limo, installed in a cushy leather throne with incrusted screens.

He feels ... nothing; he essentially sucks up the world into his own inertia. Outside his moving silent chamber, it's total chaos, with activists spraying rats in posh restaurants and a tense threat of imminent apocalypse.

This is the world morphing into, or being gobbled up by, dematerialized ultra-capitalism; a world in a state of crisis, driven by violence, and with violence as the only possible horizon. As a libidinous art dealer (Juliette Binoche) tells Packer: "It's cyber-capital that creates the future."

A walk in the dead of a New York night to Ground Zero offers extra context to Cosmopolis. This is where our post-apocalyptic modernity began, 11 years go - and where cyber-capital still creates at least some of the future. As Cosmopolis shows, turbo-capitalism is not only in crisis; turbo-capitalism, in shorthand, IS crisis.

Ground Zero remains an eerie sight deep in the dead of night. There's the memorial. There's the new unfinished glass tower. And there remain holes the size of Ground Zero all over the official narrative.