The documents show that GCHQ, based in Cheltenham, has had access to the system since at least June 2010, and generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year. The US-run programme, called Prism, would appear to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside the UK.

The use of Prism raises ethical and legal issues about such direct access to potentially millions of internet users, as well as questions about which British ministers knew of the programme.

The description following each course title either comes directly from the official course description or from a news story about the course…

“What If Harry Potter Is Real?” (Appalachian State University) – This course will engage students with questions about the very nature of history. Who decides what history is? Who decides how it is used or mis-used? How does this use or misuse affect us? How can the historical imagination inform literature and fantasy? How can fantasy reshape how we look at history? The Harry Potter novels and films are fertile ground for exploring all of these deeper questions.

“Zombies In Popular Media” (Columbia College) – This course explores the history, significance, and representation of the zombie as a figure in horror and fantasy texts. Instruction follows an intense schedule, using critical theory and source media (literature, comics, and films) to spur discussion and exploration of the figure’s many incarnations.

“Cyberporn And Society” (State University of New York at Buffalo) – With classwork like this, who needs to play? Undergraduates taking Cyberporn and Society at the State University of New York at Buffalo survey Internet porn sites.

A college education can be a wonderful thing, but right now we have got a system that is deeply, deeply broken.

Now, exactly two years later, we find that the IMF – with the support of the political establishment of the European Union, including our own George Osborne and David Cameron – was preparing to gamble billions of pounds on a lie. This gamble has resulted in liabilities being run up that will take generations to pay back. It has resulted in the destruction of millions of lives and the colonial depredation of a once-proud nation.

Greece has been sacrificed on the altar of the failed euro experiment, its business community decimated, its families driven to penury, its suicide rate through the roof (up more than 40 per cent over the period of the crisis). Unemployment in the strike country has quadrupled, and youth unemployment is now at 64%. Dreams have been destroyed, a future mortgaged – and hopes left rotting in untended olive groves.

The Post reports: Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

Mario Draghi, the ECB’s president, said the wild moves in currencies and global stock markets over the past two weeks do not change the fundamental picture, though the bank has downgraded its economic forecasts and expects a deeper contraction of 0.6 percent this year. “It is not enough to justify immediate action,” he said.

“The ECB seems to have given up. It is as if they have decided that there is not much more they can do and will simply allow events to run their course,” said David Owen from Jefferies Fixed Income.

Recently, we even wrote about how central banks and bond mutual funds are buying stocks now, too. Looks like everyone is getting back on the stock market bandwagon. Bullishness amongst stock advisors is at a multimonth high. And the percentage of assets mutual funds have invested in the stock market is near a multiyear high (both negative factors for the market)…

All of a sudden, the luxury car market is hot again. Prices for prime New York real estate have hit the stratosphere. Wall Street banks and brokerages are making billions of dollars in new profits and their executives been paid out billions of dollars in bonuses.

I remember 2007 quite vividly. From January to August of that year, the stock market just kept rising. The bulls were plentiful; the bears were rare. But just when it looked like the stock market was the only game in town, stocks started to move sideways; by October 2007, stocks started to collapse.

The economic slowdown in the global economy I’m talking about is a worldwide pullback in growth. I can’t stress this enough, dear reader: the global economy witnessing an economic slowdown means difficult times ahead for us here in North America — it’s a major global economy now, where what happens in one part of the world has ramifications for other countries worldwide.

The US economy is broken. According to a survey conducted by Pew Research, 24% of Americans said in the past 12 months that they had difficulties “putting food on the table.” In 2007, just before the Great Recession struck the US economy, this number stood at 16% (source: Pew Research, May 24, 2013).

We can’t fight another economic crisis in an environment in which our central bank has run out of arsenal to fight an economic slowdown and the government has already raked in a huge amount of national debt. That is why I believe this coming downturn will be significant and not so easy to recover from.

China this week responded to EU anti-dumping tariffs on solar panels with a levy on European wine, and warned it has “plenty of cards” still to play. By attacking wine producers, though, Beijing has potentially turned a straightforward tit-for-tat dispute over state subsidies between Germany and China into a full-blown European trade war.

France has effectively been targeted in retaliation for a levy designed to protect German manufacturers in what appears to be a deliberate attempt to inflame tensions within the EU. In doing so, experts said, the relative newcomer to the power politics of global trade has demonstrated smart tactical acumen. Berenberg Bank’s chief UK economist Rob Wood said: “China looks like it knows how to play the game.”

The danger is that China may decide to target other seemingly innocent parties if the row escalates, and that might mean Britain. Such a move could be damaging as the UK is pinning much of its hope for export success on the growing Chinese market.

Whilst paper gold saw a scary crash in mid-April, the demand for physical gold has never been as high, which confirms the complete decoupling between the paper gold and physical gold markets. What happens when everyone realises that paper gold certificates have no physical counterpart? When the title document to an ingot cannot be honoured?

The paper in question has no value. We must therefore expect more volatility in the paper gold price. This is why some brokers won’t allow any leverage on paper gold positions. This decoupling also shows that major problems are ahead because confidence has now been shaken. However, physical gold itself has its best days ahead. China has clearly understood this and buys gold en masse...

Responding to a hypothetical question, Samantha Power, who was named to replace ambassador Susan Rice, said if given the opportunity she would advise the president to sacrifice billions of dollars of aid to the Jewish state, allocating the funds instead to “the new state of Palestine.” “In the Palestine-Israeli situation, there’s an abundance of information and what we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there,” she said, in response to a question regarding how the United States should monitor a situation in the Middle east which may be “moving toward genocide.”

“What we need is a willingness to actually put something on the line in service of helping the situation, and putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import. It may more crucially mean sacrificing or investing literally billions of dollars not in servicing Israel’s military but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, investing billions of dollars it would probably take also to support what I think will have to be a mammoth protection force,” she said.

“You have to go in as if you are serious. You have to put something on the line and unfortunately the imposition of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful,” she continued. Power, a longtime adviser for President Obama, left the administration in February, but was considered the favorite to replace Rice at the U.N.

Judge Dean Spielmann, from Luxemburg, also insisted that ministers had a duty to grant the vote to prisoners. His intervention once again puts the unelected court on a collision course with Westminster. Technically, the EU and the European Court of Human Rights are separate institutions, with the ECHR overseen by the 47-member Council of Europe. But Mr Spielmann opted to combine two of the most explosive issues in British politics by saying that, if we want to leave the court, we may also have to exit the EU.

Last night, MPs said they would not give in to threats - particularly where they involved Britain's membership of the EU. Tory backbencher Dominic Raab said: 'Mr Spielmann had no previous judicial experience before ascending to the heights of this European ivory tower, and it shows. The only thing undermining the credibility of the Strasbourg court are the Mickey Mouse judgments it spews out. He and the other judges should take a long hard look in the mirror before complaining about British democracy.'

The European court has 47 members, many of whom have no prior judicial experience. The court's 'one country, one judge' rule means Liechtenstein, San Marino, Monaco and Andorra each have a seat despite their combined populations being smaller than that of the London borough of Islington.