New Governor Haruhiko Kuroda committed the BOJ to open-ended asset buying and said the monetary base would nearly double to 270 trillion yen ($2.9 trillion) by the end of 2014, a dose of shock therapy officials hope will end two decades of stagnation.

The policy was viewed as a radical gamble to boost growth and lift inflation expectations and is unmatched in scope even by the US Federal Reserve's own quantitative easing program. The Fed may buy more debt, but since Japan's economy is about one-third the size of the economy, Kuroda's plan looks even bolder.

"This is an unprecedented degree of monetary easing," a smiling Kuroda told a news conference after his first policy meeting at the helm of the central bank. "We took all available steps we can think of. I'm confident that all necessary measures to achieve 2 percent inflation in two years were taken today," he said.

The experienced investigative journalist had been busy trying to unravel the details of a large financial fraud in his native Australia when the prospect of an even bigger scoop landed on his doormat. The letter contained part of a hard drive with the details of 2.5 million digital files, a treasure trove that would ultimately yield information on 120,000 offshore companies and nearly 130,000 individuals. Ryle, who moved to Washington to head the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) soon after receiving the hard drive, admits he was not entirely sure what he was dealing with at first.

"My instinct told me it was big but you do not know," Ryle told AFP. Technical impediments also frustrated his early attempts to pore over the information he had received. The ICIJ's efforts were assisted by an Australian software company that provided free software to help make sense of the information in the files. "I approached the firm and said 'Don't ask me why I need it but can you give it to me?'" Ryle recalled.

"We're pretty confident we have a lot more because it's so vast and it takes a long time to understand," Ryle said, adding that he was not concerned about whether the revelations ultimately lead to criminal prosecutions. "It's not our duty - our duty is to report and to let others worry about that," he said. "Our job is to inform the public about something they didn't know and what people or authorities do afterwards is up to them."

Even brand-new Finance Minister Michael Sarris who got axed because he’d been chairman of Laiki when this was going on. His lesson: when a cesspool of corruption blows up, no one is safe. And German politicians learned a lesson too: that it worked!

“With the Cyprus aid package, it was proven that countries like Germany, the Netherlands, and Finland, if they stick together, are able to push for a strict stability course,” Hans Michelbach told the Handelsblatt. The chairman of the finance committee in the German Parliament and member of the CSU, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition partner, called for deeper collaboration of the triple-A countries in the Eurozone “to strengthen the confidence of citizens and investors in the common currency.” There are still five in that euro triple-A club: Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Finland, and Luxembourg.

ABN AMRO, one of the largest banks in Europe announced in a letter to clients that it would no longer allow clients to take delivery of their metal and instead will pay account holders in a paper currency equivalent to the current spot value of the precious metal.

Thus, instead of legally owning a risk free, physical asset (a bullion bar or a bullion coin), the bank’s clients are now unsecured creditors and are now exposed to the bank and the financial system – somewhat defeating the purpose of owning precious metals.

The move highlights the importance of owning physical bullion either in your possession (be that in a safe or vault in a house, in the attic, under the floorboards or elsewhere in your possession) or in a secure vault in a country that is stable and respects property rights.

For over a month now, Israel has been under cyberattack. It began with words and threats, which carry a hefty significance in and of themselves, due to their psychological impact, and because they prompt Internet activity from all levels to try to prevent the damage from such an anticipated attack.

The mass cyberattack is scheduled for this Sunday, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day here in Israel and a day of rest in many other countries. The day will give hackers plenty of free time to get comfortable in front of their computers and launch their computerized robots to try again and again to crash Israel's largest and most popular websites. The main objective is to disable access to these sites and to corrupt them, replacing them with images and slogans deriding Israel and the occupation.

According to Shai Blitzblau, the CEO of Maglan, Israel's premier cyber defense services provider, 13 hacker groups have already announced that they plan to take part in the projected attack, alongside hundreds of independent hackers who don't belong to any group. The hackers have developed a software tool to prevent user access that involves a computerized robot and a list of close to 100 targets. The list includes all the government-operated websites. Members of the hackers' Twitter account can access the tool and download it. The robot includes an access code with which hackers can enter the government sites through a back door.

Pope Francis has inherited a major scandal which demands continuing decisive action. Archbishop Mueller, the German cleric in charge of the Vatican department which investigates cases of sexual abuse - and decides whether paedophile priests are to be defrocked - has had several meetings with Pope Francis since his recent election.

Only last month one American diocese - Green Bay, Wisconsin - paid $700,000 (£460,000) to two brothers who had been sexually abused by a Catholic priest decades ago. Several American Catholic dioceses have been forced to declare bankruptcy as a result of making huge payouts to victims.

Dr Rebecca Rist, a papal historian at Reading University, said: "The papacy has always taken a strong line on the importance of the purity of life of its clergy. In the 11th Century, the medieval papacy took stringent measures against the abuses of 'simony' - the buying and selling of ecclesiastical office - and 'nicolaism' - clerical concubinage. "Pope Francis is signalling that he regards clerical sexual abuse as the modern day scourge of the Church."

ExxonMobil, the company that runs the pipeline, says it has collected hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil and water from Bartlett's neighborhood. It's not yet clear what caused the spill. Exxon's Pegasus pipeline is 65 years old. It runs 858 miles from Illinois to Texas. It was adapted a few years ago to increase its capacity by 50 percent. Exxon has repeatedly insisted that inspections were up to date and showed no cause for concern. The spill raises questions about whether the inspection process for aging pipelines is adequate.

By Monday, Shell spokespeople said inspectors found “no evidence” of an oil leak, but days later it was revealed that a breach did occur. Representatives with the US Coast Guard confirmed to Dow Jones on Thursday that roughly 50 barrels of oil spilled from a pipe near Houston, Texas and entered a waterway that connects to the Gulf of Mexico.

Meanwhile, though, rescue workers in Arkansas have been getting their hands dirty responding to an emergency there. A rupture in ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline late last week sent thousands of barrels of oil into the small town of Mayflower, around 25 miles outside of Little Rock. Authorities evacuated more than 20 homes in response, and by this Thursday roughly 19,000 barrels had been recovered.

Another incident in Canada this week caused an estimated 400 barrels — or roughly 16,800 gallons — of oil to be compromised in northern Ontario when a train derailed. Originally, Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd said only four barrels were lost in the accident.

The prolonged cold weather would also hit this autumn's harvest, he said. Looking ahead to the 2013 harvest, he said farmers had only managed to get three quarters of the planned wheat planted this year, so the UK was already 25% down on potential production.

Andrew Watts, a wheat farmer and the NFU combinable crops board chairman, said farmers had been hoping for a kind autumn after a poor harvest in 2012, but this had not happened. "It seems many farmers have written 2013 off and are trying to do what they can with the crops in the ground. Everyone is focussing on 2014 and making sure the land is in a good condition to get good crops then. This is what producing food is all about - the weather."

He added: "We have got to put it in context, this is only the first time since the late 1970s that we have been net importers. The crop damage is dealing a further blow to Britain's farming industry, which is already reeling from a spate of recent livestock deaths due to the cold weather."

This is a nice story, but according to admissions made by both Kraft and Kemin, use of these additives will indeed be used to disguise inferior meat and poultry products. According to CNS, the two companies admittedly petitioned FSIS to allow use of the chemicals in liquid form to kill pathogens like Listeria monocytogenes, which typically only exist in tainted meat derived from factory farms.

Industrial agriculture is a filthy business, especially when animals are involved. Rather than have access to pasture and the outdoors, cows and chickens from factory farms live most, if not all, of their lives in confinement, where they wallow in their own feces, and sometimes even in the rotting carcasses of other dead animals. As a result, such animals become ill, and their systems infected with harmful pathogens that must be eliminated before human consumption.

Either they will be bailed out by the government using our tax dollars, or as we just witnessed in Cyprus, they will be allowed to "recapitalize" themselves by stealing money directly from our bank accounts. So if they win, they win big. If they lose, someone else will come in and clean up the mess. This creates a tremendous incentive for the bankers to "go for it", because there is simply not enough pain in this equation for those that are taking the risks.

If the big Wall Street banks had been allowed to collapse back in 2008, that would have caused a massive change of behavior on Wall Street. But instead, the big banks are still recklessly gambling with our money as if the last financial crisis never even happened. In the end, the reckless behavior of these big banks is going to cause the entire global financial system to collapse.

If you had not kept any paper records, which most Americans do not, it would be exceedingly difficult to prove to the bank that you actually had any money in the bank. If you don’t think that something like this could ever happen in the United States, you might want to think again. Cyber attacks against major banks in the United States are becoming more powerful and more sophisticated with each passing month.

In fact, major US bank websites have been offline for a total of 249 hours over the past six weeks. And just last month, thousands upon thousands of Chase customers logged into their bank accounts only to discover that their balances had all been reset to zero. Anyone that would want to cause complete and total economic chaos in the United States could accomplish it very easily by wiping out all of our bank account records.

So please do not keep all of your money in a single bank, and from now on please keep a paper copy of all of your bank account statements. At some point it is likely that one of these cyber attacks will cause permanent damage to our banking system, and you want to be protected. The mainstream media has generally been very quiet about the massive cyber attacks against our major banks, but behind the scenes authorities are truly alarmed. They don’t know how to stop these attacks, and they just keep getting more intense and more sophisticated.

Columbia Professor Michael Woodford, the world's most closely followed monetary theorist, says it is time to come clean and state openly that bond purchases are forever, and the sooner people understand this the better. "All this talk of exit strategies is deeply negative," he told a London Business School seminar on the merits of Helicopter money, or "overt monetary financing".

He said the Bank of Japan made the mistake of reversing all its money creation from 2001 to 2006 once it thought the economy was safely out of the woods. But Japan crashed back into deeper deflation as soon as the Lehman crisis hit. "If we are going to scare the horses, let's scare them properly. Let's go further and eliminate government debt on the bloated balance sheet of central banks," he said. This could be done with a flick of the fingers. The debt would vanish.

Lord Turner, head of the now defunct Financial Services Authority, made the point more delicately. "We must tell people that if necessary, QE will turn out to be permanent."