When I first heard about this I was quite skeptical, so I went and looked it up for myself. And guess what? It is right there in black and white on pages 144 and 145 of “Economic Action Plan 2013″ which the Harper government has already submitted to the House of Commons. This new budget actually proposes “to implement a ‘bail-in’ regime for systemically important banks” in Canada. “Economic Action Plan 2013″ was submitted on March 21st, which means that this “bail-in regime” was likely being planned long before the crisis in Cyprus ever erupted.

So exactly what in the world is going on here? In addition, as you will see below, it is being reported that the European Parliament will soon be voting on a law which would require that large banks be “bailed in” when they fail. In other words, that new law would make Cyprus-style bank account confiscation the law of the land for the entire EU. I can’t even begin to describe how serious all of this is.

From now on, when major banks fail they are going to bail them out by grabbing the money that is in your bank accounts. This is going to absolutely shatter faith in the banking system and it is actually going to make it far more likely that we will see major bank failures all over the western world.

Under the arrangement, depositors in Bank of Cyprus will receive shares in the lender worth 37.5 percent of any savings over €100,000, while the rest may never be paid back, according to a statement from the Cypriot central bank.

Of the 62.5 percent of uninsured deposits not converted to bank shares, about 40 percent will continue to accrue interest but will not be repaid unless the bank does well, while the final 22.5 percent will cease to attract interest. Government figures, including finance minister Michalis Sarris and central bank governor Panicos Demetriades, had previously indicated that depositors in the island's largest lender would lose around 40 percent of their uninsured savings as part of an 11th hour agreement reached in Brussels in the early hours of Monday.

Meanwhile, account holders in Laiki Bank, the country's second largest, stand to lose up to 80 percent of their money as the lender is wound down and insured deposits transferred to Bank of Cyprus. The harsher-than-expected terms on the Bank of Cyprus' largest depositors are likely to provoke further anger among Cypriots, who face sharp economic decline with the contraction of their dominant banking sector.

A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland; and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds.

New Zealand has a similar directive, indicating that this isn’t just an emergency measure for troubled Eurozone countries. New Zealand’s Voxy reported on March 19th: The National Government [is] pushing a Cyprus-style solution to bank failure in New Zealand which will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts . . . .

Open Bank Resolution (OBR) is Finance Minister Bill English’s favoured option dealing with a major bank failure. If a bank fails under OBR, all depositors will have their savings reduced overnight to fund the bank’s bail out. Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor’s funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the banks, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay.

In Luxembourg, Finance Minister Luc Frieden has warned that the example set in Cyprus by taxing people holding €100,000 ($129,000) or more in their accounts could drive investors out of Europe. "This will lead to a situation in which investors invest their money outside the euro zone," he told SPIEGEL. "In this difficult situation, we need to avoid anything that will lead to instability and destroy the trust of savers."

Earlier this week, Euro Group President Jeroen Dijsselbloem sparked an enormous controversy after stating that the solution found in Cyprus could be applied throughout the euro zone in the future.

The remark triggered immediate criticism from his predecessor as head of the Euro Group, Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker. "It disturbs me when the way in which they tried to resolve the Cyprus problem is held up as a blueprint for future rescue plans," Juncker told German public broadcaster ZDF earlier this week. "It's no blueprint. We should not give the impression that future savings deposits in Europe might not be secure. We should not give the impression that investors should not keep their money in Europe. This harms Europe's entire financial center."

Francis' decision to disregard church law and wash the feet of two girls - a Serbian Muslim and an Italian Catholic - during a Holy Thursday ritual has become something of the final straw, evidence that Francis has little or no interest in one of the key priorities of Benedict's papacy: reviving the pre-Vatican II traditions of the Catholic Church. Virtually everything he has done since being elected pope, every gesture, every decision, has rankled traditionalists in one way or another.

Officials at Florida Atlantic University announced the move against Dr Deandre Poole after receiving a complaint from student Ryan Rotella, who claims he was unfairly suspended from class for not writing the word ”Jesus” on a piece of paper and stomping on it as part of a class exercise.The schools said removing Dr Poole from the classroom was “for safety reasons” after the incident garnered a lot of media attention.

The controversy has even caught the attention of Governor Rick Scott, who called on University System Chancellor Frank Brogan to thoroughly investigate Rotella’s claims. “As we enter the week memorializing the events of Christ’s passion, this incident gave me great concern over the lessons we are teaching our students,” Scott wrote in the letter.

Rotella, a deeply religious Mormon, told CBS12 that he was offended and refused to participate in the exercise. “Anytime you stomp on something it shows that you believe that something has no value. So if you were to stomp on the word Jesus, it says that the word has no value,” said Rotella. Rotella said he voiced his concerns to his teacher’s supervisor and later learned he was suspended from the class.

By threatening potential chaos and war in the heart of the world's most dynamic economic region, it has in the past been able to transcend its own weakness and extract diplomatic concessions. But the United States may be about to call North Korea's bluff. The US treasury department is taking steps to squeeze North Korea financially, and the Pentagon has flown B-52 and B-2 bombers over the Korean peninsula - moves that are guaranteed to provoke a hostile reaction.

Washington's tough stance presents Kim Jong-un with a dilemma. He wants to show his generals and the North Korean people that he can force concessions from the United States - in the same style as his father and grandfather. He could now be tempted to take brinkmanship to a new level, to try to convince the US and the region that confrontation does not work and carries too many risks.

But the intense negative reactions to the bailout program for Cyprus appear to be jangling other nerves in Berlin, where politicians, and many Germans in the street, are bridling at the perpetual comparisons with Germany’s dark past.

Ms Merkel’s justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, broke new ground on Wednesday by calling directly on European Union leaders in Brussels to do more to defend Germany’s role in helping the weaker members. According to the German Finance Ministry, Germany has contributed more than 220 billion euros, or $280 billion, pledged through loans and financial support packages for Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, all negotiated with those countries’ euro zone partners.

“Germany acts in solidarity so that crisis countries will have a perspective in the future,” Ms Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a member of the Free Democratic Party, the junior partner in Ms Merkel’s governing coalition, said in an interview with the newspaper Münchner Merkur. “I wish that those people at the top — the president of the EU Commission and the EU president — would defend Germans against unfair allegations.”

With the dust yet to settle on a last-minute bailout for Cyprus agreed on Monday (March 25), the European Parliament is expected to propose a future mandatory levy on savings worth more than €100,000. Gunnar Hokmark, the Swedish centre-right MEP charged with piloting draft legislation on a pan-EU bank resolution regime through parliament, has said that MEPs will push for compulsory bail-ins of large deposits to be enshrined in the new law.

Hokmark told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday (26 March) that "deposits above €100,000 are not protected and shall be treated as part of the capital that can be bailed in." Under existing EU law on deposit guarantee schemes, countries are required to protect the first €100,000 of savings in the event of a banking crisis.

However, even this principle was recently challenged by the initial plan to slap a 6.75 percent levy on deposits worth between €20,000 and €100,000 as part of the Cypriot rescue package. Some of the more hawkish member states, including Germany and the Netherlands, are believed to support measures to see investors and savers take a larger share of the burden to reduce the costs to other taxpayers.

First time: Last Saturday when he refused to rule out that insured deposits below 100,000 euros could be taxed in other euro zone countries. In that instance, he asked some very shaken reporters to ask their deposit-related questions all together to save repetition and missed answering several, garnering a stern reprimand from an FT journo, Peter Spiegel.

Then he shrugged off a question about ruling out deposit levies for the likes of Spain and Italy, saying it hadn't been discussed. Olli Rehn later that night saved the situation to some degree, but the blame game for miscommunication continued the following week. Indeed, Dijsselbloem had to backtrack just days later after a massive backlash from Cypriot Parliament and the international community, to whom protection of small deposit holders in banks is a key tenet of modern functioning economies.

He took full blame for that blunder and one might expect him to be more careful or guarded with his comments going forward. That has hardly proven the case, however. And his remarks on Monday suggesting Cyprus would be a model for future bank resolutions in Europe - despite a carefully honed Eurogroup message that Cyprus was in fact "unique" - sent the euro and risk assets spiralling.

The same can be said of his credibility now that a two-word statement clarifying that Cyprus was not a model or template had to be issued hours later. Same blunder as last week. He blatantly has no understanding of risk markets or how to communicate with them.

On Tuesday, President Obama inked his name to HR933, a continuing resolution spending bill approved in Congress days earlier. Buried 78 pages within the bill exists a provision that grossly protects biotech corporations such as the California-based Monsanto Company from litigation. With the president’s signature, agriculture giants that deal with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and genetically engineered (GE) seeds are given the go-ahead to continue to plant and sell man-made crops, even as questions remain largely unanswered about the health risks these types of products pose to consumers.

In light of approval from the House and Senate, more than 250,000 people signed a petition asking the president to veto the spending bill over the biotech rider tacked on, an item that has since been widely referred to as the “Monsanto Protection Act.”

“But Obama ignored the petition,” IB Times’ Connor Sheets writes, “instead choosing to sign a bill that effectively bars federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of GMO or GE crops and seeds, no matter what health consequences from the consumption of these products may come to light in the future.”

James Brumley, a reporter for Investor Place, explains a little more thoroughly just how dangerous the rider is now that biotech companies are allowed to bypass judicial scrutiny. Up until it was signed, he writes, “the USDA [US Department of Agriculture] oversaw and approved (or denied) the testing of genetically modified seeds, while the federal courts retained the authority to halt the testing or sale of these plants if it felt that public health was being jeopardized. With HR933 now a law, however, the court system no longer has the right to step in and protect the consumer.”