David Drumm, former chief executive of Irish Anglo Bank from 2005 until 2008, had been arrested in Boston in October 2015, and originally attempted to fight extradition — but he recently withdrew the objection and was returned to Ireland early on Monday.

Drumm faces 33 charges in Ireland, which echoes Iceland’s unprecedented move to hold its bankers criminally accountable for their role in that country’s economic meltdown. Though Drumm predictably denied wrongdoing, his charges include “fraud, forgery, misleading management reporting, unlawful lending, falsifying documents, and false accounting, linked to financial transactions prior to the collapse of Anglo,” according to the Irish Times.

In the 1940's, when Winston Churchill called for "a kind of United States of Europe", did he foresee what was to follow? Would he approve? He talked of the European "family" and called for the creation of the Council of Europe (which still exists today), but he also said "we are with Europe but not of it. We are linked but not comprised."

More importantly perhaps, when the British people last had its say on Europe in 1975, were they voting for the ever-closer political, as well as economic, union that has followed? Those that argue they were not, say that is precisely why a referendum is needed - to give the British people the opportunity to get out of a club they never chose to join.

“There exists substantial doubt whether we will be able to continue as a going concern,” it said in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. “There can be no assurance that we will be able to obtain additional financing on commercially reasonable terms or at all,” it said. The company’s share price crashed 45 percent in early trading in New York.

The Peabody group dates back 133 years and generated a tenth of America’s electric power as recently as five years ago. It is the first household name to succumb to the deepening coal crisis, which has already forced Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources into bankruptcy and wiped out the stock market capitalisation of the industry.

“In the wake of the revelations of mass surveillance the [US] president [Barack Obama] appointed two independent commissions to review the efficiency of these [surveillance] programs, what they really did and what effect they had in combating terrorism. [The commissions comprised] the highest priests of these programs, they found these programs had never stopped a single terrorist attack and never made a concrete difference in a terrorist investigation,” Snowden told Spanish TV channel.

The whistleblower went on saying, that “they [the NSA, CIA] violated the constitution and the rights of 330 million Americans for 10 years. We have to ask ourselves: was it ever worth it?” He also stated that despite being justified by preventing terrorist attacks, surveillance programs are more often used for completely different purposes.

“It was diplomatic manipulation, economic spying and social control. It was about power, and there is no doubt that mass surveillance increases the power of the government.”

Russia is a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his office said in a statement he had agreed to the move. The pullout was "in accordance with the situation on the ground", the statement said. Russia began its campaign of air strikes in Syria last September, tipping the balance in favour of the Syrian government and allowing it to recapture territory from rebels.

Mr Putin is effectively saying "job done" in Syria. He is clear, though, that a Russian air base and a naval base will remain, so this is not a total military pull-out. Coinciding with the Syria peace talks, it is yet another sign of Mr Putin's mastery of diplomatic showmanship.

"Five years ago, if you had asked me about bacteria in your gut playing an important role in your systemic immune response, I probably would have laughed it off," Daniel Chen, head of cancer immunotherapy research at Roche’s Genentech division, said in a phone interview. "Most of us immunologists now believe that there really is an important interaction there."

Two recent studies published in the journal Science have intrigued Chen and others who are developing medicines called immunotherapies that stimulate the body’s ability to fight tumors.

In November, University of Chicago researchers wrote that giving mice Bifidobacterium, which normally resides in the gastrointestinal tract, was as effective as an immunotherapy in controlling the growth of skin cancer. Combining the two practically eliminated tumor growth. In the second study, scientists in France found that some bacterial species activated a response to immunotherapy, which didn’t occur without the microbes.

That’s increased drugmakers’ interest in the human microbiome - the universe of roughly 100 trillion good and bad bacteria, fungi and viruses that live on and inside the body.

In other words, your tax dollars will be used to promote the so-called “benefits” of Monsanto’s GMOs — instead of promoting the devastating impact these vast commodity monocultures, and the toxic chemicals used to grow them, are having on your health, and the health of our entire ecosystem.

And this will all be done at the direction and insistence of the federal government.

If that’s not outrageous, I don’t know what is.

Prominent clerics, including a Church of England bishop, have lent their voices to calls for a reappraisal of the disciple who betrayed Jesus, leading to his crucifixion. The Rt Rev Nick Baines, the Bishop of Leeds, remarked that he feels “a bit sorry” for Judas. He said that the lost apostle, viewed by many Christians as a figure beyond redemption has, he said, had a “lousy press” for the last 2,000 years.

While Judas had long been reviled as “the ultimate traitor”, the truth behind Judas’s decision to hand Jesus over to the religious authorities may, he said, have been decidedly more complicated. One theory is that Judas was a dedicated revolutionary who saw Jesus as a reluctant political messiah and hoped that by handing him over for arrest he could trigger an uprising against Roman rule in Judea.

Kim made the comments as he supervised a successful simulated test of atmospheric re-entry of a ballistic missile that measured the "thermodynamic structural stability of newly-developed heat-resisting materials," KCNA said.

"Declaring that a nuclear warhead explosion test and a test-fire of several kinds of ballistic rockets able to carry nuclear warheads will be conducted in a short time to further enhance the reliance of nuclear attack capability, he (Kim) instructed the relevant section to make prearrangement for them to the last detail," the agency said.

The study was performed on more than 100 boys, many of whom were wards of the state and had been falsely declared "mentally retarded," according to The New York Times. The boys were recruited to join the "Fernald Science Club." They – and their parents, for boys who had parental guardians – were told that they were taking part in a study "in connection with the [MIT] nutrition department" aimed at "helping to improve the nutrition of our children."

In order to make the study sound appealing, the boys and their guardians were told they would be given "a quart of milk daily… taken to a baseball game, to the beach, and to some outside dinners," and that they would "enjoy it greatly." "You had to drink the milk. That was the thing," remembered one participant years later.

Shockingly, the entire point of the study was simply that Quaker Oats wanted to make advertising claims – similar to those made by competitor Cream of Wheat – that the nutrients in their cereal traveled throughout the body. In 1998, MIT and Quaker Oats signed a $1.85 million settlement of a lawsuit by 45 of the victims. The state of Massachusetts also paid $676,000 to 27 participants. Other lawsuits on the case are still pending. Quaker Oats still denies that it had a major role in the study.

"The question is, if they would do this… if they would feed radioactive oatmeal to helpless children and lie to them and their parents about it for years… well, is there anything they wouldn't do?" asked Melissa Dykes, writing for Truthstream Media. "And what other experiments have been done on the public without its knowledge or consent?"

Almost everyone who worked for the government would be a foreigner, and the court would rule against us in almost every case. And every year, the bureaucracy would grab more power and the court would say it was fine, because the court was created to decide in its favor. I don’t think that would be democratic. Of course, I want friendly relations with Canada and Mexico. But I don’t want to run them, or be run by them. I don’t think a regime like that is what we fought for in 1776 — or 1941.

Well, the government I’ve described exists. It’s the European Union, the 28-nation organization that stretches from Finland to Portugal. But the EU may be about to lose a member: on June 23, Britain will hold a national referendum to decide whether it wants to leave. The EU likes to pretend that it’s a United States of Europe in the making. That’s incorrect. Americans were made into a single people by the revolution. After we fought a terrible Civil War, we ultimately decided it was a shared national experience.

That’s what we fought for in 1776 against Britain. Now, it’s British independence that’s at stake. If our principles were true in Philadelphia then, they’re true in London today.

And there’s another reason. The EU was designed to solve 1946’s problems. But it’s now 2016, and Europe has weak economies, uncontrolled immigration, and the undemocratic EU itself. The stodgy establishment EU isn’t solving these problems. It’s feeding them.

Millions of Americans are rebelling against our own top-down political establishment, which creates problems and then pretends to solve them by grabbing power. That’s what the EU does, too. Britain isn’t considering anything radical — just reclaiming the right to govern itself. We fought side by side with the British for that right in 1941. Today, the British struggle for independence from a faraway autocracy is one Americans should understand. For this is 1776 — the other way round.

“In two global conflicts, and throughout the Cold War, the United States has fought for the founding ideals of the republic: that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth. So it is on the face of it a bit peculiar that US government officials should believe that Britain must remain within the EU – a system in which democracy is increasingly undermined.

“There is no country in the world that defends its own sovereignty with such hysterical vigilance as the United States of America. The idea is laughable, and completely alien to American traditions. So why is it essential for Britain to comply with a system that the Americans would themselves reject out of hand? Is it not a blatant case of ‘Do as I say, but not as I do’?”