Negative rates are now the policy of the European Central Bank, with a deposit rate of minus 0.40%. Ditto for Switzerland, where the rate is minus 0.75%. In Sweden, the rate is minus 0.35%. The Bank of Japan too has announced negative interest rates, of 0.10%.

More than $26 trillion of government bonds now trade at yields of below 1%, with around $7 trillion currently yielding less than 0%. Government bonds in Germany with a maturity of seven years are trading at negative yields, while Swiss and Japanese government bonds out to 10 years trade at negative yields.

Negative yields mean that if an investor places a deposit with a bank, at maturity the investor receives an amount less than the original investment. In effect, the depositor pays to place money with the bank. In the case of bonds, negative yields mean that investors accept an economic loss, as the price paid by the investor is greater than the present value of the interest payments and principal repayment for a security.

In effect, negative rates delay essential restructuring to remove the detritus of previous crises. It restricts the supply of credit to the wider economy, affecting economic activity. Misallocation of capital deepens the malaise, and an ultimate resolution to this global problem becomes even more costly and difficult.

The conditions for a crisis are now firmly established: overvaluation of financial assets; significant leverage; persistent low-growth and deflation; excessive risk taking reliant on central banks for liquidity, and the suppression of volatility.

For example, US stock buybacks have reached 2007 levels and are running at around $500 billion annually. When dividends are included, companies are returning around $1 trillion annually to shareholders, close to 90% of earnings. Additional factors affecting share prices are mergers and acquisitions activity and also activist hedge funds, which have forced returns of capital or corporate restructures.

The major driver of stock prices is liquidity, in the form of zero interest rates and quantitative easing. To be sure, stronger earnings have supported stocks. But on average, 70% to 80% of the improvement has come from cost-cutting, not revenue growth. Since mid-2014, corporate profit margins have stagnated and may even be declining.

Real estate prices have risen globally with investors purchasing rental income streams to diversify away from low income financial assets. Markets as disparate as the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, China, India and many other emerging countries have become overheated.

Collectibles including fine art, vintage cars, wine, and the like also are showing the effects of excessive enthusiasm. Their prices reflect in part the desire by the world’s “smart money” to escape the manipulation of financial markets and the tremors that could be signaling a big quake to come.

Britain gives £72 million ($101 million) a year to the Palestinians, according to the report. “More than one-third of which goes straight to the PA,” which “openly admits supporting terrorists whom it hails as heroes for fighting illegal occupation, awarding lifetime payments that rise depending on time spent in jail and the seriousness of crimes.” One example is a Hamas “master bomber” Abdallah Barghouti, who was given 67 life sentences: he has received a total of £106,000 ($150,000). UK funds also pay out “salaries” to the families of suicide bombers, as well as to “teenagers involved in the latest upsurge of deadly attacks on Israel.”

The UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the European Union (EU) “are still effectively supporting these payments to thousands of terrorists – despite claims to have ended such links two years ago,” the Daily Mail report says. This has been confirmed “by former prisoners and families receiving the cash, and in official statements by the PA.” Furthermore, PA head Mahmoud Abbas used part of the UK gifts — £8 million ($11.31 million) — to build a palace in Ramallah.

The Sunday report included an interview with Ahmad Musa, a convicted Palestinian double murderer sentenced to life in prison, who was released from Israeli prison after five years, as part of Israel’s gestures to move along the “peace process.” He gets £605 ($855) every month. Others like him get much more, and after they die, the cash goes to their families. The money for these payments comes from British and European taxpayers.

Young families are financially stretched, the elderly are unsure and everyone is fed up with hospital waiting lists. Our GPs are in crisis and the education service is not working. Yet under EU regulations homes are found, waiting queues are jumped, school places are jigged to provide non-UK nationals with as-of-right benefits.

We should rally together and face head-on the challenge by deciding the best way forward is to selfishly invest in ourselves for a 10-year period. Ridding ourselves of the twisted rules and regulations the EU call a democracy would be a creative first step. Ukip's expert independent number-crunchers have costed that, in a single year, a staggering £17 billion would be saved by leaving the EU.

Over the next 10 years, without adding to the national debt, we would be able to provide for new schools and nurseries, new medical centres and care for the elderly. Saving £17 billion and spreading its benefits across industry, commerce, farming and fishing speaks for itself. Scaremongers do no good. Particularly the pernicious CBI, falling over themselves, Pinocchio-style, to repay IOUs owed to Tory grandees.

Yet not once have the 'Inners' denied that the annual £17 billion saved from leaving the EU is a factual, unchangeable reality. People like simplicity and honesty in explanations. It has maxed-out our credit card. The UK is better-off outside a growing United States of Europe controlled by Merkel and Hollande.

“Sex offenders tend to move from country to country to avoid jail, but what makes Israel unique is the Law of Return, which essentially grants unhindered access to anyone who is Jewish to come here without any real screening,” said Manny Waks, the chief executive officer of Kol v’Oz, a newly formed non-profit that aims to prevent child sexual abuse in the global Jewish community. The Law of Return grants automatic citizenship in Israel to those who meet its definition of a Jew.

Among those accused of sexual abuse who have fled to Israel, Waks cited the prominent case of Malka Leifer, the former principal of a religious girls’ school in Melbourne, who allegedly assaulted eight of her charges. She is now under house arrest, and the Australian authorities are seeking her extradition. Waks noted several other cases of pedophiles and alleged pedophiles from the United States, Britain and the Netherlands who had fled to Israel either after being charged or to avoid being charged.

“It seems to us Israel is increasingly becoming a refuge for pedophiles and alleged pedophiles,” said Waks. “It’s an easy get-out-of-jail card for them.” According to research data he cited, one in five children in Israel experiences sexual abuse.

The plastic we discard into the ocean often makes its way into the mouths and stomachs of sea creatures. A post-mortem of the creatures, found ashore near the town of Toenning in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, showed their stomachs were full of plastic. This plastic included a 13-metre-long (43-foot-long) fisherman’s net and a 70-centimetre (28-inch) piece of plastic from a car. A man posted a shocking image on Instagram of some of the plastic found in their stomachs.

The sperm whales probably didn't die by being poisoned by plastic, however. Scientists thought it was likely they perished from heart failure due to starvation. “These findings show us the results of our plastic orientated society,” Schleswig-Holstein environment Minister Robert Habeck told the Daily Mail. “Animals inadvertently consume plastic and plastic waste which causes them to suffer and at worst, causes them to starve with full stomachs.”

The 2013 study was set out to determine whether or not viewing television at 29 months (about 2.5 years) was associated with school performance at 65 months (about 5.5 years). The study, which was conducted on 991 girls and 1,006 boys with parent and teacher reported data, came to this conclusion:

“Increases in total time watching television at 29 months were associated with subsequent decreases in vocabulary and math skills, classroom engagement (which is largely determined by attention skills), victimization by classmates, and physical prowess at kindergarten. These prospective associations, independent of key potential co-founders, suggest the need for better parental awareness and compliance with existing viewing recommendations put forth by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).”

According to this study, every 1.2 hours of television viewing for children at 29 months results in poorer motor, vocabulary, math, and social skills, and even an increase in the likelihood of being bullied, as television inhibits the development of self-confidence. The study also notes that many parents seem to be unconcerned about how long their children spend watching TV. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children over age 2 do not watch more than 2 hours per day, and that children below the age of 2 watch no TV at all.

You can believe that inmates cherish that hour and you can imagine how shocked the residents of Indiana’s Wabash maximum security prison were to find out from researchers that one third of all children aged 5 to 12 in the UK play outdoors for less than 30 minutes each day, while a fifth of parents surveyed said their children don’t go outside at all.

“Outdoor play isn’t happening,” the “Dirt Is Good” initiative found in a survey of 12,000 parents. “Almost a third of children play outside for 30 minutes or less a day and one in five don’t play outside at all on an average day.” So what are kids in the UK doing instead? Why, staring at screens of course. "Children spend twice as much time on screens inside as they do playing outside," the same study found.

The article, published in Rodong Sinmun — the print mouthpiece of the North Korean government — comes less than a month after the UN Security Council voted in favor of slapping the Hermit Kingdom with tougher sanctions, after the country teased its potential nuclear and military capabilities earlier this year. The editorial stated that hardships to come might evoke another “arduous march” — the term assigned to the famine that struck the country in the mid-1990s, killing as many as 3 million people, reports the Telegraph, a British newspaper.

“We may have to go on an arduous march, during which we will have to chew the roots of plants once again,” the editorial piece read. Rodong Sinmun called for a “70-day campaign of loyalty” and reportedly demanded that the North Korean people demonstrate their allegiance to Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. To that end, the country is requiring all residents of Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital city, to deliver about 2 lb of rice to state warehouses each month.

The Telegraph reports that the country has also requested nearly half a million tons of food aid from other countries. As of last month, however, only 17,600 tons had arrived.

We are witnessing opposition to the establishment everywhere from Germany, France, and Britain, to even China. The Chinese version of Donald Trump is Ren Zhiquiang, who has defied the Communist Party Leader President Xi Jinping. Normally, anyone who would criticize the head of the party would end up in prison.

Things are changing on a global scale. This is what our computer model has been warning would lie on the other side of 2015.75. What has emerged in China is rather amazing, for the sophisticated Chinese people, including scholars, journalists, students and dissidents, have all supported Ren against the Chinese Communist Party. That is quite amazing and unprecedented in modern times.

The “establishment” in so many countries are refusing to connect the dots. There is a change in the political winds and what is coming is something that takes place about once every 309.6 years. The last change in the political wind produced the American Revolution against monarch which caught on in France, and eventually in England structurally.

The question is what will the wind blow into town this time? Democracy at last? Or will be it be more oppression from the establishment?

The study, published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, studied the effects of subtle reminders of mass surveillance on its subjects. The majority of participants reacted by suppressing opinions that they perceived to be in the minority. This research illustrates the silencing effect of participants’ dissenting opinions in the wake of widespread knowledge of government surveillance, as revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

The “spiral of silence” is a well-researched phenomenon in which people suppress unpopular opinions to fit in and avoid social isolation. It has been looked at in the context of social media and the echo-chamber effect, in which we tailor our opinions to fit the online activity of our Facebook and Twitter friends. But this study adds a new layer by explicitly examining how government surveillance affects self-censorship.

Elizabeth Stoycheff, lead researcher of the study and assistant professor at Wayne State University, is disturbed by her findings. "The adoption of surveillance techniques, by both the government and private sectors, undermines the Internet's ability to serve as a neutral platform for honest and open deliberation. It begins to strip away the Internet's ability to serve as a venue for all voices, instead catering only to the most dominant," she said.

But here's the thing, despite all the amenities, the views and the allure this building may have, the super rich do not appear to be knocking down any doors to get in. Only 13 units have closed out of 141, according to The Real Deal.

The late Ed Hart, a credit market analyst with whom I worked at Financial News Network, taught me the very high value of anecdotal information almost three decades ago. For instance, just before the Savings & Loan bubble burst in the 1980s, Ed told me that if you see a lot of antique furniture and art work inside an S&L, short the stock!

To him, it meant that depositor money was being ill used and the institution was bound for insolvency. On more than one occasion, I witnessed such excesses, only to see the offending lender wind up in receivership a mere few months later.

NIGERIA – Over 80 killed, children burned to death

On January 30, Boko Haram terrorists killed 86 people after they attacked a village in northeast Nigeria. The assault took place on the outskirts of the city of Maiduguri, which is the birthplace of the Islamist militant group. Citing an eyewitness who managed to survive the attack, AP reported that Boko Haram extremists firebombed huts. The survivor said that he had heard the screams of children burning to death from a hiding place in a tree.

IRAQ – 29 dead after ISIS suicide bomber strikes football match

Iraq is doing its best to try and return to some semblance of normality following the violence that Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) has brought to parts of the country. However, on Friday, three days after the Brussels attacks, at least 29 people were killed at a football match south of the capital, Baghdad.

PAKISTAN – Easter suicide bomb kills 70

Taliban faction Jamaat-ul-Ahrar claimed responsibility for Sunday’s suicide blast outside a public park in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore that killed at least 70 people and injured more than 280, many of whom were women and children.

SYRIA – ISIS massacres dozens in morning rush hour

On February 21, a series of explosions rocked a district of the Syrian capital, Damascus, killing at least 83 people. Two suicide bombers, who were linked to Islamic State, carried out the attack. The first explosion was a car bomb that targeted a busy school street in the Sayeda Zeinab district during rush hour. The blast was followed by two explosions allegedly carried out by suicide bombers wearing explosive belts, and targeted the crowds gathered at the site of the tragedy.

LEBANON – ISIS strikes Shiite stronghold a day before Paris attacks

A day before the Paris attacks, two suicide bombers struck in the Lebanese capital of Beruit, killing at least 43 people, with a further 240 people injured. Islamic State claimed responsibility, with members of the militant group blowing up a motorbike with explosives in the middle of a street.

“What I’ve heard over the past 24 hours is a bunch of excuses” from Europe following the fatal Brussels airport and metro attacks, Flynn said in an exclusive interview on Wednesday. “We have to stop apologizing for the political correctness that I see just running rampant.”

Flynn, who led the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) between 2012 and 2014 and commanded US Special Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq before that, believes there is a direct link between the migrant crisis and the Brussels and Paris terror attacks.

There is very little coordination between EU nations right now, even as border controls “absolutely” have to be tightened, Flynn warned, reminding that Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) has said it wanted to infiltrate Europe and the US through the refugee stream.