While banks had reduced their exposure to Greece, which represents less than 2 percent of eurozone gross domestic product (GDP), investors are being too complacent about the implications of a Greek exit, which could have far-reaching political ramifications and amplify the polarisation between the eurozone’s core and periphery, Hung Tran, executive managing director of the Institute of International Finance (IIF), said.

Mr Tran, who helped represent private sector bondholders during Greece’s debt haircut in 2012, said he remained optimistic that there was “room for compromise” and that Greece would reach a “last minute deal” to remain in the 19 nation bloc. However, he stressed that if the country was forced out of the euro, the consequences would be complex and were “not fully understood”.

Several members of the ruling Syriza party, including embattled finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, took part in rallies, repeating they would not forsake their people and cower to the demands of creditors. In a veiled barb aimed at his paymasters, a defiant Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras tweeted: "We will prevail in our struggles to bolster and protect our rights, our democracy and our dignity".

Labour market reforms have emerged as one of the main stumbling blocks in Greece's three-month bail-out impasse, as European powers have pushed the Leftist regime to reverse its promises to raise the minimum wage. But Greece's Labour minister Panos Skourletis said the policy would go ahead, calling it a "deep and immovable red line" for the government.

They weren’t protecting anything. They weren’t serving anyone. They were collecting bodies, treating corner folk and citizens alike as an Israeli patrol would treat Gaza, or as the Afrikaners would have treated Soweto back in the day. They’re an army of occupation. And once it’s that, then everybody’s the enemy. The police aren’t looking to make friends, or informants, or learning how to write clean warrants or how to testify in court without perjuring themselves unnecessarily. There’s no incentive to get better as investigators, as cops.

Baltimore, Maryland is in many ways the perfect microcosm for these United States of America. If you still don’t get that, you’ll be in for a rude awakening in the years ahead. A gradual erosion of the Constitution and the civil rights of the citizenry, the abuse of power by people in authority, perverse financial incentives that lead to horrible outcomes, zero accountability, and a ubiquitous surveillance state apparatus; Baltimore has it all. Yet all of these troubling traits have also come to characterize early 21st century America.

The sad part is we aren’t even trying to change the incentive structure of status quo criminality. This is because the current generation of power players were trained and molded by the same types before them. This is all they know. Money and power are their gods. Crime is their religion. We have no choice but to stop them.

A laughable excuse of course, but no less laughable than the one provided by the US navy offered ten days ago when we learned that a US Navy aircraft carrier and a warship are being dispatched to intercept Iranian weapons shipment to Yemeni rebels.

And, as expected, moments ago there was yet another step up in the Persian Gulf naval escalation when CNN reported that the US Navy will escort US-flagged cargo ships through Strait of Hormuz in wake of Iran seizure this week, a US official says. Specifically, the Navy will henceforth accompany ships on concern that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard may seize them, CNN’s Jim Sciutto says in Twitter post, citing CNN’s Barbara Starr.

As a reminder the Strait of Hormuz is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, one which is transited by 35% of all seaborne traded oil.

After running several pro-GMO articles recently, The Independent began receiving letters from folks familiar with the science behind the controversial technology, warning that it isn't what it seems. The science is inconclusive on the safety and effectiveness of GM crops, many of them explained, and yet the mainstream media continues to trot out stories of unfettered support for their use.

One of the articles countering claims that GMOs are the future of food explains how, contrary to popular belief, they haven't actually reduced chemical inputs or improved yields. Many farmers are abandoning the technology, in fact, because it doesn't work, and it locks them into a perpetual system of corporate control and debt.

"The industry's claims that GM crops yield more are countered by stories of American farmers moving back to higher-yielding non-GM varieties," wrote Peter Melchett, policy director at the UK-based Soil Association, for The Independent. Melchett goes further to explain that GMOs aren't feeding the world but are actually making it much harder to farm in many areas where so-called "superbugs" and "superweeds" have taken over as a result of chemical-induced pesticide resistance.

"The real scandal is not opposition to GM crops, but why GM continues to get funding and political support when it is failing to deliver; when the plethora of innovative and sustainable agricultural practices delivering real solutions for farmers, communities and the environment globally get minimal support."

The real solution to world hunger is to diversify and decentralize agriculture, not consolidate it into the hands of a few powerful multinational corporations. Low-input, organic farming methods, in other words, are the best bet the world has at generating enough food to feed a population that is expected to grow to 9.6 billion people in 2050, according to the Pew Research Center.

Dr Sharma is “responding on the Minister’s behalf” — the Health Minister of Canada, a post roughly comparable to the US Secretary of Health and Human Services. Here is Dr Sharma’s key passage:

“For mental/psychiatric disorders in general, including depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and ADHD, there are no confirmatory gross, microscopic or chemical abnormalities that have been validated for objective physical diagnosis.”

Dr Sharma is readily admitting that the diagnosis of mental disorders has no basis in actual science.

The second smoking gun is an email sent from the FDA, dated March 12, 2009, to Dr Baughman. It was written by Donald Dobbs, Consumer Safety Officer, Division of Drug Information, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. It refers back to Health Canada and smoking gun #1:

“I consulted with the FDA new drug review division responsible for approving psychiatric drug products and they concurred with the response you [Dr Baughman] enclosed from Health Canada. “Psychiatric disorders (as Health Canada refers) are diagnosed based on a patient’s presentation of symptoms that the larger psychiatric community has come to accept as real and responsive to treatment.”

There are roughly 300 officially certified and distinct mental disorders, named and published in the American Psychiatric Association’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM). There are no defining physical tests to diagnose ANY of them. It’s all fraud. It’s that simple and stark.

The biennial foreign ministers' meeting of the Arctic Council takes place in Nunavut, Northern Canada and sees representatives from the host nation, as well as Russia, the US, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, take part in a discussion about the future of the Arctic.

Despite the council's aim to focus on cooperation in the North Pole, there are concerns among analysts who believe the Arctic may be the next contested zone for resources, as countries try and assert their claims to certain parts of the region.

As global resources become increasingly scarce, there is a growing thought that countries with land claims and access to the Arctic will further increase exploration in the hope of finding new, untapped resources. As a result, many of the countries have experienced an increase in espionage activities in their Arctic regions.

Figures from February showed allied airstrikes, including those carried out by British warplanes, had killed more than 6,000 fighters since September. According to The Guardian, Baghdadi is still incapacitated due to a possible spinal injury and has not resumed command.

Sources told the paper his injuries may mean he will never be able to lead Isis again, and it is now being led by senior official and deputy leader, Abu Alaa al-Afri. One Isis member said: 'They are planning to fight back against Europe. They want to take revenge for Baghdadi.'

In an ominous harbinger of what now lies ahead, hundreds of elderly Greeks struggled to get access to their pensions on Wednesday, as the local authority in Athens scrambled to find the cash to make its monthly payments.

With negotiations showing little discernible progress, the ECB has touted plans to put a firm ceiling on ELA, as well as forcing banks to take a bigger haircut on the collateral they need to access the funds. It is a stance that is beginning to scarily resemble the threats which resulted in Ireland eventually bowing to eurozone bail-out terms in 2010.

In the words of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras: "Whoever gets scared in this game loses". Greece may not have any choice but finally admit defeat.

It masked an encouraging set of first-quarter results for Barclays, which under its chief executive Antony Jenkins has made heavy cuts to the investment bank that ballooned under his predecessor Bob Diamond. The bank was one of six to be investigated by the Financial Conduct Authority and American regulators for foreign exchange manipulation, but was the only one not to settle with the regulators in November.

Citibank, JPMorgan, UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC paid a combined £2 billion to the FCA and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, but Barclays was forced to pull out of a settlement by New York’s banking regulator, the Department of Financial Services.

Naturally, few voters are likely to support such a radical program. Hence the acute need for secrecy, obfuscation and lies throughout the negotiation process. Eventually, even they are not enough. The lies start showing through and the flimsy facade begins to slip. In the later stages — roughly where we are now — the only way to finish the job is to incrementally, almost imperceptibly snuff out the institution of representative democracy itself.

To do that, one must still keep the illusion of democracy alive, at least until the ink on its death warrant (ie a fully signed trade agreement) is dry. This explains the European Commission’s constant empty promises of increased transparency, accountability and public consultation. The latest installment in this ridiculous charade came not from Brussels but from the US government, which announced that it will open up reading rooms in its embassies across the EU, so that national politicians can read secret documents related to TTIP.

Not only will TTIP sharpen economic disparities in Europe, it will also pit a politically fragmented Europe against a much more united, more efficient rival (the US). As Pierre Defraigne - a former head of cabinet of ex-commissioners Etienne Davignon and Pascal Lamy and one of few senior Eurocrats to have expressed public skepticism about the trade agreement - warns, this could end up shattering Europe’s already flimsy political cohesion as well as the broader international geopolitical order: None of this seems to matter to the Commission or Europe’s other senior power brokers.

Despite intensifying opposition at home, Merkel seems as keen as Obama to wrap up TTIP once and for all.

Depositors already complain vigorously about zero percent returns on checking and savings accounts. If they must start actually paying the bank to hold funds on deposit, many will opt to simply withdraw the cash and stuff it under their mattress or into a safe deposit box. That simply won’t do. The Goal Is to Force You to Deposit Cash and Charge YOU Interest

Willem Buiter, the chief economist at CitiBank, thinks he’s got the answer to this banker’s quandary. Simply abolish cash. Or tax it punitively. He isn’t the only one supporting this radical solution. Other economists, including the prominent Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff, also think banning cash is a grand idea.

Eliminating physical cash may well be a longer-term project, but it is not something the Fed can likely implement any time soon. In the meantime, there are other ways to prevent depositors from making their escape. For starters, officials can criminalize the use of cash above certain amounts.

Banks can also implement new policies of their own. Joseph Salerno from the Mises Institute discovered JPMorgan Chase leading the way. The bank very recently began test driving new rules in Cleveland as well as other markets. The bank will no longer accept cash from customers who want to use it to make mortgage payments, pay credit card balances or to cover their automobile loan.