Fighting was also reported in the second city of Aden, Lahj's provincial capital Huta, and the town of Daleh. On Tuesday, Riyadh declared its month-long campaign, which sought to restore the president, had achieved its goals. But it warned that it would continue to take action against the Houthis as needed.

More work "needs to be done" in Yemen, US White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told CNN, while emphasising the need for a negotiated solution. On Wednesday the Houthi rebels asked for the coalition action to end and for UN-sponsored peace talks. The UN says at least 944 people have been killed and 3,487 injured in air strikes, fighting on the ground and attacks by jihadist militants in Yemen since 19 March.

He faces a maximum sentence of 380 years in an American jail as a result of the allegations which emerged late on Tuesday night. He is alleged to have been at the centre of the so-called 'flash crash', which knocked the major US stock market - the Dow Jones Industrial Average - by almost 1,000 points during one 45-minute period in May 2010, triggering hundreds of billions of pounds of losses.

The charges of wire fraud, commodities fraud, commodities manipulation and 'spoofing' levelled at Mr Sarao carry prison sentences of between 10 and 25 years per count, or a possible $1 million fine. Spoofing is the practice of bidding or offering with the intent to cancel the bid or offer before execution.

His company - Nav Sarao Futures - was registered to the home his parents own in Hounslow, west London, where it is believed he operated from his bedroom. Accounts for the year to October 2013 - the most recently available at Companies House - show cash on the balance sheet of £7.5 million. But prosecutors allege he generated $40 million (£26.7 million) of trading profits over a five year period.

It’s a fantastical-sounding tale. The lawsuit, however, which focuses on 12 days in 2010, 2011 and 2014, alleges that Navinder Singh Sarao at times accounted for 40 percent of order activity on the E-Mini S&P 500 futures at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. His plan of attack, according to the allegations, was to put multiple orders in the system just off the best price to create enough volatility to foster artificial prices. He would then pounce on the dislocation, cancelling 99 percent of his previous orders in the process. If true, it’s a timely reminder of the limits of regulating risk.

It’s not unusual for a handful of people, or even just one person, to rack up big losses or spark a problem in the markets. JPMorgan’s $6 billion whale trade loss is one. So is Morgan Stanley’s wrongheaded 2007 hedge on an otherwise profitable subprime mortgage bet that cost the firm upwards of $9 billion. Traders in both instances, though, were employed by big banks with loads of capital and lumbering bureaucracies. In this instance, there was just one person working alone helping stir a crisis.

It leaves several questions unanswered, though – not least of which is why it took regulators and investigators so long to discover and prosecute a man who appears to have had little problem accounting for such a large slug of an exchange-traded market.

The Eritreans are fleeing a brutal regime which dragoons young men into military conscription and maintains a semi-permanent war footing with neighboring Ethiopia. Syrians and Iraqis are fleeing the war and atrocities committed by the self-described Islamic State, Palestinians the open prison that is Gaza, and West Africans the crushing poverty that has framed many of their lives.

The vast majority of refugees make for Libya, where a power vacuum since the 2011 fall of dictator Muammar Qaddafi has enabled gangs of human traffickers to flourish. “Everyone in Libya is armed now,” says Djiby Diop, a 20-year-old from Senegal who spent three months in Libya dodging gunmen. “If you don’t work for them, they shoot you. If you don’t give them all your money, they shoot you. Or they shoot you just for fun.”

It's hard to imagine that boatloads of African migrants are being filled in Tripoli without some of the militias that control the city taking a cut from the people smugglers. The Tunisian captain of the vessel that sank over the weekend is now in Italian custody and has been charged with murder. But in Libya, there's money to be made and few consequences for the gunmen who control the ports. For Europe, there's no prospect of a new Qaddafi to act as warden.

"They don't know how to square Barack Obama's promises with his policies," the journalist noted, presenting a brief survey of how Obama is allowing Iran to push towards nuclear proliferation and spread terror in the Middle East. "In a word, the Israelis haven’t yet figured out that what America is, isn’t what America was," wrote Stephens. "They need to start thinking about what comes next."

According to the journalist many are optimistically waiting for Obama's presidency to end in 2016. He noted that a February Gallup poll showed 70% of Americans view Israel favorably, adding "the presidential candidates from both parties all profess unswerving friendship with the Jewish state, and the Republican candidates actually believe it." "Yet it’s different this time" from previous low points in Israeli-US relations, according to Stephens, who argued there are two main reasons why things have changed.

The first reason why this time is different is because "the administration’s Mideast abdications are creating a set of irreversible realities for which there are no ready US answers." "Now the president is marching us past the point of no return on a nuclear Iran and thence a nuclear Middle East," wrote Stephens. "When that happens, how many Americans will be eager to have their president intervene in somebody else’s nuclear duel? Americans may love Israel, but partly that’s because not a single US soldier has ever died fighting on its behalf."

Elaborating his point, the WSJ deputy-editor noted that "Obama is bequeathing not just a more dangerous Middle East but also one the next president will want to touch only with a barge pole."

This confiscation of cash reserves is estimated to bring about €2 billion to the table, but then what? As it stands now, Greece has no ability to raise more funds through bond issuance. In fact, 3-year Greek bonds have spiked to a whopping 28 percent!

In the short-term, Greece had only two alternatives: default on their creditors like the IMF or default on their citizens. The confiscation prevented a default on their citizens, at least for another few weeks - it owes another €1 billion to the IMF in the first two weeks of May. Having swept up all the loose cash, and having collateralized every possible state asset against other loans, Greece has nowhere to go but down.

Economists are warning the EU to "not play with fire" by forcing Greece into collapse. It would be better, they say, to just give them the money and hope for a better solution somewhere down the road. If that happens, that would be tossing the money into a black hole, and everyone knows it. The other unseen ramification of swiping cash from state-owned enterprises is the hole that this leaves in the commercial banking system that is already underwater.

Instantly removing €2 billion from commercial banks will undoubtedly crush their reserves, putting some of them over the edge into collapse. And in any case, don't the "state-owned enterprises" have their own obligations to pay? EU bankers and politicians may find a way to kick the can down the road one more time, but the fact remains that Greece is finished and its ultimate collapse is a foregone conclusion.

Snap elections or a referendum are possible should negotiations with creditors stall, Dragasakis said. European peers want Greece to do more to revamp its debt-burdened economy before they release another tranche of the 240-billion-euro ($259 billion) bailout program. At stake is Greece’s ability to avoid a default and stay in the 19-nation euro area.

The showdown will figure heavily at a meeting of euro-area finance ministers in Latvia on April 24. In the shadow of the brinkmanship, Greek government bonds last week suffered their worst week since Alexis Tsipras was elected as prime minister in January on a platform promising to undo the tough bailout terms.

Greece’s so-called red lines are a refusal to cut wages and pensions, introduce new taxes or sell state assets, Alternate Health and Social Security Minister Dimitris Stratoulis said in an interview Saturday with Athens-based Skai TV. While “so-called” partners, including unidentified International Monetary Fund officials, want to “blackmail” the Greece into adopting measures that would hurt the working class, “we won’t betray the people’s mandate,” he said.

Worries over the standoff between the leftist-led government in Athens and its creditors - the euro zone and the International Monetary Fund - over reforms needed to unlock bailout funds has sparked uncertainty and deposit flight from Greek banks. They have been relying on emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) from the domestic central bank, drawn against collateral, as progress on talks remains painfully slow.

ECB staff have prepared a proposal to reduce the value of that collateral, a media report citing people with knowledge of the discussions said on Tuesday. The ECB declined to comment. ELA funding drawn from the Bank of Greece hit 68.5 billion euros in March as Greek banks suffered deposit outflows of 24 billion euros from December through February.

"The current situation is clearly not sustainable and requires quick and decisive action by the Greek authorities to turn things around," Coeure told Greek daily Kathimerini. Despite tangible progress in talks with the EU, the IMF and the ECB, he said significant differences remained and further work was needed. Coeure said Greece leaving the euro was "out of the question".

Don’t let the geeky facade, whimsical multicoloured logo and “don’t be evil” mantra fool you. Google may very well be the most sinister threat and wicked incarnation of them all. In an interview with the Atlantic almost five years ago, the search empire’s dark lord himself, Eric Schmidt, said, “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” He said, “I would argue that implanting things in your brain is beyond the creepy line … at least for the moment until the technology gets better.”

Then things got even creepier when Schmidt said,

“We don’t need you to type at all because we know where you are.

We know where you’ve been.

We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about.”

Then he paused and asked, “Is that over the line?”

Clearly, this creepy virtual line of Google’s is not just a moving target but a highly subjective one. How do they know when they’ve crossed it? Perhaps the more appropriate question to ask is how many lines does Google have to cross before its executives realize – before we realize – that they’re doing evil?

Last month the Wall Street Journal obtained a 160-page report from the trade agency’s bureau of competition that recommended the commission bring an antitrust suit against the search giant. And yet, the agency’s commissioners ultimately decided against and closed the investigation. Why? Could it be that Google was the second-largest donor to President Obama’s reelection campaign or that the company’s executives spend so much time at the White House that the administration is thinking of redoing the Green Room in Google’s multicolor scheme? Don’t be silly. There’s no cronyism in Washington.

Finally, European regulators last week filed an antitrust action claiming Google skews search results in favor of its own shopping network, a practice that Yelp and others have long complained about. The European Commission also added a new investigation to its ongoing efforts, this one over Google’s Android operating system. Don’t tell me we’re going to need Europe to save us from the evil empire. How ironic can you get?

Combined with the corporate news media’s dependence on drug advertising, this has put big pharma in a position where it is running roughshod over informed choice and dictating vaccine policies that have little-if-any basis in scientific research yet will greatly contribute to that industry’s already gargantuan profits.

Kennedy offers an example of scientist and paediatrician Paul Offit, the developer of the rotavirus vaccine, whose personal stake in vaccine’s development and adoption is emblematic of the monied practices tending to corrupt vaccine science in America today. “In 1999 he sat on the [CDC] committee that added the rotavirus vaccine to the schedule.” Kennedy notes,

At the time he was working on his own rotavirus vaccine. Opening that gateway, by adding that vaccine to the schedule, made his patent extremely valuable. Six years later he sold that patent for $182 million and pocketed about $40 million for himself.

So, that kind of financial entanglement by the people [who are] deciding what vaccines to add to the schedule makes it difficult, I think, for all of us to think that they only thing they’re thinking of is our children’s health.

The UNU study estimates the potential value of the globally wasted resources at about $50 billion. The volume of gold alone is more than 10 percent of what is mined every year. Most of the electronic waste comes from the US and China. Combined, they amount for about a third of the enormous pile. But if rated by e-waste per capita, European nations are in the lead, with Norwegians throwing away the most - over 28 kilograms per person.

The least waste is generated by African countries, at just 1.7 kilograms per person. "Worldwide, e-waste constitutes a valuable 'urban mine' - a large potential reservoir of recyclable materials," UN Under Secretary-General David Malone said.

But apart from the valuable metals, growing mountains of e-waste have hazardous components, including 4,400 tons of ozone-depleting toxins and 2.2 million tons of lead compounds. "The hazardous content of e-waste constitutes a 'toxic mine' that must be managed with extreme care," David Malone said. The amount of electronic waste is growing by two tons each year, says the report. The increase is driven by growing sales of gadgets and their decreasing lifecycles.

The meeting of the shadowy organisation will fuel fears of a growing resurgence in hatred towards Jews across Europe. The vile event was observed by a Mail on Sunday undercover team. Held in London’s Victoria, the meeting was, said experts, the most significant gathering of Holocaust deniers Britain has ever seen, with speakers invited from Spain, Canada and the United States.

Last night, there were calls from Jewish community leaders for police to investigate the group for race hate crimes. ‘The material from this white supremacist group makes ugly reading,’ said barrister Jonathan Arkush, vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. ‘On the face of it, their proceedings should be investigated to ascertain whether criminal offences have been committed, including incitement to racial hatred.’

The so-called Golden State is increasingly turning a dirty brown colour due to a devastating drought that is in its fourth year. Although it’s tempting to blame all those irresponsible Californians filling their huge swimming pools and watering their lawns with abandon, domestic water consumption is dwarfed by that of agriculture.

The state has long been one of the world’s biggest producers of fruit and vegetables — for profit-hungry farmers, its year-round sunshine more than outweighs the obvious drawback that it hardly ever rains there. Californian farmers have been allowed to hog dwindling supplies of water, digging ever-deeper bore holes to keep the rest of us stocked up with all-year-round peaches, sweet peppers and pistachios. And all would still have been fine if it hadn’t been for the addition of almonds.

The trouble is, global demand for the nut is soaring — as customers from David Cameron to millions of middle-class Chinese develop a passion for almond-based foods. The Prime Minister is said to splash almond milk on his breakfast cereal and in his tea. And it almost certainly comes from California. Attracted by the huge profits being made from a crop that is hardly cheap, California farmers now satisfy 84 per cent of the world’s almond demand.

Worth £3.8 billion in 2013, almonds have become California’s second biggest agricultural commodity after milk, as demand has exploded by 1,000 per cent in a decade. The problem is that almonds guzzle water on a monumental scale. It has been calculated that it takes 1.1 gallons of water to grow a single almond. Worse, they need water all the year round, so almond trees must be watered even when they are not producing.

Since almond trees cover almost a million acres of California (about the size of Cornwall) — many of them on previously virgin hillsides or in areas with little or no rain — that’s a lot of H2O being sucked up to satisfy our almond craving. In total, almonds are annually consuming 1.07 trillion gallons of water in the state — a fifth more than the entire indoor water usage of all 39 million Californians. All of which is slightly problematic, given that two-thirds of California is classified as being in ‘extreme drought’, as the region suffers its driest conditions for 1,200 years.

"It's one of the bigger farms in the state," said Bill Northey, Iowa's secretary of agriculture. "But when there's an outbreak like this, you have to make sure the disease doesn't leave." Because of avian influenza, the state's $2 billion commercial egg-laying industry has been on high alert this spring. Iowa, the nation's largest egg producer, has about 50 million hens and supplies nearly 1 in every 5 eggs consumed in the United States.

"Anybody that has a poultry operation — whether large or small, whether you've got hundreds of birds or one bird — this should be a wake-up call," said Randy Olson, executive director of the Iowa Poultry Association. Despite its virulent nature, officials say, the virus doesn't pose a danger to humans or to the food supply. Last week, H5N2 avian influenza was discovered in a flock of 27,000 turkeys in Buena Vista County. Those birds also were euthanized to contain the spread.

The coalition has "ended Operation Decisive Storm based on a request by the Yemeni government and President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi," Brigadier General Ahmed al-Assiri, Saudi spokesman, told a press briefing in the Saudi capital.

However, he said the coalition would continue to impose a naval blockade on Yemen and target any movements by the Huthi Shiite rebel forces. A coalition statement said that the next phase of operations was aimed at resuming the political process in Yemen, delivering aid, and "fighting terrorism" in the country, home to a deadly Al-Qaeda franchise.

The Saudi defence ministry said in a statement that the air strikes had managed "to successfully remove threats to Saudi Arabia's security and that of neighbouring countries".