The Bank of Japan said it would begin to charge banks for the privilege of holding money at the central bank, cutting its rate from 0.1 percent to -0.1 percent. It is the latest attempt by monetary policymakers to kickstart the economy three years after the government of Shinzo Abe launched an unprecedented assault on deflation and low growth.

The Bank of Japan has already embarked on the most ambitious programme of quantiative easing seen anywhere in the world, buying up assets to the tune of 80 trillion yen a year in government bonds. Central banks have increasingly taken recourse to negative rates, eight years after the onset of the financial crisis.

The European Central Bank imposed a negative deposit rate in 2014, following the likes of Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark in a round of global "competitive easing". The Bank of England's chief economist has suggested the UK may also need to impose negative rates to fight off the next recession.

Le Pen spoke at the end of the first meeting of the Europe of Nations and Freedom group within the European Parliament, which was formed last summer. The 36-member parliamentary group is the smallest in the European Parliament, but includes some parties gaining strength in the polls in their home countries.

At a news conference, Le Pen along with populist leaders from host Italy, the Netherlands and Austria expressed their common view that Europe's borders must be closed to mass migration from the Middle East and Africa and said that sovereignty over such policies must be restored to nations. They cited both the threat of terrorism and the strain on budgets.

"European structures that were poorly constructed are crumbling everywhere," Le Pen said. "But I have to say to European citizens that they have nothing to fear in the end of this ancient world. To the contrary, they can hope for the return of the nations and their freedom."

Also attending the Milan event Thursday and Friday were leaders of nationalist parties from the United Kingdom, Belgium, Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic.

The mosquitoes are a genetically modified (GM) version of the Aedes aegypti, the species responsible for transmitting the dengue virus to humans. The farm was inaugurated early last week and is expected to produce millions of GM insects each month.

The company breeds and releases into the wild male mosquitoes that don’t produce viable offspring. When females mate with the GMO males, they lay eggs that hatch but the larvae die before adulthood. Oxitec says trials conducted in Brazil and other countries over the past decade show releasing bioengineered male mosquitoes can reduce the wild Aedes aegypti population by 90 percent.

The primary concern, de Mier said, was the uncertainty and lack of scientific data regarding potential the GM mosquitoes will pose long-term harm to Key West’s ecosystem and its inhabitants. She and others who oppose the research also point out the potential risk of females being released along with the males, the possibility that the gene will mutate, and any unforeseen potential negative effects it might have on the area’s insects and wildlife. Researchers, however, dismiss these concerns.

In other words, Oxitec has been producing genetically modified mosquitoes on an industrial scale for years in Brazil, the country that now finds itself at ground zero of this Zika outbreak. With regard to Oxitec’s trials in Malaysia and Grand Cayman, Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology found, “Deficits in the scientific quality of regulatory documents and a general absence of accurate experimental descriptions available before releases start.” These are fascinating coincidences.

This brings us to an important point. Beyond the Bundesbank’s hype, its important to note that the repatriation information in all of the press releases and updates from the Bundesbank since 2013 has excluded most of the critical information about the actual gold bars being moved.

So, for example, in this latest update concerning the 2015 transport operations, there is no complete bar list (weight list) of the bars repatriated, no explanation of the quality of gold transferred and whether bars of various purities were involved, no comment on whether any bars had to be re-melted and recast, no indication of which refineries, if any, were used, and no explanation of why it takes a projected 7 years to bring back 300 tonnes of gold that could be flown from New York to Frankfurt in a week using a few C-130 US transporter carriers.

The White House announced on Saturday that Obama will visit the Islamic Society of Baltimore (ISB) on Wednesday. He has visited several mosques overseas as president but has resisted visiting one in the homeland. The purpose of the trip, according to the White House, is to “celebrate the contributions Muslim Americans make to our nation and reaffirm the importance of religious freedom to our way of life.”

But ISB is a curious choice for Obama’s first domestic visit. The mosque is a member of a network of mosques controlled by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a Muslim civil rights group named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror case. Several executives with that organization were convicted of sending money to aid the terrorist group Hamas.

An imam who served at ISB for a total of 15 years has also been a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood network and has worked for an Islamic relief group that was designated as a terrorist organization by the Treasury Department in 2004.

With so many Americans now unable to find jobs while many existing companies are closing plants and cutting jobs across the board, how will millions of Americans find food when warnings of widespread food shortages worldwide have already been going out from many different sources? As ANP has previously reported, the only thing standing in between civilization and anarchy are 9 meals.

Many Washington DC grocery stores had empty shelves after merely a snowstorm, leaving customers asking what happened to all the food and amazed at how quickly what was in the store was all gone. What happens when economic collapse, war or worse arrive and the chain of instant food and supplies nearly completely dries up? We're clearly heading in that direction and the answer to what may happen then is clear.

With the nation burning through almost $100 billion in reserves in 2015, things are not looking good for the US ally, as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects many deficit years ahead. But here’s where you and I should be concerned: Rather than first selling their physical assets that produce cash flow, the first and most logical move for the Saudis to make will be to start to sell their over-sized holdings of US debt.

How much US debt do they own? We don’t exactly know, as the US Treasury Department keeps that data mysteriously secret (despite reporting on every other nation individually). But what we do know is that the Saudis are the 3rd largest holders of our debt, so if they start selling it will likely impact us in a big way. China and Russia already began dumping US debt in 2015, as they plan to move away from the dollar system.

If you Google “ICELAND FORGIVES ENTIRE POPULATION OF MORTGAGE DEBT” you will get ‘About 359,000 Results’. Not one of them is a Media Outlet in the US. Not one single Major or Minor news outlet in America has mentioned a single word about this story. This is TOTAL MEDIA CENSORSHIP and a TOTAL MEDIA BLACKOUT, and it should tell you who owns and runs the Media in America.

BANKERS.

Foreign Bankers.

We are allowed to see a tortured, bleeding, dying Gaddafi anywhere, but we are not allowed to know about Debt Forgiveness. If you Google “DEBT FORGIVENESS” About 1 million 850 results. Not one of them talks about forgiving debt. Okay, 1 does. But still, out of over a million and a half results. The MAINSTREAM MEDIA totally censors anything to do with Debt Forgiveness.

Group leaders say they are a religion but they do not worship the devil. City Manager Ed Zuercher said in a statement Friday night that, at the council members' request, he would add an agenda item for next Wednesday's meeting that would change the way the city schedules groups that lead the prayer. The current system allows groups to call the city clerk's office to schedule a date.

Mayor Greg Stanton was unavailable for comment. The mayor's spokesman said his office had received 19 emails and 15 phone calls about the Satanist invocation. Stanton said earlier this week after the Satanist invocation was first reported: “I strongly disagree with this group’s message. However, the First Amendment protects free speech. As offensive as that message may be, the Constitution demands equal treatment under the law.”

A US Supreme Court ruling two years ago requires government bodies that have prayers before meetings to "let in everybody," said Dianne Post, an attorney and humanist who was the first non-religious speaker at a council meeting, last February. "If you allow God in the building, you have to allow the devil in the building," she said Friday, before word that the council members would attempt to overhaul the prayer rules. "The First Amendment says you cannot favor one church over another church, or a religion over a non-religion."

This sounds like the stuff of science fiction. In fact, every term I’ve just used comes from a questionnaire that the British Government planned to submit to children aged 13 to 18 as part of a research project sponsored by the Department of Education via the £2.9 million-a-year office of the Children’s Commissioner for England.

On Wednesday, the questionnaire — which also asks children whether they feel safe using single-sex toilets and would prefer unisex ones — mysteriously disappeared from the Children’s Commissioner’s website after the Daily Mail asked her about it. A spokesman said it was a draft, that the Commissioner had not cleared it and that a new version will be prepared with some of the questions withdrawn.

Too late. Some schools have already received the questionnaire, and details of the planned research project have been published by the feminist academics from Brighton, Lancaster and Cardiff universities who have been working on it with University College London’s Institute of Education since May last year.

Nearly every sentence of the documents in which those academics stress the importance of this research is clogged with the jargon of hardline feminists and their allies in the ‘trans’ lobby. That’s no surprise, given the CVs of the Leftie professors-cum-activists behind the scheme. One of them, Jessica Ringrose, who is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education at UCL, says that she teaches ‘in the areas of social justice, gender, sexuality and feminist qualitative research’.

Ringrose is the co-author of articles entitled ‘Boobs and Barbie: Feminist posthuman perspectives on gender, bodies and practice’; ‘Sexting, Ratings and (Mis)Recognition: Teen Boys Performing Classed and Racialised Masculinities in Digitally Networked Publics’; and ‘Posthuman performativity, gender and school bullying: Exploring the material-discursive intra-actions of skirts, hair, sluts, and poofs’.

The phrase ‘beyond parody’ comes to mind.

Ringrose would say that, as a journalist, I’m unqualified to judge her work. But, like her, I have a PhD in sociology and have sat through many boring right-on rants at academic conferences. Even by their standards, this is loopy feminist drivel. What’s truly depressing is that the questionnaire devised by Ringrose and colleagues was commissioned by a Conservative government. There could be no clearer demonstration of the way education has been infiltrated by a new generation of feminists.

Analysed: German psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Hans-Joachim Maaz has branded Angela Merkel an 'overachiever' and a 'narcissist' with an 'artificially inflated self-image'. [He] said in an analysis that Mrs Merkel is so determined not to admit that she was wrong about her migration policy that she has 'lost touch with reality'.

He describes her as a typical overachiever, who often go to great lengths to please others in order to get validation of their worth from others, as their self esteem is so low. Over-achievers feed off success and praise, and struggle to take criticism, which Dr Maaz claims fits for Mrs Merkel, Breitbart reports.

However, 45.2 percent of Germans said that Merkel’s migrant policy was not the reason for her to leave her post. Merkel has come under fire for her welcoming policy toward refugees, who have recently arrived in Germany in unprecedented numbers. She claims that the country can cope with the 1.1 million that arrived in 2015, and potentially more in 2016.

One of the issues that probably contributed to Merkel’s falling popularity is the recent sexual harassment attacks against women by refugees across Germany. State Interior Minister Ralf Jager said more than 1,200 people fell victim to attacks on New Year’s Eve in German cities, with more than a half of them suffering from sexual assaults.

On Tuesday, Merkel’s Bavarian allies sent her a letter threatening to take the German chancellor to the Constitutional Court if the federal government fails to secure the country’s borders and reduce the influx of asylum seekers.

For the first time this year, Microsoft partnered with the Iowa Democratic and Republican Parties to provide a technology platform with which the parties will run their caucuses. The software giant created separate mobile apps for each party, which officials at hundreds of caucuses across the state will use to report out results from individual precincts to party headquarters for tabulation.

The arrangement has aroused the suspicions of aides to Sanders, who regularly warn that corporate power and the billionaire class are trying to hijack democracy. Pete D’Alessandro, who is running the Iowa portion of Sanders’ campaign, questioned the motives of the major multinational corporation in an interview with MSNBC: “You’d have to ask yourself why they’d want to give something like that away for free.”

Skepticism about corporate involvement in election systems is nothing new. During the 2004 presidential election, for instance, there was widespread suspicion on the left about Diebold voting machines. With Sanders supporters already suspicious of meddling from forces they see as hostile to their candidate, including the Democratic Party and corporations, the backup system could help tamp down questions and conspiracy theories if results are contested.

What happens when the jobs are gone? What will people do, and how will they afford to live? The technology of the day has caught up to us sooner than anybody realized, and now robots and automation are destroying hundreds of millions of human jobs across the globe.

NAFTA, GATT, WTO and other multi-national trade agreements are just shuffling the deck, and have forced nations and populations to compete to the bottom for the lowest possible wages in order to hold onto work at all. Entire sectors will no longer be employed, and desperate people will turn to riots, looting and unruly behavior. Some may even turn on the “Davos elite” and other ruling members of the oligarchy.

As the talking points of their latest discussions at Davos indicate, they are worried about the revolutionary potential as a wave of mass unemployment prepares to hit. The ultra wealthy control more now than ever, as the Middle Class is completely destroyed and the struggling and poor turn to government for help.

Yet the scientists and technicians who unleashed Cybernetics brought it upon the population intentionally, or at least knowingly. Norbert Wiener, the foremost expert in this field, discussed the violent potential of technological revolution for jobs and economic survival at a management symposium in 1950 concerning the arrival of cybernetics.