Of course, in the aftermath of revelations that back in 2013, none other than the NSA was exposed for secretly 'monitoring' the SWIFT payments flows, one could wonder if being kicked out of SWIFT is a curse or a blessing, however Russia did not need any further warnings and as we reported less than a month ago, Russia launched its own 'SWIFT'-alternative, linking 91 credit institutions initially. This in turn suggested that de-dollarization is considerably further along than many had expected, which coupled with Russia's record dumping of TSYs, demonstrated just how seriously Putin is taking the threat to be isolated from the western payment system. It was only logical that he would come up with his own.

Today, Reuters report that China's international payment system, known simply enough as China International Payment System (CIPS), which serves to process cross-border yuan transactions is ready, and may be launched as early as September or October. According to Reuters, the launch of this will remove one of the biggest hurdles to internationalizing the yuan and should greatly increase global usage of the Chinese currency by cutting transaction costs and processing times.

It will also put the yuan on a more even footing with other major global currencies like the US dollar, as CIPS is expected to use the same messaging format as other international payment systems, making transactions smoother. CIPS, which would be a worldwide payments superhighway for the yuan, will replace a patchwork of existing networks that make processing renminbi payments a more cumbersome process.

In other words, while the west was using every provocation involving the Ukraine civil war as an opportunity to pressure Russia into developing its own cross-border payment system, it achieved not only just that but it also pushed China to accelerate the roll out of its own international payment system, in the process telegraphing to the world that the USD is replaceable as a reserve currency and giving any other nations (such as the BRICs) the green light to think of SWIFT as an alternative to either the Russian or Chinese payment system (which with enough political and financial stimulus, they would be delighted to do).

Less than 24 hours after starting to inquire about the dossier presented to him by a senior Labour Party politician, the editor was confronted in his office by a furious member of parliament who threatened him and demanded the documents. “He was frothing at the mouth and really shouting and spitting in my face,” Don Hale told The Daily Beast. “He was straight at me like a raging lion; he was ready to knock me through the wall.”

Despite the MP’s explosive intervention, Hale refused to hand over the papers which appeared to show that Leon Brittan, Margaret Thatcher’s Home Secretary, was fully aware of a pedophile network that included top politicians. The editor’s resistance was futile; the following morning, police officers from the counter-terror and intelligence unit known as Special Branch burst into the newspaper office, seized the material and threatened to have Hale arrested if he ever reported what had been found.

More than 30 years later, an inquiry into allegations of child sex abuse rings, murder, and cover-ups has been launched by the British government after Scotland Yard detectives said they believed statements by victims who claimed they were systematically abused as young boys at sex abuse parties attended by judges, politicians, intelligence officers, and staff at the royal palaces.

In 1983, a controversial MP, Geoffrey Dickens, had made a series of incendiary claims about active pedophiles in the corridors of power. He handed a file containing the names of alleged perpetrators to Leon Brittan; publicly the authorities shrugged off the claims and no trial or prosecution would follow. The dossier mysteriously disappeared.

Time and again crimes were reported but voices from above silenced the complaints before they came to court. Carl, who does not wish to give his second name, told The Daily Beast that this culture of secrecy, which had apparently paralyzed the British legal system, helped to scare off victims who wanted to report their powerful abusers. If a society is incapable of protecting its weakest and most vulnerable members from sexual assault by powerful adults, it’s hard to call that society civilized. Just horrible.

By churning through all of the detritus of your life — what you read, where you go, what you say —the government can predict what you will do. By mapping the synapses in your brain, scientists — and in turn, the government — will soon know what you remember. And by accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc.

Of course, none of these technologies are foolproof. Nor are they immune from tampering, hacking or user bias. Nevertheless, they have become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to render null and void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Consequently, no longer are we “innocent until proven guilty” in the face of DNA evidence that places us at the scene of a crime, behavior sensing technology that interprets our body temperature and facial tics as suspicious, and government surveillance devices that cross-check our biometrics, license plates and DNA against a growing database of unsolved crimes and potential criminals.

Indeed, there was a time when most Americans thought nothing of driving a few miles over the speed limit, pausing (rather than coming to a full stop) at a red light when making a right-hand turn if no one was around, jaywalking across the street, and letting their kid play hookie from school once in a while. Of course, that was before the era of speed cameras that ticket you for going even a mile over the posted limit, red light cameras that fine you for making safe “rolling stop” right-hand turns on red, surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition software mounted on street corners, and school truancy laws that fine parents for “unexcused” absences.

My, how times have changed. Today, there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence — especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home. That’s because technology — specifically the technology employed by the government against the American citizenry — has upped the stakes dramatically so that there’s little we do that is not known by the government. In such an environment, you’re either a paragon of virtue, or you’re a criminal.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re all criminals. This is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.

How do you survive in the American police state? We’re running out of options. As Philip K Dick, the visionary who gave us Minority Report and Blade Runner, advised: “If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.”

He told LBC: "We’ve got a strategy to encourage people, with their cameras, that is to move them down to eye level." But he warned they needed to be positioned correctly to be useful, adding: "Over the last year as facial recognition software has got better we can apply the software to the images of burglaries or robberies and we can compare those images with the images we take when we arrest people.

"What we need to be able to do is to be able to compare that photograph with the images we have of people committing a crime. As importantly, you get a whole shot of what happened at the event: What did they steal? Did they use a knife? You get all that. But more relevant today is a face. That’s what we need."

In addition, the institute operates an educational center for visitors and a preparatory training program for members of the priestly family who wish to be ready to serve as soon as the Temple is rebuilt. The altar is a central component to the Biblical sacrificial service. In fact, there were separate altars for the incense and for other sacrifices.

According to the Bible, the altar may not be made out of stones hewn by metal implements. The altar prepared by the Temple Institute, under the direction of architect Rabbi Shmuel Balsam, follows this requirement.

It is constructed instead from bricks fired at roughly 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit), to withstand the immense heat of the Temple’s eternal flame and the weight of the sacrificial animals. Its measurements conform to the interpretation of Maimonides.

What makes the altar so unique is that it can be disassembled and reassembled easily, allowing it to be transported quickly and efficiently from its current location, on display at the institute, to the Temple Mount when the time comes. It was inaugurated in December 2014 and is now ready for use. With Passover around the corner, and the Passover sacrifice a central component of the traditional celebration, perhaps that time will come soon!

In an uncharacteristically short meeting of the eurozone’s finance ministers in Brussels, president of the eurogroup Jeroen Dijsselbloem said the Greek government should start enacting the reforms it needs to complete its €7.2 billion in bail-out extension and avert bankruptcy. "We seem to be losing time now - since the last eurogroup little has been done in terms of future talks, in terms of implementation", said Mr Dijsselbloem.

"We have spent the last two weeks discussing who will meet who, where, and in what configuration. It’s been a complete waste of time." Athens drafted a six-point programme of economic reforms on Friday, but was warned its measures were not enough to satisfy the demands of its lenders. Dampening the idea that Greece could be granted an early release of some portion of its bail-out funds, Mr Dijsselbloem said Europe would only countenance such a move if Athens proved its committment to "the whole package" of creditor conditionality.

“If there is time pressure for financing needs that should be helpful for getting the package back on track," he added. Greece's Leftist government has presented plans to monitor state spending and fight tax evasion using students, tourists and housekeepers as undercover tax inspectors. But the proposals have attracted derision from a host of Europe's creditor nations, who are pushing Athens to implement more austerity if it is to be granted a four-month extension of its programme.

“The Greeks must implement now what they promised to do, and must especially refrain from taking one-sided measures,” said Germany’s Wolfgang Schaeuble.

“If they decide to kick us out, the damage will be greater for them,” said Manolis Glezos, the war-time resister who ripped the Nazi flag from the Acropolis in 1941. Mr Glezos, a Syriza MEP and the party’s venerated elder statesman, told the Daily Telegraph that his movement never wished to take Greece out of monetary union but will not shrink from doing so if EMU authorities insist on suffocating austerity. “You cannot attend the negotiating table without carrying this option along,” he said.

Greek premier Alexis Tsipras is barely more diplomatic than his ministers. Over the weekend he threatened a snap vote on the terms of austerity if Eurogroup finance ministers reject Greece’s latest list of reform proposals. "If we were to hold a referendum tomorrow with the question, 'do you want your dignity back or a continuation of these undignified policies,' then everyone would choose dignity regardless of difficulties that would come with it," he told Spiegel Magazine.

To drive home his threat, Mr Tsipras compared the eurozone to a woollen jumper. “Once it begins to unravel, you can’t stop it any more,” he said. Yet the Eurogroup did in fact reject Greece’s reform proposals in Brussels today, and in caustic terms. "We have to stop wasting time and really start talks seriously," said Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the group’s chief.

On the global stage its role should be to promote those same principles, not revert to militaristic tub-thumping. Jean-Claude Juncker’s demand for a European army flies in the face of those principles (Report, 9 March). Tories, Labour, Lib Dems and Ukip are united in opposing this proposal, and I agree with them, though not for the same reasons. It really is time that the human race learned to settle its differences without periodically slaughtering one another and without wasting precious resources on the means to do so.

Of course, that applies to Russia as well, but starting a new cold war is not likely to influence Putin in that direction.

When we sleep, our brain replays the day's activities. The pattern of brain activity exhibited by mice when they explore a new area during the day, for example, will reappear, speeded up, while the animal sleeps. This is thought to be the brain practising an activity - an essential part of learning. People who miss out on sleep do not learn as well as those who get a good night's rest, and when the replay process is disrupted in mice, so too is their ability to remember what they learned the previous day.

Karim Benchenane and his colleagues at the Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution in Paris, France, hijacked this process to create new memories in sleeping mice. The team targeted the rodents' place cells - neurons that fire in response to being in or thinking about a specific place. These cells are thought to help us form internal maps, and their discoverers won a Nobel prize last year.

These modifications could be for better or worse, says Frank. "There are a few ways of thinking about this – there's the medical application, and there's the more Orwellian application, where the government gets inside people's heads and starts to control them," he says. "It's unbelievably hard to do any of this, so I'm not deeply worried about it, but it's not impossible that it could happen."

Every nuclear power is spending lavishly to upgrade its atomic arsenal. Russia’s defence budget has grown by over 50% since 2007, and fully a third of it is devoted to nuclear weapons: twice the share of, say, France. China, long a nuclear minnow, is adding to its stocks and investing heavily in submarines and mobile missile batteries. Pakistan is amassing dozens of battlefield nukes to make up for its inferiority to India in conventional forces.

North Korea is thought to be capable of adding a warhead a year to its stock of around ten, and is working on missiles that can strike the west coast of the United States. Even the Nobel peace laureate in the White House has asked Congress for almost $350 billion to undertake a decade-long programme of modernisation of America’s arsenal.

Worst of all is the instability. During much of the cold war the two superpowers, anxious to avoid Armageddon, were willing to tolerate the status quo. Today the ground is shifting under everyone’s feet. Some countries want nuclear weapons to prop up a tottering state.

Pakistan insists its weapons are safe, but the outside world cannot shake the fear that they may fall into the hands of Islamist terrorists, or even religious zealots within its own armed forces. When history catches up with North Korea’s Kim dynasty, as sooner or later it must, nobody knows what will happen to its nukes — whether they might be inherited, sold, eliminated or, in a last futile gesture, detonated.

Others want nuclear weapons not to freeze the status quo, but to change it. Russia has started to wield nuclear threats as an offensive weapon in its strategy of intimidation. Its military exercises routinely stage dummy nuclear attacks on such capitals as Warsaw and Stockholm. Mr Putin’s speeches contain veiled nuclear threats. Dmitry Kiselev, one of the Kremlin’s mouthpieces, has declared with relish that Russian nuclear forces could turn America into “radioactive ash”.

Iran, for its part, wants to deliver an emphatic message: even if its diplomats compromise over the nuclear programme in the interests of ridding the country of sanctions, General Suleimani and his comrades will ensure that the Shia Islamic Republic remains a rising power, determined to reshape the entire Middle East in its own image. As the general himself told the official media in Tehran: “Today we see signs of the Islamic Revolution being exported throughout the region - from Bahrain to Iraq and from Syria to Yemen and North Africa.”

And that is precisely what Mr Netanyahu and the Sunni rulers of the Gulf most fear. They believe that a nuclear deal between Iran and America would herald a fundamental change in the balance of power in the Middle East. In particular, they think that an agreement to settle the nuclear issue would implicitly convey American acceptance of Iran’s domination of swathes of the region.

Already, Iranian tentacles spread far and wide. In Lebanon, the Islamic Republic has more direct influence than any other foreign power, thanks to its umbilical relationship with Hizbollah, the radical Shia movement. In Syria, General Suleimani has quietly masterminded Bashar al-Assad’s struggle to stay in power, deploying thousands of troops from the Revolutionary Guard and Hizbollah. In Iraq, General Suleimani is commanding the struggle on the ground against Isil, reinforcing his country’s ironclad alliance with the Shia-led government in Baghdad.

And in Yemen, Shia rebels have taken over the capital, Sana’a, with the benefit of Iranian weapons and support. All this has led Iranian officials to boast that four Arab capitals - Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sana’a - are under their de facto control. If this could take place in the teeth of sanctions and Iran’s bitter rivalry with America, then what might happen if a nuclear deal sweeps away the embargo and brings the superpower’s enmity to an end?

The war special interests in the United States along with its co-conspirators plan to wage across the planet encompasses not only the Middle East and North Africa, but also Russia, China, and beyond. It threatens the lives, peace, and prosperity of all on Earth. If it is not exposed, and the special interests driving it not undermined, uprooted, and purged from humanity, none will escape the dark days that inevitably lie ahead.

The Unheeded Warning

It was in 2007, in the New Yorker, that veteran journalist Seymour Hersh published his lengthy, prophetic report, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” Within it, Washington, Riyadh, and Tel Aviv were exposed amidst a criminal conspiracy to use sectarian extremists in a proxy war against Iran and its allies in Syria and Lebanon. The impending conflict was described as “cataclysmic.”

The report stated explicitly that: “To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The US has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”

On the edge of Karachi, on an earthquake-prone seafront vulnerable to tsunamis and not far from where al-Qaeda militants nearly hijacked a Pakistan navy vessel last fall, China is constructing two large nuclear reactors for energy-starved Pakistan. The new reactors, utilizing a cutting-edge design not yet in use anywhere in the world, will each provide 1,100 megawatts to Pakistan’s national energy grid. They are being built next to a much smaller 1970s-era reactor on a popular beach where fishermen still build wooden boats by hand.

But the new ACP-1000 reactors will also stand less than 20 miles from downtown Karachi, a dense and rapidly growing metropolis of about 20 million residents. Now, in a rare public challenge to the Islamabad government’s nuclear ambitions, some Pakistanis are pushing back. Of all places to locate a reactor, they argue, who could possibly make a case for this one?

“You are talking about a city one-third the population of the United Kingdom,” said Abdul Sattar Pirzada, a Karachi lawyer who is seeking to get the project halted. “If there would be an accident, this would cripple Karachi, and if you cripple Karachi, you cripple Pakistan.” Some US diplomatic officials have also expressed concern about the initiative, in particular about China’s role in providing nuclear technology to Pakistan. “The risks are there. You cannot discount them, but you prepare for them,” said Khawaja Asif, Pakistan’s water, power and defense minister. “We are a nuclear power, so don’t underestimate us.”

Musadaq Malik, a Sharif adviser on energy issues, counters that a country that trusts its military to possess nuclear weapons can also trust its government to maintain a Chinese nuclear power plant. “We may look irresponsible, but we are not that irresponsible,” Malik said. “We have engineers, we have scientists, we have our security apparatus… Like other nations, we have done all of this before, reasonably well.”

No-one would think that what happened last week at Austria’s failed Hypo Alpe-Adria Bank International falls into quite the same category; we are meant to be in the recovery phase of the latest global banking crisis, so this is more about re-setting the system than again bringing it to its knees, right?

Well, make up your own mind. I suspect neither financial markets nor policymakers have yet caught onto the full significance of the latest turn of events. In a nutshell, the Austrian government has had enough of funding the bank’s losses, and announced plans to “bail-in” external creditors to the tune of €7.6 billion instead. Essentially, what the Austrian government is doing is cutting loose an entire region, rather in the way the federal authorities in the US allowed Detroit to go bust a number of years ago.

It’s a mini-Greece going off in the heartlands of Europe.