But perhaps most significantly is France's continued apparent pivot towards Russia... Following Francois Hollande's calls for greater autonomy for Eastern Ukraine, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has come out in apparent support of Russia (and specifically against the US).

“We are part of a common civilization with Russia,” said Sarkozy, speaking on Saturday at the congress of the Union for a Popular Movement Party (UMP), which the former president heads. “The interests of the Americans with the Russians are not the interests of Europe and Russia,” he said adding that “we do not want the revival of a Cold War between Europe and Russia.”

“Crimea has chosen Russia, and we cannot blame it for doing so,” he said, pointing out that “we must find the means to create a peacekeeping force to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine.”

“We think there will be significant volatility in the second quarter of 2015 – it is almost inevitable”, he went on to say. May's election outcome is considered unprecedented, in that forecasters are incredibly divided over the likely outcome, with many signalling that the result is highly uncertain.

Goldman Sachs has described the upcoming vote as the "most uncertain election in a century". UBS Wealth Management research found that the lack of clarity over an outcome "may exert a downward pull on some UK assets". If the election resulted in a "double minority" - whereby two parties both failed to come up with the seats to form a coalition government - then this would be "particularly troubling".

"Declining support for the two major parties and the rising popularity of new alternatives - SNP, UKIP, Greens - significantly reduce the chances of a single-party victory," said UBS. "For a nation accustomed to government by a single party, this transition [towards smaller parties] is not going to be smooth," it continued.

“You can control your SmartTV, and use many of its features, with voice commands. If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you. In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.”

As an Electronic Frontier Foundation activist pointed out earlier today, via Twitter, the concept of a TV screen that might be snooping on your private conversations — and thus broadcasting a chilling effect by inculcating self-censorship within its viewers — is straight out of George Orwell’s 1984.

The Samsung example is just the latest privacy-related concern involving smart TVs — many of which routinely require users to agree to having their viewing data sent back to the TV maker and shared by them with advertisers and others simply in order for them to gain access to the service. But the clarity of wording in Samsung’s privacy policy is impressive — given it amounts to a warning not to talk about private stuff in front of your telescreen because multiple unknown entities can listen in.

Creepy, tech-fueled privacy intrusions are rarely detailed as clearly as that. So full marks to Samsung for clarity. Albeit, as per usual, these warnings are contained within the most overlooked type of document on the Internet so will easily go unnoticed by the average user.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record. Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).

They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record – for reasons GHCN and Giss have never plausibly explained – has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known. This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.

But he is likely to run up against a firm “no” from Europe’s biggest economy, which argues that Berlin does not owe it a cent and that the historic issue has long been closed. “Nearly 70 years after the end of World War II, the question of reparations has lost legitimacy,” a German finance ministry spokesman said recently.

Now, with Greece struggling under more than 300 billion euros ($340 billion) of debt, calculations that Athens is still owed just over half that amount, or 162 billion euros left over from the war, is sure to touch a nerve. Tsipras’s Syriza party and its unlikely coalition partner, the nationalist Independent Greeks party led by Panos Kammenos, plan to re-open the claim, whose impact is highly symbolic in Germany for harking back to its darkest chapter.

Haunted by its Nazi past, Germany prides itself on its efforts to come to terms with its history. Tspiras, a former communist, lost no time after his election victory in laying flowers at a memorial near Athens where dozens of Greek leftists were executed by German occupation troops in 1944.

In December, when concern about the vaccine led to a warning to Americans to prepare for 'a potentially severe flu season', still the UK authorities said nothing. In the last two weeks, there has been a 40 per cent rise in deaths among over-65s compared to 2014 – with flu a major factor. How many lives might have been saved if people who wrongly believed the jab would protect them had been told to take greater precautions or anti-viral drugs?

How much money was spent sending reminder letters and organising special clinics to administer a jab already suspected of being largely useless? Wasting taxpayers' cash is bad enough. If the silence of officialdom has cost lives, it would be nothing less than a scandal.

Britain's former top Nato commander General Sir Richard Shirreff said the UK should be playing a larger role in the efforts to resolve the crisis amid fears that it could lead to an all-out European war. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'This is the most serious crisis to have faced Europe, arguably, since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. There is a threat of total war. The UK is a major Nato member, it is a major EU member, it is a member of the UN Security Council, and it is unfortunate that the weight that the British Prime Minister could bring to efforts to resolve this crisis appear to be absent.'

Meanwhile US Vice President Joe Biden has warned that America must stand together with Europe to stop escalating Russian military involvement amid reports of transatlantic divisions over whether to send weapons to support the Western-backed Kiev government. 'We, the US and Europe as a whole, have to stand with Ukraine at this moment,' Biden said. 'Russia cannot be allowed to redraw the map of Europe.'

Biden also accused Putin of riding roughshod over peace efforts. 'Ukraine is fighting for their very survival right now. Russia continues to escalate the conflict by sending mercenaries and tanks and, as we euphemistically say in the United states, little green men, without patches, very sophisticated special operations soldiers. President Putin continues to call for new peace plans as his troops roll through the Ukrainian countryside, and he absolutely ignores every agreement his country has signed in the past.'

And according to the latest update from the 29 west coast ports that serve as the entry point of the bulk of Asia/Pacific trade into and out of the US, things are about to get far worse for America's manufacturing base, because as RILA [Retail Industry Leaders Association] reported earlier, talks between the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) representing port management, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) officially broke down on Wednesday, and without an agreement, experts have suggested that nearly 30 west coast ports could be shut down within a week.

As RILA reports, "a work slowdown during contract negotiations over the past seven months has already created logistic nightmares for American exporters, manufacturers and retailers dependent on an efficient supply chain. A complete shutdown would be catastrophic, with hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk if America’s supply chain grinds to a halt."

The association of shipping lines, terminal operators and stevedores made public details of its contract offer, including 3 percent annual raises over five years, retaining employer-paid health care, and raising pensions by 11 percent. The average dockworker now makes $147,000 a year in salary, plus $35,000 a year in employer-paid health care and an annual pension of $80,000, according to an association press release.

A 20-day lockout now would cost more than $2 billion a day, the association said in a report last year, including losses to railroads, ocean carriers and the broader economy. Which incidentally, in an economy that is desperate for any "one-time, non-recurring" item to explain what is now global secular stagnation and economic slowdown, an excuse such as a port strike, or a harsh winter, or a strong dollar, or plunging crude, may be precisely the scapegoat that the central-planning doctor ordered.

One of the main reasons why the Germans followed Hitler with such enthusiasm (also never mentioned) is that he employed the brilliant economist Hjalmar Schacht to reform the currency and give the banknotes hard-currency value again. The people would have followed any Pied Piper who could do that. But even Schacht cheated. He passed off full employment creating motorways, infrastructure and weapons of war as prosperity whereas they just piled up debt.

But the plan was to use the weapons to invade all their neighbours, confiscate the central banks’ gold and currency reserves and thus firm up the Reichsmark. And it worked – for a while. But when they lost the Nazis left not just Germany but all of Europe bankrupt. After 1946 when Adenauer morphed the Reichsmark into the Deutschmark he employed another brilliant economist, Ludwig Erhard. His job: keep the Deutschmark hard, no matter how much discipline was required. And they did – trade unions included. That is why German unions never went on strike while ours struck this country into ruin. And it worked.

The whole economic miracle was based on a single and simple creed – never debauch the currency. Go through the hell of self-denial if you have to but keep the currency rock solid. Now they are in the eurozone and what is happening? An Italian at the European Central Bank is debauching the currency.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel – who was raised in an East Germany with a loo-paper currency – is against it but this time, for the first time, she has been overruled. She is between a rock and a very hard place. She hates the europrinting spree but is also a fanatical supporter of the EU and all its works. But that may not be the mass verdict of the German people for much longer.

Instead, debt continues to grow in nearly all countries, in both absolute terms and relative to GDP. This creates fresh risks in some countries and limits growth prospects in many,” according to new research carried out by consultants McKinsey in 47 countries. The amount of world debt reached $199 trillion at the end of 2014, with the growth rate exceeding the pace of global economic expansion and the debt to GDP ratio increased from 269 to 286 percent. “Higher levels of debt pose questions about financial stability and whether some countries face the risk of a crisis.”

Geographically, Ireland was the country where the debt to GDP ratio saw a record increase – of 172 percent. The ratio in Japan added 64 percent and remains the world’s highest at 400 percent. In Russia, the debt to GDP ratio saw a moderate growth by 19 percent, remaining relatively low at 65 percent.

China is one of the key concerns as debt there has skyrocketed almost quadrupling, from $7.4 trillion in 2007 to $28.2 trillion in mid-2014. The debt-to-GDP ratio reached 282 percent comparing to 269 percent of the US. Although total Chinese debt is still manageable, experts are concerned with worrisome levels of debt in the property sector and the rapid expansion of shadow banking. “China’s total debt, as a percentage of GDP, now exceeds that of the United States.”

To avoid another crisis, the governments might take recourse to new ways of reducing the national debt such as larger sales of assets, non-recurrent wealth taxes and more effective programs of debt restructuring, the report said. “Policy makers will need to consider a full range of responses to reduce debt as well as innovations to make debt less risky and make the impact of a future crisis less catastrophic.”