Several hours later the decree which was posted in the government gazette has finally percolated among the population, and the response to what even ordinary Greeks realize is now the endgame, is less than exuberant. Bloomberg reports, that “as Greece struggles to find cash to stay afloat, local authorities say they oppose a government decision to use their reserves for short-term financing.”

“The government’s decision to seize our reserves not only raises legal and constitutional issues, but also a moral one,” said George Papanikolaou, mayor of Glyfada, the third-largest municipality in the metropolitan region of Attica after Athens and Piraeus. “We have a responsibility to serve our citizens,” Papanikolaou said by phone on Monday.

Glyfada has about 16 million euros in cash reserves, he said. George is unhappy because as recently as tomorrow, he will find there is precisely zero euros in his public bank account, as all the money has now been forcibly sequestered by the government in order to repay future Troika, pardon, IMF obligations.

Sadly for Greece, this is the only option left as the money has now fully run out: Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras ordered local governments and central government entities to move their cash balances to the central bank for investment in short-term state debt.

But there is no such thing as routine remodelling when it comes to the most contested piece of real estate in Jerusalem, where the presence of a mere screwdriver can threaten to ignite religious tensions. The carpet has sparked a verbal holy war over the hilltop compound, which is revered by Jews and Muslims whose competing claims often spill over into violence.

Israeli archaeological authorities say the repairs were carried out behind their backs, and an Israeli government minister urged an immediate halt to the work, claiming it might cause irreparable damage. Frustrated Israeli researchers say previously undocumented ancient floor designs were discovered when the old carpets were peeled off, but they didn’t get a chance to document the designs before workmen covered them up with the new carpet.

And some researchers claim the Bible’s deepest secrets may lie beneath some of the newly exposed floor designs. “Something is there. I don’t know what. But something is hidden there,” said Israeli archaeologist Zachi Dvira, who studies the site.

Ancient Jewish traditions say the gold-cased Ark of the Covenant, which contained the Ten Commandments, may have been hidden away in a chamber when the First Jewish Temple was destroyed some 2,500 years ago. It’s an Indiana Jones-type mystery that touches upon a holy grail for biblical enthusiasts.

Despite being the holiest site in Judaism, Jews and other non-Muslims are prevented from praying there due to an arrangement between the police and the Waqf Islamic authorities which administer the site, also home to the Al Aqsa Mosque complex. In order not to "offend" Muslim worshippers, Jewish visits are severely restricted and religious-looking Jews are closely monitored for any hint they might be praying - and are often promptly arrested if suspected of doing so. In one recent case an IDF soldier was arrested after bowing his head as he left the holy site.

Jewish Temple Mount campaigners have branded the draconian laws a capitulation to terrorism, noting Israeli authorities have all but abandoned the Temple Mount to Islamist groups. After a Jewish woman protests at the restrictions, citing the court ruling, the officer brushes her off: "The court can say whatever it wants, the police have a policy here. Everybody (listen up): no courts, no nothing. The entire police have a policy, and we act according to that policy, OK?"

Temple Institute International Director Rabbi Chaim Richman, who was with the group at the time, branded the incident "a terrible indictment of the government." "It is absolutely insane that on Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day) we're not allowed to say a prayer for those that fell. Is there any other place in the world where the police could get away with so flagrantly violating a court order, and saying 'we don't care what the court says, we have our own rules'?"

New York Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe said that the apes, held at Stony Brook University for research purposes, are covered by a writ of habeas corpus — a basic legal principle that lets people challenge the validity of their detention. However, hours later, Jaffe amended her court order to remove the habeas corpus language, essentially reversing the earlier decision.

The non-decision comes two years after the Nonhuman Rights Project, an animal rights group, brought legal cases in a bid to free four chimpanzees. The group said the animals — Hercules and Leo at Stony Brook University, and two others on private property — were being unlawfully imprisoned, and should be relocated to a sanctuary. Three lower court judges dismissed the cases as they were raised in 2013, but the Nonhuman Rights Project appealed, eventually convincing Jaffe that the animals were sufficiently intelligent to grant them what amounts to basic human rights — but only temporarily.

Jaffe has ordered a Stony Brook representative to appear in court on May 6th to reply to the Nonhuman Rights Project's petition that the animals are being held unlawfully. It could be that the judge organized the hearing to listen to both sides of the case before making a decision, and will ultimately decide that Stony Brook can keep the apes. Richard Cupp, a law professor at California's Pepperdine University told Science it would be "quite surprising" if the judge made "a momentous substantive finding" that chimps were legally people without both parties being able to have their say.

By late November 2011, international credit markets were exhibiting the same danger signs of stress that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, and it appeared that the long-feared next stage of a global financial implosion was at hand. It took the simultaneous actions of the world’s central banks, followed by a “final” bailout of Greece by the “troika” of the IMF, the European Central Bank and the Eurozone countries to the tune of 240 billion Euros.

Now, in the latest chapter of that on-again, off-again crisis, we face something close to the opposite reaction. There is a level of complacency in global financial markets and among world leaders that may be as irrational and extreme as the panic was three years ago.

But the recent bout of brinksmanship between Germany and Greece raises a simple, pungent question: Is it really worth the risk, just to stand firm on the principle of austerity? Is Greece worth gambling the future of the eurozone, and by extension the stability of the global financial system — not to mention the fragile health of a still-barely-recovered US economy as we head into the 2016 presidential campaign?

You would think that the answer should be clear.

No, it is not worth the risk of an implosion.

No, Greece, with its 11 million people and around $400 billion of debt, is not important enough in the grand scheme to imperil the economic stability of the eurozone and indeed the whole European Union with its $16 trillion of official GDP, and its nearly 500 million citizens.

And no, the principle of Greece abiding by its obligations and reducing its debt-to-GDP ratio – seen as so imperative by the austeristas – should not be sufficient to imperil the financial stability of the entire world, a tenuous but real stability that would be, at the very least, rocked by eurozone turmoil.

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.