Many Greeks were also withdrawing their cash because they fear the country might be forced back onto the drachma. However a little known fact is that, Greeks who had prepared for bank runs by withdrawing cash and buying gold and silver bullion and then lodging that bullion and indeed cash into safety deposit boxes have also been caught up in the draconian capital controls.

We have warned about this for many years and warned as recently as April this year that people should avoid using safety deposit boxes in banks. “Greeks cannot withdraw cash left in safe deposit boxes at Greek banks as long as capital restrictions remain in place”, Nadia Valavani, a Deputy Finance Minister in Greece told local television station according to a Reuters report.

The report was little noticed as it was published on the less trafficked ‘Bonds’ section of Reuters.com on Sunday July 5th at 1:58 pm EDT or 6:58 pm GMT. Sunday afternoon and evening is a time when traders, investors and even eagle eyed news junkies are likely to be taking a well earned break. The notion that safe deposit boxes – facilities that are used by many precious metals investors and others seeking to safeguard their wealth and valuables – need to come under capital controls to protect against bank runs is a dubious one.

This cash is not in the banking system – its withdrawal would have no negative impact on the system. Its availability to its owner might bring cash into circulation which would benefit the wider community. The only reason to put access to safe deposit boxes under capital controls – measures which were agreed between the government and the banks – is because the banks and governments wish to retain the option of confiscating the contents of those boxes should the crisis deepen.

International inspectors will have the power to veto legislation. The radical-Left Syriza government will be forced to repeal a raft of laws passed since it took power in January, stripping away the last fig leaf of sovereignty. “It is unconditional surrender. We get serious austerity with no debt relief.

We will have foreign supervisors crawling over everything,” said Costas Lapavitsas, a Syriza MP and one of 40 or so rebels who plan to abstain or vote against the deal, mostly from the Left Platform. “They are telling us that from now on, they are going to govern the country. I am afraid there is going to be a real fight about this. There is a groundswell of anger and it is now perfectly clear to a lot of people that the only way out of neo-colonial servitude is to break free of monetary union,” he said.

Raising a perfect red heifer in accordance with the Biblical commandment requires advance planning, preparation and constant supervision according to Rabbi Richman. In order for a red heifer to be considered kosher for Biblical use, it must literally be raised from birth under specific conditions and in a controlled environment, which has never been attempted in Israel during modern times.

“Three decades of research and preparation have led us to this special day. During this period known as the ‘Three Weeks,’ as world Jewry mourns the destruction of the Second Holy Temple, the Temple Institute has taken a bold move towards the third. Having already prepared over 70 sacred vessels including the golden menorah and High Priest’s gemstone-encrusted breastplate, now is the time to fulfill the commandment of the Red Heifer,” said Rabbi Richman.

According to Jewish tradition, a red heifer is a female cow that is three years of age with a particular reddish hue and cannot have even two hairs of any other color. It cannot be used for any type of labor and must be blemish free. The biblical commandment regarding the red heifer can be found in the Book of Numbers [chapter 19] and is considered as the only antidote to the state of impurity brought on by death.

The key event was the Greek referendum on the European Union's demand for further austerity in exchange for infusions of cash to save the Greek banking system. The Syriza party had called the vote to strengthen its hand in dealing with the European demands. The Greek government's view was that the European terms would save Greece from immediate disaster but at the cost of impoverishing the country in the long term. The austerity measures demanded would, in their view, make any sort of recovery impossible. Facing a choice between a short-term catastrophe in the banking system and long-term misery, the Greeks saw themselves in an impossible position.

The European Union is founded on the dual principles of an irrevocable community of nations that have joined together but have retained their national sovereignty. The specifics are less important than the fact that Greece invoked its sovereign right, and Germany responded by enforcing an agreement that compelled the Greeks to cede those rights.

There were two sides of the Greek position that frightened the Germans. The first was that Athens was trying to use its national sovereignty to compel the European Union to allow Greece to avoid the pain of austerity. This would, in effect, shift the burden of the Greek debt from the Greeks to the European Union, which meant Germany. On the other hand, if the Greeks left the European Union, it would have created a precedent that would in the end shatter the bloc. If the European Union was an elective affinity, in Goethe's words, something you could enter and then leave, then the long-term viability of the bloc was in serious doubt. And there was no reason those doubts couldn't be extended to the free trade zone.

And with this, the Germans did something they never wanted to do: resurrect fairly unambiguously the idea that Germany is the sovereign and dominant nation-state in Europe, and that it has the power and the will to unilaterally impose its will on another nation. Certainly the niceties of votes by finance ministers and prime ministers were adhered to, but it was the Germans who conducted the real negotiations and who imposed their will on Greece.

This is not over, of course. It is now up to the Greek government to implement its agreements, and it does so in the face of the Greek referendum. The situation in Greece is desperate because of the condition of the banking system. It was the pressure point that the Germans used to force Greek capitulation. But Greece is now facing not only austerity, but also foreign governance. The Germans' position is they do not trust the Greeks. They do not mean the government now, but the Greek electorate. Therefore, they want monitoring and controls. This is reasonable from the German point of view, but it will be explosive to the Greeks.

The point of the matter is not going away, and not only because the Greek response is unpredictable; poverty versus sovereignty is a heady issue, especially when the Greeks will both remain poor and lose some sovereignty. The Germans made an example of Cyprus and now Greece. The leading power of Europe will not underwrite defaulting debtors. It will demand political submission for what help is given. This is not a message that will be lost in Europe, whatever the anti-Greek feeling is now.

Let's get things started with this paragraph from the German memo of things Greece should do (emphasis added):

“…adopt more ambitious product market reforms with a clear timetable for implementation of all OECD toolkit-I recommendations, including Sunday trade, sales periods, pharmacy ownership, milk, bakeries, [over the counter pharmaceutical products is a next step], as well as for the opening of macro-critical closed professions (eg ferry transportation). On the follow-up of the OECD toolkit-II, manufacturing needs to be included in the prior action;”

This is a brief, poorly written reference to a long series of policy recommendations you can read in this audit of Greek economic policy undertaken by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Sunday provision is very simple and easy to understand — Germany thinks Greece should change its law so stores can open on Sundays on the same terms as they open on any other day.

What the German government is asking the Greek government to do about this is something that Germany rather infamously declines to do itself. In other words, they think the eurozone would be better off without Greece but they don't want to come out and say so. So they're piling on demands and hoping Greece turns them down. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, is at odds with a trend across the region in recent years to liberalize labor laws that previously kept stores closed on Sundays. As a result, the country’s bricks-and-mortar shops risk missing out on sales as they face stiffer competition from Internet retailers.

Two weeks ago, Germany’s top administrative court stopped the state of Hesse - home to the country’s financial capital of Frankfurt - from letting libraries, video stores and lottery sellers operate on Sundays, ruling it was protecting the right of workers to have the day off. It's simply not credible to believe that this is a genuine sticking point for the Germans. They are looking for reasons to keep disagreeing.

The terms are harsher by a full order of magnitude than those rejected by Greek voters in a landslide referendum a week ago, and therefore can never command democratic assent. They must be carried through by a Greek parliament still dominated by MPs from Left and Right who loathe every line of the summit statement, the infamous SN 4070/15, and have only agreed – if they have agreed – with a knife to their throats.

EMU inspectors can veto legislation. The emasculation of the Greek parliament has been slipped into the text. All that is missing is a unit of EMU gendarmes. Such terms are unenforceable. The creditors have sought to nail down the new memorandum by transferring €50 billion of Greek assets to “an independent fund that will monetise the assets through privatisations and other means”. It will be used in part to pay off debts. This fund will be under EU "supervision". The cosmetic niceties of sovereignty will be preserved by letting the Greek authorities manage its day to day affairs. Nobody is fooled.

Nobel economist Paul Krugman says the EMU demands are “madness” on every level. “What we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line. This has no bearing at all on the underlying economics of austerity,” he said. “This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept; but even so, it’s a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was supposed to stand for,” he said. Yes, Syriza has blinked, though there are many chapters in this sorry saga yet to come.

I will return to the behaviour of Germany and the diplomatic disaster that has unfolded over the last few days. For now let me just quote the verdict of historian Simon Schama. “If Tsipras was wearing the crown of King Pyrrhus this time last week, Merkel is wearing it now. Her ultimatum is the beginning of the end of the EU,” he said.

Exactly.

Negotiations between Iran and six world powers - the US, UK, France, China, Russia and Germany - began in 2006. The so-called P5+1 want Iran to scale back its sensitive nuclear activities to ensure that it cannot build a nuclear weapon. Iran, which wants crippling international sanctions lifted, has always insisted that its nuclear work is peaceful.

There has been stiff resistance to a deal from conservatives both in Iran and the US. The US Congress has 60 days in which to consider the deal, though Mr Obama said he would veto any attempt to block it. The Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives, John Boehner, said the deal would only "embolden" Tehran. "Instead of stopping the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, this deal is likely to fuel a nuclear arms race around the world," he added. Israel's government has also warned against an agreement.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it was a "stunning historic mistake" that would provide Iran with "hundreds of billions of dollars with which it can fuel its terror machine and its expansion and aggression throughout the Middle East and across the globe". He said he did not regard Israel as being bound by this agreement. "We will always defend ourselves," he added.

World powers have "gambled that in 10 years time Iran's terrorist regime will change - while removing any initiative for it to do so! In fact the deal gives Iran every incentive not to change," he lamented. Netanyahu fired that the deal will fuel "Iran's sponsorship of terror and attempts to destroy Israel," citing as proof statements to that effect made by Iranian officials and allies including Hezbollah.

“This deal repeats the mistakes made with North Korea," he intoned. "There, too, we were assured that inspections and verifications would prevent a rogue regime from developing nuclear weapons. And we all know how that ended. The bottom line of this very bad deal is exactly what Iran's President Rouhani said today: the international community is removing the sanctions, and Iran is keeping its nuclear program.”

"The deal will give an unreformed, unrepentant and far richer terrorist regime the capacity to produce many nuclear bombs - in fact, an entire nuclear arsenal, with the means to deliver it. What a stunning historic mistake. Israel is not bound by this deal with Iran, because Iran continues to seek our destruction," he warned. "We will always defend ourselves."

Just a day earlier on Monday, the prime minister declared that Israel will block Iran's path to the nuclear bomb regardless of the deal, saying, "our commitment is to prevent Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons."

The first GOP Congressman to issue a full statement on the agreement was Senator Bob Corker (Republican for Tennessee), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of the most prominent critics of the Obama administration's conduct during talks, as well as the deal itself as its form began to take shape over the past several months. In his statement, released Tuesday afternoon, Corker said he would reserve full judgement until after reading the full text of the deal, but said he was deeply pessimistic it would be a good deal for the US and its allies.

Meanwhile GOP Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee issued a more scathing rebuke of the Obama administration. "Shame on the Obama admin for agreeing to a deal that empowers an evil Iranian regime to carry out its threat to wipe Israel off the map," Huckabee tweeted. "As president, I will stand with Israel and keep all options on the table, including military force, to topple the terrorist Iranian regime," he vowed. Fellow GOP presidential hopeful Senator Marco Rubio also harshly criticized Obama for negotiating "from a position of weakness."

Fix the Court reviewed cases heard by the court between 2009 and 2013, and focused on 19 cases in which the three justices owned stock in companies that filed “friend of the court” or amicus curiae briefs. The report says that, in those cases, 68% of the time Roberts, Breyer and Alito sided with the companies in which they owned stock.

The other six justices were omitted from the study because they don’t own a significant amount of common stock in individual companies. The 19 conflict-of-interest cases involved such matters as mandatory arbitration, affirmative action, and corporate immunity for international law violations.

Examples provided by Fix the Court include three class-action cases, Wal-Mart v Dukes, AT&T v Concepcion, and Comcast v Behrend, in which Roberts owned up to $100,000 in shares of Intel (which filed a brief in support of Comcast); up to $100,000 in shares of Dell (which supported AT&T) and up to $400,000 combined in shares of Intel, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard (which filed for Wal-Mart).

In another case, Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum, Breyer and Alito sided with the defendant, which was supported by IBM (Breyer owned up to $50,000 in shares) and by Caterpillar, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, IBM and Proctor & Gamble (Alito owned as much as $280,000 in these companies).

Not once did any of the justices recuse himself from a case due to an amicus-related conflict of interest, according to Fix the Court.

The debt-fueled prosperity that so many of us take for granted is about to come to a screeching halt, and we are about to enter the hardest times that any of us have ever known. And I am not just talking about economics either. Based on all of the intel and information that I have gathered, we are about to enter a “perfect storm” that is going to shake this country in just about every possible way that it can be shaken. So I hope that you will truly savor this summer – days like this will not come around again any time soon.

Have you ever known someone that lived a seemingly charmed life even though that individual made foolish decision after foolish decision? In the end, reality almost always catches up with people like that. And in so many ways, we have been living a charmed life as a nation even though we have been making incredibly foolish decisions for decades.

We have cursed ourselves over and over again, and just about every form of evil that you can possibly imagine is exploding all around us. As a nation, we now stand for just about everything that is foul, disgusting and wicked, and the rest of the world is absolutely horrified by what has happened to us. Once upon a time, we were one of the most loved nations on the entire planet. Now we are one of the most hated.

A moderator's message on the blocked webpage said that the move was due to a ruling by a court in the mainly Muslim North Caucasus region of Chechnya in May 2015. "The community has been blocked due to the possible violation of the site's rules," it said. VKontakte, Russia's largest social networking site, did not respond to a request for comment.

A scan of the court decision published by Russian media accused the page of publishing materials that can "insult the feelings of Orthodox Christians", based on an inspection of the page by prosecutors on April 6.

A cached version of the group's website showed posts with pictures making fun of religion, mostly focusing on the Russian Orthodox Church. The influence of Russia's Orthodox Church in official circles has grown dramatically under the leadership of ex-KGB agent President Vladimir Putin.

For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan. Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada.

If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

"There will not be a 'Grexit'," said European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker, referring to the widespread fear that if there had been no deal, Greece would have had to leave the eurozone. Mr Tsipras also said he had the "belief and the hope that… the possibility of 'Grexit' is in the past".

"The deal is difficult but we averted the pursuit to move state assets abroad," he said. "We averted the plan for a financial strangulation and for the collapse of the banking system." Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the head of the eurozone group of finance ministers, said the agreement included a €50 billion Greece-based fund that will privatise or manage Greek assets. Out of that €50 billion, €25 billion would be used to recapitalise Greek banks, he said.

Greek banks have been closed for two weeks, with withdrawals at cash machines limited to €60 per day. The economy has been put under increasing strain, with some businesses closing and others struggling to pay suppliers. Parliaments in several eurozone states have to approve any new bailout. "The road will be long, and judging by the negotiations tonight, difficult," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday morning.

French President Francois Hollande said the agreement had allowed Europe to "preserve integrity and solidarity". "We also had to show that Europe is capable of solving a crisis that has menaced the eurozone for several years," he said.

In a nationwide referendum just last Sunday, nearly 62 per cent of voters rejected an austerity deal that had been offered by the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank. There were scenes of wild jubilation across the country. “It was an expression of the will of the people,” Manos Agelidis, 27, a biomedical engineering PhD student, told The Telegraph as he celebrated with friends.

Fast forward just a few days, however, and Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, did the unthinkable. On Thursday, with a deadline imposed by the creditors looming, he buckled. His radical Left-wing Syriza government, which came to power in January on the unrealistic promise of putting an end to austerity and the country's six-year long economic nightmare, put forward a plan that promises spending cuts of €12 billion in return for a third international bail-out, this time worth €53.5 billion (£38.4 billion).

What swung it appears to have been Mr Tsipras' realisation that after five months of painstaking and often acrimonious negotiations, Europe's patience really had finally run out and that without a drastic compromise, Greece could crash out of the euro. He also won vague acknowledgment from the creditors that the nation's monumental debt of €320 billion is unsustainable and needs to be restructured.

But on the streets of Athens and in tavernas on the islands, many ordinary Greeks were dumb-founded over the spectacular U-turn. There was a rally against the new bail-out in central Athens on Friday, with demonstrators chanting slogans and waving banners with messages such as "Greece is not a colony" and "No, overturn the bailout". Several thousand Leftists protested in front of Parliament – the exact same place where just a few days before they had celebrated the rejection of the previous bail-out. But if and when the deal is accepted by all sides, the recriminations are likely to start in earnest.