Adding to the drama is the fact that the Greek government is rapidly running out of money. According to the Wall Street Journal, Greece is “on course to run out of money within weeks if it doesn’t gain access to additional funds, effectively daring Germany and its other European creditors to let it fail and stumble out of the euro.” We have witnessed other moments of crisis for Greece before, but things are very different this time because the new Greek government is being run by radical leftists that based their entire campaign on ending the austerity that has been imposed on Greece by the rest of Europe.

If they buckle under the demands of the European financial lords, their credibility will be gone and Syriza will essentially be finished in Greek politics. But if they don’t compromise, Greece could be forced to leave the eurozone and we could potentially be facing the equivalent of “financial armageddon” in Europe. If nobody flinches, the eurozone will fall to pieces, the euro will collapse and trillions upon trillions of dollars in derivatives will be in jeopardy.

According to the Bank for International Settlements, 26.45 trillion dollars in currency derivatives are directly tied to the value of the euro. Let that number sink in for a moment. To give you some perspective, keep in mind that the US government spends a total of less than 4 trillion dollars a year. The entire US national debt is just a bit above 18 trillion dollars.

So 26 trillion dollars is an amount of money that is almost unimaginable. And of course those are just the derivatives that are directly tied to the euro. Overall, the total global derivatives bubble is more than 700 trillion dollars in size.

The Russian president was invited for a bilateral meeting by his Egyptian counterpart Abdul Fattah al-Sisi. “This measure will open up new prospects for trade and investment cooperation between our countries, reduce its dependence on the current trends in the world markets,” Putin said. “I should note that we already use national currencies for trade with a number of the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] states, and China.”

“This practice proves its worth; we are ready to adopt it in our relations with Egypt as well. This issue is being discussed in substance by relevant agencies of both countries.” Egypt is a long-time and trusted partner of Russia and the relationship between the two countries has been rapidly developing, the Russian president said.

A boy aged no more than ten was among those carrying placards saying Insult My Mum And I Will Punch You – quoting Pope Francis in the wake of the Paris attacks. The Pope had said people ‘cannot insult the faith of others’ and that he would punch someone if they offended his mother as he debated freedom of speech following the murders of the Charlie Hebdo magazine cartoonists.

Yesterday organisers refused to allow men and women to protest together, insisting they were segregated. Despite the rally passing off peacefully with no arrests, the banners carried a thinly veiled threat of violence towards those who continued to exercise free speech. Leaders of the protest also sparked anger by claiming the ‘extremist’ cartoonists massacred in Paris for depicting the Prophet Mohammed were as bad as the jihadis who gunned them down in cold blood.

Last night it remained unclear who is behind the Muslim Action Forum, founded in 2012, which issued the call to gather in Downing Street. According to their website, they want to ‘promote peaceful demonstration’ in ‘defending the honour’ of the Prophet.

The guidelines – the first of their kind – were introduced when as much as one-fifth of the average British diet was saturated fat such as butter, cream and fattier cuts of meat. Britons were advised by an official dietary committee to cut their fat intake to 30 per cent of total energy and saturated fat intake to 10 per cent, while increasing the amount of carbohydrate they ate. ‘The present review concludes that dietary advice not merely needs review; it should not have been introduced.’

This led food makers to create low-fat spreads, including cholesterol-lowering products, while consumers shunned cheese, milk and cream. However, now some scientists even say the advice is responsible – in part – for the obesity crisis because it encouraged an increase in carbohydrate in our diets. A new review says evidence from trials did not support the advice. It says it is ‘incomprehensible’ that such advice was introduced for 56 million Britons in 1983 and 220 million Americans six years earlier ‘given the contrary results from a small number of unhealthy men’.

It is not the first time experts have blamed faulty interpretation of studies for creating a ‘myth’ around the role played by saturated fat in heart disease. Researchers last year conducted a ‘meta-analysis’ of data from 72 studies involving more than 600,000 participants from 18 countries. It is a statistically powerful technique to reveal trends that may be masked in individual small studies, but which become obvious when they are amalgamated. A key finding was that total saturated fat, whether measured in the diet or the bloodstream, showed no association with heart disease.

Lamb is relatively expensive for take-aways to buy, which is why some use cheap, poor-quality cuts of other meat instead, such as beef, chicken and turkey. Seventeen of the dishes were mostly or entirely beef. This will particularly alarm Hindu customers, many of whom do not eat beef for religious reasons. Two samples contained pork, which most Muslims and many Jews do not eat.

Twelve dishes tested positive for undeclared allergens such as peanuts, which can cause serious reactions and even death. And seven curry sauces had high levels of the artificial colours Sunset Yellow (E110) and Ponceau 4R (E124). Sunset Yellow can cause stomach upsets, hyperactivity and other health problems, and the FSA has previously urged manufacturers to eliminate it from food aimed at children.

He told BBC Radio 4's the World This Weekend: "I believe Greece will eventually leave. I don't think it helps them or the rest of the eurozone – it is just a matter of time before everyone recognises that parting is the best strategy. The problem is that there is no way that I can conceive of the euro of continuing, unless and until all of the members of eurozone become politically integrated – actually even just fiscally integrated won't do it.

"Greece is in the position that if they don't get additional loans then they will default and leave the Euro. At this stage I don't see any people who are willing to put up the funds having been disappointed so often." He said that he does not believe that the Eurozone can stay together without greater political union. "I would say short of a political union I find it very difficult to foresee the Euro holding together in its current form," he said.

Such honest assessments are not supposed to be uttered in politics, no matter how true they may be. And so, as you can imagine, the machinery of the defenders of the status quo is in quite a lather over the whole affair. And it’s doing everything it can to minimize and marginalize the new Greek government.

As I said, the new Greece administration has got the powers that be in quite a lather. Why is that? I think it’s because the new Greek rulers have dared to call a spade a spade. They’ve spoken the unspeakable. They’ve said that the vast quantities of debt accumulated by Greece, enabled by central bank money-printing programs, are simply unpayable under current terms.

Of course, this is no different than the situations of Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, the UK, France, Japan — or even the US — which is precisely why it’s being considered such a horrendous foul for Greece to publicly speak as it is now. Such honesty does not have a welcome place in modern politics, and more dangerously, it threatens confidence in the entire system.

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.