EUROPE - The EU wants to banish the word bankruptcy from the English language because it is too stigmatising, according to reports. Officials in Brussels want to see the term replaced with a more neutral phrase, such as “debt adjustment”. The idea is part of wider reforms being considered to harmonise economic arrangements across the EU and make it easier for people who have run into financial problems to be given a second chance. Riccardo Ribera d’Alcala, the EU’s Directorate General for International Policies, said use of the word bankruptcy was too potent and made it difficult for people to rebuild their financial reputation. In his report, Mr d’Alcala said: “The use of stigmatising labels should be ended, and the pejorative term “bankruptcy” should be replaced with the more neutral ‘debt adjustment’.”

UK - Britain basked in rare sunshine on Sunday but forecasters have warned that more flood misery is on the way. The Met Office has issued a yellow warning of heavy rain for south-west England on Monday, where the ground is already saturated by weeks of downpours. Up to 40mm of rain is expected to fall on higher ground in Cornwall, Devon and Dorset, which will trickle down onto the soaked flood plains below. Low-lying areas including the hard-hit Somerset Levels will endure 15mm more rainfall, the experts warned. Swathes of the UK remain on high alert as people battle to protect their homes and communities from the floodwaters, which are still expected to rise in places despite the break in the storms.

GERMANY - German Chancellor Angela Merkel is proposing building up a European communications network to help improve data protection. It would avoid emails and other data automatically passing through the United States. In her weekly podcast, she said she would raise the issue on Wednesday with French President Francois Hollande. Revelations of mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA) have prompted huge concern in Europe. Germany has been trying to persuade Washington to agree to a "no-spy" agreement but without success.

CANADA - A giant winter storm that gridlocked traffic, left flights cancelled, and knocked out power on the US East Coast has pushed into eastern Canada. As much as 60cm (24in) was expected to fall in some areas by the end of Friday, blown about by heavy winds, from Quebec to Newfoundland. Authorities closed a 200km (124 mile) section of the Trans-Canada Highway in Quebec. The storm has been blamed for the deaths of more than two dozen people. In the US, almost 450,000 people and businesses remained without power in the typically mild southern states on Friday, some for a third day, after the storm destroyed power lines and knocked down trees.

JAMAICA - A coalition of 14 Caribbean states, including Jamaica, is now mounting the first united campaign for reparations from Britain over its role in the Atlantic slave trade. The group is ready to sue in the courts and has hired Leigh Day, the London law firm that last year won £20 million for Kenyans tortured by the British during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s. This month it will unveil a list of 10 demands for Britain, France and Holland, including funds likely to total billions, an apology, and assurances slavery will never be repeated, The Telegraph can disclose. Professor Verene Shepherd, the chairman of Jamaica’s reparations committee, said British colonisers had “disfigured the Caribbean,” and that their descendants must now pay to repair the damage.

USA - Contrary to the assertions of Jayson Lusk and Henry I Miller, genetically modified crops have perpetuated the need for ever-larger amounts of harmful pesticides, worsening the development and spread of herbicide-resistant weeds and destroying the food sources for beneficial insects like the monarch butterfly. Moreover, engineered traits have produced only modest to no gains in yield depending on the crop in question and are falling behind productivity improvements in more traditional breeding and crop production methods, including drought resistance. What we need to focus on are these more environmentally friendly, lower cost alternatives that help put more profit in the pockets of farmers, not corporations and the hedge funds that invest in them.

BRAZIL - Over 140 Brazilian cities have been pushed to ration water during the worst drought on record, according to a survey conducted by the country's leading newspaper. Some neighbourhoods only receive water once every three days. Water is being rationed to nearly 6 million people living in a total of 142 cities across 11 states in Brazil, the world's leading exporter of soybeans, coffee, orange juice, sugar and beef. Water supply companies told the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper that the country's reservoirs, rivers and streams are the driest they have been in 20 years. A record heat wave could raise energy prices and damage crops. Some neighbourhoods in the city of Itu in Sao Paulo state (which accounts for one-quarter of Brazil's population and one-third of its GDP), only receive water once every three days, for a total of 13 hours.

USA - If you have been waiting for the "global economic crisis" to begin, just open up your eyes and look around. I know that most Americans tend to ignore what happens in the rest of the world because they consider it to be "irrelevant" to their daily lives, but the truth is that the massive economic problems that are currently sweeping across Europe, Asia and South America are going to be affecting all of us here in the US very soon. Sadly, most of the big news organizations in this country seem to be more concerned about the fate of Justin Bieber's wax statue in Times Square than about the horrible financial nightmare that is gripping emerging markets all over the planet. After a brief period of relative calm, we are beginning to see signs of global financial instability that are unlike anything that we have witnessed since the financial crisis of 2008. This is truly a global phenomenon.

USA - High-frequency trading — the practice of making thousands of algorithmic stock trades per minute — is about to get a big boost in the USA. Anova, a company that specializes in deploying low-latency networks for stock trading, is completing an ultra-high-speed laser network between the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the NASDAQ. The link will be just a few nanoseconds faster than the current microwave and fiber-optic links — but in the world of high-frequency trading (HFT), those nanoseconds could result in millions of dollars in profits for the trading companies. Such is the insanity of the stock markets; such is the unbelievable capacity of HFT to create money out of almost nothing.

GERMANY - Many see German policy in the European Union as a forceful advancement of Germany's interests at the expense of other countries - EU members. There are even suspicions that the crisis in the EU is a project of Germany designed to secure the economic recovery (the European Commission even started an investigation). Berlin is not going to stop in its plans.

USA - Call it the loophole that destroyed the world. It's 1999, the tail end of the Clinton years. While the rest of America obsesses over Monica Lewinsky, Columbine and Mark McGwire's biceps, Congress is feverishly crafting what could yet prove to be one of the most transformative laws in the history of our economy – a law that would make possible a broader concentration of financial and industrial power than we've seen in more than a century. Most observers on the Hill thought the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 – also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act – was just the latest and boldest in a long line of deregulatory handouts to Wall Street that had begun in the Reagan years.

ARGENTINA - Argentina is a country re-entering crisis territory it knows too well. The country has defaulted on its sovereign debt three times in the past 32 years and looks poised to do so again soon. Its currency, the peso, devalued by more than 20% in January alone. Inflation is currently running at 25%. Argentina’s budget deficit is exploding, and, based on credit default swap rates, the market is placing an 85% chance of a sovereign default within the next five years. Want to know what it’s like living through a currency collapse? Argentina is providing us with a real-time window.

USA - The debt of the US government has increased by $2.678 trillion in the 2.5 years since House Speaker John Boehner (Republican for Ohio) completed his first deal to put legislation increasing the debt limit through a Republican-controlled House of Representatives. On August 2, 2011, President Barack Obama signed legislation, approved by the Boehner-led House, permitting the Treasury to increase the debt by $900 billion. Since then, the debt limit has been repeatedly suspended by legislation that needed to pass through the Republican-controlled House. Yesterday, the House once again passed legislation to suspend the debt limit — this time through March 15, 2015, which is after November’s mid-term congressional elections.

MIDDLE EAST - President Obama wants an agreement with Iran to prevent a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race, but it’s pushing Saudi Arabia toward its own nuke program. Last month, America’s top Iran negotiator Wendy Sherman had some bad news for ambassadors from America’s Arab allies. In a meeting with envoys from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf states, Sherman said that any bargain with Iran would likely leave Tehran, the Gulf States long-time enemy, with the capacity to enrich uranium, according to US officials briefed on the encounter. Riyadh has a long-standing interest in nuclear power. But Western and Israeli intelligence services are starting to see signs that this interest is growing more serious, and extends into nuclear enrichment.

USA - They call it the holy grail of ready-to-eat meals for soldiers — a pizza that can stay on the shelf for up to three years and still remain good to eat. Soldiers have been asking for pizza since lightweight individual field rations — known as meal ready to eat, or MREs — replaced canned food in 1981 for soldiers in combat zones or areas where field kitchens cannot be set up. Researchers at a US military lab in Massachusetts are closing in on a recipe that doesn't require any refrigeration or freezing. "You can basically take the pizza, leave it on the counter, packaged, for three years and it'd still be edible," said Michelle Richardson, a food scientist at the US Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center.