GERMANY - The current debt crisis in Europe evokes painful memories of the German hyperinflation. Price increases began with the start of World War I in 1914 and ended in disaster in 1923. The event still influences sentiment about monetary policy in the country today.

GERMANY - All of a sudden, Germany says it wants to be a grown-up. “There are people who use Germany’s guilt in the past as an excuse for withdrawal and laziness,” President Joachim Gauck said at the opening of the 50th Munich Security Conference late last month. “This restraint can lead to a notion of being privileged, and if this is the case, I will always criticize it.”

LUXEMBOURG - For opponents of the EU − who complain that it is too big, too grandiose and too costly − the European Court of Justice in Luxemborg encapsulates all that is wrong. It is a modern day Tower of Babel. Stretching 24 storeys into the air, the twin golden skyscrapers − the tallest in Luxembourg − were built to house more than 1,000 translators and interpreters.

MYANMAR - With his current visit to Myanmar [formerly known as Burma], German President Gauck is bolstering the Western geostrategic standing in its power struggle with China. Gauck, who arrived for talks on Sunday, will officially inaugurate the Goethe Institute and a German business field office.

USA - After leaving more than half a million customers without power across the Southeast, Winter Storm Pax is finally moving away from the Deep South. "The ice storm was as bad as we expected," said weather.com senior meteorologist Jon Erdman. "One inch or more of ice accumulation was reported in at least seven South Carolina counties, as well as Richmond County, Georgia" In North Carolina, snowfall led to a disastrous commute Wednesday afternoon in Raleigh and Charlotte. Cars slid off roads and heavy traffic led to gridlock, forcing some drivers to sit in hours of slow commutes or abandon their cars. Other states dealt with heavy freezing rain that felled trees and power lines, creating a scary scene in a heavily wooded region.

USA - Lake Superior hasn’t completely frozen over in two decades. But an expert on Great Lakes ice says there’s a “very high likelihood” that the three-quadrillion-gallon lake will soon be totally covered with ice thanks to this winter’s record-breaking cold. The ice cover on the largest freshwater lake in the world hit a 20-year record of 91 percent on February 5, 1994. Jay Austin, associate professor at the Large Lakes Observatory in Duluth, Minnesota, told CNSNews.com that he expects that record will be broken this winter when the most northern of the Great Lakes becomes totally shrouded in ice.

USA - Conventional wisdom holds that the past decade-plus of combat has forged a group of Army leaders as good as any our country has ever produced. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates went further in 2010, calling today’s Army “the most professional, the best educated, the most capable force this country has ever sent into battle.” Can this be true? Or is it hubris? In fact, the military conditions under which we’ve operated for the past two decades have been historically atypical. They have allowed too many in uniform to believe the hype. What happens when men whose whole professional life has known only success meet real challenges and the threat of defeat?

UK - A flood-hit village in Berkshire is pleading for help from the Army after looters began targeting homes of residents evacuated from the rising waters. Colin Rayner, 56, a Conservative councillor for Horton and Wraysbury, said the village had experienced looting and urged the police and Army to help. The farmer said he was told by the Environment Agency on Sunday that the flooding in Wraysbury was going to be worse than in 2003, and that he was to tell the residents of the village that anybody who was in a house that was flooded in 2003 was to evacuate. He said those houses would have no gas, electricity, sewerage or water for seven days.

SYRIA - British Muslims have carried out acts of torture and possibly executions in Syria, according to new video footage posted on social network sites. Evidence of atrocities committed by British fighters with extreme Islamist groups emerged as another round of peace talks between the regime and the mainstream opposition opened in Geneva on Monday. The two sides spent the day arguing about the agenda, and no progress has been made. The United Nations hopes to broker another ceasefire in the city of Homs to allow the delivery of aid and the evacuation of civilians from areas besieged by government forces.

PUERTO RICO - Moody’s Investors Service on Friday became the second rating agency this week to cut Puerto Rico’s credit rating to junk, citing concern about Puerto Rico’s weak economy and its deteriorating ability to borrow. Moody’s said it now rates the commonwealth’s general obligation bonds at Ba2, two notches below investment grade and one step deeper into junk territory than Standard & Poor’s. PR [Puerto Rico] has some $70 billion of debt outstanding - nearly four times the $18 billion owed by bankrupt Detroit. If markets push rates too high on PR debt, making it prohibitive for PR to raise money in the markets, the US territory will have to either be bailed out by the US or restructure its debt, that is, go in bankruptcy.

CANADA - Vancouver is the home to Canada's first-ever crackpipe vending machines, which were installed in the city’s troubled Downtown Eastside in a bid to curb the spread of disease among drug users. Portland Hotel Society's Drug Users Resource Centre operates two of the machines. They dispense Pyrex crackpipes for just 25 cents. "For us, this was about increasing access to safer inhalation supplies in the Downtown Eastside,” Kailin See, director of the DURC, told CTV Vancouver. She said the pipes are very durable and less likely to chip and cut drug users' mouths, which helps stop the spread communicable diseases including HIV and hepatitis C.

USA - The federal government pays for a $15 million 'wool trust fund,' runs a $170 million program to protect catfish growers from overseas competition, sets aside $3 million to promote Christmas trees, funds another $2 million to help farmers sell more sheep, and plunks down $100 million researching how to get Americans to buy more maple syrup. And that spending is just three one-hundredths of one per cent of the Farm Bill that President Barack Obama signed Friday in Michigan. Liberal and conservative watchdogs alike are hopping mad at what they say are pork-barrel projects included in the five-year agriculture spending law as home-state perks to lawmakers that are unneeded or redundant.

USA - Lawmakers have urged the imposition of federal security standards on grid operators in order to protect the US national electric grid from attack. The new push follows stories, first reported in the Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, about a 16 April 2013 sniper attack which disabled seventeen transformers in a San Jose, California substation for twenty-seven days, causing about $16 million in damage. Federal cybersecurity standards for protecting the grid are in place and mandated, but rules for protecting physical sites such as transformers and substations are voluntary.

EUROPE - After the European Central Bank unveiled its celebrated outright monetary transactions program to shore up weaker euro-bloc members’ debt in the fall of 2012, I recalled 18th century French philosopher Voltaire’s quip that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”. My view was that future historians might say that the OMT [Outright Monetary Transactions] was nether outright, nor monetary nor a transaction.

GERMANY - Last week’s ‘thunderbolt’ ruling on eurozone rescue policies by Germany’s top court marks a serious escalation of Europe’s governance crisis and may ultimately force Germany to withdraw from the euro, the country’s most influential magazine has warned.