In Cyprus, the depositors were “bailed in” (stripped of a major portion of their deposits) to re-capitalize the banks. In Detroit, it is the municipal workers who are being bailed in, stripped of a major portion of their pensions to save the banks.

Bank of America Corp and UBS AG have been given priority over other bankruptcy claimants, meaning chiefly the pensioners, for payments due on interest rate swaps they entered into with the city. Interest rate swaps – the exchange of interest rate payments between counterparties – are sold by Wall Street banks as a form of insurance, something municipal governments “should” do to protect their loans from an unanticipated increase in rates. Unlike ordinary insurance, however, swaps are actually just bets; and if the municipality loses the bet, it can owe the house, and owe big.

The swap casino is almost entirely unregulated, and it is a rigged game that the house virtually always wins. Interest rate swaps are based on the LIBOR rate, which has now been proven to be manipulated by the rate-setting banks; and they were a major contributor to Detroit’s bankruptcy.

These colony losses are being described as “catastrophic” by those in the industry, and nobody is quite sure how to fix the problem. Some are blaming the bee deaths on pesticides, others are blaming parasites and others are blaming cell phones. But no matter what is causing these deaths, if it doesn’t stop we will all soon notice the effects at the supermarket.

Bees pollinate about a hundred different crops in the United States, and if the bees disappear nobody is quite sure how we will be able to continue to grow many of those crops. This emerging crisis does not get a lot of attention from the mainstream media, but if we continue to lose 30 percent of our bees every year it is going to have a cataclysmic effect on our food supply.

It’s not just the United States, Elmwood, Canada also recently reported a discovery of over 30 million dead bees. The massive bee deaths in Elmwood came shortly after approximately 50 thousand bees were found dead in an Oregon parking lot. No matter what the true cause is, we need to find a solution quickly because if we start running out of honey bees we will rapidly be facing a nightmarish agricultural apocalypse.

Funds collected from these seizures frequently go directly back into law enforcement, creating a dangerous profit incentive for police and other law enforcers. Both the New Yorker and ProPublica have new investigations of this practice, in which officers seize property they believe is connected to drug or other illicit activity, with a much lower burden of proof than when charges are filed against a person.

Even where officers are following the letter of the law, civil forfeitures by their very nature impose a minimal burden on officers, requiring them to prove only that the property is suspect — not the individual who owns it. The burden is on the defendant, by contrast, to prove their money was improperly taken from them.

This is a significantly lower burden than in the lesser-used practice of criminal forfeiture, which only allows seizure once someone has been convicted. Advocates such as the ACLU’s Vanita Gupta question why law enforcement officers should ever be permitted to use civil forfeiture instead.

The unique aspect of Hamilton’s study is that he examines federal debt that has not been publicly released, specifically the government’s support for “housing, other loan guarantees, deposit insurance, actions taken by the Federal Reserve, and government trust funds.”

Since the global economy hit rock bottom in 2008, US federal debt has gone through the roof, increasing from $5 trillion to an estimated $12 trillion in 2013. Meeting the interest payments alone on that debt burden presents a formidable challenge for US taxpayers: In addition to the debt, Americans must pay back around $220 billion annually just in interest.

And with interest rates set to rise from their historic lows, Americans will be confronted with a significantly higher bill in the future. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office anticipates that net interest expense on US federal debt will exceed the entire defense budget by 2021.

This fiscal horror story playing out across America, however, is actually much worse than publicly recognized.

The squad was not with the Washington police department or Amtrak’s police force, but was one of the Transportation Security Administration’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response squads — VIPR teams for short — assigned to perform random security sweeps to prevent terrorist attacks at transportation hubs across the United States. With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals. Not everyone is happy.

TSA and local law enforcement officials say the teams are a critical component of the nation’s counterterrorism efforts, but some members of Congress, auditors at the Department of Homeland Security and civil liberties groups are sounding alarms. The teams are also raising hackles among passengers who call them unnecessary and intrusive.

“Our mandate is to provide security and counterterrorism operations for all high-risk transportation targets, not just airports and aviation,” said John S Pistole, the administrator of the agency. “The VIPR teams are a big part of that.”

"We don't take a fanciful approach to the Malvinas," she said, using the Argentine name for the islands. "We simply want the UN resolution to be enforced." She was referring to UN Resolution 2065, which urged both parties in 1965 to negotiate. She said Argentina and Britain should "sit down and discuss" the matter.

An Al-Qaida affiliate has developed a new generation of liquid explosive that US officials fear could be used in a future attack, ABC News reported Monday. Two senior US government sources who have been briefed on the terror threat that prompted the US to close embassies across the Mideast and North Africa this week, told the network that clothes dipped in the liquid become explosive devices when dry.

One of the US officials described the new generation explosive as "ingenious," while another said it would be undetectable under current security processes.

The liquid explosive is believed to be the brainchild of the Yemen-based affiliate Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the officials told ABC News. This affiliate is home to Ibrahim al-Asiri, a master bombmaker, who was on the 25 "most wanted terrorist" list published by the Yemeni government.

But the relative calmness with which this news is being treated is a reminder that the politics of the situation is very different now than it was ten years ago. One of the things that has changed is that it is hard to find anyone who is optimistic about the Middle East anymore. The Iraq War was borne out of optimism, the neo-cons were convinced that the Middle East could be democratised. But that optimism has now gone.

Indeed, the decision of the military to remove Egypt’s democratically elected president was greeted with almost audible relief by Western governments. As Walter Russell Mead likes to say, ‘It’s as if the Middle East were simultaneously experiencing the French Revolution and the Thirty Years’ Wars.’ It would be a brave thinker who confidently predicts how this ends. But the one thing that is certain is that this will not be a smooth process.

This is something that I have been talking about for quite some time, and now a Mexican billionaire has come forward with a similar warning. Hugo Salinas Price was the founder of the Elektra retail chain down in Mexico, and he is extremely concerned that rising interest rates could burst the derivatives bubble and cause "massive bankruptcies around the globe".

Of course there are a whole lot of people out there that would be quite glad to see the "too big to fail" banks go bankrupt, but the truth is that if they go down our entire economy will go down with them. Right now, there are about 441 trillion dollars of interest rate derivatives sitting out there. If interest rates stay about where they are right now and they don't go much higher, we will be fine. But if they start going much higher, all bets will be off and we could see financial carnage on a scale that we have never seen before.

While they weren't able to create memories from scratch, they were able to associate different feelings to neutral memories in mice. In other words, they were able to turn frightening memories into indifference. When successful, the memory-altered mice didn't recognize the location where they had earlier received an electrical shock. They thought the negative memory had been created elsewhere.

Another feat scientists are getting closer to achieving is the ability to "upload" information into our brains. Learning another language, degree, or musical instrument could be as easy as falling asleep. Boston University scientists teamed up with a neuroscience lab in Japan and wrote a paper on "Decoded Neurofeedback." It's the ability to alter brain activity patterns via a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, Bilton writes.

An even more mindblowing innovation that may not be far off: The ability to connect multiple brains together. Duke University neuroscientist Dr Miguel Nicolelis has successfully done this in both mice and monkeys. Bilton explains: "He has connected the brains of four mice in what he calls a 'brain net' allowing them to share information over the Internet. In another experiment, he took two monkeys and gave them both half of a piece of information to successfully move a robotic arm, which required them to share the information through their brain." It's already working in humans. Harvard scientists enabled a person to move a rat tail just by thinking about it.

But according to the Office for National Statistics, dramatic changes in life expectancy have prompted many couples to reconsider whether they really want to grow old together. The ONS singled out the fact that people are living longer as the most likely cause for the surge in people heading for the divorce courts as they reach retirement age.

A more relaxed attitude to divorce among the “baby boomer” generation in comparison with their parents and greater financial independence amongst women were also cited as possible explanations. But, significantly, the figures show that, in stark contrast with other age groups, men over 60 are as likely to file for divorce as women.

The Government has insisted there will be no compromise over the sovereignty of Gibraltar, and William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, has vowed to stand "shoulder to shoulder" with its citizens in response to heightened pressure and increasingly belligerent rhetoric from Madrid.

A deal on ending the dispute, which dates back to the Treaty of Utrecht 300 years ago that ceded the territory to Britain, appeared close in 2002 after negotiations between then Europe minister Mr Hain and his Spanish counterpart.

Mr Hain told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that the Spanish got "cold feet" and backed off. "There was a historic opportunity to have joint sovereignty which would have protected Gibraltarians' way of life – they could remain British citizens, but it also recognised Spain's historic claim at the root of this," he said.

The sun's magnetic field changes polarity approximately every 11 years. It happens at the peak of each solar cycle as the sun's inner magnetic dynamo re-organizes itself. The coming reversal will mark the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24. Half of 'Solar Max' will be behind us, with half yet to come.

Hoeksema is the director of Stanford's Wilcox Solar Observatory, one of the few observatories in the world that monitor the sun's polar magnetic fields. The poles are a herald of change. Just as Earth scientists watch our planet's polar regions for signs of climate change, solar physicists do the same thing for the sun. Magnetograms at Wilcox have been tracking the sun's polar magnetism since 1976, and they have recorded three grand reversals — with a fourth in the offing.

Solar physicist Phil Scherrer, also at Stanford, describes what happens: "The sun's polar magnetic fields weaken, go to zero, and then emerge again with the opposite polarity. This is a regular part of the solar cycle."

A reversal of the sun's magnetic field is, literally, a big event. The domain of the sun's magnetic influence (also known as the "heliosphere") extends billions of kilometers beyond Pluto. Changes to the field's polarity ripple all the way out to the Voyager probes, on the doorstep of interstellar space.

The Chancellor today unveiled a scheme to encourage women back into the workplace by handing up to £1,200 of taxpayer-funded childcare for each child to families where both parents have a job. He said that he had "huge respect" for stay-at-home mothers and said that the government will "help" their families by introducing tax breaks for married couples.

However Laura Perrins, a stay-at-home mother who took on the Deputy Prime Minister during a radio phone-in earlier this year, said that the reported £120 tax breaks were "pathetic" compared to the value of childcare vouchers. She said: "Saying stay-at-home mothers have made a lifestyle choice is pejorative and patronising. They are contributing to the economy, to society, to everything. Staying at home is not a luxury, it's not a hobby. Women who chose to stay at home make huge sacrifices."

"The married tax allowance is something we have been calling for but their version is pretty pathetic when compared to the childcare vouchers. We pay disproportionately more tax. They [the government] are socially engineering it, they think that stay at home mothers are not conforming to what they want."

Two EMP experts told Secrets that the EMP flashed through earth's typical orbit around the sun about two weeks before the planet got there. "The world escaped an EMP catastrophe," said Henry Cooper, who led strategic arms negotiations with the Soviet Union under President Reagan, and who now heads High Frontier, a group pushing for missile defense.

"Basically this is a Russian roulette thing," added Pry. "We narrowly escape from a Carrington-class disaster." Pry, Cooper, and former CIA Director James Woolsey have been recently demanding that Washington prepare the nation's electric grid for an EMP, either from the sun or an enemy's nuclear bomb. They want the 2,000-3,000 transformers in the grid protected with a high-tech metal box and spares ready to rebuild the system. Woolsey said knocking out just 20 would shut down electricity to parts of the nation "for a long time."

Cooper suggested that North Korea might already have the capability to launch an EMP against the United States. He said in December, North Korea tested its so-called Space Launch Vehicle which could deliver a stealthy nuclear attack on the United States by orbiting a nuclear weapon over the South Pole where the US has no radar or missile interceptors facing south. North Korea, he said, apparently orbited a satellite over the south polar region on a trajectory and altitude consistent with making a surprise nuclear EMP attack against the United States.