South Korea’s Unification Ministry reports that 446 South Korean workers have been stranded at the facility, waiting to cross back into home territory since the early hours of Wednesday. Normally, daily entry clearance is given via telephone. There are a total of about 860 South Korean workers in the Kaesong zone. One hundred and seventy-nine South Korean staff showed up at the border on Wednesday morning, but North Korea also refused to let them in.

North Korea could be making good on an earlier promise to close off the complex as part of the increasingly bellicose rhetoric exchanged between the two countries, also involving Washington. In response South Korea’s Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin said that all options are being considered, including military, if safety of South Koreans in the North is at risk, Reuters quoted Yonhap news agency as reporting.

South Korea claims to have contingency measures in place for dealing with hostage situations in Kaesong, but their administration is keeping silent on what those might be. The Kaesong industrial zone is a jointly-operated facility established in the 2000s, and is considered to be among the major sources of income for the destitute North, as well as the only true joint venture between the warring neighbors.

The children are not enjoying it. Some, such as the Cypriots and Greeks and many Italians and Spaniards, are openly resentful of "Mutti" (mum), as Berlin officials privately call Chancellor Angela Merkel. Others, such as the French, are sulking.

The mood among German politicians and officials is one of economic self-confidence tinged with a sense of parental duty to provide the euro zone with stiff-backed leadership, even if that makes them unpopular in Europe. "German policymakers have taken to their new found status with something close to gusto," Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform, said in the latest edition of the London-based think-tank's bulletin.

"They routinely tell other euro zone countries how to run their economies, citing Germany as a model for the currency union as a whole." The view from Berlin, set out by a range of policymakers who spoke on condition of anonymity, is that Germany has a unique responsibility for the survival of the single currency area as its biggest and most dynamic economy.

The subtext is that since the Germans are the main bailout contributors and have most to lose in any collapse of monetary union, they must ensure that their partners cut their deficits, implement reforms and avoid mistakes that could sink the euro. German confidence in the ability of the European Commission and the European Central Bank to hold to a firm course without yielding to political pressure is limited.

In an essay published yesterday in the New York Times (NYT), Stockman wrote that the Fed’s quantitative easing policies following the credit crisis have flooded stock markets with cash even while the “Main Street economy” remains weak. The combination, he wrote, is “unsustainable.”

“When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008,” wrote Stockman, a former senior managing director at Blackstone Group LP (BX) and a former Republican congressman from Michigan. “Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.”

Stockman, 66, is the author of “The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America,” which will be published tomorrow.

Just 43 percent of executives said they were completely confident their banks were taking acceptable risks, while less than a third said their banks shared adequate information on its risk, capital and liquidity. Among the businesses taking part in the survey were the drinks maker, Diageo, Google, the internet search provider, and the energy company, Total, with executives complaining about a lack of transparency from their banks.

“The lingering after-effects of the 2008 financial crisis and the ongoing challenges in the eurozone have forced corporations to focus on the stability of their core banking teams. Counterparty risk and exposure from banks have become heightened concerns for large corporates and, as a result, we predict that banks will have to be more transparent about their risk profiles and portfolio concentration,” said Steven Lewis, a global banking analyst at Ernst & Young.

The findings come as regulators and the Government are putting pressure on major British banks to scale back their operations. Royal Bank of Scotland has been forced to sell off much of its international network since its £45.5 billion taxpayer bail-out in 2008 and is facing further cuts.

When I first heard about this I was quite skeptical, so I went and looked it up for myself. And guess what? It is right there in black and white on pages 144 and 145 of “Economic Action Plan 2013″ which the Harper government has already submitted to the House of Commons. This new budget actually proposes “to implement a ‘bail-in’ regime for systemically important banks” in Canada. “Economic Action Plan 2013″ was submitted on March 21st, which means that this “bail-in regime” was likely being planned long before the crisis in Cyprus ever erupted.

So exactly what in the world is going on here? In addition, as you will see below, it is being reported that the European Parliament will soon be voting on a law which would require that large banks be “bailed in” when they fail. In other words, that new law would make Cyprus-style bank account confiscation the law of the land for the entire EU. I can’t even begin to describe how serious all of this is.

From now on, when major banks fail they are going to bail them out by grabbing the money that is in your bank accounts. This is going to absolutely shatter faith in the banking system and it is actually going to make it far more likely that we will see major bank failures all over the western world.

Under the arrangement, depositors in Bank of Cyprus will receive shares in the lender worth 37.5 percent of any savings over €100,000, while the rest may never be paid back, according to a statement from the Cypriot central bank.

Of the 62.5 percent of uninsured deposits not converted to bank shares, about 40 percent will continue to accrue interest but will not be repaid unless the bank does well, while the final 22.5 percent will cease to attract interest. Government figures, including finance minister Michalis Sarris and central bank governor Panicos Demetriades, had previously indicated that depositors in the island's largest lender would lose around 40 percent of their uninsured savings as part of an 11th hour agreement reached in Brussels in the early hours of Monday.

Meanwhile, account holders in Laiki Bank, the country's second largest, stand to lose up to 80 percent of their money as the lender is wound down and insured deposits transferred to Bank of Cyprus. The harsher-than-expected terms on the Bank of Cyprus' largest depositors are likely to provoke further anger among Cypriots, who face sharp economic decline with the contraction of their dominant banking sector.

A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland; and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds.

New Zealand has a similar directive, indicating that this isn’t just an emergency measure for troubled Eurozone countries. New Zealand’s Voxy reported on March 19th: The National Government [is] pushing a Cyprus-style solution to bank failure in New Zealand which will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts . . . .

Open Bank Resolution (OBR) is Finance Minister Bill English’s favoured option dealing with a major bank failure. If a bank fails under OBR, all depositors will have their savings reduced overnight to fund the bank’s bail out. Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor’s funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the banks, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay.

In Luxembourg, Finance Minister Luc Frieden has warned that the example set in Cyprus by taxing people holding €100,000 ($129,000) or more in their accounts could drive investors out of Europe. "This will lead to a situation in which investors invest their money outside the euro zone," he told SPIEGEL. "In this difficult situation, we need to avoid anything that will lead to instability and destroy the trust of savers."

Earlier this week, Euro Group President Jeroen Dijsselbloem sparked an enormous controversy after stating that the solution found in Cyprus could be applied throughout the euro zone in the future.

The remark triggered immediate criticism from his predecessor as head of the Euro Group, Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker. "It disturbs me when the way in which they tried to resolve the Cyprus problem is held up as a blueprint for future rescue plans," Juncker told German public broadcaster ZDF earlier this week. "It's no blueprint. We should not give the impression that future savings deposits in Europe might not be secure. We should not give the impression that investors should not keep their money in Europe. This harms Europe's entire financial center."

Francis' decision to disregard church law and wash the feet of two girls - a Serbian Muslim and an Italian Catholic - during a Holy Thursday ritual has become something of the final straw, evidence that Francis has little or no interest in one of the key priorities of Benedict's papacy: reviving the pre-Vatican II traditions of the Catholic Church. Virtually everything he has done since being elected pope, every gesture, every decision, has rankled traditionalists in one way or another.

Officials at Florida Atlantic University announced the move against Dr Deandre Poole after receiving a complaint from student Ryan Rotella, who claims he was unfairly suspended from class for not writing the word ”Jesus” on a piece of paper and stomping on it as part of a class exercise.The schools said removing Dr Poole from the classroom was “for safety reasons” after the incident garnered a lot of media attention.

The controversy has even caught the attention of Governor Rick Scott, who called on University System Chancellor Frank Brogan to thoroughly investigate Rotella’s claims. “As we enter the week memorializing the events of Christ’s passion, this incident gave me great concern over the lessons we are teaching our students,” Scott wrote in the letter.

Rotella, a deeply religious Mormon, told CBS12 that he was offended and refused to participate in the exercise. “Anytime you stomp on something it shows that you believe that something has no value. So if you were to stomp on the word Jesus, it says that the word has no value,” said Rotella. Rotella said he voiced his concerns to his teacher’s supervisor and later learned he was suspended from the class.

By threatening potential chaos and war in the heart of the world's most dynamic economic region, it has in the past been able to transcend its own weakness and extract diplomatic concessions. But the United States may be about to call North Korea's bluff. The US treasury department is taking steps to squeeze North Korea financially, and the Pentagon has flown B-52 and B-2 bombers over the Korean peninsula - moves that are guaranteed to provoke a hostile reaction.

Washington's tough stance presents Kim Jong-un with a dilemma. He wants to show his generals and the North Korean people that he can force concessions from the United States - in the same style as his father and grandfather. He could now be tempted to take brinkmanship to a new level, to try to convince the US and the region that confrontation does not work and carries too many risks.