As Mark Bridger was jailed for life for the abduction and murder of five-year-old April Jones, the NSPCC said there was a “worrying link” between his looking at indecent images online and the crime he went on to commit. It called for “effective measures” to curb the ease with which extreme pornography and indecent images of children can be accessed. Bridger’s laptop computer contained a cache of images of children being raped and abused. Police found a horror film in his video recorder paused at a violent rape.

There have been calls for Google to introduce their “safe search” option as a default setting, which would automatically block hard-core pornography and make it far more difficult for children to access accidentally. The current default setting, “moderate”, does not. John Carr, the government’s adviser on internet safety and secretary of a children’s charities coalition on the subject, has said: “Google can do more and should do more.”

The Bilderberg organisers, who include Tory Cabinet minister Ken Clarke, do not release a guest list but a roll-call of luminaries are expected to descend on a luxury Watford hotel from June 6, forcing police to step up security.

Hertfordshire police have refused to release the cost of security for the event, which has previously drawn anti-capitalist demonstrators in other locations around the world. However, they are in talks with the Home Office about a grant for "unexpected or exceptional costs" that is only given out if it threatens the stability of the force's policing budget. The final bill would have to total more than one per cent of the police force's overall spend - or about £1.8 million - for the grant to be successful.

The invitation-only Bilderberg meetings are attended by around 140 members of the international elite. The cloak of secrecy surrounding the meetings, which ban journalists from attending, has fuelled conspiracy theories that so-called Bilderbergers are planning global domination and world unification.

Other top Asian wheat importers South Korea, China and the Philippines said they were closely monitoring the situation after the US government found genetically engineered wheat sprouting on a farm in the state of Oregon. The strain was never approved for sale or consumption.

Wheat, long known as the staff of life, is the world's largest traded food commodity and it is used in making breads, pastries, cookies, breakfast cereal and noodles. Asia imports more than 40 million tonnes of wheat annually, almost a third of the global trade of 140-150 million tonnes. The bulk of the region's supplies come from the United States, the world's biggest exporter, and Australia, the second largest supplier.

Thus capital controls, which two months after the bailout, are still in place. Judging by just released Cyprus Central Bank data they failed. Because even though the deposit outflow in March, when the fiasco happened, was a moderate €3.8 billion, which the European politicians promptly pointed to as confirmation of a job well done, it was the April outflow that was the jawdropping number.

In a month in which deposit flight should have been largely contained, Cyprus banks saw a record outflow of 6.4 billion, or 10% of its entire deposit base, in one month! But the sad punchline is that while deposit flight by domestic residents was an unfortunate if explainable €3 billion, it was the €3.1 billion in deposit reduction by "Non-Euro Residents" - read Russians, who circumvented capital controls, and pulled a whopping 16% of their entire deposits held in the tiny and now completely insolvent island nation.

In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.

The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.” Plot the data, and it looks like this:

New England Complex Systems Institute

Pretty simple. Black dots are the food prices, red lines are the riots. In other words, whenever the UN’s food price index, which measures the monthly change in the price of a basket of food commodities, climbs above 210, the conditions ripen for social unrest around the world. When prices jump, people can’t afford anything else; or even food itself. And if you can’t eat — or worse, your family can’t eat — you fight.

But how accurate is the model? An anecdote the researchers outline in the report offers us an idea. They write that “on December 13, 2010, we submitted a government report analyzing the repercussions of the global financial crises, and directly identifying the risk of social unrest and political instability due to food prices.” Four days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire as an act of protest in Tunisia. And we all know what happened after that.

Ledwidge told the Guardian: "Once the last British helicopter leaves a deserted and wrecked Camp Bastion, Helmand – to which Britain claimed it would bring 'good governance' – will be a fractious narco-state occasionally fought over by opium barons and their cronies."

"Rendering the Afghan armed forces capable of securing the province [Helmand] is regarded by many ordinary British soldiers as little short of ridiculous," Ledwidge writes. Though British and other foreign troops were sent to Afghanistan to stop al-Qaida posing a threat to Britain's national security, "of all the thousands of civilians and combatants, not a single al-Qaida operative or 'international terrorist' who could conceivably have threatened the United Kingdom is recorded as having been killed by Nato forces in Helmand," Ledwidge writes.

He added: "There are no new lessons here, only one rather important old precept: before you engage in a war, understand the environment you are going into, precisely and realistically what it is you are trying to achieve and will it be worth the cost? In other words have a strategy."

The flagship of the plan is the Grand Renaissance Dam being built in the Benishangul-Gumuz region near to Sudan; currently 21% complete, it will have a 6 gigawatt capacity once finished.

The Chief Executive Officer of the state-run Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation, Mihret Debebe, said that “the dam is being built in the middle of the river so you can't carry out construction work while the river flowed.” The diversion of the Nile around the site “now enables us to carry out civil engineering work without difficulties. The aim is to divert the river by a few meters and then allow it to flow on its natural course.”

“We see building evidence of a cyclical downturn,” said Fredrik Nerbrand, HSBC’s global asset guru. “We find it highly troubling that the eurozone is still marred in a recession at the same time as our cyclical indicators appear to have peaked.” The bank said there is a market “disconnect” between the world’s gloomy outlook and talk of tapering by the US Federal Reserve, the supposed moment when it starts to wind down its $85 billion of monthly bond purchases.

It is surprising to me that HSBC’s leading indicator has taken so long to buckle, since commodities topped in September and the Dutch CPB index of world trade contracted over the February-March period. Rarely has there ever been such an equity boom on such quicksand. Mr Nerbrand said slowing momentum “should send shivers down the spine of any investors that are long risk”.

After almost five years we are still in a contained global depression, struggling with a world record saving rate of 25 percent, and a chronic shortage of demand. The US has kept the world afloat by running down its own saving rate to 2.7 percent this year. This is not a remotely tenable equilibrium. Hang on to your seats when that snaps back.

The new set of regulations is known as “Basel III”, and it was developed by the Bank for International Settlements. The Bank for International Settlements has been called “the central bank for central banks”, and it is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. 58 major central banks (including the Federal Reserve) belong to the Bank for International Settlements, and the decisions made in Basel often have more of an impact on the direction of the global economy than anything the president of the United States or the US Congress are doing.

All you have to do is to look back at the last financial crisis to see an example of this. Basel II and Basel 2.5 played a major role in precipitating the subprime mortgage meltdown. Now a new set of regulations known as “Basel III” are being rolled out. The implementation of these new regulations is beginning this year, and they will be completely phased in by 2019. These new regulations dramatically increase capital requirements and significantly restrict the use of leverage.

Those certainly sound like good goals, the problem is that the entire global financial system is based on credit at this point, and these new regulations are going to substantially reduce the flow of credit. The only way that the giant debt bubble that we are all living in can continue to persist is if it continues to expand. By restricting the flow of credit, these new regulations threaten to burst the debt bubble and bring down the entire global economy.

Not that the current global financial system is sustainable by any means. Anyone with half a brain can see that the global financial system is a pyramid scheme that is destined to collapse. But Basel III may cause it to collapse faster than it might otherwise have.