Confrontation can hardly lead to success, predicts an expert on Korea at the CDU-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation: The North Korean rulers are resorting to military threats toward the West to rally the population and divert attention from the country's domestic shortcomings. If you want success, you must entice Pyongyang's leadership with the promise of intensive support in "opening" its economy and guaranteeing their position of power, in the event of a transformation of the social system.

Vietnam is a blueprint for such an approach. For quite some time, German party-affiliated foundations and economic and legal experts have been serving as consultants in the North Korean capital. At the beginning of this year, a participating scholar reported that a pending "master plan" for the transformation of the social system could be implemented later this year. If the country opens its doors, Berlin would immediately benefit not only economically but politically as well: Tangible influence on the Korean peninsula would be combined with an important role in East Asia, the future center of gravity in global policy.

"It is very important to meet a spiritual leader of the world," Ban said at the start of his meeting with the Argentine pope, who last month became the first non-European leader of the world's Catholics in nearly 1300 years. "The Holy See and the UN share common goals and ideas," said Ban - one of the first world leaders to be received at an audience by the new pontiff. Francis has called for the Roman Catholic Church to be closer to ordinary people and help the needy, as well as to reach out to people of different religions and non-believers.

"Pope Francis is a man of peace and purpose. He is a voice for the voiceless," he said. Ban said he also invited the pope to visit the United Nations "at his earliest convenience". The UN leader also commented on the pope's choice to name himself after St Francis of Assisi, saying this was "a powerful message for the many goals shared by the United Nations".

"It speaks loudly of his commitment to the poor, his acute sense of humility, his passion and compassion to improve the human condition," he said. Ban gave the pope a large book with the Charter of the United Nations in six languages.

Estimates are that up to half the population in America is ignorant about the situation in Cyprus. Oh sure, they hear snippets on the evening news, but since it’s far away and happening to other people, they don’t worry about it. These people are suffering from a Normalcy Bias.

Just what is a Normalcy Bias? Wikipedia defines it as a mental state that “causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects.” It’s sometimes called the “It can’t happen here” syndrome. The assumption is that since a particular disaster has never occurred before, it never will. Any disturbing indications that something bad may happen are dismissed or trivialized.

Originally, the Normalcy Bias referred solely to natural disasters. The scale of devastation and societal disruption from Hurricane Katrina can be attributed in part to a Normalcy Bias – the refusal of the people of New Orleans to believe their beloved city could ever receive a direct hit from a major hurricane, despite its physical vulnerabilities. I distinctly remember seeing a live news report from New Orleans on the evening of August 28, 2005, that showed people partying in the street with a (then) Category 4 hurricane hours away from landfall. Disaster? Nah. It can’t happen here. Gimme another beer.

But the Normalcy Bias has been extended to include political and social disasters as well. The most extreme example is Jews (and to an extent, some Germans) during the reign of the Nazis. Despite all the warning signs, many people remained in denial. Concentration camps? Genocide? Nah. Too crazy. It can’t happen here.

When we hear the mainstream media assuring us in soothing, condescending tones that we’re in an economic “recovery” – despite all evidence to the contrary – we want desperately to believe them. We don’t want anything to disrupt our ordinary, comfortable lives. We genuinely believe that if we cling to our normal way of life and habitual methods of doing things – despite overwhelming proof that something dangerous is looming – then everything will be OK. It can’t happen here.

But the situation in Cyprus is potentially international in scope. North Korea is doing some serious saber-rattling. America’s debt is so out of control that an economic crash is a statistical certainty. Sweeping anti-gun legislation is being enacted in various states even as we speak. As Ayn Rand so memorably put it, “You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”

Right now life is still pretty good in America. Grocery stores are well-stocked, restaurants are busy, movie theaters are full. Some people know that perhaps they should think about putting some of their retirement savings into tangibles or buying up some ammo, but what’s the hurry? The government won’t seize our assets or take away the Second Amendment. It can’t happen here.

But underneath our feet there is a low-grade ominous rumbling, something perceptive people detected many years ago. All is NOT right in America and in many other places in the world. Something bad IS heading our way. People need to prepare – physically, financially and spiritually.

Modern payment technologies have been taking over transactions. Since 2000, transaction volume via debit cards skyrocketed 18.4% per year, electronic bank transfers 13.5% per year, and credit cards 3.7% per year, reported San Francisco Fed President and CEO John Williams in “Cash Is Dead! Long Live Cash!” Conversely, use of checks dropped by 5.8% per year.

Cash does have advantages: it’s reliable even during blackouts or after earthquakes when nothing works anymore; and it’s anonymous so that companies can’t track you when you buy pita bread and hummus, information that years later might lead a promotion-hungry genius at some counter-terrorism office to send drones after you. Because cash is murky, the San Francisco Fed could only estimate transaction volume. And it’s down sharply.

The other reason to hang on to cash is as a store of value, albeit a lousy one as interest income is zero... Oops, same as most bank accounts! As the Cyprus bail-in debacle has demonstrated, handing your cash over to a bank is nothing but a loan, and when the bank craters, the uninsured deposit, and perhaps even the insured deposit, might evaporate or get a crew cut.

So, in these crazy times of ours, when central banks around the world impose zero-interest-rate policies that force people to lend their money interest-free to banks that are shaky, suddenly cold hard cash that you can move out of harm’s way can be a good option.

Those systems were put in place after a large earthquake and tsunami damaged the plant’s regular cooling systems two years ago, causing fuel at three of its reactors to melt and prompting 160,000 people to evacuate their homes. Since then, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, has been flooding the damaged reactor cores to cool and stabilize the fuel.

But Tepco has struggled to find space to store the runoff water. It initially released what it said was low-level contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean, igniting furious criticism among neighbors and environmental activists. Traces of radioactive cesium were later found in bluefin tuna caught off the California coast.

Dr Schneider had been scheduled to meet Pope Benedict XVI during an early April trip to Rome. Instead, he spent about 30 minutes with Pope Francis on Monday in the papal library in the Apostolic Palace.

“I hope a Pope who shows himself so close to the poor and the suffering also shows his understanding of couples who share everything except Communion,” he told reporters. In Germany where tens of thousands of Catholics are married to Protestants, broader permission to receive Communion in each others’ churches is something many people have been seeking for years.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, said the two leaders’ conversation about ecumenism “also focused particularly on the value of the ‘ecumenism of the martyrs,’ which the pope gives particular weight to, knowing the suffering” shared by Catholics and Protestants who refused to betray their Christian faith under the Nazis in Germany.

According to the USDA, Symptoms of CCD include few or no adult honeybees present, honey and immature bees (broods) remain present in the hive suggesting a sudden abandonment of the hive – a possible response to stress. However, the bees are never found elsewhere, they simply disappear and die. Usually, the queen bee is left behind but dies without establishing a new population.

The disorder has significantly affected bee populations since the 1970s with a sharp increase in losses since 2006. Now, as beekeepers return to their hives to prepare for spring pollination, they are finding that at least half of their bees are gone. The 2013 year now marks the highest loss on record with at least 50 percent of all European honeybees in the US reported lost to CCD. The attrition rate for honeybee hives is normally around 5 to 10 percent per year. After 2006, that rate increased to about one third. This year, it is one half. That one-half figure is a critical point beyond which many beekeepers think prices will be affected.

Premier Antonis Samaras held a special meeting with the foreign minister Dimitris Avramopoulos and other key officials this morning to limit the diplomatic damage from the 80-page report.

The document – stamped “Aporito”, or secret – was drafted by a panel of experts appointed by the Greek finance ministry and delivered to officials last month. The alleged claim against Germany reaches a grand total of €162 billion, including €108 billion for rebuilding the country’s infrastructure after the Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1944. This is 80 percent of Greek GDP.

The probe was chaired by Panagiotis Karakousis, director-general of the General Accounting Office at the Finance Ministry, and relied on 190,000 pages of documents scattered through the country’s ministries and archives. Mr Karakousis told The Daily Telegraph that the report was commissioned by the current leadership, not the previous Pasok government.

The challenge for the grouping created in 2003 and named after the celebrated American poet Ezra Pound who sided with Mussolini during the war, is to rewrite history for pure political ends. “We cannot be responsible for what was happening some 70 years ago. I can’t judge events of the past, since I wasn’t alive back then; so I cannot be judged for things that happened that far back,” the movement’s vice president Simone Di Stefano told RT.

According to Di Stefano, CasaPound has been expanding across Italy gaining public support. They claim to have up to 5,000 members and say fascism has never been so popular since World War 2.

PETMAN is a bipedal robot that has been displayed during previous tests as having the ability to climb stairs and even do pushups. In the latest video, though, the experimental project is showcased as being more lifelike than ever before.

Scientists at Boston Dynamics have released a video that shows PETMAN, clothed head-to-toe in full-on camouflage, jogging in place on a laboratory platform. But unlike earlier videos in which PETMAN appeared to be nothing more than a pile of wires enclosed in metal, the newest footage shows the science project at its all-time most humanness. The robot, adds the scientists, can balance itself, move freely, walk and do a variety of suit-stressing calisthenics — all while being exposed to chemical warfare agents.

"Natural, agile movement is essential for PETMAN to simulate how a soldier stresses protective clothing under realistic conditions,” adds Boston Dynamics. “The robot will have the shape and size of a standard human, making it the first anthropomorphic robot that moves dynamically like a real person."

It is hard to exaggerate the pitiful state of Britain in the Seventies. The reckless economic policy of Mrs Thatcher’s predecessor as Tory leader, Ted Heath, who between 1970 and 1974 printed money as though it were going out of fashion, had left a legacy of high inflation, peaking at 27 per cent in 1975. But the Labour administrations of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan between 1974 and 1979 made things even worse. Wilson began by buying off trade unions with budget-busting pay rises and implemented a programme of food and housing subsidies that owed more to the Soviet bloc than to a supposedly western economy.

Jim Callaghan succeeded him in April 1976 and continued to spend money the country did not have. A refusal to accept that Britain could not spend its way out of trouble led to the International Monetary Fund having to rescue the country from bankruptcy in the autumn of 1976. The severe spending cuts the IMF ordered in return for its financial assistance aggravated relations between the Labour government and its notional supporters in the trade union movement.

Things were grim for the private sector. The top rate of tax on earned income was 83 per cent, which drove thousands of the best and brightest abroad. It was an astonishing 98 per cent on unearned income, such as dividends, which prevented many people from investing in industry. Starved of investment, industry became ever more sclerotic.

The private sector was also held hostage by the unions. From 1976 a dispute had been running for two years at Grunwick, a London photo-processing laboratory, over the management’s refusal to recognise unions. It came to symbolise the struggle between management and unions in pre-Thatcherite Britain. When Mrs Thatcher won office she delivered on her promises. Unions were forced to be democratic — no longer could they call strikes without a ballot of their members. Flying pickets were made illegal.

Having emasculated the unions by bringing them within the law, Mrs Thatcher was able to proceed with the strategy of restructuring the economy and dragging Britain into the late 20th century. By 1983, when she faced re-election — after the small matter of the Falklands War — she had won her richly deserved accolade as a transformative prime minister.

Unelected union leaders no longer dictated the terms of the political debate in Britain. For the first time since the Thirties, managers truly did have the right to manage. Our money was sound again, thanks to her refusal to fund a client state in the way her Labour — and Conservative — predecessors had. As a result of all this, not only was our country transformed in four short years, but also our standing in the world and our ability to believe in ourselves.