The White House announced Thursday that intelligence officials have concluded that the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad has twice used sarin gas on its own people. But even though US President Barack Obama has called that a “red line” for taking some kind of further action to assist the rebels, administration officials said Thursday that the intelligence wasn’t solid enough to warrant such a move.

On Thursday, US officials said there has been no new movement of US military assets to the region. The military options could include establishing a no-fly zone over or a secured area within Syria, launching airstrikes by drones and fighter jets and sending in tens of thousands of ground forces to secure the regime’s chemical weapons caches.

Setting up a no-fly zone over Syria would present a greater challenge than it did in Libya in 2011 because Syria has a more sophisticated and robust air defense system. Crippling it would require jamming its radars and taking out missile sites, or possibly even using some type of cyber-attack to interfere with the system.

The hardline central bank - known as the temple of monetary orthodoxy - told Germany’s top court that the ECB’s pledge to shore up Italian and Spanish debt entails huge risks and violates fundamental principles. “It is not the duty of the ECB to rescue states in crisis,” it wrote in a 29-page document leaked to Handelsblatt.

The Bundesbank unleashed a point by point assault on every claim made by ECB chief Mario Draghi to justify emergency rescue policies - or Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) - unveiled last summer to stop Spain’s debt crisis spiralling out of control. The Draghi plan mobilized the ECB as lender of last resort and led to a spectacular fall in borrowing costs across the EMU periphery, buying nine months of financial calm. The credibility of the pledge rests entirely on German consent. Analysts say the crisis could erupt again at any moment if that is called into question.

“The report borders on economic warfare,” said Harvinder Sian from RBS. “We think there is going to be fear and dread in the market that the court will reject OMT.” The document said OMT entails the purchase of “bad bonds”, violates ECB independence and entails a high risk of heavy losses in the “not unlikely” event that debtor states are forced out of EMU.

On Wednesday, Theresa May, the Home Secretary, with support from Germany, Austria and Holland wrote to the European Commission demanding tighter restrictions on access to welfare benefits and other state-funded services for EU migrants.

Two days later, the commission responded with a proposal for a new directive to "make it easier for people to exercise their rights in practice" in defiance of British claims that the current rules on free movement are being abused by migrants.

"With much higher levels of unemployment in some member states than others at the moment, it is all the more important to make it easier for those that want to work in another EU country to be able to do so," said Laszlo Andor, the EU commissioner for "employment, social affairs and inclusion". "This proposal will help workers to overcome obstacles to working in another EU country." Mr Andor dismissed British concerns and accused Mrs May of scaremongering over claims of benefit tourism by EU migrants "inflated because of domestic political reasons" ahead of free movement for Bulgarians and Romanians next year

The Sex Education Forum wants pornography taught in terms of "media literacy and representation, gender, sexual behaviour and body image". Campaigner Lucy Holmes, of No More Page Three, welcomed the idea. "The more open and honest dialogue we have with young people about sex and porn, the better," said Ms Holmes.

Norman Wells, of the Family Education Trust, said many parents would be horrified at the prospect of their children being taught about pornography within such a framework: "The intention appears to be to steer children and young people away from a belief in moral absolutes and to encourage them to think that there are no rights and wrongs when it comes to sexual expression. To give lessons on pornography is to play with fire," said Mr Wells.

It has 141 banks – bank companies, not ATMs. One bank per 3,808 people. Most of them do private banking. The financial sector added 38% to GDP in 2010 and contributed 30% to the country’s tax revenues, according to the Luxembourg Bankers’ Association (ABBL). All due to bank secrecy and tax laws. But suddenly, after Cyprus had been massacred, Luxembourg buckled.

“A large part of the clients of the Luxembourgian banks have undeclared money,” Steichen pointed out. They wouldn’t have a lot of options other than closing their accounts in Luxembourg, he said. They might repatriate their funds – and pay fees, taxes, and penalties – or transfer their funds to Singapore, Monaco, or other murky banking centers. Either way, these assets would leave Luxembourg. Their power to generate income, jobs, and tax revenues would evaporate.

This “undeclared money” has been called “black money” in the battle over Cyprus, much of it from Russians. Northern Europe revolted against bailing out mailbox companies and their black-money bank accounts. While they were at it, Northern Europe, including France in this case, shut down the whole offshore machine, crippled the Cypriot economy, smashed its largest source of income and wealth, and demolished its business model. Encouraged by success, Northern Europe, now including the UK, swiveled its guns in direction of Luxembourg.

"I respectfully request an investigation of the Federal Reserve leak of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) minutes on April 9 and 10, 2013. According to Bloomberg News, the list of individuals who received the information included staff at Barclays PLC, BB&T Corp, BNP Paribas SA, Capital One Financial Corp, Fifth Third Bancorp, HSBC Holdings PLC, Nomura Holdings Inc, PNC Financial Services Group Inc, Regions Financial Corp, US Bancorp, UBS AG and Wells Fargo & Co.

I have long been concerned about the Federal Reserve’s management of sensitive market-moving information. One example of blatant information “asymmetry” is the five-year lag before FOMC meeting transcripts are released to the public. As the Huffington Post reported in 2012, “Many of those people have since left the central bank and gone to work in the financial industry, taking with them privileged information about the Fed’s thinking that is still closed to the public.”

This includes Susan Bies, who is now a board member at Bank of America; Laurence Meyer, who founded Macroeconomic Advisors; and Brian Madigan, who is now at Barclays.

Some relevant questions to consider during your investigation include:

1) Who specifically received this information early?

2) Did any insider trading result from this leak?

3) Did Goldman Sachs release a note encouraging clients to short gold [Goldman's note says: "We recommend initiating a short COMEX gold position..."] right after receiving the leak information, due to the leak itself? Who else might have profited from the early release of this information?

4) What are the internal control procedures in place for the Federal Reserve to manage sensitive market-moving information? How did these procedures fail?

5) Why does the Federal Reserve continue to withhold the transcripts of FOMC meetings secret for five years, when there are many people who have been present at those meetings who have moved on to private sector employment within that blackout period?"

Good questions.

We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates.

The ammo shortage has already become so severe that police departments all over America are saying that they are being told that it is going to take six months to a year to get their orders. In fact, many police departments have begun to trade and barter with one another to get the ammo that they need. Meanwhile, the takedown of paper gold and paper silver has unleashed an avalanche of “panic buying” of physical gold and physical silver all over the planet. In the United States, some dealers are charging premiums of more than 25 percent over the spot price for gold and silver and they are getting it.

People are paying these prices even though they are being told that delivery will not happen for a month or two in many cases. Some dealers are feverishly taking as many orders as they can, and they are just hoping that they will be able to get the physical gold and silver to eventually fill those orders. Personally, I have never seen anything like this. If things are this tight now, what is going to happen when the next major financial crisis strikes and people really begin to panic?

Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the largely bipolar geopolitical superstructure, the world has become an increasingly fractured and unstable place. George W Bush’s New World Order never materialized, due to dynamic economic, cultural, and political processes, the renewed rise of national interests, and the steady encroachment of sectarian radicalism.

There are many “hotspots” in the world today, including tenuous situations in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Central Asia, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and Turkey. As awful as these situations are, none of them threaten to disrupt the global balance. But after speaking to several futurists and international affairs experts, I learned that there are at least seven different possible scenarios that could trigger the start of the next major war.

1. Ongoing turmoil in Pakistan

2. Unpredictable North Korea

3. Syria spillover

4. Revolution in China

5. War against Iran

6. Vulnerable North Africa

7. Saudi collapse

The forum will be concluded with two "hypothetical practical tests," to learn whether the Peoples Republic of China's military can "take over" and "hold onto" Taiwan or islands in the South China Sea. The conflict with Taiwan, as well as that over various islands in the South China Sea, impinges upon China's vital interests. In both cases, the USA has adopted the position of China's adversary as its own, therefore, in the case of armed conflict, NATO - and therefore, the rest of the West - could become directly involved.

A supplementary objective for the "war game exercises" is the West's rapidly expanding military presence in east and Southeast Asia. In the wake of the stationing of US troops, Germany is also strengthening its military cooperation with China's potential adversaries in Southeast Asia and intensifying arms exports into the region. If a conflict erupts, the West will be directly involved. With these "war games" Berlin is preparing for this eventuality.

After financial, currency and debt crises, wrenching budget and spending cuts, rich nations' bailouts of the poor, and surrenders of sovereign powers over policymaking to international technocrats, Euroscepticism is soaring to a degree that is likely to feed populist anti-EU politics and frustrate European leaders' efforts to arrest the collapse in support for their project.

Figures from Eurobarometer, the EU's polling organisation, analysed by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a thinktank, show a vertiginous decline in trust in the EU in countries such as Spain, Germany and Italy that are historically very pro-European.

The six countries surveyed – Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain, and Poland – are the EU's biggest, jointly making up more than two out of three EU citizens or around 350 million of the EU's 500 million population. The findings, published exclusively in the Guardian in Britain and in collaboration with other leading newspapers in the other five countries, represent a nightmare for Europe's leaders, whether in the wealthy north or in the bailout-battered south, suggesting a much bigger crisis of political and democratic legitimacy.

"The damage is so deep that it does not matter whether you come from a creditor, debtor country, euro would-be member or the UK: everybody is worse off," said José Ignacio Torreblanca, head of the ECFR's Madrid office. "Citizens now think that their national democracy is being subverted by the way the euro crisis is conducted."