This appears to be very similar to what happened in America. As noted last year: The Tarp Inspector General has said that [then-Secretary of the Treasury Hank] Paulson misrepresented the big banks’ health in the run-up to passage of TARP. This is no small matter, as the American public would have not been very excited about giving money to insolvent institutions. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson warned Congress that there would be martial law unless the Tarp bailouts were approved.

And the “financial reform” laws passed in the wake of the crisis have, in some ways, actually weakened regulation of the financial markets, allowed the big banks to get a lot bigger, and have intentionally allowed fraudulent accounting.

Likewise, the “stress tests” in both Europe and America have been a total scam … a naked attempt to put lipstick on a pig to cover up the fact that the big banks are insolvent. By choosing the big banks over the little guy – and failing to rein in the fraud which caused the crisis in the first place – the governments on both sides of the Atlantic are dooming both the financial system and the people to failure.

At least, "a battle has been won," writes the Spanish press. This partial victory in the battle against the German austerity dictate could only be accomplished under the imminent threat that the Euro zone could collapse. Berlin had already announced that it does not intend to cede any further ground. The ESM "bailout funds" will certainly not be permitted to become "a self-service shop," declared the chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group. Paris will now fulfil one of Berlin's principal demands: The French president has announced his intentions to have France ratify the Fiscal Stability Treaty - without renegotiations, as the precondition he had insisted upon during his electoral campaign.

Berlin had been able to impose several restrictions. The participating countries are obligated to fulfil the conditions of the Fiscal Stability Treaty - particularly, the strict, Germany imposed, austerity policy. Merkel's dictum "accountability and control belong together" - has laid the basis for the summit resolution on a European banking supervision, which is to be created by the end of the year. Only when this control agency, with participation of the European Central Bank (ECB), is functional, will the ESM be able to provide banks with direct recapitalization resources.

German government coalition politicians were quick with reassurances that the new rules still permit an intensive German control over the crisis countries. "The Bundestag always has the last say," declared conservative whip Volker Kauder.

Last week's crisis summit has only postponed for a short period, the dynamics of the crisis. With its 500 billion Euros, the ESM is clearly too small to permanently stabilize the European financial sector and to maintain the southern European countries' interests at a low level. The shifting of the political power constellation to Berlin's disadvantage can be seen as the summit's most important result.

Government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou said in a television interview Tuesday that the data would demonstrate that the current austerity program was counterproductive. Greece is relying on rescue loans from its partners in the eurozone and the International Monetary Fund to avoid bankruptcy. In exchange, it has made painful austerity cuts, such as tax hikes and cuts to public sector jobs, pensions and salaries. Along with uncertainty over the country's finances, those austerity measures have hit the economy hard — it is in a fifth year of recession, with unemployment topping 22 percent, roughly double the eurozone average.

The Greek government will argue that it cannot withstand the current pace of austerity terms. Debt inspectors from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF are due in Athens Wednesday. "We will present information that is astounding. It is alarming in terms of the recession and unemployment, and it shows beyond any doubt that the current policy does not bring results. It brings the opposite results," Kedikoglou told private Antenna television.

But the truth is that messing with the building blocks of life is going to have some very serious consequences. Scientists claim that they are making our crops stronger, more productive and less vulnerable to insects. Scientists claim that they can alter our animals so that they are more "useful" to us. Scientists claim that genetic modification is only going to "enhance" humanity.

But what if something goes seriously wrong? For example, what if we learn that eating genetically modified food is really, really bad for us? Well, at this point more than 70 percent of the processed foods sold in the United States contain at least one ingredient that has been genetically modified. It would be kind of hard to go back now.

Scientists all over the world seem to have no problem messing with our animals either. Recently it was revealed that scientists in China have genetically modified 300 cows to produce milk that has many of the same qualities that human breast milk does. So how did they do this? Well, they inserted human genes into the cows. So those cows are now essentially part human and part cow.

Are you disturbed yet?

You should be.

Sadly, now even human babies are being genetically modified. Recently it was reported that scientists have created babies that have three parents. The following is from a recent Daily Mail article... "The world's first genetically modified humans have been created, it was revealed last night. The disclosure that 30 healthy babies were born after a series of experiments in the United States provoked another furious debate about ethics. So far, two of the babies have been tested and have been found to contain genes from three 'parents'."

We have rushed ahead and have created hordes of freakish genetic monsters without ever seriously considering the consequences. Someday, future generations may look back on us and wonder how we could have ever been so incredibly foolish.

"The main aim of this drill is to demonstrate the Iranian nation's political resolve to defend vital values and national interests," Revolutionary Guards Deputy Commander Hossein Salami was quoted by Press TV as saying. He said the tests were in response to Iran's enemies who talk of a "military option being on the table". On Sunday, Iran threatened to wipe Israel "off the face of the earth" if the Jewish state attacked it.

“There remains a strong resentment among large parts of the British people that they voted for one thing and were delivered into another”, said Fox. “Worse, there is a suspicion that those who persuade them to do so were all too aware of this deception. Not only were they sold a pup but they were intentionally sold a pup”, he added.

The declaration implies that farmers would have to quarantine and slaughter the infected birds. Contaminated products are to be destroyed, while unaffected poultry are to be vaccinated. With poultry farming making up 40 per cent of the country’s total livestock production, the economic loss from the epidemic “is and will be irreparable,” the agriculture ministry stated.

The "super derecho" storm that pounded the Washington DC area on Friday night with hurricane-force winds is being called unprecedented. But the truth is that there are other events that could happen that would be far more damaging to our power grid. For example, a substantial EMP burst over a major US city would fry virtually all of the electronics in the city and take the power grid in the area down indefinitely.

A gigantic EMP burst over the entire country (caused by a massive solar storm or a very large nuclear explosion high in the atmosphere) could theoretically take down the entire national power grid. Hopefully this latest storm has reminded Americans about how vulnerable our power grid really is and about how close we really are to being knocked back to the late 1800s.

Soyabean prices have surged to the highest level since the 2007-08 food crisis and the price of this year’s corn crop has risen 30 per cent since mid-June. Worries about the size of the US crop come only months after drought hit the Latin American soyabean belt of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Top US farming states such as Illinois and Indiana had suffered temperatures above 38ºC (100ºF) for several days already, with no let-up this week.

“The forecast is going to remain pretty much the same over the next week. We’re not looking at much of a break in the heat,” said Matt Barnes, meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s central Illinois office. “We aren’t seeing widespread failure yet, but it sure is developing rapidly,” said Brian Fuchs, climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Centre.

The warmth that enabled farmers to plant seeds quickly has since escalated into damaging extreme heat. “The combination of low subsoil moisture, which is a reflection of the lack of precipitation that we had during the winter, together with the very hot weather that we’re seeing right now could spell a pretty disastrous scenario for corn and soyabeans,” said Hussein Allidina, head of commodities research at Morgan Stanley.

The outcome is critical to global food prices and the agribusiness industry because the US supplies almost half of global corn exports and a third of soyabean exports. Demand for both has risen as consumers in emerging countries eat more meat. The heatwave threatens to undermine forecasts of record output after the most widespread US corn plantings in 75 years.

These are the kinds of extremes climate scientists have predicted will come with climate change, although it's far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June. And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren't having similar disasters now, although they've had their own extreme events in recent years.

But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now. So far this year, more than 2.1 million acres have burned in wildfires, more than 113 million people in the US were in areas under extreme heat advisories last Friday, two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought, and earlier in June, deluges flooded Minnesota and Florida.

The 100-degree heat, drought, early snowpack melt and beetles waking from hibernation early to strip trees all combined to set the stage for the current unusual spread of wildfires in the West, said University of Montana ecosystems professor Steven Running, an expert on wildfires.

While at least 15 climate scientists told The Associated Press that this long hot US summer is consistent with what is to be expected in global warming, history is full of such extremes, said John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He's a global warming skeptic who says, "The guilty party in my view is Mother Nature."

Two decades ago, when the European currency system was last on the brink of collapse, the ultimate question was how much Germany, the continent's economic powerhouse, would do to save it. The peripheral economies were hurting, weighed down by a monetary policy that was appropriate for Germany but too austere for weaker European countries. Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, had to make a choice. It could continue to set high interest rates, thus upholding its commitment to stable prices. Or it could cut rates and accept modest inflation - and so save the rest of Europe from a prolonged recession.

We know which option Germany chose then. The Bundesbank brushed off suggestions that it should risk inflation for the sake of European solidarity; speculators correctly concluded that this made a common monetary policy intolerable for the weaker economies of Europe; and in September 1992, the continent's Exchange Rate Mechanism, a precursor of today's euro, shattered under the pressure of attacks from hedge funds. Almost 20 years later, the world is waiting for a new answer to the same question. How far will Germany go to keep Europe together?

The economist Rudiger Dornbusch observed that in economics, crises take longer to come to a head than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.

By the time you read this, the eurozone may have splintered. But whether or not that has happened, or soon will, one thing is certain. Since the beginning of the crisis, Germany has had the power to save the monetary union if it wanted to. The union's disintegration would be an optional catastrophe.