For much of 2010 and 2011, the German economy seemed immune to the euro crisis that was raging around it. Now, however, it looks as though those days are over. Several indicators show that dark clouds are gathering over the country's economic output. The latest of those came on Friday.

According to data released on Friday by Germany's Federal Statistical Office, exports fell by 1.7 percent in April in comparison with March. The fall, while expected, was twice what most economists had forecast and it marks the first time in 2012 that German exports have fallen. In total, Germany exported €81.7 billion ($102 billion) worth of goods in April.

The data revealed that Germany can no long count on the strength of growth in developing countries to offset the euro crisis. Exports to euro-zone countries mired in debt crises fell by 3.6 percent in April. Even though exports to non-European countries actually grew 10.3 percent in the month, demand from China and India has slowed and German companies are worried.

"German companies have the feeling that foreign demand is not as dynamic as before and that the global economy is entering a weak phase," Dekabank economist Andreas Scheuerle told the conservative daily Die Welt. Still, he added, the main problem was more local. "The weakness is coming from the euro zone, where the debt crisis is not only taking the form of budget plans and savings programs, but it is also creating more uncertainty about the economic situation that's being reflected in weaker investment."

Breivik, 33, already known to have a long history with the online role-playing game, was particularly absorbed by it between November 2010 and February 2011, when he played for an average of 6 hours and 50 minutes per day, according to prosecutors. The new evidence in Breivik's ongoing trial was presented in an Oslo court on Wednesday. When asked about his interest in the game by a prosecutor, Breivik angrily dismissed the idea that playing World of Warcraft had any connection to his attacks, according to media reports.

"It is not relevant to this case whatsoever," Breivik said, getting so upset that he threatened to turn off his microphone, according to Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang. On July 22, 2011, Breivik detonated a bomb in central Oslo that killed eight people, and then shot and killed 69 people attending a youth summer camp on the nearby island of Utoya. Breivik admitted mounting the attacks after his arrest, and used weapons named after Norse gods to massacre his victims. He has previously stated that he played Warcraft, as well as another "first-person shooter" game called Modern Warfare, for hours daily.

In Warcraft, players assume the identity of an online character to use magic and weapons to battle monsters and other characters and go on quests. According to prosecutors, Breivik played Warcraft under the aliases "Andersnordic" and "Conservatism." Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who was brought in as an expert witness for Breivik's defense earlier this year, said in an interview with the British network ITN that Breivik was apparently unable to separate games from reality.

Now Mali and neighboring Niger are facing swarms of locusts, which were left uncontrolled while Libya and Algeria, which normally keep local locusts from moving south, grappled with conflicts and insecurity of their own. The swarming desert locusts, which can eat their own weight in fresh food every day, threaten to devastate crops in a region where millions of people are already menaced by food shortages. In some stretches of northern Mali and Niger, some people have resorted to eating plant leaves, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Food Program have said.

Locusts are usually managed by spraying chemicals that stop the swarms from spreading. Algeria and Libya ordinarily attack the swarms, preventing them from hitting Mali or Niger. But in the last year, as Libya was wracked by fighting between rival militias in the aftermath of the ouster of Moammar Kadafi and Algeria suffered insecurity along its border, local teams and international experts have been blocked from stopping the swarms, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said. Locusts have reportedly already been spotted in the northern Mali region of Kidal, as well as neighboring northern Niger.

The onslaught is especially alarming in Mali because the unrest has crippled its ability to fight them off. Bloomberg News reported Thursday that the equipment Mali needs to stop the swarms was destroyed during the Tuareg rebellion, quoting an interview with a locust control official broadcast on state radio. Even before it was threatened by locusts, Mali has been facing its worst crisis in 50 years, Amnesty International said last month. Rebels and soldiers alike have violated human rights with executions and rapes. Tens of thousands of people have fled the region.

But new judicial woes and internal upheavals at the bank, officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), have raised new hurdles for the Vatican, just as it entered the final stretch after years of efforts to join the international club of financial righteousness. On May 24, in the type of corporate drama rarely seen in the Vatican, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, 67, the Italian president of the IOR, stormed out of the bank's executive offices.

He had spoken for 70 minutes non-stop in the boardroom to defend his management but left in a huff when it became clear that the other four board members were intent on approving a no-confidence motion against him. Gotti Tedeschi, a conservative Catholic who heads the Italian retail unit of Spain's Banco Santander, went to his car in the Sixtus V Courtyard and left the Vatican via the nearby Saint Ann's Gate, receiving a customary crisp salute by a Swiss Guard oblivious to the drama that had just unfolded.

"During the deliberations, at 4:00 pm, you abandoned the premises of the Institute without notice and without waiting to receive notice as to the results of the no-confidence vote," says a memorandum of the meeting seen by Reuters. A day after the astonishing arrest of the pope's butler in an affair of purloined documents, and 30 years after a Vatican-linked financier known as "God's Banker" was found hanged from a bridge in London, the last thing the Holy See needed was more headlines about its bank, housed in the 15th-century Tower of Nicholas V, which Pope Benedict can see from his bedroom window.

For the past two years the Vatican, a 108-acre sovereign city-state surrounded by Rome, has been pulling out all the stops to make the "white list" of states that comply with international standards against tax fraud and money laundering. Gotti Tedeschi's abrupt departure came one day after Pope Benedict's butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested in the most clamorous chapter so far of the so-called "Vatileaks" scandal, in which sensitive documents have appeared in the media since January, including some related to the IOR's transparency bid.

Officials, scrambling for solutions, have considered dipping into funds that are supposed to be for Greece’s troubled banks. Some are even suggesting doling out i.o.u.’s. Greek leaders said that despite their latest bailout of €130 billion, or $161.7 billion, they face a shortfall of €1.7 billion because tax revenue and other sources of potential income are drying up. A wrenching recession and harsh budget cuts have left businesses and individuals with less and less to give for taxes — and growing incentive to avoid paying what they owe.

The budget gap is widening as the so-called troika of lenders — the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission — withholds €1 billion in bailout money earmarked for government financing while it waits to see whether new leaders elected June 17 will honor Greece’s commitments.

Even if the troika delivers that money, Greece will struggle to cover its obligations. It underscored a harsh reality that is playing out in other troubled euro zone economies. Prolonged austerity is making it harder, not easier, for governments like Greece to become self-reliant again.

A credit rating cut for Madrid forced investors to confront the reality of the euro zone crisis after Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke damped recent hopes that the central bank would announce new moves to stimulate the US economy later this month. Top European shares were down 0.6 percent around midday, the euro had retreated to below $1.25 after a two-week high on Thursday, and Brent crude slid $1.62 to $98.25 a barrel. US stock index futures pointed to a lower open on Wall Street on Friday.

"With the negative news on Spain's rating cut, it's back to reality for the market. The recovery we saw in the last few days was not a sustainable one," said Lutz Karpowitz, currency strategist at Commerzbank, who forecast the euro would be around $1.20 by the end of June. The lack of a clear signal on Thursday from Bernanke that the Federal Reserve's June 19-20 meeting would bring in a new round of quantitative easing overshadowed what had been a positive reaction in world markets to a Chinese interest rate cut.

Instead markets worried about how Madrid can solve the crisis at many of its banks caused by a property crash and recession, a job complicated when Fitch cut its sovereign credit rating by three notches to BBB from A on Thursday. EU and German sources said Spain was set to request European aid for its banks this weekend to forestall worsening market turmoil, making it the fourth and largest country to seek assistance since the euro zone debt crisis began.

All eyes are on Spain as the euro crisis seems to deepen by the day. The country's banks are in dire need of capital, which Madrid is unable to easily provide. Yet the government continues to resist outside pressure to accept bailout money from their euro-zone partners. Instead, in an effort to avoid submitting to conditions that would be imposed in exchange for a bailout, Madrid has turned to the financial markets, an approach widely considered to be both unsustainable and a grave risk to the health of the euro zone.

Laden with bad loans left over from the collapse of the country's real estate bubble in 2009, the country's most troubled institution, Bankia SA, reportedly needs €19 billion ($24 billion) in fresh capital. In total, the Spanish banking sector is thought to need between €75 billion and €100 billion worth of liquidity. Borrowing costs on 10-year bonds, meanwhile, have crept close to the dangerous 7 percent mark, widely considered to be unsustainable.

Spanish Treasury Minister Cristobal Montoro revealed how dire the situation has become on Tuesday. "The risk premium says Spain doesn't have the market door open," he told Onda Cero radio. "The risk premium says that as a state, we have a problem in accessing markets, when we need to refinance our debt."

Spain has asked for euro-zone bailout money to be made available directly to its financial institutions, a strategy to which Germany is strictly opposed. Europe "needs to support those that are in difficulty," Rajoy told a Senate session on Tuesday, calling for a "banking union" to oversee the finanancial industry. While the European Commission and European Central Bank (ECB) are expected to present ideas for creating such banking oversight at a summit in late June, any such plan would be almost certainly be too late to help Spain.

As Spain's prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, came under mounting international pressure to accept the eurozone's fourth national bailout in two years, the government in Madrid angrily rejected the demands, insisting that it did not need rescuing. With fears of a euro meltdown having rapidly shifted from Greece to Spain, Rajoy is pleading for a direct eurozone rescue of his country's banks, to avoid the humiliation attached to requesting a national bailout.

Sources familiar with the Spanish government's thinking said its negotiating position was that the fundamental quandary facing the eurozone was not Spain, but a European failure of leadership in persuading the financial markets that the euro would be defended at all costs. A Brussels summit at the end of the month would have to remedy that by agreeing to establish a eurozone banking and fiscal union – major federalising steps certain to be fought over. Without that commitment, Spain fears the single currency would be finished in months.

The Spanish government believes that the eurozone's fourth-biggest economy is too big to rescue and that the consequences of abandoning Spain to the markets without a pledge of major European reform could be so ferocious that the single currency would not survive. The expectation is that any decisions will be delayed until after the Greek election on 17 June. Eurozone finance ministers are to meet on 21 June. The next day Rajoy is due in Rome for a summit with the leaders of Germany, France, and Italy before the Brussels summit a week later.

Speaking in Oslo, where he is holding talks with Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg, Mr Cameron said "speed is of the essence" in dealing with the crisis. "Every day that the European economies are stagnant are days when opportunities are lost, wealth is lost, jobs can be lost so we need to get our economies moving," he told reporters. "Clearly the eurozone crisis is the biggest threat to the world economy, it the biggest challenge that we face today. Obviously the Americans are concerned about this but the British economy is six times more exposed to the eurozone than the US economy. It is in our interest that we help the eurozone to take the right decision."

The UK is pressing for a series of solutions including a larger bailout fund, euro bonds AND STRUCTURAL REFORM WITHIN THE EUROPEAN UNION - which could lead to greater fiscal burden-sharing between the poorest and wealthiest countries. The UK has welcomed plans set out by the European Commission to move towards a common "banking union" across the eurozone as a "positive step in tackling the problem of 'too big to fail' in the banking sector".

And speaking in Norway - from where he will travel to Germany - Mr Cameron added: "I don't think we should single out one eurozone leader and put all the responsibility on them. There is a whole series of steps that need to be taken." Our correspondent said Mr Cameron's remarks were a recognition that Germany could not be expected to deal with problems in Spanish banks and the eurozone as a whole needed to decide where its future lay.

The euro crisis began because too many countries, such as Greece, acted on old national impulses under the umbrella of a single currency. They spent too much money – borrowed from other EU countries – with little regard for the new European rules on fiscal discipline. Instead of one for all and all for one, it was more often simply all for one.

Financial markets finally gagged on the red ink and now insist that the euro’s 17 member states create a political authority as strong as their economic union. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, agrees, in large part to justify helping Europe’s wobbly banks. But this would mean that each nation would need to give up a lot more sovereignty, such as control over spending on health and education.

Europe, which invented the nation-state, is faced with diminishing it for the sake of an elusive United States of Europe. Up to now, however, much of the EU’s unity was based on a negative identity. In 1945, Europe didn’t want to be like its fascist past. Then during the cold war, it rallied around not being like the communist Soviet Union. And it has long tried not to be like America. Now it is being forced to assert an affirmative identity in order to persuade a skeptical public into accepting far more centralized governance.

But where is that common belonging? Europe shares no common language and no common media. EVEN THE OLD GLUE OF CHRISTIANITY HAS FADED.

Things did not look this bad back in the summer of 2011 and things certainly did not look this bad back in the summer of 2010. It is almost as if a "perfect storm" is brewing. Today, the global financial system is a finely balanced pyramid of risk, debt and leverage. Such a system requires a high degree of confidence and stability. But when confidence disappears and fear and panic take over, the house of cards can literally start collapsing at any time.

Right now we are watching a slow-motion train wreck unfold and nobody seems to know how to stop it. Unless some kind of a miracle happens, things are going to look much different when we reach the start of 2013 than they do today. When was the last time that we saw so much bad economic news come out all at once? 2008 perhaps? We truly live in unprecedented times. It will be exciting to watch what happens, but it is also important to keep in mind that the coming economic crisis will cause extreme pain for millions upon millions of people.

Recently we have seen brutal beheadings in the Middle East, in Mexico, in Africa, in India and even in the United States. So what is next? Will guillotines make a comeback? This was a really difficult article to write. If you have a weak stomach you might not want to read it. I thought about not writing it, but I think it is important to expose what is really going on out there. Sometimes it is really easy to sit in our comfortable homes surrounded by people that we love and ignore the terrible evil that is happening out in our world today.

Our planet is not a very nice place and tyranny is gaining more ground with each passing day. You might think that this is something that happens "on the other side of the world" and that you do not need to worry about it, but as tyranny spreads so will this kind of brutality. What would you do someday if you had a choice of either bowing down to tyranny or losing your head?

What would you do someday if you were threatened with beheading if you did not renounce what you believe? You might want to think about how you would handle that type of situation. Our world is becoming a very evil place, and in the years ahead the pressure to submit to tyranny is only going to increase.

If you were faced with either renouncing what you believe or losing your head, what would you choose? Is what you believe worth dying for? You won't hear about it much in the mainstream media, but the truth is that every single day large numbers of people are being brutally killed for what they believe all over the world. Someday you may be forced to make a similar choice.

Immediately following the overthrow of the Assad regime, this "Working Group" is planning to launch urgent economic measures, including the coordination of aid projects and the implementation of economic reforms. Together with the United Arab Emirates, the German government is establishing a "secretariat," under the leadership of a German with Afghanistan experience. In cooperation with the Assad regime, Berlin had already promoted the Syrian economy's privatization. However, the nascent liberalization drove sectors of the population into bankruptcy, thereby contributing to insurgence against the regime.

Berlin has already received first drafts for Syria's new economic order. They were written by an activist of the Syrian National Council (SNC), which is under strong criticism by a large part of the opposition because of the pre-eminence of the Muslim Brotherhood. Washington-based Syrian exile politicians hold leading positions in the SNC. They are demanding a Kosovo-style western intervention and consider Kosovo's KLA to be a model for the Syrian opposition.

Late last week, a multinational "Working Group," co-chaired by Germany, met for the first time in Abu Dhabi, with the aim of launching urgent economic measures for immediately following the overthrow of the Assad regime. The "Working Group on Economic Recovery and Development of the Friends of the Syrian People" was established April 1 in Istanbul by the "Group of Friends of the Syrian People," an alliance of western and pro-western countries, which support the Syrian opposition in the civil war and are cooperating mainly with the exiled Syrian National Council (SNC).

It estimated how much they expected to write off as bad debt in the future but had yet to offset against profits. Its findings suggested that part-nationalised Royal Bank of Scotland was in the worst position – with £18 billion of undeclared losses. And its if loans went bad, it could one day be forced to seek a new bailout from taxpayers who have already taken an 82 per cent stake. PIRC also claimed Lloyds Banking Group had undeclared losses of £2.6 billion, HSBC £10 billion, Barclays £6.7 billion and Standard Chartered £3.6 billion.

However, the banks deny the claims. Industry sources said its estimates of future bad loans were misleading if potential future profits were not factored in. They added that more than 12 months ahead was too long a time frame to predict losses. An RBS spokesman said: “We don’t recognise PIRC’s numbers. Our capital, liquidity and funding positions are strong and our reporting complies fully with International Financial Reporting Standards.”

Under 2005 accounting rules, firms are prevented from making provision for potential future losses. PIRC said this masks the true position by including “fictional assets and fictional profits”. It meant dividends were paid out on over-rosy profit figures when they should be reserved to boost the banks’ capital reserves.

Some areas of the planet may already be so overpopulated as to be beyond hope - and once the planet is more than 50% under tarmac and agriculture, the results could be global disaster. When smaller areas hit levels above 50%, the results are disastrous. If the entire planet hits this 'tipping point', the effects would be impossible for scientists to predict.

The committee calls for 'global leadership' to prevent such a disaster - but warns some areas of the planet may already be so overpopulated as to be beyond hope.

Professor Anthony Barnosky, the lead author from the University of California, Berkeley, warns: ‘It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point. The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations.’