cryptogon.com

One morning a few weeks before Christmas a kindergarten teacher in Athens found a note about one of her four-year-old pupils.

“I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her,” it read. “Please take good care of her. Sorry. Her mother.”

In the last two months Father Antonios, a young Orthodox priest who runs a youth centre for the city’s poor, has found four children on his door step – including a baby just days old.

Another charity was approached by a couple whose twin babies were in hospital being treated for malnutrition, because the mother herself was malnourished and unable to breastfeed.

Cases like this are shocking a country where family ties are strong, and failure to look after children is socially unacceptable – they feel to Greeks like stories from the Third World, rather than their own capital city.

One of the children cared for by Father Antonios is Natasha, a bright two-year-old brought to his centre by her mother a few weeks ago.

The woman said she was unemployed and homeless and needed help – but before staff could offer her support she had vanished, leaving her daughter behind.

“Over the last year we have hundreds of cases of parents who want to leave their children with us – they know us and trust us,” Father Antonios says.

“They say they do not have any money or shelter or food for their kids, so they hope we might be able to provide them with what they need.”

Germany sold 3.9bn euros (£3.2bn) of six-month bonds at an average yield of -0.0122%, the first auction with a negative yield.

That means investors are effectively willing to pay Germany for the privilege of lending to it.

Meanwhile the European Central Bank revealed a new record for the amount of cash lodged with it overnight by banks.

Overnight deposits hit 464bn euros.

Traders said they could hit half a trillion euros by next week.

The spray, which remains on the suspect’s skin for two weeks and on clothes for up to six months, has been introduced in some of the chain’s busiest NSW stores, including those at Parramatta, Granville, Auburn, Lidcome, Kingsford and Wollongong, reported The Daily Telegraph.

If the SelectaDNA “forensic marking” spray proves successful in apprehending bandits, McDonald’s will introduce the system across all its 780 Australian outlets.

Developed in the United Kingdom by a police officer and a chemist, the spray has been used by McDonald’s outlets in Britain and Europe.

Each outlet keeps the details of its distribution a close secret, but one McDonald’s restaurant in The Netherlands installed above the main door an orange device which was electronically linked to a panic alarm system. Staff could activate the device in an emergency.

…

The spray contains a synthetic DNA strand composed of 60 variable chromosomes, said SelectaDNA director David Morrissey.

He said he had faced many threats related to past investigations aimed at intimidating him, and was finally driven to attempt suicide by accusations of wrongdoing. He did not specify who he thought was behind the threats.

“I could accept that they destroyed my car, loosened my wheels so I would kill myself. There was a million zloty (185,158 pound) bounty on my head. They killed my dog,” Przybyl said.

Col Mikolaj Przybyl was defending a military investigation into media leaks related to the air crash that killed the Polish president in 2010.

He asked reporters to leave so that he could take “a break”.

Upon hearing a loud thud, the reporters returned to find him on the floor with a pool of blood around his head.

Mr Przybyl, who was in his office in Poznan, western Poland, is now in hospital in stable condition. His life is not in danger, according to hospital officials.

One of the reporters present told Polish television: “We heard a loud thud and we went back into the room thinking one of the cameras had fallen over. Then we saw the prosecutor motionless on the ground in a pool of blood, his military gun beside him.”

In television pictures of the news conference, Col Przybyl is seen reading out a statement to reporters: “During my entire service as a civilian and later military prosecutor, I have never brought shame to the Republic of Poland and I will protect the honour of an officer of the Polish armed forces and prosecution. Thank you, please give me a five-minute break, I need to rest.”

The infantry unit was placed on “lockdown” on Wednesday after the weapons accessories were reported missing from a supply area, said Major Chris Ophardt, a spokesman for the U.S. Army’s I Corps at the base.

The missing equipment included laser-targeting gun sights, night-vision goggles, and weapons scopes with a “high-dollar value” in the “six-figure range,” said Lieutenant Colonel Gary Dangerfield, another base spokesman.

He said the items in question were deemed “sensitive” but were not considered dangerous by themselves.

The Army did not say how many individual pieces of equipment were missing, but Ophardt said missing gear was “definitely stolen.” He added that no actual weapons were missing, and there was no danger to the public.

They said senior executives of the International Energy Agency (IEA), which advises 28 oil consuming countries, discussed on Thursday an existing plan to release up to 14 million barrels per day (bpd) of government-owned oil stored in the United States, Europe, Japan and other importers.

Action on this scale would be more than five times the size of the biggest release in the agency’s history — made in response to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

The maximum release, some 10 million bpd of crude and about 4 million bpd of refined products, could be sustained during the first month of any coordinated action, the plan says.

“This would form a necessary and sensible response to a closure of the strait,” a European diplomat told Reuters. “It wouldn’t take long to put in place if it was required … and would be unlikely to prove controversial amongst the (IEA) membership.”

A spokesman for the IEA confirmed that the Paris-based agency has an existing contingency plan that outlines a maximum stock release capability of 14 million bpd for a month. “We’re watching the situation carefully,” he said of Iran.

Tehran announced plans on Friday for new military exercises in the world’s most important oil shipping lane, through which some 16 million barrels of crude pass each day.

Iranian officials have threatened to block the strait if new sanctions, aimed to discourage Iran’s nuclear programme, harm Tehran’s oil exports.

To get around the government’s immigration choke-hold, the much-discussed startup plans to sail foreign innovators 12 miles off the Northern California shore, into international waters. Once there, governed only by loosely enforced maritime treaties, these entrepreneurs can ply their trade without worrying about worker visas or various other immigration regulations. And they can live in San Francisco. Ferries will shuttle them back and forth.

This is more than just an idea. Big-name venture capitalist and PayPal founder Peter Thiel just sunk some cash into the Blueseed crusade, and on Tuesday, the company released detailed mockups of its floating incubator (see the above image gallery, given exclusively to Wired).

Gabriel Jack, an immigration attorney at law firm MJ Law in Silicon Valley, tells Wired the notion is legally sound — though he points out that workers on the floating incubator will need valid visitor visas, which can be good for up to 10 years. “There’s nothing in the [visa] law that says how often you can visit the United States. If they make it clear that they work in international waters and are using a visitor visa to stay on land,” he says. “I don’t see how the immigration department can do anything about it legally.”