In a result that should surprise no one, the Greeks voted to reject European demands for additional austerity measures as the price for providing funds to allow Greek banks to operate. There are three reasons this should have been no surprise. First, the ruling Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza party, is ruling because it has an understanding of the Greek mood. Second, the constant scorn and contempt that the European leadership heaped on the prime minister and finance minister convinced the Greeks not only that the scorn was meant for them as well but also that anyone so despised by the European leadership wasn't all bad. Finally, and most important, the European leadership put the Greek voters in a position in which they had nothing to lose. The Greeks were left to choose between two forms of devastation — one that was immediate but possible to recover from, and one that was a longer-term strangulation with no exit.

The Europeans' Mistaken Reasoning

As the International Monetary Fund noted (while maintaining a very hard line on Greece), the Greeks cannot repay their loans or escape from their economic nightmare without a substantial restructuring of the Greek debt, including significant debt forgiveness and a willingness to create a multidecade solution. The IMF also made clear that increased austerity, apart from posing an impossible burden for the Greeks, will actually retard either a Greek recovery or debt repayment.

The Greeks knew this as well. What was obvious is that austerity without radical restructuring would inevitably lead to default, if not now, then somewhere not too far down the line. Focusing on pensions made the Europeans appear tough but was actually quite foolish. All of the austerity measures demanded would not have provided nearly enough money to repay debts without restructuring. In due course, Greece would default, or the debt would be restructured.

Since Europe's leaders are not stupid, it is important to understand the game they were playing. They knew perfectly well the austerity measures were between irrelevant and damaging to debt repayment. They insisted on this battle at this time because they thought they would win it, and it was important for them to get Greece to capitulate for broader reasons.

It has been over four years since the 9.0 magnitude Tōhoku earthquake and ensuing catastrophic tsunami leveled the Pacific coast of Japan, setting off a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daichi power plant. Radiation has been pouring into the ocean, into the earth below, and into the air for over 1500 days now and there is still zero sense of urgency on the part of the government and world leaders to seriously address this blooming catastrophe. All efforts to stop the meltdown and clean up the radiation have been left in the hands of TEPCO, Japan's energy company that has been proven time and again to be inept and unprepared to confront a disaster of this sort.

The mainstream media, for its part, appears to be complicit in a cover-up of the effects that Fukushima radiation is already having on our environment and on human and animal health, and instead insists on omitting most news on the matter, or seriously dumbing down reports of the fallout.

For an excellent primer on nuclear radiation, the nuclear energy industry and the impacts of Fukushima, watch this informative talk by Dr. Helen Caldicott, M.D.:

Here is a brief sample of some of the measures the Chinese government and the PBOC have unleashed in just the past ten days to prop up the crashing market include:

• a ban on major shareholders, corporate executives, directors from selling stock for 6 months
• freezing more than half (1400 at last count per Bloomberg) of the listed companies from trading,
• blocking fund redemptions, forcing companies to invest in the market,
• halting IPOs,
• reducing equity transaction fees,
• providing daily bailouts to the margin lending authority,
• reducing margin requirements,
• boosting buybacks
• endless propaganda by Beijing Bob.

The measures are summarized below.

Commenting on Chancellor Angela Merkel's tour of the Balkans, business newspaper Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (DWN) lamented that despite the serious problems faced by the European Union over Greece, Merkel is sticking to promises of EU membership for Serbia and Albania, "in order to prevent them from coming under the influence of Russia."

"As if the EU did not have enough problems, Angela Merkel made promises for Albania and Serbia's accession to the EU," the newspaper noted on Thursday, on the eve of the wrap-up of the Chancellor's tour of Albania, Serbia and Bosnia.

On Wednesday in Tirana, Albania, Merkel promised that there would be no artificial delays in the Albanian and Serbian drive for membership in the supranational bloc. "I can tell you, nothing will be artificially delayed. There won't be any difficulties constructed," Merkel noted, adding that the countries' EU entry is related to the union's credibility.

Hannibal brought Rome to the brink of defeat during the Second Punic War. Carthage's army marched all over Italy as it if were its own backyard. However, in the end, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus the Elder was able to move the theater of operations to Africa, destroy Carthage's armies, defeat the invincible Hannibal, and establish peace on Rome's terms.

The actual victor over Hannibal was not the brilliant tactician Scipio, but the profound strategist and outstanding politician Fabius Maximus Cunctator. The Romans did not elect him Consul or even Dictator during the course of the war. Fabius Maximus remained an influential politician even when he did not exercise official power. His personal authority was strengthened by the election to the Pontifical College and as the Senate Princeps. His proteges and family members became consuls, while the opponents' sacrifices "were not favored", to the extent that election results were canceled on several occasions.

What was the strategy of Fabius Maximus? It consisted of the correct choice of the method of fighting Hannibal. Carthage's army was fundamentally different from Rome's. The Roman army consisted of citizens (recruits, conscripts), while the Carthagenian of mercenaries. In the hands of a talented commander like Hannibal, that army was a powerful instrument. Romans suffered one catastrophic defeat after another in the first years of the war. Hannibal had the ability to increase his forces not only thanks to warlike Gallic tribes living in the Po river valley, but also due to the switching of sides by Rome's allies in central and southern Italy. Therefore each of Rome's defeats not only lead to the loss of an army, which was painful enough (Carthage lost someone else's citizens--mercenaries, while Rome its own), but also to the loss of more allies.

Therefore Fabius Maximus made the only correct choice--Hannibal has to be deprived of an opportunity to score more victories. Rome's army must thwart Hannibal's maneuvers by its presence, destroy local detachments, support the loyal and, whenever possible, punish traitorous allies, but avoid a general engagement. On one occasion, the consuls of year 216 B.C. decided to abandon this strategy and organized an offensive against Hannibal's positions at Cannes. The ensuing catastrophe was on such a scale that the next defeat of this sort occurred only at the height of its power when Emperor Valens died at the head of his infantry at Adrianopolis in 378 A.D. Rome attrited Hannibal for an entire decade by adhering to Fabius' Maximus' strategy. Only then did the victories of Scipio Africanus become possible. However, even then the Cunctator was against resuming active operations, believing that he could finish of Hannibal and Carthage without excessive loss of life, especially since the mercenary army was weakening and disintegrating in the absence of major victories, and as the situation at the front worsened the conflict between Hannibal and Carthage grew. A battle always entails a risk, after all.

A decade after a group of Islamist suicide bombers attacked London's transport network, leaving 52 people dead, RT's Poppy Bullard examines the legacy of Islamophobia endured by British Muslims.

A former judge at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) said former US Vice President Dick Cheney should - and eventually will - stand trial for war crimes for his role in the Iraq War.

- "Some of us have long thought that Cheney and a number of CIA agents who did what they did in those so-called black holes should appear before the International Criminal Court" (ICC) - Thomas Buergenthal said in an interview with Newsweek.

Buergenthal, 81, served as a judge at the ICJ - the main judicial arm of the United Nations - for 10 years before retiring in 2010.The ICJ, unlike the ICC, has no jurisdiction to try individuals accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity. As the ICJ is not a criminal court, it does not have a prosecutor able to initiate such proceedings.

© WikipediaFormer International Court of Justice judge Thomas Buergenthal

Buergenthal was born in the former Czechoslovakia and survived the Auschwitz concentration camp as a boy. He is now a US citizen and a professor of law at George Washington University in Washington, DC. "We (in the United States) could have tried them ourselves," Buergenthal said of Cheney and others. "I voted for Obama, but I think he made a great mistake when he decided not to instigate legal proceedings against some of these people. I think - yes - that it will happen."

As for Cheney's superior for eight years, Buergenthal dismissed former president George W. Bush as "an ignorant person who wanted to show his mother he could do things his father couldn't." Buergenthal said Richard Nixon, whose administration Cheney served in during the 1970s, was "more intelligent. I don't think Nixon would have got involved in Iraq."

Trading on the New York Stock Exchange floor was halted shortly after 11:30 am local time Wednesday, with all screens displaying the "No quotation" message, according to eyewitnesses.

"It's chaos. No one seems to know the root of the cause which seems to me is making everything worse," a source on the floor of the stock exchange said, according to Bloomberg reporter Leslie Picker.

The NYSE is reportedly rushing to fix the "technical problem," but there has been no official explanation why all floor trading has been halted. The exchange said it was canceling all open orders as well.

"We've had some technical malfunctions. Some may be related to connectivity with other exchanges. I believe we're going to have a temporary pause certainly in a variety of stocks perhaps floor wide," Art Cashin, director of floor operations at the NYSE, told CNBC.

The NYSE suspended all trading at 11:32, half an hour after initial reports of a technical problem, according to Yahoo Finance.
NYSE stocks are still being traded through other venues, Reuters reported.

NASDAQ announced its systems were operating normally and trading NYSE securities.

It is often the moral and economic blindness of New York Times articles about the EU crisis that is most striking. The newest entry in this field is entitled "Now Europe Must Decide Whether to Make an Example of Greece." That is a chilling phrase most associated in our popular culture with a Consigliere and his Don deciding whether to order a mob "hit." It is, therefore, fitting (albeit over the top) as a criticism of the troika's economic, political, and propaganda war against the Greek people. Except that the article is actually another salvo in that war.

Let's start with the obvious - except to the NYT. "Europe" isn't "decid[ing]" anything. The troika is making the decisions. More precisely, it is the CEOs of the elite German corporations and banks that direct the troika's policies that are making the decisions. The troika simply implements those decisions. The troika consists of the ECB, the IMF, and the European Commission. None of these three entities represents "Europe." None of them will hold a democratic referendum of the peoples of "Europe" to determine policies. Indeed, they are apoplectic that the Greek government dared to ask the people of Greece through a democratic process whether to give in to the troika's latest efforts to extort the Greek government to inflict ever more destructive and economically illiterate malpractice on the Greek people.

Second, the troika has been "mak[ing] an example of Greece" for at least five years. It extorted Greece to inflict the economic malpractice of austerity in response to a Great Recession. The result was just what economists warned - Greece was forced, gratuitously, into worse-than-Great Depression levels of unemployment that persist today seven years after Lehman's collapse. In this process, the troika blocked a prior referendum proposed by Greece's Socialist Prime Minister George Papandreou in late 2011 and forced him to resign for daring to propose democratic decision-making. Read the Guardian's risible account of the 2010 coup that the troika engineered in Greece for an unintended insight as to how the UK's "New Labour" Party has become an anti-labor party of austerity and "aspirational" hostility to efforts to contain the City of London's criminal culture.

Third, the troika and a host of heads of state that have caused grave harm to workers in their nations responded immediately to the election of the anti-austerity Syriza party in Greece in January 2015 by shouting their increased eagerness to "make an example of Greece" for daring to elect Syriza. The government of Spain, for example, is desperate for the troika to double-down and "make an example of Greece" by crushing its economy in order to stave off the newly created and surging Podemos anti-austerity party that won key municipal elections in Spain. Prominent German elected officials have made explicit their desire to force Syriza (and Greece) to fail because they oppose its politics.