Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta has announced his resignation after the leader of his centre-left party, Matteo Renzi, pulled his support for the government.

On Thursday, Letta issued a statement saying he will tender his resignation to President Giorgio Napolitano on Friday at the Quirinale palace.

Letta's decision to quit came after the Democratic Party (PD), the largest party in the ruling coalition, supported a call by Renzi, the party leader and mayor of Florence, for a new government capable of opening "a new phase" of reform and pulling the economy "out of the quagmire."

"Italy cannot live in a situation of uncertainty and instability. We are at a crossroads," Renzi told a meeting of the PD's 140-strong leadership committee on Thursday.

Renzi, 39, has been criticizing the premier for failing to act aggressively enough to combat Italy's protracted economic downturn.

Napolitano is expected to accept Letta's resignation and then call on Renzi to form a new administration.

A divided federal appeals court on Thursday struck down California concealed-weapons rules, saying they violate the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

The 2-1 ruling of a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said California counties were wrong to require law-abiding applicants to show "good cause" beyond self-defense to receive a concealed-weapons permit.

California prohibits people from carrying handguns in public without a concealed-weapons permit. State law requires applicants to show good moral character, have good cause and take a training course. It's generally up to the state's sheriffs and police chiefs to issue the permits, and the vast majority require an applicant to demonstrate a real danger or other reasons beyond simple self-defense to receive a permit. The 9th Circuit on Thursday said that requirement violates the 2nd Amendment.

There is a whole brand of mind control that is little more than torture.

In other words, by inflicting duress, coercion, making threats, causing pain and disorientation, an "expert" can make a victim do and say many things. That's no secret. There are obviously drugs and hypnotic techniques that will soften up a person and/or put him into tremendous confusion, where he is pliable. And microwaves create pain.

One of the foremost lunatic practitioners of torture was world-famous Canadian psychiatrist, Ewen Cameron, who carried out experiments on unwitting patients during the 1950s. Partially funded by a CIA front, Cameron's method was called psychic driving.

After horrendous electric shocks, very heavy drugs were given to place patients in days of prolonged sleep. Cameron then subjected them to audio tapes he made, in which he repeated phrases thousands of times, in order to produce "new personalities" for them.

This is murderous coercion. There is nothing sophisticated about it.

A 2012 lawsuit filed by veterans' groups, against the CIA and the DOD, refers to Cameron's methods. The suit also states that two researchers, Dr. Louis West and Dr. Jose Delgado, working together under the early CIA MKULTRA subproject 95, utilized two protocols: brain implants ("stimoceivers") and RHIC-EDOM to program the minds of victims. RHIC-EDOM stands for Radio Hypnotic Intracerebral Control-Electronic Dissolution of Memory.

Translation: bury memory, and insert new data. But here again, burying memory, the first phase, is achieved through force. The force of subjecting the brain to massive electromagnetic disruption.

Two weeks after the suicide of a JP Morgan banker who jumped to his death from the top of a building, another of the firm's employees has died, with 37-year-old Ryan Henry Crane becoming the 5th banker fatality in just the last few weeks alone.

Crane was an Executive Director in JPM's Global Program Trading desk based in New York and had been with the firm for 14 years.

Few details have been released concerning the nature of his death, with reports merely stating that Crane is survived by his wife and son.

"We can only hope this disturbing chain of deaths within the financial industry - one of which involved a nail-gun induced suicide - is purely accidental," writes Zero Hedge.

Some have speculated that the deaths could be a precursor to a major financial collapse, although no hard evidence of a connection has been forthcoming.

The nonstop crime news swirling around JPMorgan Chase for a solid 18 months has started to feel a little spooky - they do lots of crime but never any time; and with each closed case, a trail of unanswered questions remains in the public's mind.

Just last month, JPMorgan Chase acknowledged that it facilitated the largest Ponzi scheme in history, looking the other way as Bernie Madoff brazenly turned his business bank account at JPMorgan Chase into an unprecedented money laundering operation that would have set off bells, whistles and sirens at any other bank.

The U.S. Justice Department allowed JPMorgan to pay $1.7 billion and sign a deferred prosecution agreement, meaning no one goes to jail at JPMorgan - again. The largest question that no one can or will answer is how the compliance, legal and anti-money laundering personnel at JPMorgan ignored for years hundreds of transfers and billions of dollars in round trip maneuvers between Madoff and the account of Norman Levy. Even one such maneuver should set off an investigation. (Levy is now deceased and the Trustee for Madoff's victims has settled with his estate.)

Then there was the report done by the U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the London Whale episode which left the public in the dark about just what JPMorgan was doing with stock trading in its Chief Investment Office in London, redacting all information in the 300-page report that related to that topic.

Wall Street On Parade has been filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the Federal government in these matters, and despite the pledge from our President to set a new era of transparency, thus far we have had few answers coming our way.

One reason that JPMorgan may have such a spooky feel is that it has aligned itself in no small way with real-life spooks, the CIA kind.

Just when the public was numbing itself to the endless stream of financial malfeasance which cost JPMorgan over $30 billion in fines and settlements in just the past 13 months, we learned on January 28 of this year that a happy, healthy 39-year old technology Vice President, Gabriel Magee, was found dead on a 9^th level rooftop of the bank's 33-story European headquarters building in the Canary Wharf section of London.

A grisly video has emerged showing Takfiri terrorists operating in Syria strangulating a young girl in public.

In the video, a Takfiri hooded executioner strangulates the young girl to death using a piece of metal wire in an unidentified location.

The girl has been put to death because of her refusal to recognize the rigid-minded beliefs promoted by Takfiri groups in Syria.

Earlier this month, a disturbing video emerged showing al-Qaeda-linked militants in Syria's central province of Homs beheading a man believed to have been a Shia supporter of the government.

The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which posted the video, said the beheading was conducted by militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

At first we thought Reuters had been punk'd in its article titled "EU executive sees personal savings used to plug long-term financing gap" which disclosed the latest leaked proposal by the European Commission, but after several hours without a retraction, we realized that the story is sadly true. Sadly, because everything that we warned about in "There May Be Only Painful Ways Out Of The Crisis" back in September of 2011, and everything that the depositors and citizens of Cyprus had to live through, seems on the verge of going continental. In a nutshell, and in Reuters' own words, "the savings of the European Union's 500 million citizens could be used to fund long-term investments to boost the economy and help plug the gap left by banks since the financial crisis, an EU document says." What is left unsaid is that the "usage" will be on a purely involuntary basis, at the discretion of the "union", and can thus best be described as confiscation.

The source of this stunner is a document seen by Reuters, which describes how the EU is looking for ways to "wean" the 28-country bloc from its heavy reliance on bank financing and find other means of funding small companies, infrastructure projects and other investment. So as Europe finally admits that the ECB has failed to unclog its broken monetary pipelines for the past five years - something we highlight every month (most recently in No Waking From Draghi's Monetary Nightmare: Eurozone Credit Creation Tumbles To New All Time Low), the commissions report finally admits that "the economic and financial crisis has impaired the ability of the financial sector to channel funds to the real economy, in particular long-term investment."

Jewish self-righteousness is taken for granted among ourselves to such an extent that we fail to see what's right in front of our eyes. It's simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practises its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population.

The US Jewish Establishment's onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth which is known to all: through its army, the government of Israel practises a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp. All this is done in order to keep an eye on the population's movements and to make its life difficult. Israel even imposes a total curfew whenever the settlers, who have illegally usurped the Palestinians' land, celebrate their holidays or conduct their parades.

If that were not enough, the generals commanding the region frequently issue further orders, regulations, instructions and rules (let us not forget: they are the lords of the land). By now they have requisitioned further lands for the purpose of constructing "Jewish only" roads. Wonderful roads, wide roads, well-paved roads, brightly lit at night - all that on stolen land. When a Palestinian drives on such a road, his vehicle is confiscated and he is sent on his way.

The generals are beside themselves, Whitehall's in a panic. After generations of continuous warfare, the British public has had enough. They're war-weary, the mandarins fret, and believe the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have been bloody failures.

Worse, multicultural Britain is increasingly hostile to troops marching into countries from which British citizens or their families came, defence ministry officials complain, especially as one war after another has been waged in the Muslim world.

Add to that the unprecedented vote in parliament last year to stop an attack on Syria and the governing elite is convinced its right to decide issues of war and peace without democratic interference is under threat. As the former Tory Middle East minister Alistair Burt insisted: "Politicians need space and time to take unpopular action."

Goldman Sach's chief executive Lloyd Blankfein expressed a wistful closing thought in a recent interview with Nikkei News: "It's going to be a long time before most people in the world are in love with bankers, but that is not going to stop us from working hard to be a better institution."

Blankfein and bankers around the world are working on rehabilitating their image, years after the bank-sparked financial crisis of 2008 that destroyed an estimated $34 trillion in wealth and cost governments $20 trillion in bailouts and stimulus (as well as giving Goldman Sachs its hard-to-shake "vampire squid" nickname.) Since then, "we've worked hard to engage, and I think it's a better dynamic now," Blankfein told Nikkei News. "It will take some time," he added. "The trauma of the crisis was real and economic growth is still not what it should be."

Blankfein is joined in his quest for love by 90,000 bankers in the Netherlands, who are now required to take an oath to do their "utmost to maintain and promote confidence in the financial-services industry. So help me God," Reuters reports. The full oath includes a pledge to weigh the interests of society as well. The City of London is also doing its part - it recently formed an official task force to "repair the reputation of banking," while the new head of RBS, Ross McEwan, publicly promised to "change our behaviour at every level...and clean up every aspect of how we treat customers."