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.

The EU is facing a split. Greece is the catalyst for a new dynamic of European financial systems. Angela Merkel is tired and exhausted and she can only watch how the European Union is falling apart, DWN wrote.

The summit in Brussels has shown that the EU is not functioning in a proper way. Greece is no longer the problem: the shortcomings are systemic and can't be resolved by compromises, DWN reported.

According to the newspaper, the EU consists of numerous imperfect institutions which have proved unable to function in times of the crisis. It has become a hostage to the Troika: the ECB, the IMF and the EU Commission which have totally failed.

In a counter attack against EU sanctions, the Russian government has announced that within the decade Russia will be entirely self-sufficient when it comes to food products.

Agriculture Minister, Alexander Tkachyov stated on Tuesday that Russia will be less reliant on food imports in future, hoping to eliminate them from the market altogether by 2025.

Such a move would require, of course, considerable state support - a sum of 2 trillion roubles ($35 billion) over the next five years. Nevertheless, it will undoubtedly be a huge boost to domestic agriculture. Tkachyov, appointed in April to boost agriculture development remarked that as a result of sanctions, domestic producers have greatly benefited as the cost of imported food was raised. In addition he says it is in demand by the Russian public itself:

In a curiously upbeat account, The New York Times reports that Islamic militants have joined with Ukraine's far-right and neo-Nazi battalions to fight ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine. It appears that no combination of violent extremists is too wretched to celebrate as long as they're killing Russ-kies.

The article by Andrew E. Kramer reports that there are now three Islamic battalions "deployed to the hottest zones," such as around the port city of Mariupol. One of the battalions is headed by a former Chechen warlord who goes by the name "Muslim," Kramer wrote, adding:

"The Chechen commands the Sheikh Mansur group, named for an 18th-century Chechen resistance figure. It is subordinate to the nationalist Right Sector, a Ukrainian militia. ... Right Sector ... formed during last year's street protests in Kiev from a half-dozen fringe Ukrainian nationalist groups like White Hammer and the Trident of Stepan Bandera.

"Another, the Azov group, is openly neo-Nazi, using the 'Wolf's Hook' symbol associated with the [Nazi] SS. Without addressing the issue of the Nazi symbol, the Chechen said he got along well with the nationalists because, like him, they loved their homeland and hated the Russians."

President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Russia can solve all the tasks and current difficulties by joining efforts with China.

"We are well aware of difficulties that we have to face both in economy and international politics, but combining efforts, no doubt we will overcome all the problems before us and solve all the problems and tasks before us," the Russian leader stressed at the meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the BRICS summit.

If you think the globalists are pushing pedal to the metal now, you're absolutely right! Rapid acceleration toward their one world government has humanity on a fateful collision course to Armageddon. Just look at the unfolding events in 2015 so far with barely half the year over. The Charlie Hebdo attack in January came right after France moved to recognize a sovereign Palestinian state. Clearly Hebdo was a false flag payback that only escalated movement toward more Orwellian tyranny and draconian police state oppression, not only in France but around the world.

Hebdo's aftermath in Paris with world leaders gathered arm-in-arm flanked by a duped million plus strong waving their false freedom flags reeked of foul stench - a hideous pretense of staged mockery defiance. The pathetic irony is the very same terrorist acts they were protesting against are regularly and deceitfully perpetrated by those very same international crime cabal leaders who diabolically profit from their state-sponsored terrorism. Afterwards their ratings in popularity only surge (in the wake of the recent South Carolina mass killing, Obama recorded his highest approval ratings of over 50% since 2013) while their corrupt power only tightens the NWO noose of absolute control around the necks of the global masses as their treasonous leaders celebrate arm-in-arm liberty's death march.

The German Patriot air and missile defense systems, stationed at the Turkish border with Syria, have carried out "unexplained" commands allegedly issued by unknown hackers, according to a German media report since rebutted by the government.

The US-produced missile systems, belonging to the German Bundeswehr armed forces and based on the territory of NATO ally Turkey since 2013, have been compromised, according to a report in the German Behörden Spiegel.

As a result, the systems, consisting of six launchers and two radars, reportedly carried out "unexplained" orders, the publication claimed, providing no further information on the kind of commands.

A spokesman for the Federal Department of Defense however rebutted the report on Tuesday, saying that "there is no base data" for an extremely improbable attack, Die Welt newspaper reported.

According to the magazine, there could be two weak spots in the system, which was first used by the US army over 30 years ago. The first one is the Sensor-Shooter-Interoperability (SSI), which stands for the information exchange between the missile launcher and its control system. Another weakness could be in computer chips, which are responsible for the guidance of the weapon.


Compromising military systems is not something that an amateur hacking group would have the skills to do, or would want to admit doing, believes computer security consultant and former UK-based computer hacker Robert Jonathan Schifreen. He told RT that the "unexplained" commands from the hackers mentioned in the report, while "certainly worrying," could not possibly be anything of much significance.

Something stinks very bad about Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and the entire Greek mess that has been playing out since the election victory of the nominally pro-Greek Syriza Party in January. I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that far from being the champion of the hapless Greek people, Varoufakis is part of a far larger and very dirty game.

The brilliant psychologist Eric Berne, author of the seminal book Games People Play, would likely call the game of Varoufakis and the Troika, "Rapo," as in the rape of the Greek people and, ultimately of all the EU, Germany included. How do I come to this surprising conclusion?

When the left-right coalition was elected by a Greek population desperate for change from the several years of austerity, pension cuts, health and education cuts demanded by the IMF in order to insure that Greek creditors be repaid their pound of flesh in terms of state debt, I was among many who held out hope that finally a government that stood for the interests of her people was in office in Athens.

What we have witnessed since is what can only be called a clown show, one in which the laugh is on the Greek people and EU citizens as a whole. The ones laughing, as often is so, are the mega banks and Troika - ECB, IMF and EU. Behind the Troika, almost invisible, are the Greek oligarchs who have robbed the state coffers of hundreds of billions over the years, tucking it away in numbered Swiss and Lichtenstein secret bank accounts, avoiding paying a single penny tax to support their nation. And it is looking more and more as though the "leftist" economist, Varoufakis's role is that of a Trojan Horse for the destruction of the entire Eurozone by the bankers and those Greek oligarchs. Next after Greece Italy looks poised to become victim, and that will put the entire Euro in a crisis that is today unimaginable.

Explosives have been stolen from a munitions base in the south of France. Around 200 detonators and explosives were taken from the facility in the town of Miramas. The theft comes despite an increase in security after two major terrorist attacks in 2015.

Explosives, along with 180 detonators and 40 grenades were snatched from the complex, which is around 60 kilometers northeast of Marseille. Investigators are still trying to find out the full extent of the raid and haven't ruled out that more explosives could be missing. The theft was first spotted at the 200-acre base, used as a logistics center for France's foreign operations, on Monday.