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The rapid growth of European sovereign debt can be traced back to the adoption of the euro in 1999. That shift to a single currency caused a sharp drop in inflation in countries like Greece, Italy and Spain. The lower inflation rates caused interest rates on their bonds to fall sharply. Governments responded to lower interest rates by borrowing more to finance expansions of their social programs.

You should look at it more holistically. We wouldn't have been able to increase our exports if the other countries had behaved like us and had not increased their demand for an entire decade.

Excluding Greece from the union would be the completely wrong approach. Greece's problem is its inefficiency in terms of public finances. That can be corrected.

Starbatty: In my experience, speculators are only successful when political promises diverge from economic reality, as has become clear in Greece.

Any event that makes a euro exit by Greece — the most heavily indebted member state, which is off track on its second bailout program and in the fifth year of a recession — seems bound to accelerate those flows, despite repeated statements by EU leaders that Greece is a unique case. “If it does occur, a crisis will propagate itself through the TARGET payments system of the European System of Central Banks,” U.S. economist Peter Garber, now a global strategist with Deutsche Bank, wrote in a prophetic 1999 research paper. Either member governments would always be willing to let their national central banks give unlimited credit to each other, in which case a collapse would be impossible, or they might be unwilling to provide boundless credit, “and this will set the parameters for the dynamics of collapse,” Garber warned.

Mr. Weber, who is also a member of the European Central Bank’s governing council, said that the statistics reflected Ireland’s status as a financial center: much of what is recorded as claims on Ireland is in fact money funneled through Irish subsidiaries of German banks, and ultimately bound for elsewhere, Mr. Weber said. He said total German exposure was closer to $30 billion.

In both cases more than half of the exposure was to Ireland’s private sector, rather than lending to the government or Ireland’s beleaguered banks.

Taxpayers will bear the cost, but they may never find out how much. The bad bank, known as FMS Wertmanagement, has no plans to release financial statements, according to Soffin, the German government organization that oversees bank rescues.

However, Irish companies and banks are very highly indebted to foreign banks -- three times more than the Greeks.

According to Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, German banks are Ireland's biggest creditors, to the tune of €166 billion ($226 billion), and that includes hundreds of short-term loans to Irish banks. How dangerous is the Irish crisis for Germany?

The situation is very dangerous. The German government has a vital interest in ensuring the solvency of the Irish state and its banks.

the ECB gears up to go full throttle into a business that, according to its statutes, is verboten: buying the debt of member states.

The ECB is about to turn into a money machine, into a lender of last resort, and damn the treaties that mandate an inflation-fighting commitment to “price stability”. The magic phrase now is “capping bond yields”, meaning the ECB buys up the debt of Italy and others in order to depress their borrowing costs.

After meeting with Greek Labor and Social Security Minister Yiannis Vroutsis, Adedy cited the minister as telling them that Greece's coalition government plans to slash the payments by 22.7% after having already reduced the amount by 20%.

"I cannot accept the financing of the fund's deficits from the state budget by either imposing new taxes or additional social security contributions on the new generation of workers so that older workers can receive sums that are not in line with their contributions," said Mr. Vroutsis.

Even as the mainstream media warned that Hollande's populism would be punished by the bond markets, the IMF's chief economist, Frenchman Olivier Blanchard — who is closer to Hollande's heterodoxy than might be expected — confessed that "schizophrenic" investors are now as scared by the impact of austerity on growth as they are of fiscal largesse.

"With zero growth and rising interest costs in Spain and Italy, no debt is sustainable," Fitoussi said. "Even France will be challenged if it goes into recession."

which, despite their recently elected conservative governments, are aware that only pan-European investment, eurobonds and the full support of the ECB can save the eurozone.

Davos view: Don’t get too confident about Eurozone prospects

One was the danger that European elections could show a growing mood of political protest – and volatility. Secondly, the ECB’s stress tests could spark new market alarm about the banks – which would impact sovereigns too.

Crippled eurozone to face fresh debt crisis this year, warns ex-ECB strongman Axel Weber

Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff said the launch of the euro had been a "giant historic mistake, done to soon" that now requires a degree of fiscal union and a common bank resolution fund to make it work, but EMU leaders are still refusing to take these steps.

"People are no longer talking about the euro falling apart but youth unemployment is really horrific. They can't leave this twisting in wind for another five years," he said.

Coal Protesters ignore benefits of coal exports

European companies are major employers in the state, with more than 28,000 workers for German companies alone.

School officials were wary of allowing a private company to dictate the curriculum.

Richard Morris, vice president for assembly and logistics, identifies one of the company’s biggest problems: a serious shortage of medium-skilled workers who specialize in mechatronics, or repairing robots and metal presses when they break down and operating the computers that dot the paint shop, body shop and assembly shop. Not only do these jobs pay better than typical assembly-line positions, they also open up avenues for advancement.

U.S.D.A. does not stand alone. The Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.), knowing that manufacturers grow animals under conditions virtually guaranteed to breed disease, allows them to attempt to ward off disease by feeding them antibiotics from birth until death. (This despite the stated intention of the agency to change that, and a court order requiring it to.)

About a quarter of all chicken parts are contaminated,

The F.D.A. must disallow the use of prophylactic antibiotics in animal production.

in northern India, less than half of surveyed children in fifth grade could read a story intended for second graders. About one in six students in fifth grade recognized letters but could not read words.

making it the only variety in existence to produce beta carotene, the source of vitamin A. Its developers call it “Golden Rice.”

And they have motivated similar attacks on trials of other genetically modified crops in recent years: grapes designed to fight off a deadly virus in France, wheat designed to have a lower glycemic index in Australia, sugar beets in Oregon designed to tolerate a herbicide, to name a few.

Not owned by any company, Golden Rice is being developed by a nonprofit group called the International Rice Research Institute with the aim of providing a new source of vitamin A to people both in the Philippines, where most households get most of their calories from rice,