Greek Prime Minister Tsipras writes in Le Monde (translation by w-t-w.org):  The Greek people made a courageous decision. They dared to challenge the one-way street from the rigorous austerity of the Memorandum, in order to claim a new agreement. The Greek people paid a high price for these mistakes. In five years, unemployment has soared to 28% (60% for young people), and average income fell by 40%, while Greece, according to Eurostat statistics, has become the State of the Union European (EU) having the highest social inequality index.
Worse, despite the blows that have been brought to the social fabric, the program failed to restore the Greek economy’s competitiveness. Public debt has soared by 124% to 180% of GDP. The Greek economy, despite the great sacrifices of his people, is still trapped in a climate of uncertainty caused by ongoing non attainable goals of the doctrine of the financial equilibrium, which obligate to stay in a vicious circle of austerity and recession.

The main aim of the Greek government in the last four months is to end this vicious circle and to this uncertainty. A mutually beneficial agreement that will set realistic targets in relation to surplus while reintroducing the development agenda and investment – a definitive solution to the Greek case – is now more necessary than ever. Moreover, such an agreement will mark the end of European economic crisis that erupted there seven years, ending the cycle of uncertainty for the euro area.

Today, Europe is able to take decisions that will trigger a strong recovery of the Greek and European economy by ending scenarios of a “Grexit” (Greek exit). These scenarios prevent the long-term stabilization of the European economy and are likely to undermine confidence at any time both citizens and investors in our common currency.
However, some argue that the Greek side does nothing to move in this direction because it comes to negotiations with intransigence and without proposals. Is that the case?

Tsipras continues in this vein and ends with the caution from John Donne as quoted by Ernest Heminway:  For whom the bell tolls, but does not get to: “If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.”

Nouriel Roubini writes:  A paradox has emerged in the financial markets of the advanced economies since the 2008 global financial crisis. Unconventional monetary policies have created a massive overhang of liquidity. But a series of recent shocks suggests that macro liquidity has become linked with severe market illiquidity.

Flavia Krause-Jackson and Tracy Withers write: Once upon a time there were 20 sheep to every Kiwi. Now it’s more like seven to every New Zealander. Blame cows, which are now bringing home the bacon.

Huge tracts of flatland once used for sheep farming were converted to dairy pastures as the global price for butter and cheese increased, while demand for sheep meat and wool waned, said Susan Kilsby, a dairy analyst at AgriHQ in Wellington.

“Returns for dairy have been substantially better than for a traditional sheep and beef farming operation,” she said.
The chart below shows how milk-producing cows now contribute far more to New Zealand’s economy than sheep, cows for beef and grains combined.

There were other factors at play, too. The removal of subsidies for sheep farming in the mid-1980s exposed ranchers to market forces, explained Adrienne Egger, an agriculture analyst at Beef and Lamb New Zealand, an organization representing farmers. New irrigation projects also made dairy farming possible for the first time in many parts of the country, AgriHQ’s Kilsby said (cows raised to produce milk are real water guzzlers).

There are 40 million sheep in New Zealand and they’re PISSED OFF!” Fact is, there are far fewer sheep than that.

Lamb prices at the farm-gate rose 85 percent in real terms and mutton prices more than doubled from 25 year ago. China, once a market for low-value cuts, has rapidly emerged as a major importer of Made in New Zealand — moving up from eighth place to second between 2008 and 2013.

“In 2014, China was the largest single country market by volume of lamb,” Eggers said.

May Jeng writes:  Roughly 120 miles northwest of the capital, Kampala, the asphalt road gives way to amber-colored soil and Uganda’s oil country begins. This remote region last captured the imagination of the West in the Victorian age, when gentlemen explorers arrived in search of the Nile’s source.

After the discovery of commercially viable oil reserves in 2006, companies including London-based Tullow, the French Total and the Chinese government-run CNOOC began drilling exploratory wells in the Lake Albert region. By 2009, the region’s reserves were estimated at 6.5 billion oil barrels, enough to potentially remake Uganda.

Nearly a decade after the discovery of oil, little of that promised infrastructure has been built. Meanwhile, exploratory drilling has ruined crops and killed off fish, eroding people’s livelihoods. Oil companies have made cash payouts to affected families, but that money has sometimes increased tensions.

Tullow spokesperson Conrad Nkutu said that the company expected to create as many as 150,000 jobs in the country.

The most dramatic consequence of the oil drilling so far has been the forcible eviction of 230 families last August to make way for a petroleum waste-management plant.

Villagers said they were not compensated for their lost property. The residents filed a lawsuit against the strongmen in November 2014, and the case is ongoing.

In Kaseta, a neighboring village of grass-thatched huts, the drilling has damaged the cassava crop and disturbed Lake Albert’s fish stock.

In the past few years, oil companies and the Ugandan government began compensating some of the farmers and fishermen who continue to tend to their cassavas and cast nets for tilapia in the lake.

The Ugandan government has yet to take meaningful steps to regulate the oil industry, according to George Boden, a campaigner with the watchdog group Global Witness. President Yoweri Museveni personally makes most of the decisions about the industry; he is widely believed to consider oil a means of supplying his personal coffers and maintaining power. Many of the production-sharing agreements, which outline how oil revenues will be distributed between the government and the companies, remain a secret. That’s unusual even by regional standards, which tend to favor oil companies.

Conservationists now worry that Murchison has no defense against the advances of oil companies: Already, drilling has commenced on park grounds. They point to neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, where the government is considering redrawing the boundaries of Virunga National Park in order to accommodate the oil company SOCO International’s proposed exploration.

The discovery of oil in other African nations over the last half-century has largely failed to bring development. Nigeria, Angola and Equatorial Guinea have all been afflicted with the so-called “resource curse.” No longer dependent on taxes to stay solvent, governments became less accountable to their citizens.