Africa

Twelve students will be paid to eat genetically modified (GMO) bananas as researchers at Iowa State University start moving forward with a long-delayed project. The project which is funded by the  Bill and Melinda Gates foundation would pay each student $900. Thes tests are to be carried out on the students without any previous animal testing, so it is not known what the impact would be to the students’ health. According to The Des Moines Register, the bananas were created by a Australian scientist and contain a gene that is supposed to help people living in Africa make vitamin A.

Don’t look now, but Barclays just joined the chorus of European banks reporting horrific results.

Shares plunged by double-digits on Tuesday after the bank said it swung to a £1.9 billion pre-tax loss in Q4 and moved to cut the dividend and shed its African subsidiary.

With markets happy to put February in the history books because it marked the fourth consecutive monthly decline in global stocks, we move on to March 1st, which doubles down as 'Super Tuesday' in the US when Trump's presidential candidacy will almost certainly be sealed and a day in which stocks decided to join the super fun by super surging overnight on nothing but bad global macro and economic which however was promptly ignored and instead the focus was on ongoing central bank intervention and even more jawboning.

Three young Muslim-American men were gunned down in the U.S. state of Indiana last week in what police describe as ‘execution-style’ murders – but the news has barely made a ripple in the mainstream media. 23-year-old Mohamedtaha Omar, 20-year-old Adam Mekki and 17-year-old Muhannad Tairab were all found dead in a house in Fort Wayne, Indiana on Wednesday. Police say the men, from Africa’s eastern Sahel region, had been shot multiple times. The murders came in the same week that other mass shootings in the US received widespread mainstream coverage across the world.

Authored by Satyajit Das', author of the new book "The Age Of Stagnation" (via MarketWatch),

The mispricing of assets across world markets has reached epidemic proportions.

Stock prices have made strong advances over the past several years, yet market analysts see further gains, arguing that the selloffs of August 2015 and early 2016 represent a healthy correction.