Germany

Perhaps it is merely a coincidence but just weeks after Deutsche Bank became the first bank to admit to rigging the gold market (and agreeing to rat out fellow manipulators) yesterday afternoon the head of Deutsche Bank's "integrity committee" announced he would resign two years before his time, which is a polite way of saying he was fired.

As the FT reports, Georg Thoma has been fired from Deutsche Bank’s supervisory board two years before his contract ends "after coming under fire from other board members in a battle over how to deal with the German bank’s past scandals."

It is very fitting that on today's April 28th anniversary of the bull market, the day that officially makes this the second-longest "bull market" in history, the market got a stark reminder of just how it got there: through constant and relentless central bank intervention, which has been "beneficial" to stocks for the most part, however last night was anything but.

Submitted by Giulio Meotti via The Gatestone Institute,

• The West has capitulated on freedom of expression. Nobody in the West launched the motto "Je Suis Avijit Roy," the name of the first of the several bloggers butchered, flogged or jailed last year for criticizing Islam.

With the Fed decision just one day away, followed the very next day by the increasingly more irrational BOJ, stocks had no desire to make significant moves and overnight's boring session was the result, as European stocks and U.S. index futures rose modestly but mostly hugged the flatline while Asian declined 0.2% for a third day as raw-material shares declined and Tokyo equities slumped before central bank meetings in the U.S. and Japan this week. China’s stocks rose the most in almost two weeks, up 0.6% but failed to rise above 3000 on the Shanghai Composite, in thin trading.

Submitted by Josephine Bacon via The Gatestone Institute,

• Ever since the inception of the European Economic Community, British politicians across the entire political spectrum have been perceptive enough to realize that Britain will lose its sovereignty and turn into a vassal of the France-Germany axis.