United States

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Submitted by Pam Martens and Russ Martens via WallStreetOnParade.com,

Last night ABC began its two-part series on the Bernie Madoff fraud. Viewers will be reminded about how investment expert, Harry Markopolos, wrote detailed letters to the SEC for years, raising red flags that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme – only to be ignored by the SEC as Madoff fleeced more and more victims out of their life savings.

Just like the global panic that gripped the world in October 2014 when the Ebola virus had spread from western Africa to many nations around the globe, including several isolated cases in the US, so a year and a half later, the world is urgently scrambling to unleash a sense of panic surrounding the Zika virus which, just like Ebola, came out of nowhere and is fast becoming the latest scapegoat for collapsing global commerce this year's invisible bogeyman.

Here are some of the latest developments.

At Least 54 People Infected in the U.S.

A strong magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck southern Taiwan early on Saturday, according to the US Geological Survey . The quake struck at 11:57 a.m. PT about 14 miles northeast of the city of Pingtung, 19 miles (31 km) east-southeast of Tainan at a depth of 6.2 miles, the agency said. The USGS  have also warned that a magnitude 6.4 quake is capable of causing a “severe damage”, though there have been no reports casualties but one official said that a building had partially collapsed No tsunami warnings have yet been issued.

To be sure, the rumors have been there for a while.

As we first wrote in March of 2015 when it became a topic of conversation, speculation that Cushing may fill, and even overflow, has been around for nearly 10 months.

As we reported then, there were floating predictions that Cushing may top out as soon as the summer of 2015.