Eurogroup President and Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem talks to journalists during a joint news conference with Portuguese Finance Minister Vitor Gaspar in Lisbon May 27, 2013.(Reuters / Jose Manuel Ribeiro)

European Union finance chiefs agreed Thursday investors and wealthy depositors will foot the bill for bank bailouts, in a break with the past convention of burdening taxpayers. If pursued, bailout strategy, shareholders, bondholders and depositors with more than 100,000 euro will share the financial strain of saving a bank. Deposits under 100,000 will be protected. Under the new protocol, which would come into effect in 2018, countries would be obliged to absorb 8 percent of a bank’s liabilities, with some leeway thereafter. The next time a big bank fails, governments will make sure “that shareholders and creditors are liable first and foremost,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told reporters. Rescuing banks will not be less painful for political leaders and institutions, who can now just take bank deposits instead of hiking taxes. 

French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici said France got “what we wanted” from the blueprint, and Danish Economy Minister Margrethe Vestager called the deal a “balanced compromise.” The Irish, whose taxpayers paid nearly $40 billion to bail out Anglo Irish Bank, are happy that the new status quo will be bail-ins, not bail-outs. Banks will have to bail themselves out. Other ministers were happy to have a universal strategy to address dealing with troubled banks. 

"If a bank gets in trouble we will now, throughout Europe, have one set of rules on who pays the bill," Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem said. 

Germany has previously indicated it disagrees with a universal plan to deal with bailouts across the continent, and has warned having such a strong central banking authority goes against standing treaties. 

 “It took a long time and it was arduous and it was intense,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said, without publicly voicing Germany’s previous qualms over the structure. It is highly unlikely Chancellor Merkel will agree to such a banking union before the election in September. 

The European Central Bank will officially take over supervision of eurozone banks next year. Last year it provided 1 trillion euros of cheap three-year loans to struggling banks.

Under the new umbrella, banks will be able to receive direct loans from the European Stability Mechanism, a eurozone bailout fund. The European Banking Authority was set up in 2011 to integrate rules across the EU and has secured a new supervisory function. All 17 currency member states support the motion, but some fear an all-too-powerful central bank. By next week, the 27 member states need to choose a governing body, or executor, to carry out the task. 

The legislature’s text grants nations a clear right to nationalize failing banks, if the step is seen as essential to preserve financial stability. Switzerland, Norway, and other non-EU countries within Europe will still have jurisprudence over how to deal with bank failures.

Just like Cyprus

The precedent was set after Cyprus requested an EU bailout and aid was dependent on the country’s agreement to levee account holders with more than 100,000 euro, which will likely result in a loss of 30 percent in savings. The Cyprus scenario marked the first time depositors were forced to contribute to the bank’s bailout and now it is set to become the norm. Many analysts had pointed to Cyprus as an isolated case, as their debt was heavily a result of bad Greek bonds, and a hyper-inflated banking sector, almost eight times as large as the country’s GDP. Tax-payer funded bailouts have been the source of public discontent, and the accord is seen as a move to ameliorate political relations in the EU.

Two Icelandic men formerly tied to the website WikiLeaks were investigated in secret by the US Justice Department

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (AFP Photo / Anthony Devlin)

 Assange, the publisher and founder of WikiLeaks, has been inside of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for one year as of this week. He is wanted for questioning in Sweden for alleged sex crimes, but fears the court-ordered extradition to the Scandinavian country is a step towards sending him to America. There, he assumes, he’d likely be tried for espionage and perhaps sentenced to death. Ecuador's President Rafael Correa has granted Assange asylum, but British authorities have been ordered to arrest him if he exits the embassy. Both Snorrason and McCarthy collaborated with Assange after the WikiLeaks founder visited Iceland while the website was still in its infancy. They have each distanced themselves from the website in the years since but are far from the only individuals being probed by the US Justice Department for their past participation. Perhaps most well-known among the Americans targeted by prosecutors is Bradley Manning, a 25-year-old US Army intelligence analyst currently on trial in Maryland for his alleged role in sending a trove of classified documents to WikiLeaks. If convicted of the most serious of charges, aiding the enemy, Manning could be sentenced to life in prison. In a joint statement authored by Snorrason and McCarthy, the men salute the efforts of both Assange and Manning while condemning the US government’s unforgiving treatment aimed at the WikiLeakers and others who advocate for transparency much to the chagrin of the White House. “The court orders were almost certainly related to the grand jury investigation of the unauthorized public disclosure of information showing considerable misconduct,” the men wrote, “including a number of probable cases of war crimes, by US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan during their wars in these countries, a list of people being held without trial or legal recourse in Guantanamo Bay and a trove of diplomatic cables detailing the ways the US government have conducted themselves – both good and bad – over many years.” In a pretrial hearing earlier this year in Ft. Meade, Maryland, Manning took credit for sharing with WikiLeaks the material alluded by the Icelanders, including documents that exposed American diplomatic practices described in the press as “embarrassing” and other likely war crimes considered by many as atrocities. Despite this, though, a grand jury investigation into the website has run rampant for years, and several persons, both American and other, are being targeted for their alleged roles within the group. 

Pfc. Bradley E. Manning (AFP Photo / Mark Wilson)

 “Over the last several years we have seen many of our friends, colleagues and allies pestered - for lack of a better term - by overzealous law enforcement, prosecutorial overreach and misapplication of laws which at one point may have been intended to protect democratic values. They have been hunted down, imprisoned and sometimes killed directly or indirectly, all for nothing but their desire to uphold the values our societies hold dear,” Snorrason and McCarthy say in their statement. “No more.” According to a 2011 interview Snorrason gave to the Toonari Post, he began collaborating with WikiLeaks after Assange published a document about an Icelandic bank in July 2009. Snorrason later went on to the group OpenLeaks, a similar organization started by former WikiLeaker Daniel Domscheit-Berg. McCarthy was described as “a former WikiLeaks volunteer” as early as October 2010, according to an article that month in the UK’s Telegraph, but has been tied directly to perhaps the most well-known disclosure published by Assange: a video of a US helicopter engaging in battle with unarmed Iraqi civilians released in 2010 under the name “Collateral Murder” thanks McCarthy in the closing credits. Manning has admitted to sending WikiLeaks the video shortly after being deployed to Iraq in late 2009.

US President Barack Obama (AFP Photo / Johannes Eiselle)

 On their part, Snorrason and McCarthy say the Justice Department's disclosure of the investigation suggests they may no longer be the targets of the grand jury probe being conducted in secrecy by the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. “This investigation, which appears to be winding down as Justice Liam O’Grady felt it safe to unseal the orders, appears to have been conducted not for the purpose of attributing criminal behavior to those guilty of conducting said war crimes and violations of fundamental human rights, but to punish those who performed the public service of making the world aware of them,” they wrote. “We view the documents which Google has finally provided us with,” the men added, “not as testament to our involvement or lack of involvement with the proceedings . . . but as evidence of the need to eliminate the surveillance state, in its entirety, before what democracy we do have is lost for good.” According to the documents, Google was told by the Justice Department that they were prohibited from disclosing to either Snorrason or McCarthy any information about the investigation until indicated. Google was first compelled for details regarding their online activity in July 2011, and the court unsealed the gag-order on May 2, 2013. Both men published documents that only show that Google was asked for data and that the non-disclosure demands were recently lifted. Jacob Appelbaum, an American hacker with well-documented ties to WikiLeaks, tweeted Friday that the government may be unhappy with the publication of the court orders.

 “The unsealing document states that I can do whatever I wish with it,” McCarthy tweeted to Appelbaum. “Which, to be fair, wasn’t much.” “I'm not worried about legal consequences or the US attacking extrajudicially. I am enraged by their disregard for the rule of law,” Snorrason tweeted. 

Appelbaum spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks during a 2010 conference in New York City and has had his electronic records previously subpoenaed by the government, presumably under the secretive grand jury investigation. The Justice Department has acknowledged the probe but has failed to provide any details. Attorney General Eric Holder said previously that the Justice Department and Pentagon are conducting "an active, ongoing criminal investigation” into the documents that have ended up on WikiLeaks. In a conference call with RT and other organizations earlier this week, Assange said that the probe into WikiLeaks remains open and involves a Federal Bureau of Investigation file about his website that’s 42,135 pages long. He defends his work, however, and says that it is necessary to publish classified documents in order to hold those in elected office accountable. The US, on the other hand, equates that behavior with espionage. “The broad case establishes a precedent that publishing national security related information about the United States is espionage,” Assange said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (RIA Novosti/Michael Klimentyev)

At least 600 Russians and Europeans are fighting alongside the rebels battling the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin said during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. “It is known that there are at least 600 people from Russia and Europe fighting along with opposition forces in Syria,” Putin said during the Forum’s plenary session. Putin reiterated that weapon supplies to the Syrian rebels violate international law, and threaten to further destabilize the war-torn state. "Why supply weapons to militant forces in Syria when we are not sure of the composition of these groups?” he said, adding that it remains unclear where these arms will end up. "If the United States ... recognizes one of the key Syrian opposition organizations, al-Nusra, as terrorist ... how can one deliver arms to those opposition members?" Putin said. "Where will (those weapons) end up? What role will they play?" Russia’s Foreign Ministry has also criticized the supply of arms to the rebels in separate remarks to AP and Bloomberg: “The problem is that the weapons are coming to the region anyway,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said. “And if you take, you know, stock of what is being used by the opposition you would find a lot of arms shipped by the West, including the US, to the Gulf countries and to other countries in the region,” he said. “So, this smuggling continues and this is very dangerous. Because the leading opposition force on the ground is very extremist.” 

Syrian rebels (AFP Photo/Bulent Kilic)

Putin’s remarks echo a statement made by French Interior Minister Manuel Valls earlier in June, when he said that more than 600 European nationals, including 120 from France, are fighting in Syria. At the time, Russia said that around 200 of its citizens were fighting in Syria alongside rebel militants as part of a self-proclaimed ‘Caucasus Emirate' under the flag of Al Qaeda, and that there were “various organizations affiliated with it.” In Spain, at least eight people allegedly linked to Al-Qaeda were arrested in Ceuta on suspicion of recruiting jihadi fighters to go to Syria, and elsewhere. Prior to that, Belgium announced in April it had detained the leader of Sharia4Belgium, radical Salafist organization that was allegedly recruiting volunteers to fight in the Syrian civil war. Britain was one the first Western countries to raise concerns over European Muslims joining the Syrian rebels. The Home Office voiced fears that scores of UK citizens fighting in Syria may use their military know-how to wreak havoc when they return home, and carry out terror attacks. However, despite these concerns, EU governments agreed to not extend the arms embargo on Syria, effectively allowing them to supply the Syrian opposition with weapons. Russia slammed the move, but in response was criticized for its contract to deliver advanced S-300 long-range air defense systems to Damascus. Moscow maintains that all arms supplies to Syria are being carried out under a contract signed with the country several years ago. "Russia, in the framework of existing international law, in open and transparent contracts, supplies weaponry to the current and the legitimate government of Syria," Putin said at the Economic Forum.