% of GDP and Interest per second

At this moment the biggest threat to the Euro comes not from the Cyprus bailout from the prospect of of its biggest members, particularly Germany sticking with misguided auterity policies.

Look at the EU dashboard:

Interest representatives" is a catch-all term covering interest groups, pressure groups, lobby groups, advocacy groups etc. The EU talks about "interest representatives" and "representing interests" because these are neutral terms, in keeping with its positive approach to the activity of representing interests. It uses them in preference to "lobbyist" and "lobbying" which for some people carry negative connotations.

Germany is one of the last three G20 countries to have NOT ratified the UN Convention against Corruption together with Japan and Saudi Arabia. This is not only embarrassing; it also undermines the credibility of Germany’s efforts to fight corruption at international level, and it is hampering the government’s ability to create a level playing field for German companies in international anti-corruption negotiations.

This situation is absurd because the German government wants others to fight corruption, yet it does not clean up its own house.

There are five principles of good governance: Openness, Participation, Accountability, Effectiveness and Coherence.

Hit by the crisis, Europeans have lost their confidence in the EU.  In countries like Spain,  72% of citizens express mistrust. In Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Cyprus, the EU is viewed with a distrust as overwhelming as we see in Spain. Significantly, however, the leap of distrust in the EU is taking place not only in the debtor countries, but in the creditor countries, or those financially better off: the people of Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands and Finland have also lost their trust in the EU.

The crisis in Cyprus is fundamentally a banking crisis . So Cyprus was presented with a solution , which was no solution at all. It was told that it had to do two things : to borrow an enormous amount of money relative to the economy in order to refinance the banks and  some more money had to be found through taxing the deposits--in other words, by imposing a levy on the deposits. The combination of these two measures will simply destroy the economy.

When the bailout plan was first announced, it included Russia extending its existing € 2.5 billion to the Cyprus by five years as well as reducing that loan's interest rate. Now, Russia has said NIET.

SIMPLE majority in the 56-member House of Representatives will be required for approval of the government bill on the deposits haircut. However the numbers simply do not add up to a majority.  If all members are present and voting, a simply majority means 29 votes

Under the best case scenario the government would have 26 deputies backing its bill:

Diko (President's party) 20 + Diko 4 + European Party 2= 26

Parties that would vote against:

Diko 4 + AKEL 19 + EDEK 5 + Green Party 1 + Independent Deputy 1= 30

Today the Cypriot Parliament is due to vote on the terms of the bailout package. But the NO is still not out of question. The Democratic Rally (DISY) and the Democratic Party (DIKO), the parties which supported President Anastasiades in his recent election, do not have a majority- only 28 out of 56 MPs. AKEL, the main left opposition party which has 19 MPs has said it will vote against the package, while DIKO has recently seen at least one MP who does not support Anastasiades split off.