He admitted being desperate to sweep away the “colonial nonsense” of British rule over the Rock and agreed a deal without letting the people of Gibraltar know. The plot was thwarted when Tony Blair and Spanish Premier Jose Maria Aznar had second thoughts.

In his book Outside In, he also revealed Mr Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw enthusiastically backed a plan for sharing sovereignty of Gibraltar that would have brought 300 years of British rule to an end. “Jack’s desire to do something about Gibraltar coincided with my gut instinct that it was ridiculous in the modern age for Britain to have a colony on the tip of Spain nearly 2,000 miles away,” Mr Hain wrote.

Mr Blair supported the plan “because he attached great importance to a close relationship with Spain and Italy in that order,” said Mr Hain, adding: “I don’t regret what we did.” Tory MP Andrew Rosindell said: “This is to Labour’s eternal shame. Tony Blair and Peter Hain were quite willing to sacrifice those people without any democratic choice.”

Khamenei has been heard to say that the coming of the last Islamic Messiah, the Shiites’ 12th Imam Mahdi, is near and that specific actions need to be taken to protect the Islamic regime for upcoming events. Mahdi, according to Shiite belief, will reappear at the time of Armageddon.

Selected forces within the Revolutionary Guards and Basij reportedly have been trained under a task force called “Soldiers of Imam Mahdi” and they will bear the responsibility of security and protecting the regime against uprisings. Many in the Guards and Basij have been told that the 12th Imam is on earth, facilitated the victory of Hezbollah over Israel in the 2006 war and soon will announce publicly his presence after the needed environment is created.

According to SepahOnline, sources within the Vali’eh Amr, the revolutionary forces in charge of the supreme leader’s protection, report that Khamenei held several meetings in recent days at which the leader instructed his advisers to tighten the grip on anyone who opposes or might oppose the regime in case of war.

The US, Britain and France are sending additional naval forces into the Gulf. The European Union is taking new steps to impose an oil embargo on Iran. The US is taking steps to sanction Iran’s third largest bank, though dragging its feet on actually sanctioning Iran’s Central Bank. Adding to the regional tensions, Russia is lashing out at the EU and selling $550 million worth of arms to one of Iran’s key regional allies. Will such Western moves be enough to stop Iran from building an arsenal of nuclear weapons?

Personally, I’m not convinced. Such moves would have been good a few years ago. Now they strike me as too little too late, especially after the Obama White House disastrous decision recently to cancel joint military exercises with Israel for fear of being “too provocative” towards Iran. But it doesn’t matter what I think. What matters is what Netanyahu thinks. If he decides the West isn’t doing enough and Iran is going to get the Bomb, then he is going to hit Iran hard, soon, and without warning.

In that context, it’s worth noting a speech Netanyahu gave Tuesday warning his nation that the world has not internalized the lessons of the Holocaust. ”Speaking at the Knesset just days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27), Netanyahu reasoned that the Jewish people must not put their fate in the hands of the international community,” reported the Jerusalem Post. ”Posing a rhetorical question, Netanyahu asked, ‘How does the world react to the calls for genocide against the Jews today?’

‘Seventy years after the shoa [Holocaust], Iran is calling for us to be wiped off the map, Hezbollah is calling for our extinction, as are many in Hamas. The Jerusalem Mufti [Sheikh Muhammad Hussein] called on Sunday for Jews to be killed wherever they are echoing his predecessor Haj Amin Al Husseini, who actively helped Hitler and Eichman,’ he said. ‘I do not hear the international community condemning this. I hear them condemning buildings in the West Bank. But I don’t hear them condemning this incitement,’ said Netanyahu.”

Could Netanyahu be signaling that his patience — and that of the Israeli government and military – is running out?

Users will have no way to opt out of being tracked across the board when the search company unifies its privacy policy and terms of service for all its online offerings, including search, Gmail and Google+. The move is being criticised by privacy advocates and could attract greater scrutiny from anti-trust regulators. "If you're signed in, we may combine information you've provided from one service with information from other services," Google's director of privacy, product and engineering, Alma Whitten, wrote in a blogpost.

After the new policy comes into effect, user information from most Google products – such as YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google+ and Android mobile – will be treated as a single trove of data, which the company could use for targeted advertising or other revenue-raising purposes. An article in the Washington Post raised concerns about details of people's private meetings, health, politics and finances becoming part of their digital dossier kept by Google. Confidential discussions via Gmail of a meeting location might be transferred to Google Maps without the user's consent, for example.

"There is no way anyone expected this," Jeffrey Chester, executive director of privacy advocacy group the Centre for Digital Democracy, told the Washington Post. "There is no way a user can comprehend the implication of Google collecting across platforms for information about your health, political opinions and financial concerns." Google said it expected to roll out the revised guidelines on 1 March, consolidating more than 70 privacy policies covering all of its products.

Austria's finance minister Maria Fekter said patience with Athens is exhausted. "Greece has failed its austerity targets by a wide margin. The Greeks have made decisions, but they weren't implemented. They have agreed to austerity measures, but costs haven't come down. This situation has caused great consternation," she said at a meeting of EU finance minister in Brussels. "We're sending a direct message to Greece that the community expects more. We're not pleased and only when there's a written message on the table in front of us, can further assistance be discussed," she said.

The head of the European Commission's economics team Mario Buti said Brussels is prepared to allow credit default swaps (CDS) on Greek bonds to come into play if talks fail to reach a deal that gives Greece enough debt relief to claw its way back to viability. "Triggering CDS may have to be considered," he said. The comment is a clear warning to private creditors holding €206 billion (£172 billion) of Greek debt that the EU will not step in with fresh money to prevent a default on March 20, when Greece must make a €14.5 billion debt payment.

Charlesa Dallara, the head of the International Institute for Finance (IIF) representing creditor banks, said EU officials were playing with fire by talking about default and demanded that the EU stick to the agreement reached last October. "We put an offer on the table and it remains on the table. All parties need to contribute to the solution. We are wiping off the face of the earth €100 billion in existing claims against Greece," he told Bloomberg.

The continued failure to reach a deal began to rattle markets, halting the last week's rally on bourses on both sides of the Atlantic.

ACTA has – officially – been in the works since 2008, and was signed by the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea in 2011. All negotiations were held behind closed doors, and it is mostly thanks to Internet hacktivist groups like Anonymous that news of the potential damage ACTA could cause has spread.

Under this new treaty, Internet Service Providers will police all data passing through them, making them legally responsible for what their users do online. And should you do something considered "breach of copyright" like, for instance, getting a tattoo of a brand logo, taking a photo and posting it somewhere, you may be disconnected from the Internet, fined or even jailed.

This, of course, threatens the entire founding idea of the Internet – the free sharing of information. But ACTA doesn't stop there. It goes beyond the Internet, bearing down on generic drugs and food patents. If passed, ACTA will enforce a global standard for seed patenting, which would wipe out independent, local farmers and make the world completely dependent on the patent owners (read "big corporations") for supplies. The agreement states that it must be signed and ratified by 2013, but the seemingly late deadline is no cause for celebration. And if the secrecy surrounding this latest censor tool continues to hold, it may be put into effect without anyone noticing

The recent series of shocking accidents forced homeowners in one of the counties to watch as their houses and possessions burned to the ground. And the firefighters were right there watching, as well. All because the owners didn’t pay the US$75 “fire subscription fee”, known as the “pay for spray” charge.

In the US, fire policy varies from state to state, and from county to county. In South Fulton, Tennessee, the fire fee policy dates back 30 or so years. The county does not have a county-wide firefighting service, but South Fulton offers fire coverage to rural residents for a fee. Either you pay the city for fire protection, or face potential disaster. If you don’t pay, the firefighters do arrive, but only to stop the fire from spreading to the neighboring property, whose owner has paid the fire fee.

In a recent incident, the owners begged to make an exception, saying they were ready to pay whatever it took to put out the blaze. But they were told it was too late. A similarly shocking incident occurred in California, where police and firemen watched a man drown, saying they didn’t have proper certifications for water rescue, which would leave them open to possible lawsuits if they attempted to save him. So as the tragedy unfolded for over an hour, authorities just stood there and did nothing. Even after the surf brought Raymon Zach’s body closer to the shore, firefighters refused to get in the water and retrieve the corpse, so they waited until a passer-by volunteered to do the job.

And here lies a moral dilemma: rigid local rules versus the responsibility of the government to help its citizens when they are in trouble. Or rather, versus basic human compassion. The logic – you don’t get anything unless you pay – makes sense to a lot of Americans. But when you have money and rules on one side of the scale, and humanity, the human urge to help, on the other – and money wins – this is when one gets the sense that something is wrong with the way the system works.

“For now,” Socci writes, “he is saying that this may be true (Joseph Ratzinger’s personal assumption), but I hope the story does not reach the news. But this rumor is circulating high up in the Vatican and therefore deserves close attention. The Pope has not rejected the possibility of his resignation when he turns 85 in April next year.”

Socci recalls that the assumption he will resign, without any hitches, was the same thing Ratzinger talked about in an interview in the book “Luce del mondo” (Light of the World), when, in response to a question by interviewer Peter Seewald, he said: “When a Pope arrives at a clear awareness that he no longer has the physical, mental, or psychological capacity to carry out the task that has been entrusted to him, then he has the right, and in some cases, even the duty to resign.” Furthermore, in another passage, Benedict XVI wondered if he would be able to “withstand it all, just from the physical point of view.”

The 17 euro-zone countries have reached agreement on the contract for the permanent euro bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), clearing the way for the aid fund to be launched one year earlier than planned. Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the group of euro-zone finance ministers, announced the agreement following a Monday night meeting in Brussels. The ESM is now set to replace the temporary European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) on July 1, a year earlier than originally planned.

"I believe this is an important achievement," said German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble after the meeting. "It demonstrates that the euro group and the European Union as a whole is capable of taking the necessary steps." Schäuble also said that agreement had been reached on the euro-zone fiscal pact, which would submit members of the common currency zone to stricter budgetary rules. "We aren't yet over the mountain," Schäuble said in reference to the ongoing euro-zone debt crisis. But he said there is "cause for optimism."

The ESM will be funded with €500 billion to help struggling euro-zone countries, with Germany providing the largest share - although Angela Merkel's recent refusal to consider upping that figure seems to be wavering under heavy pressure. Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti believes the ESM should be doubled to €1 trillion, while there have also been calls from French President Nicolas Sarkozy for Germany to put in more money. European Central Bank head Mario Draghi shares that view as does International Monetary Fund boss Christine Lagarde. "We need a larger firewall," Lagarde said at a Monday appearance in Berlin. "Without it, countries like Italy and Spain, that are fundamentally able to repay their debts, could potentially be forced into a solvency crisis by abnormal financing costs."

Euro-zone countries are required to provide a total of €80 billion (£66.8 billion) in cash capital to the new ESM, in the hopes that it will be more independent and more robust than its predecessor the EFSF, which was recently downgraded recently by US rating agency Standard & Poor's.

MK Tzipi Hotovely's (Likud) efforts in the Knesset Interior Committee paid off, demanding with Mk Aryeh Eldad (National Union) and MK Danny Danon (Likud) that the police allow the ascent. "The next step is to allow Jews to pray on the Temple Mount. That will demonstrate our possession of the Mount," she said.

New sanctions, announced last month by President Barack Obama and which the European Union announced Monday it would put into effect, have crippled the local currency and threaten to throw the economy into a tailspin. Western powers are hoping economic pressure can convince Iran to halt its unsupervised nuclear development and enrichment of high-grade uranium, a key ingredient for a nuclear weapon.

Iran last month responded to the plunge by prohibiting currency trading outside of banks and official exchange offices and banning the possession of foreign currencies. Simultaneously with the currency crisis, the price of gold has soared 25 percent in the last week. Iran continues to act as if nothing out of the ordinary is taking place. When the rial began its plunger earlier this month, officials said there was no connection with the sanctions, and officials reacted to the EU sanctions by saying they would only harm the West.

However, borrowing in December came in lower than expected, putting Chancellor George Osborne further ahead of a target set by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to bring borrowing down by 10 billion pounds to 127 billion pounds this financial year. The ONS said that public sector net borrowing, excluding financial interventions fell to 13.7 billion pounds in December, down from 15.9 billion pounds in the same period in 2010.

Sterling slipped slightly against the euro to 1.1918 following the news, after falling close to a four-week low on the back of better-than-expected eurozone PMI surveys. The pound also fell a quarter of a cent against the dollar, to 1.5534. Vicky Redwood, senior economist at Capital Economics, said that the 1 trillion pounds figure was "a reminder of the enormity of the challenge that still lies ahead to get the public finances back on a sustainable footing."

She added: "We expect weaker growth than the OBR is forecasting to make its future borrowing forecasts much harder to meet. Indeed, so far, it has been weaker spending growth helping borrowing to fall, whereas tax receipts are falling short of the fiscal forecasts."

Tehran has threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation. Tankers carrying 17 million barrels of oil pass through this waterway every day, accounting for 35 per cent of the world's seaborne crude shipments. At its narrowest point, located between Iran and Oman, the Strait is only 21 miles wide. Last month, Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, commander of the Iranian navy, claimed that closing the Strait would be "easy," adding: "As Iranians say, it will be easier than drinking a glass of water."

But USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered carrier capable of embarking 90 aircraft, passed through this channel and entered the Gulf without incident yesterday. HMS Argyll, a Type 23 frigate from the Royal Navy, was one of the escort vessels making up the carrier battle-group. A guided missile cruiser and two destroyers from the US Navy completed the flotilla, along with one warship from the French navy.

All three countries retain a permanent military presence in the Gulf, but a joint passage through the Strait of Hormuz by all of their respective navies is highly unusual. The flotilla will have passed within a few miles of the Iranian coastline. A western official denied this was a provocative move intended to increase the pressure on Iran. The goal was simply to "illustrate international resolve" to guarantee free movement of shipping through a vital artery of the world economy, he said.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman confirmed that "HMS Argyll and a French vessel joined a US carrier group transiting through the Strait of Hormuz to underline the unwavering international commitment to maintaining rights of passage under international law."

Foreign ministers' deal in Brussels could lead to soaring fuel prices and Iran closing the strait of Hormuz

The EU decided no further oil contracts could be struck between the member states and Iran while existing oil delivery deals would be allowed to run until July. Several countries shared reservations about the move, EU diplomats said. Greece was the trickiest problem since it imports a lot of Iranian oil on very favourable conditions. Given the financial collapse in Greece, it was in a difficult position and sought compensating measures from the rest of the EU. The impact of the embargo on countries such as Greece is to be reviewed in May.

Iran is Opec's second biggest oil producer after Saudi Arabia, and about 20% of its oil exports go to Europe. It has threatened to close the strait of Hormuz waterway if the oil embargo goes ahead, a move that would choke off global oil supplies and send international tensions soaring. The oil embargo represents a leap in the sanctions regime against Iran, following four earlier rounds of escalating penalties. Senior EU officials also concede that the move could be risky and send oil prices rocketing at a time of extreme economic difficulty in the west. "We need to ensure this does not destabilise the entire global oil market," said a senior EU official.

Mohammad Kossari, deputy head of parliament's foreign affairs and national security committee, issued the warning in respone to a decision by the European Union on Monday to impose an oil embargo on Iran over the country's alleged nuclear weapons program. "The pressure of sanctions is designed to try and make sure that Iran takes seriously our request to come to the table," EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said. However, with Washington's decision to deploy a second carrier strike group in the Gulf, the EU's attempt to pressure Iran economically could greatly increase the likelihood of all-out war in the region.

The Strait of Hormuz is the vital link between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. It is also one of the most strategic chokepoints in the world when it comes to oil transit. If economic sanctions sufficiently pressure Iran to retaliate by closing down the Strait, nearly 20 per cent of worldwide oil trade would be impacted, resulting in a massive spike in global energy costs. With over half a million regular forces and an additional 120,000 personnel in the country's elite Revolutionary Guard, analysts believe the consequences of a US-led war against Iran would dwarf recent Western-backed military incursions the Middle East.

Thus far, the US decision to maintain two carrier strike groups in the region has been described as "a routine activity" by Iran. But the vast US military buildup in the region, which was bolstered when the Pentagon dispatched an additional 15,000 troops to the neighboring nation of Kuwait, was only the latest step in an obvious attempt by Washington to strengthen its military capabilities in the region. However, the EU strategy of averting "chaos in the Middle East" by tightening the economic noose around Iran could spark the very conflagration it was ostensibly trying to avert.