“Do we really want Europe to break apart? Anybody who is tempted to think it possible to amputate Greece strategically from Europe should be careful. It is very dangerous. Who would be hit after us? Portugal? What would happen to Italy when it discovers that it is impossible to stay within the austerity straight-jacket?”

“There are Italian officials – I won’t say from which institution - who have approached me to say they support us, but they can’t say the truth because Italy is at risk of bankruptcy and they fear the consequence from Germany. A cloud of fear has been hanging over Europe over recent years. We are becoming worse than the Soviet Union,” he told the Italian TV station RAI.

This earned a stiff rebuke from the Italian finance minister, Pier Carlo Padoan. “These comments are out of place. Italy’s debt is solid and sustainable,” he said.

Yet the point remains. Deflationary conditions are causing interest costs to rise faster than nominal GDP in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, automatically pushing public debt ratios ever higher. Berkeley economist Barry Eichengreen warns that Grexit would be “Lehman squared”, setting off a calamitous chain reaction with worldwide consequences. Syriza's gamble is that the EU authorities know this, whatever officials may claim in public.

"Discussions about additional capabilities which can be delivered by Russia in the case of a humanitarian operation or an emergency situation are underway,” Anastasiades said, while his defence minister Ioannis Kasoulidis highlighted that there were no plans to have Russian troops stationed in Cyprus, also home to a strategically important British RAF base.

Doubts have been expressed about how genuine the Russian military’s ‘humanitarian’ motives in Cyprus are. Last September at a NATO summit Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov insisted that Russia’s presence in Ukraine was of a humanitarian nature. Cyprus and Russia have close economic ties. According to Global Financial Integrity, Cyprus is both the largest source and destination of foreign direct investment, while a report by the Moscow Times last month estimated that Russian-related business made up around 10% of the Cypriot economy.

A recent report by the New York Times branded Cyprus “a favourite tax haven” for Russian business, as well as for German and Latin entrepreneurs, with around 273,000 companies registered in a country where the population is only 839,000. John Herbst, a Eurasia expert at the Atlantic Council and former US ambassador to Ukraine, says that Russia’s approach toward Cyprus ought to be of great concern to NATO and the EU. Cyprus is an EU member, however it is crucially not a member of NATO, unlike neighbouring Greece and Turkey who are both members.

The chancellor was expected to arrive in Washington after a furious round of shuttle diplomacy that saw her travel to Kiev on Thursday and to Moscow on Friday in an urgent bid to craft a diplomatic solution to the escalating conflict between government troops and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine – a crisis complicated last week when the White House suddenly reversed its long-held position and said it was considering arming the Ukrainians.

The possibility of a potential new strategy upended what had been a unified approach among the US and its NATO allies of pursuing economic sanctions against interests in Moscow, as Merkel took point in applying diplomatic pressure to Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom she reportedly spoke some 40 times in the last year. With little time and a wide-ranging agenda that includes Ukraine, the ongoing battle against the Islamic State group, counterterrorism efforts and the global economy, the fissures in US-German relations will likely have to be put aside.

“The world is definitely on fire. Violence is on the rise,” says Julianne Smith, a former deputy national security adviser for Vice President Joe Biden and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank. “President Obama and Chancellor Merkel will not have a lot of time for self-reflection on US-German relations.” Merkel’s last White House visit in May was accompanied by breathless headlines suggesting the relationship between the countries was at its lowest level since World War II. While German outrage on the official level did not diminish official cooperation, US credibility eroded notably in Germany. Polling indicated a significant drop in German support for Obama and his foreign policy decisions.

Adding to the drama is the fact that the Greek government is rapidly running out of money. According to the Wall Street Journal, Greece is “on course to run out of money within weeks if it doesn’t gain access to additional funds, effectively daring Germany and its other European creditors to let it fail and stumble out of the euro.” We have witnessed other moments of crisis for Greece before, but things are very different this time because the new Greek government is being run by radical leftists that based their entire campaign on ending the austerity that has been imposed on Greece by the rest of Europe.

If they buckle under the demands of the European financial lords, their credibility will be gone and Syriza will essentially be finished in Greek politics. But if they don’t compromise, Greece could be forced to leave the eurozone and we could potentially be facing the equivalent of “financial armageddon” in Europe. If nobody flinches, the eurozone will fall to pieces, the euro will collapse and trillions upon trillions of dollars in derivatives will be in jeopardy.

According to the Bank for International Settlements, 26.45 trillion dollars in currency derivatives are directly tied to the value of the euro. Let that number sink in for a moment. To give you some perspective, keep in mind that the US government spends a total of less than 4 trillion dollars a year. The entire US national debt is just a bit above 18 trillion dollars.

So 26 trillion dollars is an amount of money that is almost unimaginable. And of course those are just the derivatives that are directly tied to the euro. Overall, the total global derivatives bubble is more than 700 trillion dollars in size.

The Russian president was invited for a bilateral meeting by his Egyptian counterpart Abdul Fattah al-Sisi. “This measure will open up new prospects for trade and investment cooperation between our countries, reduce its dependence on the current trends in the world markets,” Putin said. “I should note that we already use national currencies for trade with a number of the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] states, and China.”

“This practice proves its worth; we are ready to adopt it in our relations with Egypt as well. This issue is being discussed in substance by relevant agencies of both countries.” Egypt is a long-time and trusted partner of Russia and the relationship between the two countries has been rapidly developing, the Russian president said.

A boy aged no more than ten was among those carrying placards saying Insult My Mum And I Will Punch You – quoting Pope Francis in the wake of the Paris attacks. The Pope had said people ‘cannot insult the faith of others’ and that he would punch someone if they offended his mother as he debated freedom of speech following the murders of the Charlie Hebdo magazine cartoonists.

Yesterday organisers refused to allow men and women to protest together, insisting they were segregated. Despite the rally passing off peacefully with no arrests, the banners carried a thinly veiled threat of violence towards those who continued to exercise free speech. Leaders of the protest also sparked anger by claiming the ‘extremist’ cartoonists massacred in Paris for depicting the Prophet Mohammed were as bad as the jihadis who gunned them down in cold blood.

Last night it remained unclear who is behind the Muslim Action Forum, founded in 2012, which issued the call to gather in Downing Street. According to their website, they want to ‘promote peaceful demonstration’ in ‘defending the honour’ of the Prophet.

The guidelines – the first of their kind – were introduced when as much as one-fifth of the average British diet was saturated fat such as butter, cream and fattier cuts of meat. Britons were advised by an official dietary committee to cut their fat intake to 30 per cent of total energy and saturated fat intake to 10 per cent, while increasing the amount of carbohydrate they ate. ‘The present review concludes that dietary advice not merely needs review; it should not have been introduced.’

This led food makers to create low-fat spreads, including cholesterol-lowering products, while consumers shunned cheese, milk and cream. However, now some scientists even say the advice is responsible – in part – for the obesity crisis because it encouraged an increase in carbohydrate in our diets. A new review says evidence from trials did not support the advice. It says it is ‘incomprehensible’ that such advice was introduced for 56 million Britons in 1983 and 220 million Americans six years earlier ‘given the contrary results from a small number of unhealthy men’.

It is not the first time experts have blamed faulty interpretation of studies for creating a ‘myth’ around the role played by saturated fat in heart disease. Researchers last year conducted a ‘meta-analysis’ of data from 72 studies involving more than 600,000 participants from 18 countries. It is a statistically powerful technique to reveal trends that may be masked in individual small studies, but which become obvious when they are amalgamated. A key finding was that total saturated fat, whether measured in the diet or the bloodstream, showed no association with heart disease.

Lamb is relatively expensive for take-aways to buy, which is why some use cheap, poor-quality cuts of other meat instead, such as beef, chicken and turkey. Seventeen of the dishes were mostly or entirely beef. This will particularly alarm Hindu customers, many of whom do not eat beef for religious reasons. Two samples contained pork, which most Muslims and many Jews do not eat.

Twelve dishes tested positive for undeclared allergens such as peanuts, which can cause serious reactions and even death. And seven curry sauces had high levels of the artificial colours Sunset Yellow (E110) and Ponceau 4R (E124). Sunset Yellow can cause stomach upsets, hyperactivity and other health problems, and the FSA has previously urged manufacturers to eliminate it from food aimed at children.

He told BBC Radio 4's the World This Weekend: "I believe Greece will eventually leave. I don't think it helps them or the rest of the eurozone – it is just a matter of time before everyone recognises that parting is the best strategy. The problem is that there is no way that I can conceive of the euro of continuing, unless and until all of the members of eurozone become politically integrated – actually even just fiscally integrated won't do it.

"Greece is in the position that if they don't get additional loans then they will default and leave the Euro. At this stage I don't see any people who are willing to put up the funds having been disappointed so often." He said that he does not believe that the Eurozone can stay together without greater political union. "I would say short of a political union I find it very difficult to foresee the Euro holding together in its current form," he said.

Such honest assessments are not supposed to be uttered in politics, no matter how true they may be. And so, as you can imagine, the machinery of the defenders of the status quo is in quite a lather over the whole affair. And it’s doing everything it can to minimize and marginalize the new Greek government.

As I said, the new Greece administration has got the powers that be in quite a lather. Why is that? I think it’s because the new Greek rulers have dared to call a spade a spade. They’ve spoken the unspeakable. They’ve said that the vast quantities of debt accumulated by Greece, enabled by central bank money-printing programs, are simply unpayable under current terms.

Of course, this is no different than the situations of Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, the UK, France, Japan — or even the US — which is precisely why it’s being considered such a horrendous foul for Greece to publicly speak as it is now. Such honesty does not have a welcome place in modern politics, and more dangerously, it threatens confidence in the entire system.