People who have acquired rights of residence will still have those rights even if the EU treaties cease. They are known as "acquired rights", "executed rights" or "vested rights". They are so firmly established that they have acquired the status of "customary law", which means that they stand as a fundamental principle of international law, not needing a specific treaty to confirm them. There is even a parliamentary briefing note about it, so Mr Grieve has no excuse.

Mr Grieve stands in a long line of people who have got things wrong concerning the EU, starting with the late Sir Edward Heath who assured everybody in 1971 that joining it involved "no essential loss of sovereignty". Years later, on television he admitted that he knew all about the project for the euro currency and for a United States of Europe at the time he said this.

Even that enthusiastic europhile Lord Hattersley half admitted the truth deficit on a Radio 4 programme in 2000: "Not only was it wrong for us to deal superficially with what Europe involved, but we've paid the price for it ever since, because every time there is a crisis in Europe, people say, with some justification, 'Well we would not have been part of this if we'd really known the implication.'" So never take at face value any statement about the EU by a main party politician – especially by a lawyer on a matter of law!

As reasons for the need to establish stronger cooperation, the MP named the “security situation” in the Middle East as the primary reason for the need to “support the democratic development of the country [Egypt]”. Kauder also stressed the importance of parliamentary elections taking place in “foreseeable time”, and to enable the press in Egypt to work “as freely as possible”.

In the statement by the Christian Union parliamentary bloc, economic ties were mentioned “foremost” as a field for growing cooperation between the two countries. According to the statement, Al-Sisi expected German investments in his country to number roughly €20-€30 billion. Another important aspect was the security cooperation, with assurances by the German side that there was a “strong interest that the relationships to Cairo develop successfully”. Kauder called the formation of a joint military force, as decided on at the Arab League summit on Sunday, as “a very important step”, since this force could “stabilise the region more than in the past”.

He also called Al-Sisi’s confession to religious freedom, an important topic to the German MP in the past, “impressive” with Al-Sisi stating: “There are only Egyptians and no division between Christians and Muslims.” The German MP is known as an advocate for Christians abroad, stressing the importance to protect them as a minority. He voiced concerns as Morsi took power, warning not to transform the Egyptian civil state into a religious one, and to maintain dialogue with social groups, especially including Christians.

Marathon negotiations between Iran and foreign ministers from six world powers are nearing a self-imposed deadline. Ministers want to restrict Iran's nuclear programme in exchange for relief from crippling sanctions. There is no sign that the most intractable problems, such as the pace and timing of sanctions relief, have been resolved, the BBC's Barbara Plett reports from Lausanne.

However, reports say there are plans to issue a joint statement on general points of agreement, accompanied by documents outlining more technical details. These would be enough for all parties to continue negotiations aimed at achieving a comprehensive accord in June, our correspondent adds.

Kerry and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier announced they would stay at least until Thursday. In a potentially hopeful sign, French Foreign Secretary Laurent Fabius returned for more talks after flying back to Paris the previous day because progress had been too slow.

Six world powers - the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China - aim to stop Iran from gaining the capacity to develop a nuclear bomb. Tehran wants to lift international sanctions that have crippled its economy, while preserving what it says is its right to peaceful nuclear technology.

The sides were meant to reach a preliminary accord in the Swiss city of Lausanne which would provide an outline for a final deal to be reached by June 30. The preliminary deal was meant to be achieved by midnight on March 31, but the sides are under pressure not to go home empty handed. The powers and Iran said they had moved closer, but both sides accused the other of refusing to offer proposals that would break the deadlock. Washington said it was willing to walk away from the talks unless the sides could agree on a preliminary framework.

But so rapid has been the deterioration of relations between the Obama administration and Netanyahu government that America's protective shield is now up for discussion at the White House, as part of a broader review of US relations with Israel. Rarely have the grievances between two such close allies been given such a public airing, or chronicled in such vivid and profane detail.

Obama and his aides have made no secret of their anger at Benjamin Netanyahu for accepting an invitation from the Republican leadership to address a joint session of Congress in the midst of his re-election campaign, and then using that pulpit to denounce the potential nuclear deal between Washington and Tehran. Netanyahu's voiced opposition to Palestinian statehood in the final days of the Israel election campaign injected more poison into relations.

Brown was on hand Wednesday as state officials took stock of historically abysmal levels of snowpack in the Sierra Nevada amid the state's grinding drought. It was the first time that a governor attended the measuring event, which has taken place at Lake Tahoe since 1942. Brown ordered the California Water Resources Control Board to implement mandatory restrictions to reduce water usage by 25%. The water savings are expected to amount to 1.5 million acre-feet of water over the next nine months.

Brown said drastic changes were necessary because it's unclear how long the drought will last, and the nearly nonexistent snowpack foreshadows another dry year. Cease-and-desist orders and fines could be issued to those who fail to comply with new restrictions, he said.

Electronic readings on Wednesday at about 100 stations across the Sierra showed that the water content of the snow was only about 5% of the state average for April 1, the date on which snowpack is normally considered at its peak. Official manual readings will be announced Wednesday afternoon.

And it has huge implications for tens of millions of people who depend on water flowing downstream from melting snow — including the nation's most productive farming region, the California Central Valley. Groundwater reserves are getting lower and lower as farmers and towns drill deeper and deeper, sucking out more water than there is coming in. It's gotten so bad in the San Joaquin Valley that the ground is actually sinking. Last summer it sank a half-inch each month.

The snow supplies roughly a third of all of California's water, on average. The Sierra Nevada snowpack is supposed to be a storage bank. It holds the snow late into the spring that then melts gradually. The runoff feeds reservoirs that supply water for millions of people — and the Central Valley. This year, California's chief snow surveyor says, there may not even be runoff.

Now, with Europe facing its biggest security challenge since the end of the cold war, the multinational base is on the front line — lying closer to Russia than any other Nato command centre. A high-tech operations room is being built, the base is doubling in size to 400 officers and it is racing to achieve high readiness by mid-2016. “Things have changed dramatically,” says General Niemann.

Public opinion in Germany has also changed dramatically. Since the end of the cold war voters have been wary of military engagement, distrusting politicians’ calls for greater German participation in foreign missions such as Afghanistan, often because of ingrained fears over military adventurism born of the country’s Nazi past. Just before the Ukraine crisis erupted last March, Germans responded sceptically to an appeal from Joachim Gauck, the president, to stop using history as a “shield”.

But the Russian threat to European stability has galvanised backing for a more active military. A recent YouGov poll showed 49 per cent support for increased defence spending, versus 36 per cent against. Christian Mölling of the Berlin-based SWP think-tank says: “We didn’t really understand about sending expeditions to other parts of the world. But this is the old narrative about the defence of our homeland.”

After limiting defence spending for 25 years, Berlin will boost the military budget by 6 per cent over the next five years, starting with a €1.2 billion increase next year to €34.2 billion. “The Kremlin’s behaviour has put the importance of the Nato defensive alliance before our eyes. We thought for years we would not need to defend our borders, but now the facts show otherwise,” says Henning Otte, parliamentary defence spokesman for chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling CDU/CSU bloc.

General Niemann, whose service began in the cold war, says Germans are ready for the new challenge. “I have no doubt about it. There is no question of history [stopping us]. This is not Germany post-1945 any more. We have enjoyed the solidarity of our partners during the cold war and now our partners deserve our solidarity.”

A long-running dispute over Iran's nuclear programme has heightened tensions between Tehran and the West, but a deal on Tuesday could bring down diplomatic barriers. Failure, though, could see the crisis turn much worse. It's in many ways a make-or-break moment, but either way a deal on 31 March does not mean the crisis is over by a long shot. The date was set as the deadline for a framework deal, which will pave the way for a full agreement on all technical details by 30 June.

One of the major obstacles has been disagreement over the duration of a deal, with the sides reported to have agreed to 10 years on the most sensitive aspects of Iran's nuclear work. It is unclear what will follow when the accord expires. While a deal might defuse the stand-off between Iran and world powers, Israel has warned it could fuel a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

Under this scenario, countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia could seek to equip themselves with nuclear weapons before Iran gets a chance to. There are also strong opponents to a deal in both Iran and the US. In Iran, hardliners have denounced what they see is a humiliating compromise over a national right to enrichment, while in Washington members of Congress have threatened to oppose a final deal.

Iran says the international community is displaying double standards by not doing anything about its arch-foe Israel, which is widely believed to have a nuclear arsenal - though Israel has neither confirmed nor denied this. Israel however, like nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, is not a signatory to the NPT.

Naqdi’s comments were made public as Iran and six world powers prepared Tuesday to issue a general statement agreeing to continue nuclear negotiations in a new phase aimed at reaching a comprehensive accord by the end of June. In 2014, Naqdi said Iran was stepping up efforts to arm West Bank Palestinians for battle against Israel, adding the move would lead to Israel’s annihilation, Iran’s Fars news agency reported. “Arming the West Bank has started and weapons will be supplied to the people of this region,” Naqdi said.

“The Zionists should know that the next war won’t be confined to the present borders and the Mujahedeen will push them back,” he added. Naqdi claimed that much of Hamas’s arsenal, training and technical knowhow in the summer conflict with Israel was supplied by Iran. The Basij is a religious volunteer force established in 1979 by the country’s revolutionary leaders, and has served as a moral police and to suppress dissent.

The use of the new technology by Israel was brought up in discussions regarding a possible attack on Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the report claimed. Such a move would send Iran “back to the stone age,” the British paper said. This kind of bomb would operate based on the nonlethal technology of gamma rays, the report explained. The outburst of energy would “fry” electric devices and currents around the source of the explosion.

Arguing that NATO aggression against Russia required the “complete destruction of the enemy,” Sivkov went on to depict a chilling scenario. “Geologists believe that the Yellowstone supervolcano could explode at any moment. There are signs of growing activity there. Therefore it suffices to push the relatively small, for example the impact of the munition megaton class to initiate an eruption. The consequences will be catastrophic for the United States – a country just disappears,” he said.

A Yellowstone supervolcano eruption would kill millions of people in the initial blast and bury much of the United States in volcanic ash. According to some experts, it could cause the end of the world. The last time a supervolcano exploded in Siberia, 85 per cent of all land species and 95 per cent of all ocean dwellers were completely wiped out.

“Another vulnerable area of the United States from the geophysical point of view, is the San Andreas fault – 1300 kilometers between the Pacific and North American plates … a detonation of a nuclear weapon there can trigger catastrophic events like a coast-scale tsunami which can completely destroy the infrastructure of the United States,” he wrote.

While it would be unthinkable for anyone inside the Kremlin to take Sivkov’s comments seriously, his rhetoric illustrates how fraught tensions are between Moscow and Washington.

For example, almost two million Palestinians who have long been settled in Jordan, and have for decades enjoyed Jordanian citizenship, are routinely counted as "refugees" by UNRWA, and the State Department supports it. This, in spite of the fact that, under United States law, a person who has citizenship in the country where they reside, and enjoys the protection of that state, cannot lawfully be eligible for refugee status. How can State justify this contradiction?

Here is a second example: Another two million Palestinians who are already settled in the West Bank [sic] and Gaza, and who by their own account lived in the declared Palestinian state as its citizens, under a Palestinian government, are registered as "refugees" by UNRWA. By American legal standards, these Palestinians are "firmly settled" and therefore ineligible for "refugee" status. And according to American policy reaffirmed by three Presidents, these Palestinians already reside in their own future state, the place where Palestinian refugees are meant to be settled. Yet the State Department supports UNRWA's decision to count two million Palestinians well established in the West Bank and Gaza as "refugees" too.

Here is a third example: Under US laws and regulations, only an individual who was personally displaced, or is a spouse or underage dependent of such an individual, can be eligible for refugee status or derivative refugee status. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren are specifically not entitled to inherit refugee status merely because their ancestor was a refugee. But under UNRWA practices, any descendant of a male refugee, no matter how many generations and decades have passed is automatically entitled to be counted as a "refugee." In fact, 95% of today's UNRWA "refugees" were not even alive when Israel was born in 1948, were never personally displaced by Israel's creation, and are listed by UNRWA as "refugees" only because of this peculiar practice of inheriting refugee status as a birthright.

Amazingly, the State Department defends all this. The sad reality is that the United States Department of State does not want such simple reforms. State has chosen instead to act as UNRWA's patron and the protector of its mission, perpetuating and expanding the refugee issue as a source of conflict against Israel.

This development may be welcomed by an administration that has sought to extract the United States from Middle East wars. But the Arab initiatives — under-resourced and with questionable objectives — are as likely to compound as resolve the region’s wars, and they ultimately may undermine US interests.

In Yemen, the Saudis and like-minded nations are attempting to turn back an offensive by an alliance of dissident Yemeni forces and ethnic Houthis, a Shiite sect that has received weapons and training from Iran. The Saudis are probably correct in claiming that Iran is attempting to replace a Saudi-friendly government with another Iranian client militia; the Houthis share the ideology of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. But it’s not clear how the military campaign, which so far has consisted of bombing and naval shelling, will turn back the forces now besieging the southern port of Aden — much less accomplish the announced aims of restoring the previous government in Yemen and forcing the Houthis to disarm.

For more than a half-century, it has been the role of the United States to provide the leadership and military muscle that its Arab allies could not muster on their own. In Yemen, the Obama administration could have used air assets to turn back the Houthis before they overthrew the previous government; instead, intent on striking a deal with Iran, the White House at first indicated it could accept the Houthi takeover.

The administration now is offering intelligence support to the Saudi intervention. That will neither ensure its success nor bring about the negotiated settlement that is Yemen’s best option. The war that rages there could soon merge into a regional war between Iran and Saudi Arabia and their allies — a conflict that flourishes in the vacuum created by US retreat.

Greece came in for further criticism this weekend, when it emerged that the Greek Energy Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis is to fly to Moscow on March 30 to negotiate lower gas prices for his country and find ways of increasing Greek exports to the Russian Federation, despite the EU sanctions over Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is expected to travel to Moscow next week to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in a move that has left German politicians apoplectic with rage with the chairman of the Bundestag [German parliament] European Committee Gunther Krichbaum accusing Greece of “frittering away valuable time and trust”. He added: “Instead of asking for help from his comrades in Russia, Prime Minister Tsipras should finally put forward concrete and dependable reform proposals.”

“Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is carrying out a very risky strategy,” Manfred Weber, the leader of the conservative EPP group in the European Parliament, told Der Spiegel. “His flirting with Russia makes a constructive solution with Europe in these financial questions difficult.”

Greece on Friday sent its creditors a long-awaited list of reforms with a pledge to produce a small budget surplus this year in the hope that it will unlock badly needed cash.