The transfer was originally arranged by the previous Greek administration. But eurozone officials have blocked the claim, saying it is "legally impossible" to transfer the money back to the debt-stricken country. "There was agreement that, legally, there was no over payment from the HFSF to the EFSF," said a fund spokesman. Germany's finance ministry was also reluctant to allow the release, claiming there was "no reason" to make the transfer.

The decision is a further blow to the Greek government's attempts to stay afloat over the next few weeks. Athens has been scrambling to make repayments to its creditors and continue to pay wages and pensions. The government now faces another €2.4 billion cash squeeze in April, including a €450 million loan repayment to the IMF on April 9.

Speaking as the leaders of Greece and Germany met for high-stakes negotiations over Greece’s ongoing support within the currency union, Mr Soros warned that “we are at the cusp and I can see both possibilities”. “It’s now a lose-lose game and the best that can happen is actually muddling through,” Mr Soros said in a Bloomberg Television interview that will be shown on Tuesday. “Greece is a long-festering problem that was mishandled from the beginning by all parties.”

Mr Soros, known for his bet against the pound during the UK’s exit from the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992, said Greece was running out of time to put its finances on a sustainable footing within the eurozone. “You can keep on pushing it back indefinitely” by making interest payments without writing down debt, Soros said. “But in the meantime there will be no primary surplus because Greece is going down the drain.”

The Greek government has estimated that it could run out of money by the end of April if a vital €7.2 billion in bail-out funds is not released. The head of the European Central Bank, meanwhile, has hit back at accusations it is blackmailing Greece's new anti-austerity leadership. “We haven’t created any rule for Greece, rules were in place and they’ve been applied,” Mario Draghi told an audience of the European Parliament on Monday.

Michael Fallon said: "The threat remains. It is a very live threat. We have to respond to it." He said reports that Russia is working on an agreement to lease 12 long-range bombers to Argentina which could be used to support a renewed attack are unconfirmed. "We do need to modernise our defences to ensure that we have sufficient troops there and that the islands are properly defended in terms of air defence and maritime defence."

"The threat, of course, to the islands remains but so does our commitment to being absolutely clear that islanders have the right to remain British and the right to proper protection by our forces. It is our general view that the threat has not reduced. Argentina still, sadly, maintains its claim to the islands 30 or more years after the original invasion and the war and we have to respond to that."

It came as Russia questioned the legitimacy of Britain’s claim on the Islands. Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian Ambassador in London compared the referendum held in 2013 that found 99.8 per cent of the Falkland Islanders wanted to remain a British territory to that held in Crimea last year. The snap Crimean referendum, held at gunpoint and used to justify Putin’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula, was denounced as a sham by Britain.

Some £180 million will be spent over the next decade in upgrading the island’s defences, Mr Fallon told the Commons. Two Chinook helicopters, which were sent to Afghanistan in 2006, will return and allow troops to respond to possible incursions more quickly, while a new system will replace the Rapier air defence missiles when they go out of service at the end of the decade.

The proposal, outlined in the Siberian Times, would see the road follow a similar route to the Trans-Siberian railway, through cities including Yekaterinburg, Irkutsk and Vladivostok. A new high-speed train line would also be constructed, along with pipelines for gas and oil. The rail network may also be extended to the Chukotka region of Russia and across the Bering Strait to Alaska – making overland trips from Britain to the US – via the Channel Tunnel – a possibility.

The idea, which developers hope will help boost tourism and make Russia a global transportation hub, was presented at a meeting of the Russian Academy of Science. Vladimir Fortov, the Head of the Russian Academy of Science, said the project is "very ambitious and expensive". But he added: "It will solve many problems in the development of the vast region. It is connected with social programs, and new fields, new energy resources, and so on.

The Trans-Siberian Railway links Moscow and Vladivostok, covers 9,258km (6,152 miles) and takes seven days to complete.

Such a plan would represent a leap of faith for news organizations accustomed to keeping their readers within their own ecosystems, as well as accumulating valuable data on them. Facebook has been trying to allay their fears, according to several of the people briefed on the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were bound by nondisclosure agreements.

Facebook intends to begin testing the new format in the next several months, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. The initial partners are expected to be The New York Times, BuzzFeed and National Geographic, although others may be added since discussions are continuing. The Times and Facebook are moving closer to a firm deal, one person said.

Facebook has said publicly that it wants to make the experience of consuming content online more seamless. News articles on Facebook are currently linked to the publisher’s own website, and open in a web browser, typically taking about eight seconds to load. Facebook thinks that this is too much time, especially on a mobile device, and that when it comes to catching the roving eyeballs of readers, milliseconds matter.

The FoI response confirms that BBC staff applied for, and accepted, about £3 million of EU funds between April 2011 and November 2013, most of which has been spent on unspecified ‘research and development’ projects, with the remaining £1 million spent on programming.

However, the size of these EU gifts is arguably irrelevant, even though they are indicative of the BBC’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for public money. What is undeniably true is that the BBC has acted with characteristic slyness by concealing that it ever requested, let alone received, this European cash, suggesting that it is uneasy about the public being aware of its financial arrangements.

With the European elections only three months away, the timing of this disclosure is certainly unhelpful to the BBC, fuelling longstanding pro-EU bias concerns.

The terrorists have also been following with great enthusiasm reports that the Obama Administration is considering reassessing its policy - that the US no longer considers Israel a strategic ally in the Middle East. In short, Obama's anti-Israel stance is the best gift the Americans could have given to Muslim terrorists and radical Arabs.

Obama also seems not to want to face the fact that because of his withdrawals and neglect, the situation in the Middle East today, with the rise of Islamic State and other terror groups, is not the same as it was even five years ago. Thanks to Obama's policies, the Iranians and their friends are now in control of Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon, and much of Bahrain, and have surrounded the oilfields of the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile the US has been forced to close down its embassies in three Arab countries - Syria, Libya and Yemen.

Even Palestinians and Arabs are aware of the fact that under the current circumstances a Palestinian state would sooner or later be controlled by jihadists and Islamic terrorists, whose dream is the destruction of Israel, Europe and the US. The last thing the Americans and Europeans need is another Islamic extremist country that exports terrorism - with nuclear weapons - to all parts of the earth. The real enemy is not Netanyahu. The real enemy is Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Islamic State.

Instead, the dispute is seen by many Arabs and Muslims as part of the Obama Administration's strategy to undermine Israel and force it to make territorial concessions that would pose an existential threat to Israel. At the beginning of his first term in office, he raised high hopes in the Arab and Islamic countries when he rushed to deliver an apologetic speech at the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Al-Azhar University in Cairo. His speech left many Arabs and Muslims with the impression that here, finally, is an American president who is prepared to sacrifice Israel for the sake of appeasing its enemies.

Muslims have long considered Obama to be on their side in the conflict with Israel. They were expecting him to become the first US president to abandon Israel in favor of Arabs and Muslims. But since the 2009 speech in Cairo, there has been great disappointment with Obama in the Arab and Islamic countries for failing to "do something" about Israel. Now, at long last, the Obama Administration's increased hostility toward Israel is being welcomed in many Arab and Islamic capitals. They are overjoyed to see that after failing the Arabs and Muslims for the past six years, Obama seems finally to be moving in the "right" direction.

Terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hizbullah, Al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad are also expressing satisfaction with what they see as Obama's "declaration of war" against Israel. Palestinian Authority officials in the West Bank are also celebrating over the fact that Israel has become the number one enemy of the Obama Administration.

Israel's enemies have been sitting on its borders and waiting for an opportunity to attack. One of the reasons they have been reluctant until now to wage an all-out war to destroy Israel was their fear that the US would come to Israel's rescue. But now, Hizbullah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Islamic State and other terror groups are hopeful that Obama has finally decided to abandon Israel.

The apparent decision by the White House to leak the allegations is the latest symptom of the growing gulf between Barack Obama’s administration and Binyamin Netanyahu’s government over the Iran talks, in which the Israeli leader suspects US officials of being ready to make too many concessions at the expense of Israeli security. Intelligence analysts suggested that the leak reflects the degree of anger in Washington at Netanyahu’s actions, and could mark a more serious blow to the already tottering relationship.

The leak has come exactly a week before a deadline for the US-Iranian negotiations in Lausanne to produce a framework agreement. However, what appears to have upset administration officials more than the spying is the use of the classified intelligence acquired to brief members of the US Congress and to persuade them to torpedo the talks. After Netanyahu addressed Congress this month, 47 Republican senators wrote an open letter to the Iranian leadership, warning it that a successor to Obama could refuse to honour any agreement reached.

“It is one thing for the US and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal US secrets and play them back to US legislators to undermine US diplomacy,” the Wall Street Journal quoted a senior US official as saying. Israel has categorically denied the allegations that it spied on closed-door nuclear negotiations between Iran and the US, however it did not deny that such information had been obtained.

“I think the report is wrong, it is inaccurate,” the outgoing Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, told the country’s Army Radio on Tuesday morning. “The State of Israel obviously has various security interests and we have excellent intelligence services, but we are not engaged in espionage against the United States.” He did not, however, deny information was obtained. Lieberman said: “All the information we gathered was from another entity, not the US.” He added: “We reached a decision a long time ago not to spy on the US and I haven’t come across anyone who has violated that instruction in several decades.”

“We cannot simply pretend that those comments were never made,” McDonough told the J Street conference in Washington, whose leftist audience received his remarks enthusiastically. He also warned Israel’s next government not to consider unilateral annexation of any West Bank territory, saying it would “be both wrong and illegal,” and that America would strenuously object.

“Israel cannot maintain military control of another people indefinitely,” he said. “An occupation that has lasted for almost 50 years must end.” He denied claims that the administration’s re-evaluation of its approach to the peace process stemmed from US President Barack Obama’s “personal pique” with Netanyahu, but he described Netanyahu’s remarks before the election as “troubling.”

The active duty Air Force is 520 pilots short of its total manning requirement, with that projection expected to get worse in the near future due to an increase in private airline hiring luring the pilots away and continued cuts to the service's fleet, according to joint testimony to the Senate Armed Services committee by William LaPlante, the assistant secretary for acquisition; Lieutenant General James Holmes, the deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and requirements; and Lieutenant General Tod Wolters, the deputy chief of staff for operations.

"The shortfall evolved from force structure reductions that cut active duty fighter squadrons and fighter training squadrons to a number that cannot sustain billet requirements," the testimony states. "As a result, the Air Force is currently unable to produce and experience the required number of fighter pilots across the total force. Without these fighter pilots, the Air Force will be very challenged to continue to provide the air supremacy upon which all our forces depend," the testimony states.

It was a 24-day ordeal, and the ship returned to its home port in Wisconsin without picking up the cargo. A deep freeze this winter left much of the Great Lakes blanketed in thick ice, sidelining the ship lines and companies that move vast amounts of grain, cement and other commodities through this system of waterways. And now the spring thaw, which creates piles of impassable ice, will most likely create new delays.

Cold spells and snowstorms have taken a bite out of businesses across the Northeast and Midwest of the United States, as well as in Canada. Car manufacturers have blamed the weather for weak sales. Housing starts, too, have slumped. And blizzards in places like Boston have been brutal for many local businesses. “Two especially severe winters back to back — we haven’t seen that in a long time,” said George A Leshkevich, who tracks the ice for the research laboratory. “All the lakes seem pretty brutal.”

On Wednesday Greek banks saw deposit outflows of €300 million, the highest in a single day since a February deal with the euro zone that staved off a banking collapse. But it’s not just on Europe’s periphery that banks are experiencing problems. At the beginning of this month, Austria sent shockwaves throughout the old continent’s financial markets when the Austrian government refused to grant the scandal-tarnished, “bottomless pit” bank Hypo Alde another taxpayer-funded bailout.

Instead, bondholders, even those with bonds guaranteed by the Austrian state of Carinthia, were made to eat the losses in one of the first cases of bank bail-ins since sweeping changes to EU-wide legislation last year.

In recent days the mayhem has spread to Spain’s capital, Madrid, and Andorra, a tiny mountain-ringed tax-haven perched between France and Spain. The initial trigger of the panic was an accusation from the US government of money laundering and a host of other unsavoury practices taking place at Andorra’s third largest bank, Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA).

Fears quickly escalated that the bank would be unable to pay the sort of fine that the US treasury might impose, setting off a mini-bank run that culminated in the imposition of capital controls at Andorran branches of BPA as well as the seizure of deposits of 15,000 account holders of the bank’s Banco de Madrid subsidiary.

Because the AIIB effectively represents the beginning of the end for US hegemony, the White House has demeaned the effort from its inception questioning the ability of non-G-7 nations to create an institution that can be trusted to operate in accordance with the proper “standards.” Now, with 35 nations set to join as founders, it appears Washington may be set to concede defeat.

Here’s more, via WSJ [the Wall Street Journal]: “The Obama administration, facing defiance by allies that have signed up to support a new Chinese-led infrastructure fund, is proposing the bank work in a partnership with Washington-backed development institutions such as the World Bank.

The collaborative approach is designed to steer the new bank toward economic aims of the world’s leading economies and away from becoming an instrument of Beijing’s foreign policy. The bank’s potential to promote new alliances and sidestep existing institutions has been one of the Obama administration’s chief concerns as key allies including the UK, Germany and France lined up in recent days to become founding members of the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.”

And with that, one more leap towards de-dollarization is now on the books.