For such a force to become a reality, there would first be a host of practical hurdles to overcome. Not least of these would be the national priorities and responsibilities of the EU states. If there were to be a reccurrence of the 1982 Falklands crisis between the United Kingdom and Argentina, for instance, it is doubtful that any of the other 27 member nations would want 'their' air force getting involved in what might be perceived as somebody else's colonial war. There are also numerous inter-EU territorial disputes, such as that between Spain and the United Kingdom over Gibraltar, which would make the creation of a union-wide air force highly problematic.

Issues such as the kind of relationship that such an EU Air Force would have with NATO, and the status of non-EU but NATO-member nations within Europe, such as Norway and Turkey, would need to be ironed out. There is also the issue of the neutrality of some member states to contend with, for while the Irish Republic and Sweden are enthusiastic EU partners, they both value their non-aligned status and so might feel uneasy about committing to an institution in the European Air Force that has been so overtly created to counter Russia.

Quite apart from the practical problems with constituting a European Air Force, there are also political arguments against creating one. When Juncker claimed that Europe is facing an unprecedented level of threat from external adversaries, he neglected to mention that it is also being battered and undermined from within.

So it would seem that, while there might be sound monetary and military reasons to support the creation of a European Air Force, there are as many practical and emotional reasons against it. Therefore, just like the proposed European Army, a European Air Force at this time would appear to be a non-starter to all but the most ardent of Europhiles.

A spokesman for the European Commission defended Juncker's remarks calling for the European Union to create its own army, saying that the EU treaty allows for the pooling and sharing of national resources. "It makes sense to get EU member states to combine military and defence capabilities to make spending more efficient in times of fiscal consolidation," Margaritis Schinas said, pointing also to the fact that there is "geopolitical uneasiness around us".

"Such an army would help us to shape a common foreign and security policy and to seize together Europe's responsibility in the world," Juncker told weekly newspaper Welt am Sonntag. "You do not have a European army to deploy it immediately. But a common army of Europeans would convey to Russia that we are serious about the defence of EU values," he added.

Germany's foreign intelligence agency BND, however, could neither detect these in their own satellite imagery nor acquire adequate information from its allied US intelligence services. Breedlove has also completely exaggerated the number of Russian troops at the Ukrainian border. However, the German government has also repeatedly used this type of propaganda, for example during the aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999.

The German government's criticism of Breedlove, reported by "Der Spiegel," reflects the strategic differences between Washington and Berlin. Germany's "dual strategy" approach toward Russia, taken from the West's cold war strategy, is incompatible with the policy of unbridled aggression, championed by the war hawk wing of the US establishment. Breedlove, who is now being criticized by Germany, is a representative of this group

The question of arms sales has become a highly disputed topic in Germany’s political debate as the opposition is criticising that Germany is the third biggest arms exporter of the world and the fifth biggest supplier of arms to the Middle East.

While Germany has earned a reputation in the world as an honest broker between quarrelling parties, trying to prevent violent conflicts and war, it is at the same time exporting arms on a large scale to countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who have participated in the brutal crushing of peaceful protests in Bahrain, and has armed those in power in Egypt who did not shy away from killing their own citizens on a shockingly large scale.

However, in a recent press statement, the European Federalist Party (EFP) welcomed the proposal to create a European army to face the threat represented by an increasingly assertive Russia as well as other security threats. "Of course any army must be under democratic oversight, which requires the European Union to make a step further in the process of European integration towards a federal Europe with a stronger role for the European Parliament," said Pietro De Matteis, the president of the European Federalist Party.

Daniel Keohane, research director at the European think tank FRIDE, said he does not see it as a feasible proposal. "There's no point in talking about an army unless you're talking about a federal state," Keohane told Defense News. "You need to be clear who is the political authority controlling it and who pays for it."

History is not the main threat to the parliament's legitimacy; geography is. "The problem with the government in Tobruk is that it's just the steering wheel but the car is 800-1000 km away." The car is in Tripoli - home to the civil service, the central bank, and the organisation controlling oil production - but the Tobruk parliament can't steer it because the capital is in the hands of its rivals, who say they are the legitimate government.

The question is whether it's the government and parliament who wield the real power; or whether that lies in the hands of a military man, General Khalifa Haftar. "Haftar was accused of organising a coup d'etat on Valentines Day in 2014, except there is no real Libyan army to do a coup d'etat and there is no real state to control. So it's a coup d'etat without the 'etat'."

So who calls the shots in Tobruk? "At the moment those who hold weapons hold more power, so people like Haftar. Basically since the overthrow of Gaddafi in 2011, Libya has never really experienced a period of peace. It was not that militias were integrated into the state, it was the state which has been integrated into the militias."

Bill Maris has $425 million to invest this year, and the freedom to invest it however he wants. He's looking for companies that will slow aging, reverse disease, and extend life.

With Google’s money and clout behind him, Maris has a huge amount of freedom. He can, and does, go after Silicon Valley’s most-sought-after startups. Uber, Nest, and Cloudera are among the firm’s big wins. Maris doesn’t intend to stop pursuing these kinds of deals. But he has other ambitions, too.

“There are a lot of billionaires in Silicon Valley, but in the end, we are all heading to the same place,” Maris says. “If given the choice between making a lot of money or finding a way to make people live longer, what do you choose?”

Certainly statistics bear this out. Up to 20 percent of cats and dogs entering homes are given up for adoption within six months. And of those, about 2.7 million are euthanized each year. As for the pets that remain in homes, they often get much less care than they need, as shown by the fact that veterinary visits are on the decline and chronic disease among dogs and cats has sharply risen.

The reason for the decline in pet health can at least partially be accounted for by rising pet obesity. As we reported recently, pets are getting fatter alongside their owners, and as a consequence, cases of canine diabetes have risen by 32% since 2006. In fact, more than half of the pets in the US are now overweight, with one in five clinically obese, creating ideal pre-conditions for diabetes. But it isn't just canine diabetes that's increased. Reports show a 38 percent rise in canine arthritis and a 67 percent rise in feline arthritis in the eight years since 2007. Also, both dogs and cats have been suffering more thyroid and kidney disease than before, and apparently, even have more flea problems.

The reality is that in terms of cost and time required, taking on care of a pet isn't that different from deciding to have a child. This is even truer if you want to give the pet what it requires to thrive, rather than simply maintaining it. Some veterinarians say that pets really should get human-grade food instead of pet food (avoiding, of course, the human foods that are toxic to pets), and there's plenty of evidence to support that contention. These experts say that pets require home-cooked meals just as we do, and if you take it to the next level, that means meals composed of organic, high-quality ingredients. The average family eying puppies in the mall isn't thinking in such terms.

The indictment against Salah relates to his calls to use violence to block Jews from visiting the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, calls to racism and violence that have led MKs to launch a bill to outlaw Salah's movement.

Salah has labeled Israeli leaders “terrorists” and “enemies of Allah” in a speech to Muslims in Be’er Sheva, and was also jailed for five months in 2010 for spitting at an Israeli police officer. During a speech at a 2007 demonstration he accused Jews of using children's blood to bake matzah, invoking the infamous medieval blood libels used to trigger murderous pogroms in both Europe and the Middle East.

However, they aren’t accusations. The iOS terms clearly state that Apple will record what you say and may send it to subsidiaries and their agents. It goes on to add that they will record the names of your contacts, your relationships with them, in-home devices, and sometimes your location.

I don’t find this surprising at all, so it’s interesting to see some people question whether this is happening. We are carrying little tracking devices around with us that record what we say. And the worst part is that we all clicked “I agree.”

The book’s revelations come at a crucial time when some European countries are considering the commercial planting of GM crops following the European Parliament’s decision to allow member states to opt out of the blockade that has barred them from the EU until now. Based on the evidence presented in the book, Druker and Goodall assert that it would be foolhardy to push forward with a technology that is unacceptably risky and should never have been allowed on the market in the first place.

The book is the result of more than 15 years of intensive research and investigation by Druker, who came to prominence for initiating a lawsuit against the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that forced it to divulge its files on GM foods.

Those files revealed that GM foods first achieved commercialization in 1992 only because the FDA:

• Covered up the extensive warnings of its own scientists about their dangers.

• Lied about the facts.

• And then violated federal food safety law by permitting these foods to be marketed without having been proven safe through standard testing.

The book points out that if the FDA had heeded its own experts’ advice and publicly acknowledged their warnings that GM foods entailed higher risks than their conventional counterparts, the GM food venture would have imploded and never gained traction anywhere.

In her foreword to Altered Genes, Twisted Truth, Goodall commends it for countering the disinformation and providing much-needed clarity. She states: “I shall urge everyone I know who cares about life on earth, and the future of their children, and children’s children, to read it. It will go a long way toward dispelling the confusion and delusion that has been created regarding the genetic engineering process and the foods it produces …Steven Druker is a hero. He deserves at least a Nobel Prize.”

The markets reacted to the US revising its crude oil production upwards for 2015 and signs that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will maintain production at current levels.

The US Energy Information Agency said on Tuesday it expects total oil production in 2015 to be 9.35 million barrels per day, slightly higher than the 9.3 million bpd in last month's short-term energy outlook.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is now expected to hold firm on oil production policy at its next meeting in June unless non-OPEC members agree to reduce output, according to Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah, Qatar's former minister of energy and industry, at the Doha Energy Forum.

Deutsche Welle: Why float the idea of a European army now?

Claudia Major: Juncker is using a particular political setting - the Ukraine-Russia crisis - to relaunch an idea that hasn't worked out before: the very old idea of integrating the military forces that goes back to the 1950s and eventually failed in 1954. When the idea, which has an economic and a political dimension, was first launched, there was a different threat perception, but by 1954 the situation had changed, the states felt less threatened and were less willing to engage in a very strong interdependence, and to abandon sovereignty in an area that is very much at the heart of the nations.

In the long term, Europe needs its own army – not an intervention army that proactively wages wars, but a defensive army with crisis management capabilities where Europe can actually live up to its high normative standards. There's an EU defense summit coming up in June, and EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini just launched the process of rewriting a European security strategy. These are elements that could support setting up a European army. We could find a common denominator in what European security policy is.

Germany last month rejected renewed calls from Greece for war compensation, saying the issue had been settled at world power talks that led to German reunification in 1990. But Tsipras said his government approved plans to revive a parliamentary commission to look into the issue. "After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the legal and political conditions were created for this issue to be solved. But since then, German governments chose silence, legal tricks and delay," Tsipras told a parliamentary debate. "And I wonder, because there is a lot of talk at the European level these days about moral issues: is this stance moral?" he said.

The campaign for war damages has been waged for decades both by former Greek governments and private citizens. But it has recently gained momentum due to painful economic measures imposed on Greece under the international bailout deal. The Greek government has not officially quantified its reparation claims, and Berlin has long said that it has already honored all its war obligations, including a payment of 115 million deutschmarks (59 million euros) to Greece in 1960. Tsipras said the 1960 deal only covered compensation for the victims of Nazi horrors, not the destruction wrought on Greece by the 1941-1944 occupation during World War Two.