That means, Treasury officials say, they will have to take "extraordinary measures" beginning Monday to keep the federal government's head above fiscal water. Unless Congress acts quickly to raise the limit, those measures will include putting a stop to a planned $46 billion investment in the federal employee pension fund, which is scheduled for June.

By halting the reinvestments, the government effectively borrows that money to help stay under the debt. However, by law, that money must be repaid before the debt limit can be increased again. Other measures the Treasury will likely take are drawing down a currency stabilization fund and imposing moratoriums on state and local government deposits, USA Today reported.

The federal government began imposing limits on the amount the Treasury can borrow nearly a century ago, but because of multiple recent struggles to stay beneath it Congress simply suspended the law. The suspension, granted in February 2014, expires Sunday.

Citigroup got the most help of the four in the bailout, $2.5 trillion. That company has at least 427 offshore divisions where it squirrels away profits out of reach of the American people. Those funds, as of early 2014, totaled $43.8 billion, which would mean $11.7 billion in tax revenue for the United States if they were brought to this country.

Bank of America received a $1.3 trillion bailout from the American people. In 2014, it had $17 billion in profits stashed offshore, which would bring $4.3 billion in funding for education, infrastructure and other badly needed projects in the United States.

JPMorgan Chase got a $416 billion bailout from American taxpayers. That bank has hidden $28.5 billion overseas which would bring in $6.4 billion to the US Treasury.

Goldman Sachs was the recipient of $814 billion in virtually zero-interest loans, as well as $10 billion from the government. It’s holding $22.5 billion offshore that would bring $4.1 billion back to the American people.

Of course, banks aren’t the only companies taking advantage of tax havens. Apple, for instance, famously worked it out so two of its subsidiaries have no home country to which to pay taxes. But then Apple didn’t come hat-in-hand begging the American people not to let it go under.

He says that the US will fail in that overriding objective; German technology and capital will combine with Russian natural resources and “land-power,” to produce a truly bipolar world: US v Eurasia. So: he sees the US strategy as being to block that, by weakening both Germany and Russia. That strategy would explain what Obama is doing in Ukraine, and the sanctions that are hurting both Russia and Germany, but Friedman thinks that nothing can work.

The American political scientist George Friedman is chief of intelligence think tank “Stratfor Global Intelligence”, which he founded in 1996. The headquarters of Stratfor is located in Texas. Stratfor advises 4,000 companies, individuals and governments around the world, reports the New York Times. These include Bank of America, the US State Department, Apple, Microsoft and Lockheed Martin, Monsanto and Cisco, on security issues.

People know that bulls are dangerous, and it’s true. When animal behaviorists analyzed 21 cases that occurred across a four-state area, they found that bulls were responsible for ten of the deaths. Cows were responsible for six deaths. What’s really chilling is that, in five cases, people were killed by multiple cows in group attacks.

Group attacks can be surprisingly well-coordinated. When they’re feeling defensive, cows will gather in a circle, all facing outwards, lowering their heads and stamping the ground. When they’re feeling offensive, certain cows lead the charge.

One man, who was attacked while walking his dog along a path, reported, “I fell forwards and rolled into a ball and every time I tried to get up they jumped on me; they were rolling me along the hill with their legs trying to get me to open up. There were seven or eight cows. There were a couple leaders.”

Even the people who survive cow attacks rarely brush them off. In 2014, a mountaineer and cyclist was leading a race through a pasture when a group of cows attacked him. He received fractures on eight ribs, a shoulder, and a part of his spine. A woman, attacked the same year, got six broken ribs and a punctured lung. Cows mostly trample and kick people, but if they get their head beneath their victim they can literally throw a person into the air and let them fall back down on the ground.

• The Commission’s co-chairs said that the CIA (and likely the White House) “obstructed our investigation”.

• 9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer said “we were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting”.

• The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) – who led the 9/11 staff’s inquiry – said “at some level of the government, at some point in time… there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened”. He also said “I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years… This is not spin. This is not true.”

• The 9/11 Commissioners concluded that officials from the Pentagon lied to the Commission, and considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements.

• The tape of interviews of air traffic controllers on-duty on 9/11 was intentionally destroyed by crushing the cassette by hand, cutting the tape into little pieces, and then dropping the pieces in different trash cans around the building as shown by a NY Times article and by an article from the Chicago Sun-Times.

• Both the 9/11 Commission Investigation and 9/11 trials were based on unreliable evidence produced by torture.

• The CIA videotaped the interrogation of 9/11 suspects, falsely told the 9/11 Commission that there were no videotapes or other records of the interrogations, and then illegally destroyed all of the tapes and transcripts of the interrogations. 9/11 Commission co-chairs Thomas Keane and Lee Hamilton wrote: “Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.”

• One of the Commission’s main sources of information was tortured until he agreed to sign a confession that he was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ.

• If the 9/11 Commissioners themselves doubt the information from the government, why should we believe it?

With 99.5 percent of votes counted, Likud had won 29-30 seats in the 120-member Knesset, comfortably defeating the Zionist Union opposition on 24 seats, Israel's Central Election Committee and Israeli media said. A united list of Arab parties came in third. It amounted to a dramatic and unexpected victory - the last opinion polls published four days before the vote showed the Zionist Union with a four-seat advantage over Likud.

In a statement, Likud said Netanyahu intended to form a new government within weeks, with negotiations already underway with the pro-settler Jewish Home party led by Naftali Bennett, the centrist Kulanu party and ultra-Orthodox groups.

The critical party to get on side will be Kulanu, led by former Likud member and communications minister Moshe Kahlon, who won 10 seats, making him a kingmaker given his ability to side with either Netanyahu or the center-left opposition. "Reality is not waiting for us," Netanyahu said. "The citizens of Israel expect us to quickly put together a leadership that will work for them regarding security, economy and society as we committed to do - and we will do so."

If he manages to pull together a workable coalition, it would give Netanyahu a fourth-term in office, putting him on track to become Israel's longest-serving prime minister, a label held by the country's founding father, David Ben-Gurion. While Likud is the largest party, the process of forming a coalition is likely to be difficult. It needs 61 seats in the Knesset and crossing that threshold will be challenging given the amount of division across Israel's political landscape.

Netanyahu's victory is also likely to prolong the country's testy relationship with US President Barack Obama, especially after his strident words on settlements and his backing away from the long-stated international goal of arriving at a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But the bottom line is that the electoral math makes it almost impossible for Herzog to form a government. Netanyahu’s natural coalition is there in place even if the negotiations will likely be long and difficult as the various parties barter in the competition for Cabinet posts.

What will also remain unchanged are the tense relations between the White House and the Israeli government. President Obama may have been counting on Netanyahu being defeated but, like it or not, the prime minister will not only get a fourth term but be there after the US president leaves office in January 2017.

The announcement on Tuesday by Germany, France and Italy that they would follow Britain and join the Chinese-led venture delivered a stinging rebuke to Washington from some of its closest allies. It also called into question whether the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which grew out of a multination conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 and established an economic pecking order that lasted 70 years, will find their influence diminished.

The announcement by Germany, Europe’s largest economy, came only six days after Secretary of State John Kerry asked his German counterpart, Frank Walter-Steinmeier, to resist the Chinese overtures until the Chinese agreed to a number of conditions about transparency and governing of the new entity. But Germany came to the same conclusion that Britain did: China is such a large export and investment market for it that it cannot afford to stay on the sidelines.

American officials have fumed that China never approached the Group of 7 — the consortium of economic powers that the United States has led — but rather decided to pick off individual members, setting a deadline of the end of March for them to decide whether to join the new organization, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which many refer to by its initials, the AIIB.

China, in turn, has long chafed at the idea that the World Bank’s president is traditionally an American, and that France appoints the head of the IMF. “This has been a power struggle,” one senior European official said. “And we have moved from the world of 1945.”

Speaking on Tuesday in Washington, Treasury Secretary Jacob J Lew said it was “urgent that we address prior unmet commitments, which have grown to levels that raise significant questions about US credibility and leadership in the multilateral system.” Failure to do so, he added, could “result in a loss of US shareholding at a time when new players are challenging US leadership in the multilateral system.”

However, he said no elected government would be able to do so, suggesting that Greece will be left with an enormous debt overhang for some time. Mr Brazier is a senior figure at the Bank, as its executive director for financial stability strategy and risk and a member of the Financial Policy Committee, which tries to ensure financial stability in the UK.

"I think there are numbers for the primary surplus Greece could run, in principle, that would deliver the repayment of debt over some horizon," Mr Brazier told MPs on the Treasury Select Committee. "Is the political pain involved in running that sort of primary surplus tolerable? I find it difficult to believe."

Greece's current debt repayment schedule on its bail-out extends to 2054. Its politicians have clashed with Europe's core over a potential Greek haircut and relaxations of austerity conditions. Should a deal to extend loans to Greece fail to materialise, its Syriza-led government could default, leading to the country being thrown out of the eurozone.

Thus, Israel's official rabbis have apparently, if only indirectly, provided tacit approval for the entry of Jews and Jewish Israelis into the al Aqsa mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem. The change was done only to the Hebrew version of the sign – the English sign remains as it was.

Yehuda Glick, head of the Temple Mount Heritage Foundation, reportedly welcomed the sign change and said that “the revolution is at its height. Today we advanced another milimeter in the process” of encouraging Jews to enter the al Aqsa mosque compound. Clashes between Israeli police and Palestinian Muslim worshippers in the al Aqsa mosque erupted in the second half of last year, following daily invasions of the mosque compound by Israeli settlers and right-wing politicians.

But, in an astonishing twist, senior members of the SPD, which shares power with Mrs Merkel, yesterday disagreed. Gesine Schwan said: ‘I think it would be good for us Germans to sweep up after ourselves in terms of our history. It is about recognising that we have committed serious wrongs in Greece.’

‘The government’s legal case isn’t convincing. It leaves a bad impression that Germany doesn’t want to face up to its responsibilities.’ Ralf Stegner, SPD deputy leader, said: ‘We should not link the question of compensation with the current debate on the euro crisis. But I am of the opinion that we need to discuss compensation regardless.’ Green party parliamentary group leader Anton Hofreiter said: ‘Neither morally nor legally is this chapter complete.’ About 250,000 Greeks died during the brutal Nazi occupation.

Mrs Merkel’s spokesman said the question was ‘legally and politically closed’. But Eberhard Rondholz, a historian who has studied the issue, told the Financial Times: ‘The government view is false. This issue is not closed – it is very much open.’

Heuser repeated a question attributed to Henry Kissinger, the German-born former US secretary of state, about which country served as the locus of European power. "'What is Europe’s phone number?' I think we can give Henry Kissinger a very solid answer now. The number is in Berlin," Heuser said.

The UN envoy to Afghanistan acknowledged that the IS could potentially unite minor Islamist groups in the country under a new command. Moscow has rushed to voice concern with the IS broadening its geographical activities into Afghanistan and spreading radical Islam further to the north into other Central Asian states.

The US administration does realize the dangers of leaving Afghanistan all alone against the growing terror threat and might slow the process of withdrawing the remaining troops, the Associated Press reported on Saturday. With 10,000 American troops currently deployed to Afghanistan, Washington intended to decrease this number to 5,500 by the end of 2015 and withdraw all the troops completely by the end of Barack Obama’s second presidential term in 2016.

The Central African Republic has been rocked by sectarian violence over the past year, and the army relies on UN peacekeepers to stabilize the country. Both the Christian militia and Muslim rebels have agreed to lay down their arms, but splinter groups of fighters continue to clash.

The EU mission aims to advise the country's military on reforms to make it "professional, democratically controlled and ethnically representative."

The order to go into battle readiness mode was given to the Northern Fleet, paratroopers and units of the Western military district at 8am Moscow time (05:00 GMT) by the commander-in-chief. Some 38,000 troops, 41 ships, 15 submarines, 110 jets and choppers are taking part in the drills which focus on boosting Russia’s military presence in the Arctic and test how quickly special operations forces can be moved along large distances.

“New military challenges and threats demand further boost of the military capabilities of armed forces and special attention is being paid to the condition of the newly-set-up strategic command in the north,” Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu told journalists on Monday.