They would violate the sanctity of monetary union and risk reducing it to a fixed exchange "ERM3", inviting an attack on the weakest link to follow. The EU's extraordinary experiment in solidarity would lie in ruins. The Western security system would then face turmoil in the Balkans. It would have to deal with an embittered state - hostile to Nato, and willing to play the Russian card - along an arc of instability stretching from Ukraine, though the Levant, to North Africa.

That is why US President Barack Obama has intervened, pleading with Chancellor Merkel to avert the worst. The stakes are too high for finance ministers. It is far from clear who really has the upper hand in this game of strategic chicken. Both sides can reasonably calculate that the other will blink first at each deadline to come. One of them is wrong. That is what makes this drama so riveting, and so dangerous.

A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. "A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy," says the team. The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

LazyTruth developer Matt Stempeck, now the director of civic media at Microsoft New York, wants to develop software that exports the knowledge found in fact-checking services such as Snopes, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org so that everyone has easy access to them. He says tools like LazyTruth are useful online, but challenging the erroneous beliefs underpinning that information is harder. "How do you correct people's misconceptions? People get very defensive," Stempeck says. "If they're searching for the answer on Google they might be in a much more receptive state."

The idea was first proposed in 2013 by Sergio Canavero of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group in Italy. He wants to use the surgery to extend the lives of people whose muscles and nerves have degenerated or whose organs are riddled with cancer. Now he claims the major hurdles, such as fusing the spinal cord and preventing the body's immune system from rejecting the head, are surmountable, and the surgery could be ready as early as 2017.

[One] hurdle will be finding a country to approve such a transplant. Canavero would like to do the experiment in the US, but believes it might be easier to get approval somewhere in Europe. "The real stumbling block is the ethics," he says. "Should this surgery be done at all? There are obviously going to be many people who disagree with it."

[The Wall Street Journal reports:] “Greeks consider taxes as theft,” said Aristides Hatzis, an associate professor of law and economics at the University of Athens. “Normally taxes are considered the price you have to pay for a just state, but this is not accepted by the Greek mentality.” Indeed, for most Greeks tax evasion isn’t considered a serious crime and there is little stigma attached to getting caught, unlike in other European countries or even the US.

Kosmas, a 32-year-old chef in Athens, says his income taxes are automatically deducted from monthly paychecks. But every time he buys something and he is given an option to pay less if he doesn’t ask for a receipt, he says yes. “It is a win-win situation,” he said. “I pay less for the products and the store pays less in taxes.”

Last week, the government outlined plans to forgive up to 50% of individuals’ tax arrears, a sign it would make good on its campaign rhetoric. Syriza would risk a popular uprising by the very people who put it into power if it were to back away from those policies and get tough on taxes, political analysts warn.

Even within the government’s own ranks, officials say Syriza can’t risk tougher enforcement. The reason isn’t just political, but economic.

The brine that is a by product of the process will be sent north in a 112-mile (180-km) pipeline to the Dead Sea. The project will cost around $900 million. It will take nearly three years to complete. Jordanian officials said the two projects were crucial to providing a source of fresh water to the kingdom, which faces a severe water deficit, and to reviving the shrinking Dead Sea.

"The deal will help satisfy Jordan's increasing water needs for development," Jordan's water minister, Hazem al Nasser, said after the agreement was signed.

The Mediterranean History lecturer told The Telegraph the “soft push” for further EU integration was most prominent in Germany and France but was starting to “creep in” to teaching in Britain. It comes as 30 top historians this week pledged support to a new campaign, Historians for Britain, calling for a fundamental redrawing of the UK’s relationship with the European Europe.

Among the names to sign up are TV historian David Starkey, Cambridge University dons Professor Robert Tombs and Richard Rex, and Gladstone biographer Professor Richard Shannon. To coincide with the launch many of the academics penned pieces criticising the concept of a European demos – a single, European identity – which underpins the push for further integration. “The search for common roots has not been ignored in Brussels and among its acolytes. School textbooks are issued that attempt to present the history of Europe as a common enterprise,” Professor Abulafia wrote in his essay.

“It hardly needs to be said that this has involved a distortion of the past, by assuming that a sense of European identity has existed for centuries, and by assuming a common purpose leading to the ultimate unification of Europe.”

“The establishment of the bank would also reflect the close relations among BRICS countries, while providing a powerful instrument for increasing their economic cooperation,” it said. The Agreement will enter into force and the Bank will begin operations only after all member countries deposit their instruments of ratification with Brazil.

Central Banks of the member countries will also have to finalize an Inter-Central Bank Agreement containing the operational details of swap transactions and the Standing Committee’s Operational Procedures (SCOP) before the arrangement can be operational. Russia has agreed to provide $2 billion dollars from the federal budget for the bank over the next seven years.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov is likely to become the bank’s first Chairman of the Board of Governors while India will nominate the first President of the BRICS Bank. The first board meeting is supposed to take place in April in the Russian city of Ufa and the Bank is expected to start fully functioning by the end of 2015, according to the Russian Finance Ministry.

This is yet another example of the war on preppers that is going on all over the nation. Whether you are a gun owner or not, this assault on our constitutional rights should disturb you greatly. Barack Obama has promised to try to squeeze as much “change” as possible out of his last two years, and in the process he is “fundamentally transforming” America. But what will our country look like when he is done?

This is how republics die. When one man starts grabbing more and more power and nobody stops him, eventually a dictatorship is born. This is not what our founding fathers intended. If they could see us today, they would be rolling over in their graves. And a lot of Americans are getting fed up. In fact, according to one recent survey only 47 percent of Americans still believe that Obama loves this country…

Almost one in five birds was highly dangerous, figures published on Thursday showed. In almost 7 per cent of cases, the bacteria were present on the outside packaging of fresh whole chickens. In a statement supported for the first time by the Office for National Statistics, food safety officials concluded that "all chickens, no matter which retail outlet they are sold from" were at risk of being contaminated.

They urged families to take particular care during handling and cooking whole chickens at home. The Food Standards Agency, which is responsible for protecting the public from poisoning, criticised supermarkets for taking too long to cut contamination levels.

The National Farmers Union warned that around a quarter of British crops could be affected and said that European pesticide bans were making it more difficult to control. Yellow Rust can cause significant reductions in quality and yield, and in some cases, lead to the loss of the entire harvest.

Farmers have been urged to spray crops thoroughly but scientists say they are unsure if regular fungicides will be affective against the new strain. Many more powerful chemicals have been banned by Europe. The findings were published in the journal Genome Biology.

Pastor Mark Biltz of El Shaddai Ministries warns that “our nation will be judged” based on whether the United States sides with or against the Jewish state. Biltz believes signs in the heavens and correlations with feast days on the biblical calendar show such a judgment may be coming soon. “When Netanyahu speaks before Congress on March 3, this is the day before the Fast of Esther when the enemies of Israel, specifically Persia/Iran, had planned to destroy the nation of Israel,” he said. “The next day is Purim, which celebrates the day Israel achieved victory over Iran. The timing significance of this is just as important as the timing of the blood moon.”

Biltz, author of “Blood Moons: Decoding the Imminent Heavenly Signs,” warns that the next blood moon is scheduled to appear over Passover, which begins April 3, just one month after Netanyahu’s speech. And this will be preceded two weeks earlier by a total solar eclipse on March 20, three days after the Israeli election, and coincides with Nisan, the beginning of the New Year according to the biblical calendar. These prophetic warnings come amid unprecedented tumult in the American-Israeli relationship.

About 15 different emulsifiers are commonly used in processed Western foods for purposes such as smoothing the texture of ice cream and preventing mayonnaise from separating. Regulatory agencies such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rule that emulsifiers are “generally regarded as safe”, because there is no evidence that they increase the risk of cancer or have toxic effects in mammals.

But when immunologist Andrew Gewirtz at Georgia State University in Atlanta and his colleagues fed common emulsifiers carboxymethylcellulose and polysorbate-80 to mice, they found evidence that the chemicals affected the animals' health. Although their diet was not otherwise changed, healthy mice whose water contained the chemicals became obese and developed metabolic problems such as glucose intolerance. In mice genetically engineered to be prone to inflammatory gut diseases, emulsifiers also seemed to increase the severity and frequency with which the animals developed inflammatory bowel disease.

The Iraqi lawmaker explained that the United States prefers the chaotic situation in the province because it reportedly does not want the ISIL crisis to come to an end. The al-Ahed news website quoted Khalaf Tarmouz, head of Al Anbar Provincial Council saying that they have “discovered weapons made in the United States, European countries and Israel from the areas liberated from ISIL’s control in Al-Baqdadi region.”

Mr Tarmouz added that the weapons made by European nations and Israel were discovered from the terrorists in the Eastern parts of Ramadi. Mr Al-Zameli has previously said that the planes of the anti-ISIL coalition have dropped weapons and food supplies for the terrorist group in Al-Anbar, Salahuddin and Diyala provinces. The head of the Iraqi Parliament’s National Security and Defence Committee noted that the coalition is the main reason why ISIL still exists in Iraq. He told the news agency in January “there are proofs and evidence for the US-led coalition’s military aid to ISIL terrorists through air.”

Mr Al-Zameli added that the members of his committee have proved that planes belonging to the United States have dropped advanced weaponry for the ISIL, which is why it has set up an investigation committee to probe into the matter.

The truth is very different. The adoption of these FCC rules on the Internet represents the largest regulatory power grab in recent history. The FCC’s newly adopted rule takes the most dynamic means of communication and imposes the regulatory structure designed for public utilities. Federal regulation could also open the door to de facto censorship of ideas perceived as threatening to the political class – ideas like the troops should be brought home, the PATRIOT Act should be repealed, military spending and corporate welfare should be cut, and the Federal Reserve should be audited and ended.

The one bright spot in this otherwise disastrous move is that federal regulations making it more difficult to use the Internet will cause more Americans to join our movement for liberty, peace, and prosperity. The federal government should keep its hands off of the Internet!