Israel fears that US President Barack Obama's Iran diplomacy, with an end-of-March deadline for a framework accord, will allow its arch foe to develop atomic weapons - something Tehran denies seeking. By accepting an invitation from the Republican party to address Congress on Tuesday, the Israeli leader infuriated the Obama administration, which said it was not told of the speech before plans were made public in an apparent breach of protocol.

US Secretary of State John Kerry reiterated Washington's determination to pursue negotiations with Iran, saying on Sunday the United States deserved "the benefit of the doubt" to see if a nuclear deal could be reached. Last week, Obama's national security adviser, Susan Rice, said the partisanship caused by Netanyahu's looming address was "destructive to the fabric of US-Israeli ties".

Asked about this on the ABC program "This Week", Kerry said "the prime minister of Israel is welcome to speak in the United States, obviously. And we have a closer relationship with Israel right now in terms of security than at any time in history." He said he had talked to Netanyahu on Saturday, adding, "we don't want to see this turned into some great political football." Israel and the United States agreed that the main goal was to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon", he said.

In remarks on Saturday at Jersualem's Western Wall, Netanyahu said: “I would like to take this opportunity to say that I respect US President Barack Obama.” He added that he believed in the strong bilateral ties and said, "that strength will prevail over differences of opinion, those in the past and those yet to come.” Netanyahu did not repeat those remarks as he departed on Sunday. The Israeli prime minister, who is running for re-election in a March 17 ballot, has framed his visit as being above politics and he portrayed himself as being a guardian for all Jews.

According to Al-Jarida, the Netanyahu government took the decision to strike Iran some time in 2014 soon after Israel had discovered the United States and Iran had been involved in secret talks over Iran’s nuclear program and were about to sign an agreement in that regard behind Israel's back. The report claimed that an unnamed Israeli minister who has good ties with the US administration revealed the attack plan to Secretary of State John Kerry, and that Obama then threatened to shoot down the Israeli jets before they could reach their targets in Iran.

Al-Jarida quoted "well-placed" sources as saying that Netanyahu, along with Minister of Defense Moshe Yaalon, and then-Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, had decided to carry out airstrikes against Iran's nuclear program after consultations with top security commanders. According to the report, “Netanyahu and his commanders agreed after four nights of deliberations to task the Israeli army's chief of staff, Benny Gantz, to prepare a qualitative operation against Iran's nuclear program.”

“In addition, Netanyahu and his ministers decided to do whatever they could do to thwart a possible agreement between Iran and the White House because such an agreement is, allegedly, a threat to Israel's security.”

It was last year disclosed that Facebook failed to pass on information that could have helped to capture Fusilier Rigby’s killers. Michael Adebowale used the social networking site to express his “intent to murder a soldier in the most graphic and emotive manner” five months before the 2013 Woolwich attack.

A report by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) found that Facebook had not been aware of that specific exchange. However, the committee discovered that Facebook had previously shut down Adebowale’s accounts on the site because he had discussed terrorism, but failed to relay concerns to the security services. The site was described by MPs as a “safe haven” for terrorists.

And yet, it is becoming clearer by the day that the Greek bailout debacle is likely to leave a black mark on the IMF and damage its credibility. A former IMF official in the US also took the agency to task this week for abusing its “exceptional access lending” — loans over and above the normal quota limits — in the Greek case.

“Despite the IMF’s rules that it is not supposed to resort to exceptional access lending when a country’s public debt is unsustainable or when the chances of program success are not good, the IMF has managed to lend to Greece some 1,860% of quota,” wrote Desmond Lachman, former deputy director of the IMF’s policy department. “That is more than three times the normal maximum IMF limit for such lending.”

This flagrant departure from its own guidelines might have been justified, Lachman continued, if it had produced any beneficial results. Instead, it has been a failure down the line.

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.