The German chancellor also told the US president that America's National Security Agency cannot be trusted because of the volume of material it had allowed to leak to the whistleblower Edward Snowden, according to the New York Times. Livid after learning from Der Spiegel magazine that the Americans were listening in to her personal mobile phone, Merkel confronted Obama with the accusation: "This is like the Stasi."

The newspaper also reported that Merkel was particularly angry that, based on the disclosures, "the NSA clearly couldn't be trusted with private information, because they let Snowden clean them out." Snowden is to testify on the NSA scandal to a European parliament inquiry next month, to the anger of Washington which is pressuring the EU to stop the testimony.

• JPMorgan Chase is roughly the size of the entire British economy.

• Right now, four of the "too big to fail" banks each have total exposure to derivatives that is well in excess of 40 trillion dollars.

• The total exposure that Goldman Sachs has to derivatives contracts is more than 381 times greater than their total assets.

• According to the Bank for International Settlements, the global financial system has a total of 441 trillion dollars worth of exposure to interest rate derivatives.

• The US government has spent an astounding 3.7 trillion dollars on welfare programs over the past five years

• Only 47 percent of all adults in America have a full-time job at this point.

• At this moment, there are 6 million Americans in the 16 to 24-year-old age group that are neither in school or working.

• According to the Social Security Administration, 40 percent of all US workers make less than $20,000 a year.

• Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the world since 1975.

Tom Winsor, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, told the Home Affairs Select Committee “in anything that gets measured” there is an “incentive, resisted by many, to manipulate the process to make your own performance look good”. And Mr Winsor, the first chief inspector of constabulary to come from a non-policing background, disputed evidence given by the chief of the Metropolitan Police, Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, who claimed inspectors lauded his force’s crime data as “competent and reliable”.

His comments come after whistle-blowing police constable James Patrick told the Public Administration Select Committee officers routinely massage crime statistics to boost their forces’ performance figures. Asked by Committee chair Keith Vaz MP if there is manipulation occurring, Mr Winsor, a former rail regulator and lawyer, said: “It is almost certain that some manipulation is going on. The question is where, how much, how severe.”

The findings add to economists’ fears that Britain’s economic recovery is being fuelled by loans, rather than sustainable growth, as families put Christmas spending on credit and bury their heads in the sand. The extent of Britain’s reliance on debt was revealed this week with new figures showing that mortgages, personal loans and lending to small businesses totals more than £1 trillion.

Residents in the UK are more likely to increase spending on Christmas this year, compared with other European nations, according to the 12,000-person survey published today by ING, the Dutch-owned bank.

"Since the Lisbon Treaty we have a situation in Europe where everyone says, 'we can develop everything but we can't change the treaties'", Merkel told parliament. "I don't think that we can build a truly functioning Europe that way." Merkel was addressing the German parliament in her first speech since starting her third term as chancellor the previous day, following her victory in September 22 elections.

She said "we have a situation in Europe where Germany is often accused of resisting certain developments. This is not the case. We are among those who say that we must, if treaties are no longer sufficient, develop those treaties." Merkel added: "I know it can sometimes be difficult for nations to push through treaty changes. But those who want more Europe must be ready for new rules regarding competencies."

Tomorrow's talks in Moscow between Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill as well as Russian Foreign Ministry officials are expected to focus on the ecumenical dialogue with the Patriarchate of Moscow, on preparations for the meeting between the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church and the pope, as well as on continued cooperation with Russia on international issues such as peace in the Middle East.

The cardinal talked about the issues at a conference held in the Russian capital where he arrived on Saturday. "We'll talk about relations between our two churches and how we can enhance joint work," he told reporters, noting that he would be interested in "how the Patriarch assesses the theological dialogue and our ecumenical future."

The situation of Christians in the Middle East will be part of the discussion, a topic that is "dear to the heart" of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Vatican.

Clearly, Mr Putin is not pleased. Yet it is not Moscow that presents the biggest challenge to Ms Merkel’s line on Russia. It will be her new coalition partners in Berlin, the Social Democrats, and in particular the new foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

This is bad news both for Europe and for the United States: Ms Merkel’s tough stance has created a sense of unity inside the European Union toward the Kremlin, and, for once, between Europe and the United States. Any attempt by the Social Democrats to undermine that unity would be exploited by Mr Putin.

Germany’s hard line on Russia isn’t limited to the chancellor’s office. Germany’s president, Joachim Gauck, announced earlier this month that he would not be attending the official opening of the Winter Olympics next year in Sochi, Russia. Although his post is largely ceremonial, the fact that a German president would snub his Russian counterpart signals a major shift between Moscow and Berlin.

“Their blood is mixed. To those who kill, we are Christians. We are united in blood, even though we have not yet managed to take necessary steps towards unity between us and perhaps the time has not yet come. Unity is a gift that we need to ask for. I knew a parish priest in Hamburg who was dealing with the beatification cause of a Catholic priest guillotined by the Nazis for teaching children the catechism. After him, in the list of condemned individuals, was a Lutheran pastor who was killed for the same reason.”

“Their blood was mixed. The parish priest told me he had gone to the bishop and said to him: ‘I will continue to deal with the cause, but both of their causes, not just the Catholic priests.’ This is what ecumenism of blood is. It still exists today; you just need to read the newspapers. Those who kill Christians don’t ask for your identity card to see which Church you were baptized in.”

The only issue here is that most Americans do not own any financial assets. The bulk of the gain has come from the juiced up stock market courtesy of mega Quantitative Easing. Yet at the same time, we have a peak in food stamp usage and the real estate market is largely being driven by Wall Street speculators.

The Fed is creating a modern day Gilded Age that is favoring a very small portion of the population. The vast majority of the population is leveraged into debt with high rates while those with premiere access continue to increase their balance sheets. It is no coincidence that the top 10 percent of households control 75 percent of all wealth in the nation.

This is why sentiment for most households is negative. For the majority to participate in this party they need to go into massive debt yet again to pretend they are still part of the middle class.

The advanced version of the Russian missile has a range of 500 kilometres (310 miles) and could potentially be used to take out ground-based radar and interceptors of the new NATO shield.

The announcement prompted fears in the US and neighbouring states such as Poland. "We've urged Russia to take no steps to destabilize the region," State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said in response, adding the US had also passed on to Moscow its neighbours' concerns.

The dispute exposes a divide between France, which has several military bases abroad and argues that Europe has a responsibility to former colonies in Africa, and countries like Germany that are wary in today's economic times of intervening and spending taxpayer money abroad.

If European countries were to pitch in to such a fund, they would likely want to decide how that money is used. And they might not want France sending its troops to foreign theaters so often, and using the money to fund its own geopolitical ambitions.

French President Francois Hollande defended the Central African Republic intervention Monday, while paying homage to two French soldiers killed in combat amid sectarian violence in the largely lawless country.

If France "weren't there, no other army in this part of the world — Africa — would be able to launch such an operation to save lives and establish peace," Hollande said.

The ruling by the Washington District court comes amid heightened debate over the legality of the collection of billions of telephone records — so-called phone “metadata” — that was exposed in documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the rogue security contractor.

Judge Richard Leon, a conservative judge appointed by George W Bush, said that the NSA’s collection of the data was “almost Orwellian” in its scope and probably violated the fourth ammendment of the US Constiution.

“I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate’ and 'arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying it and analysing it without judicial approval,” Judge Leon wrote in a 68-page judgment.

“The almost-Orwellian technology that enables the Government to store and analyse the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States” he said “is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979,” when the Supreme Court case of Smith vs Maryland first allowed the government to collect such data.

With the aid of such luminaries as Peter Hain, the message they wanted to put across was that Mrs Thatcher was a friend of apartheid and opposed to Mandela’s release from prison. As all the evidence shows, this was, of course, the very reverse of the truth.

As set out in detail in A Journey With Margaret Thatcher, by Sir Robin Renwick, whom she sent to South Africa as our ambassador in 1987 – and as was confirmed last week, under the heading “Why Mandela owed a huge debt to Thatcher”, by FW de Klerk, the prime minister who shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela for their joint work in ending white rule – Mrs Thatcher played a crucial part in a process to which she long saw Mandela’s release as the key.

She first put this to South Africa’s hard-line prime minister PW Botha as early as 1984. She three times stood up to the clamour of Commonwealth leaders for more sanctions precisely because she knew these would harm black Africans more than anyone.

She explicitly appointed Renwick to work for Mandela’s release with Botha’s successor, de Klerk. And no one was more generous in recognising her part in the story than Mandela himself, which was why she was the first Western leader he came to see, and thank, after leaving prison in 1990. All this Channel 4 News blotted out. The reason for this was that it had its preferred “narrative”, which it wanted to put over regardless of the facts.

Germany lays claim to a number of Christmas traditions, including the tree, the nutcracker, glass baubles, the Advent calendar and the Christmas market. But Felicitas Höptner, director of the German Christmas Museum in the Bavarian city of Rothenburg, thinks Father Christmas's German origins are "under threat".

She said Germans no longer understood the origins of Father Christmas or the differences between him and the ever-laughing Santa Claus who was spawned by a German immigrant to the United States in the 19th century. Her museum has applied for Father Christmas and Saint Nicholas, the fourth century Greek bishop he is derived from, to be put on UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

From the bottles of beer you drink, to the places you visit on vacation, the social networking site will compile everything there is to know about you (and the billion other people online) - and then make sense of it with the hope of selling better, targeted advertising in your news feed.

The social networking giant has teamed up with New York University to set up a research lab designed to learn about artificial intelligence. The California-based social network giant is hiring professor Yann LeCun of NYU's Center for Data Science to head up a new artificial intelligence lab, aiming to use cutting-edge science to make Facebook more interesting and relevant.

It would enable Facebook to learn more about individuals and ultimately achieve better results for targeted ads and news feed improvements.