Netanyahu aides accused Obama of interfering in the Israeli election following publication of an article by Jeffrey Goldberg, which quoted the president as saying: "Israel doesn't know what its own best interests are." Obama, wrote Goldberg, viewed Netanyahu as a "political coward".

The Israeli president, Shimon Peres, who has voiced alarm at the rupture between the two leaders, was due to meet a delegation of US senators, led by Republican John McCain, in Jerusalem on Saturday night to discuss strengthening strategic relations between the two allies.

"We must not lose the support of the United States. What gives Israel bargaining power in the international arena is the support of the United States... Without US support, it would be very difficult for us. We would be like a lone tree in the desert," he told the New York Times last week.

The United States and Europe directly and clandestinely encouraged this revolutionary fever with the naive expectation that these countries could be pacified by evolving into European-style welfare states. Unfortunately for the West, these people have a common heritage as a series of Caliphate Empires that from 622 AD to 1258 AD were the most powerful, wealthy and cultured nation on earth.

Arab Spring revolutionaries understand it took 200 years for Islamic forces to defeat the Crusaders. They have demonstrated by invading Mali and attacking Algeria that they are embarking on a protracted war of liberation to re-establish Caliphate of the Moors to control of North Africa, the Middle East and Southern Europe.

Moslems reached their point of greatest world domination from 909 AD to 1171 AD under the Moorish Caliphate of Fātimid, which controlled the Maghreb, Egypt, Mauritania, Sicily, Malta, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Levant, Spain, Portugal and Southern France. The Fatimid’s built the City of Cairo as their capital and dominated trade in salt, gold, ivory, and slaves they captured from the neighboring Sahara desert (Mali) and from Europeans as pirate booty.

In 1099 the Crusaders captured Jerusalem and massacred 10,000 Muslim men, women and children who sought shelter in the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Crusaders also slaughtered the thousands of Jewish defenders in Jerusalem who had sought refuge in their synagogue by burning them alive. The fall of Jerusalem to the Crusades emboldened the Christian Reconquista rebellions in Spain and Portugal that undermined the Caliphate and eventually led to the Moors decline.

Nine centuries later to contextualize 9/11, President Clinton recalled the massacre “is still being told today in the Middle East, and we are still paying for it.”

The presence of horsemeat in value beefburgers has caused a furore. But what is usually in the patties? But a beefburger rarely contains 100% beef. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has two classifications for burger products - standard and economy.

A standard beefburger can only be classified as such if it comprises a minimum of 62% beef. Similarly, a chicken (or other poultry) or rabbit burger must contain a minimum of 55% meat, and a pork burger 67% minimum pig meat. The percentages take a tumble when it comes to economy or "value" burger products. An economy beefburger must contain 47% meat, a chicken burger 41% and a pork burger 50% pig meat.

Under European law, the term "meat" is defined as "skeletal muscle with naturally included or adherent fat and connective tissue" which has not been mechanically stripped from the carcass. Any meat that has been pressure-blasted from the carcass must be listed separately as MRM (mechanically removed) or MSM (mechanically stripped) meat. MRM meat or paste can in theory be used in economy burgers but has to be listed as a separate ingredient.

But should people be surprised at all these extra ingredients cropping up in a beefburger? Writing in the Times, food critic Giles Coren bemoaned the public's lack of knowledge about what is in their food. "What on earth did you think they put in them? Prime cuts of delicious free-range, organic, rare breed, heritage beef, grass-fed, Eton-educated, humanely slaughtered, dry-aged [beef], hand-ground by fairies...?"

"You get what you pay for," wrote Felicity Lawrence in the Guardian.

"The only surprise about the latest adulteration scandal, in which beefburgers at rock bottom prices turn out to contain horsemeat and traces of pig, is perhaps that they contain meat at all."

While there is clearly a place in the market for value beefburgers and other processed products, the best way to avoid unexpected burger ‘nasties’ is to make them yourself.

It turns out that in 1994, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the use of recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH). rBGH in milk is believed to increase the risk of cancer. In an attempt to protect its citizens from genetically-modified milk, the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the UN Food Safety Agency representing 101 nations worldwide, has banned rBGH milk in the 101 nations that it represents. Canada is another country where rBGH milk is banned.

rBGH is another one of Monsanto’s genetically-engineered products that mimics the cow’s naturally-produced BGH hormone. American dairy farmers inject their cows with rBGH to increase how much milk each cow produces – usually by 20%. The use of rBGH results in cows also producing more IGF-1 hormone, to such excess that milk from rBGH-treated cows has up to 80% more IGF-1.

Researchers throughout the world argue that consumption of excess IGF-1 hormone, which is also found in humans, may result in a higher risk of breast, colon and prostate cancer. Yet, in the US, Monsanto and the milk industry do not clearly label which milk comes from rBGH-treated cows.

Farmers in Iowa and Illinois, which accounted for almost 30 percent of US corn production in 2012, are expected to shift some acreage that was seeded exclusively with corn over the past several years to soybeans this spring. They want to avoid another year of potentially significant losses as dry conditions persist, said agricultural market analysts and economists. A move away from corn in those states may further drive up world food prices, which are already historically high, because corn stockpiles in the United States, the world's top exporter, are forecast to hit a 17-year low by the end of the summer.

The theme for this year's ecumenical Week of Prayer, "What does God require of us?", is taken from a passage in the book of the prophet Micah. "The Prophet," said the Pope, "makes clear, of course, what the Lord requires of us. It is 'to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.'"

"Walking humbly in the presence of the Lord, in obedience to his saving word and with trust in his gracious plan, serves as an eloquent image not only of the life of faith, but also of our ecumenical journey on the path towards the full and visible unity of all Christians. On this path of discipleship, we are called to advance together along the narrow road of fidelity to God’s sovereign will in facing whatever difficulties or obstacles we may eventually encounter."

For many years, the Christians of the Holy Land insistently requested the unification of the dates of Easter. They are above all the mixed families, Catholic and Orthodox in particular, that actually bear the practical consequences of the difference between the Eastern and Western dates that can be up to five weeks apart, as this year. Not being able to celebrate Easter together is also a counter-witness in the eyes of non-Christian majority. Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran parishes in the Ramallah region in fact have already celebrated the Easter date of the East for fifteen years.

Therefore, we must rejoice to see that the Catholic hierarchy has decided to respond favorably to the expectations of the faithful and to coordinate initiatives. It‘s too early to assess the impact of this ecumenical decision, especially because the Greek orthodox hierarchy shows much reticence on this point. We pray and hope that this year’s experience is the best possible so that better ecumenical coordination become feasible in the near future.

Of course, Iran’s regime seeks a world literally without America. More to the point, Mr Ahmadinejad and the mullahs in Tehran are working tirelessly to secure the means by which to accomplish that goal. Specifically, they have or are developing the ability to engage in devastating electromagnetic pulse attacks, biological warfare and other asymmetric terrorist strikes.

For his part, President Obama seems to have in mind bringing about a world without America in a geostrategic sense. As Mark Steyn notes in a characteristically brilliant essay in National Review Online, that would be “Obamacare’s other shoe.” It would amount to a “fundamental transformation” of America’s place in the world, evidently intended to be the president’s second-act counterpart to the socialist transformation of this country that dominated his first term.

This agenda is strongly evident in Mr Obama’s choices for key national security positions: John F Kerry at the State Department, Chuck Hagel at Defense and John O Brennan at the CIA. The three are, like the president, imbued with a post-American, post-sovereignty, post-constitutional, transnationalist outlook. In his administration, it would appear that their mission would be, as the American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka puts it, to manage the United States’ decline.

A failure to make payments on US Treasuries, however brief, would create widespread damage in short-term funding markets, which are crucial to daily operations of financial institutions, investment firms and many corporations, said analysts and investors.

In the event of a default, confusion would be rampant as trading systems struggle to identify, transfer and settle bonds that have matured but have not been repaid. Interest rates would surge and investors would likely sell stocks and commodities as they fled risky assets, analysts said.

A default could also trigger a wider paralysis in the financial system that could quite quickly stall the economy, as happened at the height of the financial crisis in September 2008. The economy is also more vulnerable, making the risk of a creditor exodus a far more damaging prospect for the country.

"The minute we default, there would be a complete collapse in the bond market," said Peter Schiff, chief executive officer of Euro Pacific Capital and a critic of US government spending habits. That would leave the US struggling to refinance more than $4.6 trillion that come due within two years, including $3 trillion of Treasuries due to mature in 2013.

However, the German Minister of Defense, Thomas de Maizière, declared that there would be conditions to be met. Only when "the prerequisites are clarified and fulfilled" would Berlin be able to take part in the military mission. These statements from the German government show evidence of a dual strategy. On the one hand, Berlin is insisting on concessions to strengthen its position in French-dominated West Africa, and on the other, German participation is supposed to thwart French-British unilateralism, as in the case of Libya.

Berlin feels threatened by this sort of unilateralism, because for some time, Paris and London have been strongly enhancing their military cooperation, leading some in the German capital to suspect - not without reason - that this could be a means to escape Germany's EU predomination, at least in the domain of military policy. In the meantime, the war in Mali has intensified after only a few days.