Tension over the islands - which Argentina claims as the Malvinas - has been rising in the run-up to the 30th anniversary of the Falklands war. The UK has rejected Argentina's calls for talks on the islands' sovereignty. "The UK has transformed the Malvinas into the cornerstone of a system of military bases thousands of kilometres from London to control the South Atlantic, inter-oceanic routes, and the approaches to Antarctica," Argentina's foreign ministry said in a statement. It also repeated its claim that Britain had sent a nuclear submarine to the region.

Members of the select committee have said their visit was not intended to exacerbate tensions with Argentina. Labour member Thomas Docherty said the Falklands were "an appropriate place" for the committee to visit, given the presence of British troops there. The last such visit was in 1999. The UK government has dismissed Argentine accusations of militarisation as "absurd" and says its defensive military posture has not changed. Prime Minister David Cameron has insisted there can be no negotiations on sovereignty as long as the Falkland islanders wish to remain British.

The MPs' visit is expected to take place in March. On 2 April, both nations will mark the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War, which began with an Argentine invasion of the islands and ended in victory for a British task force sent to recover them.

The Mount, the letter says, “and not the Western Wall (Kotel) is Judaism's holiest site. More Jews have wanted to visit the Temple Mount in recent years as, increasingly, rabbinic authorities are stating publicly that Jewish law does not prohibit this. Yet, Israeli police and security personnel, hoping to appease Muslim extremists including the Wakf authority on the Temple Mount, have been engaging in blatantly discriminatory and humiliating behavior toward Jewish visitors.” This is patently unfair – and constitutes discrimination against Jews.

“Access to holy places is a right guaranteed by Israeli law, but the law is not being implemented,” the letter says. “When Jerusalem once again became a united city in 1967 as a result of the Six Day War, the Israeli Knesset passed an amendment to the Law and Administration Ordinance, extending Israeli sovereignty to Jerusalem's eastern sector. That includes the Old City, and the Temple Mount in its center.”

In addition, the ZOA charges, Identifiably Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount are singled out for biased treatment. “Unfortunately there is more concern for the extremist demands of the Wakf than regard for the rights of all citizens, including Jewish citizens, under Israeli law.

“The fact is, not one act of desecration or disrespect for Muslim holy places has been committed by Jews on the Temple Mount. No Jews ever have terrorized Muslims there or engaged in rioting. The worst acts of Temple Mount violence and desecrations have been perpetrated by Muslims, such as raining rocks on Jewish worshippers below at the Western Wall. And it is the Wakf that has illegally been digging up and trashing tons of earth laden with First and Second Temple artifacts, thereby devastating a priceless archeological historical record.”

InfoWorld reports: ...the feds replaced the criminals' servers with clean ones that would push along traffic to its intended destination. Without the surrogate servers in place, infected PCs would have continued trying to send requests to aim at the now-unplugged rogue servers, resulting in DNS errors.

The malware, called DNSChanger Trojan, is said to illegally redirect traffic and prevent users from accessing the updates necessary to remove it. Without access to these critical patches, these large companies, government agencies, and home users are said to be more susceptible to hackers.

This prompted InfoWorld to wonder: This fact does raise the question of why so many Fortune 500 companies and government agencies have failed to notice they have a problem, as they presumably have IT security professionals on staff who should be monitoring such incidents. Those computers still infected with the Trojan will not be able to access the Internet after the FBI shuts down their temporary servers.

These viruses are called Trojans because they are disguised as something friendly, enter computers, and then install malicious software. Someone with a healthy distrust of the government may see the FBI's warning that millions will be cut off from the Internet as a Trojan Horse itself so that they may retain control over the new servers. After all, if the FBI is controlling the "legitimate" servers, wouldn't they have access to all the traffic information of individual users and large corporations?

When this current debt bubble finally bursts, faith in the financial system is going to disappear, credit is going to freeze up and there is going to be a massive wave of bank failures. Right now, Greece is a warning sign for the world. Nobody wants to lend money to Greece, the Greek banking system is dying, one out of every four businesses has already shut down, unemployment is soaring and the Greek economy has now been in recession for five years in a row.

Sadly, the economic implosion in Greece is rapidly accelerating. The Greek economy shrunk at a 7 percent annual rate during the 4th quarter of 2011. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Things were supposed to be getting better in Greece by now. But instead the Greek depression is getting even worse, and very soon the rest of the world is going to be going through what Greece is currently experiencing. Unfortunately, most in the mainstream media are treating what is happening in Greece as an “isolated incident” rather than as a very serious warning sign for the world.

Thankfully, there are at least a few reporters out there that are realizing the gravity of the situation. The following is how one reporter from the New York Times recently described what life is like in Greece now….

"By many indicators, Greece is devolving into something unprecedented in modern Western experience. A quarter of all Greek companies have gone out of business since 2009, and half of all small businesses in the country say they are unable to meet payroll. The suicide rate increased by 40 percent in the first half of 2011. A barter economy has sprung up, as people try to work around a broken financial system. Nearly half the population under 25 is unemployed. Last September, organizers of a government-sponsored seminar on emigrating to Australia, an event that drew 42 people a year earlier, were overwhelmed when 12,000 people signed up. Greek bankers told me that people had taken about one-third of their money out of their accounts; many, it seems, were keeping what savings they had under their beds or buried in their backyards. One banker, part of whose job these days is persuading people to keep their money in the bank, said to me, “Who would trust a Greek bank?”

Can you imagine? Greece is experiencing a full-blown economic collapse and nobody can see a light at the end of the tunnel at this point. Greece is most definitely a warning sign for the world. If you keep recklessly piling up debt, eventually a day of reckoning comes. It is inevitable. But Barack Obama does not seem to understand this. He continues to pile another 150 million dollars on to our national debt every single hour. He knows that cutting spending significantly right now would hurt the economy and that would significantly hurt his chances for another term.

Needless to say, Barack Obama is not likely to do anything that is going to significantly hurt his chances for another four years in the White House. So we continue to roll on toward disaster.

Here, one teacher describes a day in the life of an affluent primary school. What she says will shock you…

Glancing at the clock, I realise it’s time for me to change Lily’s nappy. Past experience tells me she will make a fuss, so I doubt it will be a smooth operation. Of course, most babies dislike having their nappies changed, but that’s the problem: Lily isn’t a baby, she is five years old. What’s more, I’m not her mother, I am her primary school teacher. And Lily isn’t the only child in my class who still wears nappies

It’s not as if I am a teacher in a sink school, either. I work in an affluent town in the South of England, yet every day at my school we are dealing with the fallout of what can, at best, be described as parental irresponsibility, at worst, downright negligence.

“I love my job, and I love seeing children grow, learn and flourish. What is so distressing is witnessing the way so many parents have simply abdicated responsibility over the past decade”

“When I sat down with this little boy and tried to read with him, he tried to pull it open from its spine. He had no idea how to hold a pencil, and when I asked him what letter the word ‘red’ started with, it became apparent that he wasn’t even sure what the colour red looked like...”

“These parents seem to believe that giving their children fundamental life skills isn’t their responsibility. They think that it’s the job of teachers”

"Tragically, many of the youngsters in my classroom are experiencing a horribly stunted childhood. They are painfully aware of adult concepts like binge-drinking, yet can’t recite a single nursery rhyme. I shudder to think what the future holds for them."

Read full article - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2101292/They-wear-nappies-drink-cola--dont-know-open-book-One-teachers-terrifying-insight-5-year-olds-failed-parents.html

"It is true that in many of our member states there have been student protests and strikes. This is normal in our open societies where people have a right to protest," he said. He added that the crisis has prompted a new wave of integration, however, citing the fiscal treaty agreed last month by 25 EU countries.

I want to make this very clear to Chinese public opinion. Because I understand when you see the news you may be putting some questions. Is the European Union really going to progress? I say: 'Yes. No doubt about it' ... Precisely because of the problems in the euro area the conclusion has been to further integrate and to complete the monetary union with a fiscal union and, I believe, in the future toward a political union."

Barroso and EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy went to China to attract money for EU bail-out funds.

He told European leaders to use next month’s crunch EU summit to pull the plug on the debt-laden nation. “EU summits are becoming a political ritual, divorced from the real world – nobody believes that the latest package will save Greece,” he said. “All the energy being devoted to drafting and ratifying a new treaty would be better employed implementing a plan for the orderly withdrawal of Greece from the euro, including carefully prepared support for the banks most affected.

“Everything else is just a very expensive exercise in kicking the can down the road.” His comments come as the European Commission insisted that Brussels still wanted Greece to stay in the eurozone, despite Athens not yet agreeing to strict conditions for receiving a second EU-IMF bailout.

Those flaws have been graphically illustrated by the appalling case of Ali Dizaei, the notoriously corrupt Iranian-born officer who was this week sent back to jail for a second time after his conviction for perverting the course of justice. Only an organisation obsessed with the creed of diversity and lacking in moral integrity would have allowed a swaggering, criminal bully like Dizaei to rise up its hierarchy and gain a senior position. He should have been drummed out long ago, not constantly rewarded with promotion.

But Dizaei is a symbol of the rot within the top ranks of the Met. Too many senior officers seem to have forgotten that their central duty is to protect the law-abiding British public. When he joined the Met as a superintendent in 1999, former colleagues in the Thames Valley Police, where he was an officer for more than a decade, warned us to beware, telling us of his enthusiasm for playing the race card to achieve his ends. But in a climate of hysteria over accusations of ‘institutionalised racism’, the Met’s top brass were desperate to recruit more ethnic minority senior officers. The warnings from Thames Valley Police were grimly fulfilled.

And, of course, political correctness was to blame for the pusillanimous way the rampaging gangs of looters and vandals — many from ethnic minorities — were dealt with during the riots last summer. Paralysed by political correctness and accusations of racism, terrified of being accountable for controversial decisions over public order, the Met’s senior officers allowed the mob to control the streets for five days before launching a crackdown. This is not the police force that the public deserves.

Naturally, it took a Muslim to mount a vocal defence of Christianity. Actually, I reckon that Lady Warsi understated the case. Mocked, marginalised and increasingly absent from people’s lives, the Church of England is on course to disappear from these isles within three generations, unless there’s a miracle.

Anyone who doubts this thesis is simply not paying enough attention. At my funeral, still a few decades away, God willing, I expect the congregation will know the prayers and the hymns that have sustained mankind for centuries and are part of the mental furniture of my own life. But at the funerals of my children when they are old or at those of my grandchildren yet to be born? I seriously doubt it. Christianity may yet return to where it began; a faith practised in secret by small, devout sects poring over illuminated iPads.

An English professor at Cambridge tells me that, for the first time, they have put the Bible on the undergraduate reading list. “We can no longer assume students will be familiar with it,” he says. So Christianity will die of ignorance because, shamefully, so many of our young people haven’t been taught the tenets of the great Judeo-Christian tradition which underpins their country’s laws, institutions and culture. Christianity will die of materialism, which measures our life in phone upgrades.

In keeping with the theme of interfaith dialogue, she also gave him a copy of the Koran which was translated by an East European Jew who converted to Islam and helped write Pakistan's constitution. "They were personal gifts from me," Baroness Warsi, the first female Muslim cabinet minister, told The Daily Telegraph at the Vatican on Wednesday. She also presented the pontiff with a letter from David Cameron, the Prime Minister, a message from the Queen and a copy of the King James Bible.

Baroness Warsi expanded on a speech she gave in Rome on Tuesday, and an article she wrote for The Daily Telegraph, that British society was under threat from a rising tide of "militant secularisation" and that Europe needs to be "more confident in its Christianity". Speaking after her meeting with the Pope, she said: "Secular fundamentalists are saying that people of faith shouldn't have a voice in the public sphere. I'm saying faith should be one of many voices, it should be part of the debate."

She criticised the arguments of Richard Dawkins, the outspoken atheist, as "false". According to a study carried out for Professor Dawkins's think tank, most people in Britain who identify themselves as Christian are "overwhelmingly secular in their attitudes on issues ranging from gay rights to religion in public life". Almost three-quarters of people interviewed agreed that religion should not influence public policy, while only 12 per cent thought it should.

Nearly half had not attended a church service in the previous 12 months, apart from on occasions such as weddings, funerals and christenings. "He thanked me for the comments I've made. He said he was glad I was making the case for faith."

Let's hope Europe is prepared for a Greek bankruptcy. That was the message delivered by former German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück during a Tuesday evening appearance at the Woman's National Democratic Club in Washington. Were he still in charge of German finances, he says, he would have ordered his experts "half a year ago" to come up with a plan B. "I would have liked to have been prepared for a Greek insolvency," he said.

Steinbrück's comments came immediately following an announcement by the Euro Group head, Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, that he had cancelled a Wednesday meeting of euro-zone finance ministers because Greece had yet to meet conditions demanded by Brussels. Steinbrück called the cancellation an "escalation." The comments by Steinbrück, a senior member of Germany's opposition Social Democrats and a possible candidate for chancellor in next year's general elections, are just the latest sign that leading politicians in Europe are beginning to think seriously about a Greek insolvency. On Monday evening, current German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble indicated that Europe was much better prepared for such an eventuality than it was two years ago.

Angel Gurria, the head of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), agreed with Schäuble on Tuesday, though he warned that a Greek bankruptcy could be messy. "Although we are better off today than we were two years ago for that kind of a scenario, we really don't know which unexpected consequences may happen," he said, according to the Associated Press.

NC Pre-K (before this year known as More at Four) is a state-funded education program designed to “enhance school readiness” for four year-olds. The mother says she made her daughter a lunch that contained a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, apple juice and potato chips. A state inspector assessing the pre-K program at the school said the girl also needed a vegetable, so the inspector ordered a full school lunch tray for her. While the four-year-old was still allowed to eat her home lunch, the girl was forced to take a helping of chicken nuggets, milk, a fruit and a vegetable to supplement her sack lunch.

The mother says the girl was so intimidated by the inspection process that she was too scared to eat all of her homemade lunch. The girl ate only the chicken nuggets provided to her by the school, so she still didn’t eat a vegetable. The mother says her daughter doesn’t like vegetables and – like most four year olds – will only eat them at home under close supervision. In an interview with the Civitas Institute the mother said “I can’t put vegetables in her lunchbox. I’m not a millionaire and I’m not going to put something in there that my daughter doesn’t eat and I’ve done gone round and round with the teacher about that and I’ve told her that. I put fruit in there every day because she is a fruit eater. Vegetables, let me take care of my business at home and at night and that’s when I see she’s eating vegetables. I either have to smash it or tell her if you don’t eat your vegetables you’re going to go to bed.”

The mother added, “It’s just a headache to keep arguing and fighting. I’ve even wrote a note to her teachers and said do not give my daughter anything else unless it comes out of her lunchbox and they are still going against me and putting a milk in front of her every day. Friday she came home and said ‘Mom, they give me vegetable soup and a milk,’” said the mother. The mother, who lives in Fayetteville, sent a statement to state Representative GL Pridgen (Republican for Robeson) detailing her complaint. Pridgen says he was shocked to hear it. Pridgen has since learned this is a nationwide practice based on federal guidelines. An assistant to Pridgen says the girl’s grandmother was also upset and asked, “This isn’t China, is it?”

In these anxious times anti-German sentiments are not unusual in Greece. Locked in a struggle to avoid economic ruin and exit from the eurozone, Greece is confronting the potential collapse of its self-image as a country with a secure place in Europe’s family of nations. To blame Germany draws on deep wells of national suffering endured during the 1941-1944 Nazi occupation of Greece. It is not the only response: Greek economic mismanagement, public sector corruption and dysfunctional politics inspire much self-criticism. Animosity towards Germany is not sweeping through all levels of Greek society.

However, a steady drumbeat of resentful attacks on Germany’s policies in the eurozone debt crisis, and on German popular views of Greece, rumbles week after week through television talk shows and the press. As the economic emergency intensifies, it resonates in stormy debates among Greece’s political classes.

The left wing of the socialist Pasok party, and the right wing of the conservative New Democracy party, each contain a self-styled “patriotic” element for which national sovereignty is a badge of pride. In both of Greece’s largest parties a block of pro-European modernisers, mindful of the need for sustained external financial support, is doing battle with malcontents that dabble with anti-German and anti-European Union rhetoric.

Anti-German populism finds its mirror in the impression among the German public that Greeks are lazy, unreliable and responsible for their own woes. German business people are losing patience: Franz Fehrenbach, head of Bosch, the world’s leading car parts supplier, called this week for Greece to leave the eurozone. In all these ways the economic costs and political strains of the debt crisis are producing a certain “renationalisation” of public opinion across Europe. An unmistakable discomfort accompanies the realisation that Germany’s economic pre-eminence entitles it to the leading role in tackling the emergency.

Even the most modest option now under consideration would be an historic and politically bold disarmament step in a presidential election year, although the plan is in line with President Barack Obama's 2009 pledge to pursue the elimination of nuclear weapons. No final decision has been made, but the administration is considering at least three options for lower total numbers of deployed strategic nuclear weapons cutting to around 1,000 to 1,100, 700 to 800, or 300 to 400, according to a former government official and a congressional staffer. Both spoke on condition of anonymity in order to reveal internal administration deliberations.

The potential cuts would be from a current treaty limit of 1,550 deployed strategic warheads. A level of 300 deployed strategic nuclear weapons would take the US back to levels not seen since 1950 when the nation was ramping up production in an arms race with the Soviet Union. The US numbers peaked at above 12,000 in the late 1980s and first dropped below 5,000 in 2003. Obama has often cited his desire to seek lower levels of nuclear weapons, but specific options for a further round of cuts had been kept under wraps until the AP learned of the three options now on the table.

Nuclear stockpile numbers are closely guarded secrets in most states that possess them, but private nuclear policy experts say no countries other than the US and Russia are thought to have more than 300. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that France has about 300, China about 240, Britain about 225, and Israel, India and Pakistan roughly 100 each.

Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, used for a third of the world's seaborne oil trade, if Western moves to ban Iranian crude exports cripple its energy sector. Tuesday aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln - part of the Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet - sailed through the strait of Hormuz with the Cape St George destroyer cruising behind.

"If you listen to the (Iranian) rhetoric ... you might think that there are some tensions," Admiral Troy Shoemaker, commander of the carrier strike group nine, told Reuters. "We obviously pay attention to that as we go through but I think we are conducting the transit as part of our normal business ... Our intention is to keep it professional and routine."

The commander of US naval forces in the Gulf region said Sunday Iran had built up its naval forces in the Gulf and prepared boats that could be used in suicide attacks, but the US Navy could prevent it from blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Military experts say the US Navy's Fifth Fleet patrolling the Gulf - which always has at least one giant supercarrier accompanied by scores of jets and a fleet of frigates and destroyers - is overwhelmingly more powerful than Iran's navy.