The rock's closest approach to the planet is scheduled for February 15, 2013, when the distance between the planet and space wanderer will be under 27,000 km (16,700 miles). This is lower than the geosynchronous orbit kept by the Google Maps satellite. The asteroid has proven a bitter discovery. It has been circling in orbit for three years already, crossing Earth’s path several times, says space analyst Sergey Naroenkov from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

It seems that spotting danger from outer space is still the area where mere chance reigns, while asteroid defense systems exist only in drafts.

Still, prospects of meeting 2012 DA14 are not all doom and gloom. “The asteroid may split into pieces entering the atmosphere. In this case, most parts of it will never reach the planet’s surface,” remarks Dunham. But if the entire asteroid is to crash into the planet, the impact will be as hard as in the Tunguska blast, which in 1908 knocked down trees over a total area of 2,150 sq km (830 sq miles) in Siberia. This is almost the size of Luxembourg. In today’s case, the destination of the asteroid is yet to be determined.

Further complicating Monday's White House talks is a trust deficit between the two men that has been magnified by mounting pressures of the US presidential campaign. Mr Obama's Republican foes are eager to paint him as too tough on Israel and too soft on Iran. Mr Netanyahu is coming to Washington to press Mr Obama to more forcefully declare "red lines" that Iran must not cross in its nuclear program, Israeli officials say, even as speculation mounts that the Jewish state could act militarily on its own in coming months.

"If you don't want me to attack now, I want guarantees," an Israeli official quoted Mr Netanyahu telling top Obama aides who visited Jerusalem last month. "If you're saying, 'we'll take care of you', you're not saying that clearly enough." The White House has signaled that Mr Obama, who has pledged to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon but has been vague on how far he is prepared to go, will resist pressure for a public policy shift.

Instead, amid growing signs that US-led international sanctions are starting to take a toll on Iran, he will seek to persuade Mr Netanyahu to hold off on any military strike to give those measures and diplomacy time to work, US officials say. But Israeli officials say they fear that time is running out for an effective Israeli attack as Iran buries its uranium enrichment program deeper underground.

Still, an Israeli strike ahead of the November 6 election would put Mr Obama in a political bind. He would be reluctant to come down hard on Mr Netanyahu for fear of undercutting support among Jewish voters and other pro-Israel constituencies. But some Obama aides remain suspicious of Mr Netanyahu's motives. They are convinced that he would prefer to see a Republican take control of the White House in 2013 for fear that Mr Obama's re-election would give him a freer hand to push anew for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians during a second term.

The authors, whose piece was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, have received death threats for suggesting that "what we call after-birth abortion (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled". Many believe such possibilities should never be raised - even within the confines of an ethics journal.

However, some anti-abortionists have welcomed its publication, saying it casts a bright light on what abortion actually is. Anthony Ozimic, from the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), said the article, which he described as a "chilling promotion of infanticide", showed how abortion was "creating a culture of death". While he was appalled at the suggestion that newborns should be killed for their parents' convenience, he nevertheless said it showed the logical framework behind infanticide and abortion was the same.

He said: "The paper proves what pro-lifers have long been arguing: that the common arguments for abortion also justify infanticide. There is no difference in moral status between a child one day before birth and a child one day after birth. Birth is merely a change of location, not a change from non-personhood to personhood."

He continued: "All human beings, regardless of age, location or capacities, are regarded in international law as equal members of the human family and thus as having an equal right to life." The authors, ethicists Dr Alberto Giubilini and Dr Francesca Minerva, argued: "The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a foetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

The briefing notes that of the total amount (€282.2 billion) entailed in the various measures currently on the table to save Greece – through the bailouts and the ECB – only €159.5 billion, or 57% will actually go to Greece itself. The rest will go to banks and other bondholders. Furthermore, immediately after the restructuring, Greece’s debt to GDP will still be 161%, a reduction of only 2% compared to where it is now. On top of this Greece has to undertake extensive budget cuts amounting to 20% of GDP in total – a level which no other country has even attempted in recent history.

By 2015, once the first and second Greek bailouts have been completed, as much as 85% will be owned by taxpayer-backed institutions (EU/IMF/ECB).This means that in the event of a likely default, a huge chunk of the losses will fall on European taxpayers, potentially leading to significant political fallout in countries such as Finland, the Netherlands and Germany.

The briefing concludes that, given the sizeable debt relief needed in Greece, a fuller coercive restructuring would have been a simpler and more effective option from the start and should still be pursued.

According to a report broadcast on Swiss television, already in the past, the association's president has forced his way into a house in southern Poland, he claimed belonged to him. The association has also announced its intention to wage a political campaign this spring in several Polish cities. EBO's president is the national executive director of the extreme rightwing "pro-Deutschland" party, affiliated with an extreme rightwing splinter group of the German League of Expellees (BdV).

Its honorary president would like to transform a large segment of Polish territory into a neutral country: "Zentropa." The fact that the Federal Republic of Germany has, since 1949, consistently declared the resettlement of Germans "unjust" and the "question of reparations open" is encouragement for the lawsuits demanding reparations for the resettled.

The "Property Owners Association - East," closely affiliated with extreme rightwing "pro-" organizations, can feel encouraged by the fact that every West German government has characterized the resettlement as well as the uncompensated confiscation of the property of the resettled as an "injustice." According to the jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany, the reparations issue is "open." Most recently in the summer of 2011, the government of the federal state Hesse distributed a brochure in numerous schools, saying that the time has come to intensify "the search for feasible ways for a just settlement, even in the difficult property issues."

"There is a widespread idea that accomplished expulsion is irreversible, but it is false."

Two men and four women died when a pre-dawn tornado struck Harrisburg, Illinois, a town of nearly 10,000 people. The six people were killed when powerful winds lifted a house up and dropped it on top of other homes in a housing subdivision adjacent to a wrecked shopping strip. The US National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Centre rated the Harrisburg tornado an EF-4, or one notch below the strongest tornadoes, meaning it packed winds of up to 200 miles per hour.

The EF-4 rating put it on par with the devastating tornado that killed 64 people in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, last April, and one notch below the massive EF-5 Joplin storm that flattened whole sections of the Missouri town. Scientists said the tornado was 200 yards wide with winds up to 170 mph. Adding to the danger, it hit as many slept - a timing research meteorologist Harold Brooks called unusual but "not completely uncommon." Brooks said perhaps 10 percent of tornadoes happen between midnight and 6 am, a time when the danger level rises because the storms are harder to spot and it's harder to get the word out.

Ryan Jewell, a meteorologist with the Storm Prediction Centre, said the next system is forecast to take a similar path and has the potential for even more damage. On Friday, he said, both the Midwest and South will be "right in the bull's eye."

Photo’s - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/9115824/Powerful-tornadoes-leave-a-trail-of-destruction-across-the-US-Midwest.html

Inflation is an especially insidious tax because it is not just a tax on your income for one year. It is a continual tax on every single dollar that you own. As your money sits in the bank, it is constantly losing value. Over time, the effects of inflation can be absolutely devastating. For example, if you put 100 dollars in the bank in 1970, those same dollars today would only have about 17 percent of the purchasing power that they did back then. In essence, you were hit by an 83 percent “inflation tax” and all you did was leave your money in the bank. So who is responsible for this? Well, the Federal Reserve controls monetary policy in the United States, and the inflationary monetary policy that the Fed has gotten all of us accustomed to is taxing the living daylights out of us. This is madness, and it needs to stop.

Right now, the US government says that the annual rate of inflation is somewhere around 2 percent. Those of you that have to buy food and gas on a regular basis realize how much of a joke that is. Thankfully, there are others out there that keep track of these statistics as well. According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if inflation was measured the same way that it was back in 1980, the annual rate of inflation would be more than 10 percent right now. This is why so many economists get so upset when the Federal Reserve starts printing money like there is no tomorrow. Inflation is a tax that is very cruel to average American families. It destroys their wealth and it destroys the purchasing power of their paychecks.

This is one of the reasons why so many people out there are talking about “real money” like gold and silver. Unlike fiat currency, precious metals tend to hold value over a very long period of time. For example, it will take you about three times as much US currency to buy a gallon of gasoline in 2012 as it did back in 1990. But an ounce of silver will actually buy you more gasoline today than it did back then. Back in 1990, an ounce of silver would buy you about 4 gallons of gasoline. Today it will buy you more than 8 gallons of gasoline.

Talk about holding value. We see the same kind of thing happening with gold. When Barack Obama first took office, an ounce of gold was selling for about $850. Today an ounce of gold costs more than $1700 an ounce. It is not that gold is becoming so much more valuable. It is just that the US dollar is losing value on a continual basis.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is expected to raise the issue at a White House meeting on Monday after weeks of intense diplomacy in which Mr Obama has dispatched senior officials – including his intelligence, national security and military chiefs – to Jerusalem to try and dampen down talk of an attack.

Diplomats say that Israel is angered by the Obama administration's public disparaging of early military action against Iran, saying that it weakens the prospect of Tehran taking the warnings from Israel seriously. The two sides are attempting to agree a joint public statement to paper over the divide but talks will not be made easier by a deepening distrust in which the Israelis question Mr Obama's commitment to confront Iran while the White House is frustrated by what it sees as political interference by Netanyahu to mobilise support for Israel's position in the US Congress.

"They are poles apart," said one diplomatic source. "The White House believes there is time for sanctions to work and that military threats don't help. The Israelis regard this as woolly thinking. They see Iran as headed towards a bomb, even though they agree there is no evidence Tehran has made that decision yet, and they want the White House to up the ante. The White House has the Europeans behind its position but it's losing Congress." The mood is not helped by worsening distrust between the two leaders. Relations soured within weeks of Mr Obama coming to power after he attempted to pressure Mr Netanyahu to halt construction of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories.

David Miles, a member of the Monetary Policy Committee, defended quantitative easing which has been blamed for pushing down gilt rates and therefore the income earned by pensioners. Campaigners representing the elderly claim that the scheme has left more than a million pensioners “permanently poorer”. However, Mr Miles, a senior economist, said that the £325 million quantitative easing programme had widespread economic benefits and had stopped share prices from slumping.

In the most forthright defence of the policy launched by a Bank of England figure, he said: “It is inevitable that there are some people that have been made worse off by the direct impact of the Bank’s asset purchases on gilt yields... It will not be any comfort for people in this position to be told that any monetary policy action will have some distributional impacts... But if monetary policy actions could be vetoed so long as someone was made worse off then there could be no monetary policy.”

Mr Miles added: “In the absence of the Bank’s asset purchases [quantitative easing] I am sure that investment and consumer spending would have been significantly weaker than they have been. Many more people would be much worse off. Unemployment would have been higher than it currently is.”

The Metropolitan Police yesterday said it had investigated 83 “faith-based” child abuse cases involving witchcraft in the past 10 years but believed it was still an “under-reported, hidden crime”. Children’s charities and campaigners urged communities to report abuse and said social workers must be firmer in confronting abuse in immigrant groups.

Kristy Bamu, 15, was relentlessly tortured and eventually drowned in a bath on Christmas Day 2010 by his sister, Magalie, and her partner, Eric Bikubi. The killers are facing life sentences. They believed he had cast spells on another child and punished him with increasing viciousness. The teenager “begged to die” because he was in such pain after three days of being attacked with knives, sticks, metal bars and a hammer and chisel, suffering 130 separate injuries.

DataSift announced this week that it will release Twitter data in packages that will encompass the last two years of activity for its customers to mine, while Gnip can go back only 30 days.

"Harvesting what someone said a year or more ago is game-changing," said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. As details emerge on the kind of information being mined, he and other privacy rights experts are concerned about the implications of user information being released to businesses waiting to pore through it with a fine-tooth comb.

"As we see Twitter grow and social media evolve, this will become a bigger and bigger issue," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for British-based Internet security company Sophos Ltd. "Online companies know which websites we click on, which adverts catch our eye, and what we buy ... increasingly, they're also learning what we're thinking. And that's quite a spooky thought."

In response, the UK government said any discussions on flights were a matter for the Falkland Islands government. But the Foreign Office said it expected Argentina to honour its commitments under a 1999 agreement allowing flights from Chile. In recent months Argentina has stepped up its territorial claim to the Falklands, which it calls the Malvinas.

President Fernandez was speaking in a state-of-the-nation address to the Argentine people. She repeated her demand that the UK enter negotiations on the sovereignty of the Falklands, and again accused Britain of "militarising" the South Atlantic. And she said she had asked her foreign minister to renegotiate the 1999 agreement with Britain allowing flights from Chile to the Falklands.

"We want flights to the islands from mainland Argentina - Buenos Aires - operated by our flag-carrier, Aerolineas Argentinas," she said. There have been concerns in the Falklands that Argentina might block the flights operated by Chilean airline LAN, which are the islands' only air link with South America. "The weekly flight to and from Chile is a well-established route, and is valued greatly by the Falkland Islanders, including the Chilean community and others," a UK Foreign Office spokeswoman told the BBC. "It would be deeply disappointing and utterly unjustifiable if Argentina put pressure on this flight to be suspended".

But the bailout must await the debt swap with private bondholders on 8 March, he said. EU leaders are meeting in Brussels again to discuss the debt crisis. As the summit got under way UK Prime Minister David Cameron complained that ideas to stimulate economic growth, which he set out recently in a joint letter with 11 other EU leaders, had been ignored.

Mr Cameron said the summit's draft conclusions ought to reflect the letter's call for swift action to lift regulatory burdens and expand the EU's single market. Intensive negotiations over the Greek debt mountain dominated the run-up to the summit. Private bondholders, such as banks and private investors, recently agreed to take a 53.5% loss on their Greek bonds.

Their 107 billion euros losses - the "haircut" - and a huge package of public sector cuts aim to reduce Greek debt from 160% to 120.5% GDP by 2020. And a global financial body, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, announced on Thursday that the debt write-off did not constitute a default. A ruling of a "credit event" - a default - would have meant insurance against bond losses, called credit default swaps, would have been paid out. That would have caused further losses and uncertainty for already fragile financial institutions.

Saudi officials denied the reports, however, helping prices fall back from their highs in Asia on Friday. A number of issues have pushed prices higher, including tensions over Iran's nuclear plans and regional unrest. The new high set on Thursday beat the level seen during the Libyan civil war last year.

In early trading on Friday, Brent was trading at $125.49 per barrel, with US light sweet crude at $108.47 per barrel. The problem facing the oil market at the moment is that events in a number of countries could have an impact on supply and demand, often causing traders to react more quickly to speculation and increasing volatility.

On Thursday, the trigger was a report in the Iranian media that an explosion had occurred at a pipeline in Saudi Arabia. The report came at a time when there has been a steady increase in friction between the US, its allies and Iran.

Reding told BBC Radio Four data control authorities in Europe asked French counterparts to analyze the new policy. "And they have come to the conclusion that they are deeply concerned, and that the new rules are not in accordance with the European law, and that the transparency rules have not been applied," Reding said. Google said in January it was simplifying its privacy policy, consolidating 60 guidelines into a single one that will apply to all its services including YouTube, Gmail and social network Google+.

Users cannot opt out of the new policy if they want to continue using Google's services. Asked in what respects the policy could be breaking EU law, Reding said: "In numerous respects. One is that nobody had been consulted, it is not in accordance with the law on transparency and it utilizes the data of private persons in order to hand it over to third parties, which is not what the users have agreed to."

It would have been impossible for Google to instigate the policy under proposed legislation she laid out on January 25, Reding said. "Protection of personal data is a basic rule of the European Union. It is inscribed in the treaties. It is not an if, it is a must," she said. Google earlier posted a blog defending its policy after what it called "a fair amount of chatter and confusion." "Our privacy policy is now much easier to understand," the company said.