Assembling a bomb would take up to a year, Kochavi estimated. With 100 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20 percent grade and another 4 tons of uranium enriched to 3.5 percent already in stock, Iran would need another two years to make four nuclear bombs.

Therefore, by the end of 2012 or early 2013 Iran may have a single nuclear bomb, but by 2015 the figure would jump to four or five.

The officer was essentially amplifying the words of his predecessor, Major General (retired) Amos Yadlin, who said on January 26 that as long ago as 2007 or 2008, Iran had already passed the point of no return in developing nuclear weapons. Kochavi agreed with him that none of the sanctions imposed thus far had persuaded Iran to slow down, least of all shut down, its drive for a nuclear weapon. His comments coincided with the findings published Thursday by the Enterprise Institute, an American think tank, that Iran would be able to manufacture a 15-kiloton nuclear bomb as soon as August of this year, just seven months from now.

Also Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon disclosed that the big blast at the Iranian missile base near Tehran last November blew up a new missile system with a range of 10,000 kilometers, capable of targeting the United States.

Commenting on Iran's underground bunkers for nuclear facilities, the minister stressed that any facility built by man can be destroyed by man. "Speaking as a former chief of staff, I say none of Iran's installations are immune to attack," he said.

Acknowledging its insufficient planning, TEPCO began replacing older pipes with new, plastic versions to prevent further leaks, while all leaks discovered so far have been stopped. Many of the cooling system’s pipes are exposed to the outside – and can run for several kilometers without insulation.

Some of the plant’s workers reportedly informed TEPCO’s managers about the possibility of such a problem during the summer. “It was predicted that the pipes would freeze and cause water leakage,” said one TEPCO employee cited in fukushima-diary.com. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was damaged by a devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan last March. Radiation leakage forced tens of thousands of people to leave their homes in and around the Fukushima region in central Japan.

At the closing day of the Herzliya Conference, Ya’alon referred to the many tools at the international community's disposal that could serve to slow down or stop Iran’s advancement toward nuclear weapons capability: international pressure, economic sanctions, support of Iranian opposition, and military actions. Speaking of the possibility of a military strike of Iran’s nuclear facilities, the vice PM said that “the West has the ability to strike, but as long as Iran isn’t convinced that there’s a determination to follow through with it, they'll continue with their manipulations.”

“The Iranians believe that a determination isn’t still there, both in regards to military action and in regards to sanctions,” Ya’alon said, adding that “any facility protected by humans can be infiltrated by humans. It’s possible to strike all Iran’s facilities, and I say that out of my experience as IDF chief of staff.” The vice PM’s comments seem to counter reported remarks by US defense officials quoted last week by the Wall Street Journal, according to which the Pentagon was not in possession of conventional arms strong enough to destroy all of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Ya’alon reiterated the Israeli stance that a nuclear Iran was a global threat, saying that “if Iran obtains nuclear weapons, it would be a nightmare for the free world, a nightmare for Arab states... and of course a threat to the State of Israel.” The former IDF chief also indicated that an explosion which virtually destroyed an Iran Revolutionary Guard missile base near Tehran late last year targeted a system “getting ready to produce a missile with a range of 10,000 kilometers, thus threatening the United States.”

“The Iranian threat is not a case of Iran vs Israel. Israel has never declared war on Iran, but the Khomeinistic regime has declared total war on the States of Israel’s very existence,” Ya’alon added, saying that Iran was interested in repelling a perceived western hegemony around the world and not just in the Middle East.

The crackdown comes as Iranian authorities are struggling to stabilize the rial, which has nosedived amid announcements of new US and European sanctions against Iran’s central bank and oil exports. As a warning to speculators, several money changers working on the streets of central Tehran have been arrested by undercover police officers pretending to desperately seek foreign currency.

In addition, the chief of Iran’s judiciary, Ayatollah Sadegh Amoli Larijani, threatened Wednesday to seek the death penalty for major speculators. Speaking about the unrest in the foreign-exchange markets, he warned that “depending on the importance of their crimes, some of the economic corrupted can face execution,” the semiofficial Mehr News Agency quoted him as saying in a meeting with judicial officials on the currency crisis. The government has also announced that special branches of state banks will be set up at Iran’s international airports, where travelers leaving the country will be able to purchase up to $1,000 in foreign currency — after passing through passport and customs controls — and take it with them abroad.

The rial was already losing ground to the dollar and the euro during months of increasing threats of war and further sanctions against the country, analysts said. But after President Obama signed off on new measures against Iran’s central bank on December 31, the currency fell to unprecedented lows. Since then, it has lost nearly half its value on the black market. The market rate for the dollar now stands at about 18,800 rials, compared with an official exchange rate of about 11,500 rials to the dollar. In December, the market rate was about 12,500 rials to the dollar. Even at the official rate, the rial’s value has fallen sharply since December 1, when it theoretically took only about 7,400 rials to buy a dollar.

The following are 20 signs that Europe is plunging into a full-blown economic depression...

#1 The unemployment rate for those between the ages of 16 and 24 is 28 percent in Italy, 43 percent in Greece and 51 percent in Spain.

#2 Overall, the unemployment rate for those under the age of 25 in the EU is 22.7 percent.

#3 Citigroup is projecting that the economy of Portugal will shrink by 5.7 percent this year.

#4 The total of all forms of debt in Portugal (government, business and consumer) is equivalent to 360 percent of GDP.

#5 The Greek “recession” is now entering a fifth year.

#6 The Greek economy shrank by 6 percent during 2011.

#7 It is being projected that the Greek economy will shrink by another 5 percent during 2012.

#8 The overall unemployment rate in Greece is now 18.5 percent.

#9 In Greece, 20 percent of all retail stores have been permanently shut down.

#10 The number of suicides in Greece rose by 40 percent in just one recent 12 month time period.

#11 According to the IMF, the amount of debt accumulated by the Greek government is equal to approximately 160 percent of GDP.

#12 In total, there are now more than 5 million unemployed workers in Spain.

#13 Bad loans in Spain recently reached a 17-year high.

#14 The overall unemployment rate in Spain is now a whopping 22.8 percent.

#15 The number of property repossessions in Spain has risen by 32 percent over the past year.

#16 When the maturing debt that the Italian government must roll over in 2012 is added to their projected budget deficit, the total comes to approximately 23.1 percent of Italy’s GDP.

#17 Manufacturing activity in the euro zone has fallen for five months in a row.

#18 The UK economy actually contracted during the 4th quarter of 2011.

#19 The German economy actually contracted during the 4th quarter of 2011.

#20 The Baltic Dry Index, often used as a gauge for the health of the world economy, has fallen a staggering 61 percent since October.

Economic gloom is slowly spreading throughout Europe like a dark cloud. Right now, the major industrialized nations of the world are 55 trillion dollars in debt. Everyone knew that at some point that debt bomb was going to explode.

So what is going to happen next?

We wish this were a joke, but it’s the US Food and Drug Administration’s latest claim in its battle with a Colorado clinic over its Regenexx-SD™ procedure, a non-surgical treatment for people suffering from moderate to severe joint or bone pain using adult stem cells. The FDA asserts in a court document that it has the right to regulate the Centeno-Schultz Clinic for two reasons:

•Stem cells are drugs and therefore fall within their jurisdiction. (The clinic argues that stem cell therapy is the practice of medicine and is therefore not within the FDA’s jurisdiction!)

•The clinic is engaging in interstate commerce and is therefore subject to FDA regulation because any part of the machine or procedure that originates outside Colorado becomes interstate commerce once it enters the state. Moreover, interstate commerce is substantially affected because individuals traveling to Colorado to have the Regenexx procedure would “depress the market for out-of-state drugs that are approved by FDA.”

The FDA just nakedly says in court documents that the agency wants to protect the market for FDA-approved drugs. No more beating around the bush — their agenda is right out in the open! This appears to be a novel interpretation of the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (FD&C), as evidenced by the government’s failure to cite any judicial precedent for their argument.

The implication of the FDA’s interpretation of the law, if upheld by the court, would mean that all food, drugs, devices, and biologic or cosmetic products would be subject to FDA jurisdiction. The FDA is expanding its reach even to commerce within the state, which we argue is far beyond its jurisdiction, in order to protect drug company profits.

On Sunday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu ruled out the possibility of Ankara complying with the unilateral sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic, saying Turkey is currently trying to facilitate talks between Tehran and Western nations on Iran's nuclear program.

Turkey imports a significant amount of Iranian oil for its biggest petrochemical company, Tupras, which operates four refineries with a total of 28.1 million tons of annual crude oil processing capacity. Russia, India, and China have also criticized the West's sanctions on Iranian crude.

On December 31, 2011, US President Barack Obama signed into law new sanctions on Iran and announced that the United States would begin penalizing other countries for importing Iranian oil or conducting transactions with the country's central bank. European Union ministers reached an agreement on January 23 to ban oil imports from Iran, freeze the assets of the Central Bank of Iran within the bloc, and ban the sale of diamonds, gold, and other precious metals to Iran.

The operations are part of the European Central Bank's 'TARGET2' network of automatic payments between the national central banks of the Euroland club. The Bundesbank has already provided €496 billion (£413 billion) to countries in trouble, chiefly Greece, Ireland, Italy and Spain. "This is reaching the danger point. It is already one and a half times the total budget of the German government," said Professor Frank Westermann of Osnabrück University. "If any of the crisis countries exits the euro or if there is an EMU break-up, the Bundesbank bears extreme risks."

The Bundesbank - the dominant body in the euro system - used to keep a stock of €270 billion of private securities (refinance credit) before the start of the financial crisis. This was depleted last year as it sold assets to meet growing demands on the TARGET2 scheme. Once the debt drama began to engulf the bigger economies, the Bundesbank was forced to borrow money to meet its obligations to offset capital flight, since it refused to sell its stash of gold. It now owes €228 billion to German banks.

Bundesbank's official position is that TARGET2 does not increase risk for Germany, but there has been mounting alarm from Germany's IFO Institute and private economists.

The first EU summit of 2012, which yet again focused on the financial crisis in the region, gave the crucial go-ahead for German fiscal rule to limit the size of member countries’ spending. The UK had already bowed out of the pact in December. In a surprise move, the Czech Republic this week became the second country to pull back from the agreement, bringing the number of signees to 25 out of 27.

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel said the EU cannot afford to deliberate, while the troika of the EU, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank monitors is still looking into the current state of the struggling economy. Meanwhile, European leaders might have to confront the necessity of reassessing their strategy if they are to deal effectively with the eurozone crisis, as the situation evolves. “The crisis is changing from the acute phase to the chronic phase, where a very important role is played by the European Central Bank (ECB),” Johan Van Overtveldt told RT.

“The ECB in recent weeks has been creating money at a very rapid rate to make sure banks have enough funding. The second round of long term financing the ECB will make available to the banks in a few weeks will be much larger than the initial amount. This might be the ECB’s indirect way to finance sovereign debt of countries with problems such as Greece. The longer this process takes, the more risks you start to take and the more the ECB’s stability is jeopardized. This means jeopardizing the stability of the whole EU economy.”

His remarks reflected a growing sentiment within the Obama administration that its approach to Iraq, where the official end of US combat operations came 16 months before the final US troop withdrawal in December, may provide a useful model for winding down operations in Afghanistan. Current NATO strategy, agreed to at a summit in Lisbon in November 2010, calls for coalition forces to gradually shift to a training, advisory and assistance role with the Afghan military on the way to withdrawing all combat troops by the end of 2014.

The alliance has yet to agree on the pace of that process, however, and Panetta went farther than some in the administration were prepared to say publicly about their own deliberations. “Our goal is to complete all of that transition in 2013,” Panetta told reporters en route to a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels. “Hopefully by mid to the latter part of 2013 we’ll be able to make a transition from a combat role.”

But Panetta’s comments about an accelerated change in the military mission were the latest sign that the United States and its NATO allies are seeking to hasten the end of their involvement in the unpopular, decade-long war. On Friday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, facing a tough re-election campaign this spring, abruptly announced in Paris that his country would speed up its combat drawdown this year.

It was first seen in the US but cases are now being reported in the community and not just hospitals in Britain. Dr Ruth Massey, from the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Bath, said extra vigilance was required around this and similar MRSA bugs known as PVL-positive community acquired strains. USA300 is resistant to treatment by several front-line antibiotics and can cause large boils on the skin.

In severe cases, USA300 can lead to fatal blood poisoning or a form of pneumonia that can eat away at lung tissue. Dr Massey said there were 1,000 cases of PVL-positive community acquired MRSA in England in the last year, of which 200 were USA300 strains. 'These community-acquired strains seem to be good at affecting healthy people - they seem to be much better than the hospital ones at causing disease. They don't rely on healthcare workers moving them around, which the hospital ones seem to.'

Community-acquired MRSA strains have cell walls that are different to those seen in hospitals, allowing them to sense their environment and switch toxin expression on at the right time. Justine Rudkin, a PhD student working on the project, said: 'The community-acquired bacteria has evolved further, and is able to maintain a higher level of toxicity while also resisting treatment from antibiotics, making it a much larger problem.' She added: 'While we are constantly learning more about MRSA, there is a serious threat posed by this newer strain of bacteria capable of causing disease and even death in perfectly healthy people.'

'We need to respond seriously to this threat as it reaches Britain from the United States.'

The ships’ passage was a major operation for the Suez administration as due to safety reasons they had to close off the canal to all other traffic and even shut down the bridge, disrupting the link between the banks for some four hours. The traffic on the roadways alongside the canal was also restricted, Interfax news agency reports.

There are no reports regarding the destination of the vessels, but the news comes amid the ongoing crisis in the relationship between the US and Iran. There is mounting speculation that the Annapolis and the Momsen are heading to the Persian Gulf to reinforce the US naval forces already present in the region.

Currently the US has two aircraft carrier groups in the region headed by USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Carl Vinson. It is expected that another aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise, will join the strike force in March. Since the EU placed a new round of sanctions on Iran by putting an embargo on Iranian oil, Iran is once again threatening to use military force to close the Strait of Hormuz.

The former education minister said: “Many of my constituents came up to me after the riots and blamed the Labour government, saying, ‘You guys stopped us being able to smack our children’. I have to say when this was first raised with me I was pretty disparaging. But I started to listen. These parents are scared to smack their children and paranoid that social workers will get involved and take their children away.”

Mr Lammy represents Tottenham in north London where the riots, in August, began. He admitted smacking his sons, aged three and five, and said parents should be able to physically discipline their children to help deter them from getting involved with gangs or knife crime. Mr Lammy, 39, said it was easier for middle-class parents to control their children as they could afford private schools, which have tougher discipline than state schools, and could pay for hobbies and activities.

He said: “Middle-class families can find all sorts of ways to handle children, by putting them in tennis classes or using traditional private schools. MPs have no idea of tower-block realities for single mums” Parents in his area had to “raise children on the 15th floor of a tower block with knives, gangs and the dangers of violent crime just outside the window,” he said.

“They no longer feel sovereign in their own homes. And the ability to exercise their own judgment in relation to discipline and reasonable chastisement has been taken away.” He added: “We should return to the law as it existed for 150 years before it was changed in 2004.” That year the Children Act removed the defence of “reasonable chastisement” for any punishment that leads to bruising, swelling, cuts, grazes or scratches. Parents risk a charge of assault and if found guilty face up to five years in jail.

The degree to which the German public is aware of the complexities or the consequences of a generalized austerity for Germany is less clear. Merkel must now satisfy a German public that questions bailouts and sees Greece as simply irresponsible. Capitulation from Greece is necessary for her as a matter of domestic politics.

The German move into questions of sovereignty has raised the stakes in the debt crisis dramatically. Even if the Germans simply back off this demand, the Greek public has been reminded that Greek democracy is effectively at stake. While Greece may have borrowed irresponsibly, if the price of that behaviour is yielding sovereignty to an unelected commissioner, that price not only would challenge Greek principles, it would bring Europe to a new crisis.

That crisis would be political, as the ongoing crisis always has been. In the new crisis, sovereign debt issues turn into threats to national independence and sovereignty. If you owe too much money and your creditors distrust you, you lose the right to national self-determination on the most important matters. Given that Germany was the historical nightmare for most of Europe, and it is Germany that is pushing this doctrine, the outcome could well be explosive. It could also be the opposite of what Germany needs.

Increasingly, this crisis is ceasing to be a Greek or Italian crisis. It is a crisis of the role Germany will play in Europe in the future. The Germans hold many cards, and that's their problem: With so many options, they must make hard decisions -- and that does not come easily for postwar Germany.