The UK and U.S. are drawing up plans to attack Iran amid growing tensions in the Middle East, it was claimed last night.

Barack Obama and David Cameron are preparing for war after reports that Iran now has enough enriched uranium for four nuclear weapons.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's hardline regime in Tehran has been linked to three assassination plots on foreign soil, according to senior officials in Whitehall.

Iran has come sharply back into focus following the end of the Libya conflict.

President Obama said Iran's nuclear programme continues to pose a threat and that he and French president Nicolas Sarkozy want the international community to maintain pressure on the country to admit its intentions.
And the unrest has been inflamed by sabre-rattling from top politicians in Israel.

Defence oIsrael has successfully test-fired a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and striking Iran, fanning a public debate over whether the country's leaders are agitating for a military attack on Tehran's atomic facilities.

While Israeli leaders have long warned that a military strike was an option, the most intensive round of public discourse on the subject was ignited over the weekend by a report in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot that said the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the defence minister, Ehud Barak, favoured an attack.

That was followed by a report in the Haaretz on Wednesday that Netanyahu is lobbying cabinet members for an attack, despite the complexity of the operation and the likelihood it would draw a deadly retaliation from Iran. An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Netanyahu did not yet have a majority.fficial says military tested rocket propulsion system as reports suggest country's leaders in favour of attacking Tehran

Kuwaiti paper says Binyamin Netanyahu believes the heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet may have leaked plans for attack

Israel's prime minister has ordered an investigation into alleged leaks of plans to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, it has been reported.

According to the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Jarida, the main suspects are the former heads of the Mossad and the Shin Bet, respectively Israel's foreign and domestic intelligence agencies.

Netanyahu is said to believe that the two, Meir Dagan and Yuval Diskin, wanted to torpedo plans being drawn up by him and Ehud Barak, the defence minister, to hit Iranian nuclear sites. Tzipi Livni, leader of the opposition Kadima party, is also said to have been persuaded to attack Netanyahu for "adventurism" and "gambling with Israel's national interest".

The paper suggested that the purpose of the leaks was to prevent an attack, which had moved from the stage of discussion to implementation. "Those who oppose the plan within the security establishment decided to leak it to the media and thwart the plan," it said.

Both Dagan and Diskin oppose military action against Iran unless all other options - primarily international diplomatic pressure and perhaps sabotage - have been exhausted. In January the recently retired Dagan, a hawk when he was running the Mossad, called an attack on Iran "the stupidest idea I've ever heard".

Fear that Egypt's ruling generals are working to perpetuate their hold on power is causing a political furor, threatening a "second revolution" and sending relations between the generals and activists to new lows less than four weeks before a key election.

The outcry has been prompted by a proposal from the military-appointed Cabinet to shield the armed forces from any oversight and give the generals a veto over legislation dealing with military affairs. The measure also is designed to curtail the likely influence by Islamist lawmakers over the writing of a new constitution.

The proposal, which requires the adoption of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to be binding, has united both Islamists and liberals - groups that helped engineer the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak - in its condemnation.

Egypt's best known reform proponent, Mohamed ElBaradei, decried the document as "distorted" and demanded its withdrawal.

"There is a difference between a civilian democratic state that guarantees man's basic rights and military guardianship," he said.

The Islamic fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, the country's largest and most powerful political group, is leading the opposition to the document, saying it usurped the "people's will."

Pressure rose on Italy's besieged Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to quit on Thursday, as rebel deputies from his own center-right party threatened to oppose the government in a vital parliamentary vote next week.

With financial markets in turmoil and Italian bonds under heavy fire, calls have been mounting from all sides for Berlusconi to step aside and make way for a new government to handle a crisis that now threatens the whole euro zone.

Six former parliamentary loyalists wrote to Berlusconi calling for a new government in a letter published in the daily Corriere della Sera.

"Be the backer of a new political phase and a new government," the deputies wrote.

One of the deputies, Isabella Bertolini, said the rebels could oppose Berlusconi in a parliamentary vote next Tuesday to sign off the 2010 budget.

"We are convinced that a strong political signal will come, otherwise we will see how we will act," she told reporters.

Greece is in turmoil and the world economy in limbo after Prime Minister George Papandreou apparently abandoned his explosive plan to put a European rescue deal to a referendum.

Ireland announced Thursday it is closing its embassies to the Vatican and two other nations, but denied that its deteriorating relations with the Catholic Church played a role in its choice of cuts.

Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore said Ireland was under grave financial pressure as it tries to slash spending in line with its international bailout last year. He said a review determined that Ireland's diplomatic posts to the Vatican, Iran and Timor Leste offered the least returns in foreign investment.

"The government believes that Ireland's interests with the Holy See can be sufficiently represented by a non-resident ambassador," Gilmore said, suggesting that a diplomat based in another European country would be assigned the Vatican brief too.

In Rome, the Vatican likewise dismissed concerns that the Irish were sending another rebuke to the Catholic Church over its coverups of decades of child abuse in Ireland.

"What is important are the diplomatic relations between the Holy See and states, and these aren't in question concerning Ireland," said the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi.

Rick Perry's crazy, wacky and absurd speech at an event in New Hampshire is revealing on so many levels. People are saying he was drunk or on drugs. But I think it's deeper than that.

Perry is obviously losing it. He can't contain his fruity nature under the national spotlight. Politics is a big charade that involves repeating a lot of slogans, and it seems Perry is getting sick of saying "Balance The Budget," and "Cut The Government," and "Grow The Economy."

And it's not just Rick Perry who is experiencing some sort of mental collapse or emotional meltdown.

The trend of mental collapse among high-profile U.S. politicians is very visible in the last days of the U.S. empire.

U.S. political leaders are keeping world-changing secrets from the public. And they have a false persona which they present to the American people. Hence their bizarre episodes of mental collapse.

There is John "Insane" McCain who I'm pretty sure is a retard.

Dick Cheney is considered a psychotic and a paranoid mad man by a lot of people, not just so called conspiracy theorists.

George W. Bush was losing his mind, and gave bizarre answers to questions at press conferences.

Barack Obama can't give well structured speeches without the use of a teleprompter. He is not balanced mentally or emotionally. He is not fit to be President.

Can we all agree that a $1 billion swindle represents a lot of money, and the fact that Citigroup agreed last week to pay a $285 million fine to settle SEC charges for "misleading investors" demonstrates a damning admission of culpability?

So why has Robert Rubin, the onetime treasury secretary who went on to become Citigroup chairman during the time of the corporation's financial shenanigans, never been held accountable for this and other deep damage done to the U.S. economy on his watch?

Rubin's tenure atop the world of high finance began when he was co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, before he became Bill Clinton's treasury secretary and pushed through the reversal of the Glass-Steagall Act, an action that legalized the formation of Citigroup and other "too big to fail" banking conglomerates.

Rubin's destructive impact on the economy in enabling these giant corporate banks to run amok was far greater than that of swindler Bernard Madoff, who sits in prison under a 150-year sentence while Rubin sits on the Harvard Board of Overseers, as chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and as a leader of the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project.

Some people have referred to it as the "secret government" of the United States. It is not an elected body, it does not involve itself in public disclosures, and it even has a quasi-secret budget in the billions of dollars. This government organization has more power than the President of the United States or the Congress, it has the power to suspend laws, move entire populations, arrest and detain citizens without a warrant and hold them without trial, it can seize property, food supplies, transportation systems, and can suspend the Constitution. Not only is it the most powerful entity in the United States, but it was not even created under Constitutional law by the Congress. It was a product of a Presidential Executive Order. No, it is not the U.S. military nor the Central Intelligence Agency, they are subject to Congress. The organization is called FEMA, which stands for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Originally conceived in the Richard Nixon Administration, it was refined by President Jimmy Carter and given teeth in the Ronald Reagan and George Bush Administrations.

FEMA had one original concept when it was created, to assure the survivability of the United States government in the event of a nuclear attack on this nation. It was also provided with the task of being a federal coordinating body during times of domestic disasters, such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes. Its awesome powers grow under the tutelage of people like Lt. Col. Oliver North and General Richard Secord, the architects on the Iran-Contra scandal and the looting of America's savings and loan institutions. FEMA has even been given control of the State Defense Forces, a rag-tag, often considered neo-Nazi, civilian army that will substitute for the National Guard, if the Guard is called to duty overseas.