The "Martyrs of Otranto" were 813 Italians who were slain in the southern Italian city in 1480 for defying demands by Turkish invaders who overran the citadel to renounce Christianity. Their approval for sainthood was decided upon by Francis' predecessor, Benedict XVI, in a decree read at the ceremony in February where the former pontiff announced his retirement.

Shortly after his election in March, Francis called for more dialogue with Islam, and it was unclear how the granting of sainthood to the martyrs would be received. Islam is a sensitive subject for the church, and Benedict stumbled significantly in his relations with Muslims.

The pope didn't single out any country. But - Christian churches have been attacked in Nigeria and Iraq, and Catholics in China loyal to the Vatican have been subject to harassment and sometimes jail over the last decades. Christians in Saudi Arabia must worship out of the public eye because the ultraconservative kingdom does not officially permit churches and non-Muslim religious sites.

The Maine Republican said the disclosure that a government agency would go after groups with "tea party" or "patriot" in their names would only add to a growing sense of mistrust Americans have in their government. She was one of a number of Republicans who blasted the IRS on Sunday's talk shows.

"This is truly outrageous. And it contributes to the profound distrust that the American people have in government. It is absolutely chilling that the IRS was singling out conservative groups for extra review. And I think that it's very disappointing that the president hasn't personally condemned this and spoken out," Collins told CNN chief political correspondent Candy Crowley on "State of the Union."

Obama spokesman Jay Carney said Saturday the president believes the government should be staffed with "the very best public servants with the highest levels of integrity" and that "based on recent media reports, (the president) is concerned that the conduct of a small number of Internal Revenue Service employees may have fallen short of that standard." That doesn't go far enough for Collins, who said "the president needs to make crystal clear that this is totally unacceptable in America."

The documents, obtained by The Washington Post from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that on June 29, 2011, IRS staffers held a briefing with senior agency official Lois G Lerner in which they described giving special attention to instances where “statements in the case file criticize how the country is being run.” Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the agency, raised objections and the agency revised its criteria a week later.

But six months later, the IRS applied a new political test to groups that applied for tax-exempt status as “social welfare” groups, the document says. On January 15, 2012 the agency decided to target “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement,” according to the appendix in the IG report, which was requested by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and has yet to be released.

The new revelations are likely to intensify criticism of the IRS, which has been under fire since agency officials acknowledged they had deliberately targeted groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their name for heightened scrutiny.

In 2002, Alex Jones covered school shooting police exercises targeting homeschoolers, a topic included in his film, Police State Trilogy. Since that time, the effort to malign homeschooling parents as extremists and terrorists has only increased. In 2004, cops in Muskegon, Michigan conducted a “mock attack” on a school bus as part of a terrorism response exercise. The terrorists portrayed in the exercise were not fanatical Muslims or even phantom rightwing extremists – they were said to be fanatical homeschoolers.

According to the Muskegon Chronicle, the exercise was a simulated “attack by a fictitious radical group called Wackos Against Schools and Education who believe everyone should be homeschooled,” Homeschool World reported in September, 2004. The simulated attack was funded by the Department of Homeland Security.

Stereotypes consistently propped-up by the media demonize homeschoolers as hicks, retards and extremists, despite the fact the local and national spelling bees are routinely won by homeschooled children. The ceaseless attack on homeschooling is an attempt to neutralize any alternatives parents have to placing their children in the state run re-education gulags known as the “public school system.”

The goal is to completely eradicate parent directed education and the threat it poses to public indoctrination mills that train children to passively participate in their own destruction while simulatenously worshipping government.

Using porous borders with Chad, Niger and Cameroon in the desolate scrubland around Lake Chad, they are smuggling bigger weapons, staging cross-border raids, killing and kidnapping in an escalation of violence that could further draw Nigeria's neighbors into its counter-insurgency fight, security officials say.

The Islamists now control at least 10 of the 27 local council areas in Borno state, Nigeria's most remote Northeastern region on the edge of the Sahara and a relic of one of Africa's oldest medieval Islamic empires, security sources there say. One says the real figure could be closer to 20, as local councillors fearing assassination have fled, leaving a power vacuum filled by bearded radicals with automatic rifles.

Boko Haram's struggle for an Islamic state has killed thousands since 2009 and is the main threat to Africa's top oil producer, although its fighters have so far not struck anywhere near the southern oil fields. In the meantime, Boko Haram's efforts to revive an Islamist theocracy in northeast Nigeria will cause more bloodshed yet.

Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.

Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo. David Bier, an analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, agrees with the ACLU’s fears. “The most worrying aspect is that this creates a principle of permission basically to do certain activities and it can be used to restrict activities,” he said. “It’s like a national ID system without the card.”

Mr Johnson, the Mayor of London, said leaving the European Union would not be as “cataclysmic” as some people have predicted. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Johnson said: “My position is that I think the Prime Minister is completely right. What we need to do is to say to our friends and partners, ‘Listen chums, this thing isn’t working for either of us – your eurozone is causing all sorts of misery’.”

David Cameron is under pressure from backbench MPs to call a vote in the Commons before the 2015 election on a Bill allowing a referendum on EU membership. In an unprecedented move Mr Cameron yesterday indicated that he will allow Tory ministers to condemn the Queen’s Speech formally in Parliament because of its failure to legislate for an EU referendum.

Mr Johnson said that the UK needs to renegotiate its position with the EU. “We need a renegotiation,” he said. “We need to look at the way the thing is managed. We should be prepared to pull out. That goes without saying. You can’t go in to a negotiation like that without being willing to walk away.”

Speaking at the annual military parade, President Vladimir Putin claimed that Russia was the guarantor of world security. His short speech came at the culmination of the Victory Day parade which marks the defeat of Nazi Germany 68 years ago. It is Russia's most important secular holiday, honouring the huge military and civilian losses of World War II and showing off the country's modern arsenal.

Mr Putin told 11,000 servicemen standing in tight formation on the square and the war veterans in the spectator stands that "we'll do everything, everything in order that no one ever dare unleash [war] again. They will not threaten our children, our home, our land. We'll do everything to enforce safety on this earth," he said.

The Soviet Union lost an estimated 26 million people in the war, including 8.5 million soldiers.

The continuing mass death of honeybees, known scientifically as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and a “pollinator crisis,”could well strain production of over 100 crops in the US including apples, zucchinis, avocados and plums. The agriculture value of these products is estimated at over $200 billion globally per year.

In late April, the European Union voted to enact a two-year moratorium on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides (sulfoxaflor is considered by many to be a "fourth-generation neonicotinoid") in light of scientific studies that indicate their harm to bees.

Groups such as the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) have praised the continent-wide ban. “The EU vote comes after significant findings by the European Food Safety Agency that these pesticides pose an unacceptable risk to bees and their use should be restricted. Along with habitat loss and pathogens, a growing body of science points to neonicotinoid pesticides as a key factor in drastically declining bee populations,” said a statement by PAN.

On Friday at the Western Wall, several hundred female Jewish worshipers known as “Women of the Wall’’ were targeted by rock and bottle throwing from a crowd of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jewish demonstrators outraged by their use of prayer shawls and phylacteries traditionally restricted to men.

The image at the Western Wall evoked scenes of civil rights struggles from the 1960s. Some 500 Israeli police officers on hand formed a human barrier between the women worshipers and the surging crush of demonstrators, who taunted the women and blew whistles to drown out the worship.

The dispute could widen an already existing gap over Israeli policies toward the Palestinians between the more liberal Jewish community in North America and Israeli Jewry, said Yossi Klein Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

“That is what makes this such a dangerous moment,’’ he said. “This is turning into an increasingly ugly confrontation between streams of Judaism. The Western Wall, which is supposed to unite Jews, is increasingly dividing us.’’

As ministers and central bankers met on Friday in a stately home set in rolling countryside 40 miles outside London, differences were also evident over whether to prioritize debt-cutting or promoting economic growth.

US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said Japan had "growth issues" that needed to be dealt with, but that its attempts to stimulate its economy needed to stay within the bounds of international agreements to avoid competitive devaluations. "I'm just going to refer back to the ground rules and the fact that we've made clear that we'll keep an eye on that," Lew told the CNBC business news channel.

Many militias are still intact, with no central command structure, and with some waging fierce battles against others. These conditions are not in Germany's economic and security policy interests. In fact, not only are there anti-western Islamist militias operating on Libyan territory, who have extended their range of activities to Northern Mali and Algeria, constituting a long term threat to western hegemony over the area.

The country has, at the same time, resumed being Germany's largest non-European oil supplier, and thereby, taken on a prominent significance in Germany's energy policy. The BASF subsidiary Wintershall, with headquarters in Kassel, produces a major portion of its oil in Libya, and is interested in taking over RWE Dea, also active in Libya. Battles between rival militias caused an interruption of Wintershall's production already last year.

The SWP (Berlin's Institute for International and Security Affairs) considers that "both the risks of long-term destabilization, as well as the opportunities, opened by a consolidated Libya," would be "reason" for comprehensive German activities in this North African country.

The fact that the visits were timed so the two leaders would not meet — Mr Abbas left Beijing on Tuesday, and Mr Netanyahu arrived Wednesday after a swing through Shanghai — signaled that neither they nor Xi Jinping, China’s leader, were ready for actual talks. But Mr Xi did present a four-point peace proposal to Mr Abbas, which, though it did not contain any breakthrough ideas, hinted that China had given some thought to playing a more energetic, if very limited, role as mediator in one of the world’s most protracted conflicts.

“As China’s economy, national strength and international status grow, Arab countries are looking more to China,” said Guo Xiangang, a vice president of the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing who follows China’s relations with Middle Eastern nations. “The expectations they place on China are growing.”

In their meeting on Wednesday afternoon, Prime Minister Li Keqiang of China told Mr Netanyahu that “the Palestinian issue is a core issue affecting the peace and stability of the Middle East, and a peaceful solution reached through dialogue and negotiations is the only effective answer,” according to Xinhua, the state news agency. “As a friend of both Israel and the Palestinians, China has always maintained an objective and fair stance, and is willing to strive together with all sides to actively advance the Middle East peace process,” Mr Li said.

The decision by the cabinet of Chancellor Angela Merkel came a day after Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, indicated that he supported moving ahead with efforts to create a banking union, despite Germany’s official stance that the step would ultimately require changes to European treaties.

The legislation, which awaits action by the German Parliament, would grant the ECB the authority to oversee the Continent’s largest lenders: those worth more than €30 billion, or $39.5 billion, or the three largest banks in each of the 17 European Union countries using the euro. While the German cabinet’s decision moves a banking union a step closer to becoming reality, it does not resolve arguments over how to unwind failing banks, one of the problems a banking union would address.

German officials, in particular, have been viewed as dragging their feet in arguing that establishing a sound, lasting bank supervision authority was more important than speed. Mr Schäuble has said that creating a mechanism would require changes to EU treaties, a process that could slow the effort considerably. Martin Kotthaus, a spokesman for Mr Schäuble, said Wednesday: “For a new central authority, we would need treaty change because there is no enabling power for such an authority.”