Eight people were reported with minor injuries after being hit by falling debris, Masbate mayor Socrates Tuason said on national radio. "There was panic, people were scared to go out," he said. "People were having breakfast and preparing to go to work and school when the quake happened." Cracks appeared in some buildings in Masbate City, and many of its 90,000 residents had been told to stay home for the day, he said.

"There was an old three-story building that collapsed, but engineers had already condemned it long before the quake," he said, adding that there was no one inside the structure when it crumbled. He said classes in all schools were suspended as city engineers fanned across the city to further assess the damage and ensure all buildings were safe. The Office of Civil Defense in Manila said six aftershocks were felt within hours of the initial quake.

The Philippines is situated in the "Ring of Fire," a belt around the Pacific region frequented by earthquakes and volcanic activity. Tuesday's temblor came exactly a month after a 6.7 quake hit the central island of Negros, twisting roads, crushing homes and causing massive landslides that killed at least 113 people.

The first quake was reported at 5:33am one mile southeast of East Richmond Heights with a depth of about 5.5 miles. A second quake was reported at 6:03am in around the same location. BART stopped trains due to the first temblor, and held trains at stations for 5 to 10 minutes to check the tracks for damage. Trains continue to have short delays this morning as the system gets back on track. The quake was felt in San Francisco, throughout the East Bay as far south as Hayward and as far east as Antioch and Concord, and even in peninsula cities like Redwood City. Many Bay Area residents on Twitter said they were woken from a deep sleep by the shaking.

"This is devastating for small businesses, for farmers and for those whose houses have been flooded," said NSW state premier, Barry O'Farrell, who toured the state's affected region. Attention has focused on the NSW town of Wagga Wagga, 475km south west of Sydney, as it faces its biggest flood in 150 years. Around 9,000 residents have been evacuated from the city centre amid fears the town's levee banks may not withstand the flood coming down the Murrumbidgee river. It brings to 13,000 the number of people evacuated from their homes across the state.

The fast-moving tornadoes, numbering at least 30, splintered blocks of homes and tossed around vehicles like toys. Officials said the death toll was at least 39 - 21 in Kentucky, 13 in Indiana, three in Ohio and one in Alabama. Georgia also reported a storm-related death. In hard-hit West Liberty, Kentucky, the wet, heavy snow is contributing to the danger of more structural damage to buildings already weakened by the storm. The snow has already caused the collapse of 20-foot by 30-foot tent set up to serve meals to emergency workers and survivors. Kentucky Baptist Convention volunteers shifted meal service to a crowded community center.

Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear said on Sunday the storm had caused at least $5.8 million in property damage. He described the scene in West Liberty as "total devastation" and signed an executive order barring price gouging for food and other necessities. Reports of looting began to surface late Friday, according to the Kentucky State Police, though the situation is now under control. As recently as Sunday afternoon, police stopped a vehicle on a back road that was trying to leave a home with a load full of stolen copper, said Albert Hale, the emergency manager for Laurel County.

The opportunity for looters is clearly visible - even from a busy highway drivers can view destroyed homes where items such as televisions sit unattended. Hale estimated that seven miles worth of damaged homes need to be monitored. In hard-hit areas, officials stopped drivers to make sure they had a good reason to be in the area.

The violent storms raised fears that 2012 would be another bad year for tornadoes after 550 deaths in the United States were blamed on twisters last year, the deadliest year in nearly a century, according to the National Weather Service. AccuWeather.com reported that Friday's storms may be one of the worst tornado outbreaks for early March on record, with 80 sightings between 10am and 9pm. March and April are typically busy months for tornadoes, and it is difficult to predict how bad the rest of the tornado season would be, according to Greg Carbin, warning coordination meteorologist, NOAA's National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center.

In 1982, Argentina occupied the fiercely British islands only to be driven off by a Royal Navy-led task force in a war that cost the lives of 255 British servicemen, three Falkland Islanders and 655 Argentines. Major General Thompson, the land commander in the war, tells a Channel 5 documentary: “We couldn’t do it again. We couldn’t retake them without a carrier, so they would be lost.”

“It would be a huge betrayal because all that blood and sacrifice and the money we spent defending them would have been wasted.”

Since 1982, Britain has built the vast Mount Pleasant air base which is garrisoned by 1,300 troops and four Typhoon Eurofighters. The islands are also protected by a Royal Navy warship while a submarine is thought to be in the area to deter any threat.

But in a separate interview, Major General Thompson said Argentina had the forces to seize the islands. He said: “The Argentines have a marine brigade. They’ve got a parachute brigade and special forces. All they’ve got to do is get those guys in for long enough to destroy the jets and that’s the end of it.”

It's called the Scroll of Esther, a tale of palace intrigue featuring a Jewish beauty who charms a Persian king into foiling an evil adviser's genocidal plans for her people some 2,500 years ago. "Then too, they wanted to wipe us out," Mr Netanyahu told Mr Obama, according to an Israeli official. Jewish faithful gather in synagogues on Wednesday to read the parchment text, popularly known as the Megillah, on the eve of the Jewish costume holiday of Purim, a celebration of salvation and of turning the tables on one's foes.

"And the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and with slaughter and destruction, and did what they would unto them that hated them," one of the verses says. Mr Netanyahu, who has called Iran's nuclear program a threat to the Jewish state's existence, made a point of telling reporters after his White House meeting with the president that he had given the Megillah to Mr Obama.

The Israeli leader, in a frosty meeting with Mr Obama last May, lectured the president on Jewish history and criticized his approach to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mr Netanyahu has also invoked the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust, in which six million Jews were killed, in citing the dangers he says a nuclear-armed Iran - the modern-day Persia - would pose. Mr Obama appealed to Mr Netanyahu at their White House meeting to give economic sanctions time to work, amid concern that Israel, widely believed to be the Middle East's only nuclear power, could strike Iranian atomic sites.

The two men, who have had a strained relationship, sought to present a united front in the Iranian nuclear standoff as they held White House talks. But their public statements revealed differences over how to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Behind closed doors, however, Netanyahu confirmed to Obama what the president has already stated publicly - that Israel has yet to decide whether to hit Iran's nuclear sites but retains the right to resort to military action, a source close to the talks said.

Kicking off one of the most consequential meetings of US and Israeli leaders in years, Messrs Obama and Netanyahu made no mention of lingering disagreements over what Washington fears could be an Israeli rush to attack Iran's nuclear program in the coming months. Mr Obama, facing election-year pressure from Israel's US supporters and Republican presidential contenders, sought to assure Mr Netanyahu the United States was keeping its own military option open as a last resort and "has Israel's back."

But he also urged Israeli patience to allow sanctions and diplomacy to work.

Addressing reporters during a visit to Vienna, Mr Barroso said the Commission had not yet seen Spain's 2012 budget and needed more information about the "slippage" Madrid had in 2011 so he could not comment in detail. But he added: "I have no doubts that the government will honour its commitments with respect to the stability and growth pact." Spain's new 2012 budget target is easier than originally agreed under the eurozone's austerity drive, putting a question mark over the credibility of the European Union's new fiscal pact.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy insisted he was acting within EU guidelines because the plan was still to hit the European Union public deficit goal of 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2013. Spain's new 2012 target of 5.8 percent of GDP was more realistic than the original 4.4 percent goal but still demanding, he said last week. The gambit will force the EU to decide whether to punish Spain for missing the initial target.

We grew up in another country, and because we did not guard it, or even see the danger, we have lost it, and our children will live in a censored twilight. They were spoken – apparently by a police officer – to David Jones, author of the Fireman Sam books. Mr Jones had been detained for speaking words that only a stone-faced totalitarian, wholly devoid of a sense of humour or proportion, could have objected to. Here are the words: ‘If I was wearing this scarf over my face, I wonder what would happen.’

Here is the context. Mr Jones was passing through the officious farce known as airport security, in which surly persons pretend to watch out for terrorists, and we pretend to take them seriously. A Muslim woman wearing a face veil had gone through the screen ahead of Mr Jones, had not set off the alarm, and had not been stopped. Mr Jones’s artificial hip (that well-known terrorist weapon) had caused the machine to bleep and so the law-abiding, respectable, 67-year-old former fireman was humiliated with a stupid search which (as always) revealed nothing.

I also know, because I read and hear so many stories, just how the Equality and Diversity Inquisition is rapidly turning into a full-on Thought Police in workplaces, schools and public buildings. Sooner or later, they are going to get me too. At this rate, I think it will be sooner. What Mr Jones was actually doing was to behave like a free man, instead of the cowed subject of a monitored surveillance state in which most of what we think can no longer be said, and every miserable snitch, snoop and sneak has the power to ruin his neighbour’s life.

Mr Putin told supporters in Moscow he had won in an open and honest battle. But Golos, a leading independent election watchdog, said the polls could not be considered fair and open. It said there were instances of forced voting, numerous reports of "carousel" voting - in which voters cast multiple ballots - and that campaigning had been insufficiently competitive.

"Such elections cannot be called fair, just and open according to the Russian constitution and international standards", a Golos spokeswoman said at a news conference on Monday morning. The group put Mr Putin's count at just over 50% - far less than the official figure given by the election commission. Mr Putin, who supported Mr Medvedev in the Kremlin race in 2008 and became prime minister because of a constitutional ban on a third consecutive term as president, will now be in office until 2018. He could then run for another six-year term. There was tight security around the capital, with 6,000 extra police brought in from outside.

Every day, an average of nearly 1.5 quakes are recorded in and around the city, one of the most populated places on earth. But Tokyoites are so used to being shaken in their beds or at their desks that the majority pass almost without comment. The city is, without doubt, one of the most earthquake-proofed places in the world. Even the monster quake of March 11 last year that struck just 370 kilometres (230 miles) away caused little structural damage. Public transport was thrown into temporary disarray, leaving thousands stranded, but no buildings collapsed and there were no large-scale casualties.

The University of Tokyo's Earthquake Research Institute says the city, built at the intersection of four tectonic plates, has a 50 per cent chance of suffering a major quake – anything above a magnitude 7.0 – in the next four years. "We must prepare for the earthquake that will happen," says Asahiko Taira, executive director of the government's Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. Economically, the cost would be a colossal $1.45 trillion – around a third of Japan's GDP.

Japan – which experiences a fifth of the largest earthquakes on Earth every year – lost its capital to the power of nature once before, when the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 levelled the city. That 7.9 magnitude quake and the ensuing fires killed an estimated 142,800 people, according to the US Geological Survey, and left an institutional memory of what it means for a country to be effectively decapitated.

Speaking before a meeting on Monday with the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, Obama sought to head off pressure for him to commit to military action against Tehran if it crosses specified "red lines" in its nuclear programme. The president told a sceptical audience at the annual conference of America's most influential pro-Israel lobby group that he accepts a "basic truth" that no Israeli government can tolerate Iran developing a nuclear weapon, and that he therefore understands the "profound historical obligation" weighing on the shoulders of Israel's leaders.

Obama said explicitly that he is prepared to use force against Iran to defend US interests if necessary, but he chastised those who appear to be in a hurry for war in comments apparently aimed at Israeli officials who have been making belligerent noises. "I would ask that we all remember the weightiness of these issues; the stakes involved for Israel, for America, and for the world. Already, there is too much loose talk of war," he told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). "Over the last few weeks, such talk has only benefited the Iranian government, by driving up the price of oil, which they depend upon to fund their nuclear programme."

"For the sake of Israel's security, America's security, and the peace and security of the world, now is not the time for bluster; now is the time to let our increased pressure sink in, and to sustain the broad international coalition that we have built. Now is the time to heed that timeless advice from Teddy Roosevelt: speak softly, but carry a big stick."

It would be only the second time in recent history that a joint pastoral letter on behalf of all Catholic bishops in England and Wales has been issued on an issue of political importance.

The move is being proposed as the debate over extending marriage to homosexual couples gathers momentum. At the weekend Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the most senior Catholic cleric in Britain, accused the Coalition of trying to “redefine reality” and branded the proposals a “grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right”. Although the proposals would not extend to Scotland, he argued that they would nevertheless “shame the UK in the eyes of the world”.

The remarks drew robust responses from politicians including Harriet Harman, the deputy Labour leader, who accused the Cardinal of “scaremongering”. “I don’t want anybody to feel that this is a licence for whipping up prejudice,” she said. Peter Tatchell, the gay rights campaigner, said: “If he supports marriage, the Cardinal should welcome the fact that many lesbian and gay couples want to get married.”

But one of Mr Duncan’s Conservative colleagues, Peter Bone MP, argued that the parents and teachers who objected to promoting same-sex marriage in schools could be ostracised. “If marriage is redefined, schools will have no choice but to give children equivalent teaching on same-sex marriage, even those children of a very young age, including those at primary school,” he wrote. “So what will happen to parents who because of religious, or philosophical beliefs take their children out of lessons?”

“Parents who object will be treated as bigots and outcasts, possibly excluded from being on the PTA [Parent Teacher Association], or from being a governor. Discriminated against and persecuted because they hold views that have been enshrined in our laws and have been the cornerstone of our society for 2,000 years. And what of the teachers who object to teaching about same-sex marriage. Will they face disciplinary action? How will it affect their careers?”

Some 800 banks took up €529.5 billion of loans at Mr Draghi’s second long-term refinancing operation (LTRO) on Wednesday, borrowing at 1 percent for three years with almost any form of collateral. Citigroup said this amounts to €316 billion of fresh liquidity, stripping out renewal of old loans. This compares with €200 billion in extra stimulus at the first LTRO in December.

Mr Draghi has won high praise from monetarists around the world, convinced that he has acted just in time to head off a dangerous contraction of the money supply and a full-blown banking disaster. "Draghi has been very astute, and has given the single currency project another lease of life," said Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research.

Banks must provide the ECB with collateral at a stiff haircut, using up their balance sheets. Since the ECB has first claim on these assets, other creditors are pushed down the pecking order. "There is no such thing as a free lunch: liquidity today comes at the price of subordination tomorrow," he said. Bob Janjuah from Nomura said the whole credit system is being subverted. "We have monetary anarchy running riot where the elastic band between the real economy and the current liquidity-fuelled markets is stretched further and further beyond credulity," he said.

Professor Charles Wyplosz from Geneva University said the ECB ploy of bailing out insolvent states by the back door will come back to haunt if Europe’s leaders fail to sort out EMU’s fundamental woes and later face a "contagious wave" of sovereign defaults. "The LTROs make things massively more dangerous. The banks borrow cash from the ECB to acquire sovereign bonds. The more the banks accumulate these bonds, the riskier the situation is becoming. The ECB seems to be making a trillion euro bet," he said.

It means infantry soldiers, who can expect to be risking their lives on the frontline a year after they join, are not consuming the number of calories the Army says they need. Last night one of Britain’s most respected soldiers urged the Ministry of Defence to step in. Major General Patrick Cordingley, who led Allied forces to victory over Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, said: “This is an extremely serious situation and it must be addressed by the Ministry of Defence as a matter of urgency. Either they should be paid more or their food should be more heavily subsidised.”

Traditionally troops had their pay docked monthly for all their meals. In 2006 a Pay As You Dine system was introduced to give them the choice to buy food off-base. An independent report by the Recruit Trainee Service, submitted to Parliament last week, found “83 per cent of trainees on PAYD said they can afford to eat enough to get through training”, leaving a 17 per cent shortfall. One soldier at Colchester Barracks in Essex said: “I often just take the evening meal, that way I can keep my costs down. A lot of the guys will tell you we prefer being in Afghanistan where food is better and free.”

An MoD source last night suggested some soldiers blew their money on a so-called “billionaire’s weekend” and should learn to budget better. The report, which focused on Phase 2 trainees, also found 46 per cent were deliberately skipping meals to save money.