Even for Romans, who over the centuries have endured looting, pillaging and hour long lines at the post office, these are interesting times. The unexpected resignation of Benedict XVI, the first pope to step down in almost 600 years, means there is no pope in the Vatican — at least not before Tuesday, when the conclave and papal balloting will begin. At the same time, the inconclusive results from last month’s national elections have left Italy’s politicians bickering over how to form a government.

Italians are resilient, inured to high levels of corruption and accustomed to political volatility; since 1948, the country has had 58 governments. The expectations placed on their leaders are pretty low; voters just handed a second-place finish to the party of Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister who is facing a handful of criminal prosecutions, dating a woman about 50 years his junior and appealing prison sentences.

But Italy’s problems are now harder to laugh off. The economy is in recession. Unemployment is at a record high. Governmental instability threatens not just the Italian economy but also the fate of the euro. And at the Vatican, the scandal over leaked information and the continuing sex abuse scandals have weakened the spiritual authority of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Japanese government has told the facility to revise by June its roadmap for cleaning up the site, which is expected to take well over a quarter of a century. "What we need to do is isolate, remove and store the damaged and broken nuclear fuel safely. This work will take 30 to 40 years to complete," plant manager Takeshi Takahashi told the media.

Experts say it could cost at least $12 billion to close the reactors down. Monday it will be two years since the worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and a subsequent tsunami knocked out cooling equipment at the company's Fukushima Daiichi plant north of Tokyo, leading to the meltdown of three reactor cores. More than 160,000 people were forced from their homes.

Another earthquake or tsunami could be fatal for the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, according to a nuclear engineer, as two years after the disaster it’s still vulnerable to natural disasters. "What remained intact after the disaster is completely fragile and when the next one comes it's going to collapse," he told The Weekend Australian newspaper.

A new party is forming this spring, intent on abandoning European efforts to prop up the common currency. And its founders are a collection of some of the country's top economists and academics. Named Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), the group has a clear goal: "the dissolution of the euro in favor of national currencies or smaller currency unions."

The party also demands an end to aid payments and the dismantling of the European Stability Mechanism bailout fund. Its impressive list of prominent supporters includes a large number of conservative and economically liberal university professors. The most notable name on the list is Hans-Olaf Henkel, the former president of the Federation of German Industries, but it also includes such economists as Joachim Starbatty and Wilhelm Hankel, who were part of the group that challenged Greek bailout aid at Germany's Constitutional Court.

Main initiator Bernd Lucke, a professor of macro-economics from Hamburg, was a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats for 33 years before leaving the party in 2011 as a result of euro bailout efforts. "The current, so-called rescue policies are exclusively focused on short-term interests, primarily those of the banks," Lucke told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this week.

'Sunspot numbers are well below their values from 2011, and strong solar flares have been infrequent,' the space agency says. Experts have been baffled by the apparent lack of activity - with many wondering if NASA simply got it wrong.

However, Solar physicist Dean Pesnell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center believes he has a different explanation. 'This is solar maximum,' he says. 'But it looks different from what we expected because it is double-peaked. The last two solar maxima, around 1989 and 2001, had not one but two peaks.'

The same thing could be happening now, as sunspot counts jumped in 2011 and dipped in 2012, he believes. Pesnell expects them to rebound in 2013: 'I am comfortable in saying that another peak will happen in 2013 and possibly last into 2014.'

There is also a pattern of escalating threats whenever South Korea gets a new leader. While many observers dismiss the rhetoric as bluster, others warn of "the tyranny of low expectations" when it comes to understanding North Korea, because there have been a number of serious regional confrontations.

"If you follow North Korean media you constantly see bellicose language directed against the US and South Korea and occasionally Japan is thrown in there, and it's hard to know what to take seriously. But then when you look at occasions where something really did happen, such as the artillery attack on a South Korean island in 2010, you see there were very clear warnings," Professor John Delury at South Korea's Yonsei university told the BBC.

The North consistently warned that military exercises being conducted in the area would spark a retaliation. Mr Delury argues that misreading Pyongyang's intentions and misunderstanding its capabilities has kept the US and South Korea stuck in a North Korean quagmire. The latest series of threats are being seen as "bluff" because the North's leaders know a nuclear attack would be suicidal and impractical, given the North's rudimentary missile programme.

“As a bipartisan group of former senators stated in their March 1 amicus brief to the Supreme Court, many supporters of the bill known as DOMA believed that its passage “would defuse a movement to enact a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which would have ended the debate for a generation or more.” It was under these circumstances that DOMA came to my desk, opposed by only 81 of the 535 members of Congress.

On March 27, DOMA will come before the Supreme Court, and the justices must decide whether it is consistent with the principles of a nation that honors freedom, equality and justice above all, and is therefore constitutional. As the president who signed the act into law, I have come to believe that DOMA is contrary to those principles and, in fact, incompatible with our Constitution. Because Section 3 of the act defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, same-sex couples who are legally married in nine states and the District of Columbia are denied the benefits of more than a thousand federal statutes and programs available to other married couples.

When I signed the bill, I included a statement with the admonition that “enactment of this legislation should not, despite the fierce and at times divisive rhetoric surrounding it, be understood to provide an excuse for discrimination.” Reading those words today, I know now that, even worse than providing an excuse for discrimination, the law is itself discriminatory. It should be overturned.

We have yet to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, but a society that denied women the vote would seem to us now not unusual or old-fashioned but alien. I believe that in 2013 DOMA and opposition to marriage equality are vestiges of just such an unfamiliar society.”

Earlier, Pyongyang said it had a right to carry out a pre-emptive nuclear strike and was pulling out of the armistice that ended the Korean War. The US said "extreme rhetoric" was not unusual for Pyongyang.

China, which is the North's only major ally, called for both North and South to show restraint and to continue talking. Beijing rarely criticises its ally, but has criticised the North's nuclear tests and has given support to the UN's sanctions.

South Korea's President Park Geun-hye said the current security situation was "very grave" but that she would "deal strongly" with provocation from the North. She also said she was ready to talk to Pyongyang if it "comes out on the path toward change".

The threat from the North Koreans came ahead of a unanimous vote in the UN Security Council approving its toughest sanctions yet on the North in response to an atomic test last month.

North Korea has now conducted three nuclear tests. In the past year, it has made strides toward its goal of having a nuclear weapon that could threaten the US although experts doubt it yet has the capability to hit the US with a ballistic missile or miniaturize a nuclear device to mount on such a missile.

However, the North possesses hundreds of shorter-range missiles that could hit US bases in Japan and South Korea, said Victor Cha, Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. It is difficult to know how capable US missile defense is, should it be required.

Instead of the originally-expected $250 million cut, US foreign aid to Israel will drop by $150 million, Washington sources allegedly told Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz. The sources said the cut was unavoidable, given the across-the-board slash, down from eight percent to five percent, in the nation’s budget.

Numerous Israeli firms that provide products and services to the US government, including those in the military industries, are expected to be affected by the reduction. However, newly-confirmed Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said Tuesday that any cuts would not affect US funding for Israel’s rocket and missile defense programs.

“Secretary Hagel expressed his strong commitment to Israel’s security, including maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge and continued US support for missile and rocket defense systems, in spite of fiscal constraints,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said in a statement. A separate defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Hagel “is committed to working with members of Congress to ensure that there is no interruption of funding for Iron Dome, Arrow, and David’s Sling rocket and missile defense systems, despite the fiscal uncertainly due to Congressional inaction.”