But political leaders were on Sunday night conceding the consensus had been shattered beyond repair. With Europe's economies plunging further into recession and as unemployment in the eurozone breaks record levels, voters demands for a new approach had finally become too great to ignore. The popular backlash to EU imposed austerity to the centrist New Democracy and Socialist parties in Greece threatens the existence of the euro itself.

Greece is potentially ungovernable as a minority government must try and pass a new raft of austerity measures next month which are a condition of an EU-IMF bailout and Greek membership of the euro. In France, while Hollande, the Socialist President-elect is a centrist, he is sitting on a powder keg of resentment at measures that his government will have to pass if it is not to spark a meltdown of financial markets. He has refused to ratify the treaty unless the eurozone and EU also sign up to a "growth pact".

Mr Hollande also horrified Berlin by sneering at the idea that France should change its constitution to enshrine a "debt brake" outlawing Socialist spending levels. In a meeting in Berlin next week, Chancellor Merkel is set to warn the French President, that weakening austerity pledges would rattle markets and undermine investor confidence at a critical time for the eurozone's economy.

Analysts say the vote has wide implications for the whole eurozone. Mr Hollande has vowed to rework a deal on government debt in member countries. Shortly after polls closed at 20:00 (18:00), French media published projections based on partial results giving Mr Hollande a lead of almost four points. Exuberant Hollande supporters gathered on Place de la Bastille in Paris - a traditional rallying point of the Left - to celebrate.

Mr Hollande - the first socialist to win the French presidency since Francois Mitterrand in the 1980s - gave his victory speech in his stronghold of Tulle in central France. He said he was "proud to have been capable of giving people hope again". He said he would push ahead with his pledge to refocus EU fiscal efforts from austerity to "growth". "Europe is watching us, austerity can no longer be the only option," he said.

Mr Hollande has called for a renegotiation of a hard-won European treaty on budget discipline championed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Mr Sarkozy. Mr Hollande capitalised on the country's economic woes and President Sarkozy's unpopularity. The socialist candidate has promised to raise taxes on big corporations and people earning more than €1 million a year. He wants to raise the minimum wage, hire 60,000 more teachers and lower the retirement age from 62 to 60 for some workers.

The new president is expected to be inaugurated later this month. A parliamentary election is due in June.

For most of the years that Andrew Wood has worked as a country vet in a pleasant, affluent part of East Sussex, the job has played out much as he expected – tending to little girls' ponies, old ladies' cats, occasional zoo calls and a fair chunk of farm work in between. But recently something stranger and darker has been taking up Mr Wood's time. A mysterious bug known as Schmallenberg virus has hit East Sussex hard, leaving thousands of hideously-deformed newborn animals in its wake. Most of the casualties to date are lambs but there are now cattle succumbing too, amid fears for other livestock.

"I've not seen damage like this before," said Mr Wood, 37, who works at a practice in Uckfield. "I grew up on a farm, the animals get to be like family, and it's hard not to be affected." The most widely accepted theory is that the virus was carried to Britain by midges from Holland and Germany, where the disease first emerged last year. Strong winds supposedly blew infected insects across the sea in the autumn. On arrival they attacked farms, but the disease remained hidden until the lambing season began at the start of this year, when cases began to appear in southern and eastern England.

Not everyone believes that windblown midges are to blame. Some doubt that the insects could have made the crossing so easily to so many places and in such numbers, and think it more likely that they took advantage of Britain's much-criticised standards of biosecurity to hitchhike over on cars and lorries. Others reject the midge theory entirely – citing causes that range from radioactive contamination from Japan's wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant to genetically-modified animal feed.

Whatever the truth, the virus's calling card is a frightening one. Across the south – and, recently, as far north as Lincolnshire – animals are being born with grotesque deformities, including misshapen heads and twisted limbs. The farms worst hit by the virus have lost up to 20% of their lambs – a catastrophe that can translate into tens of thousands of pounds of income.

He said it was ‘feasible’ that remote-controlled aircraft filled with poison and small enough to fit into a backpack could be used as a biological weapon in the capital. He told The Mail on Sunday: ‘An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) can be put in a backpack. They come in all sorts of sizes and it’s feasible they could be filled with something noxious and flown by remote-control.’

Lieutenant Colonel Fahy – the officer responsible for community relations during the Games – made his remarks on Friday in Leytonstone, East London, near one of six sites which could see the deployment of surface-to air missile batteries in order to shoot down aircraft attempting to infiltrate an Olympic ‘no fly’ zone. During the meeting at Buxton School, his team showed locals a ‘dummy’ missile battery and allowed children to play on the unarmed weapon.

Lieutenant Colonel Fahy declined to elaborate on what type of poison might be used during an aerial attack. He said: ‘For the duration of the Olympics anyone flying into controlled airspace is to file their flight plan with the Civil Aviation Authority. The range of threats varies in size and capability. It could be a commercial airliner hijacked by somebody with malicious intentions or a protest group using a microlight to get their name in the papers.’ His poison warning came as it was revealed that SAS troops have had anthrax emergency training at the Government’s top-secret military research establishment at Porton Down, Wiltshire.

But the staunchly pro-Europe Lord Mandelson will admit that further EU integration cannot be foisted on to the British public without an in/out referendum. He will say that the European mandate secured by the Heath government in the 1970s ‘belongs to another time and another generation’. ‘I believe a fresh referendum on this will be necessary because the political parties cannot reconcile their own differences and come to a final conclusion on their own, and nor should they,’ he will say.

He will make his demand for a ballot in a speech in Oxford today in a move that is at odds with Labour’s opposition to a referendum. The former EU Trade Commissioner’s intervention will also be used as ammunition from David Cameron’s Eurosceptic backbenchers to pile pressure on the Prime Minister to hold a referendum.

Lord Mandelson will say the referendum should take place once the Eurozone crisis has ended and the case can be made for a stronger fiscal union. ‘At that stage, a referendum would be a healthy means of re-establishing a consensus – among Britons, and among the nations of Britain for that matter - about Britain’s place in the world and the role Europe should play in that,’ he will say.

The procedure, which involves injecting a single sperm into an egg, is used in both the NHS and the private sector, and now represents more than half of all IVF treatments. But it is more expensive than standard IVF, raising fears some clinics may be promoting it to increase profits. Scientists behind the latest survey of 300,000 births found that one child in ten born following ICSI has a defect – twice the level of the general population – but that standard IVF has no extra risks compared with natural births.

Following the report, other experts called for clinics to use ICSI only when there was no medical alternative, and demanded a national database of children born from IVF be set up urgently. Women who undergo the most popular IVF treatment in Britain are twice as likely to have babies with birth defects as the rest of the population, the shocking new survey revealed. Women who undergo the ICSI process, are more likely to have a baby with problems including cleft palate, heart and lung conditions, cerebral palsy and blood disorders.

The extensive research found that ten in every 100 births from ICSI had a defect, compared with five in 100 natural births. But other forms of IVF are no more risky than natural conception. When other factors such as the mother’s age, smoking habits and underlying health problems are taken into account, the ICSI treatment is linked to a 57 per cent increase in birth defects, compared to natural conception.

By “get it” I mean that he still seems to believe that he personally behaved appropriately in the circumstances by which the late Father Brendan Smyth, a rapacious paedophile of almost unimaginable moral corruption, was tacitly permitted by the Church to continue brutally abusing children for 40 years, long after the ecclesiastical authorities knew what he was up to.

We are all aware now that paedophiles may seek to conceal their abuse by presenting it to the victim as “our little secret”. The younger Father Brady was instrumental in turning Brendan Smyth’s abuse into the Church’s little secret. The children’s parents, who would have been a source of both outrage and protection, were deliberately not informed, and nor were the police. The Church saw a choice between protecting its own reputation, and shielding young children from ferocious abuse, and it unhesitatingly chose to protect itself.

I have every confidence that had Jesus been in the room when Brendan Boland stuttered out his agonising evidence, the subsequent consequences for Smyth would have been immediate and forceful. Jesus was not in the room, however: just a group of apprehensive men acutely conscious that their hierarchical institution might lose face.

Well, it has now lost more than face, and I lament the distress that has been caused to Catholics of deep and genuine faith, as well as to those courageous priests who have always sought to live as they believe. But the authority of the Church needs to move closer to the authority of Christ. The trouble with Cardinal Brady is that he still does not seem to understand the difference.

“It’s never going to happen that the government at gunpoint says, ‘You’re going to have a tracking chip,’” said Katherine Albrecht, who with Liz McIntyre authored “Spychips,” a book that warns of the threat to privacy posed by Radio Frequency Identification. “It’s always in incremental steps. If you can put a microchip in someone that doesn’t track them… everybody looks and says, ‘Come on,’” she said. “It’ll be interesting seeing where we go.”

According to a report at Mobiledia, the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has confirmed plans to create nanosensors to monitor the health of soldiers on battlefields. The devices also would report data to doctors. But privacy analysts have expressed concern that the implants could be used not just to monitor health but to keep track of and possibly control people.

DARPA describes the technology on which it is working as “a truly disruptive innovation,” which would diagnose, monitor vital stats and “even deliver medicine into the bloodstream.” According to LiveScience.com, “Solving the problem of sickness could have a huge impact on the number of soldiers ready to fight, because far more have historically died due to illness rather than combat.”

The gloomy surveys clashed with the picture painted by European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, who on Thursday spoke of a gradual recovery taking place in the euro zone during the course of the year - although he did speak about risks. In the United States, a government report showed employers added a disappointing 115,000 workers to payrolls last month and, critically, many Americans stopped looking for work. Economists had expected 170,000 new nonfarm jobs, and the report could hurt President Barack Obama as he steps up a re-election campaign that will likely hinge on the state of the economy.

Though the US unemployment rate edged down to 8.1 percent from 8.2 percent, the SPX fell sharply as fears grew that the erratic recovery of the world's largest economy was sputtering. "This shows just how painfully slowly the US economy is growing," said Thanos Bardas, a portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman in Chicago, which manages nearly $200 billion in assets.

The US government did, however, revise upward earlier estimates of payroll growth in February and March, and the euro zone surveys indicated better progress among Chinese companies.

But positive signs were few.

This isn't the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before — and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. Much of the planet's electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms. But the world is still not prepared for a truly damaging solar storm, Hapgood argues in a recent commentary published in the journal Nature.

What exactly is a solar storm?

Solar flares mainly emit X-rays — we also get radio waves from these things, and white light in the brightest of flares. They all travel at the same speed as light, so it takes eight minutes to arrive. There are some effects from flares, such as radio interference from the radio bursts. But that's a pretty small-beer thing. The big thing is the geomagnetic storms [on Earth] that affect the power grid, and that's caused by the coronal mass ejections [from the sun].

What happens when those particles reach Earth?

There can be a whole range of effects. The classic one everyone quotes is the effect on the power grid. A big geomagnetic storm can essentially put extra electric currents into the grid. If it gets bad enough, you can have a complete failure of the power grid — it happened in Quebec back in 1989. If you've got that, then you've just got to get it back on again. But you could also damage the transformers, which would make it much harder to get the electric power back.

How else could people be affected?

You get big disturbances in the Earth's upper atmosphere — what we call the ionosphere — and that could be very disruptive to things like GPS [the network of global positioning system satellites]. Given the extent we use GPS in everyday life [including for cellphone networks, shipping safety and financial transaction records], that's a big issue. The storms can also disrupt communications on transoceanic flights. Sometimes when that happens, they will either divert or cancel flights. So that would be like the disruption we had in Europe from the volcano two years ago, where they had to close down airspace for safety reasons.

The implications of French and Greek elections for the region's drive to impose fiscal austerity will be crucial, while March readings on industrial production in Spain, Germany, Italy and France will also highlight the challenges facing the region. China takes centre stage towards the end of the week with the release of inflation, retail and factory output numbers, as signs of a weaker US economic performance and the deepening recession in Europe make Asia's strength more crucial.

The disappointing 115,000 increase in US non-farm payrolls in April reported on Friday has served to heighten fears the recovery in the world's biggest economy is fading, and will put speculation about the Federal Reserve's next move high on the agenda. For global asset managers the week's news and data should not significantly alter a view that has been dominated by moderate risk-on positions weighted towards US and Asian equities and some commodities, offset by an underweight holding of European assets.

"Europe is definitely going to be an 'ex-growth' part of the world just because of the bank deleveraging going on, and that's not even bringing into play the euro crisis." But for now Robertson said fear is a dominant sentiment in the markets, centered on whether euro zone bank restructuring and government spending reforms will take place. "Investors are far from convinced. Apart from the ECB, the rest of the policymakers are not acting tremendously dynamically."

The new bureaucrat, who would not be directly elected by voters, is set to get sweeping control over the entire EU and force member countries into ever-greater political and economic union. Tellingly, the UK has been excluded from the confidential discussions within the shady “Berlin Group” of Europhile politicians, spearheaded by German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle.

Opponents fear the plan could create a modern-day equivalent of the European emperor envisaged by Napoleon Bonaparte or a return to the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne that dominated Europe in the Dark Ages. They are concerned that David Cameron’s coalition Government is doing nothing to prevent the sinister plot. The secret talks were uncovered by Independent Labour peer Lord Stoddart of Swindon.

“This is a plot by people who want to abolish nation states and create a United States of Europe,” he said. “The whole thing is barmy. These people are determined to achieve their final objective. The only hope for Britain is to leave the EU and become an independent nation.” The move will give further momentum to the Daily Express’s hugely popular crusade for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.

Tory backbench MP Douglas Carswell said: “It doesn’t matter how you arrange the offices of these technocrats, they are useless at arranging our lives for us and they are not elected so they have no legitimacy. My worry is that the president will end up having the charisma of Van Rompuy and the economic management skills of Barroso.”

Euro-MP Paul Nuttall, of the UK Independence Party, said: “This is a truly ridiculous idea that must never be allowed to happen. It sounds as if they are trying to go back to the days of the Holy Roman Emperor.”

The shutdown leaves Japan without nuclear power for the first time since 1970 and has put electricity producers on the defensive. Public opposition to nuclear power could become more deeply entrenched if non-nuclear power generation proves enough to meet Japan's needs in the peak-demand summer months. "Can it be the end of nuclear power? It could be," said Andrew DeWit, a professor at Rikkyo University in Tokyo who studies energy policy. "That's one reason why people are fighting it to the death."

Japan managed to get through the summer last year without any blackouts by imposing curbs on use in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami. Factories operated at night and during weekends to avoid putting too much stress on the country's power grids. A similar success this year would weaken the argument of proponents of nuclear power.

In Japan, a delay in setting up a new, more independent Nuclear Regulatory Agency due to deadlock in a divided parliament is further clouding the outlook. Some analysts say the government is not going to turn public opinion unless it admits that nuclear power is never going to be absolutely safe. "The debate needs to be recast," said Bob Geller, a professor of geophysics at Tokyo University. "They have to come clean, and say, in effect - look we know they're not perfectly safe but we've made a careful evaluation of the risks, which we'll make public."

Wages and benefits have been slashed, unemployment has rocketed and thousands of businesses have collapsed. Furious Greeks have been turning to small, anti-bailout parties to punish traditional politicians they blame for the crisis. A record 8-10 parties are expected to enter parliament, and public outrage with the main parties could turn at least four small groups into potential power-brokers.

The last polls published before the election showed the conservative New Democracy and socialist PASOK parties - which between them dominated Greece for decades and now rule jointly - would scrape just enough votes to renew their uneasy coalition. They are the only parties to support the bailout. No new surveys have been allowed to be published for two weeks and pollsters warn the result may be a surprise.

"We voted for them since the 1980s and we feel cheated," municipal worker Christina Theodorakou, 50, said of the two big parties. She has seen her monthly salary cut by €500 since the crisis began. "We built a life over the years and they destroyed it overnight. Their campaigns are addressing idiots. I'll vote for a small party," she said. Her daughter Alexandra, 18, a nursing student who was joining her for lunch in the western port city of Patras, is old enough to vote for the first time but said she probably wouldn't bother: "Why go? Nobody can promise us a better future."

He told the Daily Telegraph the banks "had to lend to someone". His comments came after Bank of England boss Sir Mervyn King admitted he should have flagged up the looming crisis. Mr Hammond, who helped formulate David Cameron's economic strategy in opposition, told the newspaper lifestyle expectations had "run away with us".

"We started living a lifestyle both in private consumption and in public consumption that we could not afford," he told the newspaper. "We borrowed to top it up... now the day of reckoning has come and we are adjusting. Households were spending more than they earned. That's why household debt rose." At the annual Today Programme Lecture on Wednesday, Bank of England Governor Sir Mervyn King said he should have "shouted from the rooftops" that a system had been built in which "banks were too important to fail".

But Mr Hammond said: "People say to me, 'It was the banks'. I say, 'hang on, the banks had to lend to someone'. People feel in a sense that someone else is responsible for the decisions they made. Of course, if banks don't offer credit, people can't take it. But there were two consenting adults in all these transactions, a borrower and a lender, and they may both have made wrong calls. Some people are unwilling to accept responsibility for the consequences of their own choices."