After two and a half decades of deadlock and 15 marathon rounds of bilateral talks — the most recent occurring in late March — the countries appear a long way from finding common ground. The dispute isn't the first of its kind, nor will it be the last. The waters of the Indus River and tributaries like the Jhelum — and the dams built on them by India — have long been one of the main points of contention between the rival neighbors, along with the disputed region of Kashmir itself and cross-border terrorism.

Pakistan, whose agriculture-dominated economy is heavily reliant on the Indus and its tributaries, fears upstream dams allow India to manipulate the flows of water as it sees fit. Many in Pakistan accuse New Delhi of wantonly exacerbating the country's dire water shortages, choking its agricultural production and ruining livelihoods.

India dismisses these accusations as paranoid and without scientific backing. Its dams are run-of-the-river, it says, aimed at generating hydroelectricity, or in the case of the Tulbul navigation project on the Jhelum, meeting other development needs like facilitating year-round trade. India's Indus Water Commissioner G Aranganathan says that after India fills its reservoirs in the initial stages of each project, it only uses the water it needs to run its turbines and doesn't prevent any from flowing into Pakistan. "There is absolutely no question of interrupting or reducing Pakistan's water supply," he tells TIME.

Few believe India and Pakistan will actually go to war over the disputes, but one thing is for certain: water is making it harder for the long-time rivals to put their enmity behind them.

Firms will enforce extra checks at depots up and down the country to monitor vehicles being loaded with goods for delivery to the Westfield Stratford City mall in East London. The vast £1.45 billion shopping centre is on the east side of the Olympic park – less than 500 yards from the main Olympic stadium and just yards from the multi-million-pound basketball and aquatics centre. The 1.9 million square feet site is also home to 300 shops and 50 bars and restaurants.

The close proximity to the main Olympic venues, which are expecting up to ten million visitors, has led security advisers from the London Organising Committee of the Olympic And Paralympic Games (LOCOG) to contact every business that would need to make deliveries. A source said: ‘Over the past few months all the companies have had to beef up security. The threat of someone planting a bomb on a lorry headed for the Olympic park is very real.’

In Haringey, North London, 43 per cent of new social housing tenants were foreign while in Ealing, West London, the figure was 45 per cent. Although some boroughs did not record tenants’ nationality, making it impossible to scrutinise who is at the top of the queue, on average 11 per cent of new social housing lets in London went to foreigners.

Mr Field, former Labour welfare reform minister, described the trend as a ‘scandal’ that ‘must stop’. ‘For years we have been told that British people on the waiting list for social housing are getting a fair deal,’ Mr Field said. ‘Yet, when the situation in London is examined, we find that, in reality, nobody has any idea how many new lets are going to foreign nationals and how many to British citizens. This scandal must stop. I have a bill before parliament that will ensure that those citizens who have made most contribution to society, who have paid their taxes and whose children have not caused trouble, for example, will have first choice of any housing available. This would be a major change in our welfare state whereby benefits have to be earned rather than automatically allocated on need.’

Sir Andrew Green, Chairman of Migration Watch said, ‘The present situation is a scandal. The records are in chaos. British people who have lived in the area for many years are given little or no priority.’ He added that only British citizens - including those who were foreign born but had taken up citizenship - should be considered for social housing. He added: ‘Foreign nationals would still get housing allowance but not social housing; there is no reason why they should be entitled to subsidised housing provided by British taxpayers while British citizens spend years in the queue.’

Parts of the country are already drier than they were in the summer of 1976, when Britain experienced its worst drought for more than 100 years. The drought of 1976 led to standpipes being installed in residential streets, water supplies to businesses being rationed and schools having to close early. The Environment Agency says similar measures are unlikely to be enforced this summer, but warns the dry conditions will damage the environment and lead to widespread water restrictions.

The chairman of Shropshire Anglers Federation, Sir John Roberts, said that over the past five years general rainfall levels had been falling. “Last year was bad but this year is worse because we haven’t had the rain through the winter,” he said. “April seems to be working as we expected, but we could do with a month’s worth of constant rain to bring things back to where they should be. We are in dire straits. When we hit high summer, the River Severn could be a trickle.”

It was the latest chapter in a saga in which the Vatican has had to scramble to deal with what one spokesman called its own version of "Wikileaks" and what the Italian media have dubbed "Vatileaks." It also coincided with the publication of new leaks about the Vatican bank. The editorial was ostensibly to mark the 30th anniversary of the arrival in Rome from Germany of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected pope in 2005, to take up the powerful post as head of the Vatican's doctrinal enforcer.

But in a section about current events, it described the pope as a man who "is not stopped by wolves" and that he was ready to stand up to "irresponsible and undignified behavior." A senior Vatican official familiar with the newspaper's editorial line, asked if that part of the editorial which referred to wolves was criticizing those who have leaked the documents, said "even them" and added: "They certainly are not boy scouts."

From leaked letters by an archbishop who was transferred after he blew the whistle on what he saw as a web of corruption and cronyism, to a leaked poison pen memo which puts a number of cardinals in a bad light, to new suspicions about its bank, Vatican spokesmen have had their work cut out responding. But the editorial said the Church should see the entire episode, which some say is part of a power struggle inside the Vatican, as an opportunity for renewal. The "irresponsible and undignified behavior," the editorial said, "winds up becoming intertwined with the noise of the media, which is inevitable and certainly not disinterested, but which we need to see as an occasion for purification in the Church."

As the EC heads closer to officially condemning the fiscal perks enjoyed by the Catholic Church and introduced by the Berlusconi administration, Prime Minister Mario Monti has written to the Competition Commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, saying that the Vatican will resume property tax, or Ici, payments. Mr Almunia said in 2010 that the exemption amounted to state aid that might breach EU competition law. A parliamentary proposal by the Italian Radicals party last August to repeal the exemption, with a successful petition on Facebook, upped the pressure.

A spokesman for Mr Almunia appeared to give the thumbs-up yesterday: "It is a proposal that constitutes a significant progress on the issue and I hope will be implemented," he said. "This is a victory for public pressure," said Mario Staderini, the leader of the Italian Radicals party. "We've managed to break down – a little bit – the wall protecting the Church." The Vatican avoids Ici tax on about 100,000 properties, classed as non-commercial, including 8,779 schools, 26,300 ecclesiastical structures and 4,714 hospitals and clinics.

Meanwhile, as the Vatican financial authorities do their sums and continue to lobby, the Holy See has announced an official investigation into a series of embarrassing leaks. After the child abuse and financial scandals of recent years, the prospects for another annus horribilis were underlined last week when a document emerged suggesting there was a plot to kill Pope Benedict XVI this year.

"It's now complete war inside the Vatican," said Robert Mickens, The Tablet's Rome correspondent, who has20 years' experience of reporting on the Vatican. "Things are falling apart." The rancour has been blamed on manoeuvring surrounding the succession of Pope Benedict and the exceptional unpopularity of the current leadership.

Oklahoma emergency officials said five people died after a tornado touched down at 12:18 am Sunday in and around the northwest Oklahoma town of Woodward, the high winds damaging homes, toppling trees and downing power lines about 140 miles northwest of Oklahoma City. The brunt of the damage was reported on the west side of the town of about 12,000 and its outskirts, where search teams scoured the rubble for hours for any still trapped or injured.

Storms also were reported in Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska as a wide-ranging storm system lumbered its way across the nation's midsection Saturday and Sunday. Lightning, large hail and heavy downpours accompanied the system, which was so large that it still posed a severe weather threat from Minnnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan in the north to eastern Texas and Louisiana hundreds of miles to the south.

Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management spokeswoman Keli Cain said the state medical examiner's office confirmed five fatalities in the Woodward area early Sunday. She said she didn't know the gender or age of the victims or details of their deaths but several homes were damaged. More than 8,000 customers were without power in the region.

He warned the threat wasn't over for those across several states in the nation's interior. "Severe weather is possible in a swath from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan south to eastern Texas and Louisiana," Vaccaro told AP. National Weather Service forecasters also had issued somber outlooks that the worst of the weather in the Midwest and Plains would hit in the nighttime hours, predicting that conditions were right for exceptionally strong tornadoes. Emergency management officials had worried most about what would happen if potent storms hit when people were sleeping, not paying attention to weather reports and unlikely to hear warning sirens.

The conference centre was cleared of alcohol, a prayer room prepared and female officials advised to dress with a special touch of modesty. When Iran’s negotiators are in town, the challenge of hosting them without offending their fragile sensibilities follows in their wake. These black-clad, silver-haired men came to Istanbul yesterday to do verbal battle with the world’s leading powers. With hardened realism, a diplomat warned beforehand that a wise observer would set his sights low.

Nonetheless, Iran is back at the negotiating table, formally meeting its adversaries for the first time in more than a year. Not only is the Islamic Republic talking again, but its leaders have quietly dropped a raft of preconditions and begun discussing their nuclear ambitions. While the Iranians conceded talks on the nuclear issue, their only ally, Syria, began observing a ceasefire, though the army shelled the city of Homs again yesterday and one person was reported to have been killed. President Bashar al-Assad seems to have at least diminished the bloodshed he has meted out to his people.

Meanwhile, the most quixotic rogue state of them all, North Korea, has been humiliated by the failure of its bid to put a satellite into space. The rocket that was launched with such fanfare, only to fall apart in the earth’s atmosphere, was – the US believes – a prototype ballistic missile with the real purpose of firing nuclear warheads on to enemy capitals, not delivering satellites into orbit.

So April seems to have been a bad month for the countries whom George W Bush dubbed the “axis of evil”. Almost a decade ago, during his State of the Union address in 2002, Mr Bush coined that phrase to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

"The International Monetary Fund (IMF) does not set financial conditions, but the EU is flirting with the idea of imposing political conditions," Orban added. Hungary asked the International Monetary Fund and European Union for a €15-20 billion ($20-26 billion) credit line last November, as the forint dropped to record low levels against the euro and borrowing costs rose to record highs.

But Brussels later warned that any money would depend on Budapest proving its commitment to democratic principles. Orban's government has come under fire for a series of laws as well as a new constitution that critics say curb the independence of its central bank and judiciary, and limit press freedoms, among other things. Last month, the European Commission gave Hungary one month to bring two controversial laws - on the judicial system and its data protection authority - in line with EU principles or face court action.

Orban is due to meet with Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in Brussels on April 23.

Tornadoes skipped across the US Central and Southern Plains and residents braced for the possibility of more, but the twisters primarily affected sparsely populated areas. A hospital in the town of Creston, Iowa was damaged by a possible tornado, and patients were being moved to hospitals in surrounding communities, according to local officials.

A tornado churned through the city of Wichita, Kansas. Storm chaser Brandon Redmond, a meteorologist with the Severe Weather Alert Team, said the twister passed over his vehicle and lifted it two feet off the ground in an industrial area south of the city. "The tornado literally formed over our vehicle," he told Reuters. "I've never been that scared in my life... We had power flashes all around us and debris circulating all around the vehicle, sheet metal, parts of a roof, plywood."

"Conditions will remain very favorable through the evening for very strong and potentially long-lived tornadoes," the National Weather Service said in an advisory. "Tornadoes will be possible in these areas (Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma) through the early morning hours." It warned that nighttime tornadoes can be particularly dangerous because they are usually fast-moving and often obscured by rain and darkness.

The US tornado season started early this year, with twisters already blamed for 57 deaths in 2012 in the Midwest and South, raising concerns that this year would be a repeat of 2011, the deadliest tornado year in nearly a century. Some 550 people died in tornadoes last year, including 316 killed in an April outbreak in five Southern states, and 161 people in Joplin, Missouri, the following month.

Hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Barclays Capital now dominate the food commodities markets, dwarfing the amount traded by actual food producers and buyers. Purely financial players, for example, account for 61 per cent of investment on the wheat futures market, according to the World Development Movement report Broken Markets.

Speculative investment in agricultural commodities in 2011 was 20 times the amount spent by all countries on agricultural aid. Goldman Sachs, the largest player in the agricultural commodities market, earned £600 million from food speculation in 2009, and Barclays Capital, the world's third-largest player and largest British bank in this market, earned up to £340 million in 2010, according to the report. Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital declined to comment.

Before it was deregulated in the year 2000, the agricultural commodities futures market was used mainly by farmers and food buyers seeking to insure themselves against changes in the prices of products such as wheat, maize and sugar. When George W Bush passed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act 12 years ago, there was an influx, led by Goldman Sachs, of purely financial players who had no interest in ever buying food, but who sought solely to profit from changes in food prices, says Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food.

He added: "What we are seeing now is that these financial markets have developed massively with the arrival of these new financial investors, who are purely interested in the short-term monetary gain and are not really interested in the physical thing – they never actually buy the ton of wheat or maize; they only buy a promise to buy or to sell. The result of this financialisation of the commodities market is that the prices of the products respond increasingly to a purely speculative logic. This explains why in very short periods of time we see prices spiking or bubbles exploding, because prices are less and less determined by the real match between supply and demand."

The vote marked the first time UN diplomats on the council all agreed on a resolution since the conflict began more than a year ago. It calls on both sides to immediately "cease all armed violence in all its forms." It also calls on the Syrian government to implement the six-point peace plan put forward by international envoy Kofi Annan, including the pull-back of troops and heavy weapons from cities and towns.

The resolution calls for the deployment of an advance team of up to 30 unarmed military observers to initiate contacts with both sides and begin to report on whether there has been "a full cessation of armed violence in all its forms by all parties."

As is becoming ever more common when it comes to euroland, it's a view which is quite at odds with the facts. True enough, the ECB's surprise liquidity operation did succeed in dousing the crisis, at least temporarily. A Lehman's style meltdown was averted. But the idea that the ECB can now sit back and let the politicians do the rest is surely deluded.

Despite the ECB's actions, the big southern European countries – Italy and Spain – are slumping back into recession, casting doubt on their ability to meet fiscal targets, reigniting the banking crisis and undermining political support for structural reform. Mr Asmussen's solution to this problem appears to be more of the same, or more austerity and more structural reform.

The structural reform bit, I would go along with. All advanced economies need urgently to improve their competitiveness. Labour protections need to be swept away, and entitlement systems put on a sustainable basis. But it is plain as a pike staff that repeated rounds of immediately imposed austerity are making matters worse, not better. Once again, the eurozone is in danger of falling apart.

Since fiscal expansionism is out of the question, the only possible hope for salvation – within the euro that is – lies with the ECB. It may require the whole of the eurozone to move seriously into recession before the ECB acts, but eventually it will surely have to follow the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England into full scale quantitative easing. To the Bundesbank, it would be anathema. Already the Bundesbank thinks policy in the eurozone far too loose. To Germans, even 5 per cent house price inflation, which is roughly what they've got at the moment, looks like a bubble, and there have been a number of inflation busting pay awards of late, not least in the public sector.

The move demonstrates Beijing’s belief that the yuan is now stable enough to handle major structural reforms, despite slowing growth of the Chinese economy. Analysts said the slowdown may have actually spurred Beijing to make the change, because the Chinese government knew it could introduce the larger band without causing a spike in the yuan’s value. "The central bank chose a good time window to enlarge the trading band. The market's expectation for a stronger yuan is weakening," said Dong Xian'an, chief economist at Peking First Advisory in Beijing.

Nonetheless, The People's Bank of China took the unusual step of issuing its announcement in English rather than Mandarin. Sources said China wanted to deflect criticism of its currency policy ahead of the International Monetary Fund's annual spring meeting in Washington next week. IMF managing director Christine Lagarde supported the move today.

She said: "I would like to welcome this important step by the People's Bank of China to increase the flexibility of their currency. This underlines China's commitment to rebalance its economy toward domestic consumption and allow market forces to play a greater role in determining the level of the exchange rate."

Just when you hoped it really was "solved", the eurozone crisis has roared back on to the global agenda. Like a lingering bad smell, the fundamental contradictions at the heart of monetary union can be blanked out for a while but refuse to go away. The busted banks, the grotesque indebtedness, the inherent contradictions – in recent days they've all burst back into view. The eurozone has deeply entrenched economic, financial and political problems. No amount of tub-thumping – by Sarko, European Central Bank President, Mario Draghi, or anyone else – can change that fundamental truth.

The focus has been on Greece but now it is most definitely on Spain. Will Spanish debt woes spiral out of control and, if so, can they then be contained? That's the €1 trillion question. But how much is that in pesetas? Spain is the fourth-largest eurozone economy and the 12th biggest in the world. Spanish GDP last year was almost five times that of Greece. On the surface, Spain's government finances don't look bad, with national debt at 68 per cent of annual GDP – around half that of Italy.

Yet Spain has a vast and less widely recognised stash of private sector debt. Global bond markets, previously sedated by ECB "funny money", now realise that a big slice of those liabilities could land on the government's balance sheet. Greece has already enacted the largest sovereign debt restructuring in history to avoid a big, disorderly default. Pulling that off involved a €110 billion EU/IMF package in May 2010, another €170 billion this year and a hefty bondholders "haircut".

What would it take in Spain if that's what in took in Greece? Spain is a "grown-up" economy. Should Spain need a bail-out, and if (a big if) one can be afforded, then who's next? Where does this madness end? "Economic spring is in the air," said International Monetary Fund supremo Christine Lagarde, chiming in behind Sarkozy. Nothing as dramatic as a Prague spring or an Arab spring, one hopes. But the signs for Europe are ominous.