The flare is part of a larger increase in activity in the Sun, which runs in 11-year cycles. It is expected to peak around 2013. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center wrote: 'Category G1 (Minor) geomagnetic storms are expected 28 and 29 December due to multiple coronal mass ejection arrivals. R1 (Minor) radio blackouts are expected until 31 December.' Devices that depend on radio waves include GPS systems, radios and mobile phones.

A coronal mass ejection contains billions of tons of gases bursting with X-rays and ultraviolet radiation that are flung into space at around 5 million mph. They are mind-bogglingly hot - around 100,000,000 degrees Celsius. The Earth is occasionally hosed by these ejections, leading to amazing shimmering light shows. They are caused by the ionised solar particles becoming imprisoned by Earth's magnetic field, exciting the gases in the atmosphere and emitting bursts of energy in the form of light.

However, these particles can also cause magnetic storms, which in extreme cases have been known to disrupt satellites and electricity grids. In 1989, a CME was held responsible for leaving six million people in Quebec, Canada, without power. Last month one of the largest storms our star can produce was detected. Known as an X1.9 flare, it was one of the biggest seen in years. The flare was so powerful that it disrupted communications systems on earth a short time later. Another gigantic flare occurred in August - shown in the video below - but because it took place on the side of the Sun not facing Earth, there was no disruption to communications or power.

And while the number of married families in the UK is among the lowest in Europe, stable cohabiting relationships are also less common here than in other countries. The figures, produced by the EU's statistical arm, come at a time of increased efforts to downplay the importance of marriage by politicians and campaigners who oppose tax breaks for married couples.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has declared that 'strong relationships between parents are important' but the state should not use the tax system to favour a particular family set-up. The figures from Luxembourg-based Eurostat suggest that strong relationships outside marriage are uncommon in Britain but that the decline of marriage has meant life with a single parent for millions of youngsters.

These children are more likely than others to suffer poor health, do badly at school, and go on to less successful adult lives. According to the breakdown, 20.8 per cent of children in the UK were living in single parent families in 2008. In just three countries were children more likely to live with one parent: Estonia and Latvia in Eastern Europe, and Ireland, where the number was 23.2 per cent. It is believed the surge in Ireland is a result of generous benefits to single parent families and high immigration. The proportion of children in single-parent families in the UK is roughly 50 per cent higher than in France and 35 per cent higher than in Germany.

According to the analysis, just 12.8 per cent of children in Britain are with cohabiting parents, compared with 27.3 in Sweden and 21 per cent in France. Critics of cohabitation maintain that most such relationships are short-lived and many end by leaving behind single-parent families. Those who want the Government to support married couples said yesterday that the figures proved the impact of tax breaks and the benefit system.

Most of those affected are elderly, meaning their chances of recovering from the surgery or serious illness they were being treated for in the first place are drastically reduced. The average age of patients battling hospital bugs is 76. The figures, from the NHS Information Centre, cover all hospital infections including superbugs MRSA and C.difficile and other dangerous illnesses such as norovirus and E.coli.

Experts say that while efforts to eradicate the superbugs have had some success, the other avoidable bugs are on the rise. Only today the Health Protection Agency announced there have been 46 outbreaks of suspected norovirus in hospitals over the past two weeks, with more than half leading to ward closures or restrictions. Since the beginning of October, there have been 244 confirmed outbreaks.

Infection experts warned that some of the diseases are becoming 'hyper-resistant' to antibiotics. Critics say that while trusts are getting to grips with familiar superbugs, other infections are slipping under the radar because figures on their prevalence do not need to be submitted to the Department of Health for scrutiny. The sharp rise in the numbers suffering from hospital infections is mirrored by a similar spike in the compensation the NHS is paying to such patients which reached a record 6 million pounds last year.

Hospital-acquired infections lead to extended stays in hospital of around one month. Last year patients battling these conditions took up almost 800,000 NHS bed nights and equated to 2,200 beds on a daily basis. Joyce Robins, co-director of Patient Concern said: 'This is a terrifying prospect for vulnerable elderly people who think they are going into hospital to get better.' Earlier this month it emerged that 38 trusts had been affected by outbreaks of norovirus, with many having to close wards. Almost 800 patients were affected.

The US Navy has responded by saying the threat is unacceptable. "Anyone who threatens to disrupt the freedom of navigation in an international strait is clearly outside the community of nations; any disruption will not be tolerated," said Amy Derrick Frost, spokesperson for the US Navy 5th Fleet in Bahrain.

Earlier this week Iran announced it will block the Strait of Hormuz, which sees the transport of over one sixth of the world's oil trade, if the West sanctions the country's oil exports. Political analyst Chris Bambery thinks that as American control in the Middle East is weakening and Iranian is growing, "We are witnessing quite a dangerous escalation. We now see that American control of the Middle East is weakest in decades... it is not in control of Iraq, Iran has considerable influence in Iraq, is extending its influence in Afghanistan."

Commenting on the possible Iranian blockade of the strait, Bambery said that if the US tries to force open the passage, "that would mean war with Iran, and that would be a huge escalation and would threaten world peace." He believes that for the US it is not simply a military conflict, but something that could spill into a regional conflict in which the US has a much weaker hand than it had a decade ago.

According to Bambery, Iran is in much stronger position now and, as he sees it, "Iranians are really challenging Americans sensing the American weakness." He also said that the Western nations are making a big mistake because the "Iranian economy is doing well and Iran is in the position to exert more influence in the regional basis as we saw this week with these new agreements in Afghanistan. It is the West who has racked up that situation," he concluded.

'The situation in the United States is a far cry from the ideals that Washington proclaims,' says the newly-released report. Moscow has previously reacted angrily to the accusations of human rights breaches that the US State Department has leveled at Russia in its annual reports.

The State Department has expressed concern about the violent attacks on rights activists and journalists in Russia, most of which go unpunished and has also criticised abuses in Russia's Caucasus, including extrajudicial killings, kidnappings and torture. And last week thousands of protesters took to the streets of Moscow to demonstrate against elections believed to have been rigged in Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's favour.

The Putin regime has come under fire recently for a series of high-profile abuse cases. In October, the widow of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko won the right for a public inquest into the death of her husband, suspected of having been fatally poisoned after defecting to the UK. Before his death, Litvinenko had accused Russia's secret services of staging terrorist acts. He also accused Putin of ordering the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

The 90-page Russian report slams EU nations, Canada and Georgia, but reserves its longest section of 20 pages for what it says are violations by the US. The report does not cover Asia, Africa or the Middle East, other than a five-page section criticising the Nato operation in Libya. Moscow laments the ongoing operation of the 'notorious' prison in Guantanamo Bay, where terrorism suspects have been held since the September 11, 2001 attacks, and criticises President Barack Obama for 'legalising indefinite and extrajudicial custody and the return of court martials'.

The report accuses the US of prying into citizens' personal lives and violating the rights of Muslim Americans in the fight against terrorism. It also points to errors made by American courts.

It would have been more in keeping with Nicholas' mission to mention hundreds of Christians losing their lives to Islamic terrorism and oppressed by Palestinian Muslim dictatorship. Nichols' sermon has an historical value, because now the entire Christian hierarchy in the UK, Catholic and Protestant as well, is part of the global battle against Israel. There is a virulent animosity towards the Jewish state in the established churches in Britain, which promulgate inflammatory libels against it. Recently Barry Morgan, the Archbishop of Wales, compared Israel to apartheid in South Africa. "The situation resembles the apartheid system in South Africa because Gaza is next to one of the most sophisticated and modern countries in the world - Israel", said Morgan.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, joined the Church of England's General Synod, which voted to disinvest Church funds from "companies that make profits from Israel's occupation". Archbishop Morgan said in a lecture on the relationship between religion and violence: "Messianic Zionism began a policy of cleansing the Promised Land of all Arabs and non-Jews rather than co-existing with them". But there has been no such "cleansing" at all in the disputed territories. The only attempt at "cleansing" has been the Palestinian attempt to kill as many Jews as possible. According to Canon Andrew White, replacement theology is dominant and present in almost every church, fueling the venom against Israel.

The revised version of "Whose Promised Land?", a highly influential book by the Anglican thinker Colin Chapman, recycles the worst Christian anti-Jewish theology. "When seen in the context of the whole Bible, however, both Old and New Testaments, the promise of the land to Abraham and his descendants does not give anyone a divine right to possess or to live in the land for all time because the coming of the kingdom of God through Jesus the messiah has transformed and reinterpreted all the promises and prophecies in the Old Testament", writes Chapman camouflaging anti-Jewish replacement theology, which helped fuel burnings at stake and pogroms during the Middle Ages, as a dispassionate analysis of the conflict of Israel and the Palestinians.

According to Bishop John Gladwin, a separate Palestinian state would be merely a "first step". "Ultimately, one shared land is the vision one would want to pursue". At the beginning of the XIX [nineteenth] century, the UK Christian clergy was a driving force behind the Zionist enterprise, inspired by a brave interpretation of the Bible. A century later, British Christianity is one of the major producers of blood libels against the Jews.

The $5.25-billion project will make the canal wider and deeper, allowing huge freighters from Asia to bypass West Coast ports and head straight to terminals on the Gulf Coast and East Coast. The neighboring ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which together handle about 40% of the nation's imported Asian goods, could lose as much as a quarter of their cargo business by some estimates after the Panama expansion is completed in 2014.

The ports, neighboring towns and railroads have launched improvement projects aimed at keeping them competitive. One proposed project, for instance, would speed the loading of cargo onto trains; others eliminate bottlenecks or increase capacity so that the ports remain alluring to importers. But a coalition of business, labor and government contends that these efforts are jeopardized by opposition from some residents, environmental groups and others. Two members of the Long Beach City Council, for example, sought to block the construction of a new railroad freight complex near the ports, saying it would increase pollution and force small businesses to relocate.

The biggest ships that can squeeze through the Panama Canal now carry 4,400 to 5,000 containers. But modern cargo vessels routinely hold three times as many of the big metal boxes. So importers often use West Coast ports to land their products from Asia. Then the containers crammed with apparel, toys and other goods move from ships to trucks or trains and on to warehouses and retailer shelves throughout the US. A wider Panama Canal would accommodate some of the biggest ships afloat - 12,600-container vessels - which will present a vastly improved "all water" cargo movement option for Asian goods bound for the southern and eastern US.

Police armed with batons and shields stormed the church to restore order, after Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests and monks came to blows during preparations for Orthodox Christmas celebrations.

View video - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16346002

The president of Greece's SEV business federation, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, recently invited journalists to his imposing neoclassical headquarters in Athens. He straightened his tie, leaned forward and with a grim expression spoke into half a dozen microphones arrayed in front of him. "Now the issue is simply whether we remain in Europe or not. The governing parties have an obligation to work together honestly to finally banish the nightmare of a return to the drachma. If this government doesn't get it right, Greece will go hungry."

His dramatic appeal was ignored, once again. The Socialist PASOK party, the conservative-liberal New Democracy party and the far-right LAOS party formed a transitional government six weeks ago under non-partisan former central banker Lucas Papademos. They vowed to avert a looming state bankruptcy. But they remain as divided as ever.

Instead of getting down to business, they are absorbed in policy wrangling that seems absurdly trivial given the scale of the tasks they face. At a cabinet meeting last Thursday, Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos and Transport Minister Makis Voridis of LAOS fell out over a draft law to accelerate amicable divorces. Marriage, Voridis argued, was "a central component of our value system" - therefore LAOS could not agree to the law. Papademos remained silent. This isn't the first time the LAOS minister has blocked a decision. Recently he resisted the complete liberalization of the issue of taxi licenses, and publicly threatened to resign.

To its credit, the Papademos government mastered two important challenges early on: it secured the payout of the sixth international loan tranche of more than 8 billion euros ($10.45 billion) from the 110 billion euros European Union and International Monetary Fund bailout package agreed in May 2010. And the parliament has passed the state budget for 2012.

But since then, Athens has failed to deliver on the binding reforms and spending cuts it had pledged in return for the cash. The top priority is the exchange of Greek government debt agreed at the EU summit on October 27. Under the deal, private creditors will voluntarily write down 50 percent of their loans. But under the terms of the summit agreement, the Greek government must reach an agreement with creditors before the end of 2011 so that the bonds can be swapped for new securities at the start of 2012. It is clear that Greece won't make that deadline. "The negotiations have run into major difficulties, we are working day and night to find a solution," Venizelos admitted.

The sticking points appear to be the levels of interest rates that Greece will have to pay for new bonds and the size of the voluntary debt cut. Even if an agreement is reached, there is doubt about whether all private creditors will stick to it. Spanish hedge fund Vega, for example, has already pulled out of the talks and threatened legal action if the losses amount to more than 50 percent. If the debt swap fails, the entire 2012 budget will be null and void because it depends on drastically reduced interest payments on Greece's government debt.

"The concept that G-d created a human being who is unable to find happiness in a loving relationship unless he violates a biblical prohibition is neither plausible nor acceptable," says the document, titled "Declaration on the Torah Approach to Homosexuality." It states that same-sex attractions can be modified and "healed," and condemns the "propaganda blitz" that has been launched "to persuade the public about the legitimacy of homosexuality."

"The media is rife with negative labels implying that one is 'hateful' or 'homophobic' if they do not accept the homosexual lifestyle as legitimate. This political coercion has silenced many into acquiescence. Unfortunately this attitude has seeped into the Torah community and many have become confused or have accepted the media's portrayal of this issue," the statement says. In fact, Obama, shortly after he took office in 2009, signed into law a "hate crimes" proposal that enhances penalties for crimes attributed to "hate" of homosexuality, providing special protections for "gays" that other victims of crime are not given.

"The Torah makes a clear statement that homosexuality is not an acceptable lifestyle or a genuine identity by severely prohibiting its conduct. Furthermore, the Torah, ever prescient about negative secular influences, warns us in Vayikra (Leviticus) 20:23 'Do not follow the traditions of the nations that I expel from before you...' Particularly the Torah writes this in regards to homosexuality and other forbidden sexual liaisons," the statement says.

The document has been signed by a coalition of more than 100 rabbis, community organizers, leaders and mental-health professionals. Among the signers who have chosen to go public with their endorsement of the position are psychologist and author Dr Miriam Adaham of Jerusalem; Rabbi Simcha Feuerman, president of the International Network of Orthodox Mental Health Professions; Los Angeles psychiatrist and author Dr Miriam Grossman; Dr Joseph Gelbfish of Brooklyn, New York; Rabbi Yaakov Salomon, psychotherapist and author; Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, a vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America and dozens more.

But while other ministries are critical of Obama's pro-homosexual drive - he's put more homosexuals in positions of power than any other president, opened the US military to open homosexuality and signed into law a "hate crimes" plan that provides special protections for homosexuals - Boynes goes one step further. "The Bible says that the enemy comes to steal, kill and destroy (John 10:10)," she said. "It is his main objective to bring confusion and cause division within the church and he does this by altering God's truth in such a way that many Christians are deceived if they are not rooted and grounded in God's word."

WND recently reported on the policy of the Obama administration to be the new global sex cop and a recently signed executive order that some say is sure to promote "quotas" of LGBT hires for federal government jobs. WND also reported on the push by various administration officials to normalize LGBT behavior, including the designation of "gender identity" as a protected status for federal jobs. WND columnist Matt Barber wrote that liberals are "desperate" in their efforts "to dredge up some natural, biological rationalization - of which science has found none - to validate demonstrably unnatural behavior."

At least 32 people were killed as they poured out of the packed Christmas-morning Mass in St Theresa Catholic Church near Abuja, the capital, Interior Minister Abba Moro told TIME. Four other bombs elsewhere in the country took at least three lives. Boko Haram, a group whose aim is to impose a strict interpretation of Islamic Shari'a on Africa's most populous country, took credit for the attacks. One-third of Nigerian states already live under Shari'a.

Authorities are now battling to keep a lid on the bubbling threat of a sectarian civil conflict that would pitch one half of Nigeria's population of 155 million against the other. "The fact that Christian facilities were bombed was intended primarily to provoke Christians into attacking Muslims," Moro told TIME. "We have appealed to our Christian brothers for them not to do so."

But two days after the bombing, the area around St Theresa remained tense as angry young men loitered just beyond military cars patrolling the area. "If the government cannot protect us, we will take revenge by ourselves," said Josiah Agbo, 18, whose mother was killed in the blast. He left only after a priest from St Theresa took to the streets urging Christians not to attack Muslims. In a country where religious leaders wield enormous power, Muslim counterparts in the powerful Sokoto and Kano caliphates - the country's historic Islamic communities - denounced the bombings.

It will also offer civilian users positioning information which will be correct to the nearest 10 metres, be able to measure speeds within 0.2 metres per second and provide clock synchronisation signals accurate to 0.02 millionths of a second. China began working on the project in 2000 and designed it to be a rival to the US government run Global Positioning System (GPS).

It will also make China's military less dependent on foreign technology. Ten satellites have been sent into space and a further six will be sent by 2012, extending the system to most parts of Asia. Eventually the network will increase to a total of 35 satellites with global coverage by 2020. Having its own GPS system would also protect China against the risk of the US GPS turning off. It has also been suggested that Beidou could target cruise missiles against Taiwan if a war broke out over territory.

There have also been reports the network could be used to guide drones which could destroy foreign naval forces should China come under attack. But it's developers are keen to stress that Beidou has plenty of benefits for the mainstream public.

The new update will show friends your profile picture and the product you have 'endorsed' in much larger form in the main news feed - a move that the site admits is designed to bring in advertising revenue. Facebook say the scheme is a vital revenue booster, which will help it claw back some of the $1 billion a year it spends on developing the site. The site claims that because the stories are labelled 'Sponsored', they will be less intrusive.

If a user decides to 'like' a product, the endorsement will also remain on their new, open 'timeline' profile, enabling companies to pay Facebook to feature their adverts more visibly. But the announcement will infuriate users who feel that the social network is taking too much ownership over its 800 milllion members' personal information. Facebook users in the US have now launched a legal action against the company to contest the commercial use of the 'Like' button.

Western tensions with Iran have increased since a UN report claimed last month that Tehran appears to have worked on designing an atomic bomb. Iran strongly denies this and insists it is developing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The possibility of imposing sanctions on Iran has divided UN nations. Iran has defiantly expanded nuclear activity despite four rounds of UN sanctions meted out since 2006 over its refusal to suspend sensitive uranium enrichment.

Many diplomats believe only sanctions targeting Iran's lifeblood oil sector might be painful enough to make it change course, but Russia and China - big trade partners of Tehran - have blocked such a move at the United Nations. Iran this week repeated the warning it issued earlier this month, stating that should sanctions be imposed it will cut off oil access through the Strait of Hormuz - the world's fourth biggest oil shipping lane.

However, the US State Department has since dismissed Iran's threats by describing them as having 'an element of bluster'. According to official Iranian news agency IRNA, Iran's First Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi warned this week: 'If they (the West) impose sanctions on Iran's oil exports, then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz.' But Mark Toner, spokesperson for the US State Department, responded: 'It's another attempt to distract attention away from the real issue, which is their continued non-compliance with their international nuclear obligations.'

Rahimi's remarks coincided with a 10-day Iranian naval exercise in the Strait and nearby waters, a show of military force that began on Saturday.

The words which attract attention range from ones seemingly related to diseases or bioweapons such as 'human to animal' and 'outbreak' to other, more obscure words such as 'drill' and 'strain'. The DHS also watches for words such as 'illegal immigrant'.

The DHS outlined plans to scan blogs, Twitter and Facebook for words such as 'illegal immigrant', 'outbreak', 'drill', 'strain', 'virus', 'recovery', 'deaths', 'collapse', 'human to animal' and 'trojan', according to an 'impact asssessment' document filed by the agency. When its search tools net an account using the phrases, they record personal information. It's still not clear how this information is used - and who the DHS shares it with.

The group says that the government has used scans of social media before to analyse specific events - such as the 2010 BP oil spill - but this general 'watching' of social media using fake profiles is new. 'The initiatives were designed to gather information from 'online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards,' to store and analyze the information gathered, and then to 'disseminate relevant and appropriate de-identified information to federal, state, local, and foreign governments and private sector partners,' the group said in a court filing.

The group claims that a request under the Freedom of Information Act to access the documentation has gone unanswered.