Although the number of Catholics in Benin is rising quickly, the majority of the population follow voodoo, which was taken by slaves to the Caribbean. The Pope is also likely to face questions about comments on condoms. On his 2009 visit to Africa, he sparked outrage among Aids activists by saying that handing out condoms was worsening the spread of HIV in the continent worst hit by Aids.

Pope Benedict is to visit the city of Ouidah on Saturday, where there is a voodoo museum. Voodoo Day is celebrated as a public holiday in Benin, where 40% of the population say they follow traditional African religions. Some 27% classify themselves as Christians and 22% Muslims, but the BBC's Virgile Ahissou in the largest city, Cotonou, says MANY OF THESE PEOPLE COMBINE VOODOO PRACTICES WITH EITHER CHRISTIANITY OR ISLAM.

The bizarre diktat from Brussels has far-reaching implications for member states, including Britain, as no water sold in the EU can now claim to protect against dehydration. Any producer breaching the order, signed by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, faces being jailed for up to two years. It took the 21 scientists on the panel three years of analysis into the link between water and dehydration to come to their extraordinary conclusion.

Last night the decision of the European Food Safety Authority's panel on Dietetic Products, Nutrition and Allergies was labelled "beyond parody". Ukip's deputy leader Paul Nuttall, who sits on the European Parliament's Public Health Committee, said: "I had to read this four or five times before I believed it. It is a perfect example of what the EU does best and makes the bendy banana law look positively sane."

Conservative MEP Roger Helmer said: "The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are, highly paid, highly pensioned officials trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true. IF EVER THERE WERE AN EPISODE WHICH DEMONSTRATES THE FOLLY OF THE GREAT EUROPEAN PROJECT THEN THIS IS IT." A spokesman for the Department of Health said: "Of course water hydrates. While we support the EU in preventing false claims about commercial products, we need to exercise common sense as far as possible."

In early 2010, when Greece first ran into serious debt problems and required an immediate 110 billion euros ($148 billion) bailout, the debate in Europe was more of a philosophical one. European Union member states, said many, should not be forced to pay the debts of fellow members. This year, the discussion has taken a much more existential turn. With an ever-increasing number of countries becoming infected by the debt contagion spreading across the Continent, serious questions have been raised as to whether the EU is even able to help out its struggling members.

And the heart of the increasingly tense debate as to what should happen next has become the ongoing clash between France and Germany. Should the European Central Bank (ECB) become the lender of last resort or not? On Wednesday, France reiterated its affirmative answer to that question. In comments to the newspaper Les Echos, French Finance Minister Francois Baroin demanded that the ECB step in to do everything in its power to prop up the common currency. "We want to deploy all European institutions, including the ECB, to find the best possible answers to the crisis," he said. Baroin added that the US Federal Reserve "actively intervenes" in times of need, as do the central banks of Britain and Japan. The ECB, he demands, should do the same.

Berlin, however, is adamantly opposed to such a move. Were the ECB to flood the market with liquidity in the form of unlimited purchases of government bonds from debt-stricken euro-zone member states, rapidly climbing inflation could be the result. And Germany, for historical reasons stretching back to the 1920s - when hyperinflation smoothed Adolf Hitler's rise to power - has a deep-seated phobia of rapidly rising prices.

Makarov added, according to Russian news agencies, that "under certain conditions local and regional conflicts may develop into a full-scale war involving nuclear weapons." A steady decline in Russia's conventional forces has prompted the Kremlin to rely increasingly on its nuclear deterrent. The nation's military doctrine says it may use nuclear weapons to counter a nuclear attack on Russia or an ally, or a large-scale conventional attack that threatens Russia's existence.

Russia sees NATO's expansion to include former Soviet republics and ex-members of the Soviet bloc in eastern and central Europe as a key threat to Russia's security. Makarov specifically referred to NATO's plans to offer membership to Georgia and Ukraine as potentially threatening Russia's security. Russia routed Georgian forces in a brief August 2008 war over a separatist province of South Ossetia. Moscow later recognized South Ossettia and another breakaway Georgian province of Abkhazia as independent states and increased its military presence there.

Russia also considers missile defense plans as another security challenge. Russia has strongly opposed the US-led missile defense plan, saying it could threaten its nuclear forces and undermine their deterrence potential.

Clear signs of impending eruptions - seismic disturbances on the seabed - have also been spreading. Since July, more than 10,000 minor earthquakes have shaken El Hierro, but since October 22, the tremors have become increasingly stronger with some even surpassing four on the Richter scale. The quakes are showing a pattern typical of flowing magma, the so-called harmonic volcanic tremor - a clear sign of impending eruptions.

And scientists have been warning since September that if and when those eruptions do occur, they could well happen on land. In recent days, the tremors have shifted from the south to the north of El Hierro. Because most of the quakes there had occurred at a depth of ten kilometers or greater, there was probably no immediate risk of an eruption in the area, the local authorities had said. The magma had been confined to the deep.

But it has now started moving upwards - the most recent earthquakes have been shallower. There could soon be eruptions in or near the El Golfo valley on the northern coast, the IGN has warned. And an outpouring of lava could prove dangerous not only if it happens on land, but also in shallow water, where it could result in large steam explosions, says Ramon Ortiz, scientific adviser to the local government.

We're raising our alert status for the next financial crisis. We already raised it last week after spreads on US credit default swaps started blowing out. We raised it again after seeing the remarks of Mr Mobius, chief of the $50 billion emerging markets desk at Templeton Asset Management. Speaking in Tokyo, he pointed to derivatives, the financial hairball of futures, options, and swaps in which nearly all the world's major banks are tangled up.

And what of the derivatives sitting on the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve? Here's another factor behind our heightened state of alert. Through quantitative easing efforts alone," says Euro Pacific Capital's Michael Pento, "Ben Bernanke has added $1.8 trillion of longer-term GSE debt and mortgage-backed securities (MBS)."

Think about that for a moment. The Fed's entire balance sheet totaled around $800 billion before the 2008 crash, nearly all of it Treasuries. Now the Fed holds more than double that amount in mortgage derivatives alone, junk that the banks needed to clear off their own balance sheets.

"As the size of the Fed's balance sheet ballooned," continues Mr Pento, "the dollar amount of capital held at the Fed has remained fairly constant. Today, the Fed has $52.5 billion of capital backing a $2.7 trillion balance sheet.

"Prior to the bursting of the credit bubble, the public was shocked to learn that our biggest investment banks were levered 30-to-1. When asset values fell, those banks were quickly wiped out. But now the Fed is holding many of the same types of assets and is levered 51-to-1! If the value of their portfolio were to fall by just 2%, the Fed itself would be wiped out."

They may not carry the same drama as "bond market mayhem", but the very idea of altering the fundamental laws underpinning the European Union so soon after they were agreed runs the risk of shaking the 50-year-old European project to its core and may end up exacerbating the sovereign debt crisis. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been the most forthright of Europe's leaders in calling for changes to the Lisbon Treaty, arguing that amendments are necessary if there is to be more rapid integration and greater stability in the euro zone. The changes she is seeking include much stricter sanctions on countries that miss budget deficit targets.

"It is time for a breakthrough to a new Europe," she said in Berlin last week, emphasizing that the survival of the EU depended on being able to amend its treaty, even though it took eight years to negotiate and came into force only two years ago. "A community that says, regardless of what happens in the rest of the world, that it can never again change its ground rules, that community simply can't survive. I'm convinced of this."

"Any revision of the treaty is for deeper integration of the euro area but also for a stronger European Union," Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso told the European Parliament on Wednesday, a bid to keep the process inclusive of all 27 countries in the EU, not just the 17 in the euro zone. "But let's not fool ourselves. Treaty change takes time and should not be seen as the immediate solution for the current crisis," he said. Others are even more cautious, including Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council and the man responsible for chairing summits of EU heads of state or government.

Van Rompuy's concern is that opening the treaty to changes without a very precise idea of why and to what extent runs the risk of everything in the document suddenly being up for renegotiation - not unlike pulling a single thread in a knitted sweater only to see the entire piece of clothing unravel. In discussions he will have with leaders over the coming month, Van Rompuy will try to define what changes might be needed and only then look at what the legal necessities are.

The emergency administration, which is meant to govern Italy until elections are due in 2013, is made up of bankers, lawyers and university professors but not a single elected official - an extraordinary development for a Western democracy.

But it is a deal that much of the electorate and nearly all the mainstream parties have signed up to, in order to save Italy from the economic abyss by trimming the country's bloated bureaucracy, slashing its 1.9 trillion euro debt and unleashing its economic potential after years of stagnation.

Almost none of the new appointees was familiar to the average man or woman in the street - a fact that some Italians hailed as the new administration's chief strength, saying it was above party politics and untainted by any links to the discredited centre-Right government of Silvio Berlusconi or the weak and divided centre-Left opposition. Italy has a track record of appointing 'technical' governments during periods of political paralysis and party deadlock.

Mr Monti said that after talks with the country's big parties, he had decided that "the non-presence of politicians in the government would help it."

For EU veterans, the drama has echoes of 1993 when the Bundesbank ditched orthodoxy to rescue France, after first cutting Britain and Italy adrift in the Exchange Rate Mechanism. But this time the stakes are much higher. On that occasion, Chancellor Helmut Kohl pulled rank, more of less ordering his bankers to obey. "We must always bow three times before the Tricoleur", as he famously put it.

On Wednesday, France began to deploy its political leverage in earnest, leading an open revolt against Germany over the fire-fighting role of the European Central Bank. The country's budget minister Valerie Pecresse said the central bank had a greater duty to Europe's citizens than mere adherence to its low inflation mandate. "The ECB's role is to ensure the stability of the euro, but also the financial stability of Europe. We trust that the ECB will take the necessary measures," she said. Finance minister François Baroin made near identical comments to Les Echos.

In what is clearly a co-ordinated move by top EU players, European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said Europe is "facing a truly systemic crisis" that requires a condign response from all players in the unfolding drama. "Should the central bank be responsible for financial stability as well as price stability? My reply is yes, definitely." It is a painful moment for Germany. Either it gives up fiscal sovereignty and monetary purism, embracing eurobonds and allowing the ECB to backstop Europe's sovereign debt; or it endangers its whole strategic investment in Europe's post-War order.

The EU's €440 billion EFSF bail-out fund was supposed to take over on the rescue task, relieving the central bank. It has been a disastrous flop, unable to raise money itself at a viable cost after toying with leverage plans that greatly concentrate risk for creditor states. The net effect has been to accelerate contagion to the core. This leaves the ECB as the only lender of last resort, the one body that can stop monetary union spiralling out of control. "It's ECB bail-out or bust. And it's looking like bust," said Nobel economist Paul Krugman.

The eurozone crisis has left UK banks unable to raise the funding they need to make loans to businesses, evoking the spectre of the crunch that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers. And on one critical measure - the cost of insuring banks against going bust - lenders are already facing tougher conditions than at the height of the crunch, the Bank said.

Sir Mervyn King, the Bank's Governor, said that because of the eurozone crisis, households, companies and banks face a period of extraordinary uncertainty, including a possible slide back into recession. "There is weakness over the next few quarters. No one can know what precisely the outcome will be," he said. "In the last three years, we have seen extraordinary events. Who knows what's going to happen tomorrow, let alone next month?"

The banks can only issue loans to companies and home owners if they can find sufficient funding on the markets. According to the Bank of England's inflation report, banks' funding in the three months to September fell to levels not seen since Lehman Brothers, the US investment bank, crashed in September 2008.

At a meeting of the Arab League in Morocco, he said diplomatic efforts were "close to the end of the road". As diplomatic pressure increases on Damascus, the situation on the ground is deteriorating as well. More and more clashes are being reported between the regular army and opponents who now call themselves the Free Syrian Army.

That raises the spectre of this turning into a full-scale civil war.

But Syria has shown little sign of compromise. At today's meeting here in Morocco, Arab ministers are expected to confirm Syria's suspension from the Arab League and possibly impose new measures. Syria's chair at the meeting is empty after Damascus angrily decided to boycott the meeting. Attitudes are hardening on all sides.

The plan to post up to 2,500 Marines in the Northern Territory from mid-2012 was unveiled Wednesday during a lightning visit to Canberra by US President Barack Obama, who said it was a "commitment to the entire Asia Pacific region." But it drew criticism from China, widely seen as the target of the move, with the foreign ministry questioning whether it was appropriate or "in the interest of countries in this region."

Obama said the notion that the United States was afraid of or trying to edge out China was "mistaken" but stressed during his remarks on the Australian military boost that the Asian powerhouse would have to "play by the rules. I've said repeatedly and I'll say again today that we welcome a rising, peaceful China," he said in a joint press conference with Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Wednesday. "The main message that I have said not only publicly but privately to the Chinese is that with their rise comes increased responsibilities. It's important for them to play by the rules of the road."

"There's going to be times where they're not and we will send a clear message to them that they need to be on track in terms of accepting the rules and responsibilities that come with being a world power." The Australian troop boost is seen as a clear statement by Washington that it intends to stand up for its interests in the region. The US has viewed with concern China's growing assertiveness in the region on territorial disputes, as have many of the Asian powerhouse's neighbours.

That, in turn, is fuelling inflation and increasing the pain for hundreds of thousands of Hungarians who took out mortgages in foreign currencies when the forint was much stronger. Fitch and Standard & Poor's on Friday shifted their credit outlook for Hungary, rated on the lowest investment grade, to negative - making a downgrade to junk status appear only a matter of time.

With the highest government debt among central and east European countries, Hungary has seen credit flows slow as investors have fled risk and the growth outlook for its biggest market - the eurozone - has darkened. There are now fears that Hungary's predicament could foreshadow a new wave of contagion to CEE countries, which were particularly badly hit by the 2008 financial crisis.

Hungary's centre-right Fidesz government is nonplussed. It says it has worked hard to control the budget deficit, targeting 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product next year, and started reducing government debt from the 80 per cent of GDP inherited from the previous administration.

"We are not Greece," says Zoltan Kovacs, a government communications minister. "We suspect some speculative steps behind this. It is not justified at all." Laszlo Akar, vice-president of GKI, a Budapest economic research institute, agrees that the current pressure is "not justified by the budget stance".

The Treasury aims to sell between 3 billion euros ($4.1 billion) and 4 billion euros of a new 10-year benchmark bond that will take its 2011 borrowing to almost 90 percent of the targeted amount. France, whose yield premium over Germany hit a euro-era high on Tuesday on fears it may lose its top-grade AAA rating, is also due to sell 6-7 billion euros of debt.

The Spanish auction will be the last before a general election on Sunday which is widely expected to usher the centre-right People's Party (PP) into power. With the crisis spreading to the 17-country currency's core, PP leader Mariano Rajoy will have little time to assure investors he can take control of Spain's finances and stop it becoming the fourth member of the bloc to require a bailout.

A successful Spanish T-bill auction on Tuesday and the recent rise in Spanish debt yields means the paper is likely to attract demand but the cost will be high, with an average yield of around 6.5 percent expected by analysts. A 10-year yield of more than 7 percent is generally regarded as unsustainable for countries to finance their debts.

Over the past year, as the Federal Reserve massively increased its holdings of US Treasury securities and entities in China marginally decreased theirs, the Fed surpassed the Chinese as the top owner of publicly held US government debt. In its latest monthly report, the Federal Reserve said that as of September 28, it owned $1.665 trillion in US Treasury securities. That was more than double the $812 billion in US Treasury securities the Fed said it owned as of September 29, 2010.

Meanwhile, as of the end of this September, entities in mainland China owned $1.1483 trillion in US Treasury securities, according to data published today by the US Treasury Department. That was down slightly from the $1.1519 trillion in US Treasury securities the Chinese owned as of the end of September 2010, according to the same Treasury Department report.

Thus, at the end of September 2010, the Chinese owned about $339.9 billion more in US Treasury securities than the Fed owned at that time. By the end of September 2011, the Fed owned about $516.7 billion more in US Treasury securities than the Chinese owned.