"The weather system that brought the damage to Melbourne is known in meteorological terms as a supercell thunderstorm, an organised beast of a storm that once it gets going tends to last more than your average thunderstorm," he said. The fierce storm, which flooded city streets, saw some 26 millimetres (one inch) of rain fall on Melbourne within an hour Saturday while other areas recorded up to 70 millimetres.

In the city centre the National Gallery of Victoria suffered flooding, while the Docklands Stadium was among those buildings damaged during the storm, which washed out horse races. Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Wasyl Drosdowsky said the hail that hit in one suburban area was up to 10 centimetres (four inches) in diameter.

In the nearby tiny town of Nindigully, residents were marvelling at the amount of water surrounding the rural outpost. "Overall, we are happy to have experienced this flood because of the beauty of vast expanses of water through the bush that you never forget," Steve Burns, the owner of the 146-year-old Nindigully Pub told AAP.

In January hundreds of people were killed in riots in Jos, which lies between the mainly Muslim north and the more Christian south. Ethnic and religious riots also broke out in 2008, killing hundreds. The attack happened before dawn on Sunday morning when gangs of men descended on the village and attacked people with machetes, reports say.

A resident of Dogo-Nahawa said the attackers had fired guns as they entered the village. "The shooting was just meant to bring people from their houses and then when people came out they started cutting them with machetes," Peter Jang told Reuters. An unnamed government official told AFP at least 100 people had been killed - most of them women and children. Another eyewitness told the BBC he saw scores of dead bodies including those of children. A doctor at a hospital in Jos told Reuters news agency that victims had been cut by machetes and burnt.

Analysts say the attack seems to be in reprisal for the clashes between Christians and Muslims in January, which claimed the lives of at least 200 people and displaced thousands of others.

It is the latest in a series of incidents raising religious tensions in the Muslim-majority country. The journalists said they had attended the church service to check reports of the illegal conversion of Muslims, but found no evidence of it. While non-Catholics can attend Mass, the Church does not allow those who are not baptised to receive the communion wafer.

Protests against a court ruling in December that non-Muslims could use the word "Allah" led the government to appeal against the judgement. Arson attacks then followed, mainly targeting churches, and wild boar's heads were placed at mosques. Pigs are considered unclean by Muslims and their presence would be taken as an insult.

Malays, who are required to be Muslim in Malaysia, make up a majority of the country's population alongside substantial Chinese and Indian minorities. The Malaysian constitution gives primacy to Islam but allows the free practice of other faiths.

Many economists expect China to allow the yuan to appreciate slightly this year, but the cautious tone by Mr Zhou means that any change may not happen for some time. He said that the central bank would maintain the "basic stability" of the currency. So, despite the fact that the Chinese economy grew by 10.7pc in the fourth quarter of last year, the country's loose monetary policy looks set to continue.

"If we are to exit from irregular policies and return to ordinary economic policies, we must be extremely prudent about our choice of timing," Mr Zhou said. "This also includes the [yuan] exchange rate policy." China's currency policy has been the subject of fierce debate, particularly in the US and Europe, with the country's central bank accused of keeping the yuan artificially low to promote a domestic exports boom.

The relative value of the dollar is important to China, as the country is the world's largest holder of US government debt. According to data from the US Treasury Department, China held $894.8 billion (591 billion pounds) of US Treasury securities at the end of December. Roughly two-thirds of the country's reserves are believed to be in dollars and dollar-denominated assets such as gold. "The US dollar is still an extremely important currency, playing a key role in international trade, cross-border capital flows, direct investment as well as in determining whether we can smoothly overcome the global financial crisis," Mr Zhou said.

Basic supermarket groceries are currently immune from VAT, along with books, newspapers and children's clothes. However a VAT levy on food of between three and five per cent would raise billions of pounds in tax and help reduce Government borrowings, which are expected to hit 180 billion pounds this year. Food sales from supermarkets are estimated to total 120 billion pounds a year.

The tax would be controversial as it would disproportionately affect poorer families. Any move to impose it would be vehemently opposed by the UK's large food retailers, who argue that it would be a 'tax on living'. Justin King, the chief executive of J Sainsbury, said this weekend that a tax on groceries would be a "very bad idea". Another supermarket executive said last night that the tax would be "political dynamite".

The topic is being tentatively brought up in Whitehall as politicians, lobbyists and civil servants examine possible ways of raising revenues, according to multiple retail industry sources. An increase in headline VAT above its current 17.5 per cent level is also being mooted. A Treasury spokesman said that there was "absolutely no question" of the current Chancellor imposing VAT on groceries.

It came amid escalating tension in the long-running dispute between Iran and the West over Tehran's nuclear program, with the United States pushing for new UN sanctions against the major oil producer. Ahmadinejad described the destruction of the twin towers in New York on September 11, 2001 as a "complicated intelligence scenario and act," IRNA reported.

He added: "The September 11 incident was a big fabrication as a pretext for the campaign against terrorism and a prelude for staging an invasion against Afghanistan." He did not elaborate. In January, Ahmadinejad termed the September 11 attacks "suspicious" and accused the West of seeking to dominate the Middle East. Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map, was re-elected in a disputed presidential vote last June that stirred the largest display of internal unrest in the country since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

The British and Dutch governments want reimbursement for the 3.8 billion euros (3.4 billion pounds; $5.2 billion) they paid out in compensation to customers in 2008.

Talks between Iceland, the UK and the Netherlands broke down on Friday without agreement. With a third of votes counted, 93% of Icelanders have voted "No", less than 2% back the deal, and the remaining votes are invalid. Britain and the Netherlands want the money as repayment for bailing out customers in the Icesave online bank, which folded in 2008 due to the global financial meltdown.

Many Icelanders believe the plan should be rejected because they feel they are being penalised for the mistakes of the banking industry. "I will vote 'No' simply because I disagree very strongly with us... having to shoulder this burden," Ingimar Gudmundsson, a lorry driver, told AFP news agency. "We want to pay our debts but we want to do it without going bankrupt," Steinunn Ragnarsdottir, a pianist who voted in Reykjavik City Hall, told Reuters.

There is also anger against the UK for using anti-terrorist legislation to freeze Icesave assets in the country. Arni Gunnarsson, a former Icelandic MP, told the BBC News website: "We have not forgotten how Britain used battleships against Iceland during the cod wars. We find this a very strange method of thanking the Icelandic people for sacrificing the lives of their seamen during World War II. The colonial attitude is still going strong. The UK should come to its senses."

Balducci has been a member since 1995 of "Gentlemen of His Holiness," an exclusive fraternity of ushers within the papal household who serve during state and special occasions. Members of the group bore Pope John Paul II's coffin in 2005. This latest Vatican embarrassment, coming not long after Irish priests were summoned to Rome to discuss decades of clerical sexual abuse in Ireland, surfaced inadvertently as a result of a probe into corruption involving public works contracts.

Balducci, who sits on the board of Italy's public works council and is a construction consultant to the Vatican, was one of four people arrested in February in connection with the corruption probe. He has not yet been charged in that case, which remains open. On Wednesday, La Repubblica published excerpts from the wiretaps and other police documents from the probe, which indicated Balducci was in regular contact with Ehiem, a member of the Vatican's Giulia Choir. Police identified him as part "of an organized network ... to abet male prostitution."

Among the men allegedly procured for Balducci, according to the transcripts, were "two black Cuban boys," a former male model from Naples and a rugby player from Rome.

To express his enduring respect for Judaism and Christianity, Ayatollah Khomeini used to say, "Moses is my right eye and Jesus is my left." But in a meeting with Islamic ambassadors in Tehran, he also aired the view that today, given how diluted those faiths have become, there are no authentic Jews or Christians left.

Iran's ultimate aim is to establish global Islamic rule, a new Islamic empire, but this time under Shi'ite leadership. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself endorses the Shi'ite belief that once the Mahdi ("the Guided One") makes his prophesied return, the whole world will convert to Shi'ism. This belief, strange as it may sound to Western ears, lies at the heart of Iran's foreign policy.

The current version of the program is widely seen as providing meager protection against attack, but a new version being built will be more robust - largely because it's rooted in NSA technology. The program is designed to look for indicators of cyber attacks by digging into all Internet communications, including the contents of emails, according to the declassified summary.

Homeland Security will then strip out identifying information and pass along data on new threats to NSA. It will also use threat information from NSA to better identify emerging cyber attacks.

NSA's role is a careful balance because of the political battles that ensued over the agency's role in domestic surveillance in the George W Bush administration. Declassifying details of the NSA's role, in a program initially developed during the Bush administration and continued in the Obama administration, will likely ignite new debates over privacy.

"Yes. We're prepared to take responsibility," Stupak said on ABC's "Good Morning America" when asked if he and his 11 Democratic allies were willing to accept the consequences for bringing down healthcare reform over abortion. "Let's face it. I want to see healthcare. But we're not going to bypass the principles of belief that we feel strongly about," he said.

The Michigan Democrat held up House legislation last year until he was satisfied that its language prevented federal tax dollars from being used to fund abortions.

The White House had urged against the vote. The government of Turkey, a key American ally and fellow Nato member, had lobbied hard for the US Congress not to vote on the issue. The BBC's Jane O'Brien in Washington says Turkey must be hoping that, as with a similar resolution two years ago, the issue will not come to the floor of the House for a full vote. In 2007, it passed the committee stage, but was shelved after pressure from the George W Bush administration.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul responded angrily to the committee's vote, saying it was "an injustice to history" to take such a decision with "political concerns in mind. Turkey will not be responsible for the negative results that this event may lead to," he said. Turkey accepts that atrocities were committed but argues they were part of the war and that there was no systematic attempt to destroy the Christian Armenian people. The Armenian government welcomed the vote, calling it "an important step towards the prevention of crimes against humanity".

Armenia wants Turkey to recognise the killings as an act of genocide, but successive Turkish governments have refused to do so. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died in 1915, when they were deported en masse from eastern Anatolia by the Ottoman Empire. They were killed by troops or died from starvation and disease. Armenians have campaigned for the killings to be recognised internationally as genocide - and more than 20 countries have done so.

A quake with a magnitude of 6.4 has also struck southern Taiwan. This rash of tectonic movements around the Pacific "Rim of Fire" is heightening concern that Japan - the most earthquake-prone country in the world - is next in line for a major earthquake. Those concerns have been stoked by the unexplained appearance of a fish that is known traditionally as the 'Messenger from the Sea-god's Palace'.

The giant oarfish can grow up to five metres in length and is usually to be found at depths of 1,000 metres and very rarely above 200 metres from the surface. Long and slender with a dorsal fin the length of its body, the oarfish resembles a snake. In recent weeks, 10 specimens have been found either washed ashore or in fishing nets off Ishikawa Prefecture, half-a-dozen have been caught in nets off Toyama Prefecture and others have been reported in Kyoto, Shimane and Nagasaki prefectures, all on the northern coast.

According to traditional Japanese lore, the fish rise to the surface and beach themselves to warn of an impending earthquake - and there are scientific theories that bottom-dwelling fish may very well be susceptible to movements in seismic fault lines and act in uncharacteristic ways in advance of an earthquake - but experts here are placing more faith in their constant high-tech monitoring of the tectonic plates beneath the surface.

Mr Wilders was visibly buoyed by the results, but was also combative in his reaction, and called the results the first step in the upcoming campaign for parliamentary elections. "The national campaign begins today. Today, in Almere and The Hague, tomorrow in all of the Netherlands... On 9 June, we'll conquer the Netherlands," he said.

The question remains whether the party will be able to join local government in those two cities. Dutch politics features a plethora of parties, and compromise is necessary to form coalitions. Geert Wilders has said his party is ready to find the middle ground, but now he will be tested. Other Dutch parties are loath to work together with the PVV because of its outspoken standpoints.

Since releasing the anti-Islam film Fitna two years ago, and being refused entry into the UK last year, Mr Wilders has been riding high in the opinion polls. His party has consistently polled as one of the biggest in the country. The fact that he has been charged with fomenting hatred and discrimination has, if anything, only served to increase his popularity, at home and abroad. The trial is currently on hold after two preliminary hearings, but will resume in the summer, and ultimately Wilders could face two years in prison if convicted. But this, too, seems to have worked in the politician's favour, with many seeing him as a champion of the right to free speech.

"It's our fundamental right to decide how we want to teach our children," says Uwe Romeike, an Evangelical Christian and a concert pianist who sold his treasured Steinway to help pay for the move. Romeike decided to uproot his family in 2008 after he and his wife had accrued about $10,000 in fines for homeschooling their three oldest children and police had turned up at their doorstep and escorted them to school. "My kids were crying, but nobody seemed to care," Romeike says of the incident.

So why did he seek asylum in the US rather than relocate to nearby Austria or another European country that allows homeschooling? Romeike's wife Hannelore tells TIME the family was contacted by the Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which suggested they go to the US and settle in Morristown, Tennessee. The nonprofit organization, which defends the rights of the US homeschooling community - with its estimated 2 million children, or about 4% of the total school-age population - is expanding its overseas outreach. And on January 26, the HSLDA helped the Romeikes become the first people granted asylum in the US because they were persecuted for homeschooling.

The ruling is tricky politically for Washington and its allies in Europe, where several countries - including Spain and the Netherlands - allow homeschooling only under exceptional circumstances, such as when a child is extremely ill. That helps explain why in late February, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement formally appealed the Romeike ruling, which was issued by an immigration judge in Memphis, Tennessee. His unprecedented decision has raised concerns that the already heavily backlogged immigration courts will be flooded with asylum petitions from homeschoolers in countries typically regarded as having nonrepressive governments.