In a fiery speech Tuesday in the Iranian holy city of Qom, Mojtaba Zolnour, Khamenei's representative in the Revolutionary Guard, said he asked Ahmadinejad: "What do you see in this Mashaei, other than links to exorcists, soothsayers and fortune tellers? ...They come and gurgle on about his prophecies, and Mr Ahmadinejad thinks he has divine knowledge."

Ahmadinejad has also frequently raised concerns with what some see as his obsession over the concept of the "12th Imam," a belief among some Muslims that a leader who has been in hiding since 869 will return and unite the world under the banner of Islam. Believers say the 12th Imam will only appear during a time of worldwide chaos, however, LEADING SOME TO FEAR AHMADINEJAD WOULD DELIBERATELY ACT TO DESTABILIZE THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION IN THE HOPES OF SPARKING THE IMAM'S RETURN. Ahmadinejad has reportedly stabilized a rift with Kahmenei, following a nearly two-week sustained sulk that kept him out of his office.

But the same apparently can't be said for those arrested. Superstition and mysticism are to an extent vestiges of pre-Islamic Iranian culture. And while the Islamic system officially shuns them, a significant number of Iranians may share some of these unorthodox beliefs. Nor do many Iranians think such beliefs exist only within the their own culture.

"The reality of conjuring 'jinn' is not exclusive to our society," said Morteza Nabavi, a member of the Expediency Council, which mediates between the Iranian parliament and the Guardian Council and who is also managing director of Resalat newspaper. "In other places too, catching jinn and eliciting their help is also relevant." But that doesn't mean the proponents of such beliefs should be running a government, according to Nabavi. "The deviant group that have recently been mentioned have reached out to others ...and they have even influenced the president and gained his support." Despite the fact that Ahmadinejad is at the center of this controversy, there are limits to how seriously others in the regime are willing to damage him.

Radicals carrying placards proclaiming 'Islam will dominate the world' branded US leaders 'murderers' and warned vengeance attacks were 'guaranteed'. For many, it was a shock that the protest was allowed to go ahead in the first place as it came shortly after the verdict into the 7/7 inquest was released by Lady Justice Heather Hallett.

She recorded that the 52 victims had been 'unlawfully' killed when four terrorists attacked three London Underground trains and a bus in 2005. Lady Justice Hallett made a string of recommendations to both MI5 to prevent further atrocities and to 999 workers to react more effectively to major events. Relatives of the victims wept openly as the judge announced her verdict and she paid tribute to their 'quiet dignity' before reading the name of each person who died.

However just three miles from the Royal Court of Justice, Muslim protester Abu Muaz, 28, from east London claimed 'it is only a matter of time' before another attack and that the 'West is the enemy'. The capital has seen heightened security in recent days over fears of a revenge attacks by Al-Qaeda members. The protest against Bin Laden's death was organised by controversial preacher Anjem Choudary - who praised both 7/7 and the September 11 attacks. The former UK leader of the outlawed al-Muhajiroun and member of the 'poppy-burning' Muslims Against Crusades extremist group called on the US to return bin Laden's body to relatives.

Downing Street denied there had been any instruction from the prime minister to departments to end the tradition. However, Number 10 did hoist the flag last year. The UK's relationship with Europe is a potential source of tension between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition partners. The government's own published guidance still does suggest that departments should mark the day by flying the EU flag.

A spokesperson from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills told the BBC their permanent secretary had taken the decision to fly the flag as in previous years. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy and Climate Change, led by another Liberal Democrat, Chris Huhne, told the BBC it did not have a flagpole.

1. Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, has put further rate rises on hold until at least July and dropped the phrase "strong vigilance" from the ECB's news conference to explain the ECB's policy decision.

2. Contrary to expectations as little as a month ago that the Bank of England would by now be taking the first tentative steps towards a policy tightening, the UK Monetary Policy Committee has again left rates on hold in the face of weak economic data. No-one now expects a rate rise until the Autumn at the earliest.

3. The Markit/CIPS headline services PMI index for the UK eased to 54.3 in April from 57.1, suggesting that the UK economy failed to pick up speed in April following its lack lustre performance in the first quarter.

4. German industrial orders fell unexpectedly in March, reflecting an unusually low number of large orders and suggesting that the country's remarkable economic rebound may be past its peak.

5. World stock markets and the crude oil price took big hits on Thursday amid growing worries about the sustainability of the economic rebound.

6. The number of Americans filing for jobless aid rose to an eight month high last week. US productivity growth also slowed in the first quarter, backing up suggestions of a loss of momentum in US job creation.

7. US 10 year Treasury yields are down a further 4 basis points to 3.18 per cent, a five month low, despite Bernanke's insistence that quantitative easing will cease in June. Anyone for QE3?

8. The price of silver fell a further 6.6 per cent on Thursday, taking its five day decline to nearly a quarter as investors continued to lose their appetite for risk.

9. Most other commodity prices are also under the cosh on fears that the boom has run its course, and the cycle is about to turn down again. Glencore seems to have got the timing of its IPO spot on, or perhaps just a tad too late.

10. Reflecting its traditional safe haven status, the yen has been the major gainer in currency markets, despite rumours that the Japanese authorities might soon take further action to halt its rise.

And that's just for today! Is this just "sell in May" syndrome, or something more ominous? I guess we are about to find out.

The mass transit walkout was set to last for four hours at morning or evening rush hours. Flight personnel were set to strike from 10am to 2pm (0800-1200 GMT), and railway workers from 2pm to 6pm (1200-1600 GMT). Alitalia changed departure times to ensure intercontinental service and reduced domestic and European flights. Union leaders want the government to ease taxes on salaried workers in a country where the self-employed often evade taxes. They also demand more investment to create jobs.

"I'm not satisfied with the term 'evil'," says the Cambridge University psychology and psychiatry professor, one of the world's top experts in autism and developmental psychopathology. "We've inherited this word... and we use it to express our abhorrence when people do awful things, usually acts of cruelty, but I don't think it's anything more than another word for doing something bad. And as a scientist that doesn't seem to me to be much of an explanation. So I've been looking for an alternative - we need a new theory of human cruelty."

Baron-Cohen, who is also director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, has just written a book in which he calls for a kind of rebranding of evil to offer a more scientific explanation for why people kill and torture, or have such great difficulty understanding the feelings of others. His proposal is that evil be understood as a lack of empathy - a condition he argues can be measured and monitored and is susceptible to education and treatment.

Such a chronic breakdown in the operation of the world's largest stock market sparked an investigation by regulators, scrutiny from Washington and a flurry of new rules. Yet one year later, unease lingers that in spite of new safeguards, stock prices are vulnerable to bouts of sudden selling. For all the talk and action, the big concern remains that the Dow could suffer a repeat of last May's crash.

"We will have another flash crash, yes without question," says James Angel, associate professor of finance at Georgetown university. "The combination of human nature, markets and technology means that at some point, something will misfire." After the flash crash, the Securities and Exchange Commission moved quickly to introduce circuit-breakers, designed to impose a "time-out" whenever trading in a stock causes prices to swing too wildly. It also plans to introduce a "limit-up, limit-down" mechanism to prevent trades outside a certain price band.

Egypt is due to hold parliamentary elections in September and the group is likely to emerge with the largest bloc in the assembly. It said this week that its candidates would compete for half the seats in parliament. The Brotherhood, banned for most of its 80-year history, has begun to set up a political party to be named the Freedom and Justice party.

"We should now raise our voice to ask for: an end to normalisation [with Israel] which has given our enemy stability; an end to [Egyptian] efforts to secure from infiltrators the borders of the Zionists; the abolition of all [joint] economic interests such as the Qualified Industrial Zones agreement and the export of Egyptian gas to Israel," said Mohamed Badie, the Brotherhood's leader.

The QIZ agreement allows Egypt to export manufactured goods to the US duty-free as long as they have Israeli inputs to a value of 10 per cent. Egypt has just mediated a reconciliation between Fatah, the Palestinian faction headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza. Attempts to broker the same agreement under Mr Mubarak had failed, largely because Egypt was seen to be partial to Fatah and biased against Hamas, which shares the same Islamist credentials of the Brotherhood.

Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being "magicians" and invoking djinns (spirits). Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds".

The arrests come amid a growing rift between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei which has prompted several MPs to call for the president to be impeached. On Sunday, Ahmadinejad returned to his office after an 11-day walkout in an apparent protest over Khamenei's reinstatement of the intelligence minister, who the president had initially asked to resign.

Ahmadinejad's unprecedented disobedience prompted harsh criticism from conservatives who warned that he might face the fate of Abdulhassan Banisadr, Iran's first post-revolution president who was impeached and exiled for allegedly attempting to undermine clerical power. Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, a hardline cleric close to Khamenei, warned that disobeying the supreme leader - who has the ultimate power in Iran - is equivalent to "apostasy from God".

Emergency officials in Millington near Memphis were "going door-to-door, asking people to leave," according to the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency. Large amounts of rain and melt from the winter snow has caused a chain reaction of flooding from Canada and the Dakotas through Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee. It is expected to soon hit Mississippi and Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

"The flood is rolling down, it is breaking records as it moves down and it is one of those wait-and-see type of things as to how massive it is going to be when it's all said and done," said Charles Camillo, historian for the Mississippi River Commission and the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project. In Arkansas, westbound traffic on a section of one of the nation's major trucking arteries, Interstate 40, was closed for a second day due to flooding.

The White River was expected to crest at its highest ever level of 40 feet at Des Arc, Arkansas on Thursday night, breaking a 1949 record. A levee overflowed near the White River, forcing a mandatory evacuation of the town of Cotton Plant, the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management said. Officials at the Shelby County Office of Preparedness, that includes Memphis, predicted that the flood could affect 2,832 properties if it crests at 48 feet this coming weekend.

A crest of 48 feet would be the river's highest level since 1937, according to the National Weather Service.

Until now, vets had assumed animals could be infectious while they carried the virus that causes foot-and-mouth, which may be for between four and eight days. However, by exposing calves to infected cattle and closely monitoring them, researchers from the Institute for Animal Health in Surrey and Edinburgh University discovered that the period of infection was less than two days.

Perhaps more importantly, the researchers also discovered that animals were not infectious until they showed symptoms of the disease. Scientists had previously thought animals were infectious for hours or even days before manifesting any symptoms. These results suggest that any future outbreak could be brought under control by closely monitoring animals and slaughtering them as soon as they become ill. This approach is in contrast to the policy adopted to bring the 2001 epidemic under control.

"We think, though," he added, that "now there is a real opportunity - with the end of Bin Laden, with the Arab Spring, with all that's happening in the world - we think this is a moment of opportunity... to push forward the process of peace between Israel and Palestine." Palestine, of course, does not exist - the Oslo Accords recognize the Palestinian Authority - but this "slip" was apparently a harbinger of true British intentions to recognize a unilaterally-declared Palestinian state this coming September.

The Guardian reported yesterday that British government officials are holding this threat very distinctly over Israel's head. The paper quoted a "diplomatic source" implying a self-righteous British position of, "This will hurt me, but I may have no choice."

Prior to his meeting with the British leader, Netanyahu told reporters in London that the Fatah-Hamas agreement signed in Cairo was a "tremendous blow to peace and a great victory for terrorism. Three days ago, terrorism was dealt a resounding defeat with the elimination of Osama bin Laden; today, in Cairo, it had a victory."

The cost of living in the US rose at its fastest pace since December 2009 in the 12 months ended in March, the same month in which Chinese consumer prices rose by the most since 2008. The European Central Bank raised interest rates on April 7, joining China, India, Poland and Sweden in a bid to control inflation partly blamed on food costs. Costlier food also contributed to riots across northern Africa and the Middle East that toppled leaders in Egypt and Tunisia this year.

World grain stocks will probably slide for a second year in the 12 months through June 2012 as corn consumption outpaces production and dry weather hurts wheat prospects in the US and the European Union, the International Grains Council said in a report April 20. "With demand continuing strongly, prospects for a return to more normal prices hinge largely on how much production will increase and how much grain reserves are replenished in the new season," David Hallam, the director of FAO's Trade and Market division, said in a statement.

The FAO's food-price index fell for eight months in a row after reaching its previous peak in June 2008, a situation that probably won't be repeated this year, Concepcion Calpe, an economist at the UN agency, said last month. "Very strong demand for food, feed and biofuel may mean prices will climb in coming months," she said. "A sliding dollar and increased oil prices are contributing to high food-commodity prices," Hallam said.

Activists, meanwhile, have vowed to stage a "Day of Defiance" on Friday. More than 500 Syrians are thought to have been killed since the protests started seven weeks ago. At least 2,500 others have been detained, although rights groups say the figure could be much higher. Foreign journalists are not allowed to enter the country, so it is difficult to verify the reports. The protests, which began on 15 March, pose the most serious challenge to four decades of rule by the Assad family in one of the Arab world's most repressive countries.

The military official said the army had completed its mission to "chase elements of terrorist groups... and to restore security, peace and stability". Since the weekend, almost 1,000 men have reportedly been rounded up in Deraa alone. Rights groups say that security officials conduct house-to-house raids, carrying lists of wanted people. If they do not find those listed, they arrest relatives instead. The government's position is that the demonstrators are militant criminals and not ordinary civilians calling for political reform.

A Syrian blogger who lives in Canada has told the BBC that Deraa is a "special case" and that protests in other parts of the country have been relatively small - drawing less than 1,000 people. Camille Otrakji says the majority of Syrians want serious change, but not regime change, and that President Assad himself is still very popular with large segments of the population. "Even those who want regime change know that it is not doable [because] we're going to end up with civil war or fundamentalism," Mr Otrakji told the BBC World Service by phone from Montreal.

But the government's use of violence - including live fire - against peaceful protesters has drawn international criticism. Speaking during a visit to Rome on Thursday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Europe and the US had to work together in the interests of the Syrian people.

Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes "from a deep slumber" sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose. In a new warning, Nasa said the super storm would hit like "a bolt of lightning" and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world's health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.

Scientists believe it could damage everything from emergency services' systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to "everyday" items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs. Due to humans' heavy reliance on electronic devices, which are sensitive to magnetic energy, the storm could leave a multi-billion pound damage bill and "potentially devastating" problems for governments.

"We know it is coming but we don't know how bad it is going to be," Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa's Heliophysics division, said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. "It will disrupt communication devices such as satellites and car navigations, air travel, the banking system, our computers, everything that is electronic. It will cause major problems for the world. Large areas will be without electricity power and to repair that damage will be hard as that takes time." Dr Fisher added: "Systems will just not work. The flares change the magnetic field on the earth that is rapid and like a lightning bolt. That is the solar effect."