VATICAN - Assuming Pope Francis makes it to Israel on his planned trip in May and is not delayed by the ongoing strike by Foreign Ministry workers, his stay will include visits to the Church of the Nativity, a Catholic site, as well as to the Temple Mount, where he will visit the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Western Wall.

GERMANY - The last bastion is tumbling. Even the venerable Bundesbank is edging crablike towards quantitative easing. It seems that tumbling inflation in Germany itself has at last shaken the monetary priesthood out of its ideological certainties. Or put another way, the Pfennig has dropped that euroland is just one Chinese shock away from a deflation trap, an outcome that would play havoc with the debt dynamics of southern Europe, render the euro unworkable, and ultimately inflict massive damage on Germany.

VATICAN - Pope Francis on Wednesday accepted the resignation of Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, the bishop of Limburg, whose extravagant spending on renovations for his personal residence angered his congregation and ran afoul of the pontiff’s message of humility and modesty for the Roman Catholic Church.

USA - If you are like most Americans, paying taxes is one of your pet peeves. The deadline to file your federal taxes is coming up, and this year Americans will spend more than 7 billion hours preparing their taxes and will hand over more than four trillion dollars to federal, state and local governments. Americans will fork over nearly 30 percent of what they earn to pay their income taxes, but that is only a small part of the story.

USA - By the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire had become a has-been power whose glory days as the world’s superpower were well behind them. They had been supplanted by the French, the British, and the Russian empires in all matters of economic, military, and diplomatic strength. Much of this was due to the Ottoman Empire’s massive debt burden. In 1868, the Ottoman government spent 17% of its entire tax revenue just to pay interest on the debt.

USA - For the first time in American history, non-whites will make up half or more of the next generation, likely pushing Washington toward a bigger government — and the GOP better tone down their anti-government rhetoric if they want to win them, according to a top polling outfit. At a briefing for congressional aides hosted by the moderate Republican Ripon Society, Pew Research Vice President Michael Dimock said that the trend among younger Americans is support for government programs and acceptance of Democratic Party policies. “Their tendency is more liberal, their tendency is bigger government,” he said of so-called “millennials” born between 1979 and 1995. They will likely set the trend for the still-unnamed next generation.

UK - Teenage girls will be able to stock up on the morning-after pill under new NHS guidance which will allow young women to pre-order the drugs, despite Government fears the move will increase promiscuity. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) will make the announcement on Wednesday despite concerns from Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, and outrage from patients’ groups and campaigners. The guidance for GPs and chemists says under-25s — including girls under 16 — should be able to obtain the morning-after pill more easily, in advance of having sexual intercourse.

USA - A landmark study by Federal Reserve economists found that large US banks enjoy a "too-big-to-fail" advantage in financial markets, confirming the suspicions of many Wall Street critics more than five years after the financial crisis. The series of research papers, published on Tuesday by the US central bank's influential New York branch, suggests the biggest and most complex banks benefited even after the financial crisis from lower funding and operating costs compared to smaller firms. The researchers used data through 2009. The biggest banks also, Fed economists found, can take bigger risks than their smaller peers.

USA - Parents will have little choice over whether or not to have their children vaccinated in Colorado now, due to a bipartisan measure passed by Colorado’s House Health, Insurance and Environment Committee this past Thursday. Parents who intended to claim the ‘opt out’ available in a current rendition of Colorado’s current law, due to religious or personal beliefs, will find it much more difficult to do so. HB 14-1288, which gained traction after recent whooping cough outbreaks, will require parents to complete an online ‘education’ module and get the signature of their health care providers confirming that parents have been informed of health risks and a ‘possible detriment to the community’ if their children go unvaccinated.

ITALY - With a turnover of 53 billion euros ($73 billion) in 2013, the 'Ndrangheta mafia from southern Italy made more money last year than Deutsche Bank and McDonalds put together, a new study said Wednesday. The study by the Demoskopika research institute detailed the international crime syndicate's sources of revenue, including drug trafficking - which brought in an estimated 24.2 billion euros - and the illegal garbage disposal business, which earned it 19.6 billion euros. The southern Italian mafia earned the equivalent of 3.5 percent of Italy's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) last year, said the report based on analysis of documents from Italy's interior ministry and police, parliament's anti-mafia commission and the national anti-mafia task force.

USA - What, if anything, helps Americans grow in their faith? When Barna Group asked, people offered a variety of answers — prayer, family or friends, reading the Bible, having children — but church did not even crack the top-10 list. Although church involvement was once a cornerstone of American life, US adults today are evenly divided on the importance of attending church. While half (49%) say it is "somewhat" or "very" important, the other 51% say it is "not too" or "not at all" important. While America is evenly split on the question, "Do we still need churches?" Christians need to be able to answer the obvious follow-up: "Why do we still need churches?"

USA - Some of the people working in the Obama administration and in the White House are trying to “completely secularize our military” and are “hostile to Christians,” to the point that they “are anti-Christ in what they say and in what they do,” said Christian evangelist Franklin Graham, the son of world-renowned preacher Billy Graham.

VATICAN - They are an unlikely pair with seemingly much in common: an Argentine pope and an American president who each burst onto the global scene as a history-making change agent, each promising to promote a new post-partisan ethos, each having made the cover of Rolling Stone. But when President Obama and Pope Francis meet on Thursday, the question is whether the common arcs of their political biographies also amount to true political common ground. Having spent the first leg of his European tour consumed by the Ukraine crisis, Mr Obama arrives at the Vatican hoping to change the subject to income inequality and America’s struggling middle class, a topic in which his aides see similarities to the antipoverty economic themes embraced by the pope in his first year.

USA - President Barack Obama meets Thursday for the first time with Pope Francis, whose image among Americans has become more favorable over the first year of his papacy. More than three in four Americans currently view the pope favorably. Obama and Pope Francis, meeting at the Vatican, are expected to focus on the concerns both men have about inequality and the rising gap between rich and poor in the world today. Obama might well hope to benefit from his association with the popular pope. In the same February poll in which Pope Francis received his 76% favorable, 9% unfavorable rating from Americans, Obama's image was much more divided, at 52% favorable and 46% unfavorable.

BRAZIL - The Brazilian authorities are poised to send the army into the slums of Rio de Janeiro less than three months before the World Cup. The move follows attacks on police that have resulted in the most tense standoff for years in the favelas. The Rio state governor, Sérgio Cabral, has requested the reinforcements after assaults on police bases, apparently co-ordinated by the city's biggest gang, Comando Vermelho. An escalation of murders, revenge killings and fire-bombings have prompted talk of a war between the police and gangsters. Favela residents and NGOs say the situation is now more tense than at any time since 2010, when the authorities began a "pacification" programme to regain control of communities from armed traffickers.