Since becoming pope less than a year ago, Francis has shifted personnel in important Vatican departments, placing his picks in key positions while signalling that he intends to crack down on the intrigues and disarray that plagued the Vatican bureaucracy under the shy, aloof Benedict.

The Vatican Bank, officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion, has been under scrutiny for years, amid suspicions that some accounts might be fronts for illegal interests. European regulators are pushing the secretive bank to become more transparent and adhere to international banking standards, a process that began under Benedict.

Shortly after he announced his surprise resignation last February, Benedict approved new five-year terms for the existing five-man committee overseeing the bank, including Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, then the secretary of state, the Vatican’s second-ranking official. On Wednesday, Francis retained only one of those five — Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran — while replacing Cardinal Bertone with Pietro Parolin, the man who also replaced him as secretary of state.

Francis’ move comes a month before cardinals from around the world will come to the Vatican for a consistory to witness the formal appointment of new cardinals and discuss church affairs. On Sunday, Francis designated his first group of new cardinals, with a majority coming from outside Europe.

While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the NSA has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet, according to NSA documents, computer experts and American officials.

The technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target.

German media reports of an impasse at US-German talks to avert spying between allies prompted several senior German politicians on Tuesday to suggest diplomatic and economic pressure on Washington. Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere however said that the talks were continuing, telling journalists at a Berlin press conference that negotiations remained confidential.

Stephan Mayer, the new internal affairs spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative parliamentary group, told Reuters on Tuesday her government should consider withholding contracts with US firms that operate in Germany. Mayer said if the talks failed then Germany must contemplate whether "US firms receive government contracts from the German side or public institutions."

"The Americans understand one language very well, and that is the language of business," Mayer said, adding that such a deal could not be seen in isolation from current EU-US free-trade negotiations. The Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung quoted a German source close to the 'no-spying' talks as saying: "We're getting nothing." The German public broadcaster NDR jointly reported that German delegation sources had almost lost hope that an agreement would emerge.

Christians are facing a new age of “martyrdom” across much of the world, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said. But he insisted that religion is often just a “pretext” for violence and not the real cause. He made his remarks at the end of a two-day visit with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholemew I, the most senior cleric in the eastern Orthodox church.

His comments in a city which has in the past been the capital of both the Christian and Muslim worlds underline the significance he attaches to the threat to Christians in the region, an issue the Prince of Wales also singled out last month.

Run by a fast-growing company called BGI, this facility has become the world's largest centre for the cloning of pigs. The technology involved is not particularly novel - but what is new is the application of mass production.

The first shed contains 90 animals in two long rows. They look perfectly normal, as one would expect, but each of them is carrying cloned embryos. Many are clones themselves. This place produces an astonishing 500 cloned pigs a year: China is exploiting science on an industrial scale.

The scientist in charge, Dr Yutao Du, explains the technique in a way that leaves me reeling. "We can do cloning on a very large scale," she tells me, "30-50 people together doing cloning so that we can make a cloning factory here." A cloning factory - an incredible notion borrowed straight from science fiction. But here in Shenzhen, in what was an old shoe factory, this rising power is creating a new industry.

"We can't go on like this," he is due to say at a conference organised by two eurosceptic groups. It comes after the Tory leadership rejected a call from 95 of its MPs to allow Parliament to block EU laws. Earlier this week William Hague the foreign secretary said the European Union's rules had to be followed by all its members and the backbenchers' plan was unworkable.

But addressing eurosceptic think tank Open Europe and the Fresh Start group of MPs set up by Tories keen to see reform, Mr Osborne will say he understands the need for change. "The biggest economic risk facing Europe doesn't come from those who want reform and renegotiation," he will say. "It comes from a failure to reform and renegotiate. It is the status quo which condemns the people of Europe to an ongoing economic crisis and continuing decline." He will argue there is a "simple choice for Europe: reform or decline".

In a sign he believes spending on social security is too high not just in the UK but across Europe, he will claim: "Europe accounts for just over 7% of the world's population, 25% of its economy, and 50% of global social welfare spending." Echoing the Tories' 2010 election campaign slogan he will say: "We can't go on like this."

But according to court documents filed in 2011 by the Trustee of the Madoff victims’ fund, Irving Picard, this was not a simple case of poor risk management at JPMorgan. This was an operation structured like those Russian nesting dolls, with the Ponzi scheme as the outside doll with many more frauds layered inside the big one.

After reading the documents released by the Justice Department in connection with the settlement, the Los Angeles Times asked in a photo caption of a smirking Madoff outside of Federal Court: “Bernie Madoff: Was he part of the JPMorgan ring, or was JPMorgan part of his ring?”

According to the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), the Justice Department prosecutors who settled the case against JPMorgan Chase used the investigative material from Picard to bring their charges and settle the case. Those court filings show layers upon layers of frauds within the Ponzi scheme.

The most accurate simulation of the human brain to date has been carried out in a Japanese supercomputer, with a single second’s worth of activity from just one per cent of the complex organ taking one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers 40 minutes to calculate.

Researchers used the K computer in Japan, currently the fourth most powerful in the world, to simulate human brain activity. The computer has 705,024 processor cores and 1.4 million GB of RAM, but still took 40 minutes to crunch the data for just one second of brain activity.

The project, a joint enterprise between Japanese research group RIKEN, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University and Forschungszentrum Jülich, an interdisciplinary research center based in Germany, was the largest neuronal network simulation to date. It used the open-source Neural Simulation Technology (NEST) tool to replicate a network consisting of 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses.

While significant in size, the simulated network represented just one per cent of the neuronal network in the human brain. Rather than providing new insight into the organ, the project’s main goal was to test the limits of simulation technology and the capabilities of the K computer.

Nest launched in 2011 to strong reviews. Since its launch, Nest's smart thermostat has been replicated by larger players such as Honeywell. Google CEO Larry Page said that Google is "excited to bring great experiences to more homes in more countries."

On the data front, Google could ultimately harness more information about individual homes and their energy usage. Nest, however, did indicate that home data would stay in its company under its privacy policy, which is owned by Google now, and only be used to improve products. Nest was poised to launch a developer program in early 2014.

Consider the moving parts:

• Google has mobile access via your smartphones and various apps on multiple platforms.

• Google has multiple ways into your living room via Android and Chromecast, a streaming TV gadget, as well as tablets and PCs.

• The company had tried to monitor energy usage with utilities, but scrapped the plan in 2011.

• Google's Android will increasingly be in your car.

• And Google is working the robot market.

It remains to be seen how all of these efforts fit together, but it's clear that Google's tentacles are spreading.

The climate between Brussels and Berlin is polluted, something European Commission officials attribute, among other things, to the "reckless" way German Chancellor Angela Merkel blocked stricter exhaust emissions during her re-election campaign to placate domestic automotive manufacturers like Daimler and BMW. This kind of blatant self-interest, officials complained at the time, is poisoning the climate.

But now it seems that the climate is no longer of much importance to the European Commission, the EU's executive branch, either. Commission sources have long been hinting that the body intends to move away from ambitious climate protection goals. On Tuesday, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported as much.

At the request of Commission President José Manuel Barroso, EU member states are no longer to receive specific guidelines for the development of renewable energy. The stated aim of increasing the share of green energy across the EU to up to 27 percent will hold. But how seriously countries tackle this project will no longer be regulated within the plan.

As of 2020 at the latest - when the current commitment to further increase the share of green energy expires - climate protection in the EU will apparently be pursued on a voluntary basis.

However, despite the media’s coverage of the anomaly, or lack thereof, little has been done to protect visitors at Surfer’s Beach. As one can see in photos taken of the area where extremely high levels of radiation were found, not only by Infowars but by Steve Weiss, an electrical engineer who has worked on Geiger Counters for 40 plus years, there are disturbingly no signs warning surfers and beachgoers of the high radiation levels.

Even more startling is one woman’s testimony to Infowars on camera that her friend recently began losing his hair after swimming right off the coast of Half Moon Bay. When asked if the hair loss could possibly be natural, she reiterated that she believed it was due to his exposure to Surfer’s Beach.

The town’s local publication has already admitted to finding levels in excess of 1,400 percent at the site, but why, if they know levels are so out of the ordinary, are there no signs warning the public?

Kerry, a Roman Catholic, met with Vatican leaders on Tuesday to discuss foreign policy and economic issues, including Francis’ outspoken stance on income inequality worldwide. He did not meet with the Pope.

Obama has cited the Pope’s inequality stance himself in an economic address in December. “Across the developed world, inequality has increased,” Obama said. “Some of you may have seen just last week, the Pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length.”

Obama met Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI, in 2009, six months after taking office. That meeting, which took place at the Vatican, was Obama’s only meeting with a Pope. His presidency has been marked by some high-profile clashes with the Catholic Church, including over abortion and contraception.

But Francis’ approach to world economic issues is widely seen as more in line with Obama’s own approach than that of Benedict, who stepped down last year. In an MSNBC interview last year, Obama called Francis an "extraordinarily thoughtful and soulful messenger of peace and justice."

Goldman Sachs has to know that when they release a report like this that it will move the market. And that is precisely what happened on Monday. US stocks dropped precipitously. So is Goldman Sachs just honestly trying to warn their clients that stocks may have become overvalued at this point, or is another agenda at work here? To be fair, the truth is that all of the big banks should be warning their clients about the stock market bubble.

Personally, I have stated that the stock market has officially entered "crazytown territory". So it would be hard to blame Goldman Sachs for trying to tell the truth. But Goldman Sachs also had to know that a warning that the stock market could potentially fall by more than 10 percent would rattle nerves on Wall Street.

So is Goldman Sachs correct about what could be coming? Well, the truth is that there are many other analysts that are far more pessimistic than Goldman Sachs is. For example, David Stockman, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Reagan, believes that the US stock market is heading for "a pretty rude day of awakening"...

We consume far more wealth than we produce, and our entire nation is drowning in a massive ocean of red ink that stretches from sea to shining sea. This is not sustainable, and it is inevitable that the stock market will catch up with economic reality at some point. It is just a matter of time.

As Center for Food Safety reported last week, according to a draft bill outline leaked by Politico, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) is proposing a federal voluntary labeling bill that would block states from passing meaningful mandatory labeling bills, redefine GE food as “safe” and even allow GE foods to be labeled as “natural.”

Without mandatory labeling of GE foods, consumers are being left in the dark about the foods we are purchasing and feeding our families. There is overwhelming public demand — consistently near 95% — for the labeling of GE foods. Yet the US is one of the only developed countries in the world that doesn’t require labeling.

So why would anyone introduce another GE food labeling bill? Because industry will do whatever it takes to make sure you don’t have the right to know whether the food you’re buying is genetically engineered. Voluntary labeling of GE foods has been allowed by FDA for more than a decade and not a single company has “volunteered” to label its products as containing GE food. There is no reason to think they will do so now, when there is more support for mandatory labeling of GE food than there ever has been.

The introduction of this bill would only serve to undermine state and federal legislation meant to grant consumers the right to know and avoid GE foods. Attacking state labeling laws does nothing to address the increasing call from consumers for transparent GE food labeling. Instead, it gives the biotech and food industries yet another free pass and keeps consumers in the dark.

Monsanto has sued over 100 farmers for patent infringement. Jim Gerritsen, president of lead plaintiff OSGATA, previously explained, "We are not customers of Monsanto. We don't want their seed. We don't want their gene-spliced technology. We don't want their trespass onto our farms. We don't want their contamination of our crops. We don't want to have to defend ourselves from aggressive assertions of patent infringement because Monsanto refuses to keep their pollution on their side of the fence. We want justice."

Dave Murphy, founder and executive director of Food Democracy Now!, another plaintiff in the case, added, "Once again, America's farmers have been denied justice, while Monsanto's reign of intimidation is allowed to continue in rural America."