Francis' simple blue Ford Focus and the small Vatican motorcade pulled up quietly to the Quirinale Palace without the blaring of sirens that typically accompanies politicians and foreign dignitaries cruising through central Rome. Once inside the onetime summer residence of popes, Francis walked slowly with President Giorgio Napolitano past the honor guard and then greeted staff members and their children, further evidence of a more casual approach to official duties by the Argentine "slum pope."

Francis' shunning of the trappings of the papacy — including its security apparatus — has defined his papacy so far. But his desire to be close to his flock and his aim to curb corruption and waste in the Vatican have raised fresh security fears, beyond the occasional mobbing of his open car by overly enthusiastic pilgrims.

At least five people were killed and it is feared that several hundred people may have been injured in the fast-moving storms. A number of people are said to be trapped inside buildings. Forecasters say up to 53 million people could be affected. Hailstones the size of tennis balls have been reported.

The rapid-moving storm - with winds of up to 111km/h (68mph) - is continuing its way east. November is ordinarily one of the quietest months in the tornado calendar, meaning these storms are unusually destructive for this time of year, the BBC's Nick Bryant in New York reports.

At least four people were reported missing in Riyadh, according to local media. One of them, a 26-year-old Yemeni woman, has been confirmed dead. The body of the young woman was found in the Wadi Nimar valley, which is surrounded by steep banks and can therefore suddenly fill with water in case of rainfall, Al-Arabiya reported, citing the Saudi Civil Defense authority.

According to Saudi news website Sabq, the woman was washed away while attempting to cross the flooded area. She had been traveling in a car with her father, but they had to stop as it became too dangerous to remain in the vehicle. The search continues for other people who went missing as a result of the rainfall, which experts have already called the worst in 30 years.

The Civil Defense Force said it received over 5,000 reports of incidents, including 4,968 in the capital. Almost 100 people trapped by the flooding were rescued, Gulf News reported. Defense teams also recovered 148 vehicles that were submerged under water.

The earthquake struck at 8:44 pm local time (11:44 am GMT) at a depth of 63 kilometers (39 miles) in the Chiba prefecture which neighbors Tokyo, the US Geological Survey reported. The quake shook skyscrapers in the Japanese capital and temporarily halted the city’s high-speed train service, according to AFP. The trains soon resumed after a track inspection.

Local broadcaster NHK assured that neither Tokyo’s Narita International Airport nor regional nuclear installations were affected by the earthquake. While earthquakes of different magnitudes are not uncommon in Japan, the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster that triggered the core meltdowns of three reactors at the Fukushima plant has made every quake report in the region particularly alarming.

As the world watches with apprehension at how Fukushima’s decommissioning work unfolds, prominent Japanese-Canadian scientist David Suzuki warned last week that another nearby earthquake of magnitude 7 or higher could trigger a serious nuclear catastrophe, decimating Japan and reaching the US west coast.

“If the fourth [reactor] goes under an earthquake and those rods are exposed, then it’s bye, bye, Japan and everybody on the west coast of North America should be evacuated. And if that isn’t terrifying, I don’t know what is,” Suzuki said.

Around thirty Muslim Brotherhood activists managed to gain entry into Bloomsbury’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), which is part of the University of London, on Friday. The mob of demonstrators forced their way into a lecture hall where guest speaker, Mohamed El-Nabawy, was giving a talk, disrupting the lecture and forcing Nabawy from the stage.

The lecture in question dealt with the challenges facing Egypt following the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party. The protesters took issue with guest speaker, Nabawy, because of his affiliations with the Tamarod movement that supported the military in its removal of Morsi as president.

The Brotherhood members behaved in an aggressive manner and reportedly tried to harass the speaker. They chanted “fall, fall the rule of the military” as Nabawy was escorted from the stage by security staff. The Muslim Brotherhood organization has denounced the trial as a farce aimed at political revenge and maintains Morsi’s legitimacy as president.

“We have said what we mean, and will do what we say. The carbon tax goes,” Prime Minister Abbott told Australian lawmakers. “Repealing the carbon tax should be the first economic reform of this parliament.”

The Liberal-National Party swept up seats in September’s election in large part due to their opposition to the left-wing Labor Party’s imposition of a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. The unpopular tax was blamed for rising power bills and hurting economic growth. Abbott has touted his party’s bill to repeal the carbon tax as “our bill to reduce your bills.”

However, this is only a portion of the Abbott government’s agenda. The carbon tax repeal plan will also cut $435 million in Australian dollars funding to the country’s renewable energy bureaucracy, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). The move was met with hostility from environmental groups who believe that funding cuts will cause the country to fall behind in the global marketplace.

The Japanese government on Friday decided to target a 3.8 percent emissions cut by 2020 versus 2005 levels. That amounts to a 3 percent rise from a UN benchmark year of 1990 and the reversal of the previous target of a 25 percent reduction.

"Given that none of the nuclear reactors are operating, this was unavoidable," Environment Minister Nobuteru Ishihara said. Japan's 50 nuclear plants were closed on safety concerns after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami wrecked the Fukushima reactors northeast of Tokyo. Nuclear accounted for 26 percent of Japan's electricity generation and its loss has forced the country to import natural gas and coal, causing its greenhouse gas emissions to skyrocket.

Japan's new policy was widely criticized in Warsaw, where some 190 nations are meeting from November 11-22 to work on a global climate pact, due to be agreed in 2015. China's climate negotiator Su Wei said: "I have no way of describing my dismay" about the revised target.

Three major policy challenges are converging in January. Government spending authority expires in the middle of the month, just three weeks ahead of the debt ceiling. There is also likely to be ongoing agonizing about the implementation of ObamaCare.

January 1st is the deadline for individuals to have insurance. If the website isn't fixed or if young and healthy Americans haven't yet signed up for coverage, insurers will begin panicking and ObamaCare itself could start to unravel. Millions of healthy individuals are needed in the exchanges to subsidize the costs of treating sick and elderly patients. There could be additional measures in Congress to change or delay the law.

Budget, ObamaCare and Debt. It's the ultimate three-ring DC circus. With his approval ratings exploring new lows, Obama has little political capital for leverage. He won't be able to run the tables on all three issues. He will have to give somewhere. It may be the biggest decision of his Presidency.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is being called the "NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] of the Pacific" and "NAFTA on steroids", but the truth is that it is so much more than just a trade agreement. This treaty has 29 chapters, but only 5 of them have to do with trade. Most Americans don't realize this, but this treaty will fundamentally change our laws regarding Internet freedom, health care, the trading of derivatives, copyright issues, food safety, environmental standards, civil liberties and so much more.

It will also merge the United States far more deeply into the emerging one world economic system. Initially, twelve nations will be a party to this treaty including the United States, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Together, those nations represent approximately 40 percent of global GDP.

There are some very good reasons why Obama does not want the American people to know anything about what is in this treaty. This agreement will impose very strict Internet copyright rules on the American people, it will ban all "Buy American" laws, it will give Wall Street banks much more freedom to trade risky derivatives and it will force even more domestic manufacturing offshore. It contains a whole host of things that Obama would be unable to get through Congress on his own. But he is hoping to spring this on Congress at the last minute and get them to agree to this "free trade agreement" before they realize all of the things that are contained in it.

Once upon a time, our great manufacturing cities were the envy of the entire planet. In fact, at one time Detroit actually had the highest per capita income in the United States. But now Detroit is a rotting, decaying, festering hellhole that is completely bankrupt. And there are dozens of other formerly great manufacturing cities that are heading down the exact same path. These "free trade" agreements are neither "free" nor "fair" when you really examine them, and they are absolutely eviscerating the middle class.

Across the Dakotas and Nebraska, more than 1 million acres of the Great Plains are giving way to corn fields as farmers transform the wild expanse that once served as the backdrop for American pioneers.

This expansion of the Corn Belt is fueled in part by America's green energy policy, which requires oil companies to blend billions of gallons of corn ethanol into their gasoline. In 2010, fuel became the Number 1 use for corn in America, a title it held in 2011 and 2012 and narrowly lost this year. That helps keep prices high.

"It's not hard to do the math there as to what's profitable to have," Malsam said. "I think an ethanol plant is a farmer's friend." What the green-energy program has made profitable, however, is far from green. A policy intended to reduce global warming is encouraging a farming practice that actually could worsen it.

That's because plowing into untouched grassland releases carbon dioxide that has been naturally locked in the soil. It also increases erosion and requires farmers to use fertilizers and other industrial chemicals. In turn, that destroys native plants and wipes out wildlife habitats.

First because explosive social unrest is far from being ruled out in the coming years and secondly because the end of the petrodollar and thus the close relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States will create a wave of destabilisation in the country which only prospers thanks to these two factors.

Adapting to the new world certainly isn’t impossible but is going to be complicated and will require major reforms: in this case, the political crisis could be healthy for the country.

1) On a trip to India, Mr Cameron has again insisted that there is no limit on the number of Indian students who can come to the UK. It's a "myth" that the UK has closed its borders to Indians, he said. Speaking to the Times of India, He highlighted a recent Government debate about whether to require foreign visitors to the UK to pay a financial bond before entering the country. That plan was abandoned after attracting widespread criticism in emerging economies like India.

2) Next month's Autumn Statement to Parliament by George Osborne is being postponed (by a day) to allow Mr Cameron to visit China. That visit is happening after months of diplomacy in which Britain essentially apologised (grovelled, some say) for Mr Cameron meeting the Dalai Lama last year. The dates for Mr Cameron's trip, it may be surmised, were not the subject of much negotiation. If the UK had any say over the timing, one of the Government's major set-piece parliamentary events would not be being moved at relatively short notice.

What do we conclude from these factoids? For some, these are simply the actions of a prudent leader taking sensible actions to promote British relations with two emerging economic giants, and thus advance the British national interest. Others will see a weak leader changing his policies and his diary to appease rich foreigners.

Wherever you sit on that spectrum, I think one thing is clear here: Britain's place in the world has changed. A generation ago, it would have been unthinkable that a Prime Minister would even suggest abandoning a policy because of the reaction from the Indian public. Likewise interfering with the timetable of the Mother of Parliaments for the convenience of the Politburo in Beijing.

Mr Cameron talks of Britain being in a global race. Those two facts give us an idea of our place on the track.

Over the summer, the Air Force began offering its pilots payments of $25,000 per year as an incentive to stay on, up to a maximum of $250,000. But “pilots aren’t taking them,” Fanning said at the Defense One Summit in Washington.

The main reason is that “we’re going to have flying hour issues for the foreseeable future,” he said, with rolling groundings of two to three months per squadron. Pilots “want to fly,” Fanning said. And with the airline industry facing a wave of forced retirements of pilots, opportunities for them are opening up in the private sector.

At the same time, the Budget Control Act and sequestration are putting limits not only on Air Force operations, but investments in new aircraft platforms. “That will have a worse effect on morale” than pay and benefits issues, Fanning said. “It’s not just compensation that keeps people in the military. It’s mission.”

A police van trundles past. “You! How old are you? Time to go home now,” says an officer pointing out of the window at a large group of youths clearly in their early teens. The children laugh and scatter into the alleys, before appearing back behind the van further up the one-way road. They resume their play: shouting, smoking, fighting, practising backflips against the walls of houses and kicking the ubiquitous piles of rubbish. Basharat Ali watches wearily from his doorstep. Tonight, the 26-year-old says, is a quiet night.

“At least in the winter they go home at some point,” says Ali, a team manager at the phone company EE who lives with his wife and 18-month-old daughter. “In the summer they were having parties all night, young children dancing in the street. We would have to go out at 11pm to try and move them away. Every night it was the same.”

Their home, he says, has been burgled three times in the past three months. On the first occasion the burglars kicked down his front door at 2am and stole his car keys. The other two times they smashed a back window stealing cash and a laptop. The police are investigating, but it is clear where he feels the blame lies. And he is not alone.

The spectre of the race riots that blighted the North 12 years ago has this week reappeared over the narrow terraced streets of Page Hall, the former estate of 19th-century magnate Mark Firth, one of the kings of this steel city. David Blunkett, a former Labour home secretary and MP for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough, has warned that the antisocial behaviour of the thousands of Roma migrants who have moved here has resulted in “understandable tensions”. If the Roma do not change their ways, it is feared, the community could “explode” as Bradford, Oldham and Burnley did in the summer of 2001.

The ECB's Peter Praet – the board member in charge of setting economic policy debates – has given an astonishing interview to Brian Blackstone at The Wall Street Journal, opening the floodgates for bond purchases. It is clear that the slide towards deflation and Euroland's fizzling recovery have caused a revolt at long last. The ECB's Latin (plus) majority simply refuses to accept Bundesbank orders any more.

"If our mandate is at risk we are going to take all the measures that we think we should take to fulfil that mandate. That's a very clear signal," said Mr Praet. "For some decisions it's easier than others [to gain consensus]. One thing is clear: the Governing Council has been able to decide. That's really the message."

So there you have it. This had to happen since deflation in southern Europe is causing debt dynamics to go berserk, defeating any of the alleged gains from the rest of EMU policy. Nations have to protect themselves. "That is a radical change of position for the ECB and a very welcome one in our view," said Ken Wattret from BNP Paribas.

Quite so. But that is not the end of the story, of course. Today we have an FT oped piece by IFO grizzly bear Hans Werner Sinn castigating the ECB for cutting rates at all last week. We have Bild Zeitung firing off tabloid anathemas over the destruction of German savings by an Italian-controlled ECB. We had the Bundesbank's Andreas Dombret saying this morning that the ECB's near zero rates are posing "risks for financial stability" in Germany.

Europe's peoples are what they are. That is precisely why we Euro-sceptics have always argued that forcing the pace of EU integration is a very dangerous thing to do. As for the looming civil war within EMU over monetary policy, there is an easy solution. Germany can politely withdraw from the euro, and the South can politely agree that this would on balance be an understandable action. Everybody could be on best behaviour, seeking to demonstrate to the world that matters are under control.

Just takes a little statesmanship. Not that difficult.