A Vatican representative at the meal, annoyed by the requests for more information, shouted, “How can you ask us such questions?” The clash came amid mounting pressure on the Vatican to clean up its bank — for decades the subject of dark intrigue and linked to one mysterious death — as part of a push by the European Union to apply common rules to all the countries and micro-states like Vatican City and Monaco that use the euro.

Those pressures continued until the very last days of Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy and remain a critical issue for the cardinals now meeting to elect a new pope. As the conclave begins Tuesday, the specter of financial scandal presents a special challenge for Benedict’s successor, who must modernize the Roman Catholic Church’s finances or risk the Vatican’s access to the global banking system, undermining its moral authority and its financial stability.

Founded in 1942 and housed in a small round tower at the foot of the Apostolic Palace, the Vatican bank generally does not give loans but manages deposits and patrimony for religious institutions, clerics and diplomats accredited to the Vatican, who are among the only depositors allowed to hold accounts there. During the cold war, the bank was widely seen as a back channel to transfer money to the Eastern Bloc to help end Communism, and today the Vatican uses the bank to help it operate in sensitive areas like Cuba and China, Vatican experts say.

But largely because of the Vatican’s reluctance to reveal its account holders to outside authorities — and especially to subject itself to scrutiny of past transactions — suspicion has swirled for years about whether some of its accounts had ties to organized crime or Italian political slush funds.

While history may not repeat itself so neatly, the emergence of new political parties speaking for the unemployed and the newly poor could lead to governments who enclose their economies from the world and manage their performance through directive and manipulation.

The global financial crisis of 2008 has slowly yielded to a global unemployment crisis. This unemployment crisis will, fairly quickly, give way to a political crisis. The crisis involves all three of the major pillars of the global system – Europe, China and the United States. The level of intensity differs, the political response differs and the relationship to the financial crisis differs.

But there is a common element, which is that unemployment is increasingly replacing finance as the central problem of the financial system. When unemployment emerges, that consensus shifts and the focus shifts with it. When unemployment becomes intense, then the entire political system can shift. From my point of view, the Italian election was the first, but expected, tremor.

The Church protects the secrecy of its deliberations but at the same is keen to feed a worldwide audience. So it holds at bay and entices at the same time. The Vatican well understands the fascination with the workings of the Conclave and drip feeds the detail. Yet this remains a dangerous time for the Church.

The age of deference has passed. Much of the press approaches the Vatican as it would any other institution. Commentators are not shy in suggesting who should lead the Church. Some writers have called for a Vatican Spring. The Vatican has accused the media of trying to influence the conclave.

Here is the dilemma: The election of a new Pope can display the splendour of the Church and its worldwide influence. What it cannot do of itself is restore the authority, the moral authority of the Church. The abuse scandal remains corrosive. The question is not just: "why were the allegations not investigated more rigorously?" The more disturbing question is: "why was there so much abuse?"

One figure caught my eye. An internal report in Germany implicated over 60 priests in more than 500 cases of sexual abuse. Across the world hundreds of priests must have faced or must be facing allegations. It raises questions of whether celibacy in the priesthood is working. From leaks and interviews it is clear some cardinals want a more rigorous cleaning up of the abuse scandal.

It is naive to describe the conclave as a contest between conservatives and reformers. There are many different priorities at play. Some want a pope who will be a great evangelist; some want a communicator like John Paul II. Others want a inspirational theologian who can communicate the core beliefs of the Church. Still others mark out the priority as dealing with the challenge of faith in a secular society. All of those tensions would be expected to surface at a conclave. Yet is clear there are more fundamental arguments.

Some are looking for a powerful manager who can control the divisions within the Church. Some believe that needs to be an insider; others are arguing for a reformer less tied to the bureaucracy. That is why the outcome is so difficult to predict.

The most basic operations - getting an appendix removed or a hip replacement - could become deadly. Cancer treatments and organ transplants could kill you. Childbirth could once again become a deadly moment in a woman's life. It's a future without antibiotics. This might read like the plot of a science fiction novel - but there is genuine fear that the world is heading into a post-antibiotic era. The World Health Organization has warned that "many common infections will no longer have a cure and, once again, could kill unabated".

The US Center of Disease Control has pointed to the emergence of "nightmare bacteria". Antibiotics kill bacteria, but the bugs are incredibly wily foes. Once you start treating them with a new drug, they find ways of surviving. New drugs are needed, which they then find ways to survive. As long as new drugs keep coming, resistance is not a problem. But there has not been a new class of antibiotics discovered since the 1980s.

This is now a war, and one we are in severe danger of losing. "The consequences are absolutely massive, that's actually something people have not quite grasped."

In a swipe at the UK, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister who took over as president in January, said that Britain’s high national debt and persistent budget deficit had left it vulnerable to attacks from currency traders. His comments will not be welcomed by the Coalition, coming just days before the Budget and with the pound already in freefall, having dropped from €1.23 to below €1.16 since the start of the year.

It will also invoke ugly memories of the last sterling crisis, when the pound crashed out of the ERM in 1992. Speaking to students at the University of Amsterdam, Mr Dijsselbloem said the UK was a much riskier proposition than the US due to the state of the public finances, despite its equally high deficit and the battles in Washington over the need to cut spending.

“England is vulnerable, it may be faster on the currency speculation. That has happened in the past. A new sterling crisis could happen again,” Mr Dijsselbloem said.

The mountains of rubble and piles of smashed cars and scooters scattered along the coast only hint at the scale of the debris removed so far from coastlines and river valleys stripped bare by the tsunami. To clear, sort and process the rubble — and a vastly larger amount of radiation-contaminated soil and other debris near the nuclear plant in Fukushima, the government is relying on big construction companies whose multi-layer subcontracting systems are infiltrated by criminal gangs, or yakuza.

Researchers are only beginning to analyze environmental samples for potential health implications from the various toxins swirled in the petri dish of the disaster zone — including dioxins, benzene, cadmium and organic waste-related [matter], said Shoji F Nakayama of the government-affiliated National Institute for Environmental Studies.

The cleanup is bound to overrun its budget by several times, as delays deepen due to a lack of long-term storage options as opposition among local residents in many areas hardens. It will leave Fukushima, whose huge farm and fisheries industry has been walloped by radiation fears, with 31 million tons of nuclear waste or more. Around Naraha, huge temporary dumps of radioactive waste, many football fields in size and stacked two huge bags deep, are scattered around the disaster zone.

In a live television broadcast, she will sign a new charter designed to stamp out discrimination against homosexual people and promote the ‘empowerment’ of women – a key part of a new drive to boost human rights and living standards across the Commonwealth.

In her first public appearance since she had hospital treatment for a stomach bug, the Queen will sign the new Commonwealth Charter and make a speech explaining her passionate commitment to it.

Insiders say her decision to highlight the event is a ‘watershed’ moment – the first time she has clearly signalled her support for gay rights in her 61-year reign.

The charter, dubbed a ‘21st Century Commonwealth Magna Carta’ declares: ‘We are implacably opposed to all forms of discrimination, whether rooted in gender, race, colour, creed, political belief or other grounds.’ The ‘other grounds’ is intended to refer to sexuality – but specific reference to ‘gays and lesbians’ was omitted in deference to Commonwealth countries with draconian anti-gay laws.

Even for Romans, who over the centuries have endured looting, pillaging and hour long lines at the post office, these are interesting times. The unexpected resignation of Benedict XVI, the first pope to step down in almost 600 years, means there is no pope in the Vatican — at least not before Tuesday, when the conclave and papal balloting will begin. At the same time, the inconclusive results from last month’s national elections have left Italy’s politicians bickering over how to form a government.

Italians are resilient, inured to high levels of corruption and accustomed to political volatility; since 1948, the country has had 58 governments. The expectations placed on their leaders are pretty low; voters just handed a second-place finish to the party of Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister who is facing a handful of criminal prosecutions, dating a woman about 50 years his junior and appealing prison sentences.

But Italy’s problems are now harder to laugh off. The economy is in recession. Unemployment is at a record high. Governmental instability threatens not just the Italian economy but also the fate of the euro. And at the Vatican, the scandal over leaked information and the continuing sex abuse scandals have weakened the spiritual authority of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Japanese government has told the facility to revise by June its roadmap for cleaning up the site, which is expected to take well over a quarter of a century. "What we need to do is isolate, remove and store the damaged and broken nuclear fuel safely. This work will take 30 to 40 years to complete," plant manager Takeshi Takahashi told the media.

Experts say it could cost at least $12 billion to close the reactors down. Monday it will be two years since the worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and a subsequent tsunami knocked out cooling equipment at the company's Fukushima Daiichi plant north of Tokyo, leading to the meltdown of three reactor cores. More than 160,000 people were forced from their homes.

Another earthquake or tsunami could be fatal for the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, according to a nuclear engineer, as two years after the disaster it’s still vulnerable to natural disasters. "What remained intact after the disaster is completely fragile and when the next one comes it's going to collapse," he told The Weekend Australian newspaper.

A new party is forming this spring, intent on abandoning European efforts to prop up the common currency. And its founders are a collection of some of the country's top economists and academics. Named Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), the group has a clear goal: "the dissolution of the euro in favor of national currencies or smaller currency unions."

The party also demands an end to aid payments and the dismantling of the European Stability Mechanism bailout fund. Its impressive list of prominent supporters includes a large number of conservative and economically liberal university professors. The most notable name on the list is Hans-Olaf Henkel, the former president of the Federation of German Industries, but it also includes such economists as Joachim Starbatty and Wilhelm Hankel, who were part of the group that challenged Greek bailout aid at Germany's Constitutional Court.

Main initiator Bernd Lucke, a professor of macro-economics from Hamburg, was a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats for 33 years before leaving the party in 2011 as a result of euro bailout efforts. "The current, so-called rescue policies are exclusively focused on short-term interests, primarily those of the banks," Lucke told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this week.