Pope Francis has inherited a major scandal which demands continuing decisive action. Archbishop Mueller, the German cleric in charge of the Vatican department which investigates cases of sexual abuse - and decides whether paedophile priests are to be defrocked - has had several meetings with Pope Francis since his recent election.

Only last month one American diocese - Green Bay, Wisconsin - paid $700,000 (£460,000) to two brothers who had been sexually abused by a Catholic priest decades ago. Several American Catholic dioceses have been forced to declare bankruptcy as a result of making huge payouts to victims.

Dr Rebecca Rist, a papal historian at Reading University, said: "The papacy has always taken a strong line on the importance of the purity of life of its clergy. In the 11th Century, the medieval papacy took stringent measures against the abuses of 'simony' - the buying and selling of ecclesiastical office - and 'nicolaism' - clerical concubinage. "Pope Francis is signalling that he regards clerical sexual abuse as the modern day scourge of the Church."

ExxonMobil, the company that runs the pipeline, says it has collected hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil and water from Bartlett's neighborhood. It's not yet clear what caused the spill. Exxon's Pegasus pipeline is 65 years old. It runs 858 miles from Illinois to Texas. It was adapted a few years ago to increase its capacity by 50 percent. Exxon has repeatedly insisted that inspections were up to date and showed no cause for concern. The spill raises questions about whether the inspection process for aging pipelines is adequate.

By Monday, Shell spokespeople said inspectors found “no evidence” of an oil leak, but days later it was revealed that a breach did occur. Representatives with the US Coast Guard confirmed to Dow Jones on Thursday that roughly 50 barrels of oil spilled from a pipe near Houston, Texas and entered a waterway that connects to the Gulf of Mexico.

Meanwhile, though, rescue workers in Arkansas have been getting their hands dirty responding to an emergency there. A rupture in ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline late last week sent thousands of barrels of oil into the small town of Mayflower, around 25 miles outside of Little Rock. Authorities evacuated more than 20 homes in response, and by this Thursday roughly 19,000 barrels had been recovered.

Another incident in Canada this week caused an estimated 400 barrels — or roughly 16,800 gallons — of oil to be compromised in northern Ontario when a train derailed. Originally, Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd said only four barrels were lost in the accident.

The prolonged cold weather would also hit this autumn's harvest, he said. Looking ahead to the 2013 harvest, he said farmers had only managed to get three quarters of the planned wheat planted this year, so the UK was already 25% down on potential production.

Andrew Watts, a wheat farmer and the NFU combinable crops board chairman, said farmers had been hoping for a kind autumn after a poor harvest in 2012, but this had not happened. "It seems many farmers have written 2013 off and are trying to do what they can with the crops in the ground. Everyone is focussing on 2014 and making sure the land is in a good condition to get good crops then. This is what producing food is all about - the weather."

He added: "We have got to put it in context, this is only the first time since the late 1970s that we have been net importers. The crop damage is dealing a further blow to Britain's farming industry, which is already reeling from a spate of recent livestock deaths due to the cold weather."

This is a nice story, but according to admissions made by both Kraft and Kemin, use of these additives will indeed be used to disguise inferior meat and poultry products. According to CNS, the two companies admittedly petitioned FSIS to allow use of the chemicals in liquid form to kill pathogens like Listeria monocytogenes, which typically only exist in tainted meat derived from factory farms.

Industrial agriculture is a filthy business, especially when animals are involved. Rather than have access to pasture and the outdoors, cows and chickens from factory farms live most, if not all, of their lives in confinement, where they wallow in their own feces, and sometimes even in the rotting carcasses of other dead animals. As a result, such animals become ill, and their systems infected with harmful pathogens that must be eliminated before human consumption.

Either they will be bailed out by the government using our tax dollars, or as we just witnessed in Cyprus, they will be allowed to "recapitalize" themselves by stealing money directly from our bank accounts. So if they win, they win big. If they lose, someone else will come in and clean up the mess. This creates a tremendous incentive for the bankers to "go for it", because there is simply not enough pain in this equation for those that are taking the risks.

If the big Wall Street banks had been allowed to collapse back in 2008, that would have caused a massive change of behavior on Wall Street. But instead, the big banks are still recklessly gambling with our money as if the last financial crisis never even happened. In the end, the reckless behavior of these big banks is going to cause the entire global financial system to collapse.

If you had not kept any paper records, which most Americans do not, it would be exceedingly difficult to prove to the bank that you actually had any money in the bank. If you don’t think that something like this could ever happen in the United States, you might want to think again. Cyber attacks against major banks in the United States are becoming more powerful and more sophisticated with each passing month.

In fact, major US bank websites have been offline for a total of 249 hours over the past six weeks. And just last month, thousands upon thousands of Chase customers logged into their bank accounts only to discover that their balances had all been reset to zero. Anyone that would want to cause complete and total economic chaos in the United States could accomplish it very easily by wiping out all of our bank account records.

So please do not keep all of your money in a single bank, and from now on please keep a paper copy of all of your bank account statements. At some point it is likely that one of these cyber attacks will cause permanent damage to our banking system, and you want to be protected. The mainstream media has generally been very quiet about the massive cyber attacks against our major banks, but behind the scenes authorities are truly alarmed. They don’t know how to stop these attacks, and they just keep getting more intense and more sophisticated.

Columbia Professor Michael Woodford, the world's most closely followed monetary theorist, says it is time to come clean and state openly that bond purchases are forever, and the sooner people understand this the better. "All this talk of exit strategies is deeply negative," he told a London Business School seminar on the merits of Helicopter money, or "overt monetary financing".

He said the Bank of Japan made the mistake of reversing all its money creation from 2001 to 2006 once it thought the economy was safely out of the woods. But Japan crashed back into deeper deflation as soon as the Lehman crisis hit. "If we are going to scare the horses, let's scare them properly. Let's go further and eliminate government debt on the bloated balance sheet of central banks," he said. This could be done with a flick of the fingers. The debt would vanish.

Lord Turner, head of the now defunct Financial Services Authority, made the point more delicately. "We must tell people that if necessary, QE will turn out to be permanent."

Oligarchs and dictators' daughters apparently have a penchant for bunkering their assets on the British Virgin Islands. Barons and composers, on the other hand, seem to prefer the Cook Islands. To cheat on taxes, they create bogus firms with imaginative names like Tantris, Moon Crystal or Sequoia.

The virtual Everest of data exposes some 120,000 letterbox entities, offshore accounts and other dubious deals in more than 170 countries, in addition to the names of 140,000 individuals alleged to have placed their money in known tax havens. The list includes politicians, celebrities, weapons dealers, oligarchs, financiers and a very diverse cast of characters. It also includes hundreds of Germans.

On Friday, for the first time ever, rioting Arabs threw firebombs at police on the Mount, and one policeman caught fire and miraculously suffered only slight wounds. Footage filmed by the Arabs themselves and uploaded to the internet shows security forces remaining in place and not moving as Arabs from the Al-Aqsa Mosque throw rocks, chairs, firebombs and anything else they can find.

"Police do not respond because of the orders they were given,” Rabbi Glick told Arutz Sheva, saying that a number of police officers had explained to him they had been given orders that prevent them from acting to enforce the law on the Temple Mount compound. "If a Jew would bring a bottle of wine on to the Temple Mount there’s a riot, but an Arab brings up a firebomb and that’s okay?” he added, noting that Friday’s riot was the most serious one since the terror war that began in 2000.

Rabbi Glick repeated the call to set up a commission of inquiry to investigate how Israel lost its sovereignty on the Temple Mount and how it should act to regain it.

But in the coming years a different battle over Jewish prayer, one unfolding a few paces away, is likely to be of more significance — a growing debate over whether Jews should be allowed to pray on the Temple Mount itself.

The desire to pray on the Mount, also the site of Islam’s third-holiest shrine, has found more acceptance among mainstream rabbis in Israel over the past decade, spreading gradually from a tiny fringe to a broader religious public. The numbers of Jews actually visiting the Mount for religious reasons is still tiny — no more than several thousand a year, according to police estimates — but inching upward, and the sacred enclosure is slowly gaining in importance as an issue of religious and political meaning for religious Zionists, a group with outsize ideological and political clout in Israeli society.

That could make it a flashpoint inside Israel and an inflammatory issue for local Muslims and the entire Islamic world. Few places on earth are as potentially explosive as the Temple Mount. The shrine has been especially tense in recent weeks, with protests erupting twice after communal Friday prayers.

In an article for the Daily Mail he wrote: ''I like David Cameron and believe he is genuinely sincere in his desire to make Britain a generous nation where we care for one another and where people of faith may exercise their beliefs fully. But it was a bit rich to hear that the Prime Minister has told religious leaders that they should 'stand up and oppose aggressive secularisation' when it seems that his Government is aiding and abetting this aggression every step of the way."

He added "many Christians" doubted the sincerity of Mr Cameron's pledge to support their rights, with a recent poll showing two-thirds believed they are now part of a "persecuted minority". "Their fears may be exaggerated because few in the UK are actually persecuted, but the Prime Minister has done more than any other recent political leader to feed these anxieties," he said.

For the first time, he suggests that Britain may be in range of ballistic missiles fired by the “highly unpredictable and aggressive regime” in North Korea. In an attack on the Liberal Democrats, who are considering calling for Trident to be scrapped, the Conservative leader also questions whether anyone can “seriously argue” that now is the time to surrender our deterrent, when the threat is “evolving”.

The Prime Minister will on Thursday welcome home HMS Victorious, a Royal Navy Vanguard-class submarine, which carries Trident nuclear weapons. The Conservatives have committed to replacing the Trident nuclear deterrent and preliminary work has begun.