He told the cardinals that the fostering of the unity of Christians would lie at the very pinnacle of his ministry. Speaking of himself in the third person, the Pope went on to say that:

"Peter's current Successor takes on as his primary task the duty to work tirelessly to rebuild the full and visible unity of all Christ's followers. This is his ambition, his impelling duty. He is aware that good intentions do not suffice for this. Concrete gestures that enter hearts and stir consciences are essential, inspiring in everyone that inner conversion that is the prerequisite for all ecumenical progress."

It is clear that for Pope Benedict, the central role of the bishop of Rome is to be the guarantor of the unity of the followers of Christ, the point of unity through which all the local churches are in full communion with one another and in Christ himself.

VIPR teams were created after the 2004 bombing of a train in Madrid, Spain, to protect US transportation. At the Ogilvie station, officers held the train and searched for a person or bag that posed a potential nuclear threat.

Jerry Jones, a Chicago lawyer, was heading home on that train. He says the federal officers narrowed the trouble to the area where he was sitting “I had no idea I was the center of the activity,” he says. The special security team must have picked up on him as he entered the station and walked up the stairs, Jones says. Little did he know a nuclear stress test he had at a hospital earlier in the day had set off silent alarms and sent security scurrying.

The TSA team passed by him several times before ending up on his train car. Finally, he got a clue when an agent questioned the man right next to him and asked, ‘Sir, do you have an explanation as to why I am getting a high isotope reading on your bag?’”

“The fellow’s jaw dropped,” Jones said. Once the agent said the word “isotope,” Jones says he realized he was the one they were looking for. He raised his hand to say he had a nuclear stress test. The tests can leave patients emitting radiation for some time. After showing identification and proof of the nuclear test, Jones and the other passengers were allowed to go on their way. He says he’s satisfied with the way authorities acted, “knowing there are people on the lookout for this type of thing,” and was pleased with the way officers and passengers behaved.

Jewish groups dedicated to the Temple Mount and Temple renewal are planning the sacrifice as a reminder of what Passover looked like in Temple times. The ritual slaughter is to take place in Jerusalem, in the Armon Hanatziv neighborhood opposite the Temple Mount. The organizations planning the sacrifice were unpleasantly surprised at the Veterinary Services’ response. The Veterinary Services has authorized previous sacrifices in honor of Passover, including one held in Jerusalem last year.

“After preventing us from fulfilling the mitzvah [commandment] of the Passover sacrifice in its proper place, in violation of the law and of a Supreme Court ruling, now the authorities are plotting to stop us from even learning about the way the mitzvah is to be performed,” they accused. “This stands in contrast to the approach to events surrounding the Muslim sacrifice holiday [Eid ul-Adha], during which thousands of sheep and cattle are sacrificed freely in Jerusalem and across the country,” they added.

Organizers said that the sacrifice would take place as planned on the Thursday before Passover with or without government approval. In the meantime, they plan to file a lawsuit asking that the Veterinary Services be forced to authorize the event, “a tradition that has been ongoing for several years.”

Israeli police entered Jerusalem’s Temple Mount compound on Friday to disperse hundreds of Palestinians who, for the second Friday in succession, emerged from prayers to throw rocks at security forces near the entrance to the compound. Rioters also threw two molotov cocktails at officers from inside the al-Aqsa Mosque, in what Jerusalem police chief Yossi Pariente said was "a new level of escalation." Both petrol bombs exploded, and one of them set fire to the foot of an Israeli policeman, who quickly put out the blaze without serious injury.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said Palestinian worshipers rioted after Friday Muslim prayers at the holy site in the Old City. Four people were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the riots, the police said. Rosenfeld said police dispersed the crowd with stun grenades.

Some 522 words later he promised the result: “We will bring freedom to others and we will prevail.” As he spoke, members of the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were already crossing from Kuwait, where they’d been preparing for weeks, into southern Iraq. In those sands, it was Thursday, March 20, the dawn of a new day. Ten years later, the era that dawn ushered in looks anything but simple. After tens of thousands of deaths, not just of Americans, but also of Iraqis – many, if not most, at the hands of other Iraqis – that country is still in turmoil. American troops are gone and a democratically elected government rules.

But bombings and massacres continue, and the country remains mired in sectarian feuding between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Never has the region seen so much change in the nine decades since the end of World War I, when Western powers carved up the territories of the defeated Ottomans by drawing lines across a map. The role in that turmoil of US intervention – direct, in the cases of Iraq and Libya, and through rhetoric, in Syria and Egypt – remains an open question.

Earlier this month, as anti-Assad fighters moved through Raqqa province – first capturing a strategic dam, then the provincial capital and then the government building itself – they distributed fliers calling democracy un-Islamic. “Beware of democracy,” they read. That’s a lesson that in a different way might resonate in Egypt and Libya, where free elections have yet to mean stability.

In May 2011, Obama spelled out lofty goals in a speech that’s considered his defining remarks on the Arab spring. “There’s no straight line to progress, and hardship always accompanies a season of hope,” he said. “But the United States of America was founded on the belief that people should govern themselves. And now we cannot hesitate to stand squarely on the side of those who are reaching for their rights, knowing that their success will bring about a world that is more peaceful, more stable and more just.” Those goals aren’t much different from what Bush articulated from the White House 10 years ago this Tuesday. But they may be just as far off.

"The introduction of the euro has proved to be a fatal mistake, that threatens the welfare of us all. The old parties are used up. They stubbornly refuse to admit their mistakes." They propose German withdrawal from the EMU and return to the D-Mark, or a breakaway currency with the Dutch, Austrians, Finns, and like-minded nations. The French are not among them. The borders run along the ancient line of cleavage dividing Latins from Germanic tribes.

The plans draw on work by Hans-Olaf Henkel, former head of Germany's industry federation (BDI) and a chastened europhile - the "worst error of my professional life", he told me. The appeal of German exit is obvious. It is the least traumatic way to end the 20 percent to 30 percent misalignment between North and South, the cancer eating Europe. Club Med keeps the euro. It enjoys instant devaluation, while still able to uphold euro debt contracts. The spectre of sovereign defaults recedes.

While no one is suggesting that the pope went to the torture centres run by the military to hear confessions, he is alleged by rights activists to have withdrawn protection from two Jesuits who were later kidnapped and tortured, though subsequently freed. While the pope, who has testified in two Dirty War trials, says he lobbied for their release, Horacio Verbitsky, a journalist and author of a book on the church and the dictatorship, slammed him in an opinion piece in Página 12 as “the right person to cover up rottenness. He’s an expert in cover-ups”.

The former cardinal says he only learned about the dictatorship’s systematic plan to steal babies years after the end of the regime. HIJOS meanwhile, displayed its disgust in a poster on its website showing a photo montage of the new pope riding in an open-topped, blood-spattered Ford Falcon – the cars used for kidnappings – alongside junta members.

Hebe de Bonafini, head of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, said the lobby group of women whose children were “disappeared” under the dictatorship considered the official Argentine church “oppressive”. “We compiled a list of 150 priests murdered by the dictatorship that the official church kept quiet about ... about this pope that was named yesterday, all we have to say is: amen.”

Felipe Denegri, a longtime Chilean Jesuit priest who has since left the church, painted a picture of a divisive, power-hungry leader and a manipulator adept at winning sympathy through his humility. Joaquín Morales Solá, a commentator in La Nación newspaper who knows the pope and met him shortly before he left for the Vatican, called him “a balanced mix of pastor and politician”.

But the fact that the new Pope will meet the media before anyone else at a special audience on Saturday morning shows a vivid awareness that prayer may not be enough to deal with the situation facing the Catholic Church at this critical moment in its long history.

Francis is a Jesuit, a member of perhaps the most powerful and experienced religious order of the Catholic Church. The Jesuits are expert communicators and it is significant that one of the first people summoned to meet the new Pope this morning was Father Federico Lombardi, head of Vatican Radio (run for many years by the Jesuits) and the Vatican Press Office.

Under Pope Benedict, Father Lombardi was a mere functionary who had no direct access to the Pope. He could not pick up the phone and talk things through quickly - he just received orders from the Vatican Secretariat of State. That has now changed overnight.