Naked and goaded viciously by hornets and wasps, his blood sucked by loathsome worms. Such was the fate of a pope in Dante's "Divine Comedy" who "by his cowardice made the great refusal."

Benedict XVI, in short, knew what could happen to one who rebelled against a centuries-old tradition in a church in which suffering is far from foreign. But he also knew that it wasn't just a matter of his own suffering - it was a matter of the exhaustion, weakness and sickness of the church at large.

The pope from Bavaria has given up. Nevertheless, when he announced his resignation last Monday, hastily and almost casually mumbling the words as if he were saying a rosary, as if he were returning the keys to a rental car rather than the keys to St Peter, there was still a sense of how deeply his move has shaken the Catholic empire.

Archbishop of Berlin, Rainer Maria Woelki calls it a "demystification of the papal office." Already, he says, the pope's resignation has changed the church.

Last week, he announced that he will become the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign. The next pope may bring with him an invigorating connection to the Southern Hemisphere, a media magnetism or better leadership skills than the shy and cerebral Benedict. But whoever he may be, the 266th pope will inherit a gerontocracy obsessed with turf and Italian politics, uninterested in basic management practices and hostile to reforms.

VatiLeaks, as the scandal came to be known, dragged the fusty institution into the wild WikiLeaks era. It exposed the church bureaucracy’s entrenched opposition to Benedict’s fledgling effort to carve out a legacy as a reformer against the backdrop of a global child sex abuse scandal and the continued dwindling of his flock.

It showed how Benedict, a weak manager who may most be remembered for the way in which he left office, was no match for a culture that rejected even a modicum of transparency and preferred a damage-control campaign that diverted attention from the institution’s fundamental problems. Interviews in Rome with dozens of church officials, Vatican insiders and foreign government officials close to the church, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, mapped out that hermetic universe.

“We can reveal the face of the church and how this face is, at times, disfigured,” Benedict said in his final homily on Ash Wednesday. “I am thinking in particular of the sins against the unity of the church, of the divisions in the body of the church.” He called for his ministry to overcome “individualism” and “rivalry,” saying they were only for those “who have distanced themselves from the faith.”

Despite statements coming out of the G20 saying otherwise, many insiders and former insiders are fully admitting that there is an ongoing global currency war and that this war is accelerating. The Bank of Japan’s recent announcement of a massive bond purchase program is the latest episode in an already sorry state of affairs.

It is a historical fact that prosperity has never been obtained by devaluing a nation’s money which makes it all the more insane that the central planners are actually trying to sell the general public on these policies. Ancient Rome had a strong monetary unit when the nation rose to prominence but degenerated after the ruling powers decided to devalue its coinage.

In more recent times both the British Empire and the United States reached great heights when they maintained a sound money system. With this said, you really don’t need to be an economics guru to figure out that the result of today’s monetary policies will eventually result in a complete disaster for the global economy.

French fries in particular were dangerous because of the extra ingredients added. 'We know that they are adding salt, and cooking it in fat, but they're also putting sugar on them too. Why sugar? Because it helps get them golden crispy,' said Dr Drew Ordon, who is the author of the book 'Better in 7.'

'The amount of fat and saturated fats creates a condition called fatty liver,' Ordon said. He said the changes in liver enzymes are in line with the effects of hepatitis. That disease can ultimately cause liver failure. The US has 160,000 fast food restaurants serving an estimated 50 million customers every day.

'We're all guilty, and every now and then you have to splurge, but the problem is that so many people are getting into eating fast food, especially kids, as their staple, and I think that's the point,' Ordon said. Just ordering a salad won't help as Ordon warned that any item marked healthy or fresh at a fast food restaurant likely has added chemicals, as there aren't clear regulations for those foods.

'Some places actually put propylene glycol on the salads, which is anti-freeze, the reason behind that is that it prevents wilting,' said Ordon. 'And although they say a little anti-freeze isn't going to hurt you, obviously given a choice you don't want to be eating anti-freeze.'

Once the curia – or Vatican bureaucracy – started chewing it over, the theories it spat out were quickly flying around what the papal historian John Cornwell has characterised as “a palace of gossipy eunuchs”. And from there it is one short step to finding their way into the Italian press.

Dan Brown couldn’t have made it up. The ecclesiastical earthquake of a pope resigning has been attributed, variously, to Benedict nursing a fatal illness; to a head injury during his trip to Mexico last March that convinced him to abdicate; to being forced out after an acrimonious meeting with a group of senior cardinals two days before he announced his resignation; to his looming disgrace over either dodgy deals done by the Vatican Bank, past cover-ups of paedophile priests, or an “explosive” forthcoming report by a team of cardinals on a tendering scandal; and to a strategy to secure the succession for his favourite.

All of which at first glance makes me and many Catholics seem hopelessly naive for taking as read Benedict’s explanation in his resignation speech – namely that he was too old, physically and spiritually, to continue to be chief executive of a multinational church of 1.3 billion souls. Given that he is 85 and has always carried himself like a piece of delicate china, that sounded perfectly reasonable in worldly terms, even if it was a radical move in the history of the papacy, tantamount in some eyes to betrayal (“one doesn’t come down from the cross,” Cardinal Dziwisz, former secretary to John Paul II, has remarked disapprovingly).

But then, in what was hastily rebranded his “farewell mass” in Saint Peter’s Basilica on Ash Wednesday, Benedict appeared to add fuel to the fire of claim and counter-claim when he appealed to his Church to move beyond “individualism and rivalry”. Could these be the coded final words of a deposed pope?

Politicians are 'too afraid' of offending cohabiting partners or single parents. Marriage is as important to the future of the nation as climate change and poverty, a senior family lawyer said yesterday.

Baroness Deech said the growing numbers of families without fathers was doing more harm to the next generation than other factors such as smoking, alcohol, poor diet and lack of exercise. And she warned that a conspiracy of silence surrounded the issue because political leaders were afraid to say married families were better for children than cohabiting families or single parent families.

Children of single mothers have greater problems than those of cohabitee parents, and children of cohabitees have greater problems than those of married parents. ‘Since this is so incontrovertible, why is it so brave, as Sir Humphrey would put it, to tackle the desirability of marriage over cohabitation, both for adults and children?’ Lady Deech asked.

Finance ministers at the G20 gathering are understood to have pulled back from explicit criticism of Japan, whose prime minister Shinzo Abe has embarked on a huge programme of monetary and fiscal stimulus to jump start the world's third largest economy out of its third recession in five years.

The currency market was thrown into turmoil this week after the G7 – the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Italy – issued a joint statement warning against using domestic policy to target currencies.

But the show of unity was immediately shattered by off-the-record briefings against Japan, which needs a weaker yen to help fuel its export-driven economy. European Central Bank president Mario Draghi yesterday labelled the behind-the-scenes briefing as "inappropriate, fruitless and self-defeating".