Cardinal Peter Turkson

A TV star, "people's person" and a "wonderful" priest, the Ghanaian cardinal emerging as a strong favourite for the papacy is described by colleagues in glowing terms. Peter Turkson, who is president of the Vatican's pontifical council for justice and peace, was made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 2003 after serving for almost 30 years as an ordained priest.

Cardinal Marc Ouellet

As prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, which oversees the handing out of mitres, the multi-lingual Canadian cardinal Marc Ouellet is one of the most powerful men in the Vatican. The 68-year-old former archbishop of Quebec, who was appointed to the third most important job in the Vatican three years ago, has the power to make or break careers.

Cardinal Francis Arinze

Francis Arinze, who was born in Eziowelle, Nigeria, on 1 November 1932, has long been touted as a possible pope. Although his parents worshipped Ibo deities, Arinze – one of seven children – was sent to an Irish missionary school and soon set his heart on becoming a priest. He was ordained in 1958 and went on to teach liturgy, logic and basic philosophy at Bigard Memorial Seminary at Enugu in south-eastern Nigeria and study at the Institute of Pedagogy in London.

Cardinal Angelo Scola

The election of Angelo Scola as Benedict XVI's successor would delight Italians keen to see one of their own back on the papal throne after Polish and German popes. Scola, the son of a truck driver, was born on 7 November 1941 in Lombardy. Ordained in 1970, he holds doctorates in philosophy and theology and was professor of theological anthropology at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family.

Cardinal Turkson, who holds one of the most important jobs in the Roman Curia and has been repeatedly promoted by Pope Benedict, was quick to take a conservative line on gay marriage and other "alternative lifestyles". "We need to find ways of dealing with the challenges coming up from society and culture," he said, adding that the Church needed to "evangelise", or convert, those who had embraced "alternative lifestyles, trends or gender issues". He added: "We cannot fail in our task of providing guidance."

Cardinal Turkson has caused controversy in the past both by screening a video claiming that Europe faced being overrun by Muslims and by insisting that condoms were not the solution to preventing HIV. Cardinal Turkson also said the Vatican needs to "restore and repair" an image that has been "badly compromised by recent scandals".

Pope Benedict's eight-year papacy saw controversies over paedophile priests, a tense relationship with the Muslim world, and the conviction of his butler for stealing documents that revealed corruption at the top of the Vatican.

At just before midday local time, an earthquake with a magnitude of 4.9 was detected just north of a site where Pyongyang conducted earlier nuclear tests. The two previous tests, in 2006 and 2009, prompted quakes of 3.6 and 4.5 respectively.

The South Korean defence ministry, which raised its military alert level after the quake, said the blast had an explosive yield of between six and seven kilotons (kt) and was of "enormous destructive power". In comparison, the nuclear weapons detonated above Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 carried estimated yields of 15kt and 22kt respectively.

Unlike Pyongyang's previous nuclear tests, which are understood to involve the testing of plutonium warheads, the most recent underground explosion was to test a uranium device – the same kind of nuclear weapon that intelligence officials believe the Iranians are working on.

Indeed, Iran's nuclear weapons programme bears many striking similarities to the research being undertaken in North Korea. The delivery system for Iran's nuclear device is an advanced form of the Soviet-era Scud missile – just like the North Koreans. And Iranian scientists are working on a project similar to the North Koreans which would enable them to attach a nuclear device comprising enriched uranium to the missiles.

We should not be surprised, though, by the similarities between the two programmes. Both Iran and North Korea have benefited from the expert advice they have received from Dr AQ Khan, the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, and teams of nuclear scientists regularly shuttle between Tehran and Pyongyang to share their research material.

And the fact that North Korea has been able to detonate three nuclear devices with relative impunity will only serve to encourage Iran that, when the time comes, it will be able to test a device of its own without any unwelcome interference from the West.

Following the successful launch of an indigenous satellite into orbit using a long-range missile in December 2012, the UN Security Council recently tightened sanctions on the DPRK that impose asset freezes and travel bans on individuals involved in state companies and North Korea's space agency. Although talk of Pyongyang conducting a highly controversial nuclear test has been on the cards for months, the DPRK has recently threatened to respond to tightened UN sanctions using “stronger measures” than a nuclear test.

While bellicose rhetoric is to be expected from Pyongyang, recent statements against the United States and South Korea are unusually high on the richter scale of belligerence. "We are not disguising the fact that the various satellites and long-range rockets that we will fire and the high-level nuclear test we will carry out are aimed at the United States," stated North Korea's National Defense Commission.

Data gathered between 2003 and 2009 show the seasonal recharge of the region’s aquifers but then the onset of a potent drought in 2007 followed by a persistent big drop in water amounts, 60 percent of which is ascribed to unsustainable rates of pumping in a study to be published on Friday in the journal Water Resources Research.

Here are some useful excerpts from a joint news release from NASA and the University of California, Irvine:

"Scientists at the University of California, Irvine; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, found during a seven-year period beginning in 2003 that parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins lost 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of total stored freshwater. That is almost the amount of water in the Dead Sea. The researchers attribute about 60 percent of the loss to pumping of groundwater from underground reservoirs…."

“Grace data show an alarming rate of decrease in total water storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on Earth, after India,” said Jay Famiglietti, principal investigator of the study and a hydrologist and professor at UC Irvine. “The rate was especially striking after the 2007 drought. Meanwhile, demand for freshwater continues to rise, and the region does not coordinate its water management because of different interpretations of international laws.”

But it seems likely that the move also came out of the realization that he no longer had complete control of the church. During the so-called "Vatileaks" affair last year, secret documents and letters were smuggled out of the Vatican over a period of months. They bore witness to intrigue and a shocking power struggle among top Catholic cardinals. Pope Benedict XVI has been unable to put a stop to it. Nor was he able to reform the Vatican Bank following a series of obscure deals apparently aimed at money laundering.

The pope has "suffered greatly under certain elements that come with the office," Max Seckler, a long-time friend of Ratzinger's, told the German news agency DPA. "It is difficult to imagine the degree of intrigue that is present in Rome." Seckler, 85, said that he has wondered for years how much longer his friend could stand the strain.

But Benedict, who holds a PhD in theology, has also had difficulties addressing other issues facing the church. He has proven unable to adequately deal with the seemingly unending series of sex abuse scandals that has shaken Catholic institutions around Europe and the world in recent years. Furthermore, his hard-line stance on faith has done little to slow down the widening cleft between today's believers and the Vatican. Huge numbers have left the church in recent years, particularly in well-off dioceses in Europe and the United States as Rome has become increasingly inflexible in its orthodoxy under Ratzinger's leadership.

Lombardi seemed to hint at just how difficult that search might be in his noon comments, mentioning the "great problems the church faces today." Lombardi added that the pope did not expect that a schism would result from his decision to step down - hardly the kind of statement that will resolve doubts about the crisis now facing a deeply fractious church leadership.

It’s focused on enrichment because if they can continue and complete the enrichment of high enriched uranium, then they’ll have enough to produce enough material to produce a nuclear bomb.

“I drew a line at the UN, last time I was there,” he added. “They haven’t crossed that line, but what they’re doing is to shorten the time that it will take them to cross that line. And the way they’re shortening that time is by putting in new, faster centrifuges that cut the time by one third, so that Iran is putting itself in a position to cross the red line and have enough material to produce one nuclear bomb’s worth of highly enriched uranium. This has to be stopped, for the interest of peace and security, for the interest of the entire world.”

“The second challenge we face is in Syria. Syria is not one of the great economies of the world. It’s not a developed country. And it certainly suffered tremendous tragedies in the last two years with great human cost. But this undeveloped country has the world’s most developed weapons there. It has stockpiles of chemical weapons, and it has other strategic weapons – weapons that can change the balance of power in the Middle East. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: we will not sit idly by and let those weapons fall into the hands of terrorists.”

“And we have a third challenge, which is to advance a solid secure peace with the Palestinians,” he said. “I believe that the framework for this peace is what I outlined in my speech in Bar Ilan University: two states for two peoples – a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state. I think to reach this solution we have to negotiate in good faith. Negotiating in good faith means you don’t place preconditions.”

The news came as the supermarket chain Tesco admitted it had been selling frozen spaghetti Bolognese readymeals which were between 60 per cent and 100 cent horsemeat. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Miss Brown said retailers were currently focusing on ‘comminuted’ beef – “the stuff where meat is ground up to the point that it is not readily recognisable”.

But once the horsemeat scandal was over, other meats like pork and chicken would have to be tested too for cross-contamination. She said: “It is not lost on retailers that they need to test significantly across this product range, across wider meat-based product ranges.” The findings had to be made public to consumers.

There have been reports of chicken being secretly injected with waste from the beef and pork production process to inflate chicken breasts to fetch a higher price. The findings are particularly sensitive because Muslims, Jews and Hindus are forbidden from eating either pork or beef.

Last night it emerged that the two abattoirs that supplied the horse meat that had been identified by the Romanian government. They said that they had supplied the horse meat that ended up on British supermarket shelves but that it had been correctly labelled when it left their country. Romania exports around £8 million worth of horse meat a year. It costs on average 50 per cent less than beef and can be as much as six times cheaper.