In his most frank public comments to date on the subject, the Archbishop accepted that the Church was in a “tangle” over homosexuality. On one hand many Christians may themselves be “wrestling” with their own sexuality while others appeared to display only strong feelings of revulsion, he said. “What’s frustrating is that we still have Christian people whose feelings about it are so strong, and sometimes so embarrassed and ashamed and disgusted, that that just sends out a message of unwelcome, of lack of understanding, of lack of patience. So whatever we think about it, we need, as a Church, to be tackling what we feel about it.”

The issue of women bishops – due to come to a head at the Church of England’s General Synod in York next week – was another matter which helped give the impression that sex was “the only thing the Church is interested in”, he remarked. His comments came during a discussion day for a group of Christian teenagers at Lambeth Palace.

Video published by activists recorded heavy gunfire and explosions in suburbs of Damascus. A trail of fresh blood on a sidewalk in the suburb of Qudsiya led into a building where one casualty was taken. A naked man writhed in pain, his body pierced by shrapnel. Syria's state news agency SANA said "armed terrorist groups" had blocked the old road from Damascus to Beirut.

The declaration that Syria is at war marks a change of rhetoric from Assad, who had long dismissed the uprising against him as the work of scattered militants funded from abroad. "We live in a real state of war from all angles," Assad told a cabinet he appointed on Tuesday in a speech broadcast on state television. "When we are in a war, all policies and all sides and all sectors need to be directed at winning this war." The rambling speech - Assad also commented on subjects as far afield as the benefits of renewable energy - left little room for compromise. He denounced the West, which "takes and never gives, and this has been proven at every stage".

The United Nations accuses Syrian forces of killing more than 10,000 people during the conflict, which began with a popular uprising and has built up into an armed insurgency against four decades of rule by Assad and his father. The UN peacekeeping chief said it was too dangerous for a UN observer team, which suspended operations this month, to resume monitoring a ceasefire. The truce, part of a peace plan backed by international envoy Kofi Annan, has long since been abandoned in all but name.

After stalling in the Gulf for two days, the large and ragged storm finally began moving eastward. The center crossed the shore late Tuesday afternoon near Steinhatchee, in the Big Bend area where the Panhandle joins the peninsula. Most of the thunderstorms and rain were northeast of the storm center and had already dumped 2 feet of rain over parts of Florida.

Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center said Debby could bring another 4 to 8 inches of rain - and possibly tornadoes - to north Florida and southeast Georgia in the next two days. Emergency managers in Pasco County on Florida's central Gulf Coast ordered a mandatory evacuation for 14,000 to 20,000 people living between the Anclote and Pithlachascotee Rivers. The Anclote rose from 9 feet before Debby's approach to more than 27 feet, well above major flood level, said Pasco County spokesman Eric Keaton. The storm was piling up coastal waters and pushing them inland, preventing the rainwater from draining out to sea.

Nearly 20 inches of rain has fallen in two days on Wakulla County, a Gulf Coast county famed for its natural springs. Roads were under water in many parts of the surrounding area. Debby was the first tropical storm of 2012 to disrupt US energy operations in the Gulf of Mexico. Shutdowns peaked on Monday, when more than 44 percent of daily oil production and a third of daily natural gas production were closed.

From the vantage point of a command post about 10 miles from the path of advancing flames, the entire community of Mountain Shadows, a northwest subdivision, appeared to be enveloped in an orange glow after dark. "This is a fire of epic proportions," Colorado Springs Fire Chief Rich Brown said as ash drifted down on the city, sirens wailed and the thick smell of smoke permeated the air.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper flew into the city Tuesday night by helicopter to meet with fire commanders and tour the fire zone first-hand. He noted that the blaze was one of at least a dozen burning throughout the state. Four people have died in Colorado wildfires so far this year. "This is the worst fire season in the history of Colorado," he said during an impromptu news conference, adding that from the air he saw many homes destroyed in a glowing landscape that looked "surreal." The Waldo Canyon Fire, which has roared through at least 6,200 acres of dry timber since Saturday, has grabbed attention for days because of its proximity to landmarks like the famed mountaintop of Pikes Peak and the Air Force Academy.

The blaze claimed its first property losses on Tuesday as wind-driven flames swept over containment lines into Colorado's second-most populous city, consuming an unknown number of homes on the town's outskirts as authorities hurried to evacuate residents. El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa said 32,000 people had been evacuated.

Coupled with other biometrics, it could soon allow security systems to grant or deny access from a distance, without requiring users to stop and scan a fingerprint, swipe an ID card, or otherwise lose a moment dealing with technology. Currently IDair’s primary customer is the military, but the startup wants to open up commercially to any business or enterprise that wants to put a layer of security between its facilities and the larger world.

A gym chain is already beta testing the system (no more using your roommate’s gym ID to get in a free workout), and IDair’s founder says that at some point his technology could enable purchases to be made biometrically, using fingerprints and irises as unique identifiers rather than credit card numbers and data embedded in magnetic strips or RFID chips.

The technology works much in the same way satellites process terrain imagery, using a lot of edge detection and image sharpening to turn a fingerprint captured at a distance into a usable and identifiable image. Since users don’t have to touch a fingerprint scanner, there’s no problem with the imaging surface becoming fouled. And of course, additional layers of security like facial recognition can be piled on to make up a more robust, complete biometric profile of a person that provides that individual with access without the need for a key or passcode, either of which can be lost, stolen, or shared without authorization.

The document, released ahead of Thursday's EU summit, said greater fiscal union could lead to common debt being issued by eurozone countries. There would also be banking union, with a single European banking regulator and a unified deposit guarantee scheme. The document was released by European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and was drawn up with the presidents of the European Commission, the Eurogroup and the European Central Bank.

Mr Van Rompuy said it was "not meant to be a final blueprint", but that he expected "to reach a common understanding amongst us on the way forward" at Thursday and Friday's summit. Mr Barroso said the guiding principle was that "greater solidarity and greater responsibility must go hand in hand".

Proposals in the report included:

• Limits on the amount of debt individual countries can take on

• Annual national budgets can be vetoed if they are likely to mean a country exceeding its debt limits

• The eurozone borrowing money collectively "could be explored"

• A European treasury office to be set up to control a central budget and keep an eye on national ones

• A single European banking regulator and a common scheme guaranteeing bank deposits

• Common policies on employment regulations and levels of taxation

• Joint decision-making with national parliaments to give it "democratic legitimacy".

Earlier, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble also called for there to be a European finance minister, with the power to veto national budgets as well as an elected president of Europe. French, German, Spanish and Italian finance ministers are meeting on Tuesday to discuss closer union.

French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici has said Thursday's EU summit should, "lay the groundwork for the second phase of the euro".

The spotlight is on Germany, France, Italy and Spain, the euro area's four biggest economies, wrestling over proposals for a banking union, joint euro zone bonds and handing more control over national budgets and economic policy to the European Union. But Europe's Babel features 27 often fierce national debates in member states, each of which has the power to block any change to EU treaties, including 10 countries which are not members of the currency.

Each national argument uses a different political vocabulary and historical context, making them hard to reconcile at the best of times and harder still when the going gets tough. While investors are looking for quick, bold solutions to restore confidence in the euro, Europe's patchwork politics make rapid strides fearsomely difficult, if not impossible. Each major step is subject to ratification by national parliaments or referendums, which can easily trip the project up.

How the debate is framed may determine the outcome.

In Germany, it is a morality play about making profligate "deficit sinners" atone and do their "homework", instilling a "stability culture" (low inflation, low debt) and enforcing a "savings policy" (austerity). It is no accident that "Schulden", the German for debt, doubles as the word for "guilt". To Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose frugal caution is lauded at home as embodying the virtues of a "Swabian housewife", the key to the euro's survival is to enforce the rules of budget discipline strictly and make Europe more competitive through economic reforms, not to dilute responsibility by sharing debt.

In France, it is all about "saving the euro" by showing more "solidarity" with southern countries, seen largely as "victims" of "speculation" rather than as fiscal villains. Europe's economic crisis has accelerated a splintering of the political landscape that makes it harder to form a coherent government in countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. That could make ratifying any new EU treaty a nightmare.

The third round of talks between Iran and the United States, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany ended in Moscow without any agreement on Iran’s illicit nuclear program. Iran continues to insist that the only way out of the impasse would be for the West to accept its nuclear program.

News of the drill comes amid ongoing violence in Syria, and with Israel and the US closely discussing the means to thwart Iran’s nuclear drive. The commander of the 3rd Air Force, Lieutentant General Craig A Franklin, on a recent visit to Israel, established a planning committee with representatives of the IDF to coordinate the details of the exercise, the Maariv Hebrew daily reported Monday. Some 3,000 US soldiers are to participate, alongside thousands of Israeli troops.

The drill will simulate missiles being fired at Israel from Iran and Syria simultaneously, with potentially tens, if not hundreds, of rockets mid-air at the same time. Israel will test its upgraded Arrow 2 defense system, while the US will deploy the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System and PAC-3 Patriot air defense platforms.

According to Maariv, some military analysts have nicknamed the exercise a “dress rehearsal” for a potential military conflict, noting that it will send a clear message to Iran at a time during which the impact of international sanctions, or lack thereof, will be clearer.

Germany alone cannot and will not absorb or take on all the financial obligations that Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy have — they can't do it, and they won't do it. As far as the International Monetary Fund, there is not anywhere near enough money in there to stop a possible run on the banks in Europe. In the United States we have our Secretary of the Treasury guiding us and we have Chairman Bernanke working along with and talking with all these European financial institutions.

Of course they can, through our big banking system, get all the money they want for practically nothing. They can cycle some money through the back door into the European banks to ensure that they don't have a panic and people rushing to all the banks to withdraw their euros before they become obsolete.

The big question is how it is going to affect America. America has a lot of assets in the European banks and vice versa; they are so globally and financially integrated that it is going to be very bad. The question in regards to the collapse of the European banking system and the socialistic government which has let them live way beyond their means for many years is how they are going to restructure.

Will we have a soft landing or a hard landing in regards to the unraveling of the European debt and governmental upheaval? If we have a hard landing, I predict that our government will temporarily — and I repeat, temporarily — freeze all the money that's in American banks, including savings, 401ks and pensions. But they will also guarantee that every penny will be paid back. That's when we will get our printing presses running night and day to print all the money that's needed to prevent a complete banking failure.

So it isn't a question of "if" the mess in Europe is going to be a structured upheaval or whatever, it's a question of "when."

There are some funny, eye-rolling parts, such as...

SPIEGEL: You want nothing less than a United States of Europe.

Schäuble: Even though the term is used repeatedly, it doesn't make it any better. No, the Europe of the future will not be a federal state based on the model of the United States of America or the Federal Republic of Germany. It will have its own structure. It's an extremely exciting venture.

Exciting! But there is one nugget in there that everyone must by now understand, and that is the conditions that must exist for Germany to support the kind of fiscal burden sharing that will be required to end the euro crisis.

SPIEGEL: What would a fiscal union have to look like so that Germany could accept euro bonds?

Schäuble: In an optimal scenario, there would be a European finance minister, who would have a veto against national budgets and would have to approve levels of new borrowing. It would be up the individual countries to decide how to spend the approved funds, that is, how to answer the question: "Should we spend more money on families or on road construction?"

This is the clearest articulation yet of the German stance. If you want German money, then a European finance minister must be allowed to veto your spending. Don't like it? Then figure out a way to backstop yourself? Could Europe ever get to this point?

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble rebuffed recent criticism of Germany's handling of the euro crisis from [Mr] Barack Obama, telling the US president to get his own house in order before giving advice. "Herr Obama should above all deal with the reduction of the American deficit. That is higher than that in the euro zone," he told German public broadcaster ZDF on Sunday night. It is easy to give advice to others, he added,

[Mr] Obama, worried about the impact of the debt crisis on the global economy and financial markets - and on his own prospects for re-election - has been urging Europe to step up its efforts to tackle the problem. In the interview, [Mr] Schäuble also reiterated his opposition to euro bonds, saying countries must remain individually liable for their public debt as long as they were taking sovereign decisions on how the money was being spent.

"If you spend the money from my account, you won't be frugal with the money," said the finance minister. He added that he was against devoting large sums of money - for example from the European Central Bank - to fight the crisis. The roots of the crisis needed to be fought credibly, he said, adding that that was succeeding in Ireland and Portugal, which have both received international bailouts. "It's not succeeding so well in Greece," he added.

[Mr] Schäuble said a new structure needed to be found for the single currency, and that reforms could come quickly. He added that credible decisions could be taken at the next EU summit on Thursday and Friday when proposals for deeper integration will be presented.

Spectators looking for a demonstration of gladiatorial courage will have been disappointed. Never mind fighting lions, the main players in the arena seem not to know what form the beast takes, much less how to kill it. Since Greece went into meltdown, triggering a crisis of confidence in the euro, there have been 18 EU summits. The format is wearyingly familiar: after 36 hours of unproductive haggling, a communiqué is issued, promising a united effort to boost growth, promote jobs and curb “speculators”.

Vulnerable countries then brief reporters on the desirability of mutualising sovereign debt and fiscal transfers. This is followed by a statement from Berlin, the subtext of which is that the Germans would rather eat their own eyeballs than give Athens the PIN for a Bundesbank savings account.

Having rallied briefly on superficial hopes of effective action, financial markets lurch into reverse, forcing up the borrowing costs of weaker eurozone members to “Game Over” levels. Amid rancour and confusion, the unfulfilled alchemists of EU politics retreat to work out whom to blame next. All that has changed is Germany’s readiness to dish out its retaliation first. Anticipating (correctly) that Greece’s new order would call for an easing of the bail-out terms, Volker Kauder, one of Angela Merkel’s key parliamentary allies, last week told Der Spiegel that his government should not “send any signal” that agreed austerity measures can be changed.

At the heart of the disaster is the reluctance of Europe’s self-deluding elite to admit that the single currency was launched on a false premise and shored up by deceit. As long as its members insist that there can be a politically contrived solution to what is essentially a financial crisis, the cost of failure will continue to soar.

The warning was sounded amid growing calls from Conservative MPs for Britain to have an “in-out” referendum on the country’s ongoing membership of the European Union. George Osborne, the Chancellor and Mr Cameron’s key election strategist, is understood to be considering offering the pledge of a referendum as the centrepiece of the next Conservative manifesto. Labour is also considering a similar pledge. Separately, Wolfgang Schaeuble, Germany’s finance minister, said Berlin should hold a referendum before transferring more power to Brussels.

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has said that pushing for greater political and fiscal unity is her key aim for this week’s crucial EU Summit. But Mr Schaeuble said that the “limits of the constitution had been reached” and the German people would have to approve before more powers could be transferred. He argued that a referendum “will happen sooner than I would have thought a few months ago”.

The suggestion of referendums, rather than decisions, compounded a rout on European markets as the so-called “decisive week for Europe” had a chaotic start.

It wasn't long ago that Mario Draghi was spreading confidence and good cheer. "The worst is over," the head of the European Central Bank (ECB) told Germany's Bild newspaper only a few weeks ago. The situation in the euro zone had "stabilized," Draghi said, and "investor confidence was returning." And because everything seemed to be on track, Draghi even accepted a Prussian spiked helmet from the reporters. Hurrah.

Last week, however, Europe's chief monetary watchdog wasn't looking nearly as happy in photos taken in front of a circle of blue-and-yellow stars inside the Euro Tower, the ECB's Frankfurt headquarters, where he was congratulating the winners of an international student contest. He smiled, shook hands and handed out certificates. But what he had to tell his listeners no longer sounded optimistic. Instead, Draghi sounded deeply concerned and even displayed a touch of resignation. "You are the first generation that has grown up with the euro and is no longer familiar with the old currencies," he said. "I hope we won't experience them again."

The fact that Europe's top central banker is no longer willing to rule out a return to the old national currencies shows how serious the situation is. Until recently, it was seen as a sign of political correctness to not even consider the possibility of a euro collapse. But now that the currency dispute has escalated in Europe, the inconceivable is becoming conceivable, at all levels of politics and the economy.

Investment experts at Deutsche Bank now feel that a collapse of the common currency is "a very likely scenario." German companies are preparing themselves for the possibility that their business contacts in Madrid and Barcelona could soon be paying with pesetas again. And in Italy, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is thinking of running a new election campaign, possibly this year, on a return-to-the-lira platform.