German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has spoken out against plans to increase the permanent euro bailout fund to €1 trillion ($1.3 trillion), saying that, "Giving out more and more money is not the solution." In doing so, Schäuble is signalling the German government's resistance to French calls for such a bolstering of the fund.

On Thursday, French Finance Minister François Baroin had echoed calls made by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on Tuesday to boost the amount of available loan assistance to this level in order to shore up market confidence and prevent the possibility of contagion in the euro crisis. "The firewall, it's a little like the nuclear option in military planning, it's there for dissuasion, not to be used," Baroin said in a radio interview.

On Thursday evening, the day before euro-zone finance ministers will begin meeting in Copenhagen, Schäuble said the German government is willing to continue to operate the two bailout funds simultaneously - at least for a transition period. The original plan had been to replace the current European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) originally established to aid Greece, Ireland and Portugal with a permanent successor fund known as the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which would initially be funded with €500 billion and go into effect in mid-2012.

But now it appears that the two funds, with a combined total of roughly $800 billion, will be kept in operation alongside each other - at least initially. "That is convincing," Schäuble said of this figure. "That is enough." Likewise, the chorus of those speaking out against the expansion of the bailout fund has also been joined by Jens Weidmann, the president of the Bundesbank, Germany's central bank.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble ultimately had to concede defeat. Last Friday, Schäuble, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), voted in favor of the massive euro-zone bailout packages whose sheer size makes most people's heads spin. "The euro area is mobilizing an overall firewall of approximately €800 billion, more than $1 trillion," the Euro Group, which consists of the euro-zone finance ministers, proudly announced.

There was a palpable sense of relief among all those attending the meeting of European Union finance ministers at Copenhagen's Bella Center. After all, they had resolved a protracted dispute. For months, the Germans had resisted the high firewalls that have been urged by the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Now, Berlin has relented - but this breakthrough could soon be reversed by further setbacks. There's a good chance that the beefed-up bailout fund won't work, despite its billions of euros in firepower.

This time the problem won't be the German government but rather the German parliament, the Bundestag. Since the Bundestag insists on having a say on every minute detail involving the rescue fund, it's making life more difficult for the would-be euro rescuers. A number of instruments that the euro-zone governments only agreed to after fierce wrangling will thus probably remain permanently toothless, and possibly never be implemented.

Until now, the Bundestag has enjoyed co-determination rights that exceed virtually every other national parliament in Europe. Representatives of all political parties decided last week that these rights should now be extended. In the future, the Bundestag will have to give its approval to nearly all measures taken within the scope of the temporary euro-zone rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF).

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, were able to get their pet project of a European fiscal pact accepted by most of the European Union's member states. Now Schäuble has come up with a new idea for improving the monitoring and coordination of fiscal policy within the EU in order to promote long-term budgetary discipline.

According to an internal Finance Ministry document obtained by Spiegel, Schäuble plans to propose creating independent panels of experts at both the national and EU level, who would monitor fiscal policies in the member states, the euro zone and the EU as a whole. They would be responsible for sounding a warning if they see governments' budgetary policies straying off course.

The panels, which would be composed mainly of academics, would also be charged with checking "the compatibility of national fiscal policies with European and national requirements" as well as the "implementation of national and European regulations," according to the Finance Ministry document. Those regulations would include the tougher EU stability pact, which was adopted at a summit in March 2011, as well as the new fiscal pact, which 25 EU countries have agreed to introduce.

Improving member states' budgetary discipline has been a recurring theme in Chancellor Merkel and Finance Minister Schäuble's efforts to fight the European debt crisis. Berlin put pressure on other countries to sign up to the fiscal pact, which will introduce tougher rules for budget offenders. The pact will oblige countries to incorporate a German-style "debt brake," which forces governments to more or less balance their budgets, into their national constitutions. The treaty now has to be approved by national parliaments, with Germany's Bundestag expected to vote on the issue in May.

The halting of the Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race by a protester swimming in the River Thames this month highlighted the difficulty of ruling out a disturbance at the Games. Cyber-attacks, crowd trouble, riots, civil emergencies and even extreme weather are among the scenarios that British authorities are planning for, officials and analysts say. "It's impossible to totally guarantee that you can get rid of all risk. You can't," security analyst Margaret Gilmore of the Royal United Services Institute in London told AFP.

"But you can go a long way to deterring anyone who wants to disrupt or attack the Games, and mitigating any impact if, for example, a terrorist attack gets through." The shadow of a terror attack has hung over the London Games since the start. The day after London was named host city, four homegrown suicide bombers attacked three underground trains and a bus on July 7, 2005, killing 52 people.

It is also 40 years since Palestinian militants massacred Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and 16 years after a bombing at the Atlanta games. British Prime Minister David Cameron said during a visit by International Olympic Committee Chief Jacques Rogge last month that the security operation would be sensitive to the spirit of the Games.

That may be, but the numbers are huge: 13,500 Ministry of Defence personnel, 12,000 police and more than 16,000 private security guards and unpaid volunteers will make up the Olympics security force. The operation involves warplanes, two navy ships including a helicopter carrier stationed in the River Thames and batteries of surface-to-air missiles. Britain has also ramped up its original security blueprint for the games, boosting the budget in December from £282 million to £553 million ($877 million, €662 million).

The quake struck 26 miles north-northeast of Valparaiso, and 69 miles northwest of the capital Santiago, but there were no reports of injuries. State emergency office ONEMI said a stretch of coastline was being evacuated as a precaution, but there was no tsunami alert. Rodrigo Ubilla, an Interior Ministry undersecretary, said there had been no reports of damage to public or private infrastructure, although state television said several thousand homes were without power outside Santiago.

Apartment buildings in Santiago shook heavily, and residents opened doors as a precaution to clear potential escape routes. Local television broadcast images of lamps swinging in homes in the capital.

Chile is prone to earthquakes, and was hammered by a massive 8.8 magnitude tremor in early 2010 which ravaged the south-center of the country, devastating industries and triggering tsunamis, in a disaster that killed about 500 people. The 2010 quake caused roughly $8 billion in insured losses and economic losses of at least twice that. In the past two years, earthquakes have been a scourge of the insurance industry. In addition to Chile, quakes in Japan and New Zealand in 2011 caused record-breaking losses in the tens of billions of dollars. Mexico has also been rattled by a series of strong quakes in recent weeks.

The report, screened on the main evening news of Channel 10, was remarkable both in terms of the access granted to the reporter, who said he had spent weeks with the pilots and other personnel he interviewed, and in the fact that his assessments on a strike were cleared by the military censor.

No order to strike is likely to be given before the P5+1 talks with Iran resume in May, the reporter, Alon Ben-David, said. “But the coming summer will not only be hot but tense.” In the event that negotiations fail and the order is given for Israel to carry out an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, “dozens if not more planes” will take part in the mission: attack and escort jets, tankers for mid-air refueling, electronic warfare planes and rescue helicopters, the report said.

Ben-David said that if negotiations break down, and Iran moves key parts of its nuclear program underground to its Qom facility, the IAF “is likely to get the order and to set out on the long journey to Iran. Years of preparations are likely to come to realization,” he said, adding that “the moment of truth is near.” According to the report, it’s the older versions of the F-15 that can fly further than any other plane in Israel’s arsenal, and this puts them on the front line of any potential attack. One pilot said in the report that the F-15 “is a plane with a very wide range of operation — a combination of relatively energy-efficient engines, and significant flightworthiness regarding weapons and fuel.”

The IAF has a full-sized unmanned plane, the “Eitan,” that is said to be able to fly to Iran, the report indicated. “This plane can do all that is required of it when the order is given,” a pilot said, without elaboration. The attack, the report said, would presumably trigger a war in northern Israel, with missile attacks (presumably from the Iranian-proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon). “There will be no tranquility and peace anywhere in Israel,” Ben-David said. This could be the first full-scale war the IAF has fought in nearly 30 years, the report stated.

The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of "restrictive" walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.

The 38-year-old billionaire, whose family fled anti-semitism in the Soviet Union, was widely regarded as having been the driving force behind Google's partial pullout from China in 2010 over concerns about censorship and cyber-attacks. He said five years ago he did not believe China or any country could effectively restrict the internet for long, but now says he has been proven wrong. "I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle," he said.

He said he was most concerned by the efforts of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict use of the internet, but warned that the rise of Facebook and Apple, which have their own proprietary platforms and control access to their users, risked stifling innovation and balkanising the web.

Yesterday in a panel on the "Future of Europe" at a conference organized by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Soros said: "The Euro has really broken down. It has sprung defects, some of which could have been anticipated and some were anticipated. But some actually couldn't. Effectively, heavily indebted countries in Europe have ended up in the position of a third world country that is heavily indebted in a foreign currency. And that is only one of the unanticipated results of how things worked out with the Euro."

Soros went on to say that Europe is simultaneously suffering from a Euro Crisis, a sovereign debt crisis, a balance of payments crisis, a banking crisis, a competitiveness crisis and suffering from other serious structural defects.

The list of the disqualified hopefuls include Omar Sulaiman, who became vice-president in Mubarak's last days; Khairat Al Shater, the deputy leader of the influential Muslim Brotherhood; and Salah Abu Esmail, a populist ultra-conservative Salafist. The commission was forced to close its offices over the weekend when an angry mob of Esmail's followers, anticipating his disqualification, began protesting outside its offices.

"The commission members saw there was a danger to the lives of all those working inside the office and decided to evacuate it from the staff because there was not enough protection," said Hatem Bagatu, the secretary-general of the panel. He added that documents related to the election process and candidacies are kept inside the office.

Earlier this month, the commission said it was officially notified by the Egyptian Foreign Ministry that Abu Esmail's late mother was a US citizen. Under the Egyptian constitution, presidential candidates, their parents and spouses must be only Egyptian citizens. However, a Cairo court said earlier this week there was no evidence that Abu Esmail's mother had a dual citizenship. His supporters have vowed to continue their strike outside the commission's office until it validates his presidential bid.

Yields on Germany's benchmark 10-year Bund, viewed as the euro zone's safest debt, hit a record low of 1.628 percent. The previous record was established in November 2011, at the height of the debt crisis before the ECB injected around €1 trillion of cheap three-year funds into the banking system.

"We're back in full crisis mode," Rabobank rate strategist Lyn Graham-Taylor said. "It is looking more and more likely that Spain is going to have some form of a bailout. Assuming there is not an (ECB) intervention you would not see a cap on Spanish yields, they would just keep increasing." The latest blow to Spanish markets followed data on Friday that showed record borrowing by its banks from the ECB. Investors' main fear is that banks parked most of the funds in domestic government debt, making them more vulnerable to sovereign stress.

Spain faces a test of investor confidence this week with an auction of two- and 10-year bonds on Thursday. Contagion fears pushed Italian 10-year yields about 12 base points higher on the day at 5.66 percent.

Speaking to pilgrims and tourists in St Peter's Square on Sunday, he noted Thursday's anniversary and asked for prayers "so that the Lord may give me the strength to carry out the mission he has entrusted to me". Benedict is already older than John Paul was when he died in 2005 and is now the oldest reigning pope since Leo XIII, who died aged 93 in 1903 after reigning for 25 years. "His health at 85 is better than John Paul's was at 75," said one high-ranking Vatican official who reports to the pope regularly. "He is a very methodical man. He looks after himself and feels that he still has much to do," the official said.

The Vatican has announced that he will visit Lebanon in September and he may go to Brazil in 2013. "I'm old but I can still carry out my duties," the pope told Fidel Castro during his trip to Cuba last month. Still, Benedict is increasingly showing signs of frailty and fatigue, signs that are being watched carefully for their possible effect on the future of the 1.2 billion member Roman Catholic Church. When he left for Mexico and Cuba, he used a cane at the airport for the first time in public, though sources say he has been using it in private for some time.

Last year, to conserve his strength, he began using a mobile platform instead of walking up the aisle of St Peter's Basilica. The Vatican says it is to spare him fatigue and there is no concern about his overall health. His brother has said Benedict suffered two mild strokes before his election in 2005 and he reportedly suffers from high blood pressure and arthritis.

Where Benedict differs from his predecessors is that he is the only pope in living memory to discuss publicly the possibility of resignation, though others have done so privately. In a book in 2010, Benedict said he would not hesitate to become the first pontiff to resign willingly in more than 700 years if he felt no longer able, "physically, psychologically and spiritually" to run the Catholic Church.

"He has been an unmitigated disaster to the country," Cheney said of President Barack Obama. "I can't think of a time when I felt it was more important for us to defeat an incumbent president today with respect to Barack Obama. I think he has been an unmitigated disaster to the country," Cheney said at the Wyoming Republican Party state convention in Cheyenne on Saturday.

"I think to be in a position where he gets four more years in the White House to continue the policies he has, both with respect to the economy, and tax policy, and defense and some other areas would be a huge, huge disappointment," the former Vice President said.

Shapiro, the group's senior director of farm animal protection, said some in the audience clapped. Shapiro's bit of stagecraft was part of a fight under way in the American heartland that reaches into corporate boardrooms. US farmers and agribusiness are on one side and food safety groups and animal-rights organizations are on the other. It is fueled, in part, by politicians eager to court influential backers during an election year. Farm groups, too, want to be heard as Congress picks up its review of the federal farm bill.

And although food-safety activists and animal-rights organizations have different agendas, they both agree on one thing: Much of the public is unaware of what happens to their food before it arrives on their plate. The recent furor over so-called "pink slime" beef filler underscores how social media have given activists and consumers a powerful weapon to influence that process. Using tools such as Twitter and the threat of spending boycotts, consumers and activists pressured retailers to abandon Beef Products Inc's ammonia-treated lean, finely textured beef.

BPI idled three plants, affecting 650 workers. AFA Foods, one of the largest ground beef processors in the United States, filed for bankruptcy in early April, citing the uproar over pink slime. Agribusiness giant Cargill cut production of the meat scraps and warned the public's resistance to the filler could lead to higher hamburger prices this barbecue season. Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Kroger Co, among other grocery sellers, dropped it. "What do you have to hide?" is the new battle cry for food activists, said Amanda Hitt, a director at the Government Accountability Project, a group that protects whistleblowers.

China's yuan weakened after the central bank doubled the size of the currency's trading band over the weekend, a crucial reform in the process of liberalizing the country's nascent financial markets. A firmer dollar on the back of the euro zone's woes, and worries about slowing demand from China, also weighed on a broad range of commodities from precious metals and copper to oil.

Japan's Nikkei average .N225 shed as much as 1.6 percent. "Europe will be the focal point for the market this week, especially the results of Spanish bond auctions that may provide clues on how deep this latest crisis is running," said Choi Chang-ho, an analyst at Shinhan Investment & Securities. Investors will also keep an eye on a weekend meeting of the International Monetary Fund, where a plan to raise new resources for the global lender to contain the euro zone debt crisis tops the agenda.

The issue of discriminatory registration came to light thanks to alert Jewish visitors to the Mount, Attorney Naftali Wertzberger told Arutz Sheva. Visitors saw that Muslims and other non-Jews who entered were asked to show IDs and then allowed to enter, while when Jews entered, police took their ID cards and wrote something in a notebook before letting them pass. In addition, some Jews who were questioned by police were asked about previous visits to the Temple Mount at specific times, giving more proof that police were keeping track of Jewish entrance to the site.

“It’s a disgrace to have lists like that in a democratic state,” said Wertzberger. “Nowhere are entrance lists like that kept so that someday they can be used by ‘Big Brother,’ and the Temple Mount cannot be the one place it happens.” Police defended the procedure, saying it was needed to “keep the peace,” Wertzberger noted. The argument did not suffice in light of the fact that only Jewish names were recorded, he said. Violence on the Mount is typically not Jewish.

After activists warned police that they would take the matter to the High Court, “the police did some thinking, and this morning their legal adviser told us the procedure has been canceled, and from now on everybody will be identified through ID cards alone,” Wertzberger relayed. If police continue to discriminate against Jews in the identification process “we will not remain silent,” he added.