The results - which threatens to upend a century of physics - were put online for scrutiny by other scientists. In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims. They will be discussing the result in detail in a conference at Cern on Friday afternoon, which can be viewed online. "We tried to find all possible explanations for this," said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration. "We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News. "When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'"

The speed of light is the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it. Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit. But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.

Societe Generale led a further rout of bank shares, crashing 9% in Paris on concern that it might need recapitalisation to cope with losses on Italian and Spanish debt. The yield spread between Italian 10-year bonds and Bunds reached a fresh record of 408 basis points before the European Central Bank (ECB) intervened in late trading. It is near the level at which LCH.Clearnet raises margin requirements, the trigger that forced Greece, Portugal and Ireland to request bail-outs.

Global investors appear shaken by the refusal of the US Federal Reserve to come to the rescue yet again with quantitative easing (QE3) even though it was never likely the bank would launch fresh stimulus with core inflation running near 2% or in the face of protests from Capitol Hill. The global flight from risk has hit Europe hardest. Peter Possing Andersen from Danske Bank said Europe's authorities are running out of time. "The financial markets have lost faith in the current policies and the economy is on the verge of a recession. Radical action is needed to short-circuit the negative spiral," he said.

"Segments of the financial markets are dysfunctional and access to credit is being shut down. European policymakers must take imminent and bold measures. Until this happens, the market will grind slowly but surely towards disaster. The current policy of austerity risks killing the already fragile recovery and is making a bad situation worse in terms of debt dynamics," he said.

Asked by CNBC if he believed the US risks falling into a double-dip recession, Soros said: "I think we are in it already. We have a slowdown and basically a conflict about whether the rich ought to pay taxes to create jobs or not and there was a deal in the making which would have balanced the budget over the long term, but would have allowed short-term fiscal stimulus, which would have been the right policy," Soros said in an interview late Wednesday.

"That was rejected, it fell apart... so it will come to the electorate next year to decide what they want," he added. Euro zone policymakers have repeatedly followed the wrong policy shifts, creating a situation in Europe "more dangerous" to the global financial system than the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, Soros said.

"It is a more dangerous situation [than Lehman Bros] and I think that the authorities, when push comes to shove, will do whatever it takes to hold the system together, because the alternative is just too terrible to contemplate," he added.

Thursday's slump was sparked by a Federal Reserve warning on Wednesday about the outlook for the US economy. Gloomy comments about weak global growth from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank knocked sentiment further. On Thursday, IMF head Christine Lagarde said the global economic situation was entering a "dangerous place", while World Bank president Robert Zoellick said he thought the world was in a "danger zone".

Doubts about the strength of European banks also resurfaced on Friday, after the head of France's markets regulator, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, said "there is indeed a problem with the capitalisation of banks". He said 15 to 20 banks needed additional funds, none of which were based in France. Meanwhile, Greece has denied media reports it was contemplating defaulting on its debts, with creditors taking a 50% hit on Greek government bonds.

The close friendship that has developed between Christians and Jews "must put up with others saying things that hurt," he told Reuters after he and other Jewish leaders met the pope and Catholic prelates for about 25 minutes. "A possible beatification of Pius XII would hurt us," said Graumann, referring to efforts to put the late pope on the path to sainthood. "For us he is the pope who kept his silence too coldly and loudly during the Holocaust." Critics accuse Pius of not speaking up to defend Jews against the Nazis, but his defenders - including Benedict - say he did the best he could to help them. Graumann said the pope did not react to his objection to beatifying Pius.

In his remarks to the Jews, Benedict said Christians should never forget the horrors of the Holocaust and should become increasingly aware of their faith's deep affinity with Judiasm. Noting that the Nazis planned and organised the attempt to exterminate the Jews from offices in Berlin, Benedict called the city a "central place of remembrance."

Benedict, who as a teenager was forcibly enrolled in the Hitler Youth, said "only a few" Germans were able to see the contempt for humanity the Nazis displayed on Kristallnacht in 1938 when they burnt synagogues and Jewish stores. Adolf Hitler, he said, was a "pagan idol who wanted to take the place of the Biblical God" and that the concentration camps showed what man is capable of doing when he rejects God.

Beefed up police and troops are preparing for the rallies to turn violent and surge out of the Palestinian towns. They are also deployed at mixed population centers of Jews and Arabs up and down the country to avert clashes and concentrated on the Green Line enclosing the West Bank and the approaches to Jerusalem.

In defiance of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas' directive for rallies to stay within the limits of Palestinian towns and remain orderly, the PA's Religious Affairs Minister Mahmoud Habbash secretly instructed the imams Thursday to turn up the volume of their loudspeakers at Friday prayers and keep on shouting Allah is Great! This call coming from Al Aqsa on Temple Mount aims at reaching every Muslim in the West Bank and Israel. Israeli security chiefs are treating this call, characteristic of suicide bombers, as a war cry for stirring up riots.

Earlier, the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, said the world's economy was "in a danger zone". The comments came after the Federal Reserve warned that the US economy faced "significant downside risks". In Europe, the UK FTSE 100 closed down 4.7%, while France's Cac 40 fell 5.25% and Germany's Dax ended 5% lower. In the US, the Dow Jones was 4.3% in afternoon trading. The FTSE 100's tumble was its biggest one-day fall since the index fell 5.3% on 2 March 2009. Oil prices also fell sharply on worries that a global slowdown will hit demand. Brent crude for delivery in November tumbled $4.71 to $105.65 a barrel. West Texas crude dived $5.22 to $80.70 a barrel.

Mrs Lagarde told a news conference at the IMF's annual meeting in the US that the "path to recovery is narrower than three years ago," when developed economies sank into recession. She said that international leaders must act quickly on fiscal consolidation, the repair of household debt, and reforms of the public sectors. "Time is of the essence," she said. It was key, she added, that the banks were supported because international lending was essential to "fuel growth".

On Wednesday, the Bank of England said members of its Monetary Policy Committee had considered a new round of quantitative easing to pump money into the economy.

An unprecedented meeting between Benedict and Patriarch Kirill could begin to heal the 1,000-year-old rift between the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity, which split in the Great Schism of 1054. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Russian Orthodox Church has accused Catholics of using their new freedoms to poach souls from the Orthodox, a charge the Vatican denies.

But the biggest bone of contention concerns the fate of many church properties that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered confiscated from Eastern Rite Catholics, who worship in an Orthodox rite but owe their allegiance to Rome. Stalin gave the property to the Russian Orthodox Church but after the fall of communism, the Eastern Rite Catholics took back more than 500 churches, mostly in Western Ukraine.

"Not very much was done or is being done in order to solve this problem," said Hilarion, who is head of the external relations department of the 165-million-member Russian Orthodox Church and one of the closest aides to Patriarch Kirill. "As soon as we have this understanding, we will be ready to begin preparations for such a meeting," he said.

"Hate crimes are a security issue and may contribute to destabilising regional or even inter-state relations," he told OSCE conference whose title was "Preventing and Responding to Hate Incidents and Crimes Against Christians." The conference heard reports of growing acts of intolerance against Christians, including attacks on churches in Spain, France and Austria and attacks on anti-abortion activists in Vienna.

Lenarcic, the head of the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, said the OSCE was monitoring "hate crimes against Christians, as well as intolerance and discrimination against Christians more broadly" than before. The conference echoed recent concerns by the Roman Catholic and other Christian Churches over what they see as growing "Christianophobia" in an increasingly secular Europe.

Metropolitan (Archbishop) Hilarion, foreign minister for the Russian Orthodox Church, warned that some in Europe were looking for "an excuse to exclude signs of Christian civilisation from the public and political realities of the continent." Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, the Vatican's foreign minister, said the OSCE reports provided "irrefutable proof of a growing intolerance against Christians" and that authorities could not ignore the warning signs. "Sadly, acts motivated by bias against Christians are fast becoming a reality also in those countries where they constitute a majority," Mamberti said.

Historians say the treaty weakened the Church, which could have been a centre of opposition to the Nazis, and gave the new Nazi regime a certain legitimacy outside of Germany.

The Nazis did not keep their promises and, after a few years, limited Church publications and then began harrassing and jailing priests who criticised them. Many Catholic priests died in concentration camps, especially Dachau near Munich.

Wolfram Kastner, who disguised himself as the then pope, told Reuters Television: "I'm an artist. I try to make pictures. Pictures that have to do with current times, living pictures. I think this is a living picture that can illustrate the scandal of this failure to separate Church and State."

Every word he utters during the state visit - especially in his address to parliament in Berlin on Thursday or an Erfurt meeting with Protestant leaders on Friday - will be weighed, analysed, hailed or slammed by his supporters and critics. Benedict's predecessor John Paul always met rapturous crowds in his Catholic Poland. The pope from Catholic Bavaria can expect less deference from the Protestants of old Prussia or the atheist generations raised in communist East Germany. But he has chosen to stride straight into the lion's den, addressing on his first day the Bundestag (lower house of parliament). About 100 deputies - almost one-seventh of the legislature - plan to boycott the speech in protest.

On his second day, he will meet Protestant leaders in the Erfurt monastery where reformer Martin Luther lived as a Catholic monk before posting the 95 Theses in 1517 that inspired the Reformation and split western Christianity. The Protestants, whose ranks are roughly equal with those of German Catholics, want to celebrate the 500th anniversary of that event in 2017 with nationwide celebrations emphasising Luther's contributions to Christianity and German culture. Their question now is how far the Catholics will cooperate.

Benedict is the first pope who really knows and understands Protestants. Will he speak of Luther as a heretic? Praise him for reviving Christian interest in the Bible? Will he stress how important Luther's Bible translation was for the development of the modern German language? German Protestants and Catholics will be listening carefully when he answers these questions in Erfurt on Friday.

Given that background, the impact on ties was expected to be slight, partly because Washington deferred a decision on selling Taiwan a more advanced version of the plane that would have stirred far greater anger from Beijing. "For the sake of legitimacy, the regime has to respond strongly. There will always be bluster and threats bandied about, but they also know that the US is their most important foreign relationship," said Gabe Collins, a Michigan-based expert on the Chinese military.

"At the end of the day, I don't think there'll be significant damage," said Collins, the co-founder of China Signpost, an online publication that follows China's armed forces. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement on its website that Vice Minister Zhang Zhijun summoned US Ambassador Gary Locke in Beijing to deliver the protest. "The wrongdoing by the US side will inevitably undermine bilateral relations as well as exchanges and cooperation in military and security areas," Zhang told Locke, according to the statement.

China's Defense Ministry also protested the US decision, with spokesman Geng Yansheng saying it had "created severe obstacles for the normal military-to-military exchanges of the two countries." The ministry's deputy head of foreign affairs summoned Washington's military attache to Beijing to deliver a "strong protest," over the arms deal, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Absent from the logo is any hint that Palestine consists of anything other than Arab territory. No nod is given even to the UN's 1948 decision to divide the region into Jewish and Arab sectors. As for the shape of Israel by the time it was forced into waging the defensive Six Day war in 1967: irrelevant. The logo illustrates that the Palestinian bid before the UN for support of a unilateral declaration of statehood is disingenuous and dangerous. There is not too much left to the imagination here: Israel is "wiped off the map."

Lest anyone believe that the map is a temporary phenomenon, pending a successful Palestinian UN statehood gambit, the memo appearing on the Palestine UN mission website makes it clear this is not the case. The memo is a response to legal opinions advising the Palestinians that the status of the Palestinian Liberation Organization is at risk if their UN move succeeds. The response: The PLO will continue to be "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people as a whole." Along with their no-Israel emblem.

As the Palestinians seek statehood status from the United Nations, they claim to be interested in peace. But the logo reveals a more sinister goal: Palestinian unilateral statehood efforts go hand-in-hand with a desire by the rulers of such a state to champion the continued rejection of the Jewish state, Israel. That's what the UN - with its automatic majority of Muslim countries and their undemocratic allies - is being asked to endorse.

The stadium was built for the 1936 games, famous for the performance of black American sprinter Jesse Owens, who made a mockery of Nazi master race theories by winning gold in the 100m, 200m, 4x100m relay and the long jump. Designed by Werner March, advised by Hitler's architect Albert Speer, it remains an imposing example of Nazi architecture, with vast grey towers and a neo-classical aspect.

The stadium survived the Allies' intense bombardment of Berlin practically intact, and once Germany surrendered in 1945 it became the headquarters for British troops. Its name was changed from the Reichssportfeld to the Olympiastadion and it was gradually stripped of all signs of the Nazi regime including giant swastikas and "Aryan" statues.

The government is "more likely now than during the financial crisis to allow a large bank to fail should it become financially troubled," said the rating agency, a unit of Moody's Corp. "This is crystallizing the fact we're in a new political reality," said Jason Ware, equity analyst with Salt Lake City-based Albion Financial Group. Moody's decision hit Bank of America hardest, as it downgraded the long- and short-term debt of the holding company and long-term deposits at its main banking unit.

The ratings agency downgraded only short-term debt at Citigroup and limited the Wells' cut to its senior debt and to deposits at its lead bank. Bank of America is struggling with billions of dollars of mortgage losses, litigation and stresses from the need to raise capital to meet new regulatory obligations. After Moody's downgrade, the cost to insure $10 million of Bank of America's debt for 5 years in the credit default swap market rose 48 basis points to $378,000 per year.

Representative Barney Frank, one of the law's two primary authors, and former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp Chairman Sheila Bair have been most outspoken in arguing the only way a bailout could occur is for Congress to change the law. "I can't comment on the absolute value of Moody's ratings, but I am pleased that the rating agency recognizes that such large institutions are not 'too big to fail,'" Frank said in a prepared statement.