According to a brief statement released by the Vatican press office, the Pope and Herman Van Rompuy spoke about THE CONTRIBUTIONS THAT THE CHURCH WANTS TO MAKE TO THE EUROPEAN UNION.

"In the course of the meeting, attention also turned to the promotion of human rights and, in particular, of religious freedom," the communique added. Van Rompuy went on to meet with the Holy Father's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, and the secretary for relations with states, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti.

From Wikipedia: Mario Monti holds a degree in economics and management from Bocconi University, Milan. He completed graduate studies at Yale University, where he studied under James Tobin, the Nobel prize-winning economist. He taught economics at the University of Turin (1970-85) before moving to the Bocconi University, of which he has been rector (1989-1994) and then president (since 1994). His research has helped to create the Klein-Monti model, aimed at describing the behaviour of banks operating under monopoly circumstances.

Monti is the first chairman of Bruegel, a European think tank founded in 2005, and he is European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, a think tank founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller. He is also a leading member of the Bilderberg Group. Monti is an international adviser to Goldman Sachs and The Coca-Cola Company.

Reuters reports - "Mario Monti, the economist who will head an emergency Italian government following the departure of Silvio Berlusconi, brings credentials earned in a decade of battles as a European Commissioner from the 1990s. He is chairman of the European branch of the Trilateral Commission, a body that brings together the power elites of the United States, Europe and Japan and is also a member of the secretive Bilderberg Group of business leaders and other "leading citizens".

- Comes as US prepares to send 1,000 agents including 500 from FBI to protect its contestants

- Organising committee admits it needs to double the number of guards

Security chiefs are determined to put in place contingencies in case terrorists attempt to carry out an atrocity by flying an aircraft into a venue packed with fans. British troops would operate surface-to-air missile stations or shoulder-mounted man-portable air defence systems - or 'Manpads' - close to venues such as the Olympic Park in Stratford, East London.

The park, which will contain the 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium and the Aquatic Centre where swimming events will be held, would be a prized target for extremists. The former minister, who would have been aware of security plans for the event, said: 'Since the Atlanta Games there has been an internationally accepted minimal level of protection for the Olympics.' He urged ministers to ensure there would be 'a full range of multi-layered defence and deterrence for the London Games, including ground-to-air based missiles in London'.

The Defence Secretary replied: 'I can assure you that all necessary measures to ensure the security and safety of the London Olympic Games will be taken including, if the advice of the military is that it is required, appropriate ground-to-air defences.' It would be the first time surface-to-air missiles have been deployed in Britain since the end of the Second World War, according to an MoD spokesman.

The Army has a stockpile of around 340 surface-to-air missiles which can bring down a plane or a helicopter from long-range. The Starstreak high velocity missile and the Rapier towed missile system are laser-guided and can destroy incoming targets at a distance of nearly six miles. Another option for providing surface-to-air defence could include stationing one of Royal Navy's new missile-equipped Type 45 destroyers in the Thames.

The new Greek prime minister, Lucas Papademos, was the man who, as head of Greece's central bank, fiddled the figures to enable Greece to get into the euro (against the rules) in the first place - before being rewarded with a senior post in the European Central Bank. He is no more democratically elected than Mario Monti, who will most likely be Italy's new prime minister and had hurriedly to be made a "senator for life" to qualify him for the job. Monti's main qualification is that, as a former senior EU Commissioner, he has long been a member of the Brussels elite himself.

One of the few pleasures of watching this self-inflicted shambles unfolding day by day has been to see the panjandrums of the Today programme, James Naughtie and John Humphrys, at last beginning to ask whether the EU is a democratic institution. Had they studied the history of the object of their admiration, they might long ago have realised that the "European project" was never intended to be a democratic institution.

The idea first conceived back in the 1920s by two senior officials of the League of Nations - Jean Monnet and Arthur Salter, a British civil servant - was a United States of Europe, ruled by a government of unelected technocrats like themselves. Two things were anathema to them: nation states with the power of veto (which they had seen destroy the League of Nations) and any need to consult the wishes of the people in elections.

As Richard North and I showed in our book The Great Deception, this was the idea that Monnet put at the heart of the "project" from 1950 onwards, modelling his "government of Europe" on precisely the same four institutions that made up the League of Nations - a commission, a council of ministers, a parliament and a court. Thus, step by step over decades, Monnet's technocratic dream has come to pass.

The events of last week were by no means the first time that an elected prime minister has been toppled by the Euro-elite. The most dramatic example, as we also showed in our book, was in 1990, when Mrs Thatcher had emerged as the biggest obstacle to the next great leap forward in their slow-motion coup d'etat, the Maastricht Treaty, creating the European Union and the single currency. Following her ambushing at a European Council in October 1990, when she was outnumbered 11 to one, the trap was sprung. An alliance between the European elite, led by Jacques Delors, and our own Tory Europhiles, led by Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine, brought her down within weeks.

They had disposed of the greatest political obstacle to the onward march of their project just as ruthlessly as they were later to brush aside all those referendums expressing the objections of the French, the Dutch and the Irish to their Constitution. The one thing for which there has never been any place in their grand design is democracy.

Yields on Italy's 10-year bonds jumped back up to 6.7 per cent after Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann dashed hopes for muscular intervention by the European Central Bank to stabilise bond markets and buy time for the new government of Mario Monti. Hours later, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel called for a "breakthrough to a new Europe, and political union" but ruled out Eurobonds, debt-pooling or any form of fiscal transfers to weaker EMU states in a speech to the Christian Democrat (CDU) party conference in Leipzig.

"What investors want to know is whether the ECB is ready to stand behind the bond markets because it is not clear who else is going to buy 350 billion euros of Italian debt over the next year," said Hans Redeker from Morgan Stanley. "If we had seen a credible government in Italy six months ago it might have turned market sentiment, but it may be too late now. What is really dangerous is that the market is losing confidence in France even though Paris is delivering a 65 billion euros austerity package. We are nearing the point where French bond yields will force rating agencies to downgrade France," he said.

Mr Weidmann is unrelenting. He said that the ECB is prohibited by treaty law from acting as a lender-of-last resort for states, whether directly or covertly through the International Monetary Fund.

Yet the crisis is escalating by the day. Moody's said it is not clear whether Europe's EFSF bail-out machinery can "fund itself in the markets at low cost", raising doubts about its ability to contain the debt crisis. The rating agency said plans to leverage the EFSF to 1 trillion euros have come to little, leaving it with just 266 billion euros after funding Ireland, Portugal and Greece. "This limits the EFSF's role as an important pillar of the euro area crisis management strategy," it said.

There is nothing yet standing behind the system as Europe spins wildly into the eye of the storm.

It follows the damaging revolt over Britain's relationship with Europe, in which senior Conservative MPs, including former cabinet minister John Redwood, spoke out against official policy. However, in an apparent olive branch to the rebels, it was reported in The Times that Downing Street was considering scrapping the planned 3 pence rise due in January.

However the Prime Minister's official spokesman would only say that decisions on taxation were a matter for the Chancellor. "We recognise as a Government that motoring is an essential part of everyday life for many families and fuel is a significant cost for those families," the spokesman said.

Campaigners are most concerned about the increase in petrol duty, which they yesterday called "aslyum economics". Quentin Willson, the TV presenter and spokesman for FairFuelUK, said: "Only someone on mind-altering medication would suggest piling yet more financial pressure on an economy that's already crumbling to the touch. Fuel duty in the UK has become a trojan horse that's corroding the economy from within. We need a cut, not another rise."

Virtually nothing is more sacred to Germans than their constitution, which is known as the Basic Law. It was originally planned as a stopgap measure, but it has seen the Federal Republic of Germany through the past 62 years. During the Cold War, political parties may have squabbled over conservative Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's political commitment to Western Europe and the United States - and they had their differences over left-leaning Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik policy of normalizing relations with communist Eastern Europe, particularly with East Germany - but they immediately and unanimously praised the Basic Law. "We have one of the best constitutions in the world," German Chancellor Angela Merkel once said.

Now, it looks as if Merkel herself may order an overhaul of the German constitution. At the party conference of the chancellor's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) which commenced on Monday morning, November 14, it is expected to approve a plan that could change the face of Europe - and perhaps make it necessary for the Germans to rewrite their constitution.

This operation to amend the constitution has already become one of the government's most delicate political initiatives. If it succeeds, it would remove one of the euro's biggest problems: The 17 euro-zone countries have a common currency but do not have a common finance policy, a fact which partly explains why the euro is teetering at the edge of an abyss. This is tackled in the key sentence of the new paper. "We need more Europe in key policy areas," it says.

But China can contain these dangers by freeing up financial markets to give investors, commercial banks and the central bank greater autonomy from government control, the fund said in its first-ever review of the Chinese financial system. While not predicting an imminent disaster, the IMF made clear China needed to act quickly because it is vulnerable to destabilizing asset price booms.

"The existing configuration of financial policies fosters high savings, structurally high levels of liquidity, and a high risk of capital misallocation and asset bubbles, particularly in real estate," the IMF said. The report, which was completed in June but published only on Tuesday, contains 29 key recommendations. The fund said it ran a stress test on 17 banks that account for 83 percent of China's commercial banking system.

The discovery of a murder pistol in the home of a suspected neo-Nazi sparked fears of the existence of a Brown Shirt faction, symbolic of Hitler's Brown Shirt police who stalked the streets after his ascension to power. The pistol was found in a house rented by "Beate K," a 36-year-old woman who blew up her rented apartment to destroy evidence before turning herself in to authorities.

Police determined that the pistol was used in the previously unsolved murders of a policewoman and nine foreigner businessmen, eight from Turkey and one from Greece, over a period of six years. The case is not being treated as a one-time affair, and investigators suspect an extreme right terror network may exist in Germany.

A second suspect, a 37-year-old German, suspected of having supported the National Socialist Underground, which also may have masterminded several bank robberies. Two other suspects committed suicide last week. "For the first time since reunification, Germany faces large-scale extreme-right extremism," wrote Berlin's Tagesspiegel.

The liberal Tageszeitung newspaper told its readers, "Observers are already talking about a possible 'Brown Army Faction' that could be secretly at work. Some legislators have urged a ban on the radical National Democratic Party, which parliament member Ralf Stergner called "a political arm of the Nazi scene and enemy of the constitution."

In two images, available on Google Earth, reflective rectangles up to a mile long can be seen, a tangle of bright white intersecting lines that are clearly visible from space. Other pictures show enormous concentric circles radiating on the ground, with three jets parked at their centre.

In one picture from 2007, a mass of orange blocks have been carefully arranged in a circle. In a more recent image, however, the blocks, each one the size of a shipping container, appear to have been scattered as far as three miles from the original site.

Another image shows an array of metallic squares littered with what appears to be the debris of exploded vehicles while another shows an intricate grid that is some 18 miles long. All of the sites are on the borders of Gansu province and Xinjiang, some less than 100 miles from Jiuquan, the headquarters of China's space programme and the location of its launch pads.

The purpose of the structures is unknown, but some experts suggested that they might be optical test ranges for Chinese missiles, to simulate the street grids of cities. Tim Ripley, a defence expert from Jane's Defence Weekly, compared the structures to similar grids in Area 51, the secret United States military test base in Nevada. "The picture of the circle looks very like a missile test range, with target and instrumentation set out to record weapon effects. The Americans have lots of these in Nevada - Area 51!" he said.

The yield on Italian 10-year bonds rallied early on Monday afternoon to 6.7 per cent, while equivalent Spanish bond yields hit 6.03 per cent, up from 5 per cent five weeks ago. It is the first time Spanish bonds have breached the 6 per cent line since the European Central Bank resumed debt purchases on August 8. It leaves Spain with borrowing costs closer to those of Italy as the ECB's purchases fail to cap yields, and reveals investors' scepticism as to whether eurozone leaders will be able to push through reforms to end the debt crisis.

Italian bond yields fell from a record high of 7.48 per cent last week as Silvio Berlusconi made his way for the exit, but jumped again today before Mario Monti, the new technocrat leader, had even named his ministers or laid out a timetable to form a government. "There's a high probability of Spain following Italy," said Phyllis Reed, head of fixed-income research at Kleinwort Benson Bank in London. "In the very short term, the trigger is just the fact that we're getting close to the edge of the abyss with the euro."

The front-runner People's Party has pledged to slash "superfluous spending" and not deviate from the budget target "under any circumstances". Spain is struggling with a 23 per cent unemployment rate, a budget deficit equal to 6.6 per cent of GDP and a two-year growth forecast of 0.7 per cent.

A rally on financial markets sparked by the appointment of respected European technocrats in Rome and Athens soon stalled. Analysts warned that daunting obstacles could hinder decisive action needed to breathe new life into their ailing economies. Italy had to pay a euro-lifetime record yield of 6.3 percent to sell five-year bonds with investors wary of buying its debt until prime minister-designate Mario Monti can undertake profound economic reforms.

In a first sign of trouble for new Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, the leader of the main conservative party rejected any toughening of austerity and refused to sign a letter sought by European authorities pledging support for a new 130 billion euro bailout. Merkel dramatized the situation facing the euro zone in an attempt to rally her conservative party behind the government at a congress in Leipzig.

"Europe is in one of its toughest, perhaps the toughest hour since World War Two," she told her Christian Democrats (CDU), saying she feared Europe would fail if the euro failed and vowing to do anything to stop this from happening.

The US has raised repeated concerns about security at the London Olympics and is preparing to send up to 1,000 of its agents, including 500 from the FBI, to provide protection for America's contestants and diplomats, the Guardian has learned. American officials have expressed deep unease that the UK has had to restrict the scope of anti-terrorism "stop and search" powers, and have sought a breakdown of the number of British police and other security personnel that will be available next summer.

The prime minister and other senior members of the cabinet, including home secretary Theresa May and culture and sport secretary Jeremy Hunt, are taking turns to chair security meetings about the Olympics, which are often dominated by the latest questions from the US, sources said. But Washington's need for reassurance is exasperating British officials and anti-terrorism officials, who have privately raised concerns about the meddling, as well as the size of the US "footprint" in the UK during the games next year. "We are not equal partners in this," said one security official. "They are being very demanding."

The friction is adding to the pressures on the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Locog), which is responsible for preparing and staging the event. The Guardian has learned the committee is attempting to resolve a potential crisis over venue security, after conceding it had underestimated the number of security guards needed at the 32 sites across the country. Originally it had thought 10,000 guards would be enough, but after a review over the summer it now believes it will need up to 21,000.

Italy's president asked former European Commissioner Mario Monti on Sunday to form a government to restore market confidence in an economy whose debt burden is too big for the euro bloc to bail out. Investors will pass initial judgement on his leadership when Italy's Treasury asks investors on Monday to bid for up to 3 billion euros (2.5 billion pounds) in five-year government bonds. At an auction last week, the government's borrowing costs surged above 6 percent and kept rising to levels well beyond what the country could afford to pay over the longer term.

While Italy's problems and the long-drawn-out departure of the flamboyant Berlusconi have pushed the collapse of the much smaller Greek economy backstage, the IMF and European leaders will keep Greece's new prime minister, Lucas Papademos, under pressure to implement radical reform aimed at staving off bankruptcy.

Papademos succeeds George Papandreou, whose proposal to hold a referendum on the country's bailout terms prompted EU leaders to raise the threat of a Greek exit from the currency bloc. The new Greek leader - a former central banker who oversaw his country's entry to the euro zone in 2002 - must win a Wednesday confidence vote in his cabinet before meeting euro zone finance ministers in Brussels on Thursday, state television reported, where he will be expected to outline next year's draft budget before putting it to parliament.

He urged President Assad to launch dialogue with the opposition to effect an orderly transition. Arab leaders have increasingly criticised the crackdown in Syria after months of violence. Both the Saudi and Qatari ambassadors left Damascus in protest at the repression. The Arab League voted on Saturday to suspend Syria's membership. However King Abdullah went further than other Arab leaders in his exclusive interview with BBC World News television.

King Abdullah's remarks, coupled with the Arab League's decision to suspend Damascus, mark a turning point in the Arab world's approach to Syria. But Jordan's monarch was emphatic that President Assad stepping down was not enough. His call to the Syrian leader was about changing a "system". He admitted that no-one was clear how to do that, and the Syrian regime still believed it was "in a fairly comfortable position".

King Abdullah, like many others, also emphasised there was great concern about "life after Bashar". He warned that any outside intervention in Syria would open "Pandora's box".