Berlin's Euro-dictates are provoking growing anger in various Euro nations. For example, the Greek prime minister accuses the German government of provoking an escalation of the crisis in Ireland and Portugal with its current plans for regulating national bankruptcies. Similar accusations are to be heard in Dublin. In Lisbon, a withdrawal from the Euro is no longer seen as out of the question.

Already at the beginning of the month, French government circles were insinuating that criticism of German policy is no longer possible. It is not even sure, if Berlin still cares about European integration. Warning that continued resistance could jeopardize peace in Europe, Germany has already tried to impose its demands for re-structuring the EU - most recently following the democratic refusal of the "EU Constitution", the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty

THE GERMAN CHANCELLOR LINKS THE QUESTION OF THE PERSPECTIVE FOR THE EURO TO THAT OF CONTINUED PEACE IN EUROPE. "It is our duty to anchor a new stability culture in Europe," is how the chancellor paraphrased Berlin's visions, yesterday, in her speech at the CDU party convention. The project of formulating the EU's financial regulations according to Germany's design is "a gigantic undertaking". This is quite often forgotten, "amid all the talk of crisis mechanisms, voting rights, contracts, stability culture, rescue packages, the IMF, currency, the European Central Bank," said Merkel. In fact "it is about everything: because if the Euro fails, Europe fails." Ultimately "the European ideal of peace is at stake."

The new structure, known as the English Ordinariate, is expected to begin operation early next year. It will allow traditionalist Anglo-Catholics who oppose recent liberal reforms in the Church of England to enter into full communion with Rome while retaining some of their Anglican traditions. In an interview with Vatican Radio, Dr Williams insisted that there was "no ill feeling" between him and the five bishops leading the exodus of Anglicans to Rome.

"Obviously my reaction to the resignations is one of regret but respect - I know the considerations they've been through," he said. "There are still a great many Anglicans in the Church of England who call themselves traditionalist who have no intention of jumping ship at this point, who are at the moment in considerable confusion and distress. But they don't necessarily think if the Church of England isn't working for them that the only option is Rome."

For the first time, the Archbishop suggested that worshipers who join the Ordinariate could be allowed to stay in their Anglican churches under a plan to let Roman Catholics share Church of England facilities. "I think the challenge will come in working out shared use of churches, of how we as Anglicans 'recommend' people and also of course there will be some parishes without priests," he said.

Dr Williams suggested that the Pope's offer to allow converts to retain some of their Anglican traditions within Roman Catholicism represented a significant shift in approach from the Vatican. "Here is the Roman Catholic Church saying there are ways of being Christian in the Western church which are not restricted by historic Roman Catholic identity," he said.

Industry officials, travelers and pilots have complained bitterly to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) about new full-body scanners and more rigorous patdown checks begun in recent weeks. Security officials have defended the measures as necessary after foiled plots by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has tried to hide bombs in clothing and parcels that have made it aboard a US passenger airliner and two cargo planes.

With the busiest holiday travel season nearing, fliers face long security lines and new rigorous patdown checks aimed at discovering hidden explosives. As a result, some travelers are questioning whether to fly at all.

Ireland, the latest member to come under intense bond market pressure, agreed on Monday to discuss with an EU-ECB-IMF team how to stabilize its state-guaranteed banks but continues to resist applying for the kind of state bailout granted to Greece. Even if, as seems likely, Dublin accepts an international rescue after more face-saving words, analysts increasingly doubt that will stop contagion spreading to fellow weakling Portugal and, more ominously, perhaps to the much larger Spain.

"In practice, hopes that Ireland can be 'ring-fenced' are unlikely to succeed," Citi economists Juergen Michels, Giada Giani and Michael Saunders wrote in a note to clients. In what can become a self-sustaining frenzy, investors bid up the borrowing costs of troubled countries on the bond market until they reach an unsustainable level when a government needs to raise money or roll over expiring debt.

The European Union stemmed the first wave of debt crisis in May with "shock and awe" tactics by rescuing Greece along with the International Monetary Fund and creating a $1 trillion financial safety net for other euro zone states in distress. Six months later, the deterrent effect of the 440 billion euro European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), the main component of that contingency fund, which EU officials said they believed would never need to be used, seems to have worn off.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso played down any sense of a renewed euro zone crisis this week, saying all the necessary instruments were now in place in case a country needed help. But with typical European cacophony, the man who chairs EU summits and heads a task force on reforming euro zone economic governance, Herman Van Rompuy, undermined such soothing talk by saying the currency bloc was now in a "survival crisis."

They are being kept afloat by borrowing 130 billion euros from the European Central Bank. But the ECB is keen for banks to scale back their use of its liquidity facilities. Irish lenders also face concerns about whether Irish mortgage-holders will start defaulting in large numbers. Then there is the risk that depositors will flee: Bank of Ireland alone lost 10 billion euros of deposits in the third quarter.

The biggest problem is funding. Ireland's big three banks have about 110 billion euros of wholesale funding falling due in the next three years. They are unlikely to be able to roll this over unless the EU guarantees their debt.

It should have enough cash to do so: the EU's various bailout mechanisms have access to 500 billion euros. If the commitment was credible, an EU guarantee would probably allow Irish banks to borrow on the wholesale markets. That would help restore confidence - and ease the pressure on Ireland's sovereign debt as well.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will also attend, in a sign of warming ties. Afghanistan will be top of the agenda, with plans to bring Nato's combat operations to an end by 2014. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is scheduled to address the summit on Saturday, has said he wants Nato to hand back control of the country by the end of 2014 - a deadline the US has described as realistic but not set in stone.

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said the deadline had existed for some time as "an aspirational goal" but that this did not mean all coalition forces would have to leave by that date. The Lisbon talks are expected to shape the future of Nato at a time of shrinking budget cuts and expanding challenges, says the BBC's defence correspondent, Caroline Wyatt. Key to the future credibility of the alliance will be ensuring a workable transition in Afghanistan, our correspondent adds.

On Thursday, Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the alliance had "underestimated the challenge" in Afghanistan but was confident it was now "on the right track". "I'm very optimistic about our Afghanistan operation and we'll make a positive announcement in Lisbon - that the handover is about to begin," he told Portugal's Renascenca newspaper. There are some 120,000 international troops attached to the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in Afghanistan.

The second the doorbell rings, the lights go off and the shades are drawn on the second floor of an apartment building on the outskirts of Athens. For the unwanted visitor, this is apparently meant to convey that no one is home. Since Nikos Kanellopoulos, 62, began appearing in the headlines, he is no longer available for comment.

Kanellopoulos is probably Greece's best-known public official at the moment. He was a civil servant for about 37 years, most recently as a department head in the Ministry of Culture. He went into retirement at the end of December 2008. He must have been very successful: According to the tax authorities, he now owns 10 properties, including the four-storey apartment building containing his own, 126-square meter (1,356-square foot) apartment in the suburb of Nikaia.

Tax investigators also discovered 11 personal banking accounts with four different banks. The grand total of all deposits made into the 11 accounts amounted to the stately sum of 8,923,506.58 euros (over $12 million). Of this amount, more than 8 million euros went into the accounts during Kanellopoulos's last 10 years as a civil servant. The question is, where did the money come from?

The Kanellopoulos case is seen as a particularly drastic example of the Greek malaise. It is making headlines at the moment because it contrasts so sharply with Prime Minister George Papandreou's massive efforts to fend off the national bankruptcy that still threatens Greece.

"The Holy See would consider such actions as grave violations of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience," Lombardi said in a statement. Catholics in China are divided between one Church that recognizes the pope and his authority to name bishops and a state-backed "patriotic association" which names its own bishops. Relations between the two had been seen to be improving, so Lombardi's tough statement was a surprise.

It said that Guo did not have the pope's approval to become bishop and that the Vatican would consider it "illicit and damaging to the constructive relations that have been developing in recent times between the People's Republic of China and the Holy See". The Vatican wants to establish diplomatic relations with China but Beijing says the Holy See must first sever ties with Taiwan, which China considers a renegade territory.

Taiwan, whose formal name is the Republic of China, has full diplomatic relations with only some 20 states.

The incident has raised fears that China may have harvested highly-sensitive information from re-routed emails. Another theory is that it could be testing a cyberweapon that could disrupt internet traffic from foreign servers. The traffic included email exchanges from websites of the US Senate and the Department of Defense, along with "many others" including NASA and Department of Commerce.

Chinese internet officials have claimed that the re-routing was accidental, but the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission's annual report suggested the hijacking could have been "malicious". "Evidence related to this incident does not clearly indicate whether it was perpetrated intentionally and, if so, to what ends," the report said. "However, computer security researchers have noted that the capability could enable severe malicious activities."

Larry Wortzel, a member of the commission, said yesterday: "We don't know what was done with the data when they got it. When I see things like this happen, I ask, who might be interested with all the communications traffic from the entire Department of Defense and federal government? It's probably not a graduate student at Shanghai University. What could you do if you had the stream of email traffic for 18 minutes to and from the US Joint Chiefs of Staff? Most importantly you would get the internet addresses of everybody that communicated."

While sensitive data such as emails are generally encrypted before being transmitted, the Chinese government holds a copy of an encryption master key which could be used it to break into redirected traffic.

A team of officials is due to arrive in the Republic later for further talks on the debt crisis. Representatives from the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the EU will take part. The talks will take place with the Dublin government, which has denied that it has asked for aid. The BBC's business editor Robert Peston said that in terms of Irish resistance to a bail-out, this was "game over".

"The Irish government could not conceivably go against the advice of its [eurozone] partners and its central bank," he said. Were it to do so, commercial customers of Irish banks would accelerate withdrawals which would be devastating, he said. BBC Ireland correspondent Mark Simpson added that it could be "a fortnight until we see what these loans look like".

Once known as the "Celtic tiger" because of the strength of its economic boom, the Republic has since suffered the deepest recession of any country in the developed world, including collapsing property prices and a deeply-indebted banking sector. The Irish government has repeatedly denied that it is seeking outside support. Prime Minister Brian Cowen has said that he has not asked for bail-out money and that the Irish economy is well funded until next year. An EU handout would be seen as a big loss of face for the Republic - essentially meaning that its survival and solvency was reliant on Brussels.

Financial experts from the European Commission and IMF are today expected to arrive in Dublin to begin discussions over a bailout for Irish banks which is set to be agreed in the coming days. The new figures - from the Bank for International Settlements - disclose that Britain faces the biggest potential losses from a meltdown in the Irish economy. This country's banks have lent more than those from any other country to the Irish government, consumers and businesses.

RBS, the largely-nationalised bank, is thought to have the biggest exposure with more than 50 billion pounds of outstanding loans. Amid the growing fears that an Irish collapse could have a serious knock-on effect in this country, Mr Osborne said that the Treasury was considering all options for financial aid.

"We are going to do what we regard as being in the British national interest: Ireland is our closest neighbour, so it is in our national interest that the Irish economy is successful and that the Irish banking system is stable," the Chancellor said. "Britain stands ready to support Ireland on the steps it needs to take to bring about that stability." He added: "I won't speculate on what kind of assistance we might provide. There are options, and we are looking at all of those".

On Tuesday, embattled Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan fended off pressure from other euro-zone member states to seek a bailout package from the stability fund established by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund earlier this year. Yet Dublin may not be able to hold out for much longer. The imminent arrival of IMF and EU experts in Dublin for what are being described as "short and focused discussions" starting on Thursday could see Ireland eventually tap into the fund, though on Tuesday night, following a meeting of euro-zone foreign ministers in Brussels, Lenihan was still insisting that such a bailout was "not inevitable."

Speaking to public broadcaster RTE on Wednesday morning, Lenihan said Ireland would accept EU support if the banking crisis was too big for the country to fix on its own. "Ireland is a small country and if the banking problems in the country are too big for this small country to manage, Europe is making it clear that they will help and help in every possible way to secure the system," Lenihan said.

Dublin's preferred option is to confine any rescue deal to help with the enormous costs of propping up the Irish banking sector, which has been practically demolished by huge losses incurred from the collapse of the real estate bubble. A wider bailout would be regarded as a humiliation for an already deeply unpopular government which, due to its wafer-thin majority, is unlikely to survive a full legislative period.

The fateful decision by Lenihan in 2008 to guarantee all deposits and debts in the Irish banking sector and the subsequent nationalization of three banks has already cost the state 45 billion euros ($61 billion) and pushed the nation's 2010 deficit to a staggering 32 percent of gross domestic product. The government has already slashed public spending and the country is braced for another tough budget on December 7, when a further 6 billion euros in tax hikes and public spending cuts are to be announced. In addition, the government is to present a four-year budgetary plan next week to Brussels.

"We are directing banks to maintain adequate reserves for potential losses and other contingencies and to make appropriate disclosures," Walsh said in prepared testimony released on Wednesday. The testimony is to be delivered to a House Financial Services subcommittee on Thursday. Federal Reserve Governor Elizabeth Duke, also in prepared testimony, said regulators' on-site review of major banks will be completed by the end of the year, and bank agencies will publicly release their findings in early 2011.

The Fed and other regulators are trying to understand the scope of the problem and potential impact to the economy, she said. "Delays and uncertainty resulting from flaws in the foreclosure process have the potential to delay recovery in housing markets and to undermine confidence in our financial and legal systems," Duke said. Banks are accused of having used "robo-signers" to sign hundreds of foreclosure documents a day without proper legal reviews, a fiasco that reignited public anger with banks that received billions of dollars in taxpayer aid during the financial crisis.

Duke said the Fed is also evaluating the potential macroeconomic effects of foreclosure documentation problems to the mortgage and housing markets. She said the Fed expects about 2.25 million foreclosure filings this year and again next year, and about 2 million more in 2012.

Because of the problems, he is ordering about 50 married church officials to delete their accounts with the social networking site or resign from their leadership positions. He had previously asked married congregants to share their login information with their spouses and now plans to suggest that they give up Facebook altogether. "I've been in extended counseling with couples with marital problems because of Facebook for the last year and a half," he said. "What happens is someone from yesterday surfaces, it leads to conversations and there have been physical meet-ups. The temptation is just too great."

On Sunday, he plans to "strongly suggest" that all married people to stop using Facebook, lest they endanger their marriage. "The advice will go to the entire church," he said. "They'll hear what I'm asking of my church leadership. I won't mandate it for the entire congregation, but I hope people will follow my advice."

About one in five adults uses Facebook for flirting, according to a 2008 report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. And a do-it-yourself divorce site in the United Kingdom, Divorce-Online, reported late last year that the word "Facebook" was appearing in about one in five of the petitions it was handling. Miller says there are legitimate uses for Facebook, which is why he started an account a few years ago. "People use it as an opportunity to invite others to social gatherings, to share Scripture or talk about what went on at church," he said. "Those are all positive, worthwhile things. But the downside is just too great."

The authorities must ensure that the cards contain no mention of the number 666, which in Greek Orthodox tradition is associated with the antichrist, the Church of Greece said in a statement. "In no way should the 'citizen card' contain the number 666, either in visible or invisible manner," the Holy Synod, governing council of the Church of Greece, said after a meeting between canon scholars, legal experts, computer specialists and government officials.

"The Church is obliged to protect personal freedom and defend the integrity of the faith," the Holy Synod added. State planners have pledged to take the observation on board, it said. The new cards are to be finalised early next year. The Church is officially part of the state in Greece. Frequently criticised as backward and superstitious by liberal circles, Orthodox custodians strongly adhere to tradition surrounding the number 666, which appears in the biblical Book of Revelation, believed to have been written by the Apostle John in the first century AD.

Also known as the figure of the Beast, the number has led ultra orthodox clerics to oppose the use of bar codes on goods, as well as electronic checks carried out under the border-free Schengen Area of which Greece is a member.