The church has long argued for a reconciliation of science and faith. In fact, it was a Roman Catholic priest, Father Georges Lemaitre, who first proposed the Big Bang theory in 1927, on the basis of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, according to the American Natural History Museum in New York. The current Pope wrote about it in a 1995 book, and John Paul II called science a "highway to wonder" way back in 1979.

The Big Bang debate is just one example of the line Vatican scientists must walk. And there are many scientists indeed at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome, where Stephen Hawking and friends have discussed topics as diverse as biology, astronomy and chemistry. Not all scientists believe there will ever be accord between science and religion, of course.

"Reconciling science with Christian religion is impossible," Zbigniew Jaworowski, a medical doctor, and a professor emeritus of natural sciences at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection, in Warsaw, Poland, told FoxNews.com. "Let the Pope stick with his sacred book, and let science follow its way."

The consequences of not tackling the country's mounting debt burden would be dire, he last week told an audience of leading budget experts and economists at a gathering in Washington. "We will have the riots in the streets, we will have the defaults, we will have all of those ugliness problems," he said, referring to "French kids lobbing Molotov cocktails at cars, burning down schools because the retirement age will be moved from 60 to 62".

As it stands today, the US borrows about 40 cents of every dollar it spends. Curbing the budget deficit has been the stated mission of Mr Ryan, a rising Republican star, for several years. But such calls for action have multiplied in Washington in recent months, igniting what some say is the fiercest debate over fiscal and budgetary policy in decades.

The risks are big. If the government rushes into austerity, cutting too much and too quickly, it could stunt economic recovery. But if the political system cannot forge some kind of consensus on steps to restore US deficits to sustainable levels, the danger is potentially even greater: a sovereign debt crisis in the world's largest economy.

Now the unrest sparked by his self-immolation has led to the downfall of one of the region's longest-serving autocrats. Unable to quell the unrest, despite making a string of televised concessions to the protesters, the 74-year-old President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali simply vanished from the scene.

While the impact of the unrest on Tunisia is uncertain, its impact on the region is already apparent.

Arabs identified with the young Tunisian because his problems - unemployment, corruption, autocracy, the absence of human rights - are their problems. Throughout the region there is a dignity deficit. What is more, in an age of globalisation, regimes can no longer cut their citizens off from news. The Arab media - even in countries where they are constrained - could sense their audiences' thirst for news about Bouazizi's death and the extraordinary drama it triggered. They could not keep silent, as they might have done in the past.

Several dangers lie ahead. One is that Tunisia falls into chaos - a scenario that would convince Arab rulers to cling more tightly to power rather than sharing or relinquishing it. Another is that the unrest may spread. It is already apparent - and for broadly similar reasons - in neighbouring Algeria.

In a string of Arab countries, succession issues loom as ageing autocrats confront the unmet aspirations of their youthful and rapidly growing populations.

On Friday, Tunisia's president fled the country after trying to quell deadly riots in the North African country by slashing prices on food staples. We are entering a danger territory," Abdolreza Abbassian, chief economist at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said last week. The UN's fear is that the latest run-up in food prices could spark a repeat of the deadly food riots that broke out in 2008 in Haiti, Kenya and Somalia.

That price spike was relatively short-lived. But Abbassian said the latest surge in food stuffs may be more sustained. "Situations have changed. The supply/demand structures have changed," Abbassian told the Australian Broadcasting Corp last week. "Certainly the kind of weather developments we have seen makes us worry a little bit more that it may last much, much longer. Are we prepared for it?"

The plant produces fats to be used in industrial processes like paper-making as well as to enrich feeds for animals. The dioxin-laden industrial substance went into the animal feed ingredient. Initially the scare was confined to Germany, but then it emerged that a batch of affected eggs had been exported to the Netherlands for processing and from there to Britain. The processed eggs were destined for use in the production of a variety of foodstuffs including mayonnaise, cakes and quiches.

Some 4,700 German farms have been banned from making deliveries after tests at the Harles und Jentzsch plant in the state of Schleswig-Holstein. Authorities believe some 150,000 tons of feed for poultry and swine containing the fat have been fed to livestock across the country.

LATEST: Germany has closed 934 more poultry and pig farms as fears over the contamination of dioxin in animal feed continue. The move came after a manufacturer in Lower Saxony was found to have hidden some of the outlets it sold produce to. South Korea and China to ban imports of German pork and poultry.

The Pope's beatification could take place as early as April 2, the sixth anniversary of his death, according to veteran Vatican analyst Andrea Tornielli, who broke the news in the January 12 edition of the Italian newspaper, Il Giornale. Tornielli reported that cardinals and bishops from the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints had convened January 11 and "examined and approved the miracle attributed to the intercession of John Paul II."

The case involves the healing of a French religious sister from Parkinson's disease. Doctors had diagnosed Sister Marie Simon-Pierre with the condition in 2001. Her fellow sisters had prayed for the late Pope's intercession, however it was not until Sister Simon-Pierre wrote the pontiff's name on a paper one night in June 2005 that the miracle occurred. She was cured by the next morning and immediately took up her work as a nurse in a maternity ward

As part of the investigation into John Paul II's sainthood, her healing was placed before a team of doctors. According to an earlier report by Tornielli, the team had declared her healing to be "scientifically unexplainable." The Vatican sainthood congregation has already concluded that the Pope's writings and teachings are consistent with Catholic teaching - another requirement for beatification and sainthood.

On his lawsuit, he commented that the bail-outs were a "cardinal violation of EMU rules". He explained that "in the German Parliament, a majority has approved the bail-out, but a constitutional majority was needed. That is our most manifest argument: that the fundamental veto right of the German Parliament has been ignored by the German government. Unless the German Constitutional Court ignores its own rulings it will agree."

He referred to the Maastricht ruling by the German judges, arguing that it stated that "the German government is allowed to abandon its own currency, but only under the condition that the new currency will be as stable as the D-Mark. If that is not the case, the German government has the duty to leave the monetary union, it is explicitly stated." He said that the EU treaties' ban on bail-outs "extends to both the European Commission and the member states and sets the cornerstone principle that everyone is liable for its own risks. This is the ratio legis of the 'no bail-out clause' and it should be interpreted in this way. I'm sure that the Court will follow this reasoning."

Kerber predicted that "the euro will fail, it's better to face that". He proposed that some countries leave, noting that " Portugal probably needs a devaluation". He said that investors with stakes in struggling eurozone countries have to "understand that sometimes there is risk with a profit, and sometimes there is risk without a profit."

Commenting on the EU's Franco-German 'political motor', he said that, "Most German politicians have no inside knowledge of French policy. France sees the EU as the extension of France. It always wants an exception." He said that France was "the great obstacle" to reforming the EU and the single currency. "With France, the reform of EU is impossible," he said.

Grackles have also been found dead in their hundreds recently in Arkansas, Louisiana and Kentucky. It appears that the birds died of blunt force trauma - possibly from being hit by a truck, wildlife biologist Bill Gates told local news station WAFF. He drew his conclusion from the feathers scattered across the snow, which was bloody in places. A collision with a big rig is also believed to be responsible for the deaths of over 100 birds whose bodies were found at the side of a California highway last weekend. One witness to that incident said it 'looked like they were committing suicide'.

The Alabama deaths are just the latest in a series of mass animal deaths around the world that have spurred conspiracy theories all over the internet. First, the blackbirds fell out of the sky on New Year's Eve in Arkansas. Then it was two million fish in the Chesapeake Bay, 150 tons of red tilapia in Vietnam, 40,000 crabs in Britain and other places across the world.

Blogs connected the deadly dots, joking about the 'aflockalypse' while others saw real signs of something sinister, either biblical or environmental. The reality, say biologists, is that these mass die-offs happen all the time and usually are unrelated. Federal records show they happen on average every other day somewhere in North America. Usually, we don't notice them and don't try to link them to each other.

Previous efforts in the 1990s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin and muscle tissue from mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost failed because they had been too badly damaged by the extreme cold. But a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.

Now that hurdle has been overcome, Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, is reactivating his campaign to resurrect the species that died out 5,000 years ago. "Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth," he told The Daily Telegraph. He intends to use Dr Wakayama's technique to identify the nuclei of viable mammoth cells before extracting the healthy ones.

The nuclei will then be inserted into the egg cells of an African elephant, which will act as the surrogate mother for the mammoth. Professor Iritani said he estimates that another two years will be needed before the elephant can be impregnated, followed by the approximately 600-day gestation period. "I think we have a reasonable chance of success and a healthy mammoth could be born in four or five years," he said.

US weekly initial unemployment benefit claims showed their biggest increase in six months, suggesting that, even with recent signs of economic improvement, the labor market paints a gloomy picture for demand. The data helped drag down stock markets, even as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said he was hopeful about the recent improvement in the outlook, saying he now expects the economy to expand between 3 percent and 4 percent this year.

A delegate from a Gulf OPEC member state said OPEC will only hold an emergency meeting if oil climbs above $100 and stays there, although the group's Gulf members could informally add supply if needed. "OPEC will only have an extraordinary meeting if oil prices exceed $100 and stay there. We don't want the market to panic," the delegate told Reuters.

The prospect of oil breaking $100 a barrel, last touched in October 2008 after Lehman Brothers collapsed, has raised alarm bells about the impact of fuel costs on the economic recovery. Top exporter Saudi Arabia has said it favors an oil price between $70 to $80 a barrel, but Libya's top oil official on Thursday said oil prices at $100 a barrel would not harm the world economy and there is no need for OPEC to hold an emergency meeting or add supplies.

Police say the number of dead is likely to rise further. Rescuers have been trying to find survivors in remote areas. Relatives have been joining in the search but often only finding bodies of loved ones. The death toll has now surpassed that of mudslides in Caraguatatuba in Sao Paulo state in 1967 in which up to 430 people died.

The Brazilian armed forces have brought in a field hospital and hundreds of people have taken refuge in the gymnasium in Teresopolis. But the number of injured was threatening to overwhelm the medical services. Jorge Mario, the mayor of the Teresopolis, said: "There are three or four neighbourhoods that were totally destroyed in rural areas. There are hardly any houses standing there and all the roads and bridges are destroyed."

President Rousseff described the destruction as an act of God but she also expressed anger at illegal construction. "We saw areas in which mountains untouched by men dissolved. But we also saw areas in which illegal occupation caused damage to the health and lives of people. Saying that building houses in risky areas was "the rule rather than the exception", in Brazil she added: "When there are no housing policies in place, where will a person with an income of up to two minimum wages live? He will live where he is not allowed to."

Rio de Janeiro Governor Sergio Cabral blamed local governments for allowing poor building and illegal occupations. "Unfortunately, what we saw in Petropolis, Teresopolis and Nova Friburgo, since the 1980s, was a problem similar to what happened in the city of Rio - letting the poorer people occupy risk areas."

The number of foreclosure filings, which includes default notices, auctions and repossessions, was a record 2.9 million last year, including 257,747 filings in December. "Total properties receiving foreclosure filings would have easily exceeded 3 million in 2010 had it not been for the fourth-quarter drop in foreclosure activity - triggered primarily by the continuing controversy surrounding foreclosure documentation and procedures that prompted many major lenders to temporarily halt some foreclosure proceedings," said James J Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac.

"Even so, 2010 foreclosure activity still hit a record high for our report, and many of the foreclosure proceedings that were stopped in late 2010, which we estimate may be as high as a quarter million, will likely be re-started and add to the numbers in early 2011," Saccacio said. The firm said Nevada, Arizona and Florida continued to post the highest foreclosure rates in the country.

And just five states - California, Florida, Arizona, Illinois and Michigan - accounted for more than half of all foreclosure activity. One in every 11 housing units in Nevada received at least one foreclosure filing in 2010, more than four times the national average. In 2005, before the housing bust, banks took over just about 100,000 houses, according to the Irvine, California-based company.

Etna is Europe's tallest and most active volcano and has seen increased activity in recent months yet its seismic might poses no immediate threat to the nearby towns and cities. According to the Italian Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, a slight increase in Etna's volcanic tremors had been recorded on Tuesday, reaching its peak at 7am local time yesterday.

The activity diminished but at 9:30pm local time on Wednesday night, Etna roared into life sending lava spewing down its sides. The volcano has been active for around half a million years, with 15,000 people killed during its most violent eruption in 1669.

Thousands of air passengers were today facing hours of delays after blizzards battered 49 of America's 50 states. At least 90,000 people were caught up in the chaos at airports across the States with as many as 4,500 flights cancelled.

But millions of New Yorkers were able to struggle to work after an army of emergency workers with plows and salt spreaders were out in force early to clear the city's roads.

Families minister Maria Miller described the scale of family breakdown as a 'tragedy', saying urgent reforms are needed to ensure children maintain relationships with both parents. The Government will today unveil the biggest overhaul of child maintenance for more than a decade.

Mrs Miller said: 'We know that if effective financial arrangements are in place, those parents are much more likely to stay in contact and much more likely to have a strong relationship with their children. Staying in contact with both parents is absolutely critical to give a child the best start in life.'

Mrs Miller, in an interview with the Daily Mail, said the latest figures showed that there were 3.5 million children from broken homes. Almost half have no effective maintenance arrangements. 'Twenty per cent of children from separated families lose contact with the non-resident parent within just three years,' Mrs Miller said.