It has devastated crops, fuelled price rises and highlighted China's chronic water problems. Since last September, rainfall has been less than half the normal levels, turning much of normally temperate Yunnan into a bone-dry environmental disaster zone of evaporating reservoirs and shrivelled rivers.

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The appointment will give Opus Dei enormous influence in the American Church and Vatican, and is the most senior appointment for a member of the group. It will also lead to Mexican-born Gomez, formerly the Archbishop of San Antonio, Texas, becoming the first Latin American US cardinal, a position that will give him influence in Rome and the right to vote at a papal conclave. The choice is likely to dismay the Catholics of Hollywood, which falls within the archdiocese. The reigning archbishop, Cardinal Roger Mahony, avoided confrontation, but Archbishop Gomez is less likely to duck controversy.

Opus Dei, which he joined in 1978, is seen as one of the most devout of all the Catholic groups. Some of its priests practise self-flagellation while praying to the Virgin Mary and also wear a cilice - a spiked garter - to help them to mortify the flesh and avoid sexual sins. One of Archbishop Gomez's primary tasks will be to deal with the fallout from the abuse crisis.

None of the 2,000 priests of Opus Dei, which has the status of a "personal prelature" of the Pope, has ever been embroiled in a sexual scandal. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles, however, is one of the worst afflicted by the clerical sexual abuse crisis that has convulsed the US Church since 2002.

"Lord!" the man begins. It is night, and the torches cast flickering shadows on the ancient walls. "Your Church often seems like a boat about to sink, a boat taking in water on every side." It is a somber statement, particularly coming from a senior member of the Catholic Church.

The priest continues, speaking of weeds in the fields of the Lord, and of how much "filth there is in the Church," the result of priests' betrayal of God. "The soiled garments and face of your Church throw us into confusion. Yet it is we ourselves who have soiled them! It is we who betray you time and time again." He beseeches God, saying: "Have mercy on your Church; even within her, Adam continues to fall again and again."

These were prophetic words. They reflected a bitterness and lack of illusions that could only have been expressed by an experienced cardinal who had exhaustively studied the files outlining the "filth in the Church." The speaker was Joseph Ratzinger. He was chastising his own church during the Easter holiday five years ago, in 2005. It was a bitter indictment by a veteran of the Church, who apparently had little hope and was on the verge of retirement. It was meant as a legacy and as a warning, but what Ratzinger did not do was to specify the actual misconduct.

Of course, the office of pope does not exist so that its holder can be loved by the whole world. After Pius IX died in 1881, a number of Rome residents tried to seize the coffin so that they could throw it into the Tiber River. Today, a few days after Easter, only the most devoted pilgrims are rallying around their spiritual leader. The rest of the world, shocked by the sheer scope of the abuse cases, looks to Rome with skepticism, and some are already calling upon Benedict to take responsibility for his sinning priests and resign.

The older of the two suspects was walked out of the courthouse hours later, placed into a police vehicle and driven away. By then, white protesters had left, leaving only hundreds of blacks who screamed, ululated and whistled in support. "We are celebrating the death of the man who has abused us so much," one woman in the crowd shouted.

The killing of Eugene Terreblanche, a militant leader once convicted of beating a black farm worker so badly the man was left brain damaged, has focused attention on simmering racial tensions less than 10 weeks before South Africa hosts the World Cup.

Three aftershocks were reported in the northern province of Aceh, but there were no reports of casualties. Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, one of the world's most active areas for earthquakes and volcanoes. It has recently been struck by a string of quakes; one off Sumatra in September killed more than 1,000 people.

The latest quake - the largest in the area since March 2008 - struck at 0515 on Wednesday morning (2215 GMT on Tuesday). Although the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center initially said a small tsunami would possibly hit coasts within 100 km of the quake's epicentre, a destructive widespread tidal wave was said to be unlikely. Japan's Kyodo news agency reported blackouts in Medan and Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh Province.

But just 44 million will now be bought as cases have petered out since December. Of these, 6 million have already been used and 3.8 million is being sent to help Africa. Ministers said the renegotiated deal was good value, but the Tories said millions of pounds had been wasted. Of the nearly 44 million vaccines that the UK has agreed to pay for, 6 million have already been used on priority groups and health workers, while 3.8 million are being handed to the World Health Organization for Africa.

Of the rest, 10.6 million is already with GPs who will be ready to act if more people entitled to the jab come forward. But the remaining 23.6 million will be held in reserve. Estimates have put the value of the stockpile at between 100-150 million pounds, although the government has refused to confirm cost saying it was commercially confidential.

Health Secretary Andy Burnham said: "I am pleased we have reached an agreement that is good value for the taxpayer and means that the department has retained a strategic stockpile to protect the UK population without incurring a cancellation fee." It is also possible the vaccine could be used to combat seasonal flu this winter as it is thought the swine flu virus will become the dominant strain.

At least 33 people died in Rio de Janeiro city after 28cm (11in) of rain fell in 24 hours, while 33 were killed in the neighbouring city of Niteroi. Many houses in Rio's hillside shanty towns were buried under mudslides.

Rescue teams have been scouring the hillside to find missing people and recover bodies buried under the mud. With no let-up in the rain, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has urged residents to leave their homes if they are at risk of flooding. Authorities say Rio's transport system is close to collapse, after traffic ground to a halt with many streets under water. "The situation is chaos," Mayor Eduardo da Costa Paes said in a statement on Tuesday. "All the major streets of the city are closed because of the floods."

The head of Rio de Janeiro's civil defence department told TV Globo the amount of rain that had fallen was "more than any city is capable of supporting". Paulo Marqueiro, a reporter for the newspaper O Globo, told the BBC it was like the city had "collapsed". Houses had been brought crashing down by the floods and landslides, and there was no public transport whatsoever, he said.

Gordon Brown today met with the Queen at Buckingham Palace to ask her for a May 6 election date. The Prime Minister briefed his Cabinet at a short meeting this morning before leaving Number Ten through the front door at 10am. He smiled but kept tight-lipped and ignored the massed ranks of media as he clambered into his chauffeur-driven car which then led the motorcade on the short journey to the Palace.

There, he spent 22 minutes inside at a private meeting with the Queen before heading back to Downing Street where he will shortly emerge to make a brief statement. The move to dissolve Parliament fires the starting gun for the most defining election campaign for a generation. The Queen only flew back to the Palace from Windsor a short time ago, arriving by helicopter onto the lawns and walked inside accompanied by one aide.

They have found sheep with "neat holes" while their brains and other internal organs were removed. Other animals have lost eyes or had their flesh "carefully stripped away", usually on the left side. Phil Hoyle, 53, who has spent almost a decade investigating how the livestock have died, said the UFOs were found to have roamed a 50-mile "corridor" between Shrewsbury and Powys.

Mr Hoyle and 15 members of the Animal Pathology Field Unit, claimed they witnessed UFOs at work last month while working during the night at a Welsh hill farm near Radnor Forest. "The technology involved in these attacks is frightening," he told The Sun. "These lights and spheres are clearly not ours. They are built by technology and intelligence that's not from here." He added: "For a short while it looked more like a Star Wars battle."

Next day he interviewed farmers and "all but one had some type of unusual disappearance of animals or deaths with strange injuries", he told the paper.

Karzai made the unusual statement at a closed-door meeting Saturday with selected lawmakers - just days after kicking up a diplomatic controversy with remarks alleging foreigners were behind fraud in last year's disputed elections. Lawmakers dismissed the latest comment as hyperbole, but it will add to the impression the president - who relies on tens of thousands of US and NATO forces to fight the insurgency and prop up his government - is growing increasingly erratic and unable to exert authority without attacking his foreign backers.

"He said that 'if I come under foreign pressure, I might join the Taliban'," said Farooq Marenai, who represents the eastern province of Nangarhar. "He said rebelling would change to resistance," Marenai said - apparently suggesting that the militant movement would then be redefined as one of resistance against a foreign occupation rather than a rebellion against an elected government.

It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, EVEN IF THEY ATTACKED THE UNITED STATES WITH BIOLOGICAL OR CHEMICAL WEAPONS OR LAUNCHED A CRIPPLING CYBERATTACK.

Mr Obama's new strategy is bound to be controversial, both among conservatives who have warned against diluting the United States' most potent deterrent and among liberals who were hoping for a blanket statement that the country would never be the first to use nuclear weapons.

The most immediate test of the new strategy is likely to be in dealing with Iran, which has defied the international community by developing a nuclear program that it insists is peaceful but that the United States and its allies say is a precursor to weapons. Asked about the escalating confrontation with Iran, Mr Obama said he was now convinced that "the current course they're on would provide them with nuclear weapons capabilities," though he gave no timeline. He dodged when asked whether he shared Israel's view that a "nuclear capable" Iran was as dangerous as one that actually possessed weapons.

"Obama's treatment of [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu [during their recent meeting in Washington] was disgraceful and shameful," Peters told FoxNews. "We treat our enemies with greater courtesy! In addition, it was counter-productive - because this vendetta on the part of the White House against Israel - all it does is encourage the Palestinians and their Arab backers to make ever wilder demands that Israel cannot possibly fulfill. This is not a peace process; this is something about a chip on the President's shoulder."

Peters says that Obama's approach is "absolutely" a departure from past American policy. "It all started with Obama's Cairo speech," he said, "where Obama attempted to appease radical Muslims in the Middle East, cold-shouldered Israel, and raised Palestinian expectations that he'd take care of Israel and that the Palestinians would get their revenge. Secondly, in the past, under Presidents Clinton and Bush, there were face-to-face negotiations; the Palestinians were offered one deal after another, and it was always - always! - the Palestinians who walked away."

The American animosity towards Israel "is not about housing in Jerusalem or anything else," Peters emphasized. "We need to back up and get a little wide-angle picture and recognize the fundamental issue in play here: Israel wants to live in peace with its neighbors, and its neighbors want Israel destroyed. The President refuses to understand that."

In a nutshell, that's how many conservatives see the health reform bill President Barack Obama signed into law on March 23, after a year of acrimonious debate. The language has been shrill and the superheated political temperature is reflected by worried headlines such as "The heat is on. We may get burned" (Wall Street Journal) or "Putting out the flames" (Washington Post).

Verbal venom is not restricted to radio talk shows or Internet rants that draw parallels between Obama and Hitler or Stalin. John Boehner, the leader of the Republican party in the House of Representatives, described the reform as Armageddon and a Republican congresswoman, Michelle Bachmann, voiced fears on national television for her country's future because of the president's "anti-American views."

Today's end-of-freedom arguments sound very much like the ideas set out in a 1961 speech by the late Ronald Reagan, then an actor working as a corporate spokesman, now venerated as a secular saint by many Republicans. "One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people," he said, "has been by way of medicine."

Reagan was raising the alarm against an early version of what became Medicare, the government-run health care programme for people over 65 which now has 45 million beneficiaries, most of whom rate it more highly than private health insurance, according to surveys. If the program were passed, Reagan warned, "behind it will come other federal programmes that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country. Until one day... we will awake to find that we have socialism."

Outlook for the political temperature: high and rising

The pontiff is celebrating Holy Week - the most solemn period in the Roman Catholic calendar - as allegations that the church covered up clerical sex abuse spread across Europe, including his native Germany, and the United States. The feet-washing ceremony in St John Lateran Basilica in Rome symbolizes humility and commemorates Jesus' last supper with his 12 apostles on the evening before his crucifixion.

Wearing a white apron, Benedict poured water from a golden pitcher over one bare foot of each of the priests, who were seated in a row. With the water dripping on a golden basin, the pope dried the feet with a white cloth. The pope did not directly address the scandals during the Mass that included the feet-washing ritual. He said that Jesus, in his prayer after washing the feet of the apostles, "challenges us to a constant examination of conscience."

Cardinals rushed to Benedict XVI's defense on Holy Thursday, as an increasingly angry Vatican made a stinging attack on the US media for its coverage. The relationship between the church and the media has become increasingly bitter as the scandal buffeting the 1 billion-member church has touched the pontiff himself. On Wednesday, the church singled out the New York Times for criticism in an unusually harsh attack.

Western news organizations, including The Associated Press, have reported extensively on the burgeoning scandal, and new revelations have emerged on an almost daily basis. Venice's Cardinal Angelo Scola expressed solidarity with Benedict in his Holy Thursday homily in the lagoon city, describing him as a victim of "deceitful accusations." He praised the pope as seeking to remove all "dirt" from the priesthood.

A Times spokeswoman defended the articles and said no one has cast doubt on the reported facts. "The allegations of abuse within the Catholic church are a serious subject, as the Vatican has acknowledged on many occasions," said Diane McNulty. "Any role the current pope may have played in responding to those allegations over the years is a significant aspect of this story."

The Israeli military has told the BBC the operation was targeting four weapons factories. The strikes are the most serious for more than a year, says the BBC's Jon Donnison from Jerusalem. Witnesses and Hamas officials said the Israeli raids targeted metal workshops, farms, a milk factory and small sites belonging to the military wing of Hamas.

"Israel will not tolerate terroristic activity inside Gaza that threatens Israeli citizens," the Israeli military said in a statement released to the BBC. Palestinian news agencies reported that Israeli aircraft dropped leaflets over parts of Gaza on Thursday warning residents of retaliation for last Friday's killings of the soldiers in Khan Younis.

They were the first Israeli soldiers to be killed in hostile fire in Gaza in over a year. The military wing of Hamas claim responsibility for those attacks. Hamas said police stations and training facilities were among the targets of Israel's overnight raids. Tensions in the region are running high after a recent Israeli government announcement of plans to build 1,600 new homes for Jewish people in East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as a capital of a future state.