Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report. It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was "very high". The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%. The report read: "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate."

However, glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is 2-3 feet a year and most are far lower.

The revelation is the latest crack to appear in the scientific concensus over climate change. It follows the so-called climate-gate scandal, where British scientists apparently tried to prevent other researchers from accessing key data. Last week another row broke out when the Met Office criticised suggestions that sea levels were likely to rise 1.9m by 2100, suggesting much lower increases were likely.

The pontiff responded after an Italian Jewish leader spoke of the painful "silence" of wartime Pope Pius XII. It comes amid Jewish anger at Benedict's moves to beatify Pius. The Pope conceded that "unfortunately, many remained indifferent", to the suffering of the Jews, six million of whom were killed in the Holocaust.

But he said "The Apostolic See [the Vatican] itself provided assistance, often in a hidden and discreet way," without mentioning Pius XII by name. His remarks came directly after the president of Rome's Jewish community, Riccardo Pacifici, told him "the silence of Pius XII before the Shoah [Holocaust], still hurts because something should have been done".

"Maybe it would not have stopped the death trains, but it would have sent a signal, a word of extreme comfort, of human solidarity, towards those brothers of ours transported to the ovens of Auschwitz," he said. The visit, Benedict's third to a Jewish temple since becoming Pope in 2005, is seen as a gesture of reconciliation between Catholics and Jews.

Giovanni Ferrara, the Rome prosecutor, is invoking the 1929 Lateran Treaty between Italy and the Vatican, which stipulates that an insult to the Pope carries the same penalty as an insult to the Italian President. Prosecution requires authorisation from the Ministry of Justice, for which Mr Ferrara has applied.

The incident has strong political overtones as Mr Berlusconi has been at pains to court the Vatican - and the Catholic vote - since returning to power for the third time in May. Last weekend he accompanied Benedict to Cagliari in Sardinia and attended mass there.

Mr Berlusconi, who owns Italy's three main commercial television channels and as Prime Minister also wields influence over RAI, the state broadcaster, has been accused by the Left of using his media power to muzzle critics and satirists. The move to prosecute Guzzanti over her anti-papal remarks was praised by some on the centre Right, including Luca Volonte, a Christian Democrat, who said that "gratuitous insults must be punished".

However, many people were strongly critical. Paolo Guzzanti, Ms Guzzanti's father and a centre Right MP, said the move was "a return to the Middle Ages".

The BBC put the contract out to tender to ensure "best value for money", but its timing coincides with a storm over the Met Office's accuracy. Last July the state-owned forecaster's predictions for a "barbecue summer" turned into a washout. And its forecast for a mild winter attracted derision when temperatures recently plunged as low as -22C.

Last week the Met Office failed to predict heavy snowfall in the southeast that brought traffic to a standstill. This weekend a YouGov poll for The Sunday Times reveals that 74% of people believe its forecasts are generally inaccurate. By contrast, many commercial rivals got their predictions for winter right. They benefit from weather forecasts produced by a panel of six different data providers, including the Met Office.

The UN's warning came as the full picture of the horror in the flattened capital of Port au Prince emerged. Haitian ministers claimed the body count could rise far beyond the 50,000 estimate made by the Red Cross officials on Friday, saying that 50,000 bodies had already been buried. Trucks piled high with corpses delivered them to mass graves outside the stricken city, with thousands more still lying uncollected on the streets or buried under heavy rubble.

"We have already collected around 50,000 dead bodies," said interior minister Paul Antoine Bien-Aime. "We anticipate there will be between 100,000 and 200,000 dead in total, although we will never know the exact number." If that casualty count is confirmed, it would make Tuesday's 7.0 magnitude earthquake one of the ten deadliest on record. The death toll would also rival that of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which claimed roughly 250,000 lives. However, officials with knowledge of both incidents said the Haitian disaster - which hit a country already barely functional - posed an infinitely tougher relief challenge.

"This is a historic disaster," said UN spokesman Elisabeth Byrs, whose own organisation has lost 36 local staff in the earthquake. "We have never been confronted with such a disaster in the UN memory. It is like no other."

The event was nearly cancelled last month when the Pope said he had moved Pius XII, his wartime predecessor, closer to sainthood by bestowing on him the title "venerable". The move infuriated some groups, which claimed Pius did not do enough to speak out against the Holocaust and save Jews from the Nazis. The Pope's visit has split the Jewish community, with the event being boycotted by survivors of the Nazi death camps as well as the president of the Italian Assembly of Rabbis, Giuseppe Laras.

Relations between the Roman Catholic Church and Jews hit their lowest point for years after the Pope's decision last January to rehabilitate Richard Williamson, a British bishop who questions the extent of the Holocaust, and his unexpected announcement last month that he was advancing the beatification process for Pius XII.

The Church has long argued that Pius, who was pope from 1939 to 1958, secretly saved many Jews by allowing them to hide in monasteries and churches, and that he held back from being more critical of Hitler because he feared it would prompt even more savage persecution of the Jews. La Repubblica newspaper claimed yesterday to have unearthed previously unseen documents held in archives in Berlin in which Nazi agents complained that Pius was helping Jews to escape German round-ups.

What made the situation that much more tense was sightings of gangs of young men with machetes. On Wednesday they were seen getting into stores and taking all the supplies they could carry. The armed men were seen marching up and down the streets with machetes raised and the competition among the gangs turned quite fierce. Fights between gangs were seen on the streets. Machetes were flailing and it was impossible to predict what would happen next. There was no sign of police or any kind of law and order.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Food is often scarce. Now, with this tragedy, desperate people are doing whatever they have to do to eat. People were seen going into stores and rubble and taking anything they could find with them for their trip back to wherever they were camping out. There was not a single sign of relief on Wednesday. No workers, packages or bottles of water have arrived from relief agencies. There was just nothing.

And with no running water or electricity, people are getting hungry and thirsty. The situation is dire.

Witnesses described gutters running with blood and children sleeping among heaps of dead bodies after becoming separated from their parents. There are growing fears that lack of basic sanitation and disease could claim thousands more lives.

Many rescuers were forced to dig with their hands to free survivors trapped under tons of rubble. There were reports of looting and members of the UN peacekeeping force, whose own headquarters has been destroyed, attempted to keep order. Laura Bickle, an American working at an orphanage in Port-au-Prince, told the BBC: 'All the parks are filled with people - they either have no home to go to or they are too scared to go home. They are pulling people out of the rubble, literally with blood running in the gutter like water.'

Gareth Owen, Save the Children's director of emergencies, believes that up to two million children have been affected by the earthquake. Many were in school when it struck. 'This is an unbelievably traumatic experience for children in Haiti. We believe up to two million could be affected, and the emotional damage of what they're going through could last their entire lives. Thousands more will have lost all contact with their families and friends and are now struggling to survive alone in the rubble.'

'There's no water. There's nothing. Thirsty people are going to die.' Estimates for the number of fatalities vary but the Haitian Red Cross today said at least 50,000 are likely to have died. The Red Cross estimates three million people - a third of the population - may need emergency relief.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which maintains the clock and puts an illustration of it on its cover, attributed the move to efforts by world leaders to reduce their countries' nuclear arsenals and collaborate on climate stabilization. The group, which includes 19 Nobel laureates, said a key to the "new era of cooperation is a change in the US government's orientation toward international affairs brought about in part by the election of (US President Barack) Obama."

Nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy at a news conference held at the New York Academy of Sciences overlooking the World Trade Center site, said there had been "a shift in world opinion" recognizing that nuclear weapons are "no longer useful to fight wars and are not effective as deterrence." BAS board member Lowell Sachnoff added, "Global warming is more of a threat than nuclear war."

When the clock was created in 1947, it was set at 7 minutes to midnight. It has been adjusted only 18 times before Thursday's move. The last was in 2007, when the BAS moved it forward by two minutes citing North Korea's test of a nuclear weapon, Iran's nuclear ambitions and a renewed US emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons.

Red Cross officials said 10 people were missing, believed buried by a landslide at the popular La Paz waterfall. Rescue workers fear more victims will be found as relief operations widen. The bodies of several men were recovered from a buried van in the area late on Friday, bringing the death toll to 13, Red Cross spokesman Freddy Roman said.

"We are working on removing corpses, taking picks and shovels on all-terrain vehicles to reach areas where people may be buried," said Victor Falla, National Emergency Commission official. The Costa Rican government declared a state of emergency in San Jose and surrounding areas, including Cartago, Alajuela and Heredia.

The US Geological Survey said the tremor was centred some 35km (22 miles) north-west of San Jose. Costa Rica is located on the Pacific Ring, which forms a belt of seismic activity along the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

"It has got to be done. It will be done some day. It may be done with enormous pain. Or it may be done more rationally," said Rudolph Penner, a former head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget office who co-chaired the 24-strong Committee on the Fiscal Future of the United States.

The two-year study by the panel, assembled by the highly respected National Research Council and the National Academy of Public Administration, said that the White House had some time on its side to restore growth, but must then act.

"In the next year or two, large deficits and more borrowing are unavoidable given the severity of the economic downturn. However, action ought to begin soon thereafter," they said. "If action is taken soon, the country has a wide choice of options to help achieve fiscal sustainability. All are difficult; but if action is postponed, the options will be fewer and the choices even more difficult," they said.

"China's Internet is open and the Chinese government encourages development of the Internet," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told Reuters. "China welcomes international Internet businesses developing services in China according to the law," she said. "Chinese law proscribes any form of hacking activity."

On Wednesday, as Chinese citizens laid flowers at Google's Beijing office, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton issued a statement expressing "serious concerns" about the massive, China-based cyber-attack at the root of the controversy, and demanded answers from China's leaders. "We look to the Chinese government for an explanation," Clinton said. "The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy." On Tuesday, Google revealed it had been the victim of a massive cyber attack that compromised its corporate security. Even worse, the company said an investigation showed the targets of the attack were Chinese human rights activists, whose Gmail accounts were hacked.

"In a world in which we are so used to the public relations massaging of messages, this stands out as a direct declaration," Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School and co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, said in comments reported by the San Jose Mercury News, Google's local newspaper. "It's amazing," he said.

In fact, Google's move is nothing short of an invitation to other companies to stand up to China's communist rulers. Which Western company will be next to stand up to this gang of authoritarian cadres who hold dominion over 1.3 billion people? Will Microsoft, Yahoo and other companies operating in China match Google's human-rights stance?

Philip Angelides, the commission chairman, spent the opening 15 minutes of his questioning directed solely at Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman. The two clashed openly, interrupting each other's statements in a testy session. Angelides, who kept returning with additional questions for Blankfein, didn't buy many of his arguments and was particularly hard when asking whether Goldman deliberately sold debt products tied to mortgages that it knew were declining in value.

"It sounds to me like selling a car with faulty brakes, and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars," said Angelides.

Blankfein, who admitted in his opening statement that during good times the need to expand market share can be "blinding," said his firm was only fulfilling its role in the financial markets. "We were doing what capital markets do - which is making markets," he said. Angelides responded that he found it "troublesome" that Goldman never took the responsibility to ensure the products it was selling were good.

"We, sadly, face a series of threats, the nature of which will require the projection of power beyond our borders to protect our national security," he said. "My great fear is that we as a nation will become so risk-averse, cynical and introverted that we will find ourselves in inglorious and impotent isolation by default."

His speech to the Institute of Public Policy Research, in London, reflects a growing frustration within the Government and Armed Forces that public tolerance for military operations and media-led cynicism at the motives for British military action are undermining the current effort in Afghanistan. The minister traced several trends in society that he said were "positive", but which made it increasingly difficult for governments to deploy troops in support of Britain's interests.

"First, the decline of deference and the growth in mistrust of those in authority, which challenge government and military decision-making. Second, the 24/7 media and the new information age, which brings with it the demand for a different kind of communication between the Government and the public about military operations. Third, a freedom-of-information culture, which asserts that everything known to the State should be in the public domain without considering the impact of this on government's ability to act in our best interest."

He said he has contacted the city's returning officer. ''I have withheld the opening of my occult centres and am focusing on the general election,'' said Mr Shadee. ''I shall hope to stand as an independent. My manifesto will be very forward, and if accepted, will change many directions for the better - for the human race.''

He added: "This is an opportunity to change people's lives for the better. I also hope to have candidates in six or seven other high-profile seats. I want to tackle the problems in education, health and crime and turn Britain into a truly secular society by banning faith schools and the teaching of religious education."