Hollywood director James Cameron found little evidence of life when he descended nearly 11,000 metres to the deepest point in the world's oceans last year. If only he had taken a microscope and looked just a few centimetres deeper.

Ronnie Glud at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, and his colleagues, have discovered unusually high levels of microbial activity in the sediments at the

Here in Thayet, a township caked in dust about seven hours north of Rangoon, the oil rush began in 1989 after a farmer found crude near his land. Soon thousands of people had flooded the village, including students whose classes were cut short after the 1988 uprising. Those who have remained here since – along with a handful of wives and a fair few children – clamber under wooden derricks fashion

Cardinal Bergoglio, 76, is probably the ninth oldest of the 266 popes at the time of his election, accounting for some uncertainty because the age of many early popes remains unknown.

As a matter of actuarial science, Francis is not likely to have an especially long tenure. The nine previous men who were known to be 75 or older at the time of their election to the papacy served for an average

The eurozone debt and economic crisis has seen joblessness among youths approach 60 per cent in Greece, top 55 per cent in Spain, and reach nearly 39 per cent in Italy.
......
Andor said that youth unemployment and its related social problems now cost the European Union about 1.2 per cent of gross domestic product, or 150 billion euros.

"It‘s an enormous sum, it‘s an enormous waste," the com

“Paedophilia, homosexuality and violations of celibacy... will be an immense challenge for the new pope,” Father Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski declared in an interview with business news source money.pl.
The priest argued that such scandals represent “not just one of the problems, but the main and the greatest issue.
“It will be extremely difficult for him,” Isakowicz-Zaleski reflected.
“Only when

.. cancers that have struck other Latin American leaders, including Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, afflicted with thyroid cancer, and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, struck with lymphoma. After beginning peace talks with the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia’s conservative president Juan Manuel Santos was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Professor Chomsky wrote to me: “Very few are aware of the war the US waged against the Church after the heresy of Vatican II, seeking to return the Church to the Gospels for the first time since Emperor Constantine. You probably know that I’ve been writing about it for a long time. To closed ears, mostly.” Alas, it was a video of a lecture which Chomsky gave in 2009 which really awakened me

In the coming century, how habitable will parts of the bustling desert Southwest turn out to be? Already, in the face of heat and drought, small numbers of people from small towns in the region are leaving. And this, too, has happened before. There are sobering previous examples of what it means when extreme climate stress hits this area.

From the outset of the military regime in 1976, I was Visiting Professor at the Social Policy Institute of the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba, Argentina. My major research focus at the time was to investigate the social impacts of the macroeconomic reforms adopted by the military Junta.

I was teaching at the University of Cordoba during the initial wave of assassinations which also targeted

A group of 44 former military and police officers on trial for torture, rape and murder in a concentration camp in Cordoba province in the 1970s wore the yellow-and-white ribbons of the papal flag in Francis' honor. Many Argentine newspapers ran the photo Friday.

"I found documents in the archive of the foreign relations minister in Argentina, which, from my understanding, gave an end to the debate and show the double standard that Bergoglio used. The first document is a note in which Bergoglio asked the ministry to—the renewal of the passport of one of these two Jesuits that, after his releasing, was living in Germany, asking that the passport was renewe

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While Bergoglio previously was a member of different Vatican departments, he never previously worked within the Vatican, in contrast to Ratzinger, who had spent the bulk of his career within the Church’s apparatus in Rome. With the nomination of Pope Francis, the Church’s senior cardinals are apparently hoping that an “outsider” can reorganise the institution amid reports of murky financial arran

Many questions remain unanswered about this incident. If the rumor is true that tribal authorities were ready for a change and facilitated the smooth nature of this takeover, one can’t help but wonder why local tribal leaders supported something like “Jabhat al-Wahdet al-Tahrir al-Islamiyya” as the new authority of their city, and install this “emir.” (“Emir” is a title of authority preferred by

The regime has concentrated conventional forces in Damascus and Homs. The relatively small force deployed to northern and eastern Syria have disrupted rebel advances, but isolated strongpoints have been overrun as the regime struggles to maintain logistical lines of communication. The majority of the regime’s deployable forces have remained in Homs and Damascus, where rebels have made significant