More than 234,000 properties were in some stage of foreclosure, or one in every 538 U.S. households, Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac Inc., a seller of default data, said today in a statement. Nevada, California and Florida had the highest foreclosure rates. Filings rose 5 percent from February. About $460 billion of adjustable-rate loans are scheduled to reset this year, according to New York-based analysts at Citigroup Inc. Auction notices rose 32 percent from a year ago, a sign that more defaulting homeowners are "simply walking away and deeding their properties back to the foreclosing lender" rather than letting the home be auctioned, RealtyTrac Chief Executive Officer James Saccacio said in the statement.

"We're not near the bottom of this at all," said Kenneth Rosen, chairman of Rosen Real Estate Securities LLC, a hedge fund in Berkeley, California and chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate at the University of California at Berkeley. "The foreclosure process will accelerate throughout the year." Rising foreclosures will add more inventory to an already glutted market, keep home prices down through at least next year and thwart efforts by Congress and President George W. Bush to help homeowners avoid default, Rosen said in an interview.

Britain's biggest supermarket said pre-tax profits were up 11.8% on the year before. UK sales increased by 3.5% on a like-for-like basis, excluding petrol, in the year to February 23 as Tesco said it coped with a particularly tough second half. The group has been under increasing pressure from competitors Morrisons and Asda as the supermarkets gain market share.

Tesco, which has around 30% of the UK grocery market, said the past year had been "unusual", with belt tightening among hard-pressed consumers also seeing subdued sales of some non-food products in the final six months.

"The torch escorts are volunteers, they are not law-enforcement personnel. Their duty is to maintain the safety, purity and dignity of the Olympic Games," China's foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters. "We hope the relevant countries can fully understand this point and co-operate with us."

It was still unclear on Tuesday whether China's "security runners" would be issued visas to enter Japan. One government official said Japan was surprised Chinese security forces were allowed to enter other countries that had hosted the relay.

"The Chinese torch attendants have a practical responsibility in relation to servicing the flame, but have no responsibility in terms of security," Mr Rudd, Australia's prime minister, said. "This has been made clear to the Chinese authorities. Under no circumstances, no matter what occurs, will they be called upon to perform a security function."

Pakistan, a loyal ally of China that is due to receive the torch on Wednesday, has also made a last-minute change to the route, confining all ceremonies to a tightly guarded stadium in the capital and cancelling a procession along Constitution ­Avenue, Islamabad's main boulevard.

An interior ministry official in Islamabad said the government was concerned about the possibility of suicide attacks. Groups thought to be linked to Muslim Uighur militants opposed to China's rule in Xinjiang, the only Chinese province or "autonomous" region with a Muslim majority, have in the past targeted Chinese nationals in Pakistan.

"We are not prepared to take any chances," the official said. Pro-Tibet protests have never taken place in Pakistan and Pervez Musharraf, the country's president, during a recent visit to China strongly condemned disruptions of the relay, saying politics should be kept out of sport.

From Islamabad, the torch will travel to New Delhi, where a nervous government has trimmed the route from fear that Tibetan protesters might try to disrupt the procession. The route is still to be announced but the Indian media has reported that the torch will travel less than a third of the original 9km route.

The aid charity, Oxfam, has warned that 60 million people in Asia, Africa and South America are threatened with possible eviction to make way for "green" fuel plantations, whether palm oil, soya or sugar cane. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds accuses the Government today of overlooking the likely impact on endangered species of biofuels production, which is costing the taxpayer £500 million in subsidies.

"The reality is that people are dying already," said Jacques Diouf, of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). "Naturally people won't be sitting dying of starvation, they will react," he said. The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted "massacres" unless the biofuel policy is halted. We are all part of this drama whether we fill up with petrol or ethanol. The substitution effect across global markets makes the two morally identical.

Mr Diouf says world grain stocks have fallen to a quarter-century low of 5m tonnes, rations for eight to 12 weeks. America - the world's food superpower - will divert 18pc of its grain output for ethanol this year, chiefly to break dependency on oil imports. It has a 45pc biofuel target for corn by 2015. Argentina, Canada, and Eastern Europe are joining the race.

"The world food situation is very serious: we have seen riots in Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti and Burkina Faso," said Mr Diouf. "There is a risk that this unrest will spread in countries where 50pc to 60pc of income goes to food," he said. Roughly 100m people are tipping over the survival line. The import ratio for grains is: Eritrea (88pc), Sierra Leone (85pc), Niger (81pc), Liberia (75pc), Botswana (72pc), Haiti (67pc), and Bangladesh (65pc).

Josette Sheeran, who heads the Rome-based U.N. agency, said commodity and fuel costs had risen "even more dramatically" since it made its appeal. The price WFP pays for rice, a staple in many poor countries, jumped from around $460 a metric ton in the beginning of March to $780 a metric ton now, Sheeran told a U.S. government conference on food aid.

Donor countries and aid groups are struggling to stretch budgets to match soaring food prices, which have taken off in the past few years as new investment money pours into commodity markets and biofuel production consumes more of the world farm output. Global food prices increased close to 40 percent in 2007, and prices are expected to remain high for at least two to three years.

"Constant monitoring of the situation will be maintained," said a statement from Colombia's Interior Ministry. The volcano, in the province of Huila, is not located near any major coffee plantations integral to the economy of this part of the Andean country.

Nevado del Huila erupted at the start of 2007 after laying dormant for hundreds of years. A 1985 eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Caldas province triggered mudslides killing 25,000 people in Colombia's worst natural disaster.

In recent years, the US Catholic Church has been hit by a wave of accusations that clergy abused children and has paid some $2bn (£1bn ) in settlements. During his trip, the Pope will address the UN, celebrate two masses, pray at Ground Zero and visit a synagogue. "We will absolutely exclude paedophiles from the sacred ministry," the Pope told reporters on board the flight to Washington.

The sexual abuse by clergy had been a great suffering for the US Catholic Church, the Church in general and for him personally, the Pope said. "I am deeply ashamed and will do whatever is possible so that this does not happen in the future," he said. "It is more important to have good priests than many priests. We will do everything possible to heal this wound."

The Pope has been asked to meet some victims of clerical abuse and their families during his visit but has so far declined to do so, the BBC's Rome correspondent David Willey says. The Pope will celebrate his birthday during the trip, turning 81 on Wednesday.

He says: "The fact that we are going to have a real president, a permanent president of the continent, will be a particular achievement I think. A prominent representative for foreign affairs, I think, will change the face of Europe, especially in the eyes of the rest of the world." Returning to the subject of EU President he added, "Today we have Commissioners, we have members of the European Parliament, but we have no real leader in fact. An EU president will be a real leader and will change the face of Europe."

EUobserver reports that the President will get a salary of around €270,000, a chauffeured car, a housing allowance and a personal staff of around 20. These are equivalent to the perks received by the Commission President.

Writing on his Telegraph blog, Bruno Waterfield comments that none of the proposals relating to the discussions are in the public realm. He says: "There are no public minutes and at a dinner engagement this week no one was even taking notes... These discussions are doubly hush, hush because of the political sensitivity surrounding the Treaty - its ratification is still going on. Officials are implementing a Treaty that in most of the EU has not been ratified and because of the rush to force it through, quickly and conveniently, without pesky popular votes, there is not much time."

Since then, the spectacle of hunger sparking revolutionary violence has been the stuff of Broadway musicals rather than the real world of politics. And yet, the headlines of the past month suggest that SKYROCKETING FOOD PRICES ARE THREATENING THE STABILITY OF A GROWING NUMBER OF GOVERNMENTS AROUND THE WORLD. Ironically, it may be the very success of capitalism in transforming regions previously restrained by various forms of socialism that has helped create the new crisis.

HAITI is in flames as food riots have turned into a violent challenge to the vulnerable government; Egypt's authoritarian regime faces a mounting political threat over its inability to maintain a steady supply of heavily subsidized bread to its impoverished citizens; COTE D'IVOIRE, CAMEROON, MOZAMBIQUE, UZBEKISTAN, YEMEN AND INDONESIA are among the countries that have recently seen violent food riots or demonstrations. World Bank president Robert Zoellick noted last week that WORLD FOOD PRICES HAD RISEN 80% over the past three years, and warned that AT LEAST 33 COUNTRIES FACE SOCIAL UNREST AS A RESULT.

The sociology of the food riot is pretty straightforward: The usually impoverished majority of citizens may acquiesce to the rule of detested corrupt and repressive regimes when they are preoccupied with the daily struggle to feed their children and themselves, but WHEN CIRCUMSTANCES RENDER IT IMPOSSIBLE TO FEED THEIR HUNGRY CHILDREN, NORMALLY PASSIVE CITIZENS CAN VERY QUICKLY BECOME MILITANTS WITH NOTHING TO LOSE.

THAT'S ESPECIALLY TRUE WHEN THE SOURCE OF THEIR HUNGER IS NOT THE ABSENCE OF FOOD SUPPLIES BUT THEIR INABILITY TO AFFORD TO BUY THE AVAILABLE FOOD SUPPLIES. And that's precisely what we're seeing in the current wave of global food-price inflation. As Josette Sheeran of the U.N. World Food Program put it last month, "WE ARE SEEING FOOD ON THE SHELVES BUT PEOPLE BEING UNABLE TO AFFORD IT."

Soon after the bombs fell on Baghdad, the topic came up in April 2003 as Ratzinger talked with fellow Cardinals Carlo Maria Martini of Italy and Paul Poupard of France at an intimate Vatican diplomatic reception. A Church official present that evening remembers the typically soft-spoken German shaking his fists, and blurting out in Italian: "Basta! Basta!" Enough! Enough!

Ratzinger did not elaborate then, nor since becoming Pope, about his opposition to the American military campaign, though he has spoken out about the Iraqi people's suffering. The intellectually rigorous Pope rarely sounds off on subjects that are not in his purview, say those close to him. "He's not an armchair politician," says one German scholar who's known Ratzinger for years. "He's not an armchair anything." STILL, BEING POPE, ESPECIALLY THE SUCCESSOR OF THE DIPLOMATICALLY ADROIT JOHN PAUL II, MEANS BENEDICT IS EXPECTED TO MAKE HIS MARK ON WORLD POLITICS.

As he arrives for his first papal visit to the world's lone Superpower, geopolitics remains the great open question in Benedict's three-year reign. The six-day visit to the United States - which includes a White House visit, an address at the United Nations and a prayer at Ground Zero - may be the best opportunity for the theologian pontiff to define his leadership in international relations. "The Pope per se is simply the custodian of the Catholic tradition," says a senior Vatican official. "HE CAN BECOME A GLOBAL LEADER IF HE MANAGES TO EMBODY A BATTLE OF IDEALS THAT IS PRESENT IN THE WORLD."

The fiery sermon, DELIVERED BY YUNIS AL-ASTAL AND AIRED ON HAMAS' AL-AQSA TV, predicted that Rome would become "an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread though Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas, even Eastern Europe. Allah has chosen you for Himself and for His religion," al-Astal preached, "so that you will serve as the engine pulling this nation to the phase of succession, security and consolidation of power, and even to conquests through da'wa and military conquests of the capitals of the entire world."

"VERY SOON, ALLAH WILLING, ROME WILL BE CONQUERED, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our prophet Muhammad," he added. Al-Astal last June preached how it was the duty of Palestinian women to martyr themselves by becoming homicide bombers. "The most exalted form of jihad is fighting for the sake of Allah, which means sacrificing one's soul by fighting the enemies head-on, even if it leads to martyrdom," he said in a June 23, 2007 interview.

The pope will meet with about 150 leaders of other religions on Thursday as he visits Washington, and he plans to visit a synagogue in New York on Friday. Since his 2005 election, the pontiff has provoked concern and anger among Hindus, Muslims and Jews with highly publicized missteps. But leaders of those faiths said they are optimistic that interfaith dialogue will advance during his papacy.

"There have been a lot of positive steps," said Ravi Gupta, a religion professor at Centre College in Kentucky, a Hindu leader who will meet with the pope. "I'm hopeful ... in terms of what the possibilities are."

The main driver of crude's rally was a decline in the greenback relative to the euro on Monday, analysts said. Crude oil's recent run above $100 a barrel has been largely attributed to a steadily depreciating U.S. currency because a weakening dollar prompts investors to seek a safe haven in hard commodities such as oil and gold.

"We've seen another swing down in the U.S. dollar so I think we saw short-term traders go back into oil as a hedge against the falling dollar," said Mark Pervan, senior commodity strategist at the ANZ Bank in Melbourne, Australia. Light, sweet crude for May delivery rose to $112.48 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange midmorning Tuesday in Singapore, surpassing the previous trading record of $112.21 set last week.