UK spy agencies want to install 'black box' surveillance devices across the country's communications networks to monitor internet use, it emerged today. A report by an influential committee of MPs tells how spooks are keen to implement a nationwide surveillance regime aimed at logging nearly everything Britons do and say online.

The spy network will rely on a technology known as Deep Packet Inspection to log data from communications ranging from online services like Facebook and Twitter, Skype calls with family members and visits to pornographic websites. But civil liberties and privacy campaigners have reacted with outrage, saying that the technology will give the government a greater surveillance capability than has ever been seen.

MI5 chief Jonathan Evans told the committee: 'Access to communications data of one sort or another is very important indeed. It's part of the backbone of the way in which we would approach investigations. 'I think I would be accurate in saying there are no significant investigations that we undertake across the service that don't use communications data because of its ability to tell you the who and the when and the where of your target's activities.'

Emma Carr, deputy director of privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: 'Using highly intrusive technology to monitor how people use the internet is not something that a civil society should be using on every citizen.

The German-born Pope, 85, hailed as a hero by conservative Roman Catholics and viewed with suspicion by liberals, told cardinals in Latin that his strength had deteriorated recently. He will step down on February 28 and the Vatican expects a new Pope to be chosen by the end of March.

The pope told the cardinals that in order to govern "...both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me. "For this reason, and well aware of the seriousness of this act, with full freedom I declare that I renounce the ministry of Bishop of Rome, Successor of Saint Peter."

A solar "superstorm" could knock out Earth's communications satellites, cause dangerous power surges in the national grid and disrupt crucial navigation aids and aircraft avionics, a major report has found.

It is inevitable that an extreme solar storm - caused by the Sun ejecting billions of tonnes of highly-energetic matter travelling at a million miles an hour - will hit the Earth at some time in the near future, but it is impossible to predict more than about 30 minutes before it actually happens, a team of engineers has warned. Solar superstorms are estimated to occur once every 100 or 200 years, with the last one hitting the Earth in 1859.

Although none has occurred in the space age, we are far more vulnerable now than a century ago because of the ubiquity of modern electronics, they said.

"The general consensus is that a solar superstorm is inevitable, a matter not of 'if' but 'when?'," says a report into extreme space weather by a group of experts at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London.

Woven of gold and silk, this temporary skin embossing could detect things like bacterial infections and let others know you're sick. By giving them a call. In theory, anyway.

The show will be syndicated through Salem Communications and air for half an hour, Monday through Friday, in the 25 largest radio markets, he said at a press gathering hosted by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs' Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

The discouragement can be felt, Warren continued, in the weak economic recovery and high rate of joblessness, the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the shooting in Newtown, Conn., and the partisan gridlock among political leaders. The discouragement can also be felt in the "coarsening of society."

"People are far more rude now than they used to be," Warren said, which he attributes to the way Americans communicate with each other on the Internet. "Our civilization is losing its civility. We just don't know how to be nice to people."

The radio program will be called "Daily Hope," and will be aimed at "injecting some hope" into the country.

A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.

A video obtained by the Guardian reveals how an "extreme-scale analytics" system created by Raytheon, the world's fifth largest defence contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.

Raytheon says it has not sold the software - named Riot, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology - to any clients. But the Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing "trillions of entities" from cyberspace.

The power of Riot to harness websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns.

Advertisement Using Riot it is possible to gain a picture of a person's life - their friends, the places they visit charted on a map - in little more than a few clicks of a button.