Manama, Bahrain

Gigantic oil and gas find: The tiny Gulf state of Bahrain has announced that it has located vast reserves of shale oil and gas in an exploration field off its western coast – a discovery so large that it stands to make Bahrain a major player in the global market and alter the balance of power among oil-producing nations. The Khaleej al-bahrain basin is believed to hold 80 billion barrels of shale oil, which is equivalent to Russia’s entire reserve and would make Bahrain the world’s biggest shale oil producer. Currently, Bahrain has only 125 million barrels of reserves. The field also has an estimated 14 trillion cubic feet of gas. Bahrain was the first Arab nation to start producing oil, in 1932, but compared with its neighbours it has had limited resources to exploit, and is one of the poorest of the six Arab Gulf states.

It was never Justin Welby’s ambition to go into the Church. In fact, he didn’t particularly want to be a Christian, says Rachel Cooke in The Observer. At Cambridge, he answered God’s call “kicking and screaming”. His faith grew but, even so, he went into the oil industry, where he worked happily for many years; then, in the late 1980s, he began to get the “horrifying” feeling that he was being called to the priesthood. During his discernment process, when asked why he wanted to be ordained, he replied: “Well, I don’t really.” And what would he do if he was turned down? “I’ll go back to London and take my wife for the most expensive meal I can afford, to celebrate,” he added. But the Church did want him, and now he is the Archbishop of Canterbury – having to deal with everything from royal weddings to historic sex abuse cases against a backdrop of declining attendance in an increasingly secular world. It’s a huge responsibility and a great privilege – and also a bit bizarre. As leader of the Church of England, Welby, 62, is supposed to be an “instrument of communion and a focus of unity”, which, he says, is a strange thing to contemplate in the morning when you’re shaving: “Do I look like a focus of unity, I’ll think, as I stand in front of the mirror. Do I see here an instrument of communion?”