Who is Pope Francis?Pope Francis (born 1936) is the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State. Francis is the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas, the first from the Southern Hemisphere, and the first pope from outside Europe since the Syrian Gregory III, who reigned in the 8th century. He is also the first Pope since Gregory XVI (1831-1846) to have been a priest of a religious order.
Who are Independent?The Independent is a prominent British online newspaper that originally grew to fame as a high-quality national print broadsheet. True to its name, it was established to offer an objective, politically unaligned alternative to the heavily biased traditional British press.
What is Evolution?Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to bio-diversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms, and molecules. In the mid-19th century, Charles Darwin formulated the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection, published in his book On the Origin of Species (1859). Evolution by natural selection is a process first demonstrated by the observation that often, more offspring are produced than can possibly survive.
What is Big Bang?The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the universe. Taken from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution. The model describes how the universe expanded from a very high-density and high-temperature state, and offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB), large scale structure and Hubble's law.
Who is the Pope?The pope, or supreme pontiff is the Bishop of Rome and therefore ex officio the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church. The primacy of the Roman bishop is largely derived from his role as the apostolic successor to Saint Peter, to whom Jesus is said to have given the Keys of Heaven and the powers of "binding and loosing", naming him as the "rock" upon which the church would be built. Since the 1860s, the pope has also been head of state of Vatican City, a city-state entirely enclaved within Rome, Italy. The current pope is Pope Francis, who was elected on 13 March 2013, succeeding Benedict XVI.