Figures compiled by the price comparison website mySupermarket.co.uk show that parents with young children are also being hit particularly hard. The cost of baby wipes, creams and bath wash has risen by 38 per cent. Baby food and snacks have gone up by 21 per cent while baby milk and drinks have increased by 29 per cent.

The soaring prices are in contrast to the overall inflation rate, which is currently 3.2 per cent a year. Britain's high food prices are also at odds with many of our European neighbours, who have seen their grocery bills fall steadily over the past year. Experts say UK food prices have surged above the official rate of inflation because of worries about the financial uncertainty in the face of drastic public spending cuts. Nervous shoppers are concentrating on buying essentials rather than luxury items, which is pushing up food price inflation.

The price of bread, pasta and many processed foods is likely to rise further after Russia announced a ban on the export of wheat. Analysts believe Britons could soon be paying 15p more for a loaf of bread. Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin said it was necessary to protect his country against wheat shortages following a severe drought which has ravaged crops.

Dr Philip Thornton, of the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, said: "One [solution] is artificial meat, which is made in a giant vat." He added that another could be the use of nanotechnology, or molecular engineering, to deliver medication to livestock, which could increase their efficiency.

Other answers put forward were: increased yields from plants due to higher levels of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on which they feed; genetic modification; lowering food waste by encouraging people only to buy what they will use; or by developing food technology so agriculture produces less greenhouse gases.

However, some scientists warned that progress could be hindered by the amounts of information being controlled by some big multinationals in the sector, such as Monsanto. Professor Jenifer Piesse, an international business expert at King's College, London, said: "This represents a threat to the global commons in agricultural technology on which the green revolution has depended."

The suggestions were presented in a range of papers published by the Royal Society, the Guardian reported.

The rebel group, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), has bases in the mountains in the north of Iraq, near the Turkish border. "The president has said to Erdogan that some of the actions that Turkey has taken have caused questions to be raised on the Hill (Congress)," a senior administration official told the Financial Times newspaper.

These questions centred on "whether we can have confidence in Turkey as an ally," said the official. "That means that some of the requests Turkey has made of us, for example in providing some of the weaponry that it would like to fight the PKK, will be harder for us to move through Congress." The United States voiced disappointment after Turkey voted against fresh UN sanctions on Iran, which the United Nations Security Council adopted in June.

Ankara argued that Tehran should be given a chance to carry out a nuclear fuel swap deal, brokered by Turkey and Brazil. Relations between Turkey and Israel were thrown into crisis after an Israeli raid targeting Gaza-bound aid ships on May 31 that left nine Turks dead. Mr Obama called on Turkey to cool its rhetoric about the raid when he met Erdogan at the G20 summit in Toronto in June.

"The military counteraction of (North Korea) will be the severest punishment no one has ever met in the world," he said. The warning came a day before US and South Korean troops begin the 10-day computerised war games called "Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG)". About 30,000 US soldiers will take part in the exercise, a US military spokesman said, adding an unspecified number of American soldiers based in the United States would join in via computer networks.

Some 56,000 South Korean soldiers will be mobilised for the war games, a defence ministry spokesman said. In a message posted on a US military website, General Walter Sharp, who heads some 28,500 US troops based in the South, described the exercise as "one of the largest joint staff directed theatre exercises in the world."

A separate security drill involving South Korean government officials and soldiers will be held during the period, Yonhap news agency said. This week's exercise is one of a series planned by the South - either alone or jointly with the United States - in the aftermath of the sinking of a South Korean warship in March.

China is North Korea's closest ally and trade partner and Beijing has refused to join in international condemnation of Pyongyang for the sinking of a South Korean warship.

Mike Stock (one third of the legendary pop factory Stock, Aitken and Waterman) has publicly attacked pop culture for prematurely 'sexualising' today's children. He believes it's all gone too far: 'These days you can't watch modern stars - such as Britney Spears or Lady Gaga - with a two-year-old. Now, 99 per cent of the charts is R&B and 99 per cent of that is pornography.'

If an ordinary person came out with a statement like that the critics would be quick to sneer about 'moral panic'. If you dare to challenge the 'anything goes' conventions of our society you get dismissed as a prude. But Stock is the man who launched the career of Kylie Minogue and has made his fortune from the business he's condemning.

But any eight-year-old can watch this stuff on the TV or computer - and they do. 'Mothers of young children are worried because you can't control the TV remote control,' says Mike Stock. 'Before children even step into school they have all these images - the pop videos and computer games, such as Grand Theft Auto - confronting them, and the parents can't control it.'

Pop music has always used subtle sexual innuendo, but once it wasn't de rigueur. Now raunchy R&B and hip-hop seem to have a stranglehold on the market, so that what used to be edgy and extreme is now the commercial mainstream. I applaud this one man with influence in the music business for speaking out. For the rest - well, I wish that the producers of music videos would realise that 'restraint' is not a dirty word and that selling everything by means of the nastiest sexual message has a long-term corrupting effect on the next generation.

They won't, of course. But just don't tell me that doesn't matter.

There are currently no accounts available to higher rate taxpayers that provide a real rate of return after tax and inflation, and just a handful available to basic rate taxpayers. But even these could be nudged off the savings landscape, financial experts warned. They suggested that if CPI rises to above 3.8 per cent, there will be no point any taxpayer using a savings account to produce an income.

The real return for a basic rate taxpayer once inflation is taken into account on an average no notice account is currently minus 3.21 per cent, meaning they would actually lose the equivalent of 321 pounds if they invested 10,000 pounds over a year if CPI reached 3.8 per cent.

Economists expect inflation to climb higher in the coming months. Petrol prices could pass 1.20 pounds a litre by the August bank holiday weekend, close to an all-time high. And the price of a loaf of bread is expected to rise by 10p to 129p, which would be a record. Russia suffered from its hottest summer in a century, wiping out much of the world's wheat harvest. Motorists and retailers will also be hit when Value Added Tax rises by 2.5 per cent to 20 per cent in January.

The disaster has also battered Pakistan's economy and undermined its political stability at a time when America needs its steadfast cooperation against Islamist extremism. Meanwhile, fresh flood waves have swelled the River Indus, threatening nearby cities, towns and villages in southern Sindh province, said meteorologist Mohammed Ajmal Shad. The Indus was already more than 15 miles wide at some points - 25 times wider than during normal monsoon seasons.

Beyond the death and human misery that has struck Pakistan, the unprecedented floods now threaten to devastate its agricultural economy. Millions of acres have been submerged. Crops have been ruined. The people who worked on the land have flocked to relief camps in nearby towns. They will remain without work for months to come.

Two days ago, the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, said that the floods may have destroyed crops worth around $1 billion. About a quarter of Pakistan's economy is derived from agriculture, and nearly half of its workforce are employed by the agricultural sector. The damage is on top of the cost of 1,600 lives, two million people driven from their homes, and the lives of 20 million - fully 12 per cent of the entire population - disrupted across the country. Six million still need food, shelter and water, and yesterday the first dread case of cholera - a water-borne disease that can be devastating in the wake of floods - was confirmed.

"The rough estimate is that there is a billion dollars of lost crops," Mr Zoellick told a news conference in Sigulda, Latvia, during a visit. "All of us will have to pitch in to help." The damaged crops include rice, sugar cane and cotton, some of Pakistan's most prized exports. It will also affect wheat crops, scheduled to be grown in the winter. Most of the wheat seed stored by farmers has been destroyed.

Some experts have linked mass vampire bat attacks on people in the Amazon to deforestation. The rabies outbreak is focused on the community of Urakusa in the north-eastern Peruvian Amazon, close to the border with Ecuador. The indigenous community appealed for help after being unable to explain the illness that had killed the children.

The health ministry said it had sent three medical teams to treat and vaccinate people who had been bitten. Most of the affected population had now been vaccinated, it said, although a few had refused treatment. Vampire bats usually feed on wildlife or livestock, but are sometimes known to turn to humans for food, particularly in areas where their rainforest habitat has been destroyed.

Some local people have suggested this latest outbreak of attacks may be linked to the unusually low temperatures in the Peruvian Amazon in recent years.

Thursday's action on the New York Stock Exchange registered a technical anomaly known as the Hindenburg Omen. Read: just like the doomed German airship, the markets are fated to crash and burn. Still worse, Wednesday's trading action almost sparked Hindenburg Omen conditions. It takes two Hindenburg Omen trading days within a 36 day window to trigger the end of life in the markets as we know it.

Writing on RealMoney.com, Rev Shark notes of the market voodoo that "the logic behind this ominous-sounding indicator is this: When there are internal inconsistencies in the market that are causing a simultaneously high level of new highs and new lows, a greater risk exists that the resulting confusion and uncertainty will cause market players to exit... When the herd is confused and moving in two different directions, internally that is going to cause some problems."

But first the facts. There was a correction in the markets this week, and the sell-off triggered the Hindenburg conditions. The Hindenburg Omen occurs when an unusually high number of companies in the New York Stock Exchange reach 52-week highs and lows at the same time. The proportion of NYSE stock highs and lows must both exceed 2.2% of the total listed on the exchange. The Hindenburg Omen last occurred in October 2008, according to UBS data.

And because it will encourage unprotected sex, it risks adding to the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases among the under-25s. Figures from the Health Protection Agency show almost 400,000 new cases of sexually transmitted infections a year. Boots has just launched a website enabling customers to purchase certain treatments online without the need of a prescription. The chemist says it hopes to expand the service to include most other drugs available in-store - including the morning after pill.

Normally, users must see their GP or pharmacist for a thorough consultation before they are given the treatment. They are taken into a private room and asked a series of uncomfortable questions such as when the unprotected sex took place and the last time they took the morning after pill. But if it is made available over the internet, they will need only to fill in an online form and make a payment for the contraceptive to be delivered by post the next day.

Young girls with access to credit cards - their own or their parents' - could obtain it for themselves and for friends who would be taking it without any medical advice whatsoever. Dr Trevor Stammers, a GP from South London who also lectures in healthcare ethics, said: 'This will just encourage people to be irresponsible. The morning after pill is also fuelling an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases as people just think they can have unprotected sex. The fact that it will be available over the internet is a further trend of our increasingly sexualised society.'

Obama said: 'As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.' The president made his remarks at an Iftar dinner at the White House celebrating the beginning of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. In doing so he waded into a national controversy that sparked passionate and at times angry debate.

Representative Peter King, of New York said:'President Obama is wrong, it is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of ground zero. While the Muslim community has the right to build the mosque they are abusing that right by needlessly offending so many people who have suffered so much.'

The issue of EMP dangers to the Earth, either from a CME, a coronal mass ejection, which basically is an eruption of power from the sun, or from a nuclear-triggered EMP wave that truly is intended to destroy a society, have been the subject of multiple reports in recent months. WND reported just days ago that the US House had authorized plans to defend America's power grid against such dangers, but the members of the Senate left citizens to fend for themselves, eliminating the contingency plans.

Kappenman was interviewed recently on the radio program called OffTheGridNews, and explained that never before has civilization endured what could be coming, because historic storms hit before people were so dependant on electricity and all that it does, from turning on a cell phone to powering the pumps fueling the transportation system to keeping food from spoiling.

The domino effect, he explained, is what could cause deaths in the millions. Millions? Really? Yes, he said. "The severity of the storm we're talking about here [could produce] widespread massive damage to the power grid," he said. "That could cause maybe a 4-10 year sort of damage to the power grid... and an inability to restore that power grid." Those transformers, sometimes weighing in at 200 tons, cannot be replaced at the drop of a hat, nor are there a multitude of backups available. That, he explained, is why Kappenman estimated a recovery could take up to 10 years.

"This is clearly not something you ever want to experience firsthand, it could lead to millions of casualties,"' he said. But would losing power cause that much trouble? Not for an hour or two, but for several years, yes, he said. "Within a matter of just a few hours, you'd worry about the loss of potable water for major metro areas. You'd lose the ability to pump and treat sewage. Within a matter of a day or so you'd be concerned about the loss of perishable foods. With a few days, you would have exhausted the food supplies available.

"Then within a matter of three days you have probably lost total ability to maintain any sort of telecommunication infrastructure," he said. "We could be looking at a scenario here that far exceeds the casualties of any war, any natural disaster that humanity has ever experienced. And it may not be limited to North America."

More than a score of those displaced by the raging floodwaters in the hard-hit northwestern district of Nowshera, some 90 miles west of Islamabad, told NEWSWEEK today that they had received no aid from the government, nor any visits from officials in the more than two weeks since they were driven from their homes.

"We haven't seen, or heard from, or been helped by the government," says Inayat Ali, a tall, 25-year-old driver who pointed toward a large lake of brown water less than one mile away. His house and all his possessions, he says, rest somewhere under that body of water that has been formed by the swollen Kabul River. "We don't expect any official help," he adds stoically. But he and his family of 10 have been fortunate. A UK-based Islamic charity, the Ummah Welfare Trust, has provided Ali's family and 150 others with tents that are precariously perched by the side of a road on the outskirts of Nowshera town, much of which is still partially or completely submerged. The charity provides tents, two meals a day, and medical care.

But there are so many who need help: this crisis is worse even than the earthquakes of Kashmir (in 2005) and Haiti (this past January). The deadly flooding has swept down the Indus River corridor from the Himalayan foothills in the north to the Arabian Sea in the south. Along the way the rush of rising floodwaters have swept away or inundated everything in its path, killing at least 1,600 people.

Once again the lack of a strong government response to a national disaster has allowed Islamist groups to fill the vacuum. They are casting themselves as the most caring parties for the victims. As in the 2005 earthquake response, Islamist and jihadi groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (which is believed to have been behind the November 2008 massacre in Mumbai), along with its several charity fronts, are the most visible providers of aid that is delivered with a militant message. Even the Pakistani Taliban got into the act by exhorting the government not to accept Western assistance. "We urge the government not to take Western aid," a Taliban spokesman told Reuters. He also accused government officials of accepting the foreign aid money not to help flood victims but to "make their bank accounts bigger."

He is the first EU ambassador to be appointed after the controversial Lisbon Treaty gave the EU sweeping new powers. The new ambassador claimed to now be "leading the show" among European representatives in Washington. The prospect of an EU official speaking for the UK to its most important ally has angered eurosceptics, who said it shows Britain's waning influence.

Mr Vale de Almeida's comments are also likely to alarm Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the British ambassador in Washington. Sir Nigel is thought to have struggled to build strong relations with the White House after a memorandum he wrote for Gordon Brown questioning Barack Obama's experience was leaked in 2008. Earlier this week, The Daily Telegraph disclosed that the Ministry of Defence had hired Washington-based lobbyists to supplement British Embassy staff.

Mr Vale de Almeida has stressed to Washington officials and politicians that under the EU's' Lisbon Treaty, he has more power than his predecessors. "I'm the first new type of ambassador for the European Union anywhere in the world," he said. "I'm supposed to have a wider mandate than my predecessors." Mr Vale de Almeida said: "Our delegations now cover a wide spectrum of issues well beyond the economic dimension, trade dimension and regulatory dimension, to cover all policies in the union, including foreign policy and security policy."

On Thursday, the Emergency Situation Ministry announced that several fires in the country had been brought under control. It also said that the number of blazes in the immediate vicinity of Moscow had dropped by over a quarter in the last 24 hours. Indeed, for the first time in days, Moscow on Thursday was no longer shrouded in the thick cloud of smoke which has plagued the city recently. "I can finally open the balcony door to let my cat warm in the sun," Evgeniya Lavrova, 21-year-old economics student, told the Associated Press. "You walk in a street, feel a light breeze, and want to breathe again."

Many, however, don't trust the good news and worry that, with the capital free of smog, official interest in combating the fires elsewhere will wane. "It seems like Russian politics is based on one single calculus: How does this effect Moscow?" Vladimir Slivyak, co-head of the Moscow-based environmental group Ecodefense, told the Christian Science Monitor. "They're already saying it was just a once-in-a-thousand-year accident and declaring that it's over. But it's not over."

Indeed, many are concerned that fires burning near that Russian border with Ukraine and Belarus could release radioactivity left over from the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. Parts of the Bryansk region were heavily contaminated by fallout 24 years ago, as were other nearby areas. According to the Russian forest service website, there were 28 forest fires burning in the Bryansk region last weekend.