Today, Europe is a largely ineffectual player in world affairs. European states rotate the EU presidency, and for most non-European nations, the tenure of each new president is largely invisible. But what happens when the EU elects a full-time president with a five-year term, as the treaty stipulates? (Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, is the front-runner now.)

The European Union would then seem almost like the United States, a collection of states forming a cohesive union with a common foreign policy - and a single, prominent president who will immediately become an important player in the world. The European Union's 27 nations have A POPULATION OF ABOUT 500 MILLION, 40 percent more than the United States. Its gross domestic product is almost 20 PERCENT HIGHER THAN THE UNITED STATES'. HOW COULD IT NOT BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY?

Of course, the EU has a fractious membership. The big states, particularly England, France and Germany, want to establish the EU as a major world party, while the smaller states, like Luxembourg and the Czech Republic, are less eager, afraid they will be marginalized. But don't we have similar arguments in this country, between the South, the Northeast and other parts of the nation?

Now, for the first time, our great new competitor is a collection of like-minded democracies - our friends and allies. It certainly won't be easy to ignore Europe's concerns. Much remains to be decided. BUT WHATEVER HAPPENS, THE UNITED STATES WILL SOON HAVE A POWERFUL ALLY - OR A FEARSOME RIVAL.

Graham Summers, senior market strategist at OmniSans Research, wrote in the firm's daily e-letter yesterday that the markets may finally be on the verge of the crash he has been predicting for more than two months. "Well, judging from the market's action today, I believe we may be within 48 hours of getting the "Official Sell" signal I've been waiting for," he wrote in "Gain, Pains, and Capital."

The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 119 points yesterday, or 1.2 percent, while the NASDAQ lost 2.7 percent. The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies dropped 3.5 percent. Summers explained in an online piece Tuesday that he has been watching an ominous pattern develop in which the trading range shrinks as stocks rise higher. In the past, that pattern has led to a sharp downturn, he said.

"I'VE BEEN FOREWARNING OF A POTENTIAL CRASH FOR MONTHS NOW. And the market's current action is precisely what you would expect for a major top (increased volatility)," Summers wrote. "We see this stuff all the time, but the recent number of them with more strident and panicky tones does not bode well for these markets," he writes. "Our readers know where we stand and our professional analyst friends agree with us. IT'S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME. WE ARE AT A TURNING POINT IN MOST MARKETS," HE SAYS.

This zero-tolerance policy tells us less about the child than THE MIND-SET OF OFFICIALDOM, INCREASINGLY OBSESSED WITH MONITORING THE MOST INFORMAL PARTS OF SOCIAL LIFE. A school playground is a mess of exuberant sociability, of running, shouting, falling-out, making-up, showing off and teasing. Now if a child uses a 'wrong' word there must be forms filled in and letters home, even a call from the police.

When anti-racist education is extended down to nursery schools, it means something quite different. Anti-racism becomes not about the worthy goals of equality and even-handedness, but about the management of subconscious thoughts and private relationships.

The idea that three-year olds can be 'racist', and require specialists to train them out of their prejudice, amounts to a notion that we are born sinners and ONLY OFFICIALDOM CAN SAVE US. From their first words, apparently, children are 'learning racism' that must be monitored and corrected. Worst of all, ANTI-RACIST POLICIES CAN START TO CREATE DIVISIONS WHERE NONE EXISTED, by turning everyday playground spats into 'race issues'.

Teaching staff report that awareness-raising assemblies can lead to an outbreak of incidents and resentments. If anything, it is the anti-racist bureaucracy itself that is the main obstacle to children building free and colour-blind friendships today.

The report also says teachers are being treated like counter staff in police stations, having to fill in forms detailing name-calling and jokes. At the same time, DIVERSITY "MISSIONARIES" sent into schools to teach pupils about bigotry are said to be increasing the divide between white and black children by FORCING THEM TO SEE EVERYTHING IN TERMS OF RACE.

Schools were placed under a duty by the Government in 2002 to monitor and report all racist incidents to their local authority. Adrian Hart, the author of the report which is published by the Manifesto Club, a civil liberties group, said: "The obligation on schools to report these incidents wastes teachers' time, interferes in children's space in the playground, and undermines teachers' ability to deal with problems in their classrooms."

"WORSE, SUCH ANTI-RACIST POLICIES CAN CREATE DIVISIONS WHERE NONE HAD EXISTED, by turning everyday playground spats into 'race issues'. There are a small number of cases of sustained targeted bullying, and schools certainly need to deal with those. But most of these 'racist incidents' are just kids falling out. They don't need re-educating out of their prejudice – they and their teachers need to be left alone."

Even outside the gilded halls of Wall Street, there's no shortage of good cheer: many economists say the Great Recession has ended, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke keeps seeing "green shoots" in the economy. BUT THE ONLY GREEN SHOOTS THAT MANY NON–WALL STREET TYPES HAVE SEEN LATELY ARE THE WEEDS SPROUTING IN THE PARKING LOTS OF ABANDONED MALLS. Unemployment is marching toward 10%, and house foreclosures are still rising.

If you're a day late with your credit-card payment or overdrawn by a few bucks on your ATM card, the bank (which your tax money helped bail out) is still sticking you with obscene fees and charges. Hence the question that so many of us are asking: Where's my bailout? Welcome to Round 2 of Main Street vs Wall Street. The divide is the worst I've seen in my 40 years of writing about finance.

In a new TIME poll, 75% of the respondents say they believe Wall Street will revert to business as usual, 67% want the government to force pay cuts, and 59% want more government regulation. Main and Wall are never going to love each other. And they probably shouldn't, because their interests aren't identical. But if we're going to get through this mess as a society and regain our prosperity, Main Street and Wall Street need to understand each other. And they don't.

Too many people on Wall Street are acting in an arrogant, clueless and tone-deaf way, huffily treating any criticism of their pay and practices and perks as an attack on the free-enterprise system. Wall Streeters like to say (and may even believe) that they're helping humanity — which occasionally happens, but only by accident — rather than being out to make the most money they can.

Engineers on Wednesday will evaluate the damage caused when the rod and metal brace fell into the 73-year-old bridge's westbound lanes during Tuesday evening's rush hour. When the rod apparently snapped at about 5:30pm, it brought down with it a steel patch roughly 3 feet long, authorities said.

The rod that fell Tuesday was erected last month during an emergency repair job. It was holding in place a saddle-like cap that had been installed over a cracked link discovered over the Labor Day weekend."If you look at the totality of the circumstances — you've got the 5:30 commute, you have a 5,000-pound piece of steel falling out of the sky. We are so fortunate that no one was injured or killed," CHP Sergeant Trent Cross told KTVU-TV.

Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a civil engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley who has spent 20 years studying the Bay Bridge, called THE INITIAL CRACK A "WARNING SIGN" OF POTENTIALLY BIGGER SAFETY ISSUES WITH THE BRIDGE. "The repair they were doing was really a Band-Aid," said Astaneh-Asl, who criticized Caltrans at the time for rushing to reopen the bridge. "The Band-Aid broke, in essence." Astaneh-Asl said the failure of the repair job demonstrates the need for a longer-term solution. THE BRIDGE'S AGE AND DESIGN MAKE IT SUSCEPTIBLE TO COLLAPSE, especially if commercial tractor-trailers are allowed to continue using it, he said.

But it raises a number of moral and ethical concerns. These include the possibility of CHILDREN BEING BORN THROUGH ENTIRELY ARTIFICIAL MEANS, and men and women being sidelined from the process of making babies. Opponents argue that it is wrong to meddle with the building blocks of life and warn that the advances taking place to tackle infertility risk distorting and damaging relations between family members.

The US government-funded research also offers the prospect of a 'miracle pill' which staves off the menopause, allowing women to wait longer to have a child. It centres on stem cells, widely seen as a repair kit for the body. Scientists at Stanford University in California found the right cocktail of chemicals and vitamins to coax the cells into becoming eggs and sperm.

The sperm had heads and short tails and are thought to have been mature enough to fertilise an egg. The eggs were at a much earlier stage but were still much more developed than any created so far by other scientists. The double success, published in the journal Nature, raises the prospect of men and women one day 'growing' their own sperm and eggs for use in IVF treatments.

In a gross abuse of his high office, David Miliband appears ready to compromise his country's independence to further his own political ambitions and those of his patron, Bonaparte Blair. Indeed, far from standing up for Britain, our Foreign Secretary seems determined to run us down, SUGGESTING WE CANNOT SURVIVE AS AN INDEPENDENT POWER.

Instead, he says, we should 'embrace' EU foreign policy. ANYONE WHO THINKS OTHERWISE IS 'BLINKERED, FATALISTIC AND WRONG'.

Pouring obsequious praise on his former boss, he describes him as a statesman whose motorcades could 'stop the traffic' when he arrives in Washington or Beijing. WHAT A GREAT DEAL THAT PHRASE TELLS US ABOUT MR MILIBAND'S ATTITUDE TO POLITICAL POWER, AS A MERE STATUS SYMBOL. In short, he's playing political games with Britain's future. But what can you expect of a career politician who's never had a job in the real world?

MR MILIBAND'S PREDECESSORS ALWAYS SAW THEIR ROLE AS FIGHTING FOR AND PROTECTING BRITAIN'S INTERESTS OVERSEAS. How depressing that we now have a Foreign Secretary who sees diplomacy merely as a source of job opportunities for the political class.

THE RIGHT TO SEARCH HOMES, SEIZE CASH, FREEZE BANK ACCOUNTS AND CONFISCATE PROPERTY WILL BE GIVEN TO TOWN HALL OFFICIALS and civilian investigators employed by organisations as diverse as Royal Mail, the Rural Payments Agency and Transport for London. The measure, being pushed through by Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, comes into force next week and will deploy some of the most powerful tools available to detectives against fare dodgers, families in arrears with council tax and other minor offenders.

The radical extension of the Proceeds of Crime Act, through a Statutory Instrument which is not debated by parliament, has been condemned by the chairman of the Police Federation. Paul McKeever said that he was shocked to learn that the decision to hand over "intrusive powers" to people who were not police was made without consultation or debate. Councils and other bodies had access to asset recovery powers before but only with the authorisation and involvement of the police. NOW THEY WILL BE ABLE TO ACT INDEPENDENTLY OF ANY POLICE FORCE OR LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY.

The memo says councils and quangos will employ "trained internal financial investigators" and be "less reliant on more traditional law enforcement agencies, notably the police". The extension of such draconian powers to civilian investigators coincides with mounting legal concern about the operation of the law of confiscation. But the Home Office maintained last night that the measures would "boost the fight against crime" and "free up valuable police time".

The "Little Buddy Child Tracker" retails for $100 (far less than other devices that sell for $200 to $500). It combines global satellite positioning and cellular technology to signal the child's whereabouts to a computer or smartphone.

Parents can program the device to set up specific times and locations where the child is supposed to be - in school or at home, for example - and the device sends a text message if the child leaves the site in that time.

Many companies and government offices hope to keep operations going as much as possible with teleworking using the Internet. Among the many problems posed by this idea, however, is the issue of bandwidth - especially the "last mile" between a user's home and central cable systems.

"Such network congestion could prevent staff from broker-dealers and other securities market participants from teleworking during a pandemic," reads the GAO report, available here. "The Department of Homeland Security is responsible for ensuring that critical telecommunications infrastructure is protected." Private Internet providers might need government authorization to block popular websites, it said, or to reduce residential transmission speeds to make way for commerce.

The Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Homeland Security, a group of private-sector firms and financial trade associations, has been working to ensure that trading could continue if big exchanges had to close because of the risk of disease transmission.

The treaty, which aims to streamline the way the EU is run, must be approved by all 27 member countries. The Czech Republic is the only country which has yet to sign. Court officials in Brno said the 15-member Czech Constitutional Court panel would reconvene on 3 November when a ruling was "very probable", the Reuters news agency reported.

The court challenge is one of two hurdles to be cleared before Czech President Vaclav Klaus will sign the Lisbon Treaty. A similar case has already been dismissed, but the president - a Eurosceptic who strongly opposes the treaty - still has to sign it to complete ratification. He has said he will not do that unless provided with solid guarantees about property rights in the Czech Republic, a subject which will be addressed by a summit later this week in Brussels.

Our correspondent says the EU is keen to get on with the task of implementing far-reaching reforms, including the appointment of a new permanent EU president, but is being frustrated by the lack of Czech ratification. The Lisbon Treaty is also under threat from the UK's Conservative Party. They say they will hold a referendum on the treaty if they form a government next year, and if it is not signed into law by then.

This allegedly claimed mass immigration would make Britain more multicultural and allow Labour to portray the Tories as racists. Speaking in the Commons yesterday, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said it would be 'utterly disgraceful' for ministers to base immigration policy on party politics.

He asked Immigration Minister Phil Woolas: 'Can I invite you to put the record straight - what was the motivation behind the very rapid increase in immigration under this Government?'. Incredibly, Mr Woolas did not appear to know which report Mr Grayling was referring to - despite the widespread coverage it received over the weekend. Yesterday, the Daily Mail told how ministers were facing calls for an inquiry into claims by former Labour adviser Andrew Neather that the Government opened up Britain's borders in part to try to humiliate Right-wing opponents of immigration.

His allegations referred to a 2001 report from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a think-tank based in the Cabinet Office, which made the case for mass immigration. Earlier drafts are said to have included the statement of 'a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural'.

On 8 October, the rock crashed into the atmosphere above South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The blast was heard by monitoring stations 10,000 miles away, according to a report by scientists at the University of Western Ontario. Scientists are concerned that it was not spotted by any telescopes, and that had it been larger it could have caused a disaster.

The asteroid, estimated to have been around 10 metres (30ft) across, hit the atmosphere at an estimated 45,000mph. The sudden deceleration caused it to heat up rapidly and explode with the force of 50,000 tons of TNT. Luckily, due to the height of the explosion – estimated at between 15 and 20 km (nine to 12 miles) above sea level – no damage was caused on the ground.

However, if the object had been slightly larger – 20 to 30 metres (60 to 90ft) across – it could easily have caused extensive damage and loss of life, say researchers. Very few objects smaller than 100 meters (300ft) across have been spotted and catalogued by astronomers. An asteroid or comet fragment around 60 meters across is believed to have been behind the Tunguska Event, a powerful explosion that took place over Russia in 1908. The blast has been estimated at equivalent to 10-15 million tons of TNT – enough to destroy a large city.

Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas. Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December WOULD LEAD TO SOARING COSTS FOR MEAT AND OTHER FOODS that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.

He predicted that people's attitudes would evolve UNTIL MEAT EATING BECAME UNACCEPTABLE. "I think it's important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating," he said. "I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food."

He said that he was deeply concerned that popular opinion had so far failed to grasp the scale of the changes needed to address climate change, or of the importance of the UN meeting in Copenhagen from December 7 to December 18. "I am not sure that people fully understand what we are talking about or the kind of changes that will be necessary," he added. UP TO 20,000 DELEGATES FROM 192 COUNTRIES ARE DUE to attend the UN conference in the Danish capital.