In a statement released last week, the Europol police agency said Europe's cap-and-trade system has been the victim of organized crime during the past 18 months, RESULTING IN LOSSES OF ROUGHLY $7.4 BILLION. The agency, headquartered in the Netherlands, estimated that in some countries up to 90 percent of the entire market volume was caused by fraudulent activities.

"These criminal activities endanger the credibility of the European Union Emission Trading System and lead to the loss of significant tax revenue for governments," Rob Wainwright, Europol's director, said in a statement. Launched in 2005, the Emission Trading System seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions - which many scientists believe contribute to global warming - by allocating carbon pollution allowances to member states to fulfill its obligations under the UN's Kyoto Protocol. Companies that emit less than their allowance can sell the difference on the trading market to firms that exceed their established limits.

But, according to a diagram of the scheme provided by Europol officials, the accused traders would open an account in a national carbon registry and then purchased emission allowances without value added taxes from other companies in other countries. Those allowances were then transferred to the country where they were registered before the accused trader moves them to an unregulated broker, selling the allowances on a trading exchange, often through various buffer companies. Finally, the accused trader charges the value added tax on the transaction but does not submit that money to authorities.

The detective said companies should anticipate a shooting and hostage-taking raid "involving a small number of gunmen with handguns and improvised explosive devices". The warning — the bluntest issued by police — has underlined an assessment that A TERRORIST CELL MAY BE PREPARING AN ATTACK ON LONDON EARLY NEXT YEAR.

During a "commando-style" raid by 10 gunmen on hotels and cafes in Mumbai in November 2008, 174 people were killed and more than 300 injured over three days. OFFICIALS NOW REPORT AN INCREASE IN "INTELLIGENCE CHATTER" — COMMUNICATIONS CAPTURED BY ELECTRONIC EAVESDROPPING AGENCIES. One senior security adviser said the police warnings had intensified and become much more specific over the past two weeks.

After intense overnight wrangling, delegates from 192 countries on Saturday passed a motion simply "noting" a loose deal aimed at limiting temperature rises to less than 2C, which was agreed by the US and four other large-scale polluting nations.

However, critics warned the "Copenhagen Accord", the result of two weeks of negotiations in the Danish capital, was full of holes and lacked a timetable – AND ENVIRONMENT AGENCIES BRANDED IT TOOTHLESS AND A FAILURE. A new United Nations-backed conference could be held in Mexico in the first half of 2010, several months earlier than planned, sources suggested.

FOX NEWS - The global warming debate appears as polarized as you can get: One side fears environmental ruin unless we quickly cut carbon emissions even if that severely disrupts our way of life. The other predicts ECONOMIC RUIN FROM TRILLION-DOLLAR PLANS TO RE-ORDER THE GLOBAL ECONOMY AND REDISTRIBUTE THE WORLD'S WEALTH.

The politically sensitive strikes Thursday, first reported by ABC News, supplement efforts already under way by the government of Yemen to go after Al Qaeda in the country, the officials told Fox News, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the operation.

Such an operation is particularly sensitive in Yemen. "It's very difficult for Yemen to ask the US for help given the nature of their population and its views about the West," one official said. "And the US doesn't want to compromise their ability to ask for help." The United States has faced similar concerns in Pakistan, where reports of US drone attacks on militants are common - but never acknowledged publicly by the US or by Pakistan.

In the new attacks, cruise missiles on Obama's orders hit a suspected Al Qaeda training camp north of Sanaa, the capital, and another site, where terrorists were thought to be plotting an attack on the US, ABC News reported, citing unnamed administration officials. A Yemeni official contacted by ABC News insisted that the attacks were carried out by Yemen, not the United States. Yemeni forces also reportedly have targeted Al Qaeda in raids conducted at three locations.

THAT MEANS MILITANTS HAVE THE ABILITY TO SEE THROUGH THE EYES OF ALL KINDS OF COMBAT AIRCRAFT — from traditional fighters and bombers to unmanned spy planes. The problem is in the process of being addressed. But for now, AN ENORMOUS SECURITY BREACH IS EVEN LARGER THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT.

The military initially developed the Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver, or ROVER, in 2002. The idea was let troops on the ground download footage from Predator drones and AC-130 gunships as it was being taken. Since then, nearly every airplane in the American fleet — from F-16 and F/A-18 fighters to A-10 attack planes to Harrier jump jets to B-1B bombers has been outfitted with equipment that lets them transmit to ROVERs. Thousands of ROVER terminals have been distributed to troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But those early units were "fielded so fast that it was done with an unencrypted signal. It could be both intercepted (e.g. hacked into) and jammed," e-mails an Air Force officer with knowledge of the program. In a presentation last month before a conference of the Army Aviation Association of America, a military official noted that the current ROVER terminal "receives only unencrypted L, C, S, Ku [satellite] bands." So the same SECURITY BREACH THAT ALLOWED INSURGENTS TO USE SATELLITE DISHES AND $26 SOFTWARE TO INTERCEPT DRONE FEEDS can be used the tap into the video transmissions of any plane.

That compares with bailout costs worth just 30 per cent of gross domestic product in the Euro Zone and 50 per cent in the United States. The staggering numbers, contained in the Bank's biannual Financial Stability Report, underline the terrible price the British public has paid following a binge of risk-taking in the City.

The official aid includes injections of cash into banks, state guarantees of their debts, and central bank interventions. And despite receiving such vast quantities of taxpayer help, banks' finances remain hugely over-stretched and vulnerable to economic setbacks, the report warned. The Euro Zone figures are an average, which hides variations in the state aid between individual countries. BUT BRITISH LENDERS WILL HAVE TO FIND THE MONEY TO RE-FINANCE £1TRILLION OF THEIR DEBTS IN THE COMING YEARS.

Similar discussions, it appears, have also been taking place for several months inside the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the world's current environmental watchdog.

According to documents obtained by Fox News, a high-level group of dignitaries from 38 countries, including a bevy of environment ministers and other top environmental bureaucrats, held their first meeting under UNEP auspices last June in the Serbian capital of Belgrade to begin hammering out details of the task of "IMPROVING INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE."

The so-called Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janiero in 1992, is universally regarded as the kick-start to environmental activism that has culminated in the Copenhagen effort to drastically cut global carbon emissions and also begin a dramatic re-ordering of the world economy. "THE SCALE OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE MANDATES US TO ACT SWIFTLY," Steiner declared, according to a copy of his speaking notes obtained by Fox News.

US President Barack Obama will join more than 120 other world leaders on the final day of the climate talks, designed to strike a deal to boost international efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions widely blamed for heating up the planet. The draft still under discussion proposed limiting a rise in global average temperatures to within two degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, the sources, who declined to be identified, told Reuters.

Low-lying countries worried about rising seas want a tougher target of 1.5 degrees. Temperatures have already risen half that level over the past century, the UN climate panel says. Two sources said the draft pledged rich countries to donate $100 billion annually by 2020 to poor nations to help them adapt their economies and cope with climate change that threatens to bring chaotic weather and crop failures.

But any deal will have to be agreed by unanimity. Some small island states and African nations - most vulnerable to climate change - say they will not agree a weak deal. "We are moving out of the valley of death. We are beginning to see the outlines of a compromise, helped by the US offer on finance," said Kim Carstensen, head of the WWF environmental group's global climate initiative

However, it said the commercial banks still had to do more to improve their long-term stability. The Bank is spending £200bn under QE to boost lending in the banking sector. The Bank is using new money to buy assets from banks and other companies, in order to stimulate both bank lending and the wider economy in general.

It cautioned that the banks would still need further time to recover from the crisis in the financial system, and that in the meantime, they "remain vulnerable to the risk of less than expected economic recovery". It added that the root cause of the crisis in the global financial sector over the past year had been "excessive risk-taking in the upswing of the credit cycle and insufficient resilience in the subsequent downturn".

The Bank said these two factors had to be tackled to prevent a similar crisis happening again in the future.

Alex Deane, the director of Big Brother Watch, which carried out the survey, said: "The evidence for the ability of CCTV to deter or solve crimes is sketchy at best." But councils say the cameras help cut crime, catch criminals and make people feel safer. The study, entitled Big Brother is Watching, found that 418 local authorities control 59,753 cameras. Ten years ago, a similar study found that the total was 21,000.

Freedom of Information Act requests revealed that the councils with most cameras were Portsmouth and Nottinghamshire, which each controlling 1,454. Fife Council operates 1,350 cameras. Big Brother Watch calculates that, per person, people in the Outer Hebrides were the most watched, with eight cameras for every 1,000 residents. The UK total of nearly 60,000 cameras excludes the thousands run by private companies and central government. It is thought that Britain is one of the most-watched countries in the world with an estimated four million security cameras.

Ministers have said CCTV is "an important tool" in crime fighting. But a Home Office study found the cameras had a negligible effect on cutting crime. A Metropolitan Police study found only one crime is solved every year for every 1,000 CCTV cameras. The ONE MILLION CAMERAS IN LONDON helped to solve 1,000 crimes last year.

Once they are all in place, the burn rate is estimated to exceed $10 million an hour, or more than $8 billion a month. Much of that is literally burned — in the engines of American jeeps, trucks, tanks, aircraft and power generators. On average, each of the 183,000 soldiers currently deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq requires 22 GALLONS OF FUEL A DAY, according to a study by the international accounting firm Deloitte.

Because of a difficult and dangerous supply line that runs more than 1,200 miles through Pakistan, fuel for the troops in Afghanistan is considerably more expensive than for those in Iraq: AN AVERAGE OF $48 PER GALLON COUNTING THE COST OF TRANSPORT AND PROTECTION. Flown by helicopter to positions on remote Afghan front lines, the cost can reach $400 per gallon.

Which helps explain why Afghanistan "is one of the most expensive, perhaps the most expensive, war in US history on a per troop basis," says Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank. HIS ESTIMATE OF THE COST PER YEAR OF A SOLDIER deployed in Afghanistan this year matches the number used by the White House – AROUND $1 MILLION. BOTH THE WARS IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN HAVE SO FAR BEEN FINANCED WITH BORROWED MONEY that makes up part of the country's deficit.

The 2009 budget year, which ended in September, set an all-time high with $1.42 trillion. In 2010, it is expected to reach close to $1.5 trillion. Does that mean THE UNITED STATES IS DRAWING CLOSER TO A TIPPING POINT, a level of military overstretch and indebtedness that sapped empires in the past?

The hacking was possible because THE REMOTELY FLOWN PLANES HAVE AN UNPROTECTED COMMUNICATIONS LINK. Obtaining such video feeds could provide insurgents with information about sites the military might be planning to target. The Associated Press news agency quotes a US Department of Defense official as saying the military has also found evidence of at least one instance where insurgents in Afghanistan monitored drone video.

The breach of the Pentagon surveillance system's security in Iraq is said to have come to light when footage shot by a Predator drone was found on the laptop of an apprehended insurgent.

A senior Pentagon official is quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying that although militants were able to view the video, there was no evidence that they were able to jam electronic signals from the aircraft or take control of them.

Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) HAD PROBABLY TAMPERED WITH RUSSIAN CLIMATE DATA.

THE IEA BELIEVES THAT RUSSIAN METEOROLOGICAL-STATION DATA DID NOT SUBSTANTIATE THE ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL-WARMING THEORY. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country's territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. OVER 40% OF RUSSIAN TERRITORY WAS NOT INCLUDED IN GLOBAL TEMPERATURE CALCULATIONS for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations. CLIMATOLOGISTS USE THE INCOMPLETE FINDINGS OF METEOROLOGICAL STATIONS FAR MORE OFTEN THAN THOSE PROVIDING COMPLETE OBSERVATIONS.

The bolstered eyes in the sky will come from a mix of manned and unmanned aircraft and added technology that allows each MQ-9 Reaper drone to collect 10 video transmissions and beam them back to 10 different users on the ground, Air Force Lieutenant General David Deptula, deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, told reporters. Deptula's comments came as Defense Secretary Robert Gates continues to press the Air Force to find ways to more rapidly provide better intelligence to the US and its allies in Afghanistan.

The first troop units of the surge ordered by President Barack Obama have begun to arrive in Afghanistan, a Pentagon official said Wednesday, adding to the 68,000 US forces already deployed to counter emboldened insurgents. Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said a Marine battalion ordered to move in earlier this month already has "some boots on the ground," with the rest to be flown in before Christmas. "So the surge has begun in earnest," he said.

BBC's "Africa Have Your Say" Web site asked for people's views on whether Uganda has gone too far and whether there should be any laws against gays. But several British politicians said Wednesday that the BBC should not treat the execution of gays as a legitimate topic for discussion.

Opposition lawmaker Lynne Featherstone has written to BBC executives seeking an apology and end to the Web discussion. "The BBC are only FANNING THE FLAMES OF HATRED as many of the comments demonstrate," she says.