But amid criticism of Israel's settlement activities during the two-day solidarity event, Israeli officials were bracing for Palestinian diplomats to declare new diplomatic strategies during a General Assembly debate on Monday. Specifically, officials were expected to use the platform TO ASK THE SECURITY COUNCIL TO DECLARE A PALESTINIAN STATE along 1967 borders, with east Jerusalem as the state's capital, according to reports published in recent weeks.

Israeli Ambassador Gabriela Shalev, slated to address the assembly on Tuesday, is expected to reject the concept of a one-sided establishment of a Palestinian state, emphasizing that the only way to achieve peace is through negotiations, Israel officials said.

Palestinian representative to the UN, Riyad Mansour offered assurances that the Palestinians were commitment to peace. "We have never been an obstacle to a desired peace," he charged. "It is time, after all these years of engagement that have not yielded any results, for the international community, particularly the Security Council, to shoulder its responsibility and take immediate and decisive action."

In his message marking the solidarity event, the UN's Ban expressed concern over stalled peace talks. "IT IS VITAL THAT A SOVEREIGN STATE OF PALESTINE IS ACHIEVED," he said. "This should be on the basis of the 1967 lines with agreed land swaps and a just and agreed solution to the refugee issue - a state that lives side-by-side in peace with Israel, within secure and recognized borders."

There are clear signs of glacial retreat and ice melt from other parts of the world, but few field studies have been carried out in the Himalayas. Its glaciers too were widely believed to be receding fast. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had said that Himalayan glaciers were receding faster than in any other part of the world. The panel observed: "If the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate."

But some scientists claim that glaciers in the Himalayas are not retreating as fast as was believed. Others who have observed nearby mountain ranges even found that glaciers there were advancing. Kenneth Hewitt, a glaciologist from Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, is one of these scientists. He has been doing field studies in Pakistan's Karakoram Mountains at the western reaches of the Himalayan range for the last 40 years.

Just back from that region, he told BBC News that he saw at least half a dozen glaciers that had been advancing since the last time he saw them - five years ago.

The government needs the support of the Liberals to pass the legislation in the Senate. The Liberal revolt throws Mr Rudd's plans into turmoil. Mr Rudd had wanted the legislation to pass the Senate - where his party does not have a majority - by the start of the Copenhagen climate change summit next week. Last week he secured Mr Turnbull's support for the bill, prompting the angry reaction from some Liberal lawmakers that triggered the leadership challenge.

Mr Abbott won the final vote against Mr Turnbull by 42 votes to 41. A third challenger, Joe Hockey, was eliminated in first-round voting. Minutes after his victory, Mr Abbott told a news conference that he would fight the ETS bill. "We will seek to refer the legislation to [a Senate] committee for further scrutiny. If we cannot get the support for that course of action we will oppose the legislation in the Senate this week," he said. "I think on something of this magnitude, it is much more important to get it right than to rush it," he added.

The government's immediate hopes of passing the bill now rest on the possibility of some opposition lawmakers rebelling and voting with it. But if the Senate fails to back the scheme - as now looks likely - Mr Rudd could call a snap election, correspondents say.

The Conservative leader drew battle lines for the general election with a scathing attack on Children's Secretary Ed Balls, who had said marriage was not the key to a happy family. Mr Cameron told the Daily Mail that 'CELEBRATING' AND 'ENCOURAGING' MARRIAGE WAS THE NORM IN MOST EUROPEAN COUNTRIES and a Tory government would follow suit by changing the tax system. He dismissed speculation that the Conservatives might limit their long-standing commitment to support marriage to couples with children, or those on low incomes.

All those who tie the knot or enter a civil partnership would qualify, he insisted. Signalling that Labour also regards the family as a key election battleground, Mr Balls said yesterday that government proposals to be published next year will assert that children's welfare is not necessarily best protected through marriage, but instead through 'stable and lasting relationships between parents'.

The traditional family unit also came under attack from the Family and Parenting Institute, a state-financed organisation set up by Labour to speak for parents and children. Its head Dr Katherine Rake suggested that the model of the nuclear family is no longer 'the norm' and said THERE WOULD BE NO SUCH THING AS A 'TYPICAL FAMILY' IN THE NEXT TEN TO 20 YEARS.

The Foreign Office last night conceded that the crew of the Kingdom of Bahrain may have 'inadvertently strayed' into Iranian territorial waters as they sailed from Bahrain to Dubai for the start of an international race. It appears that the high-tech yacht was swept towards Iran by strong winds after its propeller was damaged.

Last night 21-year-old Mr Porter's mother Beverley said her husband Charles had spoken to their son on his mobile phone. She said the sailors had strayed into Iranian waters by only 500 yards, but were now being held somewhere off Iran. Diplomats say they have been in 'indirect contact' with the hostages and that they are confident they are being well treated. Privately the officials are furious that the news broke. They had hoped to keep the incident secret in order to avoid a new diplomatic incident with Iran.

The worst case scenario would see the sailors charged with espionage, handing the regime in Tehran another international propaganda coup. Iran's foreign ministry is expected to make a statement on the sailors today. The kidnap comes at a time of growing tensions with Iran over its nuclear weapons programme. Earlier this year PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD PROCLAIMED THAT BRITAIN WAS A WORSE ENEMY OF IRAN THAN THE UNITED STATES.

In the Middle East, the days leading up to Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice, are not unlike the last few days before Christmas in the West. The devout are filled with religious thoughts, while others look forward to going on vacation.

In Dubai, schools, businesses and government offices closed last Wednesday for a break of over a week. Foreigners living in the emirate boarded flights for India, Europe or the Seychelles, while local inhabitants who were not on a pilgrimage to Mecca followed the customs of their ancestors and, taking advantage of the pleasant weather, drove into the desert to celebrate. A holiday calm would have descended on the Gulf emirate - if only the government-owned holding company Dubai World hadn't decided to make one small announcement before the holiday.

"Dubai World," the company announced, "intends to ask all providers of financing to Dubai World and Nakheel to 'standstill' and extend maturities until at least May 30, 2010." It sounded innocuous enough, like a polite request to the international financial markets to wait patiently for the repayment of a $3.5-billion (€2.3-billion) loan to the state-owned real estate subsidiary Nakheel. BUT TO BANKERS, THE ANNOUNCEMENT SOUNDED MORE LIKE A CRY FOR HELP - and one that took many investors completely by surprise.

But on this Wednesday, a national holiday in the United Arab Emirates, it will finally become clear to everyone IN DUBAI THAN THE GOLDEN YEARS ARE OVER. The opening ceremony for the 818-meter Burj Dubai, the world's tallest building, was originally scheduled for Wednesday. But now it has been delayed.

The purpose of the paper, put together after an UNPUBLICIZED DAY-LONG SESSION in Switzerland by some of the world's top environmental bureaucrats: to argue for a new and unprecedented effort TO MOVE ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS TO "THE CENTER OF POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DECISION-MAKING" AROUND THE WORLD — and perhaps not coincidentally, expand the influence and reach of UNEP at the tables of world power, as a rule-maker and potential supervisor of the New Environmental Order.

The positions argued in that paper now appear to be much closer at hand; many of them are embedded in a four-year strategy document for UNEP taking effect next year, in the immediate wake of the much-touted, 11-day Copenhagen conference on "climate change," which starts on December 7, and which is intended to push environmental concerns to a new crescendo.

The major difference is that the four-year UNEP plan expresses its aims in the carefully soporific language that UN organizations customarily use to swaddle their objectives. The Swiss document makes its case passionately — and more important, plainly — than any UN official document ever would.

There was SHERYL CROW, who had called upon the public to refrain from using more than one square of toilet paper per visit ("except on those pesky occasions when two or three are required") and who was leading a Stop Global Warming concert tour across America. It was revealed that while Crow travelled in a biodiesel tour bus, HER 30-PERSON ENTOURAGE FOLLOWED IN A FLEET OF 13 GAS-GUZZLING VEHICLES.

JOHN TRAVOLTA notoriously encouraged the British public to do its bit to fight global warming — after flying into London on one of his five, yes, five private jets (one of which is a Boeing 707). IN 2006 HIS PILOTING HOBBY PRODUCED AN ESTIMATED 800 TONS OF CARBON EMISSIONS, more than a hundred times the output of the average Briton, according to the Carbon Trust.

It is less well known that TOM CRUISE — who has campaigned for the LA-based environmental group Earth Communications Office — also HAS AN AIR FLEET AND A LICENCE TO PILOT HIS FIVE PLANES, including a top-of-the-line customised Gulfstream jet he bought for his wife, Katie Holmes.

HARRISON FORD, who is vice-chairman on the board of Conservation International, voices public-service messages for an environmental federation called EarthShare, and once shaved his chest hair to illustrate the effects of deforestation, is another hobby pilot. He once owned a Gulfstream but now makes do with A SMALLER CESSNA CITATION SOVEREIGN EIGHT-SEATER JET, FOUR PROPELLER PLANES AND A HELICOPTER.

At the end of the film An Inconvenient Truth, the unbearably earnest former presidential candidate AL GORE asked his audience: "Are you ready to change the way you live?" HIS OWN HUGE NASHVILLE MANSION CONSUMED OVER 20 TIMES THE ELECTRICITY OF AN AVERAGE AMERICAN HOME. Indeed, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, it burnt twice as much power in the month of August 2006 than most American homes do in an entire year. Another inconvenient truth revealed that the former senator SPENT $500 A MONTH JUST TO HEAT THE INDOOR SWIMMING POOL in his lavish domestic establishment. The 100ft houseboat he bought in 2008, on the other hand, was said to be powered by biodiesel.

The malice, mischief and Machiavellian manoeuvrings revealed in the illegally hacked megabytes of emails from the University of East Anglia's prestigious Climate Research Unit, for example, offers a useful paradigm of contemporary scientific conflict. SCIENCE MAY BE OBJECTIVE; SCIENTISTS EMPHATICALLY ARE NOT. This episode illustrates what too many universities, professional societies, and research funders have irresponsibly allowed their scientists to become. Shame on them all.

The source of that shame is a toxic mix of institutional laziness and complacency. TOO MANY SCIENTISTS IN ACADEMIA, INDUSTRY AND GOVERNMENT ARE ALLOWED TO GET AWAY WITH CONCEALING OR WITHHOLDING VITAL INFORMATION ABOUT THEIR DATA, research methodologies and results. That is unacceptable and must change. Only recently in America, for example, have academic pharmaceutical researchers been required to disclose certain financial conflicts of interest they might have. On issues of the greatest importance for public policy, science researchers are less transparent than they should be. That behaviour undermines science, policy and public trust.

Dubbed "climate-gate" by global warming sceptics, the most outrageous East Anglia email excerpts appear to suggest RESPECTED SCIENTISTS MISLEADINGLY MANIPULATED DATA AND SUPPRESSED LEGITIMATE ARGUMENT in peer-reviewed journals.

These claims are forcefully denied, but the correspondents do little to enhance confidence in either the integrity or the professionalism of the university's climatologists. What is more, there are no denials around the researchers' repeated efforts to avoid meaningful compliance with several requests under the UK Freedom of Information Act to gain access to their working methods. Indeed, researchers were asked to delete and destroy emails. SECRECY, NOT PRIVACY, IS AT THE ROTTEN HEART OF THIS BAD BEHAVIOR BY OSTENSIBLY GOOD SCIENTISTS

RAJENDRA PACHAURI defended the INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC) in the wake of apparent suggestions in emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that they had prevented work they did not agree with from being included in the panel's fourth assessment report, which was published in 2007. The emails were made public this month after a hacker illegally obtained them from servers at the university.

Pachauri said the large number of contributors and rigorous peer review mechanism adopted by the IPCC meant that any bias would be rapidly uncovered. "The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report," he said.

"Every single comment that an expert reviewer provides has to be answered either by acceptance of the comment, or if it is not accepted, the reasons have to be clearly specified. So I think it is a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which insures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening." THE IPCC, WHICH WAS SET UP BY THE UN IN 1988, IS THE WORLD'S LEADING AUTHORITY ON CLIMATE CHANGE. It advises governments on the science behind the problem and was awarded the Nobel peace prize along with Al Gore in 2007.

Joe Public, coast-to-coast, now knows, thanks to the clowns at East Anglia's CRU, just how royally he has been screwed. Senator James Inhofe's Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has written to all the relevant US Government agencies, acquainting them with the nature of the e-mails. But the real car crash for Obama is on Capitol Hill where it is now confidently believed his Cap and Trade climate legislation is toast. It was always problematic; but with a growing awakening to the scale of the scientific imposture sweeping the world, as far as the Antipodes, the clever money is on Cap and Trade laws failing to pass, with many legislators sceptical and the mid-term elections looming ever closer.

The term that Fox News is now applying to the Climategate e-mails is "game-changer". For the first time, Anthropogenic Global Warming cranks are on the defensive, losing their cool and uttering desperate mantras such as "You can be sceptical, not denial." Thanks, guys. In fact we shall be whatever we want to be, without asking your permission.

AT THIS RATE, COPENHAGEN IS GOING TO TURN INTO A COMEDY CONVENTION WITH THE REAL WORLD LAUGHING AT THESE LIARS. Now is the time to mount massive resistance to the petty tyrants and hit them where it hurts – in the wallet. Further down the line there may be, in many countries, a question of criminal prosecution of anybody who has falsified data to secure funds and impose potentially disastrous fiscal restraints on the world in deference to a massive hoax. IT'S A NEW WORLD OUT THERE, Al, and, as you may have noticed, the climate is very cold indeed.

Aunts, uncles, grandparents and even siblings will take on increasing childcare responsibilities in a form of "COMMUNAL PARENTING" to cope with the effects of marital breakdown and growing pressures in the workplace, according to the Family and Parenting Institute. Rising divorce rates, fewer marriages and the growth of civil partnerships mean that THE TRADITIONAL FAMILY MODEL IS NO LONGER "THE NORM" and Government efforts to rescue it are futile, according to Dr Katherine Rake, the organisation's new chief executive.

Dr Rake will use her first major speech in the post to warn against the "trap" of attempting to preserve traditional family structures through Government initiatives. She will also forecast a dramatic change in the role of parents in the next decade. With mothers beginning to play a less dominant role in children's lives because of greater work commitments, fathers will experience a change comparable in scale to that seen by women since the 1950s, she predicts.

An estimated two million families in Britain already rely the older generation for help with childcare while about 200,000 grandparents are now sole carers. ALMOST HALF OF CHILDREN ARE NOW BORN OUTSIDE MARRIAGE, against only one in 10 a generation ago.

Muslim groups in Switzerland and abroad condemned the vote as biased and anti-Islamic. Business groups said the decision hurt Switzerland's international standing and could damage relations with Muslim nations and wealthy investors who bank, travel and shop there.

"The Swiss have failed to give A CLEAR SIGNAL FOR DIVERSITY, FREEDOM OF RELIGION AND HUMAN RIGHTS," said Omar Al-Rawi, integration representative of the Islamic Denomination in Austria, which said its reaction was "grief and deep disappointment." Muslims comprise about 6 percent of Switzerland's 7.5 million people. Many are refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and about one in 10 actively practices their religion, the government says.

ANXIETIES ABOUT GROWING MUSLIM MINORITIES HAVE RIPPLED ACROSS EUROPE IN RECENT YEARS, leading to legal changes in some countries. There have been French moves to ban the full-length body covering known as the burqa. Some German states have introduced bans on head scarves for Muslim women teaching in public schools. Mosques and minaret construction projects in Sweden, France, Italy, Austria, Greece, Germany and Slovenia have been met by protests.

"The sale of these assets should be on a fair, commercial basis, allowing the group to achieve its strategic long-term (goals) away from cyclical economic pressures," the source was quoted as saying. Among the conglomerate's key assets are the QE2 cruiseliner and the Turnberry golf course in Scotland.

Dubai, one of the UAE's seven city states, said Wednesday it intends to request a "standstill" for at least six months on the maturing debt of Dubai World, its largest and most-indebted state-run holding. Global stock markets sank on the news, with investors fearing a possible default by the emirate and its quasi-state corporates - liable for about 80 billion dollars - could cause a wider debt crisis.

But the source said a six-month moratorium would give the time needed to restructure the holding company under the supervision of a supreme committee charged with leading the emirate out of the crisis. The main stock markets in Dubai and Abu Dhabi have dived at least 6%.

He said he wanted to see "more progress in taking out" Bin Laden and his second-in-command Ayman Zawahiri. Meanwhile, a Senate report claims US forces had Bin Laden "within their grasp" in Afghanistan in late 2001. BBC World Affairs correspondent Mike Wooldridge said this was not a new claim.

However, he said, staff working for the Democratic majority on the Foreign Relations Committee now claimed to have evidence that in December 2001 US military power was kept on the sidelines while Bin Laden escaped "unmolested" into Pakistan's unregulated tribal areas.

The prime minister said Pakistan had made progress against the Taliban in south Waziristan. But he told the BBC: "We've got to ask ourselves why, eight years after September the 11th, nobody has been able to spot or detain or get close to Osama bin Laden, nobody's been able to get close to Zawahiri, the number two in al-Qaeda."