The name suggests a mysterious netherworld of misinformation and mind control. But military chiefs say that psy-ops - psychological operations - are a routine feature of modern conflict, as old as warfare itself. The term replaced a phrase that had even murkier connotations - propaganda.

However, the Ministry of Defence defines psy-ops simply as a way of getting "the enemy, or other target audience, to think and act in a way which will be to our advantage". Leaflets dropped from aircraft, radio broadcasts, loudspeaker vans and face-to-face conversations with civilians are all devices used by armed forces to win hearts and minds or damage opponents' morale.

Col Bob Stewart, who commanded the British peacekeeping forces in Bosnia, said, "There are two types of propaganda - white and black," he says. "White is when you tell things as they are, while black is putting more devious stuff about. The value of psy-ops can be immense - but whatever you say must be believable, and preferably the truth."

THE U.S. KEEPS AN ESTIMATED 350 THERMONUCLEAR BOMBS IN SIX NATO COUNTRIES. In four of those - Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands - the weapons are stored at the host nation's air bases, where they are guarded by specially trained U.S. military personnel.

But according to an internal U.S. Air Force report, the sites are falling short of Department of Defense requirements, with fencing and security systems in need of repair, thin rotations that often lead to staffing shortages, and responsibilities falling to inadequately trained foreign security personnel. "In some cases," the report said, "conscripts, whose total active duty commitment is nine months, provide security manpower, while other locations have the challenge of working with unionized security personnel."

In Brussels, a NATO official said there is no alliance-wide policy on weapons security: "Security arrangements for U.S. nuclear weapons are made bilaterally between the U.S. and the host country. Any improvements that would be deemed necessary should be discussed between those two governments and not in a NATO context."

Richard Falk, the special reporter on human rights in the Palestinian territories, investigates alleged Israeli violations of human rights law for the UN's Human Rights Council.

But the former Princeton professor would also like to investigate whether "some sort of controlled explosion from within" destroyed the Twin Towers, he told FOXNews.com. "I DO THINK THERE ARE QUESTIONS THAT HAVEN'T BEEN ANSWERED, questions about the way the buildings collapsed and the failure to heed a variety of signals that there was danger coming," Falk said.

"I think his beliefs are fruitcake city, but among many delegations to the UN it's probably the conventional wisdom," said John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN known for his straight talk on UN hypocrisy. It's just an example of the inmates running the asylum," Bolton said. "It's a particularly graphic example for Americans, but this is not an aberration - this is, unfortunately, TYPICAL OF MUCH OF 'WHAT GOES ON' AT THE UN."

The U.S. central bank in March said it would allow emergency loans to investment banks for the first time since the Great Depression to stave off WHAT OFFICIALS FELT WAS A THREAT OF A FULL-SCALE FINANCIAL MARKET MELTDOWN. U.S. policy-makers, including Paulson, now want to install new regulatory ground rules for such an emergency backstop.

"We should quickly consider how to most appropriately give the Fed the authority to access necessary information from highly complex financial institutions and THE RESPONSIBILITY TO INTERVENE IN ORDER TO PROTECT THE SYSTEM, so they can carry out the role our nation has come to expect -- stabilizing the overall system when it is threatened," Paulson said at a luncheon event.

The Fed and the Securities and Exchange Commission have nearly completed a formal agreement to oversee the financial system as an interim measure.

There are 6.7 billion people in the world today. The United States ranks third, with 304 million, behind China and India, according to projections released Thursday by the Census Bureau. The world's population surpassed 6 billion in 1999, meaning it will take only 13 years to add a billion people.

By comparison, the number of people didn't reach 1 billion until 1800, said Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau. It didn't reach 2 billion until 130 years later. "You can easily see the effect of rapid population growth in developing countries," Haub said.

The BBC Ten O'clock News yesterday reported on the protests which erupted as the UK House of Lords ratified the Treaty yesterday. Over the course of the start of the debate four different people were ejected from the public gallery for shouting "give us a referendum". THE FT REPORTS THAT "BRITISH APPROVAL IS SEEN IN EUROPEAN CAPITALS AS A SIGNIFICANT SIGNAL THE LISBON TREATY IS NOT DEAD." The paper reports "Mr Brown will tell the President that he will not stand in the way of efforts to salvage the Treaty."

The Guardian reports that the Government will get the Queen to give royal assent to the Treaty bill to ratify the Treaty this morning ahead of Gordon Brown's lunch with Nicolas Sarkozy today. A separate piece notes that France wants to agree a deadline of October for a deal to be agreed which would lead to a second referendum in the spring.

Gullible journalists who bought the line that the UK was "secretly" in favour of killing off the Treaty, and was only going along with ratification for diplomatic reasons, should now realise that THE UK GOVERNMENT IS NOT REMOTELY IN FAVOUR OF DROPPING THE TREATY. Rushing through royal assent just to please Sarkozy shows where the Government really stands.

The Prime Minister has been held up as an EU role model after his refusal to suspend Parliament's approval of the Treaty after last week's Irish referendum rejection. Britain's parliamentary approval of the EU Treaty, which received Royal Assent this morning, will be used by Europe's leaders at Brussels summit dinner tonight to push Ireland into holding a second referendum next year.

Hans-Gert Pöttering, President of the European Parliament, told The Daily Telegraph that THE EU TREATY WAS "CERTAINLY NOT" DEAD FOLLOWING A FINAL RATIFYING VOTE IN HOUSE OF LORDS YESTERDAY NIGHT. "This shows that the Reform Treaty is very much alive. The decisions in the House of Lords and the Commons are an encouragement to do everything to get the Treaty ratified as well in those countries where it is not yet ratified," he said.

William Hague, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, said: "People should recognise that as far as the people of Britain are concerned THE TREATY SHOULD BE DEAD. The vote in Parliament in no way represented the British people's view. It is increasingly likely that in two years there will be a Conservative Government that will put the genuine British view."

The raid took place overnight on the Bonga oil platform about 120km (75 miles) off the coast of the Niger Delta, the company said. It is the first attack on the oilfield, which normally produces about 200,000 barrels a day. ATTACKS ON THE INSHORE NIGER DELTA HAVE HELPED DRIVE UP WORLD OIL PRICES.

Nigeria's valuable offshore oilfields had always been considered difficult for most militants to target, the BBC's Alex Last reports from Lagos. But early on Thursday gunmen in boats reached the Bonga installation, Shell's flagship project, for the first time. The shutdown has cut a tenth of Nigeria's total output in one go. This comes on top of a reduction of at least 20% in recent years following inland attacks.

Our correspondent says Bonga was new, expensive and working well despite the difficulties and repeated attacks affecting the company's inshore operations in the Delta. The militants in the Delta are getting more sophisticated and better equipped and armed, he says. Now they have proven that in terms of distance at least, all of Nigeria's facilities are within their reach.

Tanzanian Foreign Minister Bernard Membe, who heads a troika of observer states, told the BBC mounting violence could make a free vote impossible. He said monitors had witnessed people being shot dead - and they were questioning the value of their mission. A spokesman for the governing Zanu-PF party dismissed Mr Membe's remarks.

Speaking to the BBC's Focus on Africa programme, Jerome Macdonald Gumbo accused the Tanzanian foreign minister of bias. He said: "Skirmishes between the MDC and Zanu-PF are normal but not to the extent that the elections cannot be free and fair. He is biased." Earlier on Wednesday, the opposition said four abducted activists had been found dead. The bodies were discovered near the capital Harare, according to the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by presidential contender Morgan Tsvangirai.

The MDC says at least 70 of its supporters have now been killed and 25,000 forced from their homes in a state-sponsored campaign of violence. Zimbabwean public broadcaster ZBC has also announced it will no longer carry campaign adverts from the MDC. There are no privately controlled radio or TV stations in Zimbabwe and only a few weekly newspapers, which most people cannot afford.

"We see striking similarities between the transatlantic tensions that built up in the early 1990s and those that are accumulating again today. THE OUTCOME OF THE 1992 DEADLOCK WAS A MAJOR CURRENCY CRISIS AND A RECESSION IN EUROPE," said a report by Morgan Stanley's European experts.

Just as then, Washington has slashed rates to bail out the banks and prevent an economic hard-landing, while Frankfurt has stuck to its hawkish line - ignoring angry protests from politicians and squeals of pain from Europe's export industry. Indeed, the ECB has let the de facto interest rate - Euribor - rise by over 100 basis points since the credit crisis began.

Just as then, the dollar has plummeted far enough to cause worldwide alarm. In August 1992 it fell to 1.35 against the Deutsche Mark: this time it has fallen even further to the equivalent of 1.25. It is potentially worse for Europe this time because the yen and yuan have also fallen to near record lows. So has sterling. A CRUNCH IS LOOMING IN 2009 WHEN A WAVE OF MATURITIES FALL DUE. "Could the funding dry up? We think it could," said the bank.

The report from the Baker Heart Institute found that 26 per cent of adult Australians had a body mass index of 25 or more, meaning they were overweight or obese. It warned that the health system was facing a time bomb unless action was taken. The findings make Australia the world's most overweight nation, ahead of the US, which has a 25 per cent obesity rate.

Professor Simon Stewart, the institute's head of preventative cardiology, said that obesity was now the biggest threat to the health of Australians, with an estimated nine million of the 21 million population obese or overweight. "That is a whole million more obese adults than we had thought," he said.

The study predicted there would be an extra 700,000 heart-related hospital admissions in the next 20 years due to obesity and almost 125,000 people would die because of the condition in that period. The report called for a national weight loss strategy on the scale of smoking and skin cancer campaigns, including subsidising gym memberships and personal training sessions.

Environment minister Phil Woolas said that the nation must ask itself whether GM crops are part of the solution to the food shortages and rising prices which have already caused rioting in several developing countries. It is understood Mr Woolas held preliminary talks with the Agricultural Biotechnology Council, an umbrella group formed in 2000 to promote the role of biotechnology in agriculture. He said: "There is a growing question of whether GM crops can help the developing world out of the current food price crisis.

There is no commercial cultivation of GM plants in the UK at present, and only one trial is under way, involving potatoes in Cambridgeshire. Supporters of the crops argue that they boost productivity and cut the use of pesticides, while critics are concerned about the contamination of conventional crops.

Gordon Brown is believed to have some sympathy for reconsidering the issue, in the light of the worsening food crisis.

In total there were 205,600 abortions carried out in England and Wales in 2007 a 2.2 per cent rise on the previous year. Of those 4,376 were carried out on girls too young to legally have sex. Women aged 19 were the most likely to have an abortion in 2007 with 36 procedures carried out for every 1,000 19-year-olds.

The rise in abortions amongst the very young showed the biggest increase with a 20 per cent rise in terminations for girls under 14, up from 136 in 2006 to 163 in 2007.

Monsignor Aldo Giordano, named earlier this month as THE PERMANENT OBSERVER OF THE HOLY SEE TO THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE, spoke Sunday with Vatican Radio about Ireland's June 12 referendum that put the Treaty of Lisbon in limbo. The treaty needs unanimous approval from the Union's 27 member states for it to go into effect.

"We are interested in the Europe of history, of culture, that Europe which today is able to confront the world," he said. "EUROPE MUST REDISCOVER ITS ROOTS, THE FOUNDATION OF ITS VALUES. Europe needs an ideal, but this ideal must be well-founded." Meanwhile, Monsignor Giordano considered the strength of the Church's voice in Europe, saying that he believes its position on morals "is heard". "Still," he affirmed, "THE KEY TO MAKING THE CHURCH'S VOICE STRONGER IS THROUGH ECUMENICAL AND INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE."

"On these important ethical topics, from the question of human life - from birth to its end - and the family, but also moral topics such as justice, peace and the environment, I SEE THAT THE VOICE OF THE CHURCH IS VERY MUCH HEEDED ON THE PART OF POLITICS," he said. "Of course, it is not just an issue of being heeded; THERE IS ALSO A CRITICAL DIMENSION."

"The Churches must come to a consensus among themselves and make a common contribution," the Holy See representative affirmed. And, "there is also the inter-religious question, because there is religious pluralism in Europe and we must be able to make proposals or give shared visions also at the level of religions. I BELIEVE THAT THE MORE WE ARE UNITED AS CHRISTIANS AND AS MEN OF RELIGION, THE MORE POLITICS WILL HEED THESE ETHICAL ISSUES."

The traditionalists dealt a serious blow to Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, by claiming that he can no longer hold the Church together. They warned that the Church was gripped by its most serious crisis since the Reformation. It could only be saved by the repentance of the Americans who triggered the row by ordaining a homosexual bishop, the Rt Rev Gene Robinson, five years ago.

The formal pronouncement of the schism is contained in an 89-page document titled The Way, the Truth and the Life, which has been drawn up by conservative Anglicans ahead of the breakaway Gafcon summit next week and which has been seen by The Telegraph. It is supported by the heads of key African churches including Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda.

Archbishop Peter Akinola, the primate of Nigeria, states in one section: "THERE IS NO LONGER ANY HOPE, THEREFORE, FOR A UNIFIED COMMUNION."