The first in COPENHAGEN, billed as "an emergency summit on climate change" and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was EXPLICITLY DESIGNED TO STOKE UP THE FEAR OF GLOBAL WARMING to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, "THIS IS NOT A REGULAR SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCE: THIS IS A DELIBERATE ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE POLICY".

Thus the name of the game last week, as we see from a sample of quotations, was to win headlines by claiming that everything is far worse than previously supposed. Sea level rises by 2100 could be "much greater than the 59cm predicted by the last IPCC report". Global warming could kill off 85 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, "much more than previously predicted". The ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica are melting "much faster than predicted". The number of people dying from heat could be "twice as many as previously predicted".

None of the GOVERNMENT-FUNDED SCIENTISTS making these claims were particularly distinguished, but they succeeded in their object, as the media cheerfully recycled all this wild scaremongering without bothering to check the scientific facts.

What a striking contrast this was to the second conference, which I attended with 700 others in NEW YORK, organised by the Heartland Institute under the title Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis?. IN BRITAIN THIS RECEIVED NO COVERAGE AT ALL, apart from a sneering mention by the Guardian, although it was addressed by dozens of expert scientists, not a few of world rank, who for professional standing put those in Copenhagen in the shade. The message of this gathering was that THE SCARE OVER GLOBAL WARMING HAS BEEN DELIBERATELY STOKED UP FOR POLITICAL REASONS AND HAS LONG SINCE PARTED COMPANY WITH PROPER SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE.

Nothing has more acutely demonstrated this than the reliance of the IPCC on COMPUTER MODELS to predict what is going to happen to global temperatures over the next 100 years. On these predictions, that temperatures are likely to rise by up to 5.3C, all their other predictions and recommendations depend, yet nearly 10 years into the 21st century it is already painfully clear that the computer forecasts are going hopelessly astray. Far from rising with CO2, as the models are programmed to predict they should, the satellite-measured temperature curve has flattened out and then dropped. If the present trend were to continue, the world in 2100 would not in fact be hotter but 1.1C cooler than the 1979-1998 average.

YET IT IS ON THIS FUNDAMENTAL INABILITY OF THE COMPUTER MODELS TO PREDICT WHAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED THAT ALL ELSE HANGS. Sea levels are not shooting up but only continuing their modest 3mm a year rise over the past 200 years. The vast Antarctic ice-sheet is not melting, except in one tiny corner, the Antarctic Peninsula. Tropical hurricane activity, far from increasing, is at its lowest level for 30 years. The best correlation for temperature fluctuations is not CO2 but the magnetic activity of the sun.

There seems little doubt that global warming is leading the world towards an unprecedented catastrophe. But it is not the Technicolor apocalypse promised by the likes of Al Gore. THE REAL DISASTER HANGING OVER US LIES IN ALL THOSE ASTRONOMICALLY COSTLY MEASURES PROPOSED BY POLITICIANS, TO MEET A CRISIS WHICH IN REALITY NEVER EXISTED.

The Bank is using its Quarterly Bulletin to highlight the threat posed to the economy by deflation – where prices fall each year rather than rise. Although inflation is currently in positive territory, it is expected to become negative in the coming months. The Bank is worried that this may combine with high levels of indebtedness to squeeze families further.

It says that families with high debts could fall prey to the debt deflation trap. This means that the cost of their debts, which are fixed, would rise compared to average prices throughout the economy. While inflation erodes debts, deflation makes them relatively higher. The Bank's paper suggests that Britain is particularly at risk because there is a high proportion of families with significant levels of debt, and many of them are on fixed mortgage rateS, which means they will not benefit from rate cuts.

The two parties would not have a majority in the 120-seat parliament and would need to secure agreements with other parties to achieve that, but it was the first step towards establishing a new Israeli government after a February 10 election. The Yisrael Beitenu official told Reuters its members had initialled the agreement with officials of Netanyahu's Likud party, after a long session of negotiations.

Netanyahu, who served as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, faces an April 3 deadline to complete a government, after being given the task last month by President Shimon Peres. Israeli media said the agreement would hand the foreign ministry to Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman, CONTROVERSIAL FOR HIS ANTI-ARAB RHETORIC. His party, the third largest in parliament, would get five cabinet posts, the reports said.

A narrow right-wing government and a prominent role for Lieberman COULD PUT NETANYAHU ON A COLLISION COURSE WITH THE ADMINISTRATION OF U.S. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA who has pledged to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.

Unemployment in Britain is at its highest for a decade and the tighter job market has put a renewed focus on the use of overseas workers. British construction workers protested earlier this year over the hiring of foreign contractors. Immigration minister Phil Woolas told the Financial Times the survey's findings were not a surprise and that he was working to give assurances to the public.

The FT said 54 percent of those questioned opposed the legal right of people from other European Union states to work in Britain. The paper said this opposition to legal migrant labour was higher than in Germany, France, Italy and Spain which was also polled by Harris.

What the town did have was a river, feeding an oasis in the Atacama Desert. But mining companies have polluted and bought up so much of the water, residents say, that for months each year the river is little more than a trickle — and an unusable one at that.

Quillagua is among many small towns that are being swallowed up in the country's intensifying water wars. Nowhere is the system for buying and selling water more permissive than here in Chile, experts say, where water rights are private property, not a public resource, and can be traded like commodities with little government oversight or safeguards for the environment.

Private ownership is so concentrated in some areas that a single electricity company from Spain, Endesa, has bought up 80 percent of the water rights in a huge region in the south, causing an uproar. In the north, agricultural producers are competing with mining companies to siphon off rivers and tap scarce water supplies, leaving towns like this one bone dry and withering.

The two reports – one by the world's foremost international economic forum and the other by 24 United Nations agencies – presage the opening tomorrow of the most important conference on the looming crisis for three years. The World Water Forum, which will be attended by 20,000 people in Istanbul, will hear stark warnings of how half the world's population will be affected by water shortages in just 20 years' time, with millions dying and increasing conflicts over dwindling resources.

A report by the World Economic Forum, which runs the annual Davos meetings of the international business and financial elite, says that lack of water, will "soon tear into various parts of the global economic system" and "start to emerge as a headline geopolitical issue". It adds: "The financial crisis gives us a stark warning of what can happen if known economic risks are left to fester. We are living in a water 'bubble' as unsustainable and fragile as that which precipitated the collapse in world financial markets. We are now on the verge of bankruptcy in many places with no way of paying the debt back."

The World Water Development Report, compiled by 24 UN agencies under the auspices of Unesco, adds that shortages are already beginning to constrain economic growth in areas as diverse as California, China, Australia, India and Indonesia. The report, which will be published tomorrow, also expects water conflicts to break out in the Middle East, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Colombia and other countries.

The Reverend Noble Samuel was driving to the studio when a car pulled over in front of him. A man got out and came over to ask him directions in Urdu. Mr Samuel, based at Heston United Reformed Church, West London, said: "He put his hand into my window, which was half open, and grabbed my hair and opened the door."

"He started slapping my face and punching my neck. He was trying to smash my head on the steering wheel. Then he grabbed my cross and pulled it off and it fell on the floor. He was swearing. The other two men came from the car and took my laptop and Bible." The Metropolitan Police are treating it as a 'faith hate' assault and are hunting three Asian men.

Pakistan-born Mr Samuel, 48, who was educated by Christian missionaries and moved to Britain 15 years ago, said that over the past few weeks he has received phone-in calls from people identifying themselves as Muslims who challenged his views. "They were having an argument with me," he said. "They were very aggressive in saying they did not agree with me. I said those are your views and these are my views. I am frightened and depressed," he said. "My show is not confrontational."

Three weeks later, prosecutors admitted the "beasts" could not be guilty - DNA tests had ruled them out - and Italians were left wondering whether growing anti-immigrant sentiment had played a role in a hurried investigation. "The discovery that these two Romanians accused of rape are not guilty is a real slap in the face for our national conscience," wrote commentator Lucia Annunziata in an editorial in La Stampa newspaper.

"The whole country was duped on a path of hasty and crude racism," she wrote. "We are a long way away from lynch mobs, but we are going in that direction. This could get serious." XENOPHOBIC FEELINGS HAVE BEEN BREWING IN POCKETS OF EUROPE IN RECENT MONTHS, fuelled by economic downturn as locals and immigrants compete for fewer jobs and ever lower wages.

There has been racist violence in the Czech Republic and Hungary, migrants who flocked to Russia looking for work in the boom have been threatened or abused, and tensions are mounting between immigrants and Spaniards competing for shelter and work.

Hundreds of protesters, including lawyers and members of the Jamaat-e-Islami religious party, hurled stones at police outside the High Court in Lahore after former prime minister and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif called supporters onto the streets. Police responded with tear gas and baton charges. "You have seen that the entire country has been turned into a police state."

The protest campaign by anti-government lawyers and opposition parties threatens to bring more turmoil to Pakistan as the government struggles to combat Islamist militants and revive a flagging economy. If the political crisis gets out of hand, the army could intervene though most analysts say a military coup is unlikely.

The United States is worried the crisis is a distraction from Pakistan's efforts to eliminate Taliban and al Qaeda enclaves on the Afghan border, vital to US plans to stabilise Afghanistan and defeat al Qaeda. An official in Zardari's party said on Saturday the president was refusing to cave in to pressure from Sharif, who was trying to overturn an election mandate by mob rule. In a step towards reconciliation with the opposition, the government said on Saturday it would seek a review of a Supreme Court ruling last month that barred Sharif and his brother from office.

Update:- ISLAMABAD - Pakistan's government agreed on Monday to reinstate Iftikhar Chaudhry as chief justice to defuse a political crisis and end a street agitation that was threatening to turn into violent confrontation. Chaudhry became a cause celebre after being dismissed in late 2007 by then-president and army chief General Pervez Musharraf. "I announce the restoration of all deposed judges including Mr. Iftikhar Chaudhry according to a promise made by the president of Pakistan and myself," Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said.

That translates into 2,984 residents per every 100,000 over the age of 12 - or 15,120 - according to the 2008 epidemiology report by the District's HIV/AIDS office.

"Our rates are higher than West Africa," said Shannon L. Hader, director of the District's HIV/AIDS Administration, who once led the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's work in Zimbabwe. "They're on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya."

"We have every mode of transmission" - men having sex with men, heterosexual and injected drug use - "going up, all on the rise, and we have to deal with them," Hader said. More than 4 percent of blacks in the city are known to have HIV, along with almost 2 percent of Latinos and 1.4 percent of whites. More than three-quarters - 76 percent - of the HIV infected are black, 70 percent are men and 70 percent are age 40 and older.

Gordon Brown's grand plan to save the global economy was in crisis last night when the German Chancellor, ANGELA MERKEL, REFUSED TO COMMIT TO A NEW GLOBAL FISCAL STIMULUS PACKAGE to steer the world out of recession. In a pointed warning to the Prime Minister, the German leader said it was too early to measure the effects of the first multibillion-dollar stimulus to give the go-ahead for any more state aid.

Mrs Merkel was backed up by Christine Lagarde, the French Finance Minister, who said nations needed to assess the impact of earlier measures before making any further tax and spend decisions. Mrs Merkel's remarks, made in a press conference alongside Mr Brown after talks in Downing Street, cast a shadow over yesterday's G20 meeting of finance ministers in Horsham, West Sussex, and Britain's attempts to secure a lasting rescue plan in the wake of the world's worst economic crisis since the 1930s.

FRANCE AND GERMANY, TWO OF EUROPE'S LARGEST ECONOMIES, ARE RELUCTANT TO BACK THE MOVES, instead calling for tougher financial regulation. The German Chancellor said it was for individual countries to decide on further tax and spend decisions, adding: "We will talk to our parliamentarians about that. Germans did not suffer the same problems with home loan and credit card debt that Americans had", she said, adding: "WE MUST RETURN TO A SOLID, SUSTAINABLE FISCAL POLICY AFTER THE CRISIS. So we have got to signal to markets that on the one hand we are tackling the crisis decisively and that, on the other, we will permanently avoid excessive global imbalances."

The Catholic Church in England and Wales will hope that such an event will capture the imagination of the country's four million Catholics, of whom only a quarter now regularly attend Mass. At the same time, the Government has embarked on a major diplomatic mission in an attempt to change the long-standing law banning Catholics from succeeding to the throne. Sources close to Gordon Brown said that CONTROVERSIAL PLANS TO REFORM THE 1701 ACT OF SETTLEMENT ARE "VERY MUCH ALIVE" - DESPITE OFFICIAL STATEMENTS TO THE CONTRARY.

Prince Charles is expected to add further momentum to Britain's bid to secure what would be only the second visit by a Pope since Henry VIII broke with Rome to establish the Church of England in 1534. Any change will be controversial. A petition lodged on the 10 Downing Street website has demanded that the government "keep the monarchy Protestant" rather than allowing Catholics to succeed.

In response a Number 10 spokesman said: "The government has no plans to change the constitutional position of the monarchy, which continues to personify both our national and Commonwealth unity as well as embodying the community cohesion and diversity of which the British people are rightly proud." This led campaigners against change to conclude they had won a victory. However, a source close to Mr Brown said: "This plan is still very much alive.

On Thursday, Liechtenstein and Andorra announced that they were loosening their strict bank secrecy laws. On Friday, the tiny countries were followed by Austria, Luxembourg and Switzerland. In the future, investigators looking into tax evasion will be able to ask their colleagues in these countries for help, provided they have probable cause. "The decision will permit the exchange of information with other countries in individual cases where a specific and justified request has been made," the Swiss government said in a statement.

The changes come after years of pressure, much of it coming recently from Germany and France, to accept OECD rules. Germany, France, Great Britain and the US signalled that they would not merely be content with sending spineless warnings. They threatened that the G-20 would publish a black list of uncooperative countries when the G-20 meets in April in London.

It seems to have worked, and not just in Europe. Hong Kong and Singapore also decided they didn't want to be named in the same breath with tax havens like the Bahamas, Monaco and the Channel Islands -- and they recently changed their practices.

Ministers from the world's largest economies also pledged to regulate hedge funds and start closer checks on credit ratings agencies to prevent a repeat of a financial markets crisis that is crippling businesses and putting millions more out of work.

"We are committed to deliver the scale of sustained effort necessary to restore growth," the ministers said in a statement promising extra money for the International Monetary Fund and regional lenders such as the Asian Development Bank.

THE G20 ACCOUNTS FOR OVER 80 PERCENT OF THE WORLD'S OUTPUT, OR GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT, which is expected to shrink in 2009 by more than any year since the 1930s after the financial crisis that erupted in the United States in 2007 engulfed confidence, activity, trade and jobs worldwide. The United States has yet to detail how it plans to clean up banks' toxic assets, which many say is vital to get a sclerotic economy moving again, though a U.S. official said details could be expected in the coming week.

The comments were the latest signal that Moscow intends to project its military capability in far-flung corners of the globe despite a tight defence budget and hardware that experts consider in many respects outdated. Russia resumed patrols by its long-distance strategic bombers in August 2007 after a 15-year hiatus, noting at the time that it was mirroring the United States which never suspended its global bomber patrols after the Cold War.

Last year, Russia temporarily based a pair of Tu-160 bombers at an airbase in Venezuela in a carefully-choreographed display of force regarded as a warning message to the United States.

Last July however, a top US air force officer warned that Russia would cross "a red line" if it were to base nuclear capable bombers in Cuba. "If they did, I think we should stand strong and indicate that is something that crosses a threshold, crosses a red line for the United States of America," said General Norton Schwartz said on July 23.