Christofias, 62, has agreed to meet the leader of the breakaway Turkish Cypriot north. The European Union, the United States and Britain urged him to waste no time to end the division hindering Turkey's European Union accession efforts.

"I believe that soon an exploratory meeting will be arranged," Christofias told journalists on Monday, while Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat asked for swift talks. "I genuinely congratulate Mr. Christofias and I call on him to cooperate in the process of negotiations which should start as soon as possible," he told a news conference in the divided Cypriot capital of Nicosia.

"I would strongly encourage you to grasp this chance and without delay start negotiations under United Nations auspices with the leader of the Turkish Cypriot community on a comprehensive settlement," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said in a statement to Christofias. The United States and Britain also issued statements saying 2008 offered a window of opportunity and offering support.

While most of the outgoing centre-left coalition supports the abortion law, centre-right politicians are divided, some favoring a more restrictive approach, others an outright ban. Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Bishops Conference, said a statement the association issued at a weekend congress, supporting the current abortion law, was invalid and "imaginary" because it had been approved "by acclamation" and not put to an individual vote by delegates.

The clash, which dominated Italian newspapers on Monday, appeared to thwart any attempt by political parties to keep the thorny issue of abortion in the background of the campaign. Pope Benedict repeated the Church's opposition to abortion on Monday, saying life must be respected "from its dawn" and "in every moment of its earthly development" but did not mention the doctors' dispute

Exponential growth in processing power and the shrinking of technology would see the development of microscopic computers, he said. "We will see a billion-fold increase in the price-performance of computers in the next 25 years," he said. "Virtual will compete with reality," he told the Game Developers Conference.

Mr Kurzweil said it was possible to accurately predict the growth and change in computing power by looking at how it had developed over the last 50 years. "There will be a 100,000-fold shrinking of computer technology over the next 25 years," he said. "Today you can put a pea-sized computer inside your brain, if you have Parkinson's disease and want to replace the biological neurons that were destroyed by the disease."

He said a billion-fold increase in computing performance and capability over the next 25 years coupled with the 100,000 fold shrinking, would lead to "blood cell-size devices" that can go inside our bodies and keep us healthy and inside our brain and expand our intelligence". Mr Kurzweil, who invented the flat bed scanner and text-to-speech synthesis, said the virtual world was a misnomer. "In virtual worlds we do real romance, real learning, real business. Virtual reality is real reality."

Politicians had "all gone crazy" over ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, taking attention from THE "BIG QUESTION" ON CONTINUING EU MEMBERSHIP, he added. The Lib Dems are expected to table a House of Commons motion on Tuesday demanding a public vote on whether Britain stays in the EU.

At the last general election in 2005 all three main parties promised a referendum on the planned European Constitution. The Conservatives and the UK Independence Party are calling for a referendum on whether the UK should ratify THE TREATY, ARGUING IT IS LARGELY THE SAME AS THE CONSTITUTION. But Labour argues that the documents are VERY DIFFERENT and that Parliament should decide. MPs are currently engaged in a 12-day debate on ratification

Mr Clegg told the BBC that the planned referendum on the constitution had been "tantamount" to one on whether to continue EU membership. He described the Tory focus on the treaty as a "side-show" and a "distraction". INSTEAD, IT WAS TIME TO DECIDE "ARE WE GOING TO CARRY ON WITH THIS AMBIVALENT ATTITUDE OR WITHDRAW" FROM EUROPE, OR "MAKE A WHOLE-HEARTED LONG-TERM COMMITMENT". All 27 EU member states have to ratify it for it to come into effect.

For the second day, the Jerusalem Conference held a discussion on Jerusalem's future. Wednesday's discussion dealt with demographics and the Temple Mount. Jerusalem's Handling by Government Unethical to the Core

"The way Jerusalem is being negotiated personifies the unethical nature of this government," said Danny Dayan, the new head of the Yesha Council of Judea and Samaria communities (formerly Gaza as well). "Even before Annapolis, the Olmert government obviously put Jerusalem on the table, conceding at least the Clinton parameters to the PA [which entail Israel relinquishing many of Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods -ed.]."

Dayan said the fact that the Olmert government is completely willing to lie to the faces of the populace - knowing that the citizenry knows full well they are being lied to - personifies the unethical nature of the current government. But he pointed the finger at the populace for failing to topple the government. "Everyone knows what is going on and everyone is hiding their heads in the sand," Dayan said. "The press is being complicit and allowing it," he added, echoing Shragai.

Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, the founder of the Temple Institute in Jerusalem said, "There is no Jerusalem without the Holy Temple," he proclaimed. "I have been sitting here for two hours and have heard about housing and demographics and even the Jewish Quarter - but nothing about the Holy Temple, which is inextricably the whole essence of Jerusalem. It is impossible to speak about Jerusalem without mentioning even once the Holy Temple."

They warned that less than 30 per cent of claims for staff allowances are fully backed up, LEAVING THE EXPENSES SYSTEM OPEN TO ABUSE. But Euro-MPs took no action. "Appropriate measures, such as suspension of payments and/or issuing of recovery orders, should be initiated for the sums not justified," said a little-noticed report by the EU Court of Auditors.

THE ALLOWANCES ARE WORTH UP TO £125,000 for each Euro-MP, a total of £98 million, and are meant to pay for assistants and secretarial staff. Under European Parliament rules, THE REPORT CAN ONLY BE READ BY LAWMAKERS IN A SEALED ROOM AND ITS CONTENTS MAY NOT BE REVEALED.

The Sunday Telegraph has been told that Euro-MPs' assistants have been lobbying for reform after finding themselves in a financial "no man's land". Many do not pay tax or national insurance in either their country of origin or Brussels. The damning section of the EU Court of Auditors report last year pointed out that AUDITORS HAD BEEN HIGHLIGHTING "WEAKNESSES" IN THE PARLIAMENT'S EXPENSES' SYSTEM FOR THE PAST DECADE.

1926: Born Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz on August 13, in Biran, Cuba

1949: Turns down a $5,000 deal to sign with the New York Giants American football team

1950: Graduates from University of Havana with doctorate in law

July 26, 1953: Leads a failed attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba

1955: Arrives in Mexico City as an exile from Cuba. Here, he is introduced to the young Argentinean doctor Che Guevara

1958: Rebel forces led by Fidel and Raul Castro and Che Guevara sweep across Cuba

January 1959: Performs a coup on Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista. Fidel becomes head of government in Cuba

1961: Botched Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles

July 2006: Fidel hands the reins of power to his brother, Raul, after undergoing emergency stomach surgery

February 19, 2008: Fidel steps down as leader of Cuba

A report by the Adam Smith Institute claims Fairtrade products do not aid long-term economic development and often fail to help the poorest farm workers. Consumers spent more than £290 million a year on Fairtrade goods in 2006 and sales of products bearing the distinctive black, green and blue logo have continued to soar. They are likely to rise further after the sugar company Tate & Lyle said it would convert its entire operation to Fairtrade-certified farmers. Under the scheme, 40 per cent of the cost of each bag of sugar will now go back to Belize, where it will be shared by farmers, cane mills and community projects.

Tom Clougherty, policy director at the Adam Smith Institute, said: "At best, Fairtrade is a marketing device that does the poor little good. At worst, it may inadvertently be harming some of the planet's most vulnerable people. There is nothing wrong with being concerned about the working conditions, wages and environment of workers, but we don't believe Fairtrade is the most effective model."

Fairtrade is one of the fastest-growing retail sectors in Britain, with sales soaring by 46 per cent between 2005 and 2006. More than 3,000 products are Fairtrade-certified including coffee, tea, chocolate, fruit, vegetables and cotton. The Fairtrade Foundation, which will launch its Fairtrade Fortnight promotion this week, claims more than seven million people in 58 countries benefit from the system. The organisation said: "This is a cynical attempt to undermine our pragmatic approach to trade. Fairtrade products cost the consumer no more than ordinary products in many cases, yet we ensure farmers receive a higher price. We also work with other ethical brands such as those in the organic movement."

Ceri Dingle, director of educational charity WorldWrite, said: "Fairtrade is much more about satisfying the Western consumer's guilt. No country has ever become a successful economy by being a farm - they need to industrialise."

Little Brandon Kramer was diagnosed with rhomboencephalosynapsis - a condition so rare it affects fewer than one in a million people worldwide - while he was still in the womb. Doctors warned his mother and father that Brandon would be born deaf and blind and would probably survive only for a couple of hours. It is believed to be the first time in Britain that the condition has been diagnosed during pregnancy - and Becky Weatherall and her partner Kriss Kramer were offered a termination up to just weeks before the birth. But the couple defied doctors' advice and their son was born healthy on October 1 last year.

Now Brandon is teething and attempting to talk, and Kriss, 24, from Pembroke Dock, South Wales, said: "The fact that he is here now, alive and kicking, truly is a miracle. The doctors say that he has defied all the odds but it's really more than that because he wasn't given any odds at all. He was written off completely and we believed he was 100 per cent certain to be handicapped."

Brandon was born naturally in October and, despite being whisked to intensive care by a team of specialists, was quickly given the all-clear. An urgent review into the case has been ordered by hospital chiefs because it is unclear if Brandon had the condition and recovered from it - or if the data was misinterpreted by hospital staff.
The couple do not want to claim compensation and just want to highlight their case as a warning to other parents. Becky said: "Perhaps doctors shouldn't put so much confidence in scans."

The move is the latest expansion of surveillance powers which, until recently, were only available to the police and intelligence services. Revenue officers used to work to a set of strict rules that even banned them from looking in cupboards at a home or business during a visit without express permission. But now officials investigating allegations of tax evasion can pry into every aspect of a suspect's life in the hunt for evidence.

Senior revenue officials have been given the power to sanction the use of surveillance techniques under the same rules that govern the work of MI5, GCHQ and the police. Customs officers who are fighting gun-runners, drug-smugglers and people-traffickers have also had similar surveillance approval.

The new powers are opposed by professional bodies, including the Institute of Chartered Accountants. Harry Travers, of the Institute's Tax Investigations Practitioners Group, said: "There is no evidence that bugging is needed in relation to tax fraud. Inspectors already have wide-ranging powers to obtain search warrants, raid people's property, seize documents and computers. They don't need to be able to bug people as well. There is real risk of breaching human rights."

Yesterday, the Government said that a universal base was "impractical." But demands from police and judges are fuelling civil liberties groups' fears that Ministers will eventually impose compulsory screening. The national DNA database, the biggest in the world, already files the genetic records of more than 4.5million people - including 560,000 never convicted of any offence.

But Home Office Minister Tony McNulty said a national database was not a 'silver bullet' and that it would raise practical as well as civil liberties issues. "How to maintain the security of a database with 4.5million people on it is one thing," he said. "Doing that for 60million people is another." Civil liberties groups warn such a register would be open to abuse.

"Taking the DNA of every man, woman and child is as expensive and impractical as it is dangerous. It ignores the extremely intimate nature of DNA and the massive scope for error and abuse." Roger Smith, director of the law and human rights group Justice, added: "A broader police power to compel samples without the requirement of reasonable suspicion is a substantial and unwarranted intrusion on the rights of personal privacy. You either go forward to a universal database, which I think would be wrong, or you go back. I want a return to the 1995 position where samples could be kept on the convicted only."

Across the globe, people are discovering it's a new contributor to world hunger. Led by the United States, governments are paying companies billions to make ethanol from corn and other crops. The result: these CROPS ARE DIVERTED FROM THE FOOD SUPPLY, creating artificial shortages and higher prices. Even record harvests haven't suppressed food prices. Instead, prices are soaring to all-time highs. Corn that traded around $2 a bushel just two years ago is now well over $5 a bushel.

The impact ripples through the food chain of milk, butter, eggs, flour, pasta and everything else, because dairy cattle, beef cattle, poultry and swine depend on the corn for their feed. "We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history," the EPI proclaimed in January. "THE UNITED STATES, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, IS GENERATING GLOBAL FOOD INSECURITY ON A SCALE NEVER SEEN BEFORE."

THIS PROBLEM BECAME FIVE TIMES WORSE IN DECEMBER when the new "energy bill" became law. It dictates that Washington will pay a 51-cent-a-gallon subsidy on 36 billion gallons of ethanol each year, up from the previous 7.5 billion gallon limit. Even before this incentive expanded, official U.S. Department of Agriculture reports showed that ethanol was "eating up" 20 percent of the corn grown in America in 2006 - up from 6 percent in 2000 - a figure expected to rise in 2008 to 25 percent. Since the beginning of 2000, butter and milk prices have tripled, and poultry prices have almost doubled. EPI's president, Lester R. Brown, says, "We're putting the supermarket in competition with the corner filling station for the output of the farm. The result is that more people will go hungry."

AS OIL PRICES APPROACHED $100 PER BARREL, MARKET INCENTIVES FOR PRODUCING MORE ETHANOL INCREASED DRAMATICALLY. But that wasn't enough to satisfy the subsidy lobby. Hence they pressed Washington to decree that WE MUST USE FIVE TIMES MORE ETHANOL and pay them for the privilege. That will raise the annual taxpayer-paid subsidy to over $18 billion per year, even though they're already profitable thanks to high oil prices. THE ENERGY BILL CONVERTS ETHANOL MANUFACTURERS' SIMPLE PROFITS INTO SUPER-PROFITS, AT TAXPAYER EXPENSE.

As The Heritage Foundation's Ben Lieberman and others have suggested, WE SHOULD BE REPEALING THE ETHANOL MANDATE INSTEAD OF EXPANDING IT. Taxpayers would save billions that now flow out of the federal Treasury, plus our food would be more affordable. And the Third World wouldn't face as many food shortages. Ending the subsidy is easier said than done, of course. As the New York Times has noted, the ethanol lobby is now "AN ENTRENCHED POLITICAL FORCE." Years of multi-billion dollar subsidies have turned a small group into a wealthy and effective lobby on Capitol Hill.

Years ago, G. K. Chesterton made this observation about our culture: "You are free in our time to say that God does not exist; you are free to say that He exists and is evil. You may talk of God as a metaphor or mystification? and it is not merely that nobody punishes, but nobody protests. BUT IF YOU SPEAK OF GOD AS A FACT, ... AS A REASON FOR CHANGING ONE'S CONDUCT, THEN THE MODERN WORLD WILL STOP YOU SOMEHOW IF IT CAN."

We have come to a time in our nation in which WE NEED TO TURN BACK TO GOD. We need to call on His name, because as WE LOOK AT THE CALAMITIES WE ARE FACING, I believe we have brought many of them upon ourselves. WE HAVE DONE OUR BEST TO GET GOD OUT OF THE COURTROOM, OUT OF THE CLASSROOM AND OUT OF OUR CULTURE, AND LOOK WHAT IS HAPPENING IN OUR NATION. Malcom Muggeridge said, "All new news is old news happening to new people." As it's been said, if we don't learn from history, then we are destined to repeat it.

The Mapping Sharia in America Project, sponsored by the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, has trained former counterintelligence and counterterrorism agents from the FBI, CIA and U.S. military, who are skilled in Arabic and Urdu, to conduct undercover reconnaissance at some 2,300 mosques and Islamic centers and schools across the country. Many of the Islamic centers are operating under the auspices of THE SAUDI ARABIAN GOVERNMENT and U.S. front groups for the radical MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD based in Egypt.

Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center is one of the mosques indentified by undercover investigators as a hive of terrorist activity and other extremism. It was founded and is currently run by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Imams there preach what is called "jihad qital," which means physical jihad, and incite violence and hatred against the U.S. DAR AL-HIJRAH'S ULTIMATE GOAL, INVESTIGATORS SAY, IS TO TURN THE U.S. INTO AN ISLAMIC STATE GOVERNED BY SHARIA LAW.

Even with such radical mosques operating in its backyard, the U.S. government has not undertaken its own systematic investigation of U.S. mosques. IN CONTRAST, EUROPEAN UNION SECURITY OFFICIALS ARE ANALYZING MEMBER-STATE MOSQUES, examining the training and funding sources of imams, in a large-scale project. "We have too many mosques in this country," said Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y. "There are too many people who are sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully."

Mobs have twice attacked the U.S. embassy in Belgrade and on Tuesday hundreds of Serbs burned down two border posts in north Kosovo, in a violent response to Kosovo's secession. British, German, Croatian and Turkish missions were also attacked.

The EU's sub-office stands empty, locked and guarded by two Kosovo-Serb police officers. The 2,000-strong EU rule of law mission is taking over supervision of Kosovo from the United Nations, following Pristina's declaration of independence from Serbia on Sunday. The United States and major EU powers have recognised the move.

The north, home to just under half of Kosovo's 120,000 remaining Serbs, has served notice that the EU mission will be treated as "occupiers". It has the backing of Serbia and Russia. Many Serbs regard Kosovo as THE CRADLE OF THEIR RELIGION and national identity, steeped in myth and RICH IN ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN HERITAGE. The territory of 2 million people has been run by the United Nations since 1999, when NATO bombed to drive out Serb forces to halt the killing and ethnic cleansing of (Moslem) Albanians in a two-year counter-insurgency war.