Mark Mardell of the BBC writes "make no mistake, the world's economic crisis is putting this unique institution, the European Union, under very serious strain." He notes that the summit was preceded by a gathering of nine eastern European countries and that, "some regarded it as a worrying trend if the EU is breaking into semi-formal groupings based on both politics and geography... THE FRACTURE COULD BECOME PERMANENT."

Writing in the Times, David Charter argues that the "LACK OF EU LEADERSHIP AND DIRECTION... threatens to wrench apart both the euro and the EU itself."

Two forms of the disease, from the same family as the mould which caused the Irish potato famine, now affect more than 700 sites across Britain. Plant health experts consider it a serious danger to woodlands and heathlands, especially to heritage gardens of the sort maintained by the National Trust. So today the Government will announce a five-year, £25m programme to manage and contain the risks of both pathogens, Phytophthora ramorum, which in the US has been responsible for the phenomenon known as "sudden oak death", and Phytophthora kernoviae, which is regarded as a considerable danger to beeches as well as other trees.

Until recently, the main host of phytophthora in Britain has been the wild rhodendendron Rhodendendron ponticum, the purple-flowering shrub often found in woodlands and country estates. Once established, the phytophthora fungus sends out spores, which is how it spreads. On other trees and plants it forms lesions on the stems and trunks, which eventually can kill them. However, last year phythophthora was found to have developed a new host, infecting wild bilberry plants on heaths both in Cornwall and Scotland, where it has spread rapidly and killed off infected plants completely.

In December, the National Trust, which has seen 19 of its historic gardens affected by phytopthora, wrote to the Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, warning that "the threat is now very real to native plant life in the wider countryside" and that the impact could be "devastating". Mr Benn's response, after a Government consultation exercise, is the campaign to be announced today, and the £25m funding – in the middle of a recession – is an indication of how seriously the Government takes the threat.

The driver of a second vehicle carrying the match umpires was killed in the attack, as were five Pakistani policemen escorting the convoy of sportsmen. The attack happened at about 8.40am local time (0440GMT) as the Sri Lankan team and their back-up staff and match umpires were being driven from their hotel to resume play on the third day of the second Test match at the Gaddafi stadium in the city of Lahore.

The gunmen converged on the convoy of tour vehicles and police escorts from four different directions in Liberty Square, a smart area lined with designer boutiques. Three arrived on rickshaws. Local television channels showed CCTV footage of the attackers, wearing backpacks over unobtrusive civilian dress, spraying the team bus and police with automatic fire from AK47 assault rifles. The assault lasted about 15 minutes.

The attack will come as A SEVERE BLOW FOR PAKISTAN'S FRAGILE DEMOCRACY WHICH FACES AN UPSURGE IN ISLAMIST EXTREMISM AND A COLLAPSING ECONOMY. In recent months extremists thought to have links with al-Qaeda have hit several times in Pakistan's urban centres, previously free from violence.

Mrs Clinton plans to talk about how to move to a final peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. But with Israel still in the process of forming a new government, few are predicting significant progress. Mrs Clinton arrived in Israel from Egypt, where the US and other international donors pledged almost $4.5bn (£3.2bn) for rebuilding Gaza.

Her two days of talks started in Jerusalem. She will also be holding separate talks with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu and caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. On Wednesday, she is due to meet Palestinian Authority President Mahmood Abbas in the West Bank. After meeting Mr Peres, Mrs Clinton said it was important to underscore the "unshakeable, durable and fundamental" US support for the state of Israel and our "unrelenting commitment to Israel's security".

"The continuing rocket attacks against Israel must cease. There is no doubt that any nation, including Israel, cannot stand idly by while its territory and people are subjected to rocket attacks," she added.

One shaken military expert told the Sun that "the revealing snaps would make it easy for terrorists to launch accurate mortar or rocket attacks". He doomwatched: "A strike on our nuclear capability would cause untold devastation. Terrorists could have a field day, knowing exactly where to aim strikes to cause the maximum devastation."

The Sun notes that Google agreed to obscure British military facilities following the Shatt al Arab hotel incident back in 2007, where "print-outs from photographs taken from Google" of the British base in Basra were found in the hands of insurgents. However, an MoD spokesman admitted to the paper: "We do everything to protect bases but it's impossible to control all websites providing satellite imagery. If people are really determined to target these sites they can find these images and there is nothing we can do to stop them."

A Google spokeswoman said: "We do listen to requests from governments but we don't comment on the details of any of those discussions."

Orly Taitz, a California dentist and lawyer, who was herself born overseas, is representing soldiers challenging Mr Obama's right to be president, including retired Major General Carroll Childers, who compared the Democrat to "Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, Mao, and Kim Jong Il".

"He is an interloper, a usurper, a fake, a scam artist, a Chicago crook, a recipient of bribes and gratuitous income for which he paid no tax, a socialist, and a grave danger to the future of the America that I love and have protected since I was 17 years old," Major General Childers wrote in a statement on the website for Ms Taitz's Defend Our Freedoms Foundation. The rumour got closest to the mainstream when Richard Shelby, an Alabama senator, gave it credibility during a recent meeting with constituents.

Asked for his views on the notion, the Cullman Times, an Alabama paper, quoted Mr Shelby as saying: "Well his father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii, but I haven't seen any birth certificate. You have to be born in America to be president." The conservative website WorldNet Daily claims to have received 300,000 signatures for an online petition challenging Mr Obama's legitimacy.

The FTSE 100 index of top UK shares dropped after HSBC confirmed a £12.5 billion rights issue. It fell by 5.3 per cent and below THE 3,700 MARK for the first time since April 2003, losing investors £47.7 billion. The sharp decline took the FTSE 100 below the lows experienced last October as UK banks teetered on the edge of collapse and were bailed out by the Government.

It came as analysts expressed concerns about the state of the UK economy, saying the financial crisis could spill over into other industries. Investors were spooked by HSBC's rights issue after the UK's biggest bank asked for extra cash from shareholders to boost its balance sheet. The request was made despite HSBC being one of the British banks least affected by the credit crisis.

The European corn borer is a tiny, nocturnal moth. It likes to eat potatoes and sorghum, but - as can be gathered from its name - its food of choice is corn. There's only one kind of insecticide that is approved for fighting the flying scourge. Under these circumstances, the agricultural industry would like to be able to use a genetically modified corn that is at least resistant to the insect's larvae. But this kind of modified corn has been deeply controversial for years. Environmentalists believe that genetically modified corn presents a danger to both eco-friendly agribusiness and moths.

On Monday, agriculture ministers from EU member states voted to reject a European Commission proposal that would have required Austria and Hungary to lift their bans on genetically modified corn seeds. Although the decision in Brussels applies specifically to the two countries, it is also likely to have implications for other member states, including Germany.

According to a number of diplomats, German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel, a member of the SPD party, voted against forcing the countries to lift their restrictions. "I don't see why we should pursue the interests of a single American corporation and, in the process, upset the citizens of EU member states," Gabriel told reporters before the vote.

A Los Angeles clinic says it will soon help couples select both gender and physical traits in a baby when they undergo a form of fertility treatment. The clinic, Fertility Institutes, says it has received "half a dozen" requests for the service, which is based on a procedure called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD.

While PGD has long been used for the medical purpose of averting life-threatening diseases in children, the science behind it has quietly progressed to the point that it could potentially be used to create designer babies. It isn't clear that Fertility Institutes can yet deliver on its claims of trait selection. But the growth of PGD, unfettered by any state or federal regulations in the US, has accelerated genetic knowledge swiftly enough that pre-selecting cosmetic traits in a baby is no longer the stuff of science fiction.

"It's technically feasible and it can be done," says Mark Hughes, a pioneer of the PGD process and director of Genesis Genetics Institute, a large fertility laboratory in Detroit. However, he adds that "no legitimate lab would get into it and, if they did, they'd be ostracized." But Fertility Institutes disagrees. "This is cosmetic medicine," says Jeff Steinberg, director of the clinic that is advertising gender and physical trait selection on its website. "Others are frightened by the criticism but we have no problems with it."

His clinic also offers sex selection. UK fertility experts are angered that the service will distract attention from how the same technology can protect against inherited disease. The science is based on a lab technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD. This involves testing a cell taken from a very early embryo before it is put into the mother's womb.

Doctors then select an embryo free from rogue genes - or in this case an embryo with the desired physical traits such as blonde hair and blue eyes - to continue the pregnancy, and discard any others. Dr Steinberg said couples might seek to use the clinic's services for both medical and cosmetic reasons. For example, a couple might want to have a baby with a darker complexion to help guard against a skin cancer if they already had a child who had developed a melanoma. But others might just want a boy with blonde hair.

His clinic is offering this cosmetic selection to patients already having genetic screening for abnormal chromosome conditions in their embryos.

The Dow hadn't traded below 7,000 since Oct. 28, 1997, and last closed below that mark on May 1 of that year. The credit crisis and recession have now slashed half the average's value SINCE IT HIT A RECORD HIGH OVER 14,000 IN OCTOBER 2007. Investors are again fleeing stocks in response to bad news about financial companies. The government said it would give American International Group Inc another $30 billion in loans, in addition to the $150 billion it has already given the insurer. AIG also said it lost a record $61.7 billion in the fourth quarter.

Investors are worried about European financial companies, too. HSBC PLC, Europe's largest bank by market value, reported a 70 percent drop in 2008 profit and said it needs to raise $17.7 billion and cut 6,100 jobs.

Meanwhile, billionaire Warren Buffett wrote in his annual letter to investors Saturday he is sure "the economy will be in shambles throughout 2009 - and, for that matter, probably well beyond - but that conclusion does not tell us whether the stock market will rise or fall."

AIG has already received $150bn in financial support - the biggest bail-out by far of any US company. Stock markets slid sharply as AIG's plight underscored fears about the health of the global financial system. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury said that AIG posed a "system risk" to the global financial system. "The potential cost to the economy and the taxpayer of government inaction would be extremely high," they said.

"The additional resources will help stabilise the company, and in doing so help to stabilise the financial system." As well as insuring households, AIG plays a key role in insuring risk for financial institutions around the world. The news of AIG's historic loss comes as HSBC, Europe's biggest bank, seeks to raise £12.5bn ($17.7bn) to strengthen its finances following a 62% fall in annual profit.

US officials fear that a failure of AIG would be disastrous for both the US and the global economy. Credit rating agencies, such as Moody's, Fitch and Standard & Poor's, had been poised to cut AIG's credit ratings as a result of the record loss. That could have forced AIG to default on its debt, which would have had a knock-on effect on all of AIG's businesses.

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western leaders were told yesterday THAT FIVE MILLION JOBS COULD BE LOST IN THE "NEW" EUROPEAN UNION COUNTRIES OF THE EAST unless radical action were taken to bail them out. The spectacular collapse of some of the post-communist tiger economies led to demands at an EU summit in Brussels for a rescue fund of €190 billion (£170 billion) to stop social collapse in the Eastern nations spilling over into the rest of Europe.

The plea, led by Hungary, was rejected in a bad-tempered meeting of the 27 European leaders, dominated by fears that Western EU countries would rather prop up their own large industries and jobs at the expense of the East. Ferenc Gyurcsany, the Hungarian leader, openly raised THE SPECTRE OF COLLAPSE IN EASTERN EUROPE and the creation of a new Iron Curtain.

"A significant crisis in Eastern Europe would trigger political tensions and immigration pressures. With a Central and Eastern European population of 350 million, of which 100 million are in the EU, a 10 per cent increase in unemployment would lead to at least five million unemployed people within the EU."

"The scale and the speed of the global banking crisis has at times been almost overwhelming, and I know that in countries everywhere people who rely on their banks for savings have been feeling powerless and afraid. But it is when times become harder and challenges greater that across the world countries must show vision, leadership and courage – and, while we can do a great deal nationally, we can do even more working together internationally."

"So now is the time for leaders of every country in the world to work together to agree the action that will see us through the current crisis and ensure we come out stronger. And there is no international partnership in recent history that has served the world better than the special relationship between Britain and the United States. It is a relationship that has endured and flourished because it is based not simply on our shared history but on the enduring values that bind us together – our countries founded upon liberty, our histories forged through democracy and an unshakeable belief in the power of enterprise and opportunity."

"I believe there is no challenge so great or so difficult that it cannot be overcome by America, Britain and the world working together. That is why President Obama and I will discuss this week a global new deal, whose impact can stretch from the villages of Africa to reforming the financial institutions of London and New York – and giving security to the hard-working families in every country." - Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister.

It was only discovered on Friday, 27 February, by Robert McNaught as a faint 19th magnitude speck on a photograph of the sky he took at Australia's Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales. It was then one and a half million miles away but closing in rapidly. The asteroid was labelled 2009 DD45 by astronomers. Closest approach occurs during daylight over Britain at 1.44pm UK time when it will be crossing the sky at a rate of half a degree - the Moon's apparent diameter - a minute.

Though there is no danger of a collision, the close approach is a reminder of the need to keep monitoring space for potential impactors. An asteroid the size of DD45 could cause devastation and loss of life if it struck or exploded over a town or city. Close encounters with Earth-crossing asteroids, or Near Earth Objects, turn our region of space into a cosmic shooting gallery.

More than a thousand potentially hazardous asteroids are known to cross our orbit and nearly 900 are known that are around 500 ft wide. Last October one labelled 2008 TC3 struck a remote part of Sudan only hours after it was first spotted.