While an official statement on EU support and presence at the Beijing Olympic games was not issued, disagreement amongst EU leaders was underlined at the meeting this weekend by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner who said "The German position and the British position are not the same," with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier not attending the opening ceremonies.

Lord Lamont told the paper: "We will effectively turn the Salisbury Convention on its head. The convention is clear that the House of Lords cannot overturn a manifesto commitment. This will be the House of Lords attempting to enforce a manifesto commitment." Challenged on whether he thought ministers had lied over the need for a referendum, he said: "I HESITATE TO ACCUSE PEOPLE OF BEING DISHONEST. BUT I WOULD COME CLOSE TO IT ON THIS ISSUE."

The article notes that much will depend on what orders Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, issues to his peers. Lord Falkland, one of 78 Lib Dem peers, told the paper: "I will be voting for a referendum and, if I am brave enough to withstand the glares of my colleagues, I will speak in the debate. When you give an undertaking, as we clearly did in our last manifesto, you cannot have it both ways. A MANIFESTO COMMITMENT HAS TO BE SACROSANCT."

The figures, revealed in the recent budget, also show that Britain will make even larger net payments to the EU in the coming years. In 2008-09, the net payment will be £6.1 billion and in 2009-10, £6.4 billion. Gordon Brown had declared in last year's budget that the UK's overall contribution to the EU this year would be £3.3bn. The rises are the result of a 2005 agreement by Tony Blair - with Gordon Brown's backing - to a staged series of cuts in the UK rebate.

Paul Stephenson of Open Europe was quoted in the Express: "THESE FIGURES JUST HIGHLIGHT THE SHEER LEVEL OF BLAIR'S SELL-OUT TO BRUSSELS IN 2005. It's hardly surprising that he's now the frontrunner to become the next president of the EU. LAST YEAR THE EU'S ACCOUNTANTS WERE UNABLE TO SIGN OFF OVER £43BN WORTH OF SPENDING. UNTIL THE EU GETS ITS HOUSE IN ORDER, GORDON BROWN SHOULD REFUSE TO SEND ANY MORE CHEQUES TO BRUSSELS."

CORN PRICES HAVE SKYROCKETED IN RECENT YEARS, HELPED BY THE BURGEONING ETHANOL INDUSTRY, WHICH TURNS THE CROP INTO FUEL, AND RISING WORLDWIDE DEMAND FOR FOOD. The higher prices have hurt poultry, beef and pork companies, who use corn to feed their animals. Farmers are expected to plant 86 million acres of corn this year, the Department of Agriculture predicted Monday, down 8 percent from 2007, when the amount of corn planted was the highest since World War II. The decreased supply could drive corn prices even higher - a cost for food producers that could be passed on to consumers.

According to the Agriculture Department, corn planting is expected to remain at historically high levels but could be down this year BECAUSE OF THE HIGH EXPENSE OF GROWING CORN and favorable prices for other crops, such as soybeans. As many farmers have made that switch, soybean planting is expected to be up 18 percent this year, at almost 75 million acres.

Though the ethanol industry is heavily subsidized and has contributed to the rise in prices, a decrease in corn production could hurt that business, too. Higher prices for the crop could be passed on to those filling their cars up with the renewable fuel. THE NUMBER OF ETHANOL PLANTS HAS INCREASED FROM 50 IN 1999 TO 134 NOW WITH MORE BEING BUILT, ACCORDING TO THE RENEWABLE FUELS ASSOCIATION. AN AVERAGE, 100 MILLION GALLON-PER-YEAR ETHANOL PLANT CONSUMES ABOUT 33 MILLION BUSHELS OF CORN.

Around the globe, people are protesting and governments are responding with often counterproductive controls on prices and exports - A NEW POLITICS OF SCARCITY IN WHICH ENSURING FOOD SUPPLIES IS BECOMING A MAJOR CHALLENGE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY. Plundered by severe weather in producing countries and by a boom in demand from fast-developing nations, the world's wheat stocks are at 30-year lows. Grain prices have been on the rise for five years, ending decades of cheap food.

Drought, a declining dollar, a shift of investment money into commodities and use of farm land to grow fuel have all contributed to food woes. But population growth and the growing wealth of China and other emerging countries are likely to be more enduring factors.

After long opposition, MEXICO'S GOVERNMENT IS CONSIDERING LIFTING A BAN ON GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS, TO ALLOW ITS FARMERS TO COMPETE WITH THE UNITED STATES, where high-yield, genetically modified corn is the norm. The European Union and parts of Africa have similar bans that could also be reconsidered. A NUMBER OF GOVERNMENTS, including Egypt, Argentina, Kazakhstan, and China, HAVE IMPOSED RESTRICTIONS TO LIMIT GRAIN EXPORTS AND KEEP MORE OF THEIR FOOD AT HOME.

YET $1 TRILLION IS THE AMOUNT OF DEFAULTS AND WRITEDOWNS AMERICANS WILL LIKELY WITNESS BEFORE THEY EMERGE AT THE FAR SIDE OF THE BURSTING CREDIT BUBBLE, estimates Charles R. Morris in his shrewd primer, "The Trillion Dollar Meltdown." That calculation assumes an orderly unwinding, which he doesn't expect.

"The sad truth," he writes, "is that subprime is just the first big boulder in an avalanche of asset writedowns that will rattle on through much of 2008." EXPECT THE LANDSLIDE TO CASCADE THROUGH HIGH-YIELD BONDS, COMMERCIAL MORTGAGES, LEVERAGED LOANS, CREDIT CARDS AND - THE BIG UNKNOWN - CREDIT-DEFAULT SWAPS, Morris says. The notional value for those swaps, which are meant to insure bondholders against default, covered about $45 trillion in portfolios as of mid-2007, up from some $1 trillion in 2001, he writes.

Morris sketches a scenario in which hedge fund counterparty defaults would ripple through default swap markets, TRIGGERING WRITEDOWNS OF INSURED PORTFOLIOS, DEMANDS FOR COLLATERAL, AND A RUSH TO GRAB CASH FROM DEFAULTING GUARANTORS. THE CREDIT SYSTEM WOULD SUFFER "AN UTTER THROMBOSIS," HE SAYS, MAKING THE SUBPRIME CRISIS "LOOK LIKE A WALK IN THE PARK."

At the heart of the proposals, agreed on Wednesday by Hank Paulson, US Treasury secretary, and Alistair Darling, UK chancellor, is the creation of a body made up of senior Treasury and regulatory figures from London and Washington.

Mr Brown and Mr Bush will discuss greater UK-US co-operation in tackling the financial crisis when they meet at a Nato summit in Bucharest this week and a Washington summit next month. Whitehall officials say the new UK-US working group, whose membership and terms of reference are being finalised, will seek to establish a common approach on how to respond to the crisis before next month's meetings of the Group of Seven, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

However, officials say that, given the huge role that London and New York play in financial markets, the significance of the new body will go beyond that.

The Great Global Warming Swindle is based on sound science and interviews with real climate scientists. "An Inconvenient Truth,"on the other hand, IS MOSTLY AN EMOTIONAL PRESENTATION FROM A SINGLE POLITICIAN. The scientific arguments presented in "The Great Global Warming Swindle" can be stated quite briefly:

1. THERE IS NO PROOF THAT THE CURRENT WARMING IS CAUSED BY THE RISE OF GREENHOUSE GASES FROM HUMAN ACTIVITY. Ice core records from the past 650,000 years show that temperature increases have preceded - not resulted from - increases in CO2 by hundreds of years, suggesting that the warming of the oceans is an important source of the rise in atmospheric CO2. As the dominant greenhouse gas, water vapor is far, far more important than CO2 - and, in any case, water vapor is not within our control.

The current warming is likely to be part of a natural cycle of climate warming and cooling that's been traced back almost a million years. It accounts for the Medieval Warm Period around 1100 A.D., when the Vikings settled Greenland and grew crops, and the Little Ice Age, from about 1400 to 1850 A.D., which brought severe winters and cold summers to Europe, with failed harvests, starvation, disease, and general misery. Advocates have tried to deny the existence of these historic climate swings and claim that the current warming is "unusual" by using spurious analysis of tree rings and other proxy data, resulting in the famous "hockey-stick" temperature graph. THE HOCKEY-STICK GRAPH HAS NOW BEEN THOROUGHLY DISCREDITED.

2. IF THE CAUSE OF WARMING IS MOSTLY NATURAL, THEN THERE IS LITTLE WE CAN DO ABOUT IT. We cannot control the inconstant sun, the likely origin of most climate variability. None of the schemes for greenhouse gas reduction currently bandied about will do any good; they are all irrelevant, useless, and wildly expensive: Ironically, even if CO2 were responsible for the observed warming trend, all these schemes would be ineffective - unless we could persuade every nation, including China, to cut fuel use by 80 percent!

3. FINALLY, NO ONE CAN SHOW THAT A WARMER CLIMATE WOULD PRODUCE NEGATIVE IMPACTS OVERALL. The much-feared rise in sea levels does not seem to depend on short-term temperature changes, as the rate of sea-level increases has been steady since the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. In fact, many economists argue that the opposite is more likely - that warming produces a net benefit, that it increases incomes and standards of living. But the main message of The Great Global Warming Swindle is much broader. WHY SHOULD WE DEVOTE OUR SCARCE RESOURCES TO WHAT IS ESSENTIALLY A NON-PROBLEM, AND IGNORE THE REAL PROBLEMS THE WORLD FACES: hunger, disease, denial of human rights - not to mention the threats of terrorism and nuclear wars? And are we really prepared to deal with natural disasters; pandemics that can wipe out most of the human race, or even the impact of an asteroid, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs? YET POLITICIANS AND THE ELITES THROUGHOUT MUCH OF THE WORLD PREFER TO SQUANDER OUR LIMITED RESOURCES TO FASHIONABLE ISSUES, RATHER THAN CONCENTRATE ON REAL PROBLEMS. Just consider the scary predictions emanating from supposedly responsible world figures: THE CHIEF SCIENTIST OF GREAT BRITAIN TELLS US that unless we insulate our houses and use more efficient light bulbs, the Antarctic will be the only habitable continent by 2100, with a few surviving breeding couples propagating the human race. Seriously!

I imagine that in the not-too-distant future all the hype will have died down, particularly if the climate should decide to cool - as it did during much of the past century; WE SHOULD TAKE NOTE HERE THAT IT HAS NOT WARMED SINCE 1998. Future generations will look back on the current madness and wonder what it was all about. They will have movies like An Inconvenient Truth and documentaries like The Great Global Warming Swindle to remind them.

Author details:- S. FRED SINGER, AN ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICIST, is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and former founding Director of the US Weather Satellite Service. He is author of Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming's Unfinished Debate. (This article was originally published in May 22, 2007)

The Alliance for Climate Protection's "we" campaign will employ online organizing and television advertisements on shows ranging from "American Idol" to "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." It highlights the extent to which Americans' growing awareness of global warming has yet to translate into national policy changes, Gore said in an hour-long phone interview last week. He said the campaign, which Gore is helping to fund, was undertaken in large part because of his fear that U.S. lawmakers are unwilling to curb the human-generated emissions linked to climate change.

"This climate crisis is so interwoven with habits and patterns that are so entrenched, the elected officials in both parties are going to be timid about enacting the bold changes that are needed until there is a change in the public's sense of urgency in addressing this crisis," Gore said. "I've tried everything else I know to try. The way to solve this crisis is to change the way the public thinks about it."

Representatives from 163 countries were to launch a weeklong, United Nations-led meeting on the nuts-and-bolts of an international agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto global warming pact after its first phase expires in 2012. Delegates are racing to rein in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which are blamed for the rise in global temperatures. Scientists say emissions need to be reduced to avoid the worst effects of warming, which they say COULD lead to drought, floods, higher sea levels and worsening storms.

The process, however, has been fraught with disagreements over which countries should take the lead to reduce greenhouse gases by as much as half by 2050. China has argued that developed countries must take the lead in reducing pollution because their unrestrained emissions over the past century contributed significantly to global warming.

Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican's newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world's population and Catholics 17.4 percent. "For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us," Formenti told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in an interview, saying the data referred to 2006.

He said that if all Christian groups were considered, including Orthodox churches, Anglicans and Protestants, then Christians made up 33 percent of the world's population -- or about 2 billion people. The Vatican recently put the number of Catholics in the world at 1.13 billion people. It did not provide a figure for Muslims, generally estimated at around 1.3 billion.

They include protectionism, defence, immigration, EU integration, Turkey and the EU budget. Gordon Brown yesterday said however that he and the French President "share the same vision of Europe".

Con Coughlin has a comment piece in the Telegraph, arguing that THE UK SHOULD REMAIN SCEPTICAL OVER ANY EXTRA FRENCH DEPLOYMENT TO AFGHANISTAN, as there is no suggestion these troops would actually be involved in combat operations, leaving the real fighting to the British, US, Danish, Canadian and Dutch troops already in the south of the country.

NOTING THAT THE FRENCH PRESIDENT MADE SIMILAR RHETORICAL PLEDGES ON HIS VISIT TO WASHINGTON LAST YEAR, without any concrete results, Coughlin concludes that "those who have dealt with Mr Sarkozy before on these issues have found that THE HEADLINE-GRABBING PROMISES HE MAKES DURING HIGH-PROFILE MEETINGS WITH FOREIGN LEADERS IN REALITY DON'T AMOUNT TO VERY MUCH."

The president said that every other European leader was grateful to Mr Brown for not blocking the replacement to the EU constitution. In return the Prime Minister signed Britain up to moves to create common EU immigration standards and cooperate on defence and nuclear policy. At the conclusion of yesterday's France-UK summit, the French president vowed to continue his charm offensive designed to draw Britain into deeper engagement in the EU.

For his part Mr Brown upgraded to formidable the entente that Mr Sarkozy had previously improved from cordiale to amicale. He said: "We believe that, working together, France and Britain can be an even greater force for good so, if you like, this will be the entente formidable."

An article in the paper notes that Britain has always in the past been against the idea of Europe having its own autonomous planning and operational centre outside NATO. However, it notes, "The British now seem to be more inclined to accept the idea of giving the EU a new 'operational headquarters' in Brussels."

The article also notes that "In order to appease London, Paris intends to only gradually ask for positions of responsibility within NATO. The post of deputy 'saceur' (number two in the allied forces in Europe) is therefore still with the British. And they remain very attached to their de facto status as America's first lieutenant within NATO."

He said that the allegations include FAKING AN MEP'S PLACE OF RESIDENCE to boost allowances, FAKING SIGNATURES TO QUALIFY FOR DAILY ATTENDANCE ALLOWANCES and faking meetings to create attendance lists. On secretarial allowances, Van Buitenen said that irregular practices went beyond the scope of the internal audit: KICKBACK PAYMENTS WERE MADE to MEP's by service providers to win a contract. Van Buitenen concluded: "THE WHOLE SYSTEM IS ROTTEN."