When Deputy Interior Minister August Hanning starts talking about his latest official visit to the United Kingdom, the otherwise unemotional security expert waxes altogether enthusiastic. The former head of Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, describes a super force of highly-trained specialists who sit at the most powerful and expensive computers where, in loyal service to Her Majesty the Queen, THEY PURSUE THE DELICATE TASK OF MONITORING, RECORDING, AND EVALUATING ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS. Everything top secret, of course, and extremely effective.

THE PROBLEM IS THAT NO AGENCY COMPARABLE TO GCHQ EXISTS IN GERMANY. There is the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA), the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), and the Federal Police. All four currently have their own separate systems for monitoring communications. And that's just at the national level - there are also numerous law enforcement and security agencies at the level of Germany's 16 federal states. All in all, there are more than 75 separate monitoring facilities in operation nationwide - and they are frankly not very effective compared to the central monitoring stations in the UK and US.

This is likely to change in the near future. On orders from Schäuble's ministry, a BKA project group has been working since April on THE AMBITIOUS PLAN OF GIVING GERMANY ITS OWN CENTRAL AGENCY FOR COMMUNICATIONS MONITORING, known in the trade as signals intelligence. This large-scale monitoring initiative is the latest in a series of bold security policy reforms Schäuble has proposed - and is one that is particularly controversial.

But the Green Party's security spokesman, Wolfgang Wieland, admits that he has a "very bad feeling about the whole thing." Despite all assurances to the contrary, he is afraid that "the police and intelligence agents will end up monitoring communications together" AND THE RESULT WILL BE THE FORMATION OF AN AGENCY OUTSIDE ANY KIND OF CONTROL.

The bonuses were paid to bankers, traders and other financial workers in the first three months of this year and are a record for the first quarter. The payout was four per cent, or around £500 million, higher than in the same period of last year. The figure for the first quarter of 2006 was £9.7 billion. According to the Office for National Statistics, BRITAIN'S ESTIMATED 1.04MILLION FINANCIAL SECTOR WORKERS POCKETED AN AVERAGE BONUS OF £12,100 EACH DURING THE FIRST QUARTER.

The bonuses come during one of the most challenging economic periods in Britain for years. Roger Bootle, managing director of Capital Economics, an economic research consultancy, said: "These bankers are not being paid for their brilliance. THEY HAVE EFFECTIVELY TAKEN A GAMBLE AND HAVE BEEN PAID HANDSOMELY. Now that it has gone so wrong, we are left to pick up the consequences."

One notable beneficiary has been Barclays investment banking chief Bob Diamond, who earned nearly £22 million last year despite the bank writing off more than £1.6 billion off credit crunch-related investments. Last week, it also emerged that the average pay for chief executives at ten of Britain's leading companies has soared by 33 per cent. The Financial Services Authority has recently hinted that it may try to take action against firms that continue to pay excessive bonuses.

In a report published on Monday, Carter was quoted as saying that the international community should conduct direct dialogue with Iran in order to persuade the country to drop its nuclear ambitions. The former president cited an Israeli nuclear arsenal as proof that it would be almost impossible for Teheran to develop such weapons in secret.

Although it is widely speculated that Israel indeed has nuclear weapons, no Israeli government official has ever admitted to such.

THE PROBE IS EQUIPPED WITH A ROBOTIC ARM TO DIG FOR WATER-ICE THOUGHT TO BE BURIED BENEATH THE SURFACE. IT will begin examining the site for evidence of the building blocks of life in the next few days. The final seven minutes of the probe's 10-month journey to Mars were regarded as the hardest part of the mission. The probe had to survive a fiery plunge through the planet's thin atmosphere, slowing from a speed of nearly 21,000km/h (13,000 mph).

The first images showed the "Arctic plain" where Phoenix came to rest - a region of Mars that has never been seen up close before. Other shots confirmed that the probe's solar arrays had unfurled successfully, and that it had landed safely on its legs.

Dr Tom Pike of Imperial College, London, is part of the British team involved in the project. "The main goal of the mission is to get below the surface of Mars TO WHERE WE ARE ALMOST CERTAIN THERE IS WATER," he told BBC News. "Water, of course, is of critical importance because it is one of the building blocks - one of the essential habitats we need - for life," he said.

Now the town, which lies on south-west fringes of Sydney, is confronting a very 21st Century issue: the proposal to construct AN ISLAMIC SCHOOL FOR SOME 1,200 MUSLIM PUPILS. Behind the proposal is the Sydney-based Quranic Society, which has purchased 15 acres of land on the fringes of town, and produced detailed plans and designs. Back in November, more than 1,000 local people took part in a public meeting. MANY PARTICIPANTS EXPRESSED THEMSELVES WITH LITTLE REGARD FOR POLITICAL CORRECTNESS.

"This has to be one of the nicest places in New South Wales," said one woman, who has lived in Camden for the past nine years. "Everywhere is being destroyed. WHY DON'T WE TELL THE TRUTH. THEY'RE WRECKING AUSTRALIA. THEY'RE TAKING US OVER," she said. "Why hasn't anyone got any guts? They've got terrorists amongst them. They want to be here so they can go and hide in all the farm houses. This town has every nationality - but Muslims do not fit in this town. We are Aussies, OK." Some of the loudest cheers of the night greeted a speech from a local man in his late 70s. "Can I just say this without being racist or political?" he said. "In 1983, in the streets of London a parade by Muslims chanted incessantly 'IF WE CAN TAKE LONDON, WE CAN TAKE THE WORLD'. Don't let them take Camden."

Camden does not harbour a large Muslim community - census figures suggest about 150 families. Most of the pupils at the proposed school would therefore be bussed in from Sydney, a journey that takes about an hour each way.

Not anymore. Over the past two and a half years, NASA astronomers have observed the Moon flashing at them not just once but one hundred times. "THEY'RE EXPLOSIONS CAUSED BY METEOROIDS HITTING THE MOON," explains Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). "A typical blast is about as powerful as a few hundred pounds of TNT and can be photographed easily using a backyard telescope."

"We started our monitoring program in late 2005 after NASA announced plans to return astronauts to the Moon," says team leader Rob Suggs of the MSFC. If people were going to be walking around up there, "it seemed like a good idea to measure how often the Moon was getting hit."

"Almost immediately, we detected a flash." These explosions don't require oxygen or combustion. METEOROIDS HIT THE MOON WITH TREMENDOUS KINETIC ENERGY, TRAVELING 30,000 MPH OR FASTER. "At that speed, even a pebble can blast a crater several feet wide. The impact heats up rocks and soil on the lunar surface hot enough to glow like molten lava - hence the flash."

Under the SCHEME PEOPLE WOULD BE GIVEN AN ANNUAL CARBON LIMIT FOR FUEL AND ENERGY USE - which they could exceed by buying credits from those who use less. The MPs admitted THE PUBLIC WERE LIKELY TO BE OPPOSED TO THE MOVE, but urged the government to be "courageous".

Committee chairman Tim Yeo said it found that personal carbon trading had "real potential to engage the population in the fight against climate change and to achieve significant emissions reductions in a progressive way. The idea is a radical one. As such it inevitably faces some significant challenges in its development. It is important to meet these challenges," he said.

Meanwhile - a new computer model developed by German researchers suggests that THE EARTH'S TEMPERATURE MAY STAY ROUGHLY THE SAME FOR A DECADE, AS NATURAL CLIMATE CYCLES ENTER A COOLING PHASE, SCIENTISTS HAVE PREDICTED.

Dr Bob Ballard, an oceanographer, has admitted that he had to locate and inspect the remains of the vessels, which sank during the 1960s, in A TOP SECRET MISSION FOR THE US NAVY BEFORE HE WAS ALLOWED TO LOOK FOR THE TITANIC. He said: "I couldn't tell anybody. There was a lot of pressure on me. It was a secret mission. I felt it was a fair exchange for getting a chance to look for the Titanic." He added: "We handed the data to the experts. They never told us what they concluded - our job was to collect the data. I can only talk about it now because it has been declassified."

In 1982, Dr Ballard approached the US Navy for funding to search for the Titanic with a robotic submarine craft he had developed. He was told that the military were not prepared to spend large sums of money on locating the liner, but they did want to know what had happened to the submarines. OFFICIALS WERE ANXIOUS TO FIND OUT HOW THE NUCLEAR REACTORS HAD FARED AFTER BEING UNDER WATER FOR SO LONG.

The oceanographer was given funding to embark on two expeditions, ONE TO FIND THE WRECK OF THRESHER IN 1984 OFF THE EASTERN COAST OF THE US, AND ANOTHER TO FIND SCORPION IN THE EASTERN ATLANTIC. It was only once these missions were complete that Dr Ballard located the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, which sank in 1912 after it hit an iceberg with the loss of 1,500 lives.

At a weekend congress in the eastern city of Cottbus, Lafontaine whipped up Left party delegates with attacks on market capitalism and basked in the glow of media reports that have dubbed him Germany's "secret chancellor". "We are being hailed as the most successful new party in decades and they say WE ARE SETTING THE POLITICAL AGENDA IN GERMANY," a beaming Lafontaine told some 600 "Linke" supporters gathered for the party's first national convention.

Now they are being credited with sparking the SPD and Merkel's left-right coalition into action on issues ranging from the minimum wage to unemployment benefits and lawmaker salaries. "Lafontaine is the one shaping the debate on social issues in Germany right now," said Wolfgang Nowak, head of the Alfred Herrhausen Society, a Deutsche Bank think tank. "HE IS EFFECTIVELY DEFINING POLICY FOR THE SPD."

In a nod to recent turbulence in financial markets, he unveiled a 12-point action plan to counter what he called the "perversity" of market-driven capitalism, including a ban on hedge funds and stock options. "We are having a huge influence," said Kathrin Vogler, a 44- year-old delegate from North Rhine-Westphalia who was an SPD member for 18 years before bolting for the Left. "We raise these issues and the coalition in Berlin shakes."

They may not think of themselves as agents of globalization, but an adventurous cluster of American farmers living in or near this booming town are evidence that some in the United States would rather join in the big opportunities flowing from Brazil's rapid rise as a global agricultural power than rail against it.

This north eastern Brazil town of 50,000 - known by the initials LEM - is growing at the fastest clip in the entire country. Though small in number, the AMERICAN FARMERS HERE ARE A WELL-KNOWN PRESENCE, AND THEY SEEM TO BE MOSTLY WELCOMED AS LANDOWNERS WHO EMPLOY LOCALS AND BRING COMMERCE TO THE AREA. "Absolutely," is how LEM's energetic mayor, Oziel Oliveira, responded when asked if more Americans would be welcome. "They're turning into Brazilians," he said.

A decade ago, this was a small, dusty, ramshackle frontier spot; now, it is full of noisy, soybean-laden trucks heading into or out of a vast bean-crushing plant owned by U.S.-based food giant Bunge, among others. The town is laid out in a large grid of dozens of streets yet to be paved, in the expectation that many more thousands will arrive for the agricultural jobs in the surrounding farm fields.

The Americans here come mostly from the Midwest. They say they grabbed an opportunity to manage big spreads WHERE LAND IS AFFORDABLE AND THE CLIMATE YIELDS TWO CROPS A YEAR. Both factors contrast with what they found back in the Midwest. "For somebody young, it would have been difficult to start farming [back home]," says Tyler Bruch, a 28-year-old farmer from northwest Iowa. "It's a new frontier."

U.S. crude oil hit an all-time peak on Thursday, climbing to $135.09, lifted by concern about long-term supply and a host of predictions of further rises from influential investment banks and investors. "WHAT WE SAY AND WHAT WE SEE IS THERE ARE NO PHYSICAL SHORTAGES," Shell's Jeroen van der Veer told Reuters television. He runs the world's second-largest fully publicly traded oil firm by market value.

"There are no tankers waiting in the Middle East, there are no cars waiting at gasoline stations because they are out of stock. THIS HAS TO DO WITH PSYCHOLOGY IN THE MARKETS AND YOU CANNOT FORECAST PSYCHOLOGY". His view that there are no shortages chimes with that of other oil producers, such as members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Others, such as the U.S. government, say supply is tight.

He notes that arguments such as the Treaty is "improving the situation" or giving Ireland "a bigger say in a better organisational structure" are not as grabbing as "we're going to get a whole lot of money through the Common Agricultural Policy or we're going to get a whole lot of money from structural funds."

From an Irish perspective, he says he would have preferred all European countries to hold a referendum on the Treaty to take off the "pressure" from Irish voters. He admits that the Lisbon Treaty was hard to comprehend, ADDING THAT HE HIMSELF HAS NOT READ IT IN ITS ENTIRETY. "I have a document that puts together what it would look like and I have read most of that," he says, adding "I would predict that THERE WON'T BE 250 PEOPLE IN THE WHOLE OF THE 4.2 MILLION POPULATION OF IRELAND THAT HAVE READ THE TREATIES COVER-TO-COVER. I further predict that there is NOT 10 PERCENT OF THAT 250 THAT WILL UNDERSTAND EVERY SECTION AND SUBSECTION."

British Liberal Democrat MEP Diana Wallis complained that the PROPOSALS WERE SCRAPPED BY SENIOR MEPS IN A CLOSED-DOOR MEETING WITHOUT WARNING. Parliamentary sources said that the leaders of the two biggest political groupings, the centre-right European People's Party and the leftwing Socialists, had lobbied for changes just hours before the crunch meeting.

BOTH ARE DOMINATED BY GERMAN MEPS IMPLACABLY OPPOSED TO SWEEPING REFORM. "It was chaotic. It is no way to run even a local parish council.

MANY EXILED TIBETANS WOULD LIKE TO GO FURTHER THAN THE CONCILIATORY "MIDDLE WAY" APPROACH OF THEIR SPIRITUAL LEADER, THE DALAI LAMA, who seeks autonomy. Yet they say it is Beijing that is to blame if their exiled movement turns violent. "The space for a militant leader is not being created by the Dalai Lama's policy, but because of China's stubborn unwillingness to negotiate with His Holiness," said Nawang Lobsang of Tibetan college students' mass movement group.

Chinese officials met representatives of the Dalai Lama earlier this month, but many Tibetan community leaders said the talks were not serious negotiations, but MERELY A PLOY TO IMPROVE BEIJING'S IMAGE AHEAD OF THE OLYMPICS.

China, which says it sent troops into Tibet in 1950 to liberate it from feudal serfdom, blames the Dalai Lama for the recent unrest and has vilified him as a separatist bent on independence for Tibet and disrupting the Beijing Olympics. "That way the Chinese are foolish because they are missing the opportunity to negotiate with a non-violent, peaceful man," Lobsang said. "THEY MIGHT HAVE TO DEAL WITH A RADICAL LEADER IN THE FUTURE."

Recently, "Server in the Sky" - a proposed international database - has ignited a firestorm of controversy. As have cavalier comments by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that fingerprints aren't "personal data." Yet earlier this week, A MEASURE CREATING A FEDERAL FINGERPRINT REGISTRY TOTALLY UNRELATED TO NATIONAL SECURITY PASSED A U.S. SENATE COMMITTEE ALMOST WITHOUT NOTICE.

The legislation would require thousands of individuals working even tangentially in the mortgage and real estate industries - and not suspected of anything - to send their prints to the feds. The database and fingerprint mandates were tucked into housing and foreclosure assistance bills that on Tuesday passed the Senate Banking Committee by a vote of 19-2.

The measure the committee passed states that "an indvidual may not engage in the business of a loan originator without first obtaining A UNIQUE IDENTIFIER." To obtain this "identifier," an individual is required to "furnish" to the newly created Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System and Registry "information concerning the applicant's identity, INCLUDING FINGERPRINTS for submission" to the FBI and other government agencies. We have wrenching debates about privacy and freedom vs. national security when it comes to proposed anti-terrorist programs. BUT THEN A SIMILAR SCHEME IS DONE IN RESPONSE TO AN ECONOMIC PROBLEM, AND IT ALMOST ESCAPES WITHOUT NOTICE.