The pharmaceutical industry came under assault from senior figures in medical research yesterday over its practice of withholding information to protect profits, exposing patients to drugs which could be useless or harmful. Experts criticised the stranglehold exerted by multinational companies over clinical trials, which has led to biased results, under-reporting of negative findings and selective publication driven by the market, which was worth £10.1bn in the UK in 2006, amounting to 11 per cent of total NHS costs.

The latest attack was triggered yesterday by an analysis of published and unpublished trials of modern antidepressants, including Prozac and Seroxat, showing they offer no clinically significant improvement over placebos (dummy pills) in most patients.

It was the first time researchers - from the UK, Canada and the US - had successfully used freedom of information legislation to obtain all the data presented to regulators when the companies applied to license their drugs. In some cases it had not been made public for 20 years. Over the past two decades the drugs, known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), have been among the biggest selling of all time, earning billions of pounds for their makers.

Yesterday's finding suggests that the money may have been misspent.

According to the report, by the year 2050 there will be 6.4 billion people living in cities, up from 3.3 billion at present. The world's total population is expected to rise to 9.2 billion in 2050 from the current figure of 6.7 billion.
As urbanization increases, the world's rural population is expected to begin declining in around a decade and should fall to 2.8 billion people in 2050 from 3.4 billion in 2007, the report said.

Some countries, like India -- home to two of the world's biggest metropolises, Mumbai and Delhi with 19 and 18.8 million people respectively in 2007 -- aim to slow down the process of urbanization by encouraging development of rural areas. Despite the challenges urbanization poses for governments and local authorities, Hania Zlotnik, head of the U.N. Population Division, told reporters urbanization is generally a sign of a lively economy. "Governments would be well advised that urban growth is a proof of economic dynamism," Zlotnik told reporters.

Tokyo is projected to remain the most populous city in the world. With 35.7 million people in its urban agglomeration at last count.

Annan suspended negotiations between government and opposition representatives on Tuesday when they failed to agree on details of a prime minister post in a planned power-sharing deal. He said he would "take the matter up" with President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga. "The leaders have to assume their responsibilities and become directly engaged in these talks," the former UN secretary general said.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday there was "no excuse" for the delay in resolving the crisis. "I am disappointed by the failure of leadership necessary to resolve all the remaining issues," Rice said in a statement. "There can be no excuse for further delay." Rice, who attended talks in Kenya earlier this month in a bid to help broker a compromise, said different options were being explored. But she added: "We will draw our own conclusions about who is responsible for lack of progress and take necessary steps. I want to emphasise that the future of our relationship with both sides and their legitimacy hinges on their cooperation to achieve this political solution."

Once seen as a beacon of peace among its war-wracked neighbours, Kenya is now reeling from one of its worst political crises since it gained independence from Britain in 1963.

"Ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable to see rates like this," said Dr. Mario Raviglione, director of WHO's "Stop TB" department. "This demonstrates what happens when you keep making mistakes in TB treatment." In Africa, where experts are particularly worried about a lethal collision between TB and AIDS, only six countries provided information. "We really don't know what the situation is in Africa," Raviglione said. "If multi-drug resistant TB has penetrated Africa and coincides with AIDS, there's bound to be a disaster."

Globally, there are about 500,000 new cases of drug-resistant TB every year, about 5 percent of the 9 million new TB cases. In the United States, 1.2 percent of TB cases were multi-drug resistant. Of those, 1.9 percent were extensively drug-resistant. The highest rates of drug-resistant TB were in eastern Europe. Nearly a quarter of all TB cases in Baku, Azerbaijan, were drug-resistant, followed by about 20 percent in Moldova and 16 percent in Donetsk, Ukraine, WHO said.

High rates of drug-resistant TB were also found in China and India, the world's two most populous nations that together are home to half the world's cases. "Multi-drug resistant TB is a threat to every person on the planet," Harrington said. "It's not like HIV, where you are only infected through specific actions. TB is a threat to every person who takes a train or a plane."

In comments published on Wednesday, Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa called for renewed Arab and regional efforts to end the standoff between the rival sides, whose power struggle is Lebanon's worst crisis since the 1975-90 civil war. Lebanon has been without a president for three months and the two sides are at odds over how to share seats in a new cabinet.

Moussa brokered two days of talks this week but failed to make progress towards resolving a conflict that continues to poison Arab ties ahead of an Arab summit in Syria next month. The governing coalition is backed by foreign powers including the United States and its Arab allies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The opposition is supported by Syria and Iran.

"The Arab League has accomplished what could be accomplished," he said. "The rest requires new Arab and regional efforts," As-Safir quoted the former Egyptian foreign minister as saying. The standoff is at the heart of a diplomatic rift between Syria and Saudi Arabia, whose King Abdullah is unlikely to attend the Arab summit unless the conflict is resolved.

It was Raul Castro's first meeting with a foreign visitor two days after succeeding his ailing brother Fidel Castro as the new leader of the communist-run country.

"With the greatest respect for the sovereignty of the country and its citizens, I expressed to President Raul Castro the concern of the Church over the prisoners and their families," Bertone said at Havana airport before his departure. Human rights groups say 320 Cubans are behind bars for expressing political views and are being held in overcrowded prisons.

Bertone said he hoped his six-day visit had given a new push to once strained ties between the Cuban state and the Catholic Church 10 years after Pope John Paul's historic trip to the island. But he said the relations would always be "challenging." Bertone's visit brought a welcome boost to the Church in Cuba through greater exposure in the state-controlled media.

People in Newcastle, Yorkshire, London, Cumbria, the Midlands, Norfolk and also parts of Wales, felt the tremor just before 0100 GMT. A man suffered a broken pelvis when a chimney collapsed in South Yorkshire. The British Geological Survey (BGS) said the epicentre of the 5.3 magnitude quake was near Market Rasen in Lincolnshire.

The main 10-second quake, which struck at 0056 GMT at a depth of 15.4km (9.6 miles), was the biggest recorded example since one with a magnitude of 5.4 struck north Wales in 1984. The West Midlands was hit by an earthquake in 2002 in the Dudley area that reached a magnitude of 5.0 and one measuring 4.3 hit Folkestone in Kent last year.

The dollar fell against 13 of the 16 most-active currencies before Bernanke testifies to Congress today. A government report will probably show a drop in new home sales, bolstering the Fed's case for cutting its benchmark 3 percent rate. The euro reached a six-week high against the yen as traders bet the European Central Bank will keep its 4 percent rate unchanged in coming months.

"We're going into a new leg of dollar weakness," Tony Morriss, a currency strategist in Sydney at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., Australia's third-biggest bank, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. "The Federal Reserve is sending a pretty clear signal they need to support growth."

The slump in the dollar pushed oil prices to a record yesterday and increased the cost of buying wheat, sugar, copper, cotton and cocoa. The dollar index will tumble to a record low "'within weeks" as the Fed lowers rates to prevent the world's largest economy from slipping into a recession, Bank of America N.A. analysts said in a research note dated today.

"It's crunch time for the dollar," said Yuji Saito, head of foreign-exchange sales in Tokyo at Societe Generale SA, a unit of France's second-largest bank by market value. "Bernanke may know that monetary policy alone cannot support the slowing U.S. economy."

Hundreds of thousands of people were returning to their dwellings, although in some parts of the province houses were still submerged in flood waters, officials said. A majority of the deaths were due to drowning, but at least 11 people were killed by landslides which environmental groups have blamed on illegal logging.

Total damage to roads and bridges in three flood-hit southern regions was put at 825.5 million pesos ($20 million) while 263 million pesos worth of agricultural crops, mostly rice and corn, were destroyed. The Philippines is lashed by an average of about 20 typhoons a year, with landslides and floods common across the archipelago. The weather bureau has said the country may be hit by more typhoons this year due to the La Nina wet weather phenomenon which could bring rains even during the summer months of April and May.

Kosovo's ethnic Albanian Prime Minister Hashim Thaci was responding to a Serbian government pledge to rule Serb-dominated parts of Kosovo following its secession from Serbia 10 days ago. Hundreds of protesters tried to attack the United States consulate in the Bosnian Serb Republic capital, Banja Luka, after a largely peaceful march by some 10,000 people. They stoned the building before being pushed back by riot police.

"We understand and respect peaceful reactions, guaranteed by the law, but we will not allow the territorial integrity of Kosovo to be compromised," Thaci, a former guerrilla commander, said. "I am constantly in contact with NATO to prevent anyone from touching even one inch of Kosovo's territory," he told reporters in Racak, scene of a Serb massacre a decade ago.

Kosovo's Albanian majority declared independence from Serbia with Western backing on February 17. Serbs in the north reject the secession, fuelling fears that the country is destined for partition, and may trigger a Serb secession from Bosnia. "As long as we live here we will not recognize an act of violence and secession of Kosovo from Serbia," Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik told the Banja Luka rally.

Frightened financiers are pulling back from credit markets -- going on strike, if you will -- to escape the unraveling daisy chain of securitized assets and promissory notes that binds the global financial system. As each financier tries to protect against the next one's mistakes, the whole system begins to sag. That's what we're seeing now, as credit market troubles spread from bundles of subprime residential mortgages to bundles of other kinds of debt -- from student loans to retailers' receivables to municipal bonds. Investors are nervous because they aren't sure how to value these bundles of securitized assets. So buyers stay away, prices fall further, and the damage spreads. The public, fortunately, doesn't understand how bad the situation is. If it did, we might have a real panic on our hands.

The hubris in this system was Wall Street's confidence that it could value paper securities that had been sliced and diced so many times that they no longer had solid connections to their underlying assets. The nation's leading financier, Warren Buffett, had warned years before that "derivatives," whose value was balanced loosely on the real assets underneath, were the equivalent of "financial weapons of mass destruction." But in the rush for profits, nobody listened.

I've saved the worst for last. Do you want to know who is bailing out America's biggest banks and financial institutions from the consequences of their folly -- by acting as the lender of last resort and controller of the system? Why, it's the sovereign wealth funds, owned by such nations as China and the Persian Gulf oil producers. The new titans are coming to the rescue, if that's the right word for their mortgage on America's future.

IN SAUDI ARABIA, where inflation had been virtually zero for a decade, it recently reached an official level of 6.5 percent, though unofficial estimates put it much higher. Public protests and boycotts have followed, and 19 prominent clerics posted an unusual statement on the Internet in December warning of a crisis that would cause "theft, cheating, armed robbery and resentment between rich and poor."

In a few places the price increases have led to violence. IN YEMEN, prices for bread and other foods have nearly doubled in the past four months, setting off a string of demonstrations and riots in which at least a dozen people were killed. IN MOROCCO, 34 people were sentenced to prison on Wednesday for participating in riots over food prices, the Moroccan state news service reported. Even tightly controlled JORDAN has had non-violent demonstrations and strikes.

Inflation was also a factor - often overlooked - in some recent clashes that were seen as political or sectarian. A confrontation IN BEIRUT between Lebanese Army soldiers and a group of Shiite protesters that left seven people dead started with demonstrations over power cuts and rising bread prices.

The Middle East's heavy reliance on food imports has made it especially vulnerable to the global rise in commodity prices over the past year. "For many basic products, we don't have free market prices, we have monopoly prices," said Samer Tawil, a former minister of national economy in Jordan. "Oil, cement, rice, meat, sugar: these are all imported almost exclusively by one importer each here. CORRUPTION IS ONE THING WHEN IT'S ABOUT BUILDING A ROAD, BUT WHEN IT AFFECTS MY FOOD, THAT'S DIFFERENT."

Mr. Abdul Raheem, the clothing store employee in Amman, said, "NO ONE CAN BE IN THE GOVERNMENT NOW AND BE CLEAN." Meanwhile, his own life has been transformed, Mr. Abdul Raheem said. He ticked off a list of prices: potatoes have jumped to about 76 cents a pound from 32 cents. A carton of 30 eggs went to nearly $4.25 from just above $2; cucumbers rose to 58 cents a pound from about 22. All this in a matter of weeks. "These were always the basics," he said. "Now they're luxuries."

Earlier this month, former finance minister and Zanu PF stalwart Simba Makoni announced he would stand against Mugabe in the poll. But the significance of Makoni lies less in what he is than in what he represents - a split in the ruling party. "With a weak opposition, the best chance for change is a reconstituted Zanu PF," says Maroleng. "This election shows that there is significant indiscipline and disarray with the party, and efforts being made to achieve precisely that."

The reason for rising discontent inside Zanu PF is not hard to guess. Last week the government announced inflation had breached 100,000%, up from 66,000% in December. Industry, agriculture and the service sector have all but ceased to exist. Shops stock no food, and power cuts last for days. Between a quarter and a third of Zimbabwe's original population of 13 million are believed to have fled the country, the majority for neighboring South Africa.

The only functioning part of the country is the security apparatus, but, aside from Mugabe's bodyguards, even that is now questionable, with consistent reports of no pay, sporadic mutinies and the apparent allying of some heavyweight military figures against Mugabe. "These guys have a bottom line," says Marengo, "and Mugabe is increasingly seen as an economic liability."

High-protein spring wheat on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange rose by almost 25% to record levels on Monday after all trading restrictions were scrapped. The March futures contract closed at up $4.75 at $24 a bushel, the record price for any US wheat contract. The price of spring wheat has more than doubled since January.

Kazakhstan has become the latest country to put export restrictions on wheat as it battles against inflation. Russia and Argentina have already imposed similar export restrictions. Reports of a drought in Northern China, where most of the country's wheat is grown, also pushed prices higher. Extreme weather has already damaged crops in other parts of the world and US wheat inventories are expected to fall to their lowest level for 60 years.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered RECORD COLD TEMPERATURES IN JANUARY AND EARLY FEBRUARY. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

CHINA is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled, it was too cold or too icy to repair them. There have been so many snow and ice storms in ONTARIO and QUEBEC in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses. IN JUST THE FIRST TWO WEEKS OF FEBRUARY, TORONTO received 70 cm of snow, SMASHING THE RECORD OF 66.6 CM FOR THE ENTIRE MONTH set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

REMEMBER THE ARCTIC SEA ICE? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past. THE ICE IS BACK. Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, SO ONE WINTER DOES NOT A CLIMATE MAKE. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades. But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use THIS WINTER'S WEATHER STORIES TO WONDER WHETHER THE ALARMIST ARE BEING A TAD PREMATURE. And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

"WE MISSED WHAT WAS RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR EYES," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather WIND CIRCULATION THAT DRIVES OCEAN CURRENTS NORTHWARD FROM THE TROPICS. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, SO RESEARCHERS HAVE COMPENSATED BY OVER-EMPHASIZING THE ROLE OF MANMADE WARMING ON POLAR ICE MELT.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon. THE LAST TIME THE SUN WAS THIS INACTIVE, EARTH SUFFERED THE LITTLE ICE AGE THAT LASTED ABOUT FIVE CENTURIES AND ENDED IN 1850.

Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. FAMINE, PLAGUE AND WAR WERE WIDESPREAD. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased. IT'S WAY TOO EARLY TO CLAIM THE SAME IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN AGAIN, BUT THEN IT'S WAY TOO EARLY FOR THE HYSTERIA OF THE GLOBAL WARMERS, TOO.