The move underlines the kingdom's growing concern about its oil installations after threats from al-Qaeda to attack facilities in the Gulf, as well as rising tensions between Iran and the US. The force already numbers about 5,000 personnel, a Saudi adviser said on Sunday.

The kingdom, which is the world's biggest oil exporter and has 25 per cent of the world's proven oil reserves, is investing an estimated $4bn-$5bn in the new equipment and the force. The force is expected to reach 35,000 within two or three years.

Saudi Arabia has a 75,000-strong army, an air force of 18,000, a navy of 15,500 and an air defence force of 16,000. Its oil installations are protected from within by 5,000 agents employed by Aramco, the state oil company. It has more than 80 oil and gas fields and an estimated 11,000 miles of pipeline.

Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, a strong proponent of free trade and globalization, is warning the U.S. could be heading into recession due to the ongoing sub-prime mortgage crisis. "It would be far too premature to judge this crisis over," Summers told the London Telegraph for today's edition. "I would say the risks of recession are now greater than they've been any time since the period in the aftermath of 9/11."

Traders are bracing for another week of uncertainty after the near breakdown of America's $2,200 billion market for commercial paper. Investors are said to be waiting to learn whether or not the Federal Reserve would succeed in stabilizing the market, the latest domino to fall in the spreading contagion from sub-prime debt.

Investors have suddenly lost trust in this form of debt, fearing it may be tainted by exposure to [collateralized debt obligations]," writes veteran journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph. He notes stock markets rallied late last week on the belief the Fed would start to cut its key lending rate next month, and that the European Central Bank would refrain from further tightening.

The US states of Idaho and California have, like Greece, been hit by wildfires, while Ohio, already suffering from flooding, was hit by tornados that left hundreds of thousands with no electricity. Meanwhile, China, India and Romania have been suffering from severe flooding.

In the US, a mandatory evacuation was ordered for residents of more than 1,000 homes south of Ketchum in Idaho where a massive wildfire raged. And in California, a seven-week-old wildfire has been burning in Santa Barbara county and a recommended evacuation has been put into effect.

In Ohio, beleaguered residents were picking up the pieces after tornado-bearing thunderstorms knocked out power across the state. Powerful storms during most of the past week caused disastrous floods from south-eastern Minnesota to Ohio that were blamed for at least 18 deaths.

In China, the official Xinhua News Agency yesterday reported torrential rainstorms had triggered landslides and floods, killing at least 13 people.

In India, nearly 2,000 people have been killed by snake bites, drowning, diarrhoea and in house collapses since July when swollen rivers burst their banks, inundating huge areas in eastern India and Bangladesh. The death toll rose by 74 over the weekend.

Overnight rains also caused widespread flooding in Romania, when rivers overflowed, leaving about 1,400 people stranded in villages and forcing the evacuation of the 17th-century Sambata de Sus Monastery. The rain followed three days of unusually high temperatures of up to 40C (104F).

Skies cleared over Chicago as the storms moved east and south, while tornado warnings were issued for parts of Ohio. Storms have battered US states from Minnesota down to Ohio in the last week or so, killing at least 17 people. More than 650,000 customers in Illinois lost their power supply after a major storm on Thursday.

"There's so much flooding continuing from the rain and run-off from two days ago," said Mark Ratzer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. "That's going to take a while to recede," he told the Associated Press.

The states of Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota are cleaning up after their earlier flooding.

The £224m Contact Point System will contain details of the 11m children in the country. It goes live next year. But the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS) has outlined "significant" concerns, The Times said. However, the Department for Children, Schools and Families insisted the system would be secure.

The system was set up after the official inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbie concluded the eight-year-old's murder could have been prevented if there had been better communication between the professionals involved. However, The Times said the ADCS had written to Christine Goodfellow, who is in charge of Contact Point, expressing concerns about the policing and vetting arrangements.

Richard Stiff, the chairman of the ADCS information systems and technology policy committee, said it "may allow a situation where an abuser could be able to access Contact Point for illegitimate purposes with limited fear of any repercussions".

Around 330,000 approved users, including head teachers, doctors and social workers, will have access to the database, The Times said. Security concerns were heightened by the disclosure that the details of the children of politicians and celebrities were expected to be excluded, the newspaper added.

However, the Department for Children, Schools and Families insisted the new system would be secure.

Father Vincent Brennan said this in a statement issued today that responds to the proposed legislation that would amend South Africa's 1996 act legalizing abortion. The bill exempts maternity clinics from a 24-hour waiting period to perform abortions, and allows nurses to perform the procedure. Until now, abortions have been restricted to only doctors and midwives.

The bishops' statement said: "Society and the Church cannot profess to support the right to life and yet allow thousands of women to experience the distress and need which causes them to contemplate abortion." It continued: "The genuineness of convictions about the right to life of the unborn child must be measured by our willingness to give the necessary support.

"Those who are in a position to help, and who do not, cannot escape their responsibility. No woman should feel that she must face an unhappy pregnancy alone. The Catholic Church," the statement added, "exercising this consistent life ethic, is committed to various initiatives that provide vulnerable women with alternative choices to abortion, such as adoption."

The U.S. bishops condemned Amnesty International's recent decision to support abortion, and said that it will only work with organizations that promote the right to life from conception to natural death. The bishops also urged the organization to reverse its policy, which they said "undermines Amnesty's longstanding moral credibility and unnecessarily diverts its mission."

Their position was outlined in a statement sent Thursday from Bishop William Skylstad of Spokane, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. "In promoting abortion," said Bishop Skylstad, "Amnesty divides its own members -- many of whom are Catholics and others who defend the rights of unborn children -- and jeopardizes its support by people in many nations, cultures and religions who share a consistent commitment to all human rights."

The bishop said that while the "essential work of protecting human life and promoting human dignity must carry on - we will seek to do so in authentic ways, working most closely with organizations who do not oppose the fundamental right to life from conception to natural death."

"True commitment to women's rights," he continued, "puts us in solidarity with women and their unborn children. It does not pit one against the other but calls us to advocate on behalf of both." Bishop Skylstad added: "We call upon Amnesty International once again to act in accord with its noblest principles, reconsider its error, and reverse its policy on abortion."

It's costing the NHS £10bn a year, £200m of which is wasted on drugs that are never used. Nina Lakhani reports on a dangerous addiction Britain is in the grip of a prescription drug-taking epidemic, with unprecedented numbers of medicines being handed out by GPs, costing billions of pounds and stretching already tight NHS resources to breaking point.

Prescription drug use has increased by 27 per cent in the past five years and the NHS drug bill topped £10bn in 2006. GPs prescribed 918 million medicines last year compared with 721 million five years ago, according to figures obtained by The Independent on Sunday.

Health experts put rocketing prescription numbers down to medical advances, but also point to poor prescribing by GPs, growing public demand for a "pill for every ill" and aggressive marketing tactics by the pharmaceutical industry, which prompted one MP to warn that the UK is heading towards what he called "pharmageddon".

The worst infernos were concentrated in the mountains of southern Greece and on the island of Evia north of Athens, and early Sunday, flames approached villages just outside Ancient Olympia.

After first light Sunday, firefighting planes began dropping water in the area, and Ancient Olympia mayor Giorgos Aidonis said the site was no longer in imminent peril. Dozens of charred bodies were found across fields, homes, along roads and in cars, including the remains of a mother hugging her four children.

Church bells rang out in the village of Kolyri near Ancient Olympia as panicked residents tried to gather their belongings and flee through the night, said one man who called the television station. "The situation is desperate," said another. "I can't describe this in words, it is a national tragedy."

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said arson was suspected in some of the blazes. "So many fires breaking out simultaneously in so many parts of the country cannot be a coincidence," he said in a nationally televised address. "The state will do everything it can to find those responsible and punish them." The government also announced a reward of up to £500,000 for anyone providing information that would lead to the arrest of an arsonist.

Hot, dry seasonal winds drove the flames across a landscape parched by successive heat waves. Reduced winds and a slight dip in temperatures were forecast for Sunday. The fires were so severe that authorities said they could not yet provide an estimate of how much damage they had caused, nor what expanse of land had been burned.

Bad weather in key grain growing areas such as Canada and parts of Europe has limited supplies as demand has risen, sparking fears of a supply shortfall. While it will mean higher bread prices, it could also trigger an increase in meat and dairy prices as farmers battle to pass on rising feed costs.

Global wheat stockpiles will slip to their lowest levels in 26 years as a result, official US figures predicted earlier this month. The dire forecast came as Canadian officials said the country expected its harvest to be slashed by a fifth as a result of drought.

Meanwhile, its rival Australia - the world's third-largest wheat exporter and a key supplier to Asian regions and South America - has also warned harvests may be reduced by warmer-than-expected temperatures experienced in the spring.

Crops in the Black Sea area of Europe, however, have been ruined by bad weather, while Chinese production is expected to fall by 10% as a result of both flooding and droughts.

And as supplies fall, demand from emerging economies such as India is increasing - factors which helped push prices to record highs of $7.44 a bushel on the benchmark Chicago Board of Trade market in the US on Thursday.

In the UK, prices have also soared, with bread-making wheat now fetching about £200 per tonne - double last year's level.

I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It's not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93's debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field?

If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers - whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C - would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower - the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) - which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering - very definitely not in the "raver" bracket - are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive".

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers - which could well have been the beams cracking - are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let's claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA's list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were - and still are - very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now - we create our own reality". True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.

Six bodies were found near the town of Areopolis, about 120 miles south-west of Athens, including two French tourists and two firefighters, the fire brigade and police said. Dozens of other Greek villages asked for help, from the west coast of the Peloponnese to the region of Mani, some 50 miles further east, as the fires were spread by strong winds.

Across the country, more than 150 fires were burning. Aircraft and helicopters were being deployed against the flames, but at times the wind reached gale force and prevented the firefighting planes from taking off. The government announced a state of emergency in Lakonia and Messinia provinces and asked for help from the European Union. Acting Interior Minister Spyros Flogaitis said Greece was appealing to EU member states to "send any help they can" to fight the fires.

But Greece was not alone in its alarm at the damaging heatwave. Italy's Civil Protection Authority said Thursday had been the worst day for forest fires in the country's history. By 9am on Friday, it had already received 36 requests for help.

In south-eastern Bosnia, the temperature hit 42 Celsius (108 F) this week. Firefighters and villagers were battling several forest fires fanned by strong winds yesterday.

Even in Portugal, which like neighbouring Spain has been spared the worst of the fires because of an unusually cool, damp summer in western Europe, 300 firefighters had to be mobilised on Thursday to put out a blaze near the historic town of Sintra

One of the biggest worries for those looking at global health is the sudden rise of a new and deadly illness. Air travel and a worldwide market in live animals means that a virus could sweep across continents in just a few months.

SARS - In 2003, the SARS virus caused an unprecedented panic: A contagious illness, with a week's delay before the emergence of symptoms, and a very high death rate - potentially a very dangerous cocktail. Fortunately for the world, SARS proved to be less infectious than first feared, and the virus was contained within just a few months, not before killing several hundred people.

Pandemic Influenza - Scientists believe that an outbreak of pandemic influenza, a new strain jumping from animals into humans, could be a far greater threat, and governments across the world have been asked to plan for its arrival. Normal seasonal influenza in the UK can kill, but generally only those who are weakened by age or other illness. A completely new strain of pandemic flu, however, is likely to be far more virulent because humans do not have any resistance to it.

Haemorrhagic fevers - In the 1990s, these were the nightmare illnesses, predicted by some to be capable of spreading like wildfire due to modern travel habits. Viruses such as Marburg and Ebola have some of the highest fatality rates of all, and can kill within just a few days. Tropical Africa is the hotbed for haemorrhagic fevers, and victims develop a high temperature, diarrhoea, and then severe bleeding, and are highly contagious. In the 21st Century, an outbreak in Angola claimed more than 200 lives, with nine out of ten of those diagnosed with the illness dying.

Malaria - A million people die from malaria every year worldwide, and the WHO says that not enough is being spent to stop this number increasing. This means that malaria is emerging in new areas, or coming back in areas where it was thought to be eradicated. The parasite that causes the disease is becoming more resistant to some of the most common treatments.

Cholera - Cholera has made a comeback in the last 25 years, says the WHO, which wants to see renewed efforts to control it. War, conflict and natural disaster all play their part in its return, as poor sanitation and unclean drinking water are the root cause of outbreaks. In the aftermath of the Rwandan crisis of 1994, up to 800,000 people crossed the border to refugee camps near the city of Goma in DR Congo. In the first month after their arrival, an estimated 50,000 died from cholera and dysentery, as Vibrio cholerae contaminated Lake Kivu, the only source of drinking water.

Tuberculosis - Tuberculosis, one of the major killers of people with AIDS, accounts for approximately 1.5 million deaths worldwide a year. Antibiotic therapies do exist, although many patients do not have access to them. A major concern for the WHO is the increasing resistance of the bacterium which causes TB to these antibiotics.

It said confidential details of more than 1.3 million people, mainly Americans, were stolen by malicious hackers who carried out the attack. It said that servers in the Ukraine and hijacked home computers were used to mount the attack.

The thieves got away with names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of Monster.com users. The job site said that the thieves did not get any useful financial information such as bank account details in the attack. Monster told the Reuters news agency that it first heard about the attack on 17 August thanks to security firm Symantec.

The jobs portal said it managed to shut down the rogue servers used in the attack on 21 August after contacting the Ukranian company hosting them. The vast majority of those affected by the attack are based in the US. Monster estimates that less than 5,000 people outside the US had their details pinched in the attack.

Monster said it had more than 73 million CVs in its database.

Temperatures are soaring into the 100's in certain locations. The temperature hit 101 degrees in Greece, yet the hottest spot was 107 in Turkey. The reason for this all this excessive heat is because of the Scirocco winds off of the Sahara Desert.

Closer to home, we are still expecting to see temperatures reach into the 90's over the weekend over much of the East. High temperatures this month across the Southeast have been averaging between 5 and 10 degrees above normal. In contrast, Philadelphia, Pa., tied its previous coolest high temperature record from 1965 with a high of 69 degrees.

It also marked the third consecutive day that the high failed to reach the 70s, (first time since 1940 that has happened in August). In the midwest, several northern Ohio counties are under states of emergency. Rising flood waters have inundated the area and caused catastrophic damage. It's the worst flooding in a century. In other news - in the west, many wildfires are burning throughout Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Montana.