It's obvious that if you buy food from thousands of miles away, the transport alone must consume vast amounts of energy, thus fuelling climate change and global meltdown. AS ANY CONCERNED CITIZEN KNOWS, THINK GREEN, THINK LOCAL.

OR THINK AGAIN. Researchers are finding that FOOD MILES ARE FAR FROM THE WHOLE STORY when assessing the environmental impact of what we eat. At a conference last month on the economics of food, Chris Foster of Manchester Business School presented some startling conclusions from a review of the evidence.

Researchers in New Zealand claim that antipodean lamb and apples use less energy - even after being transported 12,000 miles - than the same products from Britain. A study by Lincoln University in New Zealand compared the use of fuel, electricity, pesticides, fodder, transportation, storage and other items and calculated that a ton of New Zealand apples generated the equivalent of 407lb of CO2 compared with almost 600lb for UK apples.

The difference was even more marked in lamb. The study claimed that a ton of New Zealand lamb carcass generated more than half a ton of CO2 compared with about three tons for British lamb. MUCH OF THE HUGE CO2 DISPARITY WAS DOWN TO THE USE OF ELECTRICITY AND FERTILISER IN REARING THE BRITISH LAMBS. The shipping of New Zealand lamb to the UK accounted for only 273lb of CO2.

PACKAGING (or lack of it) is another area where consumers can readily make a difference, ALONG WITH WASTE. As much as ONE-THIRD OF FOOD BOUGHT IN THE UK IS NOT EATEN, which means that IT GENERATES GREENHOUSES GASES IN ITS PRODUCTION AND ITS DECAY. So shop little and often, use your leftovers and compost scraps.

The alarm was sounded decades ago by environmentalists -- and was little heeded. The picture, meanwhile, has changed: Africa is now a leader in destructiveness. The numbers have changed: UN specialists estimate 60 acres of tropical forest are felled worldwide every minute, up from 50 a generation back. And the fears have changed. Experts still warn of extinction of animal and plant life, of the loss of forest peoples' livelihoods, of soil erosion and other damage. But scientists today worry urgently about something else: the fateful feedback link of trees and climate.

Global warming is expected to dry up and kill off vast tracts of rain forest, and dying forests will feed global warming. "IF WE LOSE FORESTS, WE LOSE THE FIGHT AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE," declared more than 300 scientists, conservation groups, religious leaders and others in an appeal for action at December's climate conference in Bali, Indonesia.

The burning or rotting of trees that comes with deforestation -- at the hands of ranchers, farmers, timbermen -- sends more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all the world's planes, trains, trucks and automobiles. FOREST DESTRUCTION ACCOUNTS FOR ABOUT 20 PERCENT OF MANMADE EMISSIONS, second only to burning of fossil fuels for electricity and heat. CONVERSELY, HEALTHY FORESTS ABSORB CARBON DIOXIDE AND STORE CARBON.

"THE STAKES ARE SO DIRE THAT IF WE DON'T START TURNING THIS AROUND IN THE NEXT 10 YEARS, THE EXTINCTION CRISIS AND THE CLIMATE CRISIS WILL BEGIN TO SPIRAL OUT OF CONTROL," said Roman Paul Czebiniak, a forest expert with Greenpeace International.

The two most powerful occurred hours apart in the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighbouring Rwanda, with magnitudes of 6.0 and 5.0 respectively. At least 10 people died as a church collapsed in western Rwanda, while the eastern DR Congo city of Bukavu suffered widespread damage. Police say the death toll could rise, as there are many people trapped. A powerful 6.8 magnitude earthquake rocked the region in December 2005. While it is prone to seismic activity it has mostly escaped major quakes in recent years.

An official from the country's UN peacekeeping mission said damage in the city was extensive. "There is lots of damage. Many buildings have been hit. Lots of houses have completely collapsed," Jacqueline Chenard said. The quakes were also felt in neighbouring Burundi, disrupting hydroelectric power and causing a half-hour electricity cut.

In this case, the first study - which suggested that the antidepressant, Paxil, might help depressed teens - was widely publicized by Paxil's maker. The second study - which suggested that Paxil was no better for these adolescents than a placebo - got no such public airing. The selective disclosures about Paxil set off an uproar. Congress held hearings. New York's attorney general sued Paxil's maker, alleging consumer fraud. Top medical journals pressured companies and researchers to publicly register trials on a government website, and the industry promised to be more transparent.

You'd think the industry would have learned its lesson, and doctors and the public would be better informed. But today, new questions are arising about whether companies are finding ways to suppress or delay negative news. Congress passed a stricter law, requiring nearly all drug studies and their results to be posted on the government website. Laws, however, can only do so much. Compliance depends on the attitudes of pharmaceutical executives, some of whom have let the public down. When it comes to drugs, what you don't know can hurt you. Doctors and patients shouldn't have to wonder whether drugmakers know dangerous facts they're keeping to themselves.

In little less than a year and a half, the nationwide recalls of tainted products have formed their own peculiar food pyramid: meats, vegetables, salad, snacks, fast food, even dessert items. The various pathogens in those products killed at least three people, sickened more than 1,300 others and touched almost every state in the country as well as Canada. And even though the number of outbreaks has leveled off over the past few years, it is the variety of outbreaks that most troubles the scientists and government health officials who deal with them: Many of the contaminations are showing up in foods never before associated with poisoning.

"It's been a little bit of a roller coaster the past 10 years," said Dr. Robert Tauxe, deputy director of the division of food-borne bacterial and mycotic diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "I am struck that I am seeing new food vehicles. New foods are a problem. Spinach was a new one. And peanut butter, there's a surprise. Also the Veggie Booty, or vegetarian snack food." Not only are scientists puzzled about how such staples became tainted, but they are concerned that U.S. health officials need to do a better job of pinpointing potential sources of contamination before unsafe food winds up on supermarket shelves.

The food safety issue is inescapably linked to the ongoing revolution in U.S. agriculture, with the emergence of mega-farms, mega-distribution centers and mega-transporters. "Once you start to have larger and larger units and these bigger and bigger companies, any contamination incident automatically gets much worse by orders of magnitude," said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist with Consumers Union. "Before, it was just bad produce coming from one farm."

The whole food production system has grown increasingly concentrated, overwhelmingly complex, and - paradoxically - at times fragmented. At the same time, critics charge, U.S. government oversight is not adequate.

The season's first snowfall in the greater Tokyo region measured 3.5 inches in the center of the capital on Saturday, the heaviest accumulation in eight years, the Japan Meteorological Agency said. At Narita airport, some 40 miles from downtown Tokyo, 51 international flights were cancelled as airport workers were unable to remove snow from runways quickly enough.

More than 90 other flights were delayed for a night, leaving passengers stuck in the terminal, an airport public relations official said. "A total of 9,690 passengers were stranded overnight at the two terminals. We provided blankets and extended the time for air-conditioning and lighting to accommodate them at lobbies," the official said.

The Falcon cable was cut 56 kilometres (35 miles) from Dubai, between Oman and the United Arab Emirates, according to its owner, FLAG Telecom, which is part of India's Reliance Communications. The repair ship had been notified and was expected to arrive at the site in the next few days, the company said on its website.

Flag Telecom owns another cable that was damaged off Egypt on Wednesday. A repair ship was expected to arrive by Tuesday to restore that cable and repairs were expected to take a week, the company said. The outages have disrupted business across the Middle East and South Asia, including in India, where businesses said it may take up to 15 days to return to normal.

Parliament is expected to approve a constitutional amendment next week sponsored by the ruling AK Party, which has Islamist roots, and a nationalist opposition party that is aimed at easing a 1989 headscarf ban for students in higher education. Secularists fear lifting the ban would, over time, lead to heavy pressure on uncovered women to wear the Muslim garment.

"Turkey is secular and will remain secular," shouted protesters as they waved national flags and banners of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, revered founder of the republic which separated religion and state, at his mausoleum in the capital Ankara. "I am a true believer in Islam, but my religion is in my heart, not in what I wear. I feel that the headscarf will bring the country backwards," said Fatma Sarikaya, a retired engineer. "Turkey is unique in this region. It has modernized Islam and we should be leading other Muslim countries," she said.

But pressure has intensified this week with university rectors warning that allowing students to wear the Muslim headscarf at university would provoke campus chaos and street violence and end up destroying the secular state. Secularist professors have threatened not to allow women into class if they wore the garment. Thousands of students have been expelled over the years for trying to wear the headscarf at university.

The Bishop is also facing anger from the most senior members of the Church of England hierarchy for his comments on Islam. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has made Islam a priority of his archiepiscopate and set up a Muslim-Christian forum to promote relations between the faiths in 2006. One senior cleric told The Times yesterday: "The Bishop of Rochester is in effect threatening to undo everything we have done."

The cleric said that some congregations in cities such as Leicester, where interfaith work was a priority, were increasingly wary of donating money towards this work. Church leaders in towns with a large Muslim population were anxious that relations with their neighbours were being undermined. Dr Nazir-Ali was in India when staff at his home in Rochester took a number of phone calls threatening his family and warning him that he would not "live long" if he continued to criticise Islam. He has been given an emergency number at Kent Police, along with other undisclosed protection measures, and said that the threats were being taken "seriously".

Speaking to The Times, Dr Nazir-Ali, who is on the conservative evangelical wing of the Church and is Britain's only Asian bishop, said: "The irony is that I had similar threats when I was a bishop in Pakistan, but I never thought I would have them here. My point in saying what I did was that Britain had lost its Christian vision, which would have provided the resources to offer hospitality to others." He said that this absence of a Christian vision had led to multiculturalism. "Everyone agrees that multiculturalism has had disastrous consequences, and that segregation and extremism have arisen from this."

Liu Hongqun was forced to have her baby girl in a toilet after three days waiting at Beijing West station after the freak weather snapped power lines. Liu and her husband were just two of 105 million passengers across China who have been left stranded as heavy snowfall and ice storms disrupted Chinese new year travel plans.

The worst affected station had been Guangzhou, in the far south, where 800,000 people have been waiting since heavy snow began wreaking havoc a week ago. Trains finally began moving today as the key line between Beijing and Guangzhou was restored, in part by using diesel locomotives to get through areas hit by power shortages.

A staggering 150,000 homes have collapsed and another 650,000 have been seriously damaged, disaster relief officials have revealed. And a total of 64 people have so far died and the effects of the weather crisis has triggered food shortages. "The impact of the snow disaster in southern China on winter crop production is extremely serious," said Chen Xiwen, the government's leading expert on the agricultural economy.

The extreme weather is forcast to last another week.

"We will work to close the border between us and Egypt," Mahmoud al-Zahar told reporters upon returning to Gaza from talks in Cairo. "We will restore control over this border, in cooperation with Egypt and gradually."
Hamas militants blew up a frontier wall on January 23 to allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, impoverished by an Israeli-led blockade, to pour into the Egyptian Sinai and stock up on supplies. Egypt has since tried to seal the crossings. Zahar called the toppling of the wall a "popular action".

Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan brokered a deal between Kenya's rival parties on Friday to take immediate steps to end post-election violence which has killed nearly 900 people and displaced more than a quarter of a million. But on Saturday, huge flames soared over slum dwellings in the Rift Valley town of Kericho. Residents dragged out mattresses, cupboards, suitcases and pots and pans, piling them onto carts as they tried to escape the unrest.

"They say these buildings belong to a Kikuyu so they are burning them to tell them to go away," said Victor Kemboi, one Kericho resident, as shacks smouldered behind him. Riots, clashes with security forces and ethnic reprisals broke out after President Mwai Kibaki was returned to power in a Dec. 27 poll which his rival Raila Odinga says was rigged.

The conflict, which has often pitted Kibaki's Kikuyu ethnic group against other tribes supporting Odinga, has tarnished the image of a nation long seen as one of Africa's more stable and with one of the continent's most promising economies.

The consortium will focus on Ambac, America's second-biggest insurer, before addressing concerns at other insurance firms. The consortium, which includes Citigroup, Société Générale and UBS, is working with the New York Insurance Department, the state's industry regulator, to bail out bond insurers, who are facing multibillion-dollar claims in the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

Although the plans are at an early stage, they are most likely to involve the consortium raising $15 billion to inject into the handful of insurers that dominate the market.

THE BOND INSURERS TRADITIONALLY HAVE HAD THE TOP AAA CREDIT RATING, which is key to their ability to attract new underwriting business. This year Ambac, Financial Guaranty and Security Capital Assurance have lost their top rating.

The insurers desperately need cash to meet the expected surge in claims as well as to regain or preserve their AAA ratings. ANALYSTS SAY THAT BOND INSURERS WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SURVIVE WITHOUT THE TOP CREDIT RATING AS POLICY-HOLDERS NEED TO HAVE ABSOLUTE ASSURANCE THAT THE UNDERWRITER HAS THE ABILITY TO MEET ANY CLAIMS. If they are to survive, the insurers need multi-billion-dollar cash injections or to find a buyer, analysts argue.

The consortium, which also includes BNP Paribas, Wachovia and Dresdner, believes that it would be cheaper to prop up the confidence of bond investors by buoying up its underwriters. HOWEVER, EXPERTS BELIEVE A CASH INJECTION OF AS MUCH AS $200 BILLION, NOT $15 BILLION, IS NEEDED.

HESHAM H. ISLAM, a special assistant to DEPUTY DEFENSE SECRETARY GORDON ENGLAND, recently criticized Maj. Stephen Coughlin, one of the military's leading authorities on Islamic war doctrine, FOR MAKING THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE RELIGION OF ISLAM AND TERRORISM. After Islam lodged complaints, Coughlin's contract with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon was not renewed.

Islam also was upset with briefings Coughlin recently prepared for the U.S. military warning that major U.S. Muslim groups were fronting for THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, a worldwide jihadist movement based in Egypt. Islam, who was born and raised in Egypt, is heavily involved with one of the groups - the Islamic Society of North America, which U.S. prosecutors last year named as a member of the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terror-funding case. Speaking during ISNA's 2006 opening ceremonies, England proclaimed, "THERE IS NO CONTRADICTION BETWEEN THE PEACEFUL RELIGION OF ISLAM AND AMERICA'S VALUES AND PRINCIPLES."

Coughlin reached the opposite conclusion in a 329-page report submitted to the National Defense Intelligence College, in which HE WARNS THAT ISLAMIC LAW SANCTIONS VIOLENCE.

Recently declassified FBI documents reveal its sister organization, an Islamist think tank known as the International Institute of Islamic Thought, or IIIT, is involved in A MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD CONSPIRACY TO WAGE A CULTURAL AND POLITICAL JIHAD TO EVENTUALLY TAKE OVER AMERICA FROM WITHIN - MOST NOTABLY, THROUGH INFILTRATION OF GOVERNMENT AGENCIES.

The FBI official warned that the Muslim aides are part of a conspiracy by Muslim Brotherhood fronts to run "influence operations" against the U.S. government. A senior U.S. official who has met with England says he was not even aware THAT A CONVICTED TERRORIST AND AL-QAIDA FUND-RAISER CREATED THE PENTAGON'S MUSLIM CHAPLAINS CORPS. Adurahman Alamoudi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader and founder of the American Muslim Council, PLACED MUSLIM CHAPLAINS THROUGHOUT THE MILITARY. He is now in jail on charges of terrorism. However, most of the chaplains he trained and sponsored are still in their current positions

"Hesham Islam is an Islamist with a pro-Muslim Brotherhood bent who has brought in groups to the Pentagon who have been unindicted co-conspirators," he said. Emerson said A "TROJAN HORSE" OF SUBVERSIVES AND POTENTIAL SPIES HAVE PENETRATED DEEP INSIDE THE PENTAGON, and they are now bearing fruit with the ouster of Coughlin. Sources say Islam has high security clearance.

A former Pentagon colleague of Coughlin described Islam as a "gatekeeper," who at a minimum, is blocking candid discussion of the religious nature of the threat posed by Muslim terrorists. Such action, William Gawthrop says, thwarts the U.S. war effort, because it denies military brass and rank-and-file the information they need to effectively fight the Islamist enemy. "WE STILL DO NOT HAVE AN IN-DEPTH UNDERSTANDING OF THE WAR-FIGHTING DOCTRINE LAID DOWN BY (THE MUSLIM PROPHET) MUHAMMAD, how it might be applied today by an increasing number of Islamic groups, or how it might be countered," Gawthrop told WND. He says Coughlin was trying to bridge that gap before being pushed out.

Blair, currently the Middle East envoy for the US, Russia, EU and the UN, has told friends he has made no final decision, but is increasingly willing to put himself forward for the job if it comes with real powers to intervene in defence and trade affairs.

Blair, who is being actively promoted by the French president Nicolas Sarkozy, recognises he would need to abandon his well-paid, private sector jobs if he won. His wife Cherie - often portrayed as seeking ever more wealth and well-paid consultancies for her husband - is understood to be supportive of him accepting the job.

Some Blair allies also say that he now recognises that as envoy in the Middle East he is not going to be allowed to become the key player in furthering Israeli-Palestinian talks this year, and will be reduced to a role of supporting political development in Palestine and boosting its economy.

The president of the European council of ministers is a post created under the Lisbon treaty. The president will be the permanent chair of the council of ministers, Europe's chief decision-making body. Apart from Blair, two other candidates most often mentioned are the former Austrian chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, promoted by Germany, and the current Luxembourg prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker.