A handful of MEPs have been exercising their right to explain, after each vote, why they voted as they did in not more than 60 seconds. But even this was too much for the majority of EURO-FEDERALISTS. They were so determined to prevent us from making our gesture that they crossly tore up their own rule-book.

Whenever I complained of the impropriety of what was being done, I got the same answer: WE HAVE THE MAJORITY BEHIND US. This is true - opponents of the European Constitution number no more than 50-odd MEPs out of 785. But a simple majority cannot override a constitution. This may seem a small point, but in it is contained the entirety of the difference between constitutional government and arbitrary rule. I REMINDED MEPS YESTERDAY THAT THE 1933 ENABLING ACT HAD COMMANDED A MAJORITY IN THE REICHSTAG, BUT THAT ITS PASSAGE OPENED THE DOOR TO DICTATORSHIP.

Whatever else they are, MEPs are not Nazis. My point was that MEPs, of all people, should be wary of setting the law aside arbitrarily. Their greatest boast, and their constant justification, is that they have spread democracy across Europe. That is why it is so outrageous to see them DISREGARDING THE RULES WHEN THE RULES DON'T SUIT THEM.

It is precisely this behaviour that has turned people against the European project. "Yes" votes are treated as final and binding, "No" votes as obstacles to be overcome. UNAUDITED ACCOUNTS are treated as a small price to pay for the goal of closer integration. THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS.

The wealthy avoid tax worth £13bn while the country's largest firms escape tax worth £12bn, according to the study commissioned by the Trades Union Congress. The report concluded that Britain's top 50 companies pay corporation tax at 22.5 per cent, far below the official rate of 30 per cent, by using a range of measures to manage the amount of tax due.

Richard Murphy, a tax specialist, estimated that the real tax paid by corporations was falling by 0.5 per cent year - indicating that major firms are becoming more and more effective at avoiding tax. Mr Murphy's report, based on studying hundreds of company reports and trawling through data from HM Revenue and Customs, said that wealthy people saved £3.2bn in tax by turning conventional income into investment income, which is taxed at a lower rate, or by shifting income to family members on lower tax bands. Another £3.8bn in tax was lost by moving transactions out of the country.

Union leaders stressed that tax-avoidance measures were wholly legal, but urged ministers to close loopholes to make real tax payments reflect headline tax rates.

From 1981 to 2000, the proportion of babies who survived after being born at 22-25 weeks gestation more than doubled from 32 per cent to 71 per cent at the University College London Hospitals NHS Trust. Pressure has been growing for a cut in the 24-week limit because of evidence that some babies are viable at gestations of 23 or 22 weeks. MPs have been promised a free vote on any amendments on abortion to the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Bill currently before Parliament.

No one any more believes the soothing noises from the builders (aka investment bankers), who say the worst will soon be over. The Federal Reserve's drastic cuts in interest rates amount to little more than a bit of cosmetic repointing. Yesterday there was a fresh buckling noise coming from the foundations, where the monoline insurers reside. These are the institutions that insure trillions of dollars of bond issues against default. Having strayed from their original safe but dull role of insuring municipal bonds to underwriting racy sub-prime-backed securities, they are paying the price. One of the biggest, MBIA, announced a $2.3 billion loss yesterday, while another, FGIC, was downgraded by Fitch. All have seen their shares thumped and face further downgrades.

No one quite knows how bad the impact would be if one failed. Together they insure bonds with a face value of $2,400 billion. Most are rock solid, but there is still a residual $231 billion of more questionable securities, a large chunk of them backed by US sub-prime mortgages. Defaults by struggling American homeowners are going to work their way back along the food chain, ultimately to the monoline insurers.

Monolines played a key role in the gigantic game of financial pass-the-parcel that has characterised the credit markets in the past few years. The basic rule was to make a quick turn and pass the risk on to the next mug as quickly as possible. Monolines were where the buck was supposed to stop. If one of these insurers were to fail, the liability would be passed back to the banks.

In an address to members of the Vatican department on doctrinal matters, Benedict said the Church had a duty to defend the "great values at stake" in the field of bioethics. The speech was the latest in a series in which the conservative Pope has told his listeners that scientific progress should not be accepted uncritically. Benedict, who headed the same department for years before his election in 2005, said the Church was not against scientific progress but wanted it based on "ethical-moral principles".

He said this included total respect for the human being as a person "from conception until natural death," and respect for the natural transmission of life through sexual intercourse. Practices like freezing embryos, suppression of embryos in multiple pregnancies, embryonic stem cell research, the prospect of human cloning and artificial insemination outside the body had "shattered the barriers meant to protect human dignity", he said.

"When human beings in the weakest and most defenseless state of their existence are selected, abandoned, killed or used as pure 'biological material,' how can one deny that they are being treated not as 'someone' but as 'something,'" he said. It was the Pope's latest foray into scientific issues. On Monday he warned against the "seductive" powers of science, saying it was important that science did not become the sole criteria for goodness.

More than 10% of virus samples taken in Western Europe this winter were resistant to oseltamivir, better known as Tamiflu, according to figures from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). Nearly 10% of the samples in Canada were resistant too, according to national authorities there, and the U.S. found nearly 7% resistance.

The number of resistant strains are still small overall, but the superbugs aren't evenly distributed around the world: In Norway, a staggering 75% of the 16 samples taken this winter were drug-resistant - enough to pull up Western Europe's average by about 8 percentage points.

One thing is certain. The news won't help Roche Holding AG, the Swiss holding company for Tamiflu manufacturer Hoffman-La Roche. Tamiflu sales dropped off sharply in the second half of 2007, Roche announced this week.

African leaders at a summit in neighboring Ethiopia attended by the U.N. head have called for urgent action to stop the bloodletting, which has turned one of the continent's more stable nations and best economies into its most pressing crisis. Ban arrived from Ethiopia in the morning to meet predecessor Kofi Annan, who is spearheading mediation efforts in Nairobi, as well as opposition leader Raila Odinga and civil society representatives, U.N. officials said.

He told the 53-nation African Union summit on Thursday the violence in Kenya threatened to "escalate to catastrophic levels" and called on President Mwai Kibaki and Odinga to do everything possible to resolve the crisis. "The aim of the visit is to offer support to the Annan-led panel and be briefed by the U.N. country team on the humanitarian crisis," a U.N. official in Nairobi said. More than 300,000 Kenyans are living as refugees.

Mr Gate's letter to the German Defence Minister has been described as "unusually stern" by a German newspaper which has seen the correspondence. The German Defence Minister, Franz Josef Jung, is reported to have issued an equally stern response. The Nato-led force has almost 37,000 troops in Afghanistan.

Mr Gates's letter asks for Germany to consider a new mandate which could allow thousands more troops to be sent to Afghanistan with some deployed to the more dangerous south. This harsh exchange of letters comes amid growing concern that the Nato led mission in Afghanistan is failing. It also comes amid growing signs of a strain in the Nato alliance itself.

Washington has tried to avoid a public row with Nato members. But speaking to a senate committee a senior US diplomat stated that "we expect more from our Nato allies" adding that too few allies had combat troops fighting the insurgents in the south.

Men who consume two or more sugary soft drinks a day have an 85% higher risk of gout compared with those who drink less than one a month, a study suggests. Cases in the US have doubled in recent decades and it seems fructose, a type of sugar, may be to blame, the British Medical Journal study reports. UK experts said those with gout would be advised to cut out sugary drinks.

About 1.5% of the UK population currently suffers from gout and there has been an increase in numbers over the last 30 years - although the condition is more associated with Victorian times. The symptoms of painful, swollen joints, mainly in the lower limbs, are caused when uric acid crystallises out of the blood into the joints.
US and Canadian researchers said the increase in cases had coincided with a substantial rise in the consumption of soft drinks. Previous research had also shown that fructose increases levels of uric acid in the bloodstream.

Dr Andrew Bamji, president of the British Society for Rheumatology, said anecdotally cases of gout appeared to be rising. "When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense in that fructose inhibits the excretion of uric acid. I will certainly change my advice to patients and I suspect the number drinking fructose is quite large."

Without doubt, this would be a significant geopolitical move on both Iran's and China's part, bound to unsettle the US superpower that enjoys unrivalled hegemony in the oil region and which has unsettled China with its recent civilian nuclear agreement with India, widely interpreted as a long-term "containing China" initiative. In the tight interplay of geopolitics and geo-economics, with China heavily dependent on energy imports from Iran and other Persian Gulf states, the trend is definitely toward China's naval complement of its flurry of energy deals in order to secure its precious oil and (liquefied) gas cargo ships exiting through the narrow corridors of the Strait of Hormuz.

Presently, China's strategy is confined to the port city of Gwadar along the southwestern coast of Pakistan in Balochistan province, strategically located near the Hormuz Strait. Yet, due to the close US-Pakistan relations, it is highly improbable the US would permit Islamabad to enter into strategic relations with Beijing so that China, still lacking a formidable navy, could utilize it for power projection in the region. Not so with Iran, which is constantly threatened by the US, and now France, and which already enjoys observer status at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), headed by China and Russia. Iran's bid to join the SCO has been stalled partly as a result of the standoff over its nuclear program, but will likely succeed in the not too distant future should the present patterns of Iran-Russia and Iran-China cooperation continue.

Regarding the latter, China has already surpassed Germany as Iran's number one trade partner. Sinopec, China's largest oil refiner, has just finalized a multi-billion dollar deal to develop the giant Yadavaran oil field, and this is in addition to the "deal of the century" contract for natural gas from Iran's immense North Pars field. Chinese contractors are also busy constructing oil terminals for Iran in the Caspian Sea, extending the Tehran metro, building airports, among other projects. And this while China arms sales to Iran have included such hot items as ballistic-missile technology and air-defense radars.

The growing Iran-China cooperation on the energy and trade fronts is bound sooner or later to spill over into more meaningful military cooperation and, in turn, this depends to some extent on the ebbs and flows of Iran-US and China-US "games of strategy", particularly if China feels additional pressure from the US on the geopolitical front.

Warning of catastrophe, U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon said he would travel to Nairobi on Friday from an African Union summit in neighboring Ethiopia to help his predecessor Kofi Annan, who has been trying to mediate an end to the crisis. The instability has shocked neighboring states and Western donors, and transformed Kenya from one of Africa's more peaceful and prosperous nations into its most urgent crisis.

Fresh protests erupted on Thursday after David Kimutai Too, an opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) member of parliament, was killed in the Rift Valley town of Eldoret. Police commissioner Hussein Ali said Too's murder was a "crime of passion". The traffic police officer responsible, who had been arrested, had shot a fellow officer believed to be his girlfriend along with the legislator, he said.

ODM leader Raila Odinga said it was a political act, without giving evidence. "I condemn this second execution of an ODM member of parliament. The purpose of this killing is to reduce the ODM majority," he said. Earlier this week, another opposition legislator, Melitus Were, was gunned down outside his Nairobi home, triggering rioting and ethnic killings. ODM said it was a "political assassination". Police said they were treating it as "murder".

The world's second biggest quoted oil company said that fourth quarter income climbed 60 per cent, during a period when the oil price soared to $100 a barrel and prices at the petrol pump climbed to more than a £1 a litre. Union leaders called the results "obscene" at a time when pensioners, motorists and industry were struggling to pay higher energy prices. Tony Woodley, the General Secretary of Unite, demanded that the Government levy a windfall tax on the oil majors.

A newborn baby was illegally snatched from its mother by social workers in the early hours of yesterday morning. Officials claimed the 18-year-old mother was unfit to care for the child because of mental health problems. But hours later a High Court judge ordered the infant to be returned immediately, saying THE SOCIAL WORKERS HAD ACTED BEYOND THEIR POWERS. Mr Justice Munby told the officials that they "SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER".

The troubling case follows complaints from parents THAT SOCIAL WORKERS HAVE TAKEN THEIR CHILDREN FOR ADOPTION WITHOUT GOOD REASON, and suggestions that families are being broken up to meet bureaucratic targets.

He said: "On the face of it, WHAT WAS DONE WAS WITHOUT LAWFUL AUTHORITY. The professionals involved in this case should know better. You cannot remove children, short of immediate murderous intent (situations where a child is in immediate danger), except by lawful means, which means either by a police officer or court". The judge added: "There is no suggestion in the documents shown to me so far that the mother is posing a risk of exposing the child to immediate physical attack and physical harm." The ruling was made shortly after midday, and mother and baby were reunited 46 minutes later.

Adoption targets were brought in seven years ago, when Tony Blair was trying to persuade social workers to find adoptive homes for more children. The then Prime Minister set targets to raise the number of children being adopted by 50 per cent to 5,400 every year. He promised millions of pounds to councils that managed to achieve the targets. Some have already received more than £2million for successful adoptions. Campaigners say the number of babies under a month old being taken into care and then adopted has risen from 500 in 1997 to 1,300 a year. Last year a BBC investigation discovered more than 100 claims of miscarriages of justice by parents whose children were taken by social workers for adoption.

Layton Bevan, co-founder of Families and Social Services Information Team, a support group for families frustrated by social services' actions, said: "It's obscene the way some social services can take children away from parents without the proper paperwork. We are aware of this happening in hundreds of cases a year through the sheer incompetence and organisational failure of social services departments. If they need to meet adoption targets they will do it by taking children from vulnerable families. Worryingly, the social services involved seem to have no accountability and ride roughshod over the law and the parents and children involved."

Members of Kenya's biggest tribe have disappeared in their thousands from Kisumu, making it the first - but perhaps not the last - city to be ethnically cleansed. "If we find any Kikuyus, we're going to slaughter them or burn them alive," 19-year-old Daniel Odongo said Wednesday, who wielded the machete as a mob of hundreds of young men with rusty axes and other weapons roared their approval. "But there is none in the houses around here."

Government figures released Wednesday said the number of people forced from their homes has risen to 300,000, showing that ethnic cleansing has not diminished, and this threatens to redraw Kenya's once cosmopolitan ethnic map in areas like the Rift Valley. On Wednesday, the top U.S. envoy for Africa, Jendayi Frazer, said Kenya was experiencing "clear ethnic cleansing" in the Rift Valley region. "There was an organized effort to push people out of the Rift Valley," Frazer said.

INDONESIA - Forty missing as floods sweep away Indonesia bridge. 80 people are feared dead in landslides and floods in the neighbouring Central Java province.

CARIBBEAN - Rare December tropical Storm Olga kills 22 in Caribbean.

ISRAEL - The coldest winter Snow storm covers Jerusalem for second night.

CHINA - China's worst snow storms in decades look set to continue for at least three more days, a top forecaster has warned. Storms cost China $4.5.billion.

AUSTRALIA - Australia's North eastern coast has been battered by cyclonic winds and flooding in December and January after many years of drought. You either get too much rain, or not enough!

USA IN 2007 - This year has been a year of weather extremes, from incessant rain in the Northwest to chronic drought in the heartland and wildfires in the West.

FIGI - This week Cyclone Gene hit Fiji's main island of Viti Levu, 3,500 km (2,200 miles) east of Australia, causing serious flooding.

SOUTHERN AFRICA - Africans lose homes, face crocodiles in floods. Floods and heavy rains which swept through southern Africa have left about 70,000 people in Malawi homeless. Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique have also been hit by serious floods that have killed many.

UNITED KINGDOM - The unseasonably warm and wet winter so far in Britain has coaxed plants into early flowering. Daffodils were in bloom early January - a month earlier than normal. Update - January blew out with a vengeance yesterday as 80mph winds brought chaos around the the country and claimed the life of a lorry driver. Now a new wave of weather misery will batter Britain, with much of the country facing disruption from blizzards and icy conditions.