Israeli intelligence is now estimating that Iran will master centrifuge technology and be able to begin enriching uranium by the end of this year, 12 months ahead of schedule. As a result, Israeli military officials believe the Islamic republic could have a nuclear weapon by the middle of 2009. "WITHIN A YEAR, THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT WILL HAVE TO DECIDE BETWEEN TWO OPTIONS: either not do anything and reconcile itself to the fact that Iran is now nuclear, or take unilateral military action," Giora Eiland, Israel's former national security adviser, told Scotland on Sunday.

According to the Jerusalem Post, Israel is also worried that Tehran is developing a cruise missile that can evade interception by the Arrow, Israel's anti-ballistic missile defences. Iran is suspected of using smuggled Ukrainian X-55 cruise missiles as a model for its own project. A cruise missile, which flies low to dodge radar and interception, could be used to carry a nuclear warhead.

With US President George Bush nearing the end of his term, the likelihood of US military action appears to be fading. THE STRONG CHANCE OF DEMOCRAT BARACK OBAMA WINNING THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE MEANS ISRAEL WILL HAVE TO CONSIDER GOING IT ALONE. "It's certainly not an option to be taken lightly, but at the end of the day, WE MAY DECIDE IT IS THE ONLY OPTION WE HAVE," an Israeli official told the Scotland on Sunday.

Eau Claire, where "old-fashioned winters" have been a thing of the past, recorded 43 days of below-zero temperatures, while folks down in Madison shoveled away at a 117-year record snowfall throughout the season, as did many in New England and Canada. Rare snowfalls struck Buenos Aires, Capetown, and Sidney during their mid-year winter, while China continually battled blizzards. Even Baghdad experienced measurable snowfall.

FROM JANUARY 2007 THROUGH THE END OF JANUARY 2008, THE AVERAGE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE FELL BY NEARLY A DEGREE FAHRENHEIT, based on data obtained by the MET Office in Great Britain and other international temperature monitoring networks.

What are we to make of this? The recent climate conference held in New York City, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, provides some answers. Several hundred climatologists in attendance dispelled notions that the global warming debate is over. Most attendees, who readily acknowledge the existence of post-Little Ice Age warming, BELIEVE MAN-MADE EMISSIONS ARE UNLIKELY TO CAUSE MAJOR CLIMATE CHANGE AND SIGNED A DECLARATION TO THAT EFFECT.

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Leading academics and watchdog groups allege that the UN's main offset fund is being routinely abused by chemical, wind, gas and hydro companies WHO ARE CLAIMING EMISSION REDUCTION CREDITS FOR PROJECTS THAT SHOULD NOT QUALIFY. The result is that no genuine pollution cuts are being made, undermining assurances by the UK government and others that carbon markets are dramatically reducing greenhouse gases, the researchers say.

The criticism centres on the UN's clean development mechanism (CDM), an international system established by the Kyoto process that allows rich countries to meet emissions targets by funding clean energy projects in developing nations. Credits from the project are being bought by European companies and governments who are unable to meet their carbon reduction targets.

The market for CDM credits is growing fast. At present it is worth NEARLY $20BN A YEAR, but this is expected to grow to OVER $100BN WITHIN FOUR YEARS. More than 1,000 projects have so far been approved, and 2,000 more are making their way through the process.

Pagan Amum, secretary general of the southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), told reporters northern troops were building up around the remote central town, with southern troops likely to follow. Amum said the way to avoid a full-scale conflict was for all troops to leave the town, to be replaced by a U.N. peacekeeping force or, eventually, joint north-south military units.

"We are on the brink of war as we speak. Clashes have already happened and forces are building up," he said before a news conference in Khartoum. Sudan has witnessed sporadic, sometimes fierce fighting in recent weeks in the Abyei region, which is claimed by both Khartoum and the southern government. AT STAKE ARE A NEARBY OIL PIPELINE AND INSTALLATIONS THAT PRODUCE AROUND HALF OF SUDAN'S DAILY OUTPUT OF 500,000 BARRELS OF OIL, AND GRAZING GROUNDS AND TERRITORY COVETED BY NORTHERNERS AND SOUTHERNERS.

LATEST - from independent.co.uk - Abyei, in the heart of Sudan, was a town of more than 30,000 people. It had a school and a hospital, a marketplace and a bar. IT DOESN'T EXIST ANY MORE. Almost everything has been burnt to the ground. What remains is devastation.

BUT LEADING POLITICIANS CLAIM HE'S JUST TRYING TO DIVERT ATTENTION FROM HIS CORRUPTION SCANDAL. The announcement from the office of the Israeli prime minister in Jerusalem was short, dry and dramatic. Peace negotiations are underway between Israel and Syria, with Turkey serving as the intermediary. In making the announcement, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert confirmed for the first time what Syrian President Bashar Assad had already disclosed a month ago. At the time, Olmert had remained silent, only indirectly confirming Assad's statement.

LIFE IS BECOMING MORE DIFFICULT FOR OLMERT. The Syrian-Israeli talks can only become serious if he manages to shed the suspicions of corruption that currently weigh heavily on him. A prime minister who faces criminal charges would no longer be acceptable. Members of Olmert's Kadima Party are already discussing - openly, no less - the question of a successor, especially with Olmert under police investigation in other scandals, as well. This explains Olmert's decision to take the offensive and PORTRAY HIMSELF TO VOTERS AS AN APOSTLE OF PEACE. The cameras, Olmert hopes, would then highlight him as a statesman and not as much as a politician plagued by scandal.

The road to harmonious coexistence between Syria and Israel remains long - so long, in fact, that Israeli and Syrian negotiators still refuse to sit directly facing each other. They are staying in separate hotels in Ankara, while their Turkish hosts shuttle back and forth between the two delegations with interim results. BUT EVEN THIS IS PROGRESS. IN THE PAST, ISRAELIS AND SYRIANS WERE NOT EVEN WILLING TO MEET IN THE SAME CITY.

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."