Waqf officials say the digging of the trench, 500 meters long and 1.5 meters deep, is necessary to replace 40-year-old electric cables. But the petitioners say the work "is causing irreversible damage to antiquities and archaeological artifacts of the greatest importance, and is being carried out illegally, without the requisite authorizations."

The petition, against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, other cabinet ministers and the Israel Antiquities Authority, maintains that Temple courtyards were located where the dig is taking place, and that some 400 tons of dirt removed in the process contain priceless archaeological artifacts from various periods.

"The excavations were carried out in an area where the bedrock is sometimes at a depth of only half a meter," the petition stated. "Therefore, massive digging to a depth of a meter and a half entails damage to ground layers, some of which may have been in place since the first Temple stood there 3,000 years ago. Excavating with heavy equipment and tractors severely damaged the ground and directly caused the destruction of ancient stones and other artifacts."

The petitioners charged that law enforcement authorities are failing to meet their obligation to uphold the Antiquities Law on the Temple Mount.

The [Pope's] homily centered on the mantra of the early Christian martyrs of Abitene: "Without Sunday we cannot live."

The Pontiff said: "Sunday has been transformed in our Western societies into the weekend, into leisure time. But Sunday," said the Pontiff, "also calls to mind 'the day of the dawning of creation'. Therefore Sunday is also the Church's weekly feast of creation - the feast of thanksgiving and joy over God's creation."

"At a time when creation seems to be endangered in so many ways through human activity, we should consciously advert to this dimension of Sunday too."

Today was the first session that markets in Asia were open since the widely-watched non-farm US payroll figures released on Friday showed that the economy lost jobs for the first time since 2003. The figures have helped fuel fears that the slump in the US housing market could drag the economy into recession.

Weaker economic data out of Japan today did little to brighten the mood or the risk appetite of investors. The economy, still the world's second-biggest, shrank at twice the annual rate that economists had been expecting in the second quarter. The 1.2pc annual contraction makes it less likely that the country's central bank will raise interest rates further this year.

Takehireo Sata, an economist at Morgan Stanley, told Bloomberg News that "a cloud is hanging over the domestic and global economy."

Current UK passports contain a traditional message from the British sovereign printed inside the front cover requesting 'assistance and protection' for the holder anywhere in the world 'in the Name of Her Majesty'.

But the time-honoured passage could be dropped as a result of the new European Treaty - which critics claim is simply a repackaged version of the discredited EU Constitution.

A new message would set out rules under which any EU citizen who gets into trouble in a country where their own state has no representative can go to the British embassy and demand help.

This huge refinancing, mainly through London, exceeds the $100 billion that became due in mid-August, and which sparked the most serious phase in the money-market crisis, which has seen banks scrambling for funds and market interest rates rising sharply. "This is a serious pressure point," said one leading banker.

Another senior executive of one of Britain's top five retail banks said: "These are the worst conditions I have seen in money markets for 20 years".

The refinancing of the commercial paper is expected to start tomorrow and end on September 20. In that short period the City is braced for huge market volatility.

The company said the job cuts could be lower if interest rates fell and mortgage market prospects improved. But on the basis of the current interest rate environment it was predicting a 25 per cent fall in the total mortgage market in 2008.

Eight immigrants from the former Soviet Union have been arrested in recent days in connection with at least 15 attacks, and a ninth fled the country, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said, in the first such known cell to be discovered in Israel.

All of the suspects are in their late teens or early 20s and have Israeli citizenship, Rosenfeld said. A court decided Sunday to keep them in custody. The young men covered their faces with their shirts during the hearing, revealing their tattooed arms. They did not comment.

News of the arrests came as a shock in Israel, which was founded nearly 60 years ago as a refuge for Jews in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust. Any forms of anti-Semitism around the world outrage Israelis, and the discovery of such violence in the country's midst made the front pages of newspapers and dominated talk on morning radio shows.

The gang documented its activities on film and in photographs. Israeli TV stations showed grainy footage of people lying helpless on floors while several people kicked them, and of a man getting hit from behind on the head with an empty bottle.

The ancient tunnel was dug beneath what would become the main road of Jerusalem in the days of the second biblical Temple, which the Romans destroyed in the year 70, the dig's directors, archaeology Professor Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority, told a news conference.

The walls - ashlar stones one meter deep - reach a height of 3 meters - in some places and are covered by heavy stone slabs that were the main road's paving stones, Shukron said. Several manholes are visible, and portions of the original plastering remain, he said.

Pottery sherds, vessel fragments and coins from the end of the Second Temple period were discovered inside the channel, attesting to its age, Reich said. The discovery of the drainage channel was momentous in itself, a sign of how the city's rulers looked out for the welfare of their citizens by organizing a system that drained the rainfall and prevented flooding, Reich said.

The discovery "shows you planning on a grand scale, unlike other cities in the ancient Near East," said anthropologist Joe Zias, an expert in the Second Temple period who was not involved in the dig. But what makes the channel doubly significant is its role as an escape hatch for Jews desperate to flee the conquering Romans, the dig's directors said.

Historian Josephus Flavius indicated in "The War of the Jews" that numerous people took shelter in the channel and lived inside until they fled the city through its southern end. "It was a place where people hid and fled to from burning, destroyed Jerusalem," Shukron said. About 100 meters of the canal have been uncovered so far. Reich estimates its total length will approximate one kilometer, stretching north from the Shiloah Pool at the Old City's southern end to the Temple Mount.

Archeologists think the tunnel leads to the Kidron River, which empties into the Dead Sea.

The 80-year-old German Pontiff told diplomats and representatives of international organizations that Europe could not deny its Christian roots because Christianity had played a decisive role in forging its history and culture.

"It was in Europe that the notion of human rights was first formulated. The fundamental human right, the presupposition of every other right, is the right to life itself," he said in an address at the former imperial Hofburg Palace. "This is true of life from the moment of conception until its natural end. Abortion, consequently, cannot be a human right -- it is the very opposite. It is a deep wound in society." He also said Europe "cannot and must not deny her Christian roots" as they are "a dynamic component of our civilization".

Last March, Benedict strongly criticized the European Union for excluding a mention of God and Christian roots in declarations on its 50th anniversary, saying the continent was committing a form of "apostasy of itself" by excluding God.

But his words had ramifications beyond Europe. Abortion is expected to be a big issue in next year's campaign for president in the United States, where conservatives want to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion.

He was speaking on the final day of his three-day visit to Austria. In his sermon, the Pope said leisure was a good thing amid the mad rush of the modern world, but warned of the dangers of it becoming wasted time.
Correspondents say the papal visit to Austria comes as the influence of the Catholic Church is in decline there.

"Give the soul its Sunday, give Sunday its soul," the Pope said, quoting a phrase coined by a German bishop in the 20th Century. "Leisure time is certainly something good and necessary, especially amid the mad rush of the modern world," he said in his sermon.

The Pope added though that if leisure lacked an inner focus, it could easily become wasted time. The Pope has come to Austria not only as a pilgrim, but also as a missionary, according to the local press. His aim during this brief three-day visit is to help revitalise religious practice in an increasingly secular Austrian society, our correspondent adds.

According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second. However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory.

The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart.

Being able to travel faster than the speed of light would lead to a wide variety of bizarre consequences. For instance, an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving.

The scientists were investigating a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling, which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable laws. Dr Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: "For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of."

Now, in another report that sounds like it comes out of the pages of a Harry Potter book, the University of St Andrews team has created 'incredible levitation effects' by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together. Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts.

Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person. The Casimir force is a consequence of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the world of atoms and subatomic particles that is not only the most successful theory of physics but also the most baffling.

The force is due to neither electrical charge or gravity, for example, but the fluctuations in all-pervasive energy fields in the intervening empty space between the objects and is one reason atoms stick together, also explaining a "dry glue" effect that enables a gecko to walk across a ceiling.

Now, using a special lens of a kind that has already been built, Prof Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin report in the New Journal of Physics they can engineer the Casimir force to repel, rather than attract.

Because the Casimir force causes problems for nanotechnologists, who are trying to build electrical circuits and tiny mechanical devices on silicon chips, among other things, the team believes the feat could initially be used to stop tiny objects from sticking to each other.

Prof Leonhardt explained, "The Casimir force is the ultimate cause of friction in the nano-world, in particular in some microelectromechanical systems."

Almost 20 per cent of the short-term money market loans issued by European banks are due to mature between September 11 and September 19. Senior bankers fear that they will have to refinance almost all of these debts with funds from their own coffers, putting a further strain on bank balance sheets.

Tens of billions of pounds of these commercial paper loans have already built up in the financial system, because fear-ridden investors no longer want to buy them. Roughly £23bn of these loans expire on September 17 alone. Fears of this impending call on bank credit lines are the true reason that lending between banks has ground to a halt, according to senior money market sources.

Banks have been stockpiling cash in preparation for this "double rollover" week, which sees quarterly loans expire alongside shorter term debts - exacerbating a problem that lies at the heart of the credit crisis.

"Banks are hoarding cash," said David Brickman, the head of European credit strategy at Lehman Brothers. "We think the reason for that is the commercial paper markets. There was $100bn of commercial paper issued by European institutions that was scheduled to roll over in August, much of which struggled to do so.

"Those markets are just not functioning normally, so some debt has already come on to bank balance sheets and more will have to follow. We estimate that between September 11 and 19 $139bn [£68.5bn] of European commercial paper [will come] up for renewal, including monthly and quarterly maturities. That's why banks are hoarding cash."

Market sources believe confidence will be restored only when all the sub-prime losses in the system have been exposed. Christopher Wood, the strategist at Hong Kong-based brokerage CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets credited with predicting the US sub-prime crisis two years ago, said: "The sub-prime crisis has exposed the structured credit asset class as highly dubious. In five years' time it won't exist."

In the latest sign of the "great wall of money" from Asia heading towards western Europe, the infrastructure company of Li Ka-shing is understood to be among a number of suitors preparing first-round offers for the network, which delivers electricity to some 2.2m customers in north-west England.

Li Ka-shing may be an unknown name in Britain but over the past 20 years his Hong Kong-based conglomerate, Hutchison Whampoa, has amassed a sizeable UK portfolio worth around £15bn - making him Asia's biggest investor in Britain. His empire over here includes household names such as 3, the mobile phone network, Superdrug, the health and beauty chain, three of Britain's biggest ports, including Felixstowe and Harwich, and Cambridge Water.

Cash-rich bidders from emerging markets in Asia and the Middle East have been at the forefront of the recent spate of takeovers in Britain. Two years ago Dubai Ports World bought P&O, while the investment arm of the Qatar government is considering a bid for J Sainsbury. Earlier this year Tata, the Indian conglomerate, bought Corus and in 2005 Appejay International picked up Typhoo, taking tea back to India.

The commodities boom has underpinned much of the growth in these countries. China, Russia and India have all registered triple-digit percentage growth over the past decade, while some oil-rich nations have grown faster still.

The huge amount of cash has led to the emergence of sovereign investment funds, such as the one stalking Sainsbury. For many of these countries the issue is how to diversify away from foreign debt and into tangible assets; China alone has earmarked a staggering $200bn-$300bn to fund further acquisitions. Last month the China Development Bank, an arm of the Beijing government, took a sizeable stake in Barclays, which was intended to help boost the British group's chances in the battle for ABN Amro, the Dutch bank.

The last (and only) time Huawei made headlines in the UK was when it emerged two years ago as a bidder for Marconi, the British group that had come close to collapse after a string of disastrous acquisitions. Located a few miles from the centre of Shenzhen, the Chinese city that neighbours Hong Kong, Huawei's campus stretches to nearly a square mile. A three-lane highway runs through the complex.

The company's chairman is in the habit of visiting a different country, noting the architecture he likes and putting up buildings of the same design at Huawei's HQ. Hence there is a large office complex that bears a close resemblance to the White House in Washington and a "chill out" area for staff that looks like a Bali beach hut.

Over 20,000 staff work here, while 3,000 live on site in a residential area that has schools, playing fields and all the other trappings of urban living. There is a massive research department, a highly automated distribution centre that handles 30,000 different raw materials but only employs 38 workers, and a manufacturing complex.

In 2005, when it made its abortive bid for Marconi, Huawei had turnover of $3.8bn (£1.9bn) and net income of $681m. Last year its turnover was $8.5bn, with revenues of $512m. It now holds over 20,000 patents and counts most of Europe's major telecoms companies among its customers.

Its relatively low profile is explained by the fact that in Europe it does not sell directly to the consumer. But in the UK, for example, its technology will play a key role in the country's telecoms infrastructure. BT's £10bn 21CN project will create a next-generation telecoms network with an unprecedented bandwidth and speed. For Huawei, winning this assignment was a bridgehead to an assault on European markets that has accelerated over the past two years. Its customers now include Vodafone, Orange and Telefonica, to name but a few.

It was founded in 1988 by Ren Zhengfei, a former officer in the People's Liberation Army. Little is known about him or his fellow board members. A company spokesman says it began as a third-party reseller of other groups' telecoms devices, before selling its own technology to the domestic market. Huawei has apparently never had any outside investment, although its expansion has been funded in part by unspecified loans from nationalised Chinese banks.

Mr Zhengfei and his fellow directors never give interviews. In fact, in Huawei's annual report, the identities of the board members are not even mentioned. Instead there is a message from the "executive management team".

While this may seem odd from a Western business perspective, it is more normal in Chinese culture, where it is bad form to boast about success.

All visitors, or rather "distinguished guests", are ushered around the vast hall to marvel at Huawei's technological achievements. In total, the company shipped 27 million such devices in 2006 and a further 17 million in the first half of 2007, including three million for Europe.

Most of its products to European markets are "white label" goods, which carry the operators' brands. For example, Hua- wei makes one of Vodafone's most popular 3G mobile phones, called the V710. Nearly one million of the devices have been shipped so far.

Huawei has achieved what most Chinese companies have failed to do: it has become a genuine global giant. However, until the group opens the door to its boardroom, as well as its exhibition hall, its achievements will remain open to question.