"They have covered the entrance and refuse to come out and are threatening to blow themselves up," an official in the local prosecutor's office told Reuters by telephone. "They threaten to detonate a gas tank and blow themselves up."

The cult members, who include 29 adults and four children, are hidden inside a snow-covered hillside in the Penza region of central Russia. A Penza police spokeswoman said they had moved into the dug-out on November 7. "No one wants to take on the responsibility of provoking them - because our information is that there are children among them," said the official.

They are thought to have taken food and fuel supplies in with them and Russian television pictures from the scene showed smoke or steam coming out of a hole in the snow-covered ravine where it was built. A police patrol was guarding the area to prevent anyone provoking them.

"They are simple Christians," a local priest, Father Georgy, told NTV television station. They say: "The church is doing a bad job, the end of the world is coming soon and we are all saving ourselves." Media reports said the cult members believed the world would end sometime in May next year. Police expected them to emerge when their supplies ran out.

Achim Steiner of the UN Environment Programme (Unep) said there was an urgent need for standards to make sure rainforests weren't being destroyed. Biofuel makers also had to show their products did not produce more CO2 than they negated, he told BBC News. Critics say biofuels will lead to food shortages and destroy rainforests. They point to the destruction of Indonesia's peat swamps as an example of biofuel folly.

The swamps are one of the richest stores of carbon on the planet and they are being burned to produce palm oil. Mr Steiner implied that because of Indonesia's inability to police its land use, biofuels from palm oil grown by the nation might never be deemed to be sustainable. But he said some biofuels could be considered sustainable. He highlighted ethanol production in Brazil, and a dry land crop called jatropha, which is resistant to pests and droughts.

He said enlargement was "our most powerful tool" for extending stability. In his first major speech on the UK's relationship with Europe, he said the EU would not become a "superpower" but should be a "role model" for the world. It could be a "model power of regional co-operation" dedicated to free trade, the environment and tackling extremism.

He said the EU must "keep our promises to Turkey", adding: "If we fail.... it will signal a deep and dangerous divide between east and west. Beyond that we must keep the door open, retaining the incentive for change that the prospect of membership provides."

Mr Miliband made his address at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, where Baroness Thatcher delivered her famous warning against "some sort of identikit European personality" almost exactly two decades ago in September 1988.

He will join lawmakers and ministers on the steps of the state Capitol to pray for rain. While public prayer vigils might raise eyebrows in other parts of the nation, they are mostly shrugged off in the Bible Belt, where turning to the heavens for help is common and sometimes even politically expedient.

"Christianity has more of a place in the culture here than in some other region," said Ray Van Neste, a professor of Christian studies at Union University in Jackson, Tenn. "And it's only natural, in a way, for the public to pray for rain."

Perdue won't be the first governor to hold a call for public prayer during the epic drought gripping the Southeast. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley issued a proclamation declaring a week in July as "Days of Prayer for Rain" to "humbly ask for His blessings and to hold us steady in times of difficulty."

The loudest opposition to Perdue's move has come from the Atlanta Freethought Society, a secular group that is expecting about a dozen of its 125 members to protest at the vigil. "The governor can pray when he wants to," said Ed Buckner, who is organizing the protest. "What he can't do is lead prayers in the name of the people of Georgia."

With rivers and reservoirs dropping to dangerously low levels across the region, a prayer rally at a high school football stadium in the Georgia town of Watkinsville drew more than 100 worshippers last week, and a gospel concert dedicated to rain attracted hundreds more two weeks ago at an Atlanta church.

"We need to try a different approach," said Rocky Twyman, who organized the concert. "We need to call on God, because what we're doing isn't working. We think that instead of all this fussing and fighting, Gov. Perdue and all these others would come together and pray."

A Baptist, Perdue has several times mentioned the need for prayer ? along with water conservation ? as the crisis has worsened. Over the summer, he participated in a day of prayer for agriculture at a gathering of the Georgia Farm Bureau.

Emergency protection zones were immediately set up around the site of the outbreak.

If the disease spreads it is feared it could devastate the industry in the run-up to Christmas. Tests confirmed yesterday that a turkey at the farm in Redgrave near Diss had died from the H5 strain of bird flu. Further tests overnight are expected to reveal whether it had the especially dangerous H5N1 subtype which has killed millions of birds worldwide.

The farm is operated by Gressingham Foods, whose operations director Geoffrey Buchanan said: "We believe the outbreak has been contained and that the measures are in place to allow us to continue to serve our customers.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced the plan after talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin during which the two discussed projects for a more than twofold increase in trade by the end of the decade. "The symbol of our cooperation is the joint agreement to send an unpiloted spaceship to the moon for scientific investigation," Singh said in comments broadcast on Russian state television after the meeting.

Russia's space agency Roskosmos said it had signed an agreement with the Indian space agency for joint lunar exploration through 2017, including the construction of a module that will orbit the moon "for peaceful purposes."

"Russia and India will jointly build a spaceship. Under the project we plan to send an entire laboratory to the moon," Roskosmos head Anatoly Perminov said in a statement. During the talks the Russian and Indian leaders also "paid particular attention to cooperation in nuclear energy and in military-technical cooperation," Putin said.

Russia accounts for 70 percent of Indian military hardware while India currently accounts for 30 percent of Russian arms sales, Interfax reported, citing Russian officials.

He warned that he had "no truck with anti-Americanism" and said the EU should strengthen ties with the US. Mr Brown also called for more "hard-head internationalism" in peacekeeping, aid and reconstruction. In the speech at the Lord Mayor of London's banquet, he also warned Iran over its "nuclear ambitions".

Mr Brown told the audience at Guildhall the UK had to work with "all those who share our vision of the future", including Nato, the UN, the EU and the US. He said: "It is no secret that I am a life-long admirer of America. I have no truck with anti-Americanism in Britain or elsewhere in Europe and I believe that our ties with America - founded on values we share - constitute our most important bilateral relationship.

Hundreds of policemen and prison guards are preventing her from leaving the house where she has been served with a seven-day detention order. She had planned to lead what she called a "long march" to Islamabad on Tuesday.

A Commonwealth meeting in London has given Pakistan 10 days to lift its emergency rule or face suspension. After an extraordinary session attended by foreign ministers, the meeting also said President Pervez Musharraf had to step down as army chief and release political detainees.

Pakistan was suspended from the Commonwealth in 1999, after Gen Musharraf seized power in a coup. It was reinstated in 2004.

This is not because of the Northern Rock collapse - probably unavoidable - but because THE BANK DID NOT MEET TWO RED BOOK OBJECTIVES: to keep short-term money market rates consistent with Bank rate until the next monetary policy committee meeting and to ensure efficient liquidity distribution even in stressed conditions.

CHARGE NUMBER ONE IS TARDINESS. Money market interest rates rose sharply on August 9. The European Central Bank added emergency short-term funds that day; the Federal Reserve a day later. The following week, the Fed cut its emergency funding rate to half a point above its policy rate; on August 22 a special ECB operation supplied three-month funds at an auction-determined rate. The Bank's first move came on September 5 when it said it would intervene a week later if conditions remained stressed. The actual supply of funds on September 13 occurred more than a month after the crisis broke.

CHARGE TWO CONCERNS THE BANK'S INSISTENCE ON CHARGING A 1 PERCENTAGE POINT PENALTY premium on emergency lending. This condition applied to standard emergency lending and its special supply of three-month money announced on September 19, despite the Fed's cut to half a point and the ECB's auction-determined rates, which yielded average rates of 0.52-0.61 percentage points above its policy rate. This contradicts the red book, which says emergency lending rate cuts relative to Bank rate can be used to relieve stressed market conditions.

The BANKS' ACCESS TO EMERGENCY FUNDS WAS CONSTRAINED BY STRICTER RULES THAN ELSEWHERE. Normally, the Bank restricts collateral to securities of public sector bodies with credit ratings of Aa3 or higher. UK banks hold few such securities. By contrast, the ECB allows private sector assets to be used, with a lower rating threshold of A. The Fed's definition is similarly broad but has no specified rating minimum. The Bank loosened requirements for its September 19 operations but the stricter rules are maintained for other operations.

The Bank was tardy and failed to follow its framework. Recent events also show the red book needs revising: the Bank should widen its definition of eligible collateral and add three-month money auctions as an instrument for maintaining functioning markets.

The Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the US energy department, estimates that revenues will increase even further in 2008 to a high of $762bn, a 16 per cent rise from this year, driven by continued strength in oil prices and further output increases.

The large increase in oil income this year, a five-fold jump since 1998, is helping Opec's members, including Iran and Venezuela, to flex their political muscles.

The gradual climb towards the symbolic $100-a-barrel level is transforming the domestic economies of producer countries, allowing Opec members to go on spending sprees or launch big development projects.

It has also created an assertive group of Middle East sovereign wealth funds that have been seeking high-profile acquisitions beyond their borders. "OPEC COUNTRIES ARE BECOMING MORE POWERFUL," said Mark Spellman, head of energy practice at Accenture, the consultancy firm.

We have heard about sub-prime mortgages; we have heard about COLLATERALISED DEBT OBLIGATIONS (CDOs); we have heard about banks writing down their assets; we have heard about global bankers resigning; we have heard about Northern Rock and the first run on a British bank in 140 years.

This is still an emerging story. It was not until last Wednesday that The Financial Times led on the legal provision that CDOs can be liquidated by the senior holders when they go into default. That could lead to a fire sale of CDOs and still larger defaults.

Yet this, as important as it could be, is not the biggest threat. Few non-bankers have heard of FAS 157 and 159, yet these are the regulations that will set the terms on which the banks will value their assets. The trouble with FAS 157 and 159 is that they are perfectly reasonable regulations in themselves which could have disastrous, though unintended, consequences.

WHAT ARE FAS 157 AND 159? They are the new United States (Federal) accounting standards that have been introduced to regulate the valuation of bank assets. These valuations are of crucial importance because they are the basis of all bank lending: no assets, no lending; no lending, no bank. The new rules divide bank assets into three "levels", according to the freedom with which they can be bought or sold.

LEVEL-ONE ASSETS, which are easy to value or trade, have to have quoted prices in active markets such as US government bonds or gold bullion.

LEVEL TWO is an intermediate stage; these assets are not as fully marketable as level one, but still sufficiently tradeable to have a definite value.

LEVEL-THREE ASSETS - usually artificial financial instruments - are the problem. They do not have quoted prices in active markets. They have to be valued by reference to the bank's own models. According to the analyst Martin Hutchinson, who had analysed some of the US banks, the holdings of level-three assets are substantial. Lehman has $22 billion; Bear Stearns $20 billion; JP Morgan Chase $60 billion. Even these figures may be understated, since the banks have themselves decided whether assets belong to level three or the more acceptable level two, and they have an interest in placing as little in level three and as much in level two as they reasonably can.

THE GLOBAL BANKING SYSTEM NOW FACES THE RISK OF A GENERAL FLIGHT TOWARDS CASH AND LIQUID LEVEL ONE ASSETS ON A SCALE THAT HAS NOT BEEN SEEN SINCE THE EARLY 1930S. Already British banks are showing signs of near panic. I hear of London banks going back on recently agreed loans to parties of good credit, presumably on orders from head office. There have also been cancellations of offers of credit cards that had already been approved.

It is far too late to cancel FAS 157 and 159, even if that were desirable. The concept of different levels for bank assets has been introduced to the banking system and the defaults on sub-prime mortgages have lowered the acceptability of all level-three assets. No one knows what they are worth and hardly anyone wants them.

Attempts to clone human embryos for research have been dogged by technical problems and controversies over fraudulent research and questionable ethics. But the new technique promises to revolutionise the efficiency by which scientists can turn human eggs into cloned embryos.

It is the first time that scientists have been able to create viable cloned embryos from an adult primate - in this case a 10-year-old male rhesus macaque monkey - and they are scheduled to report their findings later this month. The scientists will also demonstrate that they have been able to extract stem cells from some of the cloned embryos and that they have managed to encourage these embryonic cells to develop in the laboratory into mature heart cells and brain neurons. Scientists who know of the research said it was the breakthrough that they had all been waiting for because, until now, there was a growing feeling that there might be some insuperable barrier to creating cloned embryos from adult primates - including humans.

The development will not be welcomed in all quarters. Opponents of cloning will argue that the new technique of manipulating primate eggs to improve cloning efficiency will lead to increased attempts at creating - and destroying - cloned human embryos for research purposes.

The Oregon team, working with a group in China, has so far produced about 100 cloned embryos that have been transferred into around 50 female macaques, but none has resulted in a full-term pregnancy, he said.

He said, "I don't want at all to leave proposals we have prepared for the coming months condemned to wait until when the treaty is in force." On behalf of the Commissioner, an official said, "Frattini will put this idea forward in an informal way to member states. If you put it forward formally it will not work since there is no legal basis," the official added, describing the scheme as a 'gentlemen's agreement.'

Many fear that EPAs will force developing countries to liberalise too quickly. Mandelson said, "There is absolutely no question of arm twisting Kenya into signing an interim market access agreement as part of a future EPA." However, he said that it is only through such an agreement that Kenya would enjoy duty free and quota free access into the EU from 1 January 2008.

If Kenya doesn't sign an EPA, Mandelson said that the EU would have to impose higher tariffs on the country, by raising the tariff rate applied to Kenya's exports to the General System of Preferences (GSP). "Unfortunately this could have a devastating impact on the booming Kenyan horticultural exports to the EU," he said.

According to Business Daily, if Kenyan trade with the EU reverts to GSP, some products that have been entering the European market at zero duty will attract duty of between 8.5 and 15.7 per cent - an issue that most producers have argued would jeopardise their chances of remaining competitive in their traditional main export markets in Europe.

Malloch-Brown, a former United Nations official brought into government by Gordon Brown, has fallen out with some diplomats who have dubbed him "Bollock-Brown" for his off-message views.

The minister has clashed with David Miliband, the foreign secretary, and caused embarrassment for Brown before the prime minister's trip to Washington by saying that Britain and America would no longer be "joined at the hip"!

In an interview to be broadcast today, the prime minister seeks to bolster Britain's relationship with the United States, describing Washington as "our most important ally", and refuses to rule out support for a bombing campaign against Iran. He tells Sunday Live on Sky News: "Iran is breaking its commitments that have been made freely under the non-proliferation treaty."