The basic problem lies in the inability of Flemings and Walloons to agree on the division of powers within the country, and over recent years Flemish opinion has hardened against their Francophone compatriots and against the Belgian state generally.

The Walloons are generally hostile to any further decentralisation of power because they are big recipients of federal money. They fear that if the regions (i.e., in effect, Flanders) have fiscal autonomy, autonomy over corporate tax, employment policy and family policy, then the country will have, in effect, split into two. The sticking point with the New Flemish Alliance is the social security budget, which the Flemings want to regionalise. This would put an immediate end to the massive gravy train which is the Belgian state and Wallonia would lose out heavily.

In the meantime, the caretaker Belgian government (composed of the same ministers who ran the previous government) has signed the EU Reform Treaty (the replacement for the defunct Constitution) even though the Belgian constitution forbids a caretaker government from signing any new international agreements while it is in office.

It is one of five central banks that have injected billions in emergency cash into money markets. The aim is to cut the cost of lending between retail and commercial banks, which has jumped in the past few weeks. All banks with enough collateral, and which submitted bids of at least 4.21%, received funds from the ECB.

The ECB move - making the extra cash available over the next two weeks -will ease fears of a credit meltdown over the Christmas period, when banks need extra cash.

On Monday, the US Federal Reserve made $20bn available through auction, though it did not say how many banks took advantage of the extra money. And on Tuesday the Bank of England is set to lend more than another £10bn in funds. As well as the Bank of England, the Fed, and the European Central Bank, the national banks of Canada and Switzerland are also involved in the funding plan.

But some analysts say that until the banks reveal the true scale of their potential losses, the central banks will be unable to do much to ease the credit crunch.

The Hittites of Anatolia, whose empire stretched from northern Turkey into Iraq and Syria, were famed for their lethal chariots and skill with horses. In the Biblical book of Genesis, the Hittites are named as the descendants of Ham, through his son, Canaan. They are described as a great power who dwell "in the mountains".

Now Dr Siro Trevisanato, a molecular biochemist, has claimed that many of the Hittites' glorious victories were down to their use of infected sheep, which they would slyly introduce into cities they wanted to conquer. "There is no doubt that these were the first weapons of mass destruction," he said. "They were waging bioterrorism".

The sheep carried tularemia, also known as rabbit fever, a devastating bacterial disease that is a potential threat even today, since there is no known vaccine. The disease can pass from animals to humans, causing enormous skin ulcers and respiratory failure. Without antibiotic treatment, around 15 per cent of its victims die.

The method of attack was simple. The Hittites would leave the sheep outside the targeted city. Locals would bring them in and either breed them or eat them, spreading the disease. However, Dr Trevisanato noted, the Hittites paid a high price for their tactics. An epidemic of the disease weakened their ranks a few years after the Symra attack.

What's it like aboard the "Booze Bus" on one of the busiest party nights of the year? Over the course of a 12-hour shift on Friday night, the three colleagues on the Alternative Response Vehicle - or Booze Bus, as it's more commonly known - draw on their reserves of composure, ingenuity and stoicism to treat more than 20 dazed drunks.

At St Thomas' Hospital, where some of these patients are taken, a visibly-frustrated doctor speaks despairingly of dealing with a tide of alcohol-related problems, instead of people who are seriously ill. "Everyone I've treated tonight has been drunk - this is ridiculous," he says. One drunk patient had assaulted him, he says, and the waiting room was full of people being sick or aggressive.

"Twenty-four hour drinking has made a huge, huge difference. The problem is that staff are dealing with people who are drunk and don't know what they're doing," he says. He adds: "I don't know what's happening to society as a whole. It's scary - it's not just the kids. It's also adults. People in their 40s and 50s who you would think know better.

Paul Morro of the Congressional Research Service reports that, in 2006, the European Union and its member states gave US$815 million to the Palestinian Authority, while the United States sent it $468 million. When other donors are included, the total receipts come to about $1.5 billion. One report suggests the European Union has funnelled nearly $2.5 billion to the Palestinians this year.

Looking ahead, Abbas announced a goal to collect pledges of $5.8 billion in aid for a three-year period, 2008-10, at the "Donors' Conference for the Palestinian Authority" attended by over ninety states on Monday in Paris. (USING THE BEST POPULATION ESTIMATE OF 1.35 MILLION PALESTINIANS ON THE WEST BANK, THIS COMES TO A STAGGERING AMOUNT OF MONEY: PER CAPITA, OVER $1,400 PER YEAR, OR ABOUT WHAT AN EGYPTIAN EARNS ANNUALLY.) Endorsed by the Israeli government, Abbas immediately raised nearly that amount for 2008 at the donors' conference. Well, it's a bargain if it works, right? A few billion to end a dangerous, century-old conflict - it's actually a steal.

But innovative research by Steven Stotsky, a research analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) finds that an influx of money to the Palestinians has had the opposite effect historically. Relying on World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other official statistics, Stotsky compares two figures since 1999: budgetary support aid provided annually to the Palestinian Authority and the number of Palestinian homicides annually (including both criminal and terrorist activities, and both Israeli and Palestinian victims). GRAPHED TOGETHER, THE TWO FIGURES SHOW AN UNCANNY ECHO.

In brief, each $1.25 million or so of budgetary support aid translates into a death within the year. As Stotsky notes, "These statistics do not mean that foreign aid causes violence; but they do raise questions about the effectiveness of using foreign donations to promote moderation and combat terrorism."

A topsy-turvy understanding of war economics has prevailed in Israel since the Oslo negotiations began in 1993. Rather than deprive their Palestinian enemies of resources, Israelis have been following Shimon Peres's mystical musings, and especially his 1993 tome, The New Middle East, to empower them economically. As I wrote in 2001, this "IS TANTAMOUNT TO SENDING THE ENEMY RESOURCES WHILE FIGHTING IS STILL UNDER WAY - NOT A HUGELY BRIGHT IDEA."

Rather than further funding Palestinian bellicosity, Western states, starting with Israel, should cut off all funds to the Palestinian Authority.

Every year in late December, the ministers meet for a marathon session to decide the following year's fishing quotas. The European Commission typically points to scientific evidence showing a collapse in key catches, and suggests that quotas should be slashed across the board. And just as predictably, individual governments within the E.U. ignore these proposals, and raise the quotas - usually around 50% higher.

It is, conservationists say, a policy to fish Europe out of business. "Mocking scientific advice has become standard practice in the decisions made by the European fisheries ministers," says World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Fisheries Policy Officer Carol Phua.

The Commission - using figures from the Denmark-based International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) - has suggested there should be a 25% cut in cod catches for most E.U. waters. Other recommendations include a 32% cut in blue whiting, a 15% cut in North Sea plaice and sole, a 41% cut in North Sea herring, and a full closure of the Bay of Biscay for anchovy fishing.

But when E.U. ministers meet to thrash out the quotas, concerns about the survival of stocks comes in conflict with sustaining the livelihoods of Europe's fishermen. Although the fishing community has seen its own numbers shrink drastically in recent years, its efficiency has improved dramatically thanks to innovations like sonar, trawler freezers, and driftnets up to 1.5 miles (2.5km) wide. The result has been a vacuuming of fish across the seas and a collapse of key stocks.

But these quotas have also upset the irascible fishing community, which claims talk of dwindling stocks is exaggerated. In France, trawlermen have gone on strike to protest rising fuel costs, which have cut further into their profit margins. And at the annual fish quota sessions in Brussels, E.U. governments have shown themselves more responsive to the grumbles of their fishermen than the broader concerns about the state of marine resources.

Critics warn that the E.U. could follow Canada, whose fishing industry was ravaged in the early 1990s when Atlantic cod stocks were wiped out as a result of overfishing. If that happens, it would be a sad indictment for Europe, and a triumph of national selfishness over conservation.

But Amity focuses on one title ? the Bible ? and primarily one market, China. It is the largest printer of Christian literature in the officially atheist country, where freedom of religion remains weak; up until 1979, when Deng Xiaoping began undoing the social strictures of the Mao Zedong era, the mere possession of a Bible could get a person into serious trouble.

Amity has churned out 41 million Bibles for Chinese believers at its plant outside the southern city of Nanjing, including more than 3 million copies last year. (About nine million copies have been exported to Africa, other parts of Asia and Central Europe.) For a country whose religious oppression tends to make more international headlines than its exhibitions of tolerance, that stands as a significant achievement. But it also highlights the gap between China's officially sanctioned churches and the illegal "house" churches that exist outside the limited sphere of religious freedom in China.

Demand has grown to the point that the foundation plans to open a new, 515,000-square-foot (48,000 sq. m.) printing plant next year, which will allow Amity to turn out more than a million books a month. It's thought to be one of the largest Bible production facilities in the world.

Since 1997, 1.5 million foreign workers have entered the British workplace, with many of these arriving from Eastern Europe in just the past three years, according to a report by the influential economic analysts, the Ernst & Young ITEM Club.

During the same three years, the number of unemployed British 18 to 24 year olds has increased by 100,000. The report says: "There is some evidence that the growth of immigrant employment seen in the last few years may have come at the expense of the domestic workforce. Given the age and skill profile of many of the new immigrants, it is possible that 'native' youngsters may have been losing out in the battle for entry-level jobs."

In a year-end report waiting to cut the cable, HSBC predicts the pound will plummet to $1.76 against the dollar over the next 15 months. "Sterling's outlook for 2008 is about to take a significant turn for the worse. Trade data shows that the UK is becoming increasingly uncompetitive in the international arena," said David Bloom, the bank's chief currency strategist.

Sterling reached a quarter-century high of $2.11 in October on dollar woes, but has since dropped back to under $2.02.

HSBC said financial earnings and large profits from the oil sector helped keep the British economy afloat over recent years and shield it from the consequences of a gaping trade deficit, now roughly 6pc of GDP. Both are now in doubt after the credit crunch.

"There's definitely some storm clouds and concerns, but the underpinning is good," Bush said at a Rotary Club meeting, an informal setting chosen to show the president engaged with local communities. "We'll work our way through this period."

The nation is in a sour mood this holiday season, with consumer confidence hovering near a two-year low. As a wide-open field of candidates vies to replace Bush in the White House, the economy has zoomed to the forefront of public priorities, often ahead of Iraq. Bush's appearance reflects the administration's push to show that the president is actively trying to solve the problems - and ready as ever to blame Congress for moving too slowly to help him.

Democratic leaders responded that Bush is in denial. "What world is President Bush living in to be so out of touch with the economic realities families and markets are facing?" said Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, chairman of Congress' Joint Economic Committee.

The changes created "a very serious risk that fewer people will be able to get food," particularly in the developing world, said Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The agency's food price index rose by more than 40 percent this year, compared with 9 percent the year before - a rate that was already unacceptable, he said. New figures show that the total cost of foodstuffs imported by the neediest countries rose 25 percent, to $107 million, in the last year.

At the same time, reserves of cereals are severely depleted, FAO records show. World wheat stores declined 11 percent this year, to the lowest level since 1980. That corresponds to 12 weeks of the world's total consumption - much less than the average of 18 weeks consumption in storage during the period 2000-2005. There are only 8 weeks of corn left, down from 11 weeks in the earlier period.

Diouf blamed a confluence of recent supply and demand factors for the crisis, and he predicted that those factors were here to stay. On the supply side, these include the early effects of global warming, which has decreased crop yields in some crucial places, and a shift away from farming for human consumption toward crops for biofuels and cattle feed. Demand for grain is increasing with the world population, and more is diverted to feed cattle as the population of upwardly mobile meat-eaters grows.

"We're concerned that we are facing the perfect storm for the world's hungry," said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program, in a telephone interview. She said that her agency's food procurement costs had gone up 50 percent in the past 5 years and that some poor people are being "priced out of the food market."

To make matters worse, high oil prices have doubled shipping costs in the past year, putting enormous stress on poor nations that need to import food as well as the humanitarian agencies that provide it. "You can debate why this is all happening, but what's most important to us is that it's a long-term trend, reversing decades of decreasing food prices," Sheeran said.

Already "unusual weather events," linked to climate change - such as droughts, floods and storms - have decreased production in important exporting countries like Australia and Ukraine, Diouf said. "In the U.S., Australia, and Europe, there's a very substantial capacity to adapt to the effects on food - with money, technology, research and development," Howden said. "In the developing world, there isn't."

Until recently, however, even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA -- an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants, for example, to help the plants ward off insects or tolerate drought. Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA. Scientists in Maryland have already built the world's first entirely handcrafted chromosome -- a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce.

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to "boot itself up," like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.

The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial -- and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.

The two sides reached agreement last week on a schedule to finish building the plant after years of delays. Some Western countries fear Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons but Tehran says its programme is for peaceful power generation only.

The UN has demanded that Iran halt uranium enrichment but has approved the Russian nuclear fuel deliveries. Russia's foreign ministry said it had received assurances from Tehran that the fuel would not be used anywhere but at Bushehr. The foreign ministry statement urged Iran to stop enriching uranium, saying there was no longer any need.

But a senior Iranian official said his country would not halt uranium enrichment under any circumstances, Reuters news agency said. Iran has always insisted it has the right to develop the full nuclear cycle, including making the fuel for reactors. Russia has played its Bushehr card skilfully, says our diplomatic correspondent, but risks significant additional tensions with Washington.

Lately, its financial wizardry has stood out even more as it thrived, even as most of its rivals were saddled with billions of dollars in write-downs and credit losses. But fame and fortune have their price. Goldman has increasingly been attracting more attention than the secretive firm desires, including unwanted scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers. "They're the top of the heap. Their success is eye-popping. Their latest record earnings in the face of big losses taken by most of the other investment banks is impressive in itself," said Harvard Business School professor Samuel Hayes. "It inspires a lot of envy. There's a lot of resentment."

Goldman is expected to report a record $11 billion of annual profit on Tuesday, including billions of gains from bets against the subprime mortgage market. Rivals, such as Morgan Stanley (MS.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Merrill Lynch & Co Inc (MER.N: Quote, Profile, Research), have ousted top executives and are expected to cap the year with money- losing quarters. And while year-end bonuses are expected to be flat or smaller across Wall Street, Goldman payouts will rise to roughly $18 billion. On average, that is about $600,000 per employee, or double the average paid at other firms.

The disparity of results has some accusing Goldman of having an unfair edge or of hiding its mistakes. The presence of former Goldman CEO Hank Paulson as U.S. Treasury Secretary has one New York tabloid columnist convinced Goldman gets inside information on the bond market.

According to the officials, this was likely to be especially true of Egypt, which has of late sought to get closer to Hamas and would like to see Hamas incorporated back into Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's government. Israeli officials said that Jerusalem would be watching the sums pledged to the PA from the Arab world carefully and that the amount the individual countries actually paid would be a good indication of their real support for the Annapolis process.

Among the Arab countries that will be represented in Paris at the foreign ministerial level are Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Algeria, Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan and Egypt. Iraq, Syria and Yemen are sending ambassadors to the conference, meaning that they won't be pledging any money. Some 90 countries and global institutions like the World Bank are taking part in the conference.

European officials have said that the goal was to raise some $5.6 billion. Meanwhile, Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam Fayad said in an interview with AP that the PA needed a quick injection of cash to get through the next few months.

Fayad said in Paris he hoped the Arab states would pitch in, adding that Europe could not be expected to go much beyond the already considerable amount of aid it had been providing to the Palestinians. The EU gave the PA some $1.4 billion in 2007. Ahead of Monday's meeting, The European Union announced it would pledge $650 million (€448 million) in aid to the Palestinians for 2008.