And the phenomenon of emigration among Eastern-rite Christians worries the Holy See, and in particular Benedict XVI, affirmed Cardinal-designate Leonardo Sandri, who will be elevated to cardinal in the Nov. 24 consistory.

In an interview granted to L'Osservatore Romano last Saturday, on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the Congregation for Eastern Churches, the prefect said, "The Holy Land is everyone's land. It is the family from which we come. It's the home that has to be maintained and loved."

The phenomenon of migration "is a real challenge at present. We are worried, as is the Pope. People uprooted from their original traditions run the risk of losing the deep religious values that guided their lives as individuals and communities," he affirmed.

Research by Times Online can reveal that BA has increased the surcharge on long-haul flights 23-fold in less than fours year despite a less than threefold rise in the price of fuel. In May 2004, when BA first introduced a fuel surcharge, customers paid an extra £2.50 on longhaul flights. From today passengers will pay an extra £58.00 on a one-way long-haul flight taking longer than nine hours. Since 2004, the price of Brent crude has risen from $36.97 a barrel to $91.07.

A spokesman at the Air Transport Users Council (AUC), said that stripping out the cost of fuel was "misleading", because it is a cost of business and should be included in the price of the ticket. He said: "Companies try and make out that the actual price of the ticket is cheap for example, a ticket to America costs £100 but it is actually £250 because the other £150 covers surcharges and other costs. These are the cost of business and should be included in the overall price."

In nearly four years, BA has increased fuel surcharges ten times, mostly on long-haul flights. The carrier has reduced prices only once, on long-haul flights lasting less than nine hours, by £5 to £30.00.

He conjured up visions of "Fortress Britain" as he unveiled a succession of security measures at airports, railway stations, sports venues and other public places. There is also to be a huge "hearts and minds" drive aimed at diverting young Muslims away from the influence of fanatics.

The Prime Minister said a review of vulnerable buildings and crowded spaces like shopping centres had led to a rethink of the way they are protected. More than 250 busy railway stations, airports and seaports as well as 100 "sensitive" installations like power stations and electricity substations will be given extra security.

This could include screening luggage at major stations like London King's Cross or Manchester Piccadilly using mobile checking devices that can be moved around the country. More buildings will be defended by barriers to stop car bomb attacks, extra blast-proofing, vehicle exclusion zones and metal detectors.

For every journey, security officials will want credit card details, holiday contact numbers, travel plans, email addresses, car numbers and even any previous missed flights. The information, taken when a ticket is bought, will be shared among police, customs, immigration and the security services for at least 24 hours before a journey is due to take place.

Anybody about whom the authorities are dubious can be turned away when they arrive at the airport or station with their baggage. Those with outstanding court fines, such as a speeding penalty, could also be barred from leaving the country, even if they pose no security risk. The information required under the "e-borders" system was revealed as Gordon Brown announced plans to tighten security at shopping centres, airports and ports.

This could mean additional screening of baggage and passenger searches, with resulting delays for travellers. The e-borders scheme is expected to cost at least £1.2billion over the next decade. Critics warned of mayhem at ports and airports when the system is introduced, beginning in earnest from mid-2009. By 2014 every one of the predicted 305million passenger journeys in and out of the UK will be logged, with details stored about the passenger on every trip.

The scheme will apply to every way of leaving the country, whether by ferry, plane, or small aircraft. It would apply to a family having a day out in France by Eurotunnel, and even to a yachtsman leaving British waters during the day and returning to shore. The measure applies equally to UK residents going abroad and foreigners travelling here. The information will be stored for as long as the authorities believe it is useful, allowing them to build a complete picture of where a person has been over their lifetime, how they paid and the contact numbers of who they stayed with.

Powerful aftershocks rattled northern Chile on Thursday, startling residents and emergency workers a day after a large earthquake killed two people and injured more than 100 in the mineral-rich region. The quake was measured officially at 7.7 magnitude.

Wednesday's large quake cut power to some of the world's largest copper mines, forcing them to work on backup generators on Thursday. Copper prices jumped on Wednesday by more than 6 percent to $3.3040 a pound on the New York Mercantile Exchange's COMEX division. That price backed off 4.11 percent in early trade on Thursday.

"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.