The number of blazes and their wind-whipped ferocity strain the area's firefighting resources to the limit. The gale-force winds turned hillside canyons into giant blowtorches from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. Although the worst damage was around San Diego and Lake Arrowhead, dangerous fires also threatened Malibu, parts of Orange and Ventura counties, and the Agua Dulce area near Santa Clarita.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, calling it "A TRAGIC TIME FOR CALIFORNIA," declared a state of emergency in seven counties and redeployed California National Guard members from the border to support fire fighters. Schwarzenegger stressed how much California officials have learned since the devastating wildfires of October 2003, which raged over much of the same terrain.

But as the day wore on, it became clear that any hard-earned knowledge was no match for natural forces overrunning the ability of fire fighters to control them.

"THE ISSUE THIS TIME IS NOT PREPAREDNESS," said San Diego City Council President Scott Peters. "IT'S THAT THE EVENT IS SO OVERWHELMING."

Easley has already asked communities across the state to conserve water as drought worsens statewide. As of last week, 71 of North Carolina's 100 counties were in exceptional drought, the federal government's highest classification.

The governor said residents should experiment with drastic cuts in water use over the coming week so officials can see whether the state will be able to manage as the supply of water continues to drop. The governor's office will monitor public water systems across the state, then release a list of those that saw significant reductions in water consumption between Monday and Oct. 31.

The state will keep gathering information about water use until the drought ends.

After more than 8 inches of rain fell on parts of New Orleans by late afternoon, Mayor Ray Nagin shut City Hall early, and schools also closed. People were asked to stay indoors until the flood potential subsided. More rain was expected overnight.

The Harvey Canal in Jefferson Parish was one of several in the area placed under new safety guidelines after Hurricane Katrina's flood waters breached two New Orleans canals in August 2005, causing catastrophic flooding. The corps has worked to strengthen the canal, about five miles from downtown, but engineers worried that water being driven into it might lead to flooding. The area around the canal includes homes and businesses.

Robert Ricks, a lead forecaster with the National Weather Service in Slidell, said that a flood watch was extended to midnight Monday and that some areas could expect 10 inches or more of rain. Despite the flooding potential, the rain also offered relief to parts of Louisiana that have been abnormally dry. Until Monday's drenching, rainfall for New Orleans was about 11 inches below normal for the year.

The scattered showers and thunderstorms also came as a blessing to other drought-stricken areas of the Southeast on Monday. Still, climatologists say it will take more than a few scattered storms to pull the region out of a record drought. Rainfall in Atlanta is almost 17 inches below normal for the year, and state officials have warned that a north Georgia reservoir that supplies more than 3 million people with water could be depleted within three months.

Almost one-third of the Southeast is covered by an "exceptional" drought - the worst drought category.

The Mafia has turned into one of Italy's biggest business enterprises with a turnover of more than $120bn (£60bn) a year, a new report says. The report, prepared by Italy's leading retailer's association, warns of growing Mafia influence in the south. It estimates that 7% of Italy's output is filtered off by organised crime.

The retailer's association says it is seriously concerned by the spread of Mafia extortion rackets from small to big businesses. Some of Italy's best known and largest construction companies are denounced by name in the report for allegedly turning a blind eye to organised crime.

Organised crime is present in all areas of the economy, from food manufacture to tourism, from real estate to finance and in the service industries, the report says. Big business also finds it easier to negotiate agreements with the Mafia rather than to denounce extortion rackets to the police, it adds.

The study alleges that 20% of Italian shops pay regular hush money to criminals to carry on business undisturbed. The proportion is much higher in southern Italy. In Sicily, eight out of 10 shops pay a regular monthly sum to the Mafia, the report says.

Deputy Minister of the Interior Marco Minniti said the growth of Mafia business crime was alarming.

Foreign Minister Ali Babacan made the announcement as he prepared to travel to Baghdad for talks with senior Iraqis, including PM Nouri Maliki. The US has again urged Iraq to take swift action against the insurgents to forestall the threatened Turkish raids. Turkey's UN envoy has warned that his country's patience has its limits.

Sunday's deadly PKK ambush near the Iraqi border has inflamed public opinion in Turkey, with the media and opposition leaders calling for immediate strikes against the rebels. Last week, the Turkish parliament approved raids into Iraq and up to 100,000 soldiers, backed by tanks, fighter jets and helicopters, have been deployed along the border.

Speaking via a secure video link between the White House and Baghdad on Monday, the Iraqi prime minister, Mr Maliki, agreed with Mr Bush to "work together, in co-operation with the Turkish government, to prevent the PKK from using any part of Iraqi territory to plan or carry out terrorist attacks", a White House statement said.

"We want the Iraqi government to take swift action to stop the activity of the PKK," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said afterwards. "We do not want to see wider military action on the northern border." Mr Bush also spoke to Turkish President Abdullah Gul, telling him of his "deep concern" at recent PKK attacks.

PKK sources reported heavy Turkish shelling of rebel positions after Sunday's ambush but there were no reports of an incursion.

The group, which has Marxist-Leninist roots, was formed in the late 1970s and launched an armed struggle against the Turkish government in 1984, calling for an independent Kurdish state within Turkey. Since then, more than 37,000 people have died. During the conflict, which reached a peak in the mid-1990s, thousands of villages were destroyed in the largely Kurdish south-east and east of Turkey, and hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled to cities in other parts of the country.

In the 1990s, the organisation rolled back on its demands for an independent Kurdish state, calling instead for more autonomy for the Kurds. In 1999, it suffered a major blow when its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was arrested. Shortly afterwards, it introduced a five-year unilateral ceasefire and took a number of steps to try to change its image and widen its appeal, changing its name several times before deciding it again wanted to be known as the PKK. It also further watered down its demands, calling on Ankara to involve it in the country's political process, allow more cultural rights for the country's estimated 15 million Kurds and release imprisoned PKK members.

But Turkey, which, like a number of Western countries, regards the PKK as a terrorist organisation, refused to negotiate with it and has offered only a limited amnesty to its members. In 2004, the PKK resumed its violent campaign, which has escalated steadily over the past two years despite several other short-lived, unilateral ceasefires. Two recent attacks - the killing of 13 Turkish soldiers in a single clash and the killing of 12 civilians in a bus ambush - were regarded as being among the worst over recent years.

Although Turkey's ruling AK Party has recently made political gains in the south-east, MANY KURDS, AND THE EUROPEAN UNION, say the government needs to do a lot more to improve the rights of the country's Kurdish minority. And the PKK remains popular with many people there. At the annual Kurdish spring festival, Nowruz, Kurds regularly take to the streets proclaiming their support for the group's imprisoned leader Ocalan.

A group said to be an offshoot of the PKK, calling itself the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, has claimed responsibility for a number of bomb blasts in Istanbul and Turkish Mediterranean resorts. The group also swears allegiance to Ocalan. And the last few years have also seen the rise of a sister organisation - Pejak - which has carried out attacks against Iran.

Turkey believes that the PKK currently has several thousand fighters based in the Candil mountains of northern Iraq; an area which is also said to be a base for Pejak. With violence in south-eastern Turkey rising and the US and the Iraqi Kurds apparently unwilling, or unable, to take action against PKK bases in Iraqi territory, the Turkish government is now threatening to take matters into its own hands.

Nearly 250,000 people were forced to flee in San Diego County alone, where hundreds of patients were being moved by school bus and ambulance from a hospital and nursing homes. All San Diego Police Department officers and off duty detectives were ordered to return to work to help with evacuations.

The fires have burned about 100,000 acres, or 156 square miles, in San Diego County, county Supervisor Ron Roberts said. Across the region, 40,000 acres, or 62 square miles, had burned by Sunday; among the structures destroyed in Malibu were a church, homes and a historic castle. "This is a major emergency," Roberts said.

The UK's FTSE 100 index was down 1.4% to 6,435 just after noon in London, while Germany's Dax had lost 1.4%, and France's Cac had shed 1.3%. Earlier, Tokyo's Nikkei index closed 2.2% lower. European and East Asian markets were responding to heavy US share falls on Wall Street on Friday.

The Dow Jones, the main US share index, fell 367 points on Friday, the 20th anniversary of the Black Monday stock market crash. The falls were set off by concerns that the full effects of the US housing slowdown have not yet been seen.

"Friday's slump on Wall Street is going to dominate market sentiment as the new trading week gets under way," said Matt Buckland, a trader in London with CMC Markets. "Obviously there's speculation that we may see a repeat of the losses from Black Monday some 20 years ago, and with little economic data being scheduled for release, it's going to be sentiment rather than the fundamentals that provide the bulk of the direction."

On Black Monday in 1987, the Dow Jones fell 23%, which nowadays would mean a drop of more than 3,000 points. The fall on the FTSE 100 comes after it had recovered from the panic that gripped markets in August in the wake of the global credit squeeze.

Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) personnel monitoring the trench-digging have, for the first time, found traces of the First Temple. The IAA studied an archaeological level dating to the First Temple Period, exposed in the area close to the south-eastern corner of the raised platform surrounding the Dome of the Rock.

Archaeological examination of a small section of this level, led by Jerusalem District Archaeologist Yuval Baruch, uncovered fragments of ceramic table wares, animal bones, and more. The finds date from the 8th to 6th centuries BCE; the First Temple existed between the 9th and 5th centuries BCE, having been built by King Solomon in 832 and destroyed in 422.

The archaeological team - Baruch of the IAA, Prof. Sy Gitin, Director of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, Prof. Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University and Prof. Ronny Reich of Haifa University - reached the conclusion, after examining the finds and archaeological data, that their characteristics and location may aid scholars in reconstructing the dimensions and boundaries of the Temple Mount during the First Temple Period.

The finds include fragments of bowl rims, bases and body sherds, the base of a juglet used for the ladling of oil, the handle of a small juglet, and the rim of a storage jar. The bowl sherds were decorated with wheel burnishing lines characteristic of the First Temple Period. The IAA announced that it will hold an archaeological seminar concerning these finds and their archaeological interpretation at a later date.

Muslim and Jewish Claims

Muslim scholars often deny any Jewish claim to the Temple Mount, and it is often charged that Arab excavations there are employed for the purpose of throwing out truckloads of artifacts that would prove otherwise. Moslem claims to the Temple Mount, on the other hand, have been debunked even by other Moslems. A commentator for the official Egyptian government weekly, of all places, has written that the entire Moslem claim on Jerusalem and the El-Aksa mosque is based on a mistaken reading of one chapter of the Quran. Ahmed Mahmad Oufa wrote that the verse that mentions a night journey by Muhammed to a mosque has nothing to do with Jerusalem, as is generally claimed, but with a mosque near the holy Moslem city of Medina.

Prof. Moshe Sharon, Middle Eastern expert in the Hebrew University, expressed great surprise at the fact that such an article would be published in Arabic and in an Arabic-speaking country. He told Arutz-7 at the time, "All in all, this is not a new claim. We must remember that Jerusalem is not mentioned at all in the Quran [though it is mentioned hundreds of time in the Bible - ed. note]. The verse in question is in Sura [chapter] 17, which states that Muhammad was brought at night from one mosque to a 'more distant' - aktsa, in Arabic - mosque. The first Moslem commentators did not explain this as referring to Jerusalem at all, of course, but rather as a miraculous night journey or night vision or some such. In the beginning of the 8th century, however, they began associating this with Jerusalem, because they had a need to start giving sanctity to Jerusalem, and so they started connecting this verse with Jerusalem... Originally, however, the Moslems recognized the area of the Dome of the Rock as holy because of the Jewish Temple of King Solomon."

The Blessing is recited daily in synagogues in Israel by descendants of Aaron the Priest, and only on festivals in the Diaspora.

The special visit was held to commemorate the 842nd anniversary of Maimonides's famous visit to the Temple Mount, Judaism's holiest site. A group of some 25 Jews, organized by the Temple Institute in Jerusalem, marked the special day with a commemorative visit. Giving extra-special meaning to the occasion was a spontaneous Priestly Blessing delivered to the group by Yehuda Katz, the lead singer of the Reva L'Sheva band, and Eliezer Breuer, originally of the former Soviet Union and now from Kiryat Arba.

Rabbi Chaim Richman, one of the organizers of the trip, said, "This was probably the first time since the destruction of the Temple [1,928 years ago] that the Priestly Blessing was delivered on our holiest site. At times like these, when there is talk of giving away our precious places, and when despair is sometimes in the air, events of this nature serve to remind us that G-d has not forgotten about us, and that He still has big plans for both us and the Holy Temple - and that the Temple will yet become the focal point of the world once again."

Another notable aspect of the visit was the welcoming attitude of the police. "In an unusual departure from standard procedure," one participant said, "we found that the police were particularly sympathetic to our needs. At one point, when the Moslem Wakf guards started yelling that we were praying, one of the policemen took our side and even threatened to remove them if necessary."

Critics said the British Board of Film Classification's members had adopted a policy of "anything goes" and were a "law unto themselves". The controversy was triggered by the board's decision to approve the ultra-violent film Eastern Promises without any cuts.

The 18-certificate movie, which is released this week, includes graphic scenes of throatslitting, child prostitution and a man having an eye gouged out. A spokesman for the board said it was up to adults to decide what they wanted to watch and that movie-goers were free to look away from the screen.

But John Beyer, of pressure group Mediawatch UK, said the board should be sacked for failing to show leadership at a time when street violence is spiralling. "The BBFC has become increasingly lax and ineffective and is completely out of touch with public opinion," he told the Mail.

- These are some of the milestones in 70 years of censorship:

1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Enchanted forest scenes deemed unsuitable for "nervous children".
1939, Gone with the Wind: Clark Gable's line, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn", cleared in U.S. after special appeal.
1962, Lawrence of Arabia: Battle scenes cut for being too brutal.
1964, Carry on Cleo: Bawdy humour and near nudity trimmed to win an "A" rating.
1974, Cockfighter: Film about clandestine sport in the Deep South refused BBFC certificate because of "extreme" violence.
2004, 9 Songs: Featured real sex but granted 18 certificate with no cuts.
2006, Destricted: Series of pornographic films passed uncut by BBFC as "a work of art not intended to arouse".

THE price of peas and other vegetables have soared by as much as 65 per cent because of this summer's floods, according to the latest industry figures. The sharp price rises in legumes, including peas and beans, as well as cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli and brussels sprouts, have been sparked by disastrous UK harvests.

Now leading trade magazine The Grocer claims retailers are desperately trying to slow the 40 per cent harvest shortfall by introducing dramatic price hikes. Its researchers found the sharpest increase was on the price of peas, with Tesco's own label frozen peas, which previously retailed at £1.08, now selling for £1.79 for a 1.2kg pack. Other packs in the same supermarket have increased by 23 per cent and Birds Eye frozen peas have also leapt substantially in price.

Tim Mudge, of the Processed Vegetable Growers' Association, confirmed the wet summer weather was starting to have a major impact on prices. "Earlier in the year retailers were locked in a price battle on peas, ignoring the realities of supply and demand," he said. "Now they are trying to avoid running out of stock."

Concerns were first raised by farmers - particularly those in the Gloucestershire and Worcestershire areas - who watched as their crops were submerged by the flood waters.

Steven Watkins, of Sheepcote Farm in Severn Stoke, saw his entire summer crop of sweetcorn, parsnips, potatoes, spring onions, peas and beans wiped out. He said: "It just shows how fragile the food supply chain is. I suppose these price rises may come as a bit of a wake-up call to some people."

Farmers have also been engaged in a long-standing fight with supermarkets to be paid a "fairer price" for their milk. However when Arla Food Milk Partnership increased the amount it paid dairy farmers by 5p per litre in August, the supermarkets raised shelf prices by the equivalent of 8.8p per litre, to make sure they didn't lose out.

The damage done to New Orleans in 2005 has spurred two rival teams of climate experts, in America and Israel, to redouble their efforts to enable people to play God with the weather. Under one scheme, aircraft would drop soot into the near-freezing cloud at the top of a hurricane, causing it to warm up and so reduce wind speeds. Computer simulations of the forces at work in the most violent storms have shown that even small changes can affect their paths - enabling them to be diverted from major cities.

But the hurricane modifiers are fighting more than the weather. Lawyers warn that diverting a hurricane from one city to save life and property could result in multi-billion dollar lawsuits from towns that bear the brunt instead. Hurricane Katrina caused about $41 billion in damage to New Orleans.

Hurricanes form when air warmed over the ocean rises to meet the cool upper atmosphere. The heat turns to kinetic energy, producing a spiral of wind and rain. The greater the temperature differences between top and bottom, and the narrower the eye of the hurricane, the faster it blows.

Moshe Alamaro, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told The Sunday Telegraph of his plans to "paint" the tops of hurricanes black by scattering carbon particles - either soot or black particles from the manufacture of tyres - from aircraft flying above the storms. The particles would absorb heat from the sun, leading to changes in the airflows within the storm. Satellites could also heat the cloud tops by beaming microwaves from space.

The MIT team has now hired a professor of risk management to advise on steps necessary to protect themselves from legal action by communities affected if a hurricane is diverted. It is pressing for changes to US law and for an international treaty to settle possible disputes between neighbouring countries.

Mr Alamaro said: "The social and legal issues are daunting. If a hurricane were coming towards Miami with the potential to cause damage and kill people, and we diverted it, another town or village hit by it would sue us. They'll say the hurricane is no longer an act of God, but that we caused it."

US banks have raised reserves for loan losses by at least $6bn over the second quarter and by even larger amounts from last year, indicating financial executives believe consumers will be increasingly unable to make payments on a variety of loans.

Banks are adding to reserves not just for defaults on mortgages, but also on home equity loans, car loans and credit cards.

"What started out merely as a subprime problem has expanded more broadly in the mortgage space and problems are getting worse at a faster pace than many had expected," said Michael Mayo, Deutsche Bank analyst.

The Civic Platform defeated the conservative Law and Justice party of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Sunday's election after a record number of Poles turned up at the ballot box to reject social conservatism and isolationism. The Platform's victory will be greeted with relief in EU capitals where the Kaczynskis have earned a reputation of troublemakers with their nationalist agenda since coming to power in 2005.

"Poland's credibility will be rebuilt," said Zbigniew Lewicki, a foreign policy expert at the University of Warsaw. "We have a chance of becoming a normal European country." Despite a booming economy, the Kaczynskis had ruled during constant infighting, particularly over the campaign against post-communist graft that has been their central policy. Kaczynski, whose party got over 30 percent of the vote, conceded defeat. His twin brother Lech, the president, does not face an election until 2010 but opposition parties together looked set to get enough seats in parliament to trump his veto power.

The opposition had accused them of abusing secret services and undermining good democratic practice with attacks on independent judiciary and tight control of state media. Following its victory, Platform leaders said they would try to put Poland's all-but-abandoned drive to adopt the euro back on track, with 2012-13 seen as the earliest entry date.

It promised to seek lower taxes, cut red tape and speed up privatization to help slash the budget deficit and debt -- key euro zone criteria seen as the main obstacles to euro zone membership. It also plans to bring home some 900 troops from the U.S.-led force in Iraq and may bargain hard with Washington over U.S. plans to set up a missile defense site in Poland, vehemently opposed by neighboring Russia.