Families face a massive surge in power bills today with accusations that foreign energy giants are treating the UK like "Treasure Island". German owned N-Power is rushing through immediate rises of up to 27.1per cent. The average family buying both gas and electricity from the company will find the annual bill soaring above £1,000. Charities for the elderly fear the sudden increase will put many lives at risk.

The decision by Npower, part of German utility powerhouse RWE, is expected to be followed by other suppliers, many with foreign parent companies. EON is also owned by the Germans and EDF by a French business, while Scottish Power is part of the Spanish conglomerate Iberdrola.

Adam Scorer, campaigns chief at the consumer body Energywatch, hit out at the profiteering of the foreign energy giants. "The big European energy companies treat Great Britain like 'Treasure Island,' " he said. "They raid the UK's North Sea for gas supplies when it is cheap but then levy punitive prices when demand is higher. This move suggests something is very badly wrong, not only in the GB energy market but in Europe as well. There is no actual shortage of gas across Europe, we have new pipelines to bring that gas to the UK, greater storage capacity and terminals to bring in supertankers full of liquefied natural gas."

Flights were grounded in Northern California as gusts reached 80 mph during the second wave of an arctic storm that sent trees crashing onto houses, cars and roads. Forecasters expected the storm to dump as much as 10 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada by Sunday. The heavy snow was slowing search efforts for a family believed to be missing in the mountains, authorities said.

Highways from Sacramento to San Francisco were closed because of debris or toppled big rigs blocking lanes, and local roads were flooded.

At Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park in Key Biscayne, iguanas fell out of trees Thursday. The cold-blooded reptiles go into a sort of hibernation when temperatures get too low, even if they are perched in branches. Most woke up when the weather warmed later in the day. The animals are not native to Florida and are considered a nuisance, park officials told The Miami Herald.

Three American Airlines Boeing 767-200s that fly daily round-trip routes between New York and California will receive the anti-missile laser jammers this spring, according to the Department of Homeland Security, which is spending $29 million on the tests.

Jets will fly with the jammer device mounted on the belly of the plane, between the wheels. The device works with sensors, also mounted on the plane, that detect a heat-seeking missile and shoot a laser at it to send the missile veering harmlessly off course.

Anti-missile systems have been tested on cargo planes. But "this is the first time these systems have been tested on actual passenger airlines in commercial service," says Burt Keirstead, director of commercial aircraft protection at BAE Systems, which developed the anti-missile device. "It's the ultimate consumer use of the equipment."

Some have been housed in makeshift camps while others have sought refuge in police stations or churches, fleeing violence that has claimed 350 lives. In badly-affected western Kenya nearly all the refugees are hungry, and several children have died of exposure. A top UN official in Nairobi says about 500,000 Kenyans need urgent help. The UN World Food Programme said it was scrambling to bring food to 100,000 displaced people in the Rift Valley area.

"The level of hatred is very high. Violence of tribal origin is the worst - it knows no limits and is extremely difficult to quell," said Alexandre Liebeskind, deputy head of ICRC operations for the Horn of Africa. A statement by a group of independent UN rights experts on Friday said: "We are profoundly alarmed by the reports of incitement to racial hatred and the growing frictions between the different ethnic groups in Kenya."

The BBC's Karen Allen in the Rift Valley town of Eldoret says the CATHOLIC CHURCH is now spearheading a co-ordinated relief effort to get blankets, tents and food to around 30,000 local people who have been made homeless.

A new crisis is emerging, a global food catastrophe that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen. The credit crunch and the reverberations of soaring oil prices around the world will pale in comparison to what is about to transpire, Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group said at the Empire Club's 14th annual investment outlook in Toronto on Thursday. "IT'S NOT A MATTER OF IF, BUT WHEN," HE WARNED INVESTORS. "IT'S GOING TO HIT THIS YEAR HARD."

Mr. Coxe said the sharp rise in raw food prices in the past year will intensify in the next few years amid increased demand for meat and dairy products from the growing middle classes of countries such as China and India as well as heavy demand from the biofuels industry. "The greatest challenge to the world is not US$100 oil; it's getting enough food so that the new middle class can eat the way our middle class does, and that means we've got to expand food output dramatically," he said.

The impact of tighter food supply is already evident in raw food prices, which have risen 22% in the past year. Mr. Coxe said in an interview that this surge would begin to show in the prices of consumer foods in the next six months. Consumers already paid 6.5% more for food in the past year.WHEAT PRICES ALONE HAVE RISEN 92% IN THE PAST YEAR, and yesterday closed at US$9.45 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade.

At the centre of the imminent food catastrophe is corn - the main staple of the ethanol industry. The price of corn has risen about 44% over the past 15 months, closing at US$4.66 a bushel on the CBOT yesterday - its best finish since June 1996. This not only impacts the price of food products made using grains, but also the price of meat, with feed prices for livestock also increasing. With 54% of the world's corn supply grown in America's mid-west, the U.S. is one of those countries with an edge.

But Mr. Coxe warned U.S. corn exports were in danger of seizing up in about three years if the country continues to subsidize ethanol production. BIOFUELS ARE EXPECTED TO EAT UP ABOUT A THIRD OF AMERICA'S GRAIN HARVEST IN 2007.

THE AMOUNT OF U.S. GRAIN CURRENTLY STORED FOR FOLLOWING SEASONS WAS THE LOWEST ON RECORD, RELATIVE TO CONSUMPTION, HE SAID. "You should be there for it fully-hedged by having access to those stocks that benefit from rising food prices."

He said there are about two dozen stocks in the world that are going to redefine the world's food supplies, and "those stocks will have a precious value as we move forward." Mr. Coxe said crop yields around the world need to increase to something close to what is achieved in the state of Illinois, WHICH PRODUCES OVER 200 CORN BUSHES AN ACRE COMPARED WITH AN AVERAGE 30 BUSHES AN ACRE IN THE REST OF THE WORLD.

One is a feudal aristocrat widely reviled as corrupt and blamed for his wife's undoing when she was the country's Prime Minister in the 1990s. The other, their son, is a bookish Oxford undergraduate who talks of democracy but whose political clout derives entirely from his middle name. Yet there they were, three days after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, their beloved wife and mother, proclaiming themselves inheritors of her political fief, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), and assuring Pakistan that they were the answer to all its problems. "My mother always said democracy is the best revenge," the younger man intoned.

Pakistan is a long way from democracy, but revenge is on the minds of Bhutto's supporters. Their rage is directed not at her presumed assassins - al-Qaeda-linked Islamic extremists from the lawless tribal areas along the northern border with Afghanistan - but at President Pervez Musharraf, a man the Bush Administration deems a vital ally.

Washington struggled to come to terms with Bhutto's death - the White House hoped she would share power with Musharraf and had made her the centerpiece of its latest plan for Pakistan. While the White House continued to back Musharraf's grip on power as the best near-term key to Pakistan's survival, others are more blunt in their assessment. Anthony Zinni, former chief of the Pentagon's Central Command, whose remit includes Pakistan, warns that extremist groups are "trying to ignite Pakistan into the kind of chaos they need to survive, and create a fundamentalist, even radical, Islamic government."

It doesn't take much insight to see the dangers of that outcome. Failure to keep the sole Muslim nuclear power stable, whole and democratic might be catastrophic not just for the war on terrorism and the stability of South Asia but also for the future of Islam and the relations between Islamic states and the West. Yet Bhutto's assassination has exposed how little influence the U.S. - or any other outside power - has on the nation that was bloodily carved out of India when the British left 60 years ago, and which has been bedeviled by violence and venal politics ever since.

Last month, employers added the fewest new jobs to their payrolls in more than four years, said the jobs report released Friday by the Labor Department. The report also showed that employment conditions are deteriorating, strained by a housing slump and credit crunch that are sapping economic strength.

The unemployment rate jumped from 4.7 percent in November to 5 percent in December, the highest since November 2005 after the Gulf Coast hurricanes dealt the country a mighty blow. Payrolls - both private employers and government - grew by just 18,000 last month, the worst showing since August 2003, when the economy suffered job losses as it struggled to recover from the 2001 recession. The December employment picture was much weaker than economists were expecting. They were forecasting the unemployment rate to bump up to 4.8 percent and for employers to add around 70,000 jobs to their payrolls.

Employers have grown cautious as they try to cope with fallout from housing and credit problems and rising uncertainty about how the economy will fare in the months ahead. Galloping energy prices and bad weather in some parts of the country also probably figured into the weak job figures. Manufacturers, construction companies, financial services all cut jobs in December - casualties of the housing slump. Retailers also sliced jobs. The government added 31,000 jobs in December, while private employers actually cut payrolls by 13,000, underscoring the weakness.

"Perhaps we should call it our new climate," said the Bureau of Meteorology's head of climate analysis, David Jones. He was speaking after the release of statistics showing that last year was the hottest on record in NSW, Victoria, South Australia and the ACT. NSW and the Murray-Darling Basin experienced their seventh consecutive year of below-average rain. Dr Jones said the statewide rain statistics would have looked even worse had it not been for heavy falls along the coast.

Sydney had its wettest year since 1998, receiving 1499 millimetres, well above the long-term average of 1215. While much of it was coastal, rain that did fall across the state fell at the wrong time for farmers, soaked into drought-parched soils or evaporated during scorching days.

Australia and New Zealand Bank and Commonwealth Bank of Australia said Hong Kong-registered SAFE Investment Company had bought stakes of less than one per cent in each of the banks. An entity with the same name has taken a stake of about one-third of a per cent in National Australia Bank, people inside NAB reckon.

The investments were made in the past two months and built up during several weeks so as not to move the banks' share prices or trigger any mandatory disclosure requirements, according to an internal report by one of the Australian banks. A banker familiar with SAFE Investment's activities said the firm had also been looking at similar under-the-radar investments in London.

The new measures - which echo those in place in the US - would allow the FSA to seize and protect depositors' cash when a bank gets into serious difficulty, heading off the risk of a run on the bank. Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, believes a special insolvency regime for banks is vital because it would mean that a badly run bank could be allowed to fail without fear of a systemic crisis caused by a loss of public confidence.

The central bank has committed at least £25bn of taxpayer-backed loans to Northern Rock since savers began queuing around the block to withdraw their money last September. Under the new banking insolvency regime, Mr Darling will propose a series of "triggers" - including a request from a bank for an emergency Bank of England loan - which could see the FSA step in if the institution was in danger.

Treasury officials said the deposits would be immediately secured and could then be repaid quickly or parcelled off to another bank, including to the original bank if it had been successfully restructured. The FSA would then oversee the future of the failed bank.

In a study of nearly 3,000 healthy British adults, lead by Dr. Andrew Steptoe of University College London, found that those who reported upbeat moods had lower levels of cortisol -- a "stress" hormone that, when chronically elevated, may contribute to high blood pressure, abdominal obesity and dampened immune function, among other problems.

In the study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, women who reported more positive emotions had lower blood levels of two proteins that indicate widespread inflammation in the body. Chronic inflammation is believed to contribute to a range of ills over time, including heart disease and cancer.

Researchers have long noted that happier people tend to be in better health than those who are persistently stressed, hostile or pessimistic. But the reasons are still being studied.

Most of WFP's shipments to east and central Africa come through the Kenyan port of Mombasa, but the spiralling violence that has followed the country's disputed election has left trucks stranded and contractors refusing to move without escort.

"There are delays in reaching the rest of the region," said WFP spokesman Peter Smerdon. "Some have left Mombasa but have been held up at checkpoints or roadblocks run by vigilantes, some drivers did not come back after Christmas and some contractors refuse to leave Mombasa without escort from the security forces."

Turmoil in Kenya after President Mwai Kibaki announced victory at the polls has already killed more than 300 people, with violence bringing much of the country to a standstill.

The top Vatican official in charge of relations with Islam, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, said he expected an advanced group of three Muslim representatives in February or March to lay the groundwork for the meeting.

"In a certain sense, (the meeting) can be defined as historic," Tauran told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, in an edition published earlier this week.

Some 138 Muslim scholars wrote to Pope Benedict and other Christian leaders in October, saying "the very survival of the world itself" might depend on dialogue. The Pope, who as head of the Catholic Church represents more than half the world's two billion Christians, responded in November by welcoming their call and inviting them to Rome.

The German-born Pontiff sparked Muslim protests in 2006 by making a speech hinting that Islam was violent and irrational. He repeatedly expressed regret for the reaction to the speech but stopped short of the clear apology sought by Muslims.

Ford Motor Company named Tata Motors Ltd the top bidder for its Jaguar and Land Rover brands on Thursday and entered into "focused negotiations at a more detailed level," meaning Tata was named preferred bidder for the storied British automakers.

"While no final decision has been made, we will proceed with further substantive discussions with Tata Motors over the forthcoming weeks," Lewis Booth, executive vice president of Ford's European units, said in a statement. Jaguar and Land Rover employees in the United Kingdom were told about the negotiations Thursday morning shortly before the company made the announcement. Ford executives have said they expect to sell the two British automakers early this year.

A single trader bid up the price by buying a modest lot and then sold it immediately at a loss, it was said. The New York Mercantile Exchange confirmed that US crude oil futures traded just once in triple figures. But prices have since remained below that historic level and market analysts questioned the validity of the trade.

Stephen Schork, a former floor trader on the New York Mercantile Exchange and the editor of an oil market newsletter, said one floor trader bought 1,000 barrels, the smallest amount permitted, and sold it immediately for $99.40 at a $600 loss. "They absolutely overpaid," he told Radio Four's Today Programme. "HE PAID $600 FOR THE RIGHT TO TELL HIS GRANDCHILDREN THAT HE WAS THE FIRST IN THE WORLD TO BUY $100 OIL."

Most trading in energy futures has shifted away from the trading floor and takes place on electronic platforms. The supporters of electronic trading claim that it is faster, cheaper, more efficient for users, and less prone to manipulation by market makers. The dwindling liquidity on the NYMEX trading floor has led to considerable speculation that the exchange will soon shut down the trading floor to cut costs.