But the shadow of real crime has intruded into the popular Second Life virtual world as it emerged that police are examining claims it is now being used by paedophiles. Set up in 2003, the online world now has 6.2 million registered users who can buy "land", create virtual houses and businesses and meet each other using "avatars" - or virtual 3D characters of themselves.

However, German television revealed that one user, who poses as a 13-year-old girl, has been offering photographs of real-life child pornography to other users. Peter Vogt, the head of Germany's Central Agency for the Prevention of Child Pornography, yesterday revealed his department was working with San Francisco-based Linden Lab, the owners of Second Life.

"Linden Lab has been working very hard here against this abuser who misuses this game as a platform for child porn," Mr Vogt said. Visitors to Second Life agree to abide by terms and conditions banning offensive language and behaviour when they log on to the virtual world, which requires a computer software download and a broadband internet connection.

However, the vast number of people inhabiting Second Life - 1.7 million have logged in during the past 60 days - makes policing it a near impossibility. Instead, like YouTube, it relies on other users flagging up offensive behaviour to the owners. Users have to be aged 13 to join Second Life, and even then are kept to a "teen world" before being allowed to join the main online area at the age of 18.

MANY companies have scrambled to buy a presence in Second Life as the business opportunities of the virtual world have become clearer. Second Life now has 65,000 "acres" that residents can buy, plus 16-acre "islands", available for £844 (plus £148 per month maintenance) on which they can build virtual shops and offices. Computer giant IBM, BMW, American retailer Sears and Vodafone are among the companies with Second Life buildings.

And American lawyer, Stevan Lieberman, sees clients in a virtual office for £163 per hour. Second Life has its own currency, the Linden Dollar, which can be bought and sold like real currency. Others have chosen to mesh their real life with their online existence even more closely - one user has his real house linked to Second Life so that when his physical front door opens, the door of his virtual house opens too.

Department for Transport (DfT) officials are working with international experts to develop worldwide standards for car data recorders that record key information, including a car's speed and steering angle, in the moments up to a crash. Some are capable of sending a signal to alert the emergency services if they "think" that the driver is seriously injured. Sat-nav technology then guides police and paramedics to the vehicle.

Different types of black boxes, which are actually brightly coloured so they can be easily found following a crash, have already been installed in a small number of top-of-the-range cars in the UK and in a larger number of vehicles in the United States.

This information includes vehicle speed, engine revs per minute, acceleration, what angle the vehicle is at, data from the antilock braking system, whether the driver and passenger are wearing seatbelts, and what angle the steering wheel is at. The boxes will also collect data from the car's airbag systems. Unlike similar systems on aircraft, the black box will not record conversations in the car.

Human rights lawyer John Scott said: "This sort of development could represent a further encroachment into privacy. When we already have a number of different techniques for vehicle recognition and massive CCTV coverage all over, THIS IS ANOTHER WAY OF TRACKING US. BIT BY BIT OUR PRIVACY IS BEING ERODED. While we have a government which means us no harm, these things can be used in ways we wouldn't like."

A spokeswoman for the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders Limited (SMMT) added: "This is something which has not really been discussed for quite a while. The engine management systems in some cars can record some of this kind of data, but there needs to be a balance between the issues of road safety and personal privacy. A lot more research needs to be done." Others were more welcoming but foresaw problems over fears THE DEVICES WOULD BE USED FOR ROAD PRICING.

Some cars already carry forms of black boxes, which can record some data about speed as part of engine management systems. Many newer Mercedes-Benz cars, for instance, log engine data so that mechanics can analyse any starting problem.

In addition, some newer BMWs have devices which are connected to satellite navigation networks and can analyse whether to alert the emergency services after an incident. If the vehicle's airbags have been activated and the car is not moving, the computer judges that an accident has taken place. If the driver has not pressed the SOS button available in some models, then the computer will alert a BMW rescue centre which will in turn request an ambulance and police to go to the scene of the accident.

The church is distributing 100,000 DVDs to MPs, peers, religious leaders and other influential figures, accusing the BBC of "gross bias" in its reporting, in a bid to protect its reputation against the programme's investigators, who spent six months probing whether Scientology is a legitimate religion.

Scientologists, who reportedly used CCTV, followed the Panorama team and regularly confronted its journalists, have also set up a website and are distributing 10,000 magazines to support the DVD.The centrepiece of the film is a scene in which the BBC journalist John Sweeney is shown to have "lost the plot" while visiting a Church of Scientology exhibition, "Psychiatry: Industry of Death", which uses graphic images to attack psychiatry.

Afterwards, Mr Sweeney is confronted about his investigation by Tommy Davis, a senior Scientologist, who accuses him of giving one of his interviewees, a critic of Scientology, an easy ride. Mr Sweeney then yells at the top of his considerable voice: "You were not there at the beginning of the interview. You were not there. You did not hear or record all the interview."

The scene has now been posted on YouTube. Mr Sweeney has apologised for his outburst. "For an hour and a half they showed me these appalling images. I felt as though if I didn't fight it they would take over my mind," he said. "I've reported in Bosnia and I've never felt like this, but I am sorry. The moment I lost it I knew I was in the wrong."

Scientology, founded in Phoenix, Arizona in 1952 by science fiction writer, L Ron Hubbard, asserts that 75 million years ago a galactic warlord called Xenu rounded up 13.5 trillion beings from an overcrowded corner of the universe, dumping them on Earth before killing them with nuclear bombs. Their tortured souls have now attached to human beings and are at the root of most of the planet's problems.

The church, has several A-List Hollywood followers, including Tom Cruise and John Travolta, who has written a letter of complaint to the BBC about the Panorama programme. Scientology claims that it now has around 120,000 members in the UK.

Nearly 70 years after the invasion of Poland marked the beginning of a global cataclysm, the Central European nation once again finds itself confronting a foe it sees as a threat to Western civilization. While the rest of Europe largely accommodates a rising tide of secularism, many Polish leaders are prepared to fight back with a bold, traditional social agenda they envision not only for their own country but for the continent and the world.

Poland's vice premier and minister of education, Roman Giertych told the World Congress of Families here his multi-pronged plan including a proposal issued last month to ban "homosexual propaganda" in schools is "something I have to do."

"The family is the hope for Poland, the hope for Europe, the hope for the entire world," the 36-year-old leader told the global gathering of more than 3,200 from 75 nations. " Without the family, there is no nation, there is no continent, there is no civilization, there is nothing."

As WND reported, the fourth World Congress convened this weekend to address Europe's "demographic winter" of plunging birthrates by promoting the "natural family" as the "springtime of Europe and the world."
In April, members of the European Parliament quickly denounced Giertych's "homosexual propaganda" proposal as "repulsive" and "hateful" and passed a resolution of condemnation 325-124, with 150 abstentions.
Janina Fetlinksa, a member of the Polish Senate and the Council of Europe, told WND in an interview the European Union doesn't really understand Poland.

While many Poles don't practice the country's traditional Catholic faith, it's still deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, Fetlinska said. Our pope, John Paul II, moved our spirits toward God," she explained. "I think this is the reason the value of life is very important to us. It's in our politics, too, because politics are from people."
"This world of permissiveness, of certain attitudes which promote homosexuality, which promote pornography, this world is coming to an end, because our civilization is built on virtues, on Roman law on the Decalogue," said Giertych, "This civilization has great strength for rebirth. The rebirth will take place in the family, not only in Europe, but in the entire world."

"Today we need a great charter for the rights of the family and nations that defines the right to life, that would define abortion as murder," Giertych told the World Congress delegates. "Whether three months old or three months before birth, whether 60 or 90 years old, murder is always murder. It is always a crime."
One of the fundamental truths that should be in that charter, he said, is that families are led by a man and a woman.

American scholar Robert Knight of the Media Research Center in Alexandria, Va. Affirmed in an interview with WND that Poland is "nearly alone" as the European Union promotes abortion, homosexuality and pornography "as hard as it can as part of an overall deconstruction of the family."

"We have taken our courage in what the Poles are doing," he said. "This is a nation that has suffered enormously over many decades. First from Nazism and then communism. They're a tough bunch of people who appear to have the strength to resist especially the homosexual agenda.

"If you've been victim of communists and Nazis, you're not going to run in fright from the forces from San Francisco."

With plumes of black smoke billowing over the city of 12 million people, there were extraordinary scenes as gunmen on motorbikes pumped bullets into crowds demonstrating against Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, while police stood by and watched.

In images more reminiscent of Baghdad, bloodstained corpses lay where they had fallen in the streets and bodies piled up in hospital morgues. As the sense of crisis deepened, a crisis meeting between Gen Musharraf and the prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, resolved to send in paramilitary troops to restore order, and to place the army on standby. The men agreed that a state of emergency would be imposed if the first two options failed.

It was the bloodiest escalation of the two-month long saga which began when the president attempted to sack the country's chief justice in March. The ensuing challenge by lawyers and opposition parties to Gen Musharraf's eight-year rule has left the president - a key Western ally in the "war on terror" - desperately clinging to power.

Opponents believe he had hoped to create a compliant judiciary ahead of elections which he has promised to hold later this year. But what started as a political confrontation has now lit Karachi's tinderbox of ethnic rivalry.
Many of the 15,000 police and security forces deployed in the city stood idly by as armed activists from Karachi's ruling party, Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), a coalition ally of Gen Musharraf, blocked Mr Chaudhry's exit from the airport and took control of the city's central district.

Lawyers railed against the government. "This is a shocking attempt by the government to suppress the people," Iqbal Haider, a human rights lawyer and former senator, told The Sunday Telegraph. "Musharraf is making all sorts of mistakes to save himself from sinking."

Tension has been simmering in Karachi for the past week, with rumours swirling round that Mr Musharraf had allowed conflicting rallies to go ahead to create the requisite level of disorder to justify the declaration of an emergency.

Exacerbating the political furore in Karachi over the sacking of Mr Chaudhry is a decades-old and simmering feud between the MQM, a movement supported by the city's mohajir population who migrated from India at Partition in 1947, and ethnic Pathans, who were originally from Pakistan's North West Frontier province.
Opponents of the MQM claim that its actions yesterday were ordered in micro-detail by the movement's autocratic leader, via telephone, from Edgware in north London.

In a move that has already angered some of his most ardent supporters, President Bush has asked the Democratic leadership in the U.S. Senate to revive a proposal for ratification of the United Nation's Law of the Sea Treaty, (LOST) an international agreement defeated two years ago by Republican leadership in the upper house.

Critics say ratification would compromise U.S. sovereignty and place 70 percent of the Earth's surface under the control of the U.N. even providing for a "tax" that would be paid directly to the international body by companies mining in the world's oceans.

The battle over the Law of the Sea Treaty first began 25 years ago, eventually being vetoed by President Reagan. It resurfaced in 2004 under the sponsorship of Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and was successfully defeated by then Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. It would establish rules governing the uses of the of the world's oceans treating waters more than 200 NAUTICAL MILES OFF COASTS as the purview of a new international U.N. bureaucracy, the International Seabed Authority

The ISA would have the authority to set production controls for ocean mining, drilling and fishing, regulate ocean exploration, issue permits and settle disputes in its own new "court." Companies seeking to mine or fish would be required to apply for a permit, paying a royalty fee

The U.S. would have only one vote of 140 and no veto power as it has on the U.N. Security Council.
One of the main authors of LOST not only admired Karl Marx but was an ardent advocate of the Marxist-oriented New International Economic Order. Elisabeth Mann Borgese, a socialist who ran the World Federalists of Canada, played a critical role in crafting and promoting LOST.

The youngest daughter of the German novelist Thomas Mann, Borgese openly favored world government, wrote for the left-wing The Nation magazine and was a member of a "COMMITTEE TO FRAME A WORLD CONSTITUTION." In a 1997 interview, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation broadcaster Philip Coulter asked Borgese about the collapse of Soviet-style communism and the triumph of the "elites."
Borgese replied "there is a strong counter-trend. It's not called socialism, but it's called SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, which calls for the eradication of poverty. There is that trend and that is the trend that I am working on."

THE CONCEPT OF "SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT," CONSIDERED A EUPHEMISM FOR SOCIALISM OR COMMUNISM, HAS BEEN EMBRACED IN VARIOUS PRONOUNCEMENTS BY THE U.N. AND EVEN THE U.S. GOVERNMENT.

In an article co-authored with an international lawyer, Borgese noted how LOST stipulates that the oceans "shall be reserved for peaceful purposes" and that "any threat or use of force, inconsistent with the United Nations Charter, is prohibited." She argued LOST prohibits the ability of nuclear submarines from the U.S. and other nations to rove freely through the world's oceans.

He also told Brazilian bishops gathered in Sao Paulo's main cathedral that they must focus on helping the poor. He criticized Brazil as a country blighted by poverty in which many politicians and rich people cared only for themselves.After leading a festive mass to canonize Brazil's first saint, Pope Benedict railed against slack morals, rampant sexual activity and abortion.

He also turned his attention to another prime concern -- the exodus of millions of people from the Catholic Church."Certainly the present is a difficult time for the Church," he told about 250 bishops seated in pews between the Cathedral da Se's magnificent arches.

He complained that Protestant groups were aggressively courting new members and many people were turning away from religion altogether. "No effort should be spared in seeking out those Catholics who have fallen away." To applause from the bishops, he bemoaned the ills in Brazilian society such as huge income inequalities and he implicitly condemned corruption.

"There is a need to form a genuine spirit of truthfulness and honesty among the political and commercial classes," the 80-year-old Pontiff said. He hammered the theme of combating loose morals, urging Catholics to spurn media portrayals of life that glamorize premarital sex and undermine the traditional family. "The world needs transparent lives, clear souls, pure minds that refuse to be perceived as mere objects of pleasure," he said in his sermon.

But in a country where sex outside marriage is common, birth control is widely used, and divorce is not frowned upon, his message has had a mixed reception.

New figures showed retail sales in the US unexpectedly tumbled last month, hit by a double whammy of higher petrol prices and a crumbling housing market.

Retail sales are being closely watched since US consumers have helped keep the world economy afloat in recent years, borrowing against the rising value of their houses to finance spending on everything from new cars to flatscreen TVs.

American consumers spent $372bn (£190bn) last month, a vast amount but a smaller one than had been expected, giving rise to speculation that the Fed, under new chairman Ben Bernanke, may start cutting interest rates later this year.

Following a prolonged period in which consumer spending was underpinned by a booming real estate market, the breakdown of today's retail sales figures showed that the weakness of America's housing market is starting to put the brake on consumer spending.

To find this enormous complex, you have to travel beneath the surface. One hundred metres below Geneva's western suburbs is a dimly lit tunnel that runs in a circle for 27km (17 miles). The tunnel belongs to Cern, the European Centre for Nuclear Research. Though currently empty, over the next two years an enormous experiment will be installed here.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a powerful and impossibly complicated machine that will smash particles together at super-fast speeds in a bid to unlock the secrets of the Universe. By recreating the searing-hot conditions fractions of a second after the Big Bang, scientists hope to see new physics, discover the sought-after "God particle", uncover new dimensions and even generate mini-black holes.

When completed, two parallel tubes will carry high-energy particles called protons in opposite directions around the tunnel at close to the speed of light. The energies achieved by the experiment are 70 times greater than those of the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) which previously occupied the tunnels at Cern.

Only by raising the bar will scientists be able to expand our current understanding of the Universe. Whatever the discoveries ahead for physicists working at the LHC, the experiments will, according to its chief scientific officer, Jos Engelen, "keep physicists off street corners for a long time to come". For full story,
go to:- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4229545.stm

Organisers of the "Family Day" expect at least 100,000 to attend the rally, backed by the Roman Catholic Church. The proposed law would allow all unmarried couples greater rights in areas such as inheritance, but stops short of legalizing gay marriage. The divisive issue is causing problems for Prime Minister Romano Prodi.

A counter-demonstration supporting the new legislation is also planned in Rome. There will be Catholics and Communists within Mr Prodi's coalition standing on opposing sides, magnifying the same divides that brought down his government in February, says the BBC's Christian Fraser. The demonstration has the backing of the Vatican and Italy's Catholic bishops, although neither is involved in organising of the protest.

"Family belongs to believers and non-believers alike," said Gaetano Quagliariello, a centre-right senator. "Family has to do with culture and civilisation." But Franco Grillini, president of Italy's main gay rights group, Arcigay, said the country was "scared of diversity".

Yet Mr Grillini said he welcomed the Family Day rally. "It will be a big protest against us, and that is the best advertisement we could ever have." bout 500,000 unmarried Italian couples are without shared rights or benefits. They miss out on social benefits, property or inheritance, a situation that is now at odds with many countries in Europe.

When Prime Minister Romano Prodi came to power last year he promised his supporters that the government would bring in new laws to protect cohabiting couples. But with only a razor-thin majority in the Senate, Mr Prodi needs the full support of all sides of his coalition, our correspondent says.

They had said Zimbabwe was unsuitable because of its human rights record and economic problems. It is suffering food shortages and rampant inflation. But Zimbabwe has dismissed such criticism, calling it an insult.
The country was chosen by other African nations. The CSD post rotates every year between the world's regions.

Zimbabwe was elected to lead the commission by a 26-21 secret ballot among CSD members at the UN headquarters in New York. There were also three abstentions. Zimbabwe's Environment Minister Francis Nheme will now become chairman of the CSD. Mr Nheme is the subject of European Union travel ban because he is a member of President Robert Mugabe's government.

That means he cannot travel to the EU to meet ministers on commission business.
"It's our right. We're members of the United Nations and we're members of CSD, and the Africa group did make a decision and endorsed Zimbabwe," he told the BBC's Network Africa programme. "They're making a storm out of a teacup."

He said the real objection came down to Britain's criticism of Zimbabwe's controversial land reform programme. Zimbabwe was once a prosperous food exporter, but production has plummeted since land reforms in 2000 that saw thousands of white-owned farms seized.
Meanwhile, Mozambique has threatened to cut electricity to its neighbour for failing to pay its debts.

Mozambique's Cahora Bassa dam supplies Zimbabwe with 500 megawatts of power. The BBC's Jose Tembe in Maputo says Zimbabwe has accumulated debt to the tune of $9m.

lined up at its harbor to board a ferry back to the mainland. Many covered their faces with towels and bandanas as ashes fell. "The city is threatened right now," Los Angeles County fire Capt. Ron Haralson said.

The blaze scorched more than 500 acres, including a commercial building and several storage buildings, but no homes had been destroyed as of Thursday night. Smoke hung over Avalon's quaint crescent harbor, the landmark 1929 Catalina Casino and homes, restaurants and tiny hotels that cling to slopes rising sharply above the waterfront.

Part of the city was under a mandatory evacuation order, Haralson said. "There's an eerie glow over the town, we need to leave," Dan Teckenoff, publisher of the Catalina Islander said earlier in the day during a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Catalina is a long, narrow island covering 76 square miles and is served by ferry boats from Los Angeles, Long Beach and other mainland harbors. Avalon has a population of 3,200 that swells to more than 10,000 on weekends and in summer, according to the Catalina Island Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau.

Researchers from the firm surveyed billions of sites, subjecting 4.5 million pages to "in-depth analysis". About 450,000 were capable of launching so-called "drive-by downloads", sites that install malicious code, such as spyware, without a user's knowledge. A further 700,000 pages were thought to contain code that could compromise a user's computer, the team report.

To address the problem, the researchers say the company has "started an effort to identify all web pages on the internet that could be malicious". "The user is presented with links that promise access to 'interesting' pages with explicit pornographic content, copyrighted software or media. A common example are sites that display thumbnails to adult videos." The vast majority exploit vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to install themselves.

Some downloads, such as those that alter bookmarks, install unwanted toolbars or change the start page of a browser, are an annoyance. But increasingly, criminals are using drive-bys to install keyloggers that steal login and password information.

Other pieces of malicious code hijack a computer turning it into a "bot", a remotely controlled PC. Drive-by downloads represent a shift away from traditional methods of infecting a computer, such as spam and email attachments.It found that the code was often contained in those parts of the website not designed or controlled by the website owner, such as banner adverts and widgets.

Widgets are small programs that may, for example, display a calendar on a webpage or a web traffic counter. These are often downloaded form third party sites. The study also found that gangs were able to hijack web servers, effectively taking over and infecting all of the web pages hosted on the computer.

In a test, the researchers' computer was infected with 50 different pieces of malware by visiting a web page hosted on a hijacked server. The firm is now in the process of mapping the malware threat. Google, part of the StopBadware coalition, already warns users if they are about to visit a potentially harmful website, displaying a message that reads "this site may harm your computer" next to the search results.

State monopoly Russian Railways, or RZD, said last week that the freight route to Estonia was undergoing regular maintenance, but trading sources said the cut in refined-products supplies was a Kremlin reaction to a dispute with Tallinn over the monument's relocation.

Estonian media have quoted industry sources as saying the country's railway firm could cut staff and reduce working hours due to lower cargo shipments from Russia. "I don't have any forecast for June," said the source at one of Muuga's terminals. "Everybody is waiting for a political decision. It has nothing to do with the economy."

In the course of the dispute over the memorial, Moscow has also imposed other trade curbs on Estonia, though it has denied any political motive. Restrictions have affected exports of Russian coal. Russia also canceled a train service and imposed curbs on a road bridge on the main highway into Estonia.

The collection has attracted interest from the military, which is interested in its potential against chemical and biological weapons.

A team at Cornell University in New York state has created a denim jacket that protects against air pollution and a dress that wards off colds and flu.
The clothes' protective qualities are due to microscopic metal particles that cling to the cotton fabric and destroy harmful particles in the air on contact.
The dress is impregnated with tiny particles of silver by dipping it into a special solution.
Silver and copper have antibacterial qualities, which are more effective when the particles are very small.
The dress kills off many harmful bacteria and viruses that touch it by stopping them from reproducing, said the scientists.
Nanotech clothing needs to be washed far less since the tiny size of the particles makes it harder for the fabric to absorb stains.
The nanoparticles in the hooded jacket are made of palladium, one of the metals used in catalytic converters to clean car exhausts.
According to its creators, clothes made from such a fabric would be particularly useful for allergy sufferers and anyone living in an area with high air pollution. Olivia Ong, a fashion student, wanted to create something that would deal with smog.
She approached Prof Juan Hinestroza and Hong Dong in the fibre science department at Cornell.
"Initially, we were just doing this for fun. "We didn't think this was going to make a big noise but it has," said Prof Hinestroza, who has already met with US Army chiefs to discuss the military potential of the project.
He said the process could also be used on fabrics such as carpets, curtains and car seats. However, a square yard of the cotton would cost about £5,000, but its creators expect that figure to drop if the cloth is produced commercially.
Unfortunately, the range only comes in yellow, purple, brown or black because the size of the nanoparticle determines the colour.
Prof Hinestroza said he had been inundated with job offers from fashion companies but he wants to concentrate on his research.
His next goal is to change the colour of a garment by moving the particles around the fabric, so that workers could go out in the evening without having to get changed.