The Government is refusing to produce an official English translation of the text until after Parliament rises for the summer in mid-October. This follows a blanket refusal to discuss its negotiating position with MPs. The translation is available at: www.openeurope.org.uk/research/translation.pdf. An analysis is at: http://www.openeurope.org.uk/research/comparison.pdf

The Government's strategy for handling the revival of the European Constitution has been pretty badly undermined by a slew of other European leaders admitting that the new "treaty" is exactly the same as the old Constitution.

Key events
23 July Launch of IGC

7- 8 September Foreign Ministers' meeting

17-18 October Final agreement of text at European Council in Lisbon

October - Decisions on referendums in other member states

November - Queen's Speech - Parliamentary timetable set out

December - April '08 Legislation passing through Commons and Lords

EU is an empire. EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has said of the EU: "We are a very special construction unique in the history of mankind. Sometimes I like to compare THE EU AS A CREATION TO THE ORGANISATION OF AN EMPIRE. WE HAVE THE DIMENSION OF AN EMPIRE." According to the Times, "Nervous aides to the former Portuguese Prime Minister inquired after his press conference whether this description might feature in British media reports."

Euro-facts - The EU is spending £3.8 billion a year on "propaganda" to win over its citizens. ( Times 2 July)
- EU fraud is costing taxpayers more than £1million for every working day, an 11% increase on last year, according to figures from the EU Commission. (Express 10 July)

It is a term that may be painfully relevant to our own times. BACK IN THE 1930s, THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE DEMOCRATIC COUNTRIES KNEW WHAT HITLER WAS DOING -- AND THEY KNEW THAT THEY HAD ENOUGH MILITARY SUPERIORITY AT THAT POINT TO STOP HIS MILITARY BUILD UP IN ITS TRACKS. BUT THEY DID NOTHING TO STOP HIM.

Instead, they turned to what is still the magic mantra today -- "NEGOTIATIONS." No leader of a democratic nation was ever more popular than British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain -- wildly cheered in the House of Commons by opposition parties as well as his own -- when he returned from negotiations in Munich in 1938 waving an agreement and declaring that it meant "peace in our time."

We know now how short that time was. Less than a year later, World War II began in Europe and spread across the planet, killing tens of millions of people and reducing many cities to rubble in Europe and Asia. Looking back after that war, Winston Churchill said, "THERE WAS NEVER A WAR IN ALL HISTORY EASIER TO PREVENT BY TIMELY ACTION." THE EARLIER IT WAS DONE, THE LESS IT WOULD HAVE COST. At one point, Hitler could have been stopped in his tracks "without the firing of a single shot," Churchill said. That point came in 1936 -- three years before World War II began -- when Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland, in violation of two international treaties.

At that point, France alone was so much more powerful than Germany that the German generals had secret orders to retreat immediately at the first sign of French intervention. AS HITLER HIMSELF CONFIDED, THE GERMANS WOULD HAVE HAD TO RETREAT "WITH OUR TAIL BETWEEN OUR LEGS," BECAUSE THEY DID NOT YET HAVE ENOUGH MILITARY FORCE TO PUT UP EVEN A TOKEN RESISTANCE.

Why did the French not act and spare themselves and the world the years of horror that Hitler's aggressions would bring? The French had the means but not the will. "Moral paralysis" came from many things. The death of a million French soldiers in the First World War and disillusionment with the peace that followed cast a pall over a whole generation. Pacifism became vogue among the intelligentsia and spread into educational institutions. As early as 1932, Winston Churchill said: "France, though armed to the teeth, is pacifist to the core." It was morally paralyzed.

History may be interesting but it is the present and the future that pose the crucial question: IS AMERICA TODAY THE FRANCE OF YESTERDAY? We know that Iran is moving swiftly toward nuclear weapons while the UNITED NATIONS IS MOVING SLOWLY -- OR NOT AT ALL -- TOWARD DOING ANYTHING TO STOP THEM.

THE IRANIAN LEADERS ARE NOT GOING TO STOP UNLESS THEY GET STOPPED. AND, LIKE HITLER, THEY DON'T THINK WE HAVE THE GUTS TO STOP THEM. Incidentally, Hitler made some of the best anti-war statements of the 1930s. He knew that this was what the Western democracies wanted to hear -- and that it would keep them morally paralyzed while he continued building up his military machine to attack them.

Iranian leaders today make only the most token and transparent claims that they are building "peaceful" nuclear facilities -- IN ONE OF THE BIGGEST OIL-PRODUCING COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD, WHICH HAS NO NEED FOR NUCLEAR POWER TO GENERATE ELECTRICITY. Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran and its international terrorist allies will be a worst threat than Hitler ever was. But, before that happens, THE BIG QUESTION IS: ARE WE FRANCE? ARE WE MORALLY PARALYZED, PERHAPS FATALLY?

--Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.

The platform also calls for a just and agreed-upon resolution to the refugee problem on the basis of UN resolutions. The proposal, which was presented to PA ministers, requires the approval of the PA parliament.

Also, for the first time in the history of the PA, the government does not mention in its political program the Arabic word for "resistance" or "armed struggle." Instead, the guidelines remained committed to Abbas's platform of calling for "national opposition to the occupation" and therefore supported the Arab peace initiative.

Government sources expressed cautious optimism over the omission of "armed struggle" from the new proposed guidelines. "It is an important declaration and a basis for continuing cooperation with the PA government," Israel Radio quoted the sources as saying.

Hamas slammed the proposal and vowed that it would continue the armed struggle. The group's spokesman in Gaza, Ayman Taha, told Israel Radio that "no decision can erase the resistance to the occupation."

The agency, more familiar with involvement in international disaster zones such as the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, sent 400 by boat and all-terrain vehicles to stranded families in Gloucestershire. It expects to supply a further 800 in the coming days. The beleaguered town of Tewkesbury and its surrounding villages were the first beneficiaries from the packages, which contain enough food and "essential items" for one person to survive a week.

A spokesman said: "People cannot get out of their homes to get food and there are vulnerable people - the elderly and children - in need." The Red Cross packages contained five tins of canned fruit, a loaf of longlife bread, two packets of rye crackers, three cartons of long-life milk, a jar of savoury spread, three packets of plain biscuits, three tins of fish, three tins of meat, five tins of potatoes, two jars of sandwich spread, two packs of cereal bars, a torch, batteries, toilet paper, and one tube of sanitiser hand gel. A Red Cross spokesman said: "All the food has been donated by Tesco and we have chosen things that do not need to be cooked and have a nutritional value."

- Towns and cities could get their own weather forecasts accurate to within three square miles within a few years. The Met Office is developing a £120million computer that it hopes will pinpoint the direction of severe storms 12 hours before they strike.

In addition, some water bowsers in the town's run-down Hester's Way estate had bleach tipped in them, while others had simply been pushed over and the water spilled on the ground.

The youths are then said to have stood around laughing as desperate residents looked on in despair.
After police had been called in to guard the water, one angry resident said: "It's unbelievable that they think it's funny to put people's lives in danger.

"Everybody in Cheltenham is without water and desperate for any help they can get."

"We have too much crime on the streets," he said on "Good Morning America." "People are getting killed throughout the country. We have an education system that's not educating everybody. That's detrimental to the whole country, including the people who are left behind."

"We have no answers as to how we're going to have energy independence," he said. "We don't have a good immigration policy that will carry this country forward. Overseas, we have many problems. We're not liked, and sadly, our reputation's gone way downhill overseas."

The FTSE-100 index of the UK's top listed companies suffered its biggest single day fall in more than five years yesterday, closing down 3.15 per cent at 6,251.2, its lowest point since March. London was guided by the negative sentiment in the US, where the Dow Jones Industrial Average opened down 121 points at 13,684, its second-largest opening fall of the year and well down on the record 14,000 points it reached last week. It later fell to 13,470.4, a fall of 314.67.

"ATTEMPTS TO ISLAMISE THE WEST CANNOT BE DENIED," Monsignor Georg Gaenswein was quoted as saying in the weekly Sueddeutsche Magazin to be published Friday.

"THE DANGER FOR THE IDENTITY OF EUROPE THAT IS CONNECTED WITH IT SHOULD NOT BE IGNORED OUT OF A WRONGLY UNDERSTOOD RESPECTFULNESS," the magazine quoted him as saying. Gaenswein also defended a speech Benedict gave last year linking Islam and violence, saying it was an attempt by the pontiff to "act against a certain naivety."

Muslims around the world protested against Bendict's speech, with churches set ablaze in the West Bank and a hard-line Iranian cleric saying the pope was united with U.S. President George W. Bush to "repeat the Crusades."

An Italian nun was also gunned down in a Somali hospital where she worked, and the Vatican expressed concern that the attack was related to reaction to the pope's remarks.

Recently, the influential archbishop of Cologne, Joachim Meisner, said in a widely-publicised interview on Deutschlandfunk radio that THE "IMMIGRATION OF MUSLIMS HAS CREATED A BREACH IN OUR GERMAN, EUROPEAN CULTURE."

They lived in rural areas at high altitude, where temperatures in some cases are reported to have plummeted to as low as -20C (-4F). Peruvian Health Minister Carlos Vallejos said almost 2,000 medics had been deployed in the affected areas. He told the BBC he expected the situation to get worse before it improves.

The National Civil Defence Institute (Indeci) has launched a campaign to provide clothing and shelter to the worst affected areas. The institute's General Luis Salomino said he had collected 300 metric tons of clothes and other supplies from businesses, individuals and government departments in the capital, Lima. Forecasters in Peru are predicting the cold spell will continue until September.

Even low-lying jungle regions are facing unusually cold weather, with temperatures dropping to 10C (50F). Many adults have also died during the harsh winter, and thousands of people are suffering from pneumonia and other respiratory infections.

"I've got some meat today," whispers a shop assistant, glancing to make sure there's no-one else in earshot.

She disappears to the back of the shop, returning with a small plastic-wrapped packet of mince that she stuffs quickly into this shopper's bag. The price? Some 300,000 Zimbabwe dollars (about £590 officially, but just £1.15 at the unofficial but widely-used black market rate for foreign exchange), well above the Z$87,000 per kilo that Robert Mugabe's government says beef must be sold for.

Meat, like most other basic commodities, has disappeared from Zimbabwe's supermarkets after Mr Mugabe's controversial price-slashing initiative early this month. Trying to find beef in Mutare, Zimbabwe's third-largest city, is now "like looking for a snowflake in the Sahara desert", the local newspaper, Manica Post, said last week. Empty shelves and freezer units greet shoppers in grocery shops and butchers.

Farmers have stopped delivering their livestock for slaughter after the government said it would only pay around Z$8 million per beast, five times less than the going market rate. Official figures show that only 100 cattle are being slaughtered per day by the government-owned Cold Storage Company, which is now Zimbabwe's only licensed meat processing company after all private abattoirs were banned. That's 100 animals to feed Zimbabwe's entire population of nearly 12 million people. No wonder everyone is asking where to find meat.

At lunchtimes, a convenience store on the outskirts of Mutare sells a small amount of freshly-baked bread at Z$40,000 per loaf - nearly double the government-set price of Z$22,000 - as a store manager lurks anxiously by the entrance doors, watching for the government inspectors. Look at the bread receipt when you get out of the shop and you'll find it's blank - it's too dangerous, apparently, to print the real price.

Such is the sentiment of Andy Wells, the mayor of St. John's in Newfoundland, Canada. "I think there's a lot of junk science out there that's masquerading as true science," the mayor told CanWest News Service, "and I think as a consequence public agencies and organizations such as municipal councils are making stupid decisions."

During a council debate on the subject of herbicide use in St. John's Monday night, the mayor blasted a fellow council member, calling him a junk scientist like "Al Gore." "I think this Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth,' from what I've read, contains a lot of very poor science,"

WELLS SAID GORE AND THE SIERRA CLUB OF CANADA TRADE ON FEAR TO SCARE CANADIANS INTO GIVING THEM MONEY TO FUND THEIR ACTIVITIES.

Teenage members are also asking to be taught how to write a CV and speak more effectively in public. Some 80% of 16 to 25-year-olds in the movement want safe-sex advice and 93% want guidance on how to manage money, according to a survey of 1,000 guides.

Girlguiding UK boss Denise King said it was important to "stay relevant". Chief guide Liz Burnley, said: "As the UK's largest youth organisation just for girls and young women we prioritise giving girls the skills, experiences and opportunities they need to reach for new aspirations and succeed in the modern world.

"But these goalposts don't stand still. Which is why we constantly ask our members what they think, so that we can continue to be truly relevant to tomorrow's young women." Earlier this year, it was announced older guides would be trained as "peer educators" to teach others aged between 10 and 25 about such things as sexual health and binge drinking.

The movement mainly includes girls aged between 10 and 14, but some stay on into adulthood. About 10 million people worldwide are members, of which 500,000 are in the UK.

Figures covering three months up to 23 July show more than 387mm (15.2in) of rain fell in England and Wales.

That is more than double the average of 186mm (7.3in) for the period, resulting in two bouts of devastating floods in parts of England in June and July. The previous biggest summer deluge since records started in 1766 came in 1789 when almost 350mm (13.8in) fell.

EXTREME WEATHER CONDITIONS HIT EUROPE
Extreme weather conditions have hit Europe with record-high temperatures
causing deaths in south-eastern Europe while heavy rainfall in northern
Europe is prompting major flooding in some parts of the UK. Around 500
people have died in Hungary in the past week alone.

BRUSSELS EMBRACES LIBYA AFTER MEDICS' RELEASE
Libya is welcomed back into the international community after 20 years out
in the cold, and can look forward to "a new era of relations" with the
European Union following the release of European medical staff from a
Libyan jail.

GERMANY CONSIDERS OPENING UP TO JOB SEEKERS FROM NEW EUROPE
Germany is set to consider relaxing or dropping labour barriers against job
seekers from the new EU member states due to a rising number of vacancies
impossible to fill by domestic workers.

JUST LIKE THE CONSTITUTION, SAY FRIENDS AND FOES OF NEW EU TREATY
Both advocates and critics of the complete draft of the new EU treaty
highlight its similarity with the bloc's failed constitution. While
advocates consider it the argument for a swift ratification through
parliaments, critics maintain it should be decided by public referendum.

EU NEEDS MINIMUM RULES FOR TRANSPARENCY, SAYS OMBUDSMAN
Member states are escaping public scrutiny over decisions they make in
Brussels due to a lack of transparency, according to the EU ombudsman. He
calls for greater access to EU documents and cutting the time it takes for
EU institutions to reply to citizens' complaints.

EU SEEKS BALANCED APPROACH TO THE MIDDLE EAST
Tony Blair, the former UK premier and the newly-appointed envoy of the
Mideast Quartet, has urged Israelis and the Palestinians to capitalize on a
current "moment of opportunity", while the European Union seeks a balanced
approach to the region.

PRESIDENT PUTIN TEACHES EUROPE A LESSON
The diplomatic dispute between Britain and Russia brings back unmistakeable
echoes of the cold war. It is now time for the EU to put foreign policy at
the top of the priority list and speak to president Putin with a clear and
unified voice, argues Richard Laming, who heads the UK's Federal Union.

Every day they recede further, like water running slowly out of an immense bathtub, threatening a worldwide catastrophe. Standing on an island in a quiet channel of the giant river, he points out what is happening. A month ago, the island was under water. Now, it juts 5m above it. It is a sign that SEVERE DROUGHT IS RETURNING TO THE AMAZON FOR A SECOND SUCCESSIVE YEAR. And that would be ominous. New research suggests that one further dry year beyond that could tip the whole vast forest into a cycle of destruction.

The rivers of the Amazon Basin usually routinely fall 9m to 12m - greater than most of the tides of the world's seas - between the wet and dry seasons. But last year they just went on falling in the worst drought in recorded history. AT ONE POINT IN THE WESTERN BRAZILIAN STATE OF ACRE, THE WORLD'S BIGGEST RIVER SHRANK SO FAR THAT IT WAS POSSIBLE TO WALK ACROSS IT.

Millions of fish died, and thousands of communities whose only transport was by water were stranded. And the drying forest caught fire; in September, satellite camera images showed 73,000 blazes in the basin. This year, says Otavio Luz Castello, the water is draining away even faster than last year - and there are still more than three months of the dry season to go.

Flying over the forest - with trees in a thousand shades of green stretching, for hour after hour, as far as the eye can see - IT SEEMS INCONCEIVABLE THAT ANYTHING COULD ENDANGER ITS VERDANT IMMENSITY. Until recently, scientists took the same view, seeing it as one of the world's most stable environments. Though they condemned the way that, ON AVERAGE, AN AREA ROUGHLY THE SIZE OF WALES IS CUT DOWN EACH YEAR, this did not seem to endanger the forest as a whole, much less the planet. Now they are changing their minds in the face of increasing evidence that deforestation is pushing the Amazon and the world to the brink of disaster.

Dr Antonio Nobre, of Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research, told the symposium that the felling was drying up the entire forest and helping to cause the hurricanes that have been battering the United States and the Caribbean.

The hot, wet Amazon, he explained, normally evaporates vast amounts of water, which rise high into the air as if in an invisible chimney, drawing in wet northeast trade winds, which have picked up moisture from the Atlantic. This, in turn, controls the temperature of the ocean - as the trade winds pick up the moisture, the warm water left gets saltier and sinks. Deforestation disrupts the cycle by weakening the Amazonian evaporation which drives the whole process. One result is that the hot water in the Atlantic stays on the surface and fuels the hurricanes. Another is that less moisture arrives on the trade winds, intensifying the forest drought.

The American multinational Cargill built a huge port for soya three years ago at Santarem. This encouraged entrepreneurs to cut down trees to grow soya. The symposium flew to inspect the damage this had caused - vast fields of beans destined to feed supermarket chickens in Europe, where until recently there was lush forest. Brazilian politicians say their country has so many other pressing problems that the destruction is unlikely to be brought under control, unless the world helps. Calculations by Hylton Philipson, a British merchant banker and rainforest campaigner, reckon that doing this would take US$60 billion ($80 billion) a year - less than a third of the cost of the Iraq war.

About a fifth of the Amazonian rainforest has been razed completely. Another 22 per cent has been harmed by logging, allowing the sun to penetrate to the forest floor, drying it out. Add these two figures together and THE TOTAL IS PERILOUSLY CLOSE TO 50 PER CENT, PREDICTED AS THE "TIPPING POINT" THAT MARKS THE DEATH OF THE AMAZON. Nobody knows when that crucial threshold will be passed, but growing numbers of scientists believe that it is coming ever closer.

Studies by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre, carried out in Amazonia, have concluded that the forest cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down.
Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern hemisphere and could massively accelerate global warming with incalculable consequences. The research - carried out by the Massachusetts-based centre in Santarem on the Amazon River - has taken even the scientists conducting it by surprise.

When Dr Dan Nepstead started the experiment in 2002 - by covering a chunk of rainforest the size of a football pitch with plastic panels to see how it would cope without rain - he surrounded it with sophisticated sensors, expecting to record only minor changes.

The trees managed the first year of drought without difficulty. In the second year, they sunk their roots deeper to find moisture, but survived. But in year three, they started dying. Beginning with the tallest the trees started to come crashing down, exposing the forest floor to the drying sun.
By the end of the year the trees had released more than two-thirds of the carbon dioxide they have stored during their lives, helping to act as a break on global warming. Instead they began accelerating the climate change.

The Amazon now appears to be entering its second successive year of drought, raising the possibility it could start dying next year. The immense forest contains 90 billion tons of carbon, enough in itself to increase the rate of global warming by 50 per cent. Nepstead expects "mega-fires" rapidly to sweep across the drying jungle. With the trees gone, the soil will bake in the sun and the rainforest could become desert.

Deborah Clark from the University of Missouri, one of the world's top forest ecologists, says research shows "THE LOCK HAS BROKEN" ON THE AMAZON ECOSYSTEM AND THE AMAZON IS "HEADED IN A TERRIBLE DIRECTION".