The Netherlands' largest newspaper called it the "trial of the century." It will begin on January 20, two months before municipal elections in which Wilders's Freedom party is involved. "I find it horrible that I'm prosecuted" Wilders said. "This is a political trial, and it's sad that I'm PROSECUTED AS A CRIMINAL FOR ONLY VOICING MY POLITICAL OPINIONS. I hope free speech will prevail. I am convinced that the trial can only lead to my acquittal."

The charges of the use of hate speech include Wilders's charging US President Barack Obama with "CLOSING HIS EYES TO THE GREAT DANGERS OF ISLAMISATION" and comparing the President with Neville Chamberlain, the former British Prime Minister. Chamberlain is remembered for his appeasement policy that culminated with his signing an agreement with Hitler and Italy's Benito Mussolini in 1938, allowing the Nazi dictator and murderer to annex Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia. The following year, Chamberlain declared war on Germany after Hitler invaded [Poland].

Wilders defended his analogy concerning President Obama, saying at the time, "It is a tough comparison, but he is pursuing a dangerous, naïve and irresponsible policy." Wilders catapulted into the international limelight in 2008 with his 15-minute movie called "Fitna," which depicts Islam and its prophet Mohammed as encouraging hate and terror. The film set off violent riots in the Muslim world, and he was subjected to several death threats.

The Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) group has declared its mission to be educating Americans "ABOUT THE THREAT THAT ISLAMIC DOCTRINE AND THOSE WHO SUPPORT IT PRESENT TO OUR FREEDOMS, AND THE FUTURE OF OUR DEMOCRACY AND COUNTRY." The organizers call themselves "scholar warriors/ideological warriors in the cause of American freedom and Constitutional government," as well as in "the defence of... our society of liberty, knowledge, and human decency."

SIOA believes that political ISLAM IS OPPOSED TO AMERICAN VALUES OF "FREEDOM, TOLERANCE, OR HUMAN RIGHTS." They seek to raise the issue of what they call "brutal, misogynist" Islamic law and jihad in America, because "tolerance for ideologies that are opposed to our principles of individual freedoms and our Constitution is indefensible," the group declares in its online manifesto. A recently-released film, The Third Jihad, warns that radical Islam is working on a non-violent, cultural takeover of the United States.

"We are now in a new phase of a 1,400-year-old jihad against the kafirs (all non-Muslims everywhere); we are not prepared to meet the threat," SIOA says. "IGNORANCE ABOUT ISLAM, ITS DOCTRINE AND PURPOSES IS A MORAL AND ETHICAL FAILURE WHOSE CONSEQUENCES CAN BE NOTHING SHORT OF NATIONAL EXTINCTION." The official launch of the SIOA is slated for September 25, 2009, at an as-yet unknown venue in the US capital. The timing and location appears to be far from coincidental. A MASSIVE MUSLIM PRAYER GATHERING IS PLANNED FOR THE SAME DAY in front of the Capitol building. Organizers are expecting 50,000 people to attend.

That has helped drive Britain's overall jobless total up by 210,000 in the three months to July. The new total of 2.47million is the highest in 14 years. The unemployment rate has jumped to 7.9 per cent from 5.6 per cent a year ago. The figures lay bare the toll exacted by the recession. Only a few groups are seeing rising employment levels, including public sector and foreign-born workers and people of retirement age, yesterday's Office for National Statistics report showed.

David Blanchflower, a former Bank of England official and labour market specialist, said the current generation of school and university leavers is the largest for 20 years, making the recession doubly harmful. 'There has been a huge increase in youth unemployment. We need to prevent a lost generation of young individuals who are not being given a chance.' Yesterday's ONS report showed that a record 19.7 per cent of young people are out of work in Britain. Another 34.6 per cent, or 2.55million, are classified as 'inactive'.

FOREIGN-BORN WORKERS ARE CONTINUING TO WIN JOBS WHILE THE REST OF THE POPULATION SUFERS FROM THE UNEMPLOYMENT CRISIS. The Office for National Statistics reported that employment among non-UK born individuals INCREASED BY 22,000 TO 3.7 MILLION in the second quarter. But Home Secretary Alan Johnson RULED OUT A CAP ON IMMIGRATION THIS SUMMER, SAYING THIS WOULD DAMAGE THE ECONOMY!

That is to say that Nelson Piquet Jr, son of the eponymous three-times world champion, a young man desperate to make his mark on the sport and yet struggling to keep up with its demands, WAS TOLD TO HAVE AN "ACCIDENT" at the Singapore Grand Prix last September.

As a result of his crash, Piquet's team-mate, Fernando Alonso, was able to win a race he would otherwise have not, taking advantage of the safety procedures that are laid down in Formula One. Piquet was sacked by his team in July for his failure to bring in the results they wanted and turned whistleblower. After the usual bluster and cover-up, Renault — the company, not the Formula One team — has made its move. IT WILL OFFER NO DEFENCE TO THE CHARGES and has parted company with the team principal, Flavio Briatore, and his No 2, Pat Symonds.

THIS EXAMPLE OF CHEATING PASSES ALL ITS SINGLE-EVENT PREDECESSORS. The potentially lethal consequences of this act were beyond anyone's control. What we must now ask is whether this is an isolated example of a total loss of perspective, or whether it is a straw that shows which way the winds of sport are blowing.

The sale will allow the bank to "derecognise the assets", shielding it from any further fall in their "mark-to-market" value. Instead, Barclays will use a different accounting treatment to take "a longer term view" that will provide "a boost to its capital strength by punting the issue into the long grass", Ian Gordon, banks analyst at Exane BNP Paribas, said.

Simon Maughan, analyst at MF Global Securities, described it as a way for Barclays to "wriggle free from its toxic assets". Barclays has a core tier one capital ratio of 8.8pc, which Mr Gordon said was expected to be under pressure as the assets face further mark downs. Barclays' clever accounting comes at a time of failing trust in the banks and politicians claimed the move would not help restore it. John McFall, chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, said: "This is short-circuiting the transparency that is required in the market at the moment. Is it banking by sleight of hand?"

The deal also promises to make 45 former investment bankers at Barclays Capital very rich. They have resigned to join Protium, which will charge Barclays a $40m annual management fee, including office costs. The bank stressed that no leaver will receive a severance payment. Protium hopes to repeat the deal with other banks.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, told bankers to repent over their mistakes, as he fears the City is getting back to "business as normal. There hasn't been what I would, as a Christian, call repentance," the Archbishop told the BBC. "We haven't heard people saying 'well actually, no, we got it wrong and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, was empty'."

He also warned the gap between rich and poor would lead to a "dysfunctional" society and that "economics is too important to be left to economists". Dr Williams also said he believed the government should act to cap bonus payments. The Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, added to the criticism. He said that the fallout from the crisis could put morality back at the centre of public life.

In a speech to members of the Governing Body of the Church in Wales, Dr Morgan said he believes global recession may have caused sentiment to turn. He called for the church to ask congregations to force morality back on the agenda. The Archbishop argued that communities and trust in public institutions had been damaged by policies focusing on market forces.

Peter Kendall, the NFU president, told me that the cheap food sold in supermarkets was "morally questionable". Meanwhile, Sir Stuart Hampson, the then-John Lewis boss and author of a report on farming, said that A SUSTAINABLE UK RURAL ECONOMY WAS "CLOSE TO BEING LOST FOREVER". It was bleak stuff. So two years on, how have things changed? Food prices in shops saw a sustained period of inflation over the last year - surely a good thing for farmers? - and we are hearing less about farmers' plights than we were back then. Are they finally happy?

Sadly, no. In fact, THINGS ARE WORSE THAN THEY WERE TWO YEARS AGO. Prices to farmers are actually falling and input costs - fertilizer, fuel, feed - are rising. On top of this farms are HAVING TO DEAL WITH EVER-GREATER REAMS OF RED TAPE. They are still closing at an alarming rate. In his newsletter to members this month, Mr Kendall of the NFU said the following: "With prices of agricultural produce around the world continuing to fall for most sectors, coupled with the high costs of many inputs, we will all use whatever time we have available to look at what production is viable for the coming year." Hardly encouraging words.

Dairy farmers are on their knees. "It's a dead industry," the chairman of the Royal Association of British Dairy Farmers told The Grocer magazine this week. The collapse earlier this year of Dairy Farmers of Britain - one of the UK's three co-operatives - and a slump in the milk price have killed off many farms. The result is that production in the UK is at its lowest for decades.

Farmers talk of a "dire" situation today. A recurring (if not new) issue is that farmers' customers - the all-powerful retailers - constantly squeeze them on price. "Our margins are so so skinny. THE SUPERMARKETS' MARGINS ARE 30-40PC, BUT OURS ARE PENCE," one farmer tells me. Something is wrong in the food chain, they argue. Producers - be they wheat farmers, strawberry growers, or dairy farmers - take all the risk, pay for the production, the packaging, (in most cases) the distribution, and often the marketing but get very little in return.

We all need to get real. For a sustainable, safe, secure food chain in the UK three things need to happen. Firstly we - consumers and retailers - need to pay more for what is on our plates. Secondly farmers need to act collectively and with more business nous. And thirdly, red tape must be cut.

What makes the issue particularly difficult is that MANY OF THE EVENTS CATASTROPHIC ENOUGH TO CAUSE A MAJOR CRISIS - known as "fat tail risks" or as "Black Swans" by trader and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb - COME FROM OUTSIDE THE REALM OF FINANCE. To be able to forecast what the next global shock will be, we need to be able to make predictions about geopolitics, war, terrorism, extreme weather events, earthquakes and pandemics.

In their book this year on fat tail risks, Ian Bremmer and Preston Keat of political risk consultancy Eurasia Group noted that they pose fundamental problems for accurate prediction. Fat tails, they wrote, "represent the risk that a particular event will occur that appears so catastrophically damaging, unlikely to happen, and difficult to predict, that many of us choose simply to ignore it. Until it happens."

A growing body of theory and evidence suggests that making accurate forecasts about rare catastrophic events is inherently impossible. But it also suggests a practical solution to mitigate the dangers - detailed scenario-planning by imaginative analysts who do not cling too tightly to mathematical models of reality.

"In fact, when considering the military-modernization programs of countries like China, we should be concerned less with their potential ability to challenge the US symmetrically - fighter to fighter or ship to ship - and more with their ability TO DISRUPT OUR FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT AND NARROW OUR STRATEGIC OPTIONS," Gates said in a speech to the Air Force Association.

"Investments in cyber and anti-satellite warfare, anti-air and anti-ship weaponry, and ballistic missiles could threaten America's primary way to project power and help allies in the Pacific - in particular our forward air bases and carrier strike groups," Gates said in National Harbor, Maryland.

Defense analysts have warned that the US military will soon lose its dominance on the high seas, in space and in cyberspace as China and other emerging powers obtain sophisticated weaponry and missiles. The intelligence guidelines for the next four years also elevated the importance of the cyber domain, singling out China as "very aggressive in the cyberworld."

The governor sent a letter Wednesday to Brown, referring to "news stories regarding the ACORN organization that have concerned me greatly." ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. The group has come under fire after employees were caught on tape giving tax advice to conservative operatives posing as prostitutes and pimps.

The most recent video surfaced this week in San Bernardino and has been used extensively by Fox News and conservative websites. "You can hear on the tape, the ACORN worker offering advice as to how to lie, how to claim that the house is a business, not a brothel," KTKZ talk show host Eric Hogue said Wednesday on his radio broadcast in Sacramento. Callers weighed in, one saying, "It just makes me sick."

At ACORN's Sacramento offices on Florin Road, a worker who answered the door said she couldn't answer questions. Ronald Coleman, ACORN's legislative director in Sacramento, later confirmed that tax and mortgage services were being suspended for now.

"Positive identification of the attacker was made, and US forces fired in self-defence wounding the attacker," the army said in a statement. "Local Iraqi police secured the scene and transported the wounded attacker to a local hospital for medical care," it added. Dr Ali Hatam of Fallujah hospital confirmed that Mr Latif later died from gunshot wounds.

The incident came a day after the Iraqi television journalist, Muntazer al-Zaidi, was freed after spending nine months in jail for throwing his shoes at the former US president George W Bush during a visit to Baghdad last December.

He argues that: "If we can't do away with factory farming, we should at least take steps to minimise the amount of suffering that is caused. I'm offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering." Researchers have already performed similar tests on mice noting that if they are lacking a certain gene they are less sensitive to heat and pressure.

Future advances could allow scientists to switch off the pain receptors of animals set for slaughter but it raises certain moral issues. Should we be playing God with animals' DNA? Even if animals couldn't feel physical pain, that wouldn't alleviate the emotional and psychological pain they endure of being cooped up in dark, overcrowded conditions for days, weeks, months, years leading up to their innevitable deaths. And if anything, relieving animals of physical pain will encourage slaughterhouses to treat them even worse.

Changing animals' DNA is a clever solution to the problem of slaughterhouse cruelty but it's still a lazy one in my book. The problem needs to be tackled head on. If we can do something so amazing as to readjust a living organism's DNA to alter their pain barriers, WHY CAN'T GOVERNMENT'S HERE AND ABROAD DO THE COMPARABLY SIMPLE TASK OF PUSHING THROUGH LEGISLATION ENSURING THE ANIMALS ARE TREATED BETTER?

As a result our hunger is not satisfied, and we eat more and more. The effect is so powerful that a cheeseburger eaten on a Friday could be responsible for feelings of hunger three days later, the US researchers believe. Dr Deborah Clegg, who carried out the study, said: 'Normally, our body is primed to say when we've had enough, but that doesn't always happen when we're eating something good. What we've shown in this study is that someone's entire brain chemistry can change in a very short period of time.'

In a series of experiments, Dr Clegg showed that saturated fats trick the body into switching off the system that tells us how hungry we are and whether we've eaten enough. The fat makes the brain send out messages telling the body to ignore the information it is getting from the appetite-regulating hormones leptin and insulin. Dr Clegg, of the University of Texas, said: 'Our findings suggest that when you eat something high in fat, your brain gets "hit" with the fatty acids, and you become resistant to insulin and leptin. Since you're not being told by the brain to stop eating, you overeat.'

Writing in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, the researchers said that a type of fat called palmitic acid is particularly good at fooling the brain. Palmitic acid is a common saturated fat found in butter, cheese, milk and beef. However, the fats found in olive oil were given a clean bill of health. The scientists now plan to look at how long it takes the body's appetite to return to normal.

That is an increase from £49billion in 1998-99 - a year after Labour came to power promising a 'bonfire of the quangos'. The spiralling budgets of the 'quangos' - public agencies and advisory and monitoring bodies often staffed by box-ticking bureaucrats - and NHS trust will make uncomfortable reading for the Government. Ministers are facing a wave of public anger as ordinary families are told to prepare for sweeping spending cuts to get a grip on Britain's record national debt.

THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE EMPLOYED BY THE QUANGOS - often run by Labour cronies - has also rocketed from around 1million to 1.5MILLION over the same period. Mr Elliott said: 'Over the past decade, billions of pounds have disappeared into the quango state, which is so disjointed and poorly managed by ministers and civil servants that they end up doing the same jobs and wasting even more taxpayers' money on form-filling and bureaucracy.

'Gordon Brown likes quangos because it gives him the chance to shift the blame for poor public services onto non-departmental bodies, and to shift overpaid civil servants into supposedly non-civil service jobs, so he can claim he's made efficiency savings. Spending cuts are desperately overdue so we can avoid job-destroying tax rises, and the quango state is where the axe should fall first.' There has been an explosion in the number of quangos since Labour came to power in 1997. The Treasury has admitted that 160 of the biggest quangos, which are independent of the Government, cost the taxpayer £34billion last year.

The Guardian understands that key differences have emerged between the US and Europe over the structure of a new worldwide treaty on global warming. Sources on the European side say the US approach could undermine the new treaty and weaken the world's ability to cut carbon emissions. The treaty will be negotiated in December at a UN meeting in Copenhagen and is widely billed as THE LAST CHANCE TO SAVE THE PLANET FROM A TEMPERATURE RISE OF 2PER CENT OR HIGHER, which the EU considers dangerous.

"If we end up with a weaker framework with less stringent compliance, then that is not so good for the chances of hitting 2PC," a source close to the EU negotiating team said. News of the split comes amid mounting concern that the Copenhagen talks will not make the necessary progress. Ban Ki-moon, the UN general secretary, told the Guardian last night that negotiations had stalled and need to "get moving". Ahead of an unprecedented UN climate change summit of almost 100 heads of government in New York next week, Moon said the leaders held in their hands "the future of this entire humanity".

The US distanced itself from Kyoto under President Bush because it made no demands on China, and the treaty remains political poison in Washington. European negotiators knew the US would be reluctant to embrace Kyoto, but they hoped they would be able to use it as a foundation for a new agreement.