Imagine how wonderful the world would be if man-made global warming were just a figment of Al Gore's imagination. No more ugly wind farms to darken our sunlit uplands. No more whopping electricity bills, artificially inflated by EU-imposed carbon taxes. No longer any need to treat each warm, sunny day as though it were some terrible harbinger of ecological doom. AND DEFINITELY NO NEED FOR THE $7.4 TRILLION CAP AND TRADE (CARBON-TRADING) BILL — THE LARGEST TAX IN AMERICAN HISTORY — which President Obama and his cohorts are so assiduously trying to impose on the US economy.

Imagine no more, for your fairy godmother is here. His name is Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at Adelaide University, and he has recently published the landmark book Heaven And Earth, which is going to change forever the way we think about climate change.

'The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it IS CONTRARY TO VALIDATED KNOWLEDGE FROM SOLAR PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY, HISTORY, ARCHAEOLOGY AND GEOLOGY,' says Plimer, and while his thesis is not new, you're unlikely to have heard it expressed with quite such vigour, certitude or wide-ranging scientific authority. Where fellow sceptics like Bjorn Lomborg or Lord Lawson of Blaby are prepared cautiously to endorse the International Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) more modest predictions, Plimer will cede no ground whatsoever. ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING (AGW) THEORY, HE ARGUES, IS THE BIGGEST, MOST DANGEROUS AND RUINOUSLY EXPENSIVE CON TRICK IN HISTORY.

State officials said today's attacks meant both private and official websites were either blocked or difficult to access. One official said seven South Korean websites are affected and follow another two attacks earlier this week. But officials said the third attack was bigger than predicted with the Parliament, the Defence Ministry, the Foreign Ministry and the National Intelligence Service websites affected.

Ku Kyo-young from the state-run Korea Communications Commission said some are still working normally despite the attacks by hackers who have planted the viruses in thousands of personal computers in South Korea and overseas. Earlier today, the country's leading computer security company warned that another wave of cyber attacks was expected later in the day.

It is believed sites owned by the White House, the US Defence and Treasury Departments and the Secret Service were targeted earlier this week. The earlier attacks had crippled 14 major US sites. Many of the sites targeted either crashed or slowed to a crawl. Most had regained service but others remained unstable or inaccessible. 'THIS IS NOT A SIMPLE ATTACK BY AN INDIVIDUAL HACKER, BUT APPEARS TO BE THOROUGHLY PLANNED AND EXECUTED BY A SPECIFIC ORGANISATION OR ON A STATE LEVEL,' South Korea's spy agency said yesterday.

The Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009, put forward by Republican Representative Ron Paul of Texas, now has 250 co-sponsors in the House. It will get air-time on Thursday during a congressional hearing on Fed independence that will feature testimony from the Fed's No 2 official, Donald Kohn.

PUBLIC ANGER OVER THE TRILLION DOLLARS THE FED HAS PUT INTO PLAY to battle the financial crisis and bail out investment bank Bear Stearns and insurer American International Group has created a backlash and calls for more accountability. A proposal from President Barack Obama to put the Fed in charge of monitoring risks to the entire financial system has intensified the scrutiny.

Paul has tapped into this anger and put forward a 2 1/2 page bill that would explicitly repeal a provision of law that prohibits the Government Accountability Office, a government watchdog agency, from auditing monetary policy decisions. Fed officials see this as a dangerous intrusion on their independence that could hinder their ability to make the best long-term decisions for the economy.

Paul, however, thinks Congress needs more control. "Why should they be independent? INDEPENDENCE TO THEM MEANS SECRECY, DO WHATEVER THEY WANT, SPEND BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, BAIL OUT THEIR FRIENDS," Paul told Reuters Television. The Fed, for its part, is taking Paul very seriously.

What these mysterious vibrations say about future earthquakes is far from certain. But some think the deep tremors SUGGEST UNDERGROUND STRESS MAY BE BUILDING UP FASTER THAN EXPECTED and may indicate an increased risk of a major temblor. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, monitored seismic activity on the fault's central section between July 2001 and February 2009 and recorded more than 2,000 tremors. The tremors lasted mere minutes to nearly half an hour.

UNLIKE EARTHQUAKES, TREMORS OCCUR DEEPER BELOW THE SURFACE AND THE SHAKING LASTS LONGER. During the study period, two strong earthquakes hit a magnitude 6.5 in 2003 and a magnitude 6.0 a year later. Scientists noticed the frequency of the tremors doubled after the 2003 quake and jumped six-fold after 2004.

Tremor episodes persist today. Though the frequency of tremors have declined since 2004, scientists are still concerned because they are still at a level that is twice as high as before the 2003 quake. The team also recorded unusually strong rumblings days before the 2004 temblor.

China's vehicle sales in June rose to 1.14 million, the second-highest month to date after April's 1.15 million units, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said. Passenger car sales hit a monthly record of 872,900 units.

Total sales for the first half of the year rose to 6.1 million, up 17.7 percent from a year earlier, the industry group said. That outpaced the United States, where passenger car sales in the same period plunged to 4.8 million amid an economic slump. China's auto sales weakened in late 2008 as the global financial crisis hit but rebounded after Beijing launched a stimulus package with sales tax cuts, subsidies to trade in older cars and other incentives.

Global automakers are looking to China to help drive revenues as they struggle with falling demand in North American and other markets. China surpassed US auto sales for five of the past six months. The United States pulled ahead temporarily in May before dropping back with 859,847 cars sold in June. Analysts expect China's sales this year to top 10 million vehicles, while one Chinese industry group says the total could exceed 11 million.

The date is set. The second referendum in Ireland on the European Union's Lisbon Treaty will take place on Oct. 2, the government in Dublin announced Wednesday. Prime Minister Brian Cowen said that he was confident that voters would approve the treaty this time around. Last year, Irish voters' rejection of the treaty plunged the EU into a deep state of crisis.

Lisbon can only go into effect once it has been ratified by all 27 member states. Outside of Ireland, the treaty still hasn't been ratified by Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic.

In Germany, the country's highest court ruled last week that before the treaty could be adopted, a NEW LAW WOULD HAVE TO BE PASSED IN BERLIN STIPULATING A FAR GREATER ROLE FOR THE FEDERAL PARLIAMENT AND UPPER LEGISLATIVE CHAMBER IN BRUSSELS DECISION-MAKING. The German government has said it plans to draft and pass the required legislation prior to the German general election scheduled for September 27.

At the moment it plans to spend £125bn, but it can increase that by £25bn without asking the Treasury. At the current rate of spending, the £125bn will all have been spent in the next two weeks. Taking on the extra £25bn would allow the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) to see the next set of quarterly economic forecasts before it decides whether to ask the Treasury to extend the scheme further.

Investec economist Philip Shaw said he expected that the Bank would spend the extra £25bn - as well as asking permission to print more money. But he said it was "early days" to judge whether quantitative easing was proving effective. "WE ARE WAITING FOR THE BANKS TO START LENDING BUT THERE ARE VERY FEW SIGNS THAT HAS HAPPENED SO FAR."

Anyone searching for a number can type the name and location of the person into the 118800 website. It claims to have some 15m numbers in its database. Privacy campaigners have been angered by the system despite it getting the all-clear from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

The ICO ruled that the system did comply with current law and was little different from companies who use such contact lists for cold calling. It said that opting out of the service should be made easy for those not wanting their details to be used in the directory.

Connectivity - the company operating the 118800 service - said that privacy is paramount to them, and that IT'S EASY TO WITHDRAW YOUR MOBILE PHONE NUMBER FROM THEIR DATABASES should you choose to do so. TO UNSUBSCRIBE, you can either click on the ex directory button on the their web homepage, or you can TEXT THE LETTER 'E' TO 118800 FROM THE MOBILE PHONE YOU WANT TO BE MADE EX-DIRECTORY. 118800 will send you an SMS message confirming you've been taken off.

Muslims and Jews are among the groups that have been warned to be on the alert. Several ethnic and religious minorities also could be at risk, senior police officials say. Neo-Nazis "are not choosy about which community" they target, explained Commander Shaun Sawyer of the Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorism command (SO15). Whichever group they target, they will hope to cause serious injury or loss of life, he said.

Police believe British neo-Nazi groups are more likely to target Muslims than Jews, whose communities have reported an increase in the frequency of neo-Nazi style attacks on their institutions in recent years.

The warnings were issued shortly after police announced that they had uncovered a major extremist network. OFFICERS IN A COUNTER-TERRORISM UNIT FOUND THAT A GROUP OF FAR-RIGHT EXTREMISTS HAD ACCESS TO 80 BOMBS AND HUNDREDS OF OTHER WEAPONS. Dozens were questioned in connection to the affair, which police believe involved a plot to bomb mosques.

But research funded by the Department of Health shows that young women who attended the programme, at a cost of £2,500 each, were 'significantly' more likely to become pregnant than those on other youth programmes who were not given contraception and sex advice.

A total of 16 per cent of those on the Young People's Development Programme conceived compared with just 6 per cent in other programmes. Experts said the scheme failed because it introduced girls 'at risk' of becoming pregnant to promiscuous girls they might not otherwise have met.

Because of peer pressure, the more timid teenagers were more likely to have sex and become pregnant.

The £5.9million YPDP programme was also designed to slash cannabis use and drunkenness among teenagers, but made no difference whatsoever. Last night ministers pledged to drop the scheme after admitting it had failed. Around 40,000 teenage girls become pregnant every year in the UK, the highest level in Western Europe.

Nerves transmit electrical messages but communicate with each other via neurotransmitters, chemicals that activate neighbouring cells. Parkinson's, for instance, is caused by a lack of the neurotransmitter dopamine - or the cellular receptors that respond to it. The artificial cell is made from an electricity conducting plastic and can deliver different kinds of neurotransmitter. Only cells sensitive to a specific neurotransmitter are activated.

In contrast, current methods of stimulating nerve cells electrically are liable to activate all cells in the target area, causing undesired effects. Cochlea implants use electrical stimulation to restore hearing. The Swedish scientists demonstrated the "delivery electrode" by using it to control hearing in the brains of guinea pigs.

Chief researcher Professor Agneta Richter-Dahlfors, from the Karolinska Institute, said: "The ability to deliver exact doses of neurotransmitters opens completely new possibilities for correcting the signalling systems that are faulty in a number of neurological diseases."

The sites of the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, the National Assembly, Shinhan Bank, Korea Exchange Bank and top internet portal Naver went down or had access problems since late Tuesday, said Ahn Jeong-eun, a spokeswoman at Korea Information Security Agency.

They appeared to be linked to the knockout of service of websites of several government agencies in the United States, though investigators are still unsure who was behind the attacks, Ahn said. An initial investigation found that MANY PERSONAL COMPUTERS WERE INFECTED WITH A VIRUS PROGRAM ordering them to visit major official websites in South Korea and the US at the same time, Korea Information Security Agency official Shin Hwa-su said.

The US sites were hit by a widespread and unusually resilient computer attack that began July 4, The Associated Press has learned. In the United States, the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department websites were all down at varying points over the holiday weekend and into this week, according to officials inside and outside the government.

Some of the South Korea sites remained unstable or inaccessible on Wednesday morning. Ahn said there were no immediate reports of financial damage or leaking of confidential national information. THE ALLEGED ATTACKS APPEARED AIMED ONLY AT PARALYZING WEBSITES, she said.

The Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department websites were all down at varying points over the holiday weekend and into this week, according to officials inside and outside the government. Some of the sites were still experiencing problems Tuesday evening.

Federal government officials refused to publicly discuss any details of the cyber attack, and would only generally acknowledge that it occurred. It was not clear whether other government sites also were attacked. Others familiar with the outage, which is called a denial of service attack, said that the fact that the government websites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

The Homeland Security Department confirmed that officials had received reports of "malicious web activity" and they were investigating the matter, but had no further comment. Two government officials acknowledged that the Treasury and Secret Service sites were brought down, and said the agencies were working with their internet service provider to resolve the problem.

Ben Rushlo, director of internet technologies at Keynote Systems, called it a "massive outage" and said problems with the Transportation Department site began Saturday and continued until Monday, while the FTC site was down Sunday and Monday.

A BBC correspondent in Urumqi says the security forces are now mounting a show of force after fresh clashes on Tuesday between MUSLIM UIGHURS and Han Chinese. More than 1,400 people have been arrested over Sunday's violence. President Hu was expected to join G8 talks taking place in Rome on Thursday. Instead he is flying home from an airport in Pisa, leaving officials to represent China at the G8 summit. A state visit to Portugal has also been cancelled, China's official news agency Xinhua said.

The BBC's Quentin Sommerville, in Urumqi, notes that Mr Hu is a former party leader of neighbouring Tibet, where riots also broke out last year. Given that unrest and the latest unrest in Xinjiang, promises by Mr Hu's government to guarantee ethnic harmony and stability in western China increasingly lack credibility, our correspondent says. There was a significant increase in the number of troops deployed on the streets of Urumqi when the curfew ended on Wednesday morning, many standing to attention with bayonets fixed.

Officials say 156 people - mostly Han Chinese - died in Sunday's violence. Uighur groups say many more have died, claiming 90% of the dead were Uighurs. One official described Sunday's unrest as the "deadliest riot since New China was founded in 1949".

Writing in the journal Stem Cells and Development, the Newcastle team say it will be at least five years before the technique is perfected. They began with stem cell lines derived from human embryos donated following IVF treatment. The stem cells had been removed when the embryo was a few days old and were stored in tanks of liquid nitrogen.

The stem cells were brought to body temperature and put in a chemical mixture to encourage them to grow. They were "tagged" with a genetic marker which enabled the scientists to identify and separate so-called "germline" stem cells from which eggs and sperm are developed. The male, XY stem cells underwent the crucial process of "meiosis" - halving the number of chromosomes. The process of creating and developing the sperm took four to six weeks.

This research also raises ethical issues. Josephine Quintavalle from Comment on Reproductive Ethics (Corethics) said: "This is an example of immoral madness. Perfectly viable human embryos have been destroyed in order to create sperm over which there will be huge questions of their healthiness and viability. IT'S TAKING ONE LIFE IN ORDER TO PERHAPS CREATE ANOTHER. I'm very much in favour of curing infertility but I don't think you can do whatever you like."