The open-pit mine at Mountain Pass, California, holds THE WORLD'S RICHEST PROVEN RESERVE OF "RARE EARTH" metals, a family of minerals vital to producing the powerful, lightweight magnets used in the engines of Toyota Motor Corp's Prius and other hybrid vehicles as well as generators in wind turbines. At the peak of its operations two decades ago, the mine produced 20,000 tonnes of rare earth oxides a year, accounting for the entire US supply and about a third of the world's total. Most of the rest came from China.

But as Chinese production and exports grew through the 1990s, rare earth prices worldwide plunged, undercutting business for Molycorp, then owned by oil company Unocal. Chinese rare earth production, meanwhile, has swelled to about 97 percent of global supplies, or 139,000 tonnes of refined material in 2008, experts say. Output is expected to reach 160,000 tonnes a year by the middle of the next decade.

But global demand is climbing faster, driven by the clamor for clean energy and clean cars, leading to projections of a 40,000-tonne annual shortfall by 2015. Plans call for mining to resume at Mountain Pass by 2012, at the rate of about 1,000 tons of ore a day, enough to produce 20,000 tonnes of rare earth oxides for sale each year. Smith said the mine has approval to double that volume in time.

"If we put our facilities into the fully permitted production rates, we could come very close to meeting the needs of most of the rest of the world," he said. But Molycorp first needs to drain some 95 million gallons (360 million litres) of water that has filled the pit's bottom and remove surface rock covering the ore, A TWO-YEAR PROCESS.

The Islamic production company responsible makes the case that the endtime global leader, also known as "THE BEAST OF REVELATION," WILL ACTUALLY BE THE CHRISTIAN AND JEWISH MESSIAH. Since being posted on YouTube in June, "The Arrivals" has gone viral with more than a quarter million views to date. According to sources in the United Kingdom, writes Joel Richardson, author of the new book, "The Islamic Antichrist," in a WND commentary today, the documentary has become extremely popular among Britain's Muslim youth population.

Richardson's book, "The Islamic Antichrist," stands in stark contrast to most other popular prophecy books of the last 40 years. The student of Islam and the Middle East says that after decades of reading popular prophecy books and even best-selling fiction like the "Left Behind" series, millions of evangelical Christians around the world are expecting the Antichrist to emerge from a revived Roman Empire, which many have assumed is associated with the Roman Catholic Church and the European Union. Not so, argues Richardson. His book makes the case that the biblical Antichrist is one and the same as the Quran's Muslim Mahdi.

Many evangelical Christians believe the Bible predicts a charismatic ruler, the Antichrist, will arise in the last days, before the return of Jesus. The Quran also predicts that a man, called the Mahdi, will rise up to lead the nations, pledging to usher in an era of peace. Richardson makes the case these two men are, in fact, one and the same.

But a source indicated that ALL THE MAJOR SUPERMARKETS WERE INVOLVED in the discussions except Waitrose. Multi-national giants have been involved in a wide-ranging campaign over the last year to suggest GM crops could be the solution to Third World hunger. That notion was rejected by a UN study last year. But the GOVERNMENT HAS ORDERED THE FOOD STANDARDS AGENCY TO CARRY OUT A YEAR-LONG SPIN CAMPAIGN TO WIN SUPPORT FOR GM. Earlier this year Sir Terry Leahy, boss of Tesco, Britain's biggest supermarket, said supermarkets may have made the decision to reject GM products too hastily.

'It may have been a failure of us all to stand by the science,' he said. 'Maybe there is an opportunity to discuss again these issues and a growing appreciation by people that GM could play a vital role in feeding the world's growing population.' Friends of the Earth's senior food campaigner, Clare Oxborrow, said THE GOVERNMENT AND BIG BUSINESS APPEARED TO BE TRYING TO BRAINWASH THE PUBLIC INTO ACCEPTING 'FRANKENSTEIN FOOD'.

She said: 'During the 2002 GM debate the public delivered a resounding "no" to GM crops and foods. Ministers already know what the public think about GM but they don't like the answer'. Research assessing the impact of growing GM crops in Britain found they were more damaging to farmland wildlife than traditional farming.

Each electric Prius motor requires 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of neodymium, and each battery uses 10 to 15 kg (22-33 lb) of lanthanum. That number will nearly double under Toyota's plans to boost the car's fuel economy, he said. Toyota plans to sell 100,000 Prius cars in the United States alone for 2009, and 180,000 next year.

Among the rare earths that would be most affected in a shortage is neodymium, the key component of an alloy used to make the high-power, lightweight magnets for electric motors of hybrid cars, such as the Prius, Honda Insight and Ford Focus, as well as in generators for wind turbines.

Close cousins terbium and dysprosium are added in smaller amounts to the alloy to preserve neodymium's magnetic properties at high temperatures. Yet another rare earth metal, lanthanum, is a major ingredient for hybrid car batteries. Production of both hybrid cars and wind turbines is expected to climb sharply amid the clamour for cleaner transportation and energy alternatives that reduce dependence on fossil fuels blamed for global climate change.

Fire crews battling the blaze in the Angeles National Forest tried desperately to beat back the flames and prayed for weather conditions to ease. The fire was the largest of at least eight burning across California after days of triple-digit temperatures and low humidity. The flames scorched 164 square miles of brush and threatened more than 12,000 homes, but the lack of wind kept them from driving explosively into the hearts of the dense suburbs northeast of Los Angeles.

"It's burning everywhere," US Forest Service spokeswoman Dianne Cahir said. "When it gets into canyons that haven't burned in numerous years, it takes off. If you have any insight into the good Lord upstairs, put in a request." Fire crews set backfires and sprayed fire retardant at MOUNT WILSON, home to at least 20 television transmission towers, radio and cell phone antennas, and the century-old Mount Wilson Observatory. The observatory also houses two giant telescopes and several multimillion-dollar university programs. It is both a landmark for its historic discoveries and a thriving modern center for astronomy.

The fire about a half-mile away was expected to reach the mountaintop sometime Monday night, said Los Angeles County fire Captain Mark Whaling. If the flames hit the mountain, cell phone service and TV and radio transmissions would be disrupted, but the extent was unclear.

Time pressures, a lack of treatment options, and parental reluctance to address weight problems prevented them having any effect, said staff. The government said no one group could solve obesity on its own. In the UK, AROUND 27% OF CHILDREN ARE NOW OVERWEIGHT.

Writing in the British Journal of General Practice, the researchers said there had been moves to involve primary care staff in spotting and treating overweight children. This includes 2006 guidelines from both the Department of Health and the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence.

But in a series of in-depth interviews with GPs, practice nurses, school nurses and health visitors, the researchers found this view was not shared by those on the front line. GPs and practice nurses said they rarely saw primary school-age children in the surgery and when they did there were often more pressing problems to deal with than their weight. Dr Katrina Turner said, "WE'RE TALKING ABOUT AN OBESITY EPIDEMIC - the people who go to the GP are the tip of the iceberg."

Hans and Petra Schmidt have been teaching their children, Josua, 16, and Aaron, 14, for more than nine years in an attempt to shield them from what they hold to be a hostile moral and heavily secularised environment in German public schools. To date the Schmidts have been forced to pay nearly 13,000 Euros (US $18,300) in home schooling fines AND HAVE HAD A LIEN PLACED ON THEIR HOME BY THE GOVERNMENT.

This month, Germany's Supreme Court ruled that "the religious conviction of a minority" is subordinated to "a contradictory tradition of a differently inclined majority." The court fined the parents 80 Euros. The Court declared that "Consequently, the paternal right to raise children is restricted, in a constitutionally permissible way, by the concretization of the state's obligation to ensure a universal duty to compulsive school attendance." THE BAN ON HOMESCHOOLING IS ONE OF THE FEW BILLS INTRODUCED BY THE NAZI REGIME THAT IS STILL ON THE BOOKS TODAY!

IN SWEDEN AND BRITAIN, THERE IS GROWING CONCERN AMONG HOMESCHOOLING FAMILIES over government hostility to homeschooling. There are growing fears that these governments are attempting to impose similar restrictions to those of Germany.

Letters released yesterday prove Justice Secretary Jack Straw had originally intended to exclude Megrahi from a prisoner transfer agreement – negotiated around the same time as the BP deal in 2007 – allowing Libyans convicted in Britain to serve their sentences in Libya. But when Libya's ruling despot Colonel Gaddafi threatened to withdraw from the oil agreement, Mr Straw suddenly changed his mind.

Mr Straw repeats the Government mantra that Megrahi WAS RELEASED NOT UNDER THE TRANSFER DEAL BUT ON COMPASSIONATE GROUNDS BECAUSE HE HAS TERMINAL CANCER. The decision, he said, was taken entirely by Mr MacAskill. The compassionate grounds were a mere fig leaf to spare Scottish blushes, and a desperately inadequate one. The official diagnosis that Megrahi has less than three months to live was made by a GP. NO CANCER SPECIALIST WAS PREPARED TO GUESS AT HIS LIFE EXPECTANCY, prompting questions about how ill he really is.

With this dirty little deal, they have sold out the Lockerbie families, the fight against terrorism and the integrity of the English and Scottish legal systems. Worst of all, they have sold out the memory of the 270 who died.

Could this be the same Mr O'Leary who in 2005, after Ryanair had fallen foul of some typical Brussels regulatory stupidity, said: "I think we should blow the place up and shoot all the regulators"?

SURELY HIS CHANGE OF HEART HAS NO CONNECTION WITH THE FACT THAT MR O'LEARY HAS RENEWED HIS INTEREST IN BUYING AER LINGUS. Ireland's state airline is weakening in its earlier opposition to the bid. However, under EU competition rules it cannot go through without permission from Brussels.

Dr Paul Kroon said: "In the human body these compounds will be fermented by bacteria in the colon, creating metabolites that may be beneficial, for example with antioxidant activity." The research, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, shows the chemical which is normally not considered by food chemists - is an important part of a healthy diet.

Professor Fulgencio Saura-Calixto, who led the project, said: "These polyphenols are major constituents of the human diet with important health properties. To consider them in nutritional and epidemiological research may be useful for a better understanding of the effects of plant foods in health."

Their efforts could be undermined by a surge in foreclosures of commercial property carrying mortgages that were packaged and sold by Wall Street as bonds. Similar mortgage-backed securities created out of home loans played a big role in undoing that sector and triggering the global economic recession. Now the $700 billion of commercial-mortgage-backed securities outstanding are being tested for the first time by a massive downturn, and the outcome so far hasn't been pretty.

The CMBS sector is suffering two kinds of pain, which, according to credit rater Realpoint LLC, sent its delinquency rate to 3.14% in July, more than six times the level a year earlier. One is simply the result of bad underwriting. In the era of looser credit, Wall Street's CMBS machine lent owners money on the assumption that occupancy and rents of their office buildings, hotels, stores or other commercial property would keep rising. In fact, the opposite has happened. THE RESULT IS THAT A GROWING NUMBER OF PROPERTIES AREN'T GENERATING ENOUGH CASH TO MAKE PRINCIPAL AND INTEREST PAYMENTS.

The other kind of hurt is coming from the inability of property owners to refinance loans bundled into CMBS when these loans mature. By the end of 2012, some $153 billion in loans that make up CMBS are coming due, and close to $100 billion of that will face difficulty getting refinanced, according to Deutsche Bank. BANKS HOLD $1.7 TRILLION OF COMMERCIAL MORTGAGES AND CONSTRUCTION LOANS, and delinquencies on this debt already have played a role in the increase in bank failures this year.

Still, most of the $6.7 trillion in commercial real estate is privately owned. Also, it is unlikely commercial real estate will benefit much from an early stage of an economic recovery. WHAT LANDLORDS NEED is occupancy and rents to rise, and that means employers have to start hiring and consumers need to shop more. SO FAR, THERE ARE FEW SIGNS THIS IS HAPPENING.

Q: How bad is this wave of failures?

A: A cascade of collapses began last year as the financial crisis struck. Eighty-four banks have fallen so far this year as tumbling home prices and spiking unemployment pushed loan defaults upward. That's the largest number in a year since the early 1990s, at the apex of the savings and loan crisis. It compares with 25 bank failures last year and three in 2007.

Q: What's behind this?

A: Banks around the country have run into trouble on their loans for construction and development, the fastest-growing category of troubled loans for US banks, especially in overbuilt areas. Many companies have shut down in the recession, vacating shopping malls and office buildings financed by the loans. Lots of banks have heavy concentrations of these loans in their lending portfolios, and some small banks are considered by regulators to be particularly vulnerable.

Q: So even though the economy is starting to recover, banks are still struggling?

A: The condition of the banking industry is what economists call a lagging indicator: It falls behind the state of the economy because the problems take longer to percolate through banks, as opposed to other signposts such as consumer spending, gross domestic product or permits for building construction. That means the pain will continue to weigh on the banking sector while the economy rebounds.

The heat-driven fire nearly doubled in size overnight and has now burned 35,000 acres (14,000 hectares) of thick, bone-dry brush in the mountains above five towns, a 12-mile (19 km) stretch from La Crescenta to La Canada Flintridge, the California Fire Department said. Authorities have ordered residents to evacuate about 2,000 homes threatened by the fire about 15 miles (24 km) northeast of downtown Los Angeles.

"THESE FIRES ARE STILL TOTALLY OUT OF CONTROL," Schwarzenegger told reporters at the firefighters' command post in Lake View Terrace, California. "This is a huge and very dangerous fire. The fire is moving very close to homes and to structures... this is why it's important to pay close attention to the evacuation."

Three remote homes have been destroyed so far and some 10,000 others and 2,500 other buildings are in danger, AS IS MOUNT WILSON, THE NEXUS FOR KEY TELECOMMUNICATIONS FACILITIES. "That site is the nerve center for most of communication in the Los Angeles area," Station Fire Commander Mike Dietrich said. "It is not out of danger as we speak."

The law change applies to female couples in England and Wales who were having fertility treatment on or after 6 April 2009. Previously, the mother's female partner could not be registered as a parent. But the change in the law confers legal parenthood on the mother's female partner.

According to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, there were 728 lesbians who underwent in vitro fertilisation (IVF) between 1999 and 2006. And in the same period, there were 5,211 lesbian females who received donor insemination (DI) treatment.

Stonewall's Head of Policy and Research Ruth Hunt said that as a result of the law change, life for lesbian families "isn't only fairer, it's also much easier". She added: "As the law improves to provide further equality, knowing your new rights will help people make full use of the services they're entitled to. And, if discrimination occurs, the same knowledge can help them demand fair treatment. Now lesbian couples in the UK WHO MAKE A CONSIDERED DECISION TO START A LOVING FAMILY will finally be afforded equal access to services they help fund as taxpayers."

Wilders asked Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen if he agrees that "this man is behaving like a pig, just like the barbarous Prophet Mohammed, who married a six-year-old girl." Wilders wants the Foreign Minister to summon the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the Netherlands to express his disgust at the act.

WILDERS HAS ENJOYED GROWING SUPPORT THROUGHOUT EUROPE, as well as in his own country, for his outspoken statements against Muslim terror. He sparked furious protests two years ago when he disseminated his 15-minute film called Fitna, which exposes links between the Muslim religion and terror. The Saudi Arabian Arab News reported the incident of the 10-year-old bride. It said the man denied he is 80-years old, as claimed by the girl's family, which he accused of meddling in his affairs.

"My marriage is not against Shariah [Muslim law]," he told Arab News. "It included the elements of acceptance and response by the father of the bride." The unidentified man explained that he had been engaged to his wife's elder sister, who broke off the engagement. In return, her father offered his younger daughter. "I was allowed to have a look at her according to Shariah and found her acceptable," said the elderly man.