Soon they will be the only kind of light bulb allowed, but now officials in BRUSSELS HAVE ADMITTED THAT ENERGY-SAVING BULBS ARE NOT AS BRIGHT AS THE OLD-FASHIONED KIND THEY ARE REPLACING. From tomorrow a Europe-wide ban on traditional incandescent bulbs will begin to be rolled out, with a ban on 100W bulbs and old-style frosted or pearled bulbs.

Buyers of the main type of energy-saving bulb, compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), are told on the packaging that they shine as brightly as an old-fashioned bulb. For example, AN 11W CFL IS LABELLED AS BEING THE EQUIVALENT OF A 60W INCANDESCENT BULB. However, the European Commission, which was responsible for the ban, has now conceded that this is "not true" and that such claims by manufacturers are "exaggerated".

The Sunday Telegraph has conducted its own tests on level of illuminance provided by light bulbs from different manufacturers to see whether their claims stand up to scrutiny. We found that under normal household conditions, using a single lamp to light a room, AN 11W LOW-ENERGY CFL PRODUCED ONLY 58 PER CENT OF THE ILLUMINATION OF AN "EQUIVALENT" 60W BULB – even after a 10-minute "warm-up".

Mr Hatoyama, 62, said people were "fed up" with the governing party. Prime Minister Taro Aso said that he took responsibility for the defeat and would resign as head of the LDP. Japan is suffering record unemployment and its economy is struggling to emerge from a bruising recession. The DPJ has said it will shift the focus of government from supporting corporations to helping consumers and workers. The White House has already said it hopes to forge a "strong alliance" with the incoming government.

Mr Hatoyama, who is almost certain to lead the next government, is the wealthy grandson of the founder of Bridgestone tyres. His other grandfather was a former LDP prime minister. He said after polls closed: "We will not be arrogant and we will listen to the people. The people are angry with politics now and the ruling coalition. We felt a great sense of people wanting change."

Mr Hatoyama, who is expected to announce a transition team on Monday, has promised to boost welfare and reform the bureaucracy. He also vowed on Sunday to strive to resolve a long-standing territorial feud with Russia. The White House called the election "historic", adding: "We are confident that the strong US-Japan alliance and the close partnership between our two countries will continue to flourish."

“The scenario goes like this. Imagine a sudden shutdown of oil supplies; a sudden collapse in the petrol that streams steadily through the pumps and so into the engines of the lorries which deliver our food around the country, stocking up the supermarket shelves as soon as any item runs out.

If the trucks stopped moving, we'd start to worry and we'd head out to the shops, stocking up our larders. By the end of Day One, if there was still no petrol, the shelves would be looking pretty thin. Imagine, then, Day Two: your fourth, fifth and sixth meal. We'd be in a panic. Day three: still no petrol. What then? With hunger pangs kicking in, and no notion of how long it might take for the supermarkets to restock, how long before those who hadn't stocked up began stealing from their neighbours? Or looting what they could get their hands on?”

“Conventional wisdom had it that in an age of mechanisation, the cost of producing the food that we eat would decrease as technology found new ways of improving yields and minimising labour costs. But there was a problem that hadn't been factored in. Production methods are now such that 95 per cent of all the food we eat in the world today is oil-dependent.

This is a continuation of an Islamic-PA campaign to convince the world that the millennia-old natural association between Jerusalem and Jews is a myth. As Islamic Movement chief Raed Salah stated in 2006, "We remind, for the 1,000th time, that the entire Al-Aqsa mosque [on the Temple Mount], including all of its area and alleys above the ground and under it, is exclusive and absolute [emphasis added] Moslem property, and no one else has any rights to even one grain of earth in it."

HOWEVER, THIS "ABSOLUTE" MOSLEM CLAIM IS ACTUALLY NOT ALL THAT ABSOLUTE. Back in 1925, the Supreme Moslem Council - also known as the Waqf, which traditionally oversees Temple Mount activities on behalf of Islam - BOASTED PROUDLY THAT THE TEMPLE MOUNT SITE WAS NONE OTHER THAN THAT OF SOLOMON'S TEMPLE.

The official 1925 Supreme Moslem Council Guide Book to Al-Haram Al-Sharif (the Moslem name for the Temple Mount) states, on page 4, "Its identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which 'David built there an altar unto the L-rd...'" The pamphlet cites the Biblical source in 2 Samuel XXIV,25.

Kennedy's sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, died August 10. SHE ALSO RECEIVED A LETTER FROM THE POPE before she died. Both were siblings of President John F Kennedy and Senator Robert F Kennedy, who were both assassinated in the 1960s.

The Vatican newspaper revealed that when President Barack Obama visited the Vatican in June, THE POPE SENT WITH THE PRESIDENT A LETTER TO THE DYING SENATOR. Kennedy had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in May 2008.

While noting Kennedy's "unfortunate" support for abortion rights, L'Osservatore noted as well that the senator "was constantly on the front lines in the battles on behalf of immigrants, arms control, and a minimum wage for the poor."

Torop, 48, is the spiritual leader of at least 5,000 devoted followers, among them intellectuals, artists and professionals who flock to worship him in the small isolated village of Petropavlovka - more than 2000 miles from Moscow.

He says he realised that God had sent him to Earth to teach mankind about the evils of war and the havoc we were wreaking on the environment. WITH CHRISTMAS ABOLISHED his followers mark the day of his first sermon on August 18 as their special feast day.

HIS FOLLOWERS, who have given up their lives to follow him, ARE STRICT VEGANS and are banned from smoking and drinking or handling money. Around 300 of them live in wooden huts in the village that has grown up around his church and which does not appear on any maps. Many thousands more have made their homes in the small villages that surround Petropavlovka and survive the vicious Siberian winters so that they can be close to their Messiah.

According to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, more than a million bone parts are used in transplants every year. IN NO OTHER COUNTRY IS IT POSSIBLE TO MAKE SO MUCH MONEY WITH BODY PARTS. If a body were disassembled into its individual parts, then processed and sold, THE TOTAL PROCEEDS COULD AMOUNT TO $250,000 (€176,000). For a single corpse! The US tissue industry generates total revenues of about $1 billion a year, says journalist Martina Keller, a co-author of this article and the author of the German book, "Cannibalized: The Human Corpse as a Resource."

According to Klaus-Peter Günther, president of the German Society of Orthopedics and Orthopedic Surgery, they are often "not the first choice" in operations. "For us, the gold standard is still tissue taken directly from the patient in question." Alternatives are only an option, says Günther, when the material from the patient's body is insufficient. Those alternatives include animal bones and artificial replacement parts made of ceramic material, for example - or human donor bones.

In the United States, doctors have far fewer qualms about using body parts from corpses than their German counterparts - in such areas as spinal surgery, sports injuries and cosmetic surgery. For instance, DOCTORS USED PULVERIZED SKIN PARTICLES TO ENHANCE LIPS AND SMOOTH OUT WRINKLES.

That has left the supply chain with an unknown number of suppliers who are dead but do not know it - companies so undercapitalized and overleveraged they will never raise the money they need to get their idle plants running again. "Their lenders are going to say, 'Sorry, we're not going to increase our exposure with you because we don't know if you're going to make it or not,'" says Bill Diehl, the chief executive of BBK, an advisory firm that does supply chain risk analysis.

And that, of course, would be a horror show for the publicly traded manufacturers that rely on these suppliers. It could leave them scrambling to secure components once the recovery starts - and missing some of the rebound's benefits. "That's the bigger risk," says Craig Giffi, the head of Deloitte's US consumer and industrial products practice. "THEY COULD BE LEFT UNABLE TO CAPTURE THE UPTURN."

In the past, suppliers were often initially insulated from the effects of industrial cycles because their big customers were slow to cut production - because they believed the downturn would be brief or because slow internal processes made quicker cuts impossible. BUT THE INDUSTRY'S MOVE FROM MASS PRODUCTION TO A BUILD-TO-ORDER PARADIGM, and the outsourcing of many parts once produced in-house to outside suppliers, have changed all that.

They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Senator Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which STILL APPEARS TO PERMIT THE PRESIDENT TO SEIZE TEMPORARY CONTROL OF PRIVATE-SECTOR NETWORKS DURING A SO-CALLED CYBERSECURITY EMERGENCY.

The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

"I THINK THE REDRAFT, WHILE IMPROVED, REMAINS TROUBLING DUE TO ITS VAGUENESS," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "IT IS UNCLEAR WHAT AUTHORITY SENATOR ROCKEFELLER THINKS IS NECESSARY OVER THE PRIVATE SECTOR. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."

Los Angeles County Fire Department dispatcher Melanie Flores told The Times that two people were being treated for burns at the Big Tujunga ranger station, though more details were not immediately available. The Station fire has now burned more than 20,000 acres, according to fire officials.

The latest evacuation zone is in the remote upper reaches of Big Tujunga Canyon near the ranger station, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The city of GLENDALE also ordered evacuations north of Santa Carlotta Street between Pennsylvania and Lowell avenues. The city of PASADENA advised residents of the Florecita neighborhood in the far northwest of the city to evacuate their homes voluntarily.

Massive and ominous-looking smoke plumes continue to envelop the area and have made for poor air quality, falling ash and smoky odors in the nearest communities, the San Fernando Valley and other parts of Los Angeles. Outside the fire command post today at the Hansen Dam Recreation Center in Lake View Terrace, the air is so choked with smoke that it resembles a London fog of decades ago. Literally adding fuel to the fire is 20- to 30-foot-high brush that has not burned in 60 years, said Mike Dietrich, incident commander from the Forest Service.

The curator, Karl Rössler, told The Jerusalem Post that it is a "scandal" that the director of the Werkstatt, Philippa Ebéné, sought to censor the exhibit. "One must, of course, name that al-Husseini, an SS functionary, participated in the Holocaust," said Rössler.

The exhibit covers the "The Third World during the Second World War" and three exhibit panels of a total of 96 are devoted to the mufti's collaboration with the Nazis. The grand mufti delivered a talk to the imams of the Bosnian SS division in 1944, and WAS A KEY ISLAMIC SUPPORTER OF NAZI GERMANY'S DESTRUCTION OF EUROPEAN JEWRY.

Record immigration levels over the past decade have driven up the number of women of childbearing age. This helped boost the number of births last year to 791,000 - up 33,000 on 2007. For the first time in a decade, the excess of births over deaths played a bigger role than immigration itself in driving population growth, which is now twice as fast as in the 1990s.

The figures from the Office for National Statistics show that net immigration - the balance of those arriving over those leaving - fell by 44 per cent between 2007 and 2008 as economic turmoil triggered an exodus of foreign workers. Immigration Minister Phil Woolas seized on those figures as proof that Britain's borders were 'stronger than ever' and migration was 'under control'.

He insisted that previous projections showing the UK population rising to 70million within 30 years were now 'not true'. Opposition critics and immigration campaigners reacted with incredulity, pointing out that immigration remains at near-record levels and IT IS FOREIGN-BORN MOTHERS WHO ARE PUSHING UP THE BIRTH RATE.

California began selling unneeded or unclaimed items online last week and is holding a two-day auction of 6,000 more on Friday and Saturday. To entice buyers, the governor has autographed the sun visors of several of the vehicles up for sale in order to raise their value.

"By posting items online, Californians and people from other states and around the world can participate in the Great California Garage Sale," Mr Schwarzenegger said in a statement on his website. "This is a win-win for the state and for shoppers. Together we are eliminating waste and providing great deals in this tough economy."

After the meeting in London, both leaders continued to present optimistic statements about "progress" towards a resumption of direct PA-Israeli negotiations, which in effect have been conducted with the United States as a proxy for the PA. The discussions between Mitchell and the Israeli leader are a continuation of American attempts to keep all sides talking, DESPITE STATEMENTS FROM BOTH SIDES THAT SEEM TO MAKE ANY AGREEMENT IMPOSSIBLE.

However, ABBAS SAID IN RAMALLAH ON WEDNESDAY THAT THERE MAY BE TALKS BUT NOT ANY NEGOTIATIONS, adding that he is "DETERMINED TO ESTABLISH AN INDEPENDENT STATE WITH JERUSALEM AS ITS CAPITAL," without letting Israel exercise sovereignty over any land that was restored to the Jewish State in 1967.

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU REITERATED TUESDAY THAT ISRAEL WILL NOT GIVE UP SOVEREIGNTY OVER JERUSALEM and will not stop all construction. PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, in an interview with the London Times, said that the PA will be a de facto state within two years, regardless of Israel's position. BOTH HE AND ABBAS HAVE REFUSED TO RECOGNIZE ISRAEL AS A JEWISH STATE, A CONDITION THAT PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU HAS SAID IS A NECESSITY FOR AN AGREEMENT.

Germany's Federal Statistical Office has released data showing exports to Iran increased 10 percent in 2008. Germany's exports to Iran reached $6 billion in 2008, close to the record it set in 2004 and 2005. On November 27, 2008, German and Iranian business leaders began a conference in Hamburg called "Iran Sanctions: Practical Consequence for German Firms." The purpose of the conference was to improve German business relations in Iran as well as the German and Iranian political relationship. Angela Merkel's own administration has subsidized investments in Iran by providing German firms with $400 million in credit guarantees.

Meanwhile, on June 8 2009, German petrochemical company Basell Polyolefine signed a $1.3 billion trade deal with Iran to supply technology to build three plants involving synthetic and plastic material.

New reports also suggest that the Iranian regime is using technology obtained from Siemens, the German energy and engineering giant, and its partner, the Finnish communications firm Nokia, to crack down on internet access, cell phone use, and Twitter accounts of protesters and dissidents.