The Roman Catholic Church, which also faces fierce competition from resurgent Islam, has felt the heat. With one of the world's largest Catholic populations, estimated at 158 million, though, Africa can still pack them in. More than 500,000 are expected to attend Mass in the Angolan capital, Luanda, celebrated by the Pope.

The Vatican's uncompromising messages on HIV/Aids, the role of priests and nuns in the 1994 Rwandan genocide and its apparent inability to deliver millions from squalor and poverty has, however, dented its image on a continent that saw its fastest growth during the past century. "The Catholic Church lacks passion. It's really not a very exciting place," Jaoa, a worshipper at Luanda's "Universal Church of the Kingdom of God", said on Sunday as he held out his arms to the sky and begged God to expel his demons.

The Pope said he hoped that the six-day trip to Cameroon and Angola would bring hope to Africa. He will begin the visit in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, before moving on to Angola, but many will ask why it took him four years to visit a continent his predecessor came to 16 times.

Alistair Darling and senior figures in the US Treasury have been encouraging the Fund to issue hundreds of billions of dollars worth of so-called Special Drawing Rights in the coming months as part of its campaign to prevent the recession from turning into a global depression. Should the move, which is up for discussion by the summit of G20 finance ministers this weekend, be adopted, it will represent a global equivalent of the Bank of England's plan to pump extra cash into the UK economy.

However, economists warned that the scheme could cause A MAJOR SWELL OF INFLATION AROUND THE WORLD as the newly-created money filters through the system. The idea has been suggested by a number of key figures, including billionaire investor George Soros and US Treasury adviser Ted Truman.

Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF, said: "The principle behind it is that everyone would get bonus dollars and instead of the Federal Reserve having to print them, everyone gets them. The objective is to create a windfall of cash. HOWEVER IF EVERYBODY GOES OUT AND SPENDS THE MONEY IT COULD BE VERY INFLATIONARY."

The scale of the crisis faced by Africa because of the economic downturn is only now becoming apparent. The head of the African Development Bank, Donald Kaberuka, called it an "emergency" at the meeting in London. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown heard tales of woe from across the continent - 500,000 thrown out of work in copper mines in Zambia, farmers losing jobs in Tanzania when the cotton price halved, foreign receipts down everywhere because of a cut in tourism and the reduction in remittances sent home by workers living abroad.

Prime Minister Brown wants a strong commitment from fellow leaders of the developed world at the G20 summit next month, but many are more concerned about their own economies than the state of Africa. Few have lived up to the commitments they made to increase aid at the Gleneagles summit in 2005, and some are talking about cutting aid budgets.

There is no agreed figure for what Africa needs, but Mr Kaberuka of the African Development Bank said that the impact was "deeper than anticipated at the beginning". All of the African leaders in London stressed the need to make finance for trade available again. For now it has completely dried up.

The prime minister will argue that Iran will be a litmus test of how nuclear nations can work together with non-nuclear states to equip them with new sources of energy, including nuclear power. "Like it or not", Mr Brown will say, A MASSIVE EXPANSION OF NUCLEAR POWER WILL BE NEEDED TO MEET CARBON REDUCTION TARGETS.

According to International Atomic Energy Agency forecasts, more than 30 nuclear reactors will have to built every year if the world is to meet its target of halving carbon emissions by 2050. "We have to create a new international system to help non-nuclear states acquire the new sources of energy they need," the prime minister will say.

He will reportedly receive a European Commission pension at the age of 65 of £31,000 a year but EU rules stipulate that if he speaks out against Europe as a former Commissioner he could be stripped of his pension altogether. Commissioners have to abide by certain obligations "both during and after their term of office" and one of these obligations as a staff member of the Commission is to maintain a "duty of loyalty to the Communities".

Saturday's Mail reported that the Conservatives have stepped up their campaign to oblige Lord Mandelson to make public the full details of his "golden goodbye" from the European Commission.

As late as November 2007, Barclays in Paris held a private account for Teodorin Obiang, the study says. A scion of the ruling family in Equitorial Guinea, Mr Obiang in the past 10 years spent €4.5 million on sports cars even as 20 percent of children die before their fifth birthday due to poverty in the oil-rich country. A €1.2 million Bugatti Veyron: Teodorin Obiang bought three. The cost of less than one of the cars could buy a mosquito net for every child in the malaria-prone country. Until March 2007, BNP Paribas was involved in billions of euros of syndicated loans to the Angola ruling elite-linked oil firm Sonangol, Global Witness writes.

Deutsche Bank has still not made clear to the NGO what happened to the €2 billion or so of Turkmenistan's natural gas income, which it was holding for the country's notoriously cruel dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov, when he died in January 2007. "THE INTERNATIONAL BANKING SYSTEM IS COMPLICIT IN HELPING TO PERPETUATE POVERTY, CORRUPTION, CONFLICT, HUMAN SUFFERING AND MISERY," the Global Witness paper says.

Coming ahead of the G20 finance summit in London on 2 April and in a climate of hostility to big bank secrecy caused by the financial crisis, the report calls for regulation of bank dealings with "PEPs" (politically-exposed persons) and a name-and-shame campaign by FATF (the Financial Action Task Force).

HSBC and Banco Santander are named in connection to the Obiang family. Credit Lyonnais allegedly helped Gabonese President Omar Bongo place funds abroad. Societe Generale is said to have done similar work for the ruling family of Congo-Brazzaville. Fortis bank is accused of helping the former ruler of Liberia, Charles Taylor, fund conflict in east Africa by processing payments for government-linked timber firms. The list of banks implicated in the Angola loans includes Commerzbank, KBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland, ING and Standard Chartered.

The Guardian reports that THE TRANSATLANTIC RIFT is threatening the prospect of a deal to handle the economic crisis at the G20 in April. The Times reports that the rift has been emphasised in an admission by Britain's most senior civil servant, Sir Gus O'Donnell, that it was proving "unbelievably difficult" to liaise with the Obama Administration to prepare for the meeting.

Tony Barber, writing in the FT argues that the number of recent EU summits on the financial crisis are "without precedent in the EU's 51-year history." He quotes EU Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia saying, "If new summits take place without precise decisions and results, confidence in the capacity of these summits to solve problems will clearly diminish."

The Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch-Brown has said that the G20 meeting must produce a substantive plan to rescue the world economy or there will be "disastrous" financial consequences because the stakes have been raised so high, according to the Telegraph.

The first in COPENHAGEN, billed as "an emergency summit on climate change" and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was EXPLICITLY DESIGNED TO STOKE UP THE FEAR OF GLOBAL WARMING to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, "THIS IS NOT A REGULAR SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCE: THIS IS A DELIBERATE ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE POLICY".

Thus the name of the game last week, as we see from a sample of quotations, was to win headlines by claiming that everything is far worse than previously supposed. Sea level rises by 2100 could be "much greater than the 59cm predicted by the last IPCC report". Global warming could kill off 85 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, "much more than previously predicted". The ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica are melting "much faster than predicted". The number of people dying from heat could be "twice as many as previously predicted".

None of the GOVERNMENT-FUNDED SCIENTISTS making these claims were particularly distinguished, but they succeeded in their object, as the media cheerfully recycled all this wild scaremongering without bothering to check the scientific facts.

What a striking contrast this was to the second conference, which I attended with 700 others in NEW YORK, organised by the Heartland Institute under the title Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis?. IN BRITAIN THIS RECEIVED NO COVERAGE AT ALL, apart from a sneering mention by the Guardian, although it was addressed by dozens of expert scientists, not a few of world rank, who for professional standing put those in Copenhagen in the shade. The message of this gathering was that THE SCARE OVER GLOBAL WARMING HAS BEEN DELIBERATELY STOKED UP FOR POLITICAL REASONS AND HAS LONG SINCE PARTED COMPANY WITH PROPER SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE.

Nothing has more acutely demonstrated this than the reliance of the IPCC on COMPUTER MODELS to predict what is going to happen to global temperatures over the next 100 years. On these predictions, that temperatures are likely to rise by up to 5.3C, all their other predictions and recommendations depend, yet nearly 10 years into the 21st century it is already painfully clear that the computer forecasts are going hopelessly astray. Far from rising with CO2, as the models are programmed to predict they should, the satellite-measured temperature curve has flattened out and then dropped. If the present trend were to continue, the world in 2100 would not in fact be hotter but 1.1C cooler than the 1979-1998 average.

YET IT IS ON THIS FUNDAMENTAL INABILITY OF THE COMPUTER MODELS TO PREDICT WHAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED THAT ALL ELSE HANGS. Sea levels are not shooting up but only continuing their modest 3mm a year rise over the past 200 years. The vast Antarctic ice-sheet is not melting, except in one tiny corner, the Antarctic Peninsula. Tropical hurricane activity, far from increasing, is at its lowest level for 30 years. The best correlation for temperature fluctuations is not CO2 but the magnetic activity of the sun.

There seems little doubt that global warming is leading the world towards an unprecedented catastrophe. But it is not the Technicolor apocalypse promised by the likes of Al Gore. THE REAL DISASTER HANGING OVER US LIES IN ALL THOSE ASTRONOMICALLY COSTLY MEASURES PROPOSED BY POLITICIANS, TO MEET A CRISIS WHICH IN REALITY NEVER EXISTED.

The Bank is using its Quarterly Bulletin to highlight the threat posed to the economy by deflation – where prices fall each year rather than rise. Although inflation is currently in positive territory, it is expected to become negative in the coming months. The Bank is worried that this may combine with high levels of indebtedness to squeeze families further.

It says that families with high debts could fall prey to the debt deflation trap. This means that the cost of their debts, which are fixed, would rise compared to average prices throughout the economy. While inflation erodes debts, deflation makes them relatively higher. The Bank's paper suggests that Britain is particularly at risk because there is a high proportion of families with significant levels of debt, and many of them are on fixed mortgage rateS, which means they will not benefit from rate cuts.

The two parties would not have a majority in the 120-seat parliament and would need to secure agreements with other parties to achieve that, but it was the first step towards establishing a new Israeli government after a February 10 election. The Yisrael Beitenu official told Reuters its members had initialled the agreement with officials of Netanyahu's Likud party, after a long session of negotiations.

Netanyahu, who served as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, faces an April 3 deadline to complete a government, after being given the task last month by President Shimon Peres. Israeli media said the agreement would hand the foreign ministry to Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman, CONTROVERSIAL FOR HIS ANTI-ARAB RHETORIC. His party, the third largest in parliament, would get five cabinet posts, the reports said.

A narrow right-wing government and a prominent role for Lieberman COULD PUT NETANYAHU ON A COLLISION COURSE WITH THE ADMINISTRATION OF U.S. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA who has pledged to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.

Unemployment in Britain is at its highest for a decade and the tighter job market has put a renewed focus on the use of overseas workers. British construction workers protested earlier this year over the hiring of foreign contractors. Immigration minister Phil Woolas told the Financial Times the survey's findings were not a surprise and that he was working to give assurances to the public.

The FT said 54 percent of those questioned opposed the legal right of people from other European Union states to work in Britain. The paper said this opposition to legal migrant labour was higher than in Germany, France, Italy and Spain which was also polled by Harris.

What the town did have was a river, feeding an oasis in the Atacama Desert. But mining companies have polluted and bought up so much of the water, residents say, that for months each year the river is little more than a trickle — and an unusable one at that.

Quillagua is among many small towns that are being swallowed up in the country's intensifying water wars. Nowhere is the system for buying and selling water more permissive than here in Chile, experts say, where water rights are private property, not a public resource, and can be traded like commodities with little government oversight or safeguards for the environment.

Private ownership is so concentrated in some areas that a single electricity company from Spain, Endesa, has bought up 80 percent of the water rights in a huge region in the south, causing an uproar. In the north, agricultural producers are competing with mining companies to siphon off rivers and tap scarce water supplies, leaving towns like this one bone dry and withering.

The two reports – one by the world's foremost international economic forum and the other by 24 United Nations agencies – presage the opening tomorrow of the most important conference on the looming crisis for three years. The World Water Forum, which will be attended by 20,000 people in Istanbul, will hear stark warnings of how half the world's population will be affected by water shortages in just 20 years' time, with millions dying and increasing conflicts over dwindling resources.

A report by the World Economic Forum, which runs the annual Davos meetings of the international business and financial elite, says that lack of water, will "soon tear into various parts of the global economic system" and "start to emerge as a headline geopolitical issue". It adds: "The financial crisis gives us a stark warning of what can happen if known economic risks are left to fester. We are living in a water 'bubble' as unsustainable and fragile as that which precipitated the collapse in world financial markets. We are now on the verge of bankruptcy in many places with no way of paying the debt back."

The World Water Development Report, compiled by 24 UN agencies under the auspices of Unesco, adds that shortages are already beginning to constrain economic growth in areas as diverse as California, China, Australia, India and Indonesia. The report, which will be published tomorrow, also expects water conflicts to break out in the Middle East, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Colombia and other countries.

The Reverend Noble Samuel was driving to the studio when a car pulled over in front of him. A man got out and came over to ask him directions in Urdu. Mr Samuel, based at Heston United Reformed Church, West London, said: "He put his hand into my window, which was half open, and grabbed my hair and opened the door."

"He started slapping my face and punching my neck. He was trying to smash my head on the steering wheel. Then he grabbed my cross and pulled it off and it fell on the floor. He was swearing. The other two men came from the car and took my laptop and Bible." The Metropolitan Police are treating it as a 'faith hate' assault and are hunting three Asian men.

Pakistan-born Mr Samuel, 48, who was educated by Christian missionaries and moved to Britain 15 years ago, said that over the past few weeks he has received phone-in calls from people identifying themselves as Muslims who challenged his views. "They were having an argument with me," he said. "They were very aggressive in saying they did not agree with me. I said those are your views and these are my views. I am frightened and depressed," he said. "My show is not confrontational."

Three weeks later, prosecutors admitted the "beasts" could not be guilty - DNA tests had ruled them out - and Italians were left wondering whether growing anti-immigrant sentiment had played a role in a hurried investigation. "The discovery that these two Romanians accused of rape are not guilty is a real slap in the face for our national conscience," wrote commentator Lucia Annunziata in an editorial in La Stampa newspaper.

"The whole country was duped on a path of hasty and crude racism," she wrote. "We are a long way away from lynch mobs, but we are going in that direction. This could get serious." XENOPHOBIC FEELINGS HAVE BEEN BREWING IN POCKETS OF EUROPE IN RECENT MONTHS, fuelled by economic downturn as locals and immigrants compete for fewer jobs and ever lower wages.

There has been racist violence in the Czech Republic and Hungary, migrants who flocked to Russia looking for work in the boom have been threatened or abused, and tensions are mounting between immigrants and Spaniards competing for shelter and work.