Panarin might be easy to ignore but for the fact that he is a dean at the Foreign Ministry's school for future diplomats and a regular on Russia's state-guided TV channels. And his predictions fit into the anti-American story line of the Kremlin leadership. "THERE IS A HIGH PROBABILITY THAT THE COLLAPSE OF THE UNITED STATES WILL OCCUR BY 2010," Panarin told dozens of students, professors and diplomats Tuesday at the Diplomatic Academy — a lecture the ministry pointedly invited The Associated Press and other foreign media to attend.

Panarin didn't give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources. He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world's wealthiest country for more than a decade now. But he said the recent economic turmoil in the US and other "social and cultural phenomena" led him to nail down a specific timeframe for "The End" — WHEN THE UNITED STATES WILL BREAK UP INTO SIX AUTONOMOUS REGIONS AND ALASKA WILL REVERT TO RUSSIAN CONTROL.

One instructor asked Panarin whether his predictions more accurately describe Russia, which is undergoing its worst economic crisis in a decade as well as a demographic collapse that has led some scholars to predict the country's demise. Panarin dismissed that idea: "The collapse of Russia will not occur." But Alexei Malashenko, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center who did not attend the lecture, sided with the skeptical instructor, saying Russia is the country that is on the verge of disintegration. "I CAN'T IMAGINE AT ALL HOW THE UNITED STATES COULD EVER FALL APART," Malashenko told the AP.

According to official reports, one of 66 satellites owned by Iridium, a US telecoms company, and the Russian Cosmos-2251 satellite, launched in 1993 and believed to be defunct, collided on February 10 about 800 kilometers (500 miles) above Siberia.

However, Major General (Retired) Leonid Shershnev, a former head of Russia's military space intelligence, said in an interview published by the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper on Tuesday that the US satellite involved in the collision was used by the US military as part of the "dual-purpose" Orbital Express research project, which began in 2007.

Shershnev claims the US military decided to continue with the project to "develop technology that would allow monitoring and inspections of orbital spacecraft by fully-automated satellites equipped with robotic devices." The February collision could be an indication that the US has successfully developed such technology and is capable of manipulating 'hostile satellites,' including their destruction, with a single command from a ground control center, the general said.

In a speech to both Houses of Congress, Mr Brown will call on the US not to turn in on itself, warning that the financial problems facing them are global and can be dealt with only if they "seize the moment" and resort to international co-operation. The Prime Minister will attempt to speak on behalf of the European Union as a whole when he says that - for the first time in living memory - the entire region is united in wanting to work with America.

Aiming his message in particular at any Congressmen harking back to transatlantic rifts with France and Germany over the Iraq invasion, he will say: "There is no old Europe, no new Europe, there is only your friend Europe."

In an upbeat message at a time of plummeting stock markets, repossessions and redundancies in the US as in Britain, Mr Brown will predict a doubling in the size of the world economy over the next two decades, with sharp growth in business opportunities, prosperity, jobs and incomes.

The 14.9 per cent rise to 480.7 billion yuan (£50 billion), up 62.5 billion yuan from 2008, was announced in advance of the annual meeting of the rubber-stamp parliament, the National People's Congress. It is slightly smaller than the increase in recent years, suggesting that the government is focusing its spending on boosting the wider economy. But after rises of 17.8 per cent in 2007 and 17.6 per cent in 2008, it still amounts to a rise of more than half since 2006.

In addition, the United States claims that real spending is significantly higher, as many costs, including major arms purchases, are kept off the officially announced budget. China is known to be upgrading its nuclear arsenal and has all but confirmed plans to build its first aircraft carrier, but it is unclear whether these heavy cost loads are included in the budget.

"The primary aim of the concerted action by crime fighting authorities is to seize and confiscate prohibited items like music in order to move effectively and extensively against the spread of right wing extremism," the BKA said in a statement.

More than 60 years after World War Two and the Nazi Holocaust, RIGHT-WING RADICALISM IS STILL A PROBLEM IN GERMANY, particularly in the former communist eastern part of the country where unemployment is nearly double the rate in the west.

The BKA said last year that neo-Nazis appeared to have shifted their tactics and stepped up violent attacks. Government figures show anti-Semitic crimes rose at the end of last year. The BKA said the search began earlier Wednesday and was being carried out in all 16 federal states. A BKA spokeswoman could not say for now if any arrests had been made.

"Clearly this kind of activity is unhelpful and not in keeping with the obligations entered into under the 'road map'," Clinton said, referring to the long-stalled peace plan. "It is an issue that we intend to raise with the government of Israel and the government at the municipal level in Jerusalem," she added at a joint news conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Officials say they intend to have 7,000 troops and police in position by the end of the week. Rival gangs are battling for control of the city, which is a key entry point for drug smuggling into the US. Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said the troops were there in support of the local authorities. "Ciudad Juarez worries us deeply," he said in an interview with Reuters news agency.

"It is the reason why there is a response by the federal government to support the request of local authorities. Public safety is a shared responsibility among the federal, state governments and municipalities." He added: "In areas where drug traffickers have a lot of influence, sadly there is a risk that they will have an interest in influencing the formation of public power, particularly the local authority. This is something that concerns us."

Last month, the police chief in Ciudad Juarez, Roberto Orduna, stepped down after drugs gangs threatened to kill at least one police officer every two days until he quit.

Reports say Sudan's capital, Khartoum, was tense as people awaited the decision, with fears of unrest. The UN estimates some 300,000 people have died and millions been displaced in six years of conflict in the region. The spokeswoman for the court in The Hague, Laurence Blairon, said Mr Bashir was suspected of being criminally responsible for "murdering, exterminating, raping, torturing and forcibly transferring large numbers of civilians and pillaging their property".

She said the violence in Darfur was the result of a common plan organised at the highest level of the Sudanese government, but there was no evidence of genocide. The court would transmit as soon as possible to the government of Sudan a request for his arrest and surrender, she added. It is the ICC's first ever warrant issued against a sitting head of state.

The Constitution, he said, gives Congress, not the private Federal Reserve, "the authority to coin money and regulate the value of the currency." Now he's introduced another new plan, to "reform the manner in which the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is audited by the Comptroller General of the United States and the manner in which such audits are reported."

Throughout its nearly 100-year history, the Federal Reserve has presided over the near-complete destruction of the United States dollar," the Texas Republican said. "Since 1913 the dollar has lost over 95 percent of its purchasing power, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve's loose monetary policy. How long will we as a Congress stand idly by while hard-working Americans see their savings eaten away by inflation? Only big-spending politicians and politically favored bankers benefit from inflation," he said.

"No one oversees the Fed. The Fed is held accountable to absolutely nobody. But Senator Dorgan (as with everyone else in Congress) has no one to blame but himself. Ever since the Marxist, E. Mandell House, convinced President Woodrow Wilson to create the Federal Reserve in 1913, the Congress of the United States has had virtually nothing to do with the way our fiscal policies are managed. The Fed (which is not even a government agency, but rather A PRIVATE CORPORATION CONSISTING OF MOSTLY FOREIGN BANKERS) dictates America's financial policies," Baldwin said.

Grown in their millions in nothing but water inside greenhouses large enough to house ten football pitches each, they are as far as you can get from 'natural' homegrown food. The £80million development – called Thanet Earth – will allow Britain for the first time to produce its own salad crops throughout the winter. Cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers will be grown for 52 weeks – come rain, snow or shine – under the complex's seven greenhouses, which cover 220 acres of the Isle of Thanet off the Kent coast.

Most plants are grown in a hydroponic system, which relies on them being drip-fed water enriched with nutrients rather than being planted in the soil. The greenhouses are so divorced from nature that a colony of WORKER BEES has been introduced into the complex to pollinate the plants, while WASPS have been added to keep down any pests or mites which find their way in. And tens of thousands of RED SPIDERS have been released so the wasps do not go hungry.

Steve McVickers, chief executive of Thanet Earth, said: "Vegetables have been grown without soil in water before. What's new here is the scale. The advantage is it gives you a clean growing medium. You get no soil-borne diseases and you can control the nutrients, light and temperatures the plants get. We produce so little of what we actually eat and this is the first real project with the opportunity to reverse that trend."

But Ben Raskin, from the Soil Association, said: "Soil contains billions of organisms, many of which we don't even know about, which create complex sets of relationships. I suspect if you tried to survive purely on hydroponically grown food, YOU'D QUICKLY FIND YOUR BODY WASN'T GETTING EVERYTHING IT NEEDS."

The development will rely on seven small gas-fired power stations, called combined heat and power plants. Any by-products produced – namely heat and carbon dioxide – will be taken into the greenhouses to support the growing process. Together, they will also generate enough electricity to power 50,000 homes, which will be sold to the National Grid.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but Pakistani officials said that it bore the hallmarks of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistani militant group blamed for the attack on Mumbai in November. That has raised fears among Western security officials that LeT and its allies may be SHIFTING THEIR TACTICS FROM SUICIDE BOMBINGS TO COMMANDO-STYLE ATTACKS BY TRAINED, HEAVILY ARMED GUNMEN IN CROWDED URBAN AREAS. Large events such as the 2011 cricket World Cup and 2012 London Olympics could be prime targets.

Barack Obama expressed his deep concern over the attack as he met Gordon Brown and said that he would announce a new US strategy on Pakistan and Afghanistan before next month's Nato summit. "The safe havens for al-Qaeda remain in the frontier regions of Pakistan," he said. "What we have to do is to make sure that action against terrorism in Pakistan is effective. We know that the vast majority of al Qaeda fighters are in Pakistan, not in Afghanistan.

Last night New Zealand cancelled a tour to Pakistan at the end of the year. "We are not going," said Justin Vaughan, the chief executive of the country's cricket body. "I don't think any international team will be going to Pakistan in the foreseeable future."

After intense negotiations with the new administration, Mr Brown got some warm words on the historic links between the US and UK. But there was no family get-together, nor did the President offer Mr Brown and his wife Sarah a star-studded White House dinner. And instead of the traditional joint press conference, the Prime Minister was instead given an impromptu media briefing in the Oval Office.

Within minutes of landing in a snowbound Washington on Monday night, Mr Brown's aides had been made aware that their high expectations for the trip were in danger of exceeding the low-key welcome the Obama administration was prepared to offer. Suggestions that the new President's crowded diary made it impossible to give more time to Mr Brown rang hollow after it emerged that his other engagements included a routine speech to the Department for Interior and a meeting with the Boy Scouts of America.

British officials tried to counter the rumours by pointing out that Mr Brown was the first European leader to be invited to Washington. To underscore the change from the informality of the Bush years, Mr Obama pointedly referred to Mr Brown throughout as 'Prime Minister', with just one reference to him as 'Gordon' at the end of the press talks.

However, Mr Obama struck a conciliatory tone at the joint media briefing, saying: "Great Britain is one of our closest and strongest allies and there's a link and a bond there that will not break. The special relationship between the US and Great Britain is one that is not just important to me - it's important to the American people. Rest assured the relationship is not only special and strong but will only get stronger as time goes on."

On Saturday, a leader in the Times argued that the single market, the Euro, and the EU's policy of enlargement "are all in danger at the same time." It argued that, "THE BIGGEST MISSING FEATURE OF EUROPEAN POLITICS IS NOT INSTITUTIONAL REFORM. IT IS STRONG LEADERSHIP."

Mark Mardell of the BBC writes "make no mistake, the world's economic crisis is putting this unique institution, the European Union, under very serious strain." He notes that the summit was preceded by a gathering of nine eastern European countries and that, "some regarded it as a worrying trend if the EU is breaking into semi-formal groupings based on both politics and geography... THE FRACTURE COULD BECOME PERMANENT."

Writing in the Times, David Charter argues that the "LACK OF EU LEADERSHIP AND DIRECTION... threatens to wrench apart both the euro and the EU itself."

Two forms of the disease, from the same family as the mould which caused the Irish potato famine, now affect more than 700 sites across Britain. Plant health experts consider it a serious danger to woodlands and heathlands, especially to heritage gardens of the sort maintained by the National Trust. So today the Government will announce a five-year, £25m programme to manage and contain the risks of both pathogens, Phytophthora ramorum, which in the US has been responsible for the phenomenon known as "sudden oak death", and Phytophthora kernoviae, which is regarded as a considerable danger to beeches as well as other trees.

Until recently, the main host of phytophthora in Britain has been the wild rhodendendron Rhodendendron ponticum, the purple-flowering shrub often found in woodlands and country estates. Once established, the phytophthora fungus sends out spores, which is how it spreads. On other trees and plants it forms lesions on the stems and trunks, which eventually can kill them. However, last year phythophthora was found to have developed a new host, infecting wild bilberry plants on heaths both in Cornwall and Scotland, where it has spread rapidly and killed off infected plants completely.

In December, the National Trust, which has seen 19 of its historic gardens affected by phytopthora, wrote to the Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, warning that "the threat is now very real to native plant life in the wider countryside" and that the impact could be "devastating". Mr Benn's response, after a Government consultation exercise, is the campaign to be announced today, and the £25m funding – in the middle of a recession – is an indication of how seriously the Government takes the threat.