Former President Bill Clinton, who has been slow to warm to Obama after the bruising primary battle that his wife lost, gave Obama an unwavering seal of approval in a speech to a packed convention hall where delegates cheered his appearance for so long that he had to ask them to sit down.

"My fellow Democrats, I say to you: Barack Obama is ready to lead America and to restore American leadership in the world," former President Clinton told flag-waving delegates who interrupted him repeatedly with roars of approval. "Barack Obama is ready to be president of the United States," he said.

Not since Katrina struck on August 29, 2005, have residents faced a forced departure from their homes and businesses as many still struggle to rebuild their lives in a city famed for its jazz clubs and Mardi Gras festival. Storm levees broke under the onslaught of Katrina, flooding 80 percent of New Orleans and killing 1,500 people in the city and along the Gulf of Mexico coast. The hurricane caused $125 billion in wind and flood damage.

With Tropical Storm Gustav swirling near Cuba and likely to enter the Gulf of Mexico as a hurricane this weekend, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said an evacuation could begin as early as Friday - three years to the day after Katrina inundated New Orleans. Jindal said he had activated the state's catastrophic action team and could declare a state of emergency as early as Thursday. He also put the Louisiana National Guard on alert.

Jindal, elected as governor in October 2007, is hoping to avoid heavy criticism that fell on his predecessor, Kathleen Blanco, for not reacting quickly enough after Katrina. Federal agencies and the New Orleans city government also faced the wrath of residents over their response to the disaster, while President George W. Bush was criticized for his role, including his initial decision to view the devastated city only from the air.

"Ahmadinejad is not complying with the will of the people," The Financial Times Deutschland quoted Grand Ayatollah Bajat Sanjani as saying. "This is a major threat, a big danger," the cleric added in an unusually direct personal attack. The newspaper also said Sanjani accused Ahmadinejad's government of breaking the law, seriously violating personal freedom and illegally empowering the Revolutionary Guard.

Ahmadinejad is expected to run for a second term in Iran's next presidential election, slated to take place early in 2009. His reformist rivals are expected to attack him especially on his economic policies. Iran suffers from a rising consumer price index, high percentage of unemployment and inflation of 26 percent.

This allows them to hand out fines for a raft of offences, from dropping litter to riding a bike on the pavement. They can also stop cars to check their tax discs, seize alcohol from underage drinkers and demand people's names and addresses. The hope is that they will free up rank-and-file officers from having to perform these unpopular tasks. The uniformed, badged army of snoopers will become a vital part of the 'extended police family', ministers say.

But privacy campaigners have dubbed them Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's 'Stasi' after the East German secret police. Phil Booth of NO2ID said: 'This is a sinister move towards a Stasi snooper state in which jobsworths are devolved the powers of the police - including the right to demand you identify yourself.' Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve added: 'This is a consequence of the Government's obsession with policing on the cheap as well as their staggering complacency towards the extension of surveillance by an increasing amount of different bodies.

'The public will be angered that the Home Office is seeking to take serious powers that should be appropriately applied by the police and encouraging them to be given not just to local councils, but also to private firms. The public want to see real police on the streets discharging these responsibilities, not private firms who may use them inappropriately - including unnecessarily snooping on the lives of ordinary citizens.'

A spokeswoman says more than 100 of those caught up in Monday's raid on Howard Industries were released based on humanitarian concerns, mostly because they have children. Most of the rest were transferred to a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Jena, Los Angeles. Nine 17-year-olds were transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

The Mississippi raid was one of a series of recent high-profile crackdowns on illegal immigrants. In May, officials swept into the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa and detained 400 workers.

The potential for Gustav to become a major hurricane over the next four days depends primarily on two factors - how close it tracks to Cuba and the interaction it has with the island. According to Expert Senior Meteorologist John Kocet, "The longer Gustav stays over the warm water in the Caribbean, the stronger it gets and the greater the chance that it will become a Category 3 hurricane by Saturday."

Kocet adds, "The storm will weaken if it moves close to Cuba, but it will strengthen if it tracks farther south across the Caribbean." If Gustav is able to thread the needle, passing through the Yucatan Channel into the Gulf of Mexico, it could intensify to Category 4 or 5 strength over the warm water in the Gulf. If it makes it to the Gulf, Gustav could be the first major hurricane (Category 3 or greater) in the Gulf since Hurricane Wilma reached Category 3 strength as it steered from the Yucatan Peninsula to South Florida in October 2005. ALL INTERESTS IN THE CARIBBEAN, THE GULF OF MEXICO AND FLORIDA SHOULD CLOSELY MONITOR GUSTAV AS IT MOVES THROUGH THE CARIBBEAN.

Gustav is already having an impact on world oil markets. The Associated Press reports that oil prices swung in both directions in trading Tuesday before news that Gustav could threaten oil operations in the Gulf of Mexico sent prices rapidly higher.

The EU-funded organisation the Young European Federalists have said in a open letter to athletes from the 27 EU member states that if they became Team EU they would have a higher medal tally than the US, China or Russia.

EUobserver reports that Nicolas Sarkozy has issued a statement in which he notes that the combined medal haul of the entire EU is 280. He goes on to say, "The European Union therefore takes the leading position. It's a victory for sport and for the fundamental and common values of the people of the union."

The mayor of Europe's latest 'party' destination has called on the UK Government to do something about the drunken, rowdy young Britons invading his town. 'They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit,' said Konstantinos Lagoudakis, mayor of Malia in Crete. 'It is only the British people — not the Germans or the French.'

The town has fallen prey to the curse of the package tour, like Ayia Napa in Cyprus, Faliraki in Greece and others before it. 'The government of Britain has to do something,' said Mr Lagoudakis. 'THESE PEOPLE ARE GIVING A BAD NAME TO THEIR COUNTRY.'

The fact that the mayor's comments appeared in the New York Times will only underline the impression that he is right. They come in the wake of a Foreign Office report which said 602 Britons had been hospitalised and 28 raped in Greece alone in 2006/07, with the number of UK citizens arrested in foreign resorts up by more than 15 per cent to 4,603. 'Many arrests are due to behaviour caused by excessive drinking,' the Foreign Office report added.

In a study of more than 61,000 ethnic Chinese living in Singapore who were followed for up to 12 years, the investigators found a link between heavy incense use and various respiratory cancers. The findings are published in the medical journal Cancer. Incense has been used for millennia in many cultures' religious and spiritual ceremonies. In Asia, people commonly burn incense in their homes - a practice that is becoming more popular in Western countries as well.

For their study, the researchers followed 61,320 Singapore Chinese men and women between the ages of 45 and 74 from the Hokkien or Cantonese dialect group. All of the subjects were cancer-free at the outset. Over the next 12 years, 325 men and women developed cancer of the upper respiratory tract, such as nasal, oral or throat cancer. Another 821 developed lung cancer.

"There is an agreement actually reached, reached between the two parties on a fixed date, which is the end of 2011, to end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil," Maliki said in a speech to tribal leaders in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone. "An open time limit is not acceptable in any security deal that governs the presence of the international forces," he said.

Maliki's remarks were the most explicit statement yet that the increasingly assertive Iraqi government expects the U.S. presence to end in three years as part of a deal between Washington and Baghdad to allow them to stay beyond this year.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Robert Wood said a draft agreement had been prepared but it needed to "go through a number of levers in the Iraqi political system before we actually have an agreement from the Iraqi side."

In Britain alone, experts say landfill sites could offer up an estimated 200 million tonnes of old plastic - worth up to 60 billion pounds at current prices - to be recovered and recycled, or converted to liquid fuel. As many oil analysts predict oil prices will stay above $100 a barrel, waste experts in America, Europe and across Asia have been conducting pilot projects to recoup old plastic and other waste materials.

Prices for high quality plastics such as high-density polyethelenes (HDP) have more than doubled to between 200 and 300 pounds ($370-560) per tonne, from just above 100 pounds a year ago, according to experts in the waste industry. With this in mind, leaders of the world's waste management industry are planning to come together in London in October for what is being billed as the first "global landfill mining" conference.

Ahead of a key German survey of business sentiment due out later on Tuesday, the dollar strengthened to $1.4717 against the euro. Against the pound, the dollar was trading at $1.8468, just below a two-year high versus sterling. The latest German survey may show more signs of a possible European recession.

The US currency has benefited as the economic outlook has darkened in both mainland Europe and the UK. Investment guru Warren Buffett said last week that he had no bets against the dollar - underscoring the currency's strength. The fall in the euro and sterling could help European exporters whose goods will now be cheaper overseas.

But it will hurt holidaymakers who have benefited from a strong pound when travelling to countries which use the dollar.

He issued the threat at a Boy Scout ceremony as a response to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's remark last week that "if Lebanon becomes a Hizbullah state, then we won't have any restrictions" in striking the country. The Prime Minister claimed that during the last war, Israel did not use all of its firepower because the enemy was Hizbullah and not its host country Lebanon.

The flurry of threats and warnings came two days after a report in the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera that three HIZBULLAH LEADERS VISITED RUSSIA in July to clinch a deal involving the purchase of ANTI-TANK MISSILES AND AIR-DEFENCE SYSTEMS. Israel disclosed evidence during the Second Lebanon War that Hizbullah used advanced Russian anti-tank missiles smuggled from Syria, in violation of previous international agreements.

The prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran's growing nuclear threat also played a hand in Hizbullah's latest threats. Mohammed Raad, the head of the terrorist party's political bloc in the Lebanese government, warned, "The first shot fired from the Zionist entity toward Iran will be met by a response of 11,000 rockets in the direction of the Zionist entity. This is what military leaders in the Islamic Republic [Iran] have confirmed." HIZBULLAH HAS BECOME A STRONGER POLITICAL FORCE IN LEBANON since the end of the war two summers ago, winning enough representation in the Cabinet to veto any major decisions.

Speaking at the Humbert Summer School in Co Mayo, the cleric said the EU's prevailing culture and social agenda seems to be DRIVEN BY THE SECULAR TRADITION "RATHER THAN BY THE CHRISTIAN MEMORY AND HERITAGE OF THE VAST MAJORITY OF MEMBER STATES," the Irish Times reported.

Cardinal Brady warned of "dangerous individualism that does not care about God or about what the future might have in store. As the recent referendum on the Lisbon treaty in Ireland suggests, at least some of those who were previously enthusiastic about the founding aims of the EU, both social and economic, are now expressing unease," he added. The cardinal referred to "a fairly widespread culture in European affairs WHICH RELEGATES MANIFESTATIONS OF ONE'S OWN RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS TO THE PRIVATE AND SUBJECTIVE SPHERE."

"Successive decisions which have undermined the family BASED ON MARRIAGE, THE RIGHT TO LIFE FROM THE MOMENT OF CONCEPTION TO NATURAL DEATH, THE SACREDNESS OF THE SABBATH, THE RIGHT OF CHRISTIAN INSTITUTIONS TO MAINTAIN AND PROMOTE THEIR ETHOS, INCLUDING SCHOOLS - these and other decisions have made it more difficult for committed Christians to maintain their instinctive commitment to the European project. Without respect for its Christian memory and soul, I believe it is possible to anticipate continuing difficulties for the European project," Cardinal Brady warned.

According to a recent US Department of Agriculture report, Iran has bought about 1.18 million tonnes of US hard wheat since the beginning of the 2008-2009 crop season in June. The number, which has been growing steadily all summer, already represents nearly 5.0 percent of US annual exports forecast by the USDA. The last time Iran imported US wheat was in 1981-1982.

According to Nelson, Iran's wheat production has been hammered by several months of drought, with crop forecasts of roughly 10 million tonnes this year, about five million tonnes short of the country's needs. This is a serious setback for Iran from a domestic point of view because they made a big deal about self-sufficiency in grains.