It was another blow to Prime Minister Gordon Brown after he was forced by party rebels into a humiliating policy reversal over tax cuts on Wednesday and came a week ahead of local elections that will be his first major test at the ballot box.

Driving instructors, job centre workers and employees in pension and benefits offices joined teachers and coastguard operators in the one-day strike over pay. The unions estimated that between 100,000 and 400,000 people joined the action. Refinery workers at the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland are also set to strike in a dispute over pensions that could cause major fuel distribution problems.

Tens of thousands of teachers and thousands of college lecturers are staging their first national strike in 20 years, frustrated over pay deals they say don't match inflation. "We teach the future leaders, the nurses, the teachers - you can't do without us," teacher Janet Arthur told Reuters at a protest rally in London.

The bank made a net loss of 2.1bn Swiss francs ($2.1bn; £1.0bn) after writing down 5.3bn Swiss francs in mortgage securities and big buyout loans. It had made a net profit of 2.7bn Swiss francs in the same period of last year. Credit Suisse had already warned it was likely to make a loss, which it blamed partly on the "intentional misconduct" of a number of traders.

Credit Suisse wrote down £850m on leverage finance such as loans to finance private-equity deals, and a further £400m on commercial mortgages. "It is further confirmation that imprudent lending and investing was not confined to US subprime and collateralised debt obligations," said BBC's business editor, Robert Peston.

"In this crisis, a number of times people have seen a light at the end of the tunnel and it has ended up being a train coming down the tracks," said Brady Dougan, chief executive of Credit Suisse. Switzerland's second biggest bank's losses from the credit crisis are tiny compared with those of its bigger compatriot UBS, which has so far made $37.4bn of losses.

This week's five percent jump takes prices to nearly three times their level at the start of the year, intensifying fears of social unrest in Asia as millions of the region's poor find themselves struggling to pay for staple goods.
The surging price of fuel and food, which some analysts attribute to panic buying by both consumers and governments rather than a dire shortage of supply, has so far sparked riots in Africa and Haiti, but not Asia.

Having started with India's imposition of export curbs to protect domestic supplies last year, the crisis was felt in the United States this week, with major retailers saying they had started to notice signs of panic buying.
"Everywhere you see, there is some story about food shortages and hoarding and tightness of supplies," said Neauman Coleman, an analyst and rice broker in Brinkley, Arkansas.

Manila said on Thursday it had increased the size of another tender on May 5 to 675,000 tonnes from 500,000 tonnes, putting yet more heat under the price of a grain that for decades moved sedately between $200 and $300 a tonne. There is also a big question mark over Iran and Indonesia, two countries that normally buy as much as 1 million tonnes of Thai rice each year but which have bought nothing so far in 2008 because of the soaring prices.

Saudi Arabia's influence as the biggest oil exporter would wane if the fields are as big as advertised, and China and India would become dominant buyers of Persian Gulf oil, said Peter Zeihan, vice president of analysis at Strategic Forecasting in Austin, Texas. Zeihan's firm, which consults for companies and governments around the world, was described in a 2001 Barron's article as "'the shadow CIA."

Brazil may be pumping "several million" barrels of crude daily by 2020, vaulting the nation into the ranks of the world's seven biggest producers, Zeihan said in a telephone interview. The U.S. Navy's presence in the Persian Gulf and adjacent waters would be reduced, leaving the region exposed to more conflict, he said.

"We could see that world becoming a very violent one," said Zeihan, former chief of Middle East and East Asia analysis for Strategic Forecasting. "If the United States isn't getting any crude from the Gulf, what benefit does it have in policing the Gulf anymore? All of the geopolitical flux that wracks that region regularly suddenly isn't our problem."

The U.S. imports about 10 million barrels of oil a day, or 66 percent of its needs, according to the Energy Department in Washington. Saudi Arabia was the second-largest supplier in January, behind Canada.

It is also feared that premium products are being adulterated to boost profits. For example, ordinary virgin oil is dyed dark green with chlorophyll to make it look like extra virgin. As much as 10 per cent of food sold through high street grocers and restaurants is not what it seems, says the consumer group Which?. The watchdog also raises the alarm over GM ingredients finding their way into the national diet - without being declared - through rice, soya and cooking oils. High-value products are the most likely to chosen for food fraud.

Last year, Tesco was found to be selling expensive 'corn-fed' chicken that were actually raised on a cheaper diet. It apologised for an 'accidental mistake' by a farmer. Last year also saw one of the country's biggest restaurant chains, Mitchells & Butler, prosecuted for a series of food fraud offences. The company behind Vintage Inns, O'Neills, All Bar One and Browns made misleading claims to dress up the origins of its ingredients and dishes in some outlets.

In one case a buffalo mozzarella turned out to be a cheaper full-fat cow's cheese. The company blamed an administrative error. Leading stores, including Sainsbury's and Harrods, were accused of selling cheap farmed fish as wild last year. An FSA investigation across the high street found that one in ten supposedly wild sea bass and sea bream, which are among the most exclusive and sought-after fish, were farmed. The proportion rose to almost one in seven of 'wild' salmon samples. The stores involved all insisted that their fish came from accredited suppliers who offered guarantees over its origin.

The FSA is increasingly using DNA testing to establish the origins of food.

A mood of deep pessimism has spread among the international community of Aids scientists after the failure of a trial of a promising vaccine at the end of last year. It just was the latest in a series of setbacks in the 25-year struggle to develop an HIV vaccine. The Independent's survey of more than 35 leading Aids scientists in Britain and the United States found that just two were now more optimistic about the prospects for an HIV vaccine than they were a year ago; only four said they were more optimistic now than they were five years ago.

Nearly two thirds believed that an HIV vaccine will not be developed within the next 10 years and some of them said that it may take at least 20 more years of research before a vaccine can be used to protect people either from infection or the onset of Aids. The US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), spends about $500m (£250m) on HIV vaccine research each year.

About 33 million people in the world are infected with HIV and some 26 million have died of Aids since the pandemic began. The majority of scientists who responded to The Independent's survey said that a vaccine would be the most effective way of preventing the spread of the virus given the failure of many education programmes.

Protests and tight security have followed the Olympic torch around the world over the past month, putting China's domestic and foreign polices under the spotlight ahead of the Games in August. Beijing had hoped the torch's progress would be a symbol of unity in the run-up to the Beijing Games. However, it has turned into a public relations nightmare, forcing host countries to protect the torch with security measures usually afforded a state leader.

Anti-Chinese protests during the previous relay legs have sparked a wave of patriotism amongst Chinese at home and abroad, and on Thursday thousands of Chinese chanting "One China" packed the start and finish of the torch relay in the Australian capital. In a largely peaceful relay leg, Chinese six-deep lined the 16-km (10-mile) relay route, and hundreds of cars drove around Canberra carrying Chinese flags.

"The huge influx of Chinese nationals has given Canberra echoes of the feeling of being overwhelmed which prevails in the Tibetan capital Lhasa," said Australian Greens leader Bob Brown.

Garment makers are seeing demand shrink as consumers in the US and Europe are cutting back on spending. US cotton consumption is set to fall 6.5% from last year to less than a million tonnes whilst EU consumption is expected to fall 11% to about 460,000 tonnes, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) predicts.

At the same time, they are hit by more expensive raw materials and by soaring oil prices, which make their factories more expensive to operate and which pushes up the cost of shipping to foreign markets. In India, the weaving industry is in crisis. In China, the textile sector is squeezed. And, yet again, the root cause of their problems can be found in America.

In the US, ever more cotton farmers are switching to more lucrative crops - soybeans, corn, and wheat - whose market prices are rising even faster. The prices of these crops have been pushed higher by a mixture of subsidies, growing demand from biofuel producers and market speculation. As a result of the shift by farmers, "the cotton harvested area in the USA is projected to decline by a further 15%" in the year ahead, predicts the International Cotton Advisory Committee (ICAC). That would bring the cotton acreage in the US to 9.5 million acres, down from 10.8 million in 2007 and from whopping 15 million acres in 2006. "It is obvious that cotton prices will be higher," ICAC says.

The change splits England into three and lumps those parts together with chunks of other countries to create "transnational regions". It is claimed these zones - which have been allocated their own budgets - are intended to boost trade between EU nations. But the Tories yesterday accused the Government of trying "to create a European superstate via the back door".

Under the programme, known as INTER-REG, counties along England's south coast form the "Manche Region" along with northern France. The "Atlantic Region" takes in western England, along with Ireland, Wales and parts of Portugal, Spain, France and Scotland. Meanwhile eastern England is part of the "North Sea Region", which covers areas of Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Norway and the Netherlands.

The UK Government is fully behind the project, even though the words "England" and "Britain" are left off official maps of each area and the Manche Region renames the English Channel "The Channel Sea". Each region, which will be given taxpayers' money to promote trade links, cultural ties, transport policies and tourism, is to be run by a "managing authority" of unelected officials overseen by a director.

Eric Pickles, the Conservatives' communities spokesman, said: "We already knew that Gordon Brown had hoisted the white flag of surrender to the European Constitution. Now the Labour Government has been caught red-handed conspiring with European bureaucrats to create a European superstate via the back door. Gordon Brown literally wants to wipe England off the map."

Physicist Phil Chapman, the first native-born Australian to become an astronaut with NASA [he became an American citizen to join up, though he never went into space], said pictures from the U.S. Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) showed no spots on the sun. He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7 degrees Centigrade.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," Chapman wrote in The Australian Wednesday. "If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over." But scientists from the U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Bolder, Colorado published a report in 2006 that showed the sun had a negligible effect on climate change.

Meanwhile, some Americans are stocking up on staples such as rice, flour and oil in anticipation of high prices and shortages spreading from overseas. Their pleas did not find a sympathetic audience at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), where regulators said high prices are mostly the result of soaring world demand for grains combined with high fuel prices and drought-induced shortages in many countries.

The regulatory clash came amid evidence that a rash of headlines in recent weeks about food riots around the world has prompted some in the United States to stock up on staples. Families have been warned that the prices of basic foods will rise steeply again because of acute shortages in commodity markets.

Experts told The Times yesterday that prices of rice, wheat and vegetable oil would rise further. They also forecast that high prices and shortages - which have caused riots in developing countries such as Bangladesh and Haiti - were here to stay, and that the days of cheap produce would not return. Food-price inflation has already pushed up a typical family's weekly shopping bill by 15 per cent in a year.

Sam's Club, the No. 2 U.S. warehouse club operator, said it is limiting sales of Jasmine, Basmati and long grain white rice "due to recent supply and demand trends." U.S. rice futures hitting an all-time high Wednesday on worries about supply shortages.

On Tuesday, Costco Wholesale Corp (COST.O: Quote, Profile, Research), the largest U.S. warehouse club operator, said it has seen increased demand for items like rice and flour as customers, worried about global food shortages and rising prices, stock up. Sam's Club, the No. 2 U.S. warehouse club operator, is limiting sales of the 20-pound (9 kg), bulk bags of rice to four bags per customer per visit, and is working with suppliers to ensure the products remain in stock.

Warehouse clubs cater to individual shoppers as well as small businesses and restaurant owners looking to buy cheaper, bulk goods.

Increased demand from rapidly developing nations such as China, the use of crops for biofuels, global stocks at 25-year lows and market speculation are blamed for pushing prices of wheat, corn and rice to record highs. That in turn has sparked food riots in several African countries, Indonesia and Haiti. The FAO has said 37 countries face food crises but Director General Jacques Diouf on Wednesday said solutions were available.

"This is not Greek tragedy where fate is decided by the gods and humans can do nothing about it. No, we have the ability to influence our futures," he told a news conference in Paris. "It's a good thing that international institutions... are helping the poor gain access to food, but on our side we need to fight the most important battle today which is to ensure the 2008 farming season is a success."

The body of the friar, who died in 1968 and was said to have had the stigmata - the wounds of Jesus's crucifixion on his hands and feet - will be placed in a glass coffin in San Giovanni Rotondo on Thursday. Padre Pio's body was exhumed from a crypt on March 3 and found to be in "fair condition" after 40 years. Since then a team of medical examiners and biochemists has been hard at work preserving and reconstructing the body for display.

Its condition at the end of their work has been a closely guarded secret. Monks who have seen it were under orders not to talk to the media before it goes on display on Thursday at about 1 p.m. (7:00 a.m. EDT) after an outdoor Mass expected to be attended by at least 15,000 people. About 750,000 people from around the world, mostly from Italy, have made reservations to view the body up to the end of December, according to church officials. About 7,200 people a day will file past the glass coffin.

A poll in 2006 by Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana found that more Italian Catholics prayed to Padre Pio than to any other icon, including the Virgin Mary or Jesus. There are about 3,000 "Padre Pio Prayer Groups" around the world, with a total membership of 3 million.

Operators Ineos and the union held two days of talks at conciliation service Acas in a bid to halt the strike by workers at the Grangemouth plant. Up to 1,200 workers will walk out on Sunday and Monday over proposals to change pension scheme arrangements. The refinery processes 210,000 barrels of oil a day.

Ineos has already started shutting down Grangemouth and warned of fuel shortages from later this week if the strike went ahead.