The scientists at the Laurel, Md., institution were reporting this week on data collected from NASA's Cassini probe. "Several hundred lakes or seas have been discovered, of which dozens are estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than the entire known oil and gas reserves on Earth," wrote lead scientist Ralph Lorenz of the university's Applied Physics Laboratory in the Jan. 29 issue of the Geophysical Research Letters.

Lorenz also reported dark dunes running along the equator cover 20 percent of Titan's surface, comprising a volume of hydrocarbon material several hundred times larger than Earth's coal reserves. "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material - it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," Lorenz wrote.

Lorenz used the term "organic chemicals" in the sense that hydrocarbons are traditionally included within the study of "organic chemistry," not to imply any of the hydrocarbons discovered on Titan are of biological origin.

The announcement is another setback for the Archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans, who is struggling to heal divisions between liberals and traditionalists. "We are not attending the forthcoming Lambeth (Conference)," Nzimbi told local broadcaster NTV. "We are not pulling out of the Anglican communion." Bishops in neighboring Uganda said on Thursday that they would not be attending the meeting, being held in July in Canterbury, southern England.

The consecration of openly gay U.S. Bishop Gene Robinson in 2003 has split the 400-year-old church and set a liberal minority against a conservative majority, mostly from Africa, Asia and Latin America. One of Australia's most powerful Anglican leaders has said bishops from Sydney will also miss the Lambeth Conference, a meeting of senior figures which is held every 10 years to discuss church governance and policy.

Some conservative Anglicans have announced plans to hold an alternative summit in Jerusalem in June.

The mission was formally endorsed at midnight on Saturday (11:00 p.m. British time on Friday) after none of the EU's 27 member states objected to an operation plan for the mission before an agreed deadline, a diplomatic source said. "The silent procedure was not broken," the source said, referring to the low-profile method used to push through the legal documents authorizing the mission.

After leaders of the overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian majority declare independence, the EU will take over police, judicial and civil administration tasks from the current U.N. mission after a 120-day transition period.

He will meet Benin's President Thomas Yayia to discuss a US-funded plan to supply mosquito nets to tackle malaria. Mr Bush's six-day, five-nation visit is expected to focus on democratic reform, economic and military assistance, and the fight against HIV/Aids. The US president also wants to allay concerns about a new military command he wants to base in Africa. He will also try to rally leaders on the current crises in Kenya and Darfur.

In a BBC interview prior to his tour, the US president defended his stance on the Sudanese region of Darfur, where at least 200,000 people have died and two million been displaced in a five-year conflict. Despite what he called a genocide taking place there, he said he had not wanted to send US troops into another Muslim country. He said the US had instead imposed sanctions on Sudanese leaders and companies, and that he would remind the president of China "that he can do more to relieve the suffering in Darfur".

Officials at Cheshire County Council are writing to the Government and European Union chiefs to challenge the rules governing great crested newts. Councillor Barrie Hardern, who has written to Hilary Benn, the Secretary of State for the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, said the newts had to be given a new habitat as a part of a planning application for building work at Fallibroome High School in Macclesfield. He said: "Around £15,000 per newt seems a ludicrous sum of money to me."

"They are a legally protected species under EU regulations because there are parts of Europe where they are quite rare. However, in Cheshire we have in the order of 16,000 ponds and newts are widespread and locally abundant. The EU regulations together with UK legislation carry substantial fines if we do not protect the newts as part of planning applications. I am very concerned about taxpayers' money being used in this way."

Great crested newts (Triturus cristatus) are Britain's largest newt species, they can live for 27 years and grow up to 17cm long. They are black with orange or yellow bellies with black blotches, and can be found across northern Europe. There are estimated to be 400,000 great crested newts in the UK in 18,000 breeding sites.

On the morning of 9 February 2004, The New York Times carried an exclusive and alarming story. The paper's Baghdad correspondent, Dexter Filkins, reported that US officials had obtained a 17-page letter, believed to have been written by the notorious terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the "inner circle" of al-Qa'ida's leadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war. The letter argued that al-Qa'ida, which is a Sunni network, should attack the Shia population of Iraq: "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis."

Later that day, at a regular US press briefing in Baghdad, US General Mark Kimmitt dealt with a string of questions about The New York Times report: "We believe the report and the document is credible, and we take the report seriously. It is clearly a plan on the part of outsiders to come in to this country and spark civil war, create sectarian violence, try to expose fissures in this society." The story went on to news agency wires and, within 24 hours, it was running around the world.

There is very good reason to believe that that letter was a fake - and a significant one because there is equally good reason to believe that it was one product among many from a new machinery of propaganda which has been created by the United States and its allies since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY, THERE IS A CONCERTED STRATEGY TO MANIPULATE GLOBAL PERCEPTION. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said the president and the pope would continue discussions they began during Bush's trip to the Vatican in June 2007 on the importance of faith and reason in reaching shared goals.

Stanzel said the goals include advancing peace throughout the Middle East and other troubled regions, promoting interfaith understanding and strengthening human rights and freedom. The pope was also expected to address the United Nations, visit ground zero in New York and celebrate Mass in New York and Washington during his April 15-20 trip.

The appeal follows public condemnation by the bishops of an explicit sex scene in Caos Calmo, starring the Italian actor and director Nanni Moretti, which has just been released. In the film, directed by Antonello Grimaldi, Moretti plays a television executive who experiences a mid-life crisis, after the death of his wife, in the course of which he has a torrid affair with a woman he saves from drowning.

Father Nicolò Anselmi, head of the youth section of the Italian Bishops Conference, said that Moretti was normally noted for his "idealistic and sensitive" films. But the "gratuitous" sex scene with Isabella Ferrari, his co-star, would have an undesirable effect on the "impressionable young" since it was shown without any context involving love or tenderness.

Franco Zeffirelli, the film and opera director, said: "The Church is full of pedants who have lost all sense of proportion." It was a "fourth-rate" film that did not merit the publicity generated by the bishops' intervention.

Investigators working on the fraud probe into Saudi arms deals were told they faced "another 7/7" and the "loss of British lives on British streets" if they continued the inquiry, secret papers reveal. SAUDI ARABIA'S RULERS THREATENED TO MAKE IT EASIER FOR TERRORISTS TO ATTACK LONDON unless the corruption investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) was stopped, according to documents shown to the High Court.

The previously secret files reveal the warning by the Saudis that they would go ahead and cut off intelligence links with the UK about potential terror strikes and suicide bombers. It was alleged in court that Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, was behind the threats to withold information.

During the hearing, he was accused of flying to Britain in December 2006 and issuing the warning which forced Tony Blair to call for an end to the investigation into alleged bribery and corruption involving deals between British arms firm BAE Systems and Saudi Arabia. Lord Justice Moses said yesterday that the Government appeared to have simply "rolled over in the face of" Saudi threats that they would pull out of lucrative arms contracts if the bribery investigation went ahead.

He also attacked Mr Blair for "holding a gun" to a prosecutor's head to make sure he dropped the probe. The former Prime Minister was singled out for criticism during the case in which two pressure groups are challenging the decision by the director of the SFO to drop the investigation. Dinah Rose QC, for the groups, also accused him of overstepping the mark by applying "irresistible pressure" to ensure the probe was halted.

The losses were also greater than those suffered after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, the Asian financial crisis starting in 1997, Argentina's default on its debt in 2001 and the 1994 Mexican peso crisis. "It could take months or even years before Wall Street and others get a handle on the true cost of the US subprime meltdown and the attendant global credit crunch," Quinlan said. "While subprime loans were once thought to be relatively small in scale and contained to just one segment of the US financial sector, the opposite has become painfully evident over the past few months."

A report last week by Standard & Poors ratings agency showed global stock markets were walloped with a collective loss of 5.2 trillion dollars in the month of January alone. Quinlan said it is not clear that the massacre in equities is over yet. "Against this backdrop, any investor that has been buying US equities on the dips over the past few months has, in general, dug himself a deeper hole," he said. "In the end, the current financial crisis is one for the record books and one, more ominously, not over yet."

It will do so with strong support from the major EU powers and the United States, and equally vigorous opposition from Serbia and Russia, which have vowed never to recognise it.

Belgrade and Moscow slammed any declaration of independence as "null and void" and a violation of international law, as they made last-ditch appeals to the UN Security Council on Thursday. "Let me be clear. The Republic of Serbia shall never accept any violation of its territorial integrity," Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic told a closed-door meeting of the 15-member council in New York.

A core group of leading EU member states -- Britain, France, Germany and Italy -- are expected to recognise Kosovo's independence almost immediately, followed by the United States. Serbs make up less than 10 percent of Kosovo's population but see the province as the sacred cradle of their Orthodox culture and religion dating back centuries.

Le Blanc and I are into our 500th kilometer on the river when HE TURNS MY VIEW OF MODERN AFRICAN HISTORY ON ITS HEAD. Le Blanc earns his keep sailing the tributaries of the Congo River. He's 40 years old, and his real name is Malu-Ebonga Charles - he got his nickname, and his green eyes and dark honey skin, from a German grandfather who married a Congolese woman in what was then the Belgian Congo.

If his unconventional genealogy gave him a unique view of the Congo's colonial past, it is his job on the river, piloting three dugouts lashed together with twine and mounted with outboards, that has formed his opinion of the Democratic Republic of Congo's present. "The river is the artery of Congo's economy," he says. "When the Belgians and the Portuguese were here, there were farms and plantations - cashews, peanuts, rubber, palm oil. There was industry and factories employing 5,000 people. But since independence, no Congolese has succeeded. The plantations are abandoned."

It's true that our journey through 643 kilometers of rainforest to where the Maringa River joins the Congo at Mbandaka, has been an exploration of decline. An abandoned tug boat here; there, a beached paddle steamer stripped of its metal sides to a rusted skeleton; several abandoned palm oil factories, their roofs caved in, their walls disappearing into the engulfing forest, their giant storage tanks empty and rusted out. The palms now grow wild and untended on the riverbanks and in the villages we pass, the people dress in rags, hawk smoked black fish and bushmeat, and besiege us with requests for salt or soap. THERE ARE NO SCHOOLS HERE, NO CLINICS, NO ELECTRICITY, NO ROADS. It can take a year for basic necessities ordered from the capital, Kinshasa, nearly 2,000 kilometers downstream, to make it here - if they make it at all.

Le Blanc isn't much concerned with that history; he lives in the present, in a country where education is a luxury and death is everywhere. Around 45,000 people die each month in the DRC as a result of the social collapse brought on by civil war, according to a study released in January by the International Rescue Committee. IT ESTIMATED THE TOTAL LOSS OF LIFE BETWEEN 1998 AND APRIL 2007 AT 5.4 MILLION. For many Congolese like Le Blanc, the difficulties of today blot out the cruelties of the past. "On this river, all that you see - the buildings, the boats - only whites did that. After the whites left, the Congolese did not work. We did not know how to. For the past 50 years, we've just declined." He pauses. "THEY TOOK THIS COUNTRY BY FORCE," HE SAYS, WITH MORE THAN A TOUCH OF ADMIRATION. "IF THEY CAME BACK, THIS TIME WE'D GIVE THEM THE COUNTRY FOR FREE."

In a report strongly rebutted by the government, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) said: "We look like a soft touch. We are indeed a soft touch, from within and without." How much to integrate Britain's ethnic communities, particularly its 1.8 million Muslims, has been a hot political issue since four British Islamist suicide bombers killed 52 people on London's transport system in July 2005.

The attacks sparked a debate on whether Britain's policy of avoiding imposing a single British identity and instead promoting a multicultural society had led to segregation of ethnic minorities. The report, based on the findings of former military chiefs, diplomats and analysts, concluded: "THE COUNTRY'S LACK OF SELF-CONFIDENCE IS IN STARK CONTRAST TO THE IMPLACABILITY OF ITS ISLAMIST TERRORIST ENEMY. The security of the United Kingdom is at risk and under threat," it said.

The report called for the creation of a new cabinet committee to oversee security policy. It said another parliamentary committee should seek to build consensus and identify security weaknesses. "Islamist terrorism is where people tend to begin. THE UNITED KINGDOM PRESENTS ITSELF AS A TARGET, AS A FRAGMENTING, POST-CHRISTIAN SOCIETY, INCREASINGLY DIVIDED ABOUT INTERPRETATIONS OF ITS HISTORY, ABOUT ITS NATIONAL AIMS, ITS VALUES AND IN ITS POLITICAL IDENTITY," the RUSI report said. "That fragmentation is worsened by the firm self-image of those elements within it who refuse to integrate."

The report said "lack of leadership from the majority, which in misplaced deference to 'multiculturalism' failed to lay down the line to immigrant communities" had undercut those within them trying to fight extremism.

Professor David Baltimore, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), said there was little hope among scientists. But he said that they were continuing efforts to develop a vaccine.
"Our lack of success may be understandable but it is not acceptable," he said.

"Some years ago I came to the conclusion that our community had to seriously undertake new approaches or we might find ourselves with a worldwide epidemic and no effective response," Prof Baltimore told the annual meeting of the AAAS in Boston.

"That is just where we are today." HIV had evolved a way to protect itself from the human immune system, he said. "I believe that HIV has found ways to totally fool the immune system. So we have to do one better than nature." Attempts to control the virus through antibodies or by boosting the body's immune system have ended in failure. This has left the vaccine community depressed because they can see no hopeful way of success, Prof Baltimore said.

The shooting took place at Northern Illinois University, in De Kalb, 65 miles (100km) west of Chicago. Students ran for cover as a white male armed with two handguns and a shotgun opened fire during a science lecture.
Another 16 people were injured in the attack. Police said there was no apparent motive.

The shooting comes 10 months after 32 students and staff were shot by a student at Virginia Tech University in one of the worst shootings ever at a US school. It is also the fourth shooting at a US education establishment within a week. Last Friday, a woman shot dead two fellow students before killing herself at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge. In Memphis, Tennessee, a 17-year-old is accused of shooting and critically wounding a student on Monday, and a 15-year-old was shot at a junior high school in California on Tuesday.