"These groups are planning to come to Tehran within the next week or two and they are all the Palestinian groups that are struggling for the freedom of their land," government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham told reporters. Iran is one of the most vocal backers of Palestinian militant groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad and pledged millions of dollars in 2006 to the then Hamas government crippled by a Western aid cut.

The Islamic republic does not recognise Israel and its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has provoked outrage by calling for the Jewish state to be wiped off the map. Elham indicated the Tehran meeting would be a riposte to the conference bringing together Israeli and Palestinian leaders which started in Annapolis outside Washington on Tuesday. "It means that the Annapolis conference is not representing the Palestinians and not talking on their behalf, but on the contrary is moving against their rights," he said.

More than a dozen Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia and Iran's top regional ally Syria, have sent representatives, leaving Tehran conspicuously isolated. On Monday Ahmadinejad told Saudi King Abdullah in a telephone call that he "wished" the kingdom was not taking part in the peace conference. Tehran's arch foe Washington, which is hosting the meeting, dismissed the Iranian criticism as "not surprising," and charged that Tehran backs the extremists sidelined by the talks.

Bush cautioned it would take time for Israelis and Palestinians to reach an agreement. The goal is to reach an accord within 14 months by the end of Bush's presidency. "I don't think it's a risk to try for peace," the president said in an Oval Office interview with reporters from The Associated Press. "I think that's an obligation." Bush said a vision of the outlines of a Palestinian state would help settle the divide between Abbas' Fatah Party and the militant Hamas movement that governs the Gaza Strip.

"One of the powers of having a state defined is that it'll serve as a catalyst to marginalize extremists who have no vision; at least they don't have a positive vision," he said. "What you're watching is the development of a state which becomes something that people like Abbas and reasonable moderate people can say, 'Support us and this is what you'll end up having; support the other bunch and you'll have war.'"

He said there was little possibility of a state, though, if the Palestinian territories remain divided between governance by Fatah and Hamas. "There can be a vision for what a Palestinian state would look like," Bush said. "But it's going to be very difficult for that Palestinian state to come into being so long as there are terrorists who are able to exploit a weak government and launch attacks against their neighbors."

As the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, with assets estimated at $650 billion, it poured money in the past into low-return, low-profile investments or small emerging market deals, unlike its flashy emirate neighbor, Dubai. But a falling dollar and a growing cash pile are spurring Abu Dhabi to change strategy, according to analysts, economists and deal makers, who said that more big-ticket deals might be ahead.

Flush with cash from its oil exports, Abu Dhabi turned to Wall Street, using a complicated transaction late Monday to buy 4.9 percent of Citigroup, acquiring high-yield, convertible stock that must be exchanged for common stock between March 2010 and September 2011. Abu Dhabi is the largest oil producer of the seven United Arab Emirates and is eager to spend its petrodollars.

The Abu Dhabi fund had recently been searching for potentially undervalued banks in which to make a large investment. Citigroup's shares had dropped to just above $30 Monday from $57 in late December. The shares remained weak Tuesday, even as the Dow Jones industrial average rose nearly 200 points.

The two countries had agreed to reciprocal warship visits in 2000, but China cancelled a planned port call in 2002 after then Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited Yasukuni Shrine, seen in China as a symbol of Japan's past militarism.

The missile destroyer Shenzhen, named after the booming southern Chinese city, docked at Harumi pier, near Tokyo's upscale Ginza shopping district, greeted by hundreds of Chinese residents in Japan waving small Chinese and Japanese flags.

China's ambassador to Japan, Cui Tiankai, also stressed the significance of the ship's visit in the two countries' relations."Shenzhen is a messenger for peace and friendship. It wants to relay the hope for a harmonious Asia and a harmonious world," he said before reporters and guests were taken on board the warship for a rare glimpse at its high-tech weaponry, including a missile launcher.

Ties between China and Japan have been troubled by bitter Chinese memories of Japan's invasion and partial occupation before and during World War Two, and they fell to their lowest in decades during the five years Koizumi was in power.

The National Muslim Leaders Forum said its deal with the Orange Democratic Movement was to end the current discrimination against Muslims. Christian leaders have been calling for the pact to be made public to end angry speculation ahead of December's polls. Roughly one-third of Kenya's population of 34 million is Muslim. Recent opinion polls show 45% of those interviewed support ODM's Raila Odinga compared to 43% who favour President Mwai Kibaki, who is running on a Party of National Unity ticket.

Muslim leaders decided to make the pact public after a document circulated on the internet claimed that Mr Odinga's ODM had pledged to introduce Sharia in parts of the country where Muslims are in the majority. "There was a fear that Muslims will force their faith on other people, Islam does not allow suppression of other religions and we will be the last to advocate for this," said Abdullahi Abdi of the National Muslim Leaders Forum.

US President George W Bush will meet with Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas alone before a rare three-way meeting. It follows a conference on Tuesday when both sides agreed to engage in "vigorous" efforts to reach a peace deal by the end of 2008. But the Palestinian group Hamas said the conference - from which it was excluded - had been a "failure".

In Tuesday's conference, Mr Bush committed himself to spending the rest of his presidency - until January 2009 - working towards an independent democratic viable Palestinian state. "Such a state will provide Palestinians with the chance to lead lives of freedom, purpose and dignity," Mr Bush said. "And such a state will help provide Israelis with something they have been seeking for generations: to live in peace with their neighbours.

Observers say the fact that the summit is being hosted by the US and has attracted the participation of Saudi Arabia and Syria, two Arab states that do not recognise Israel, is critical to its chances for success. Expectations going into Annapolis have been low because every other attempt at negotiation between the Israelis and the Palestinians has failed, says the BBC's Jeremy Bowen at the conference. However, there are grounds for optimism, says our correspondent: the Americans are behind the talks, there is no plan B and the consequences of failure could be bloody.

Following the conference, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu-Zuhri said it had only achieved "a declaration of the beginning of negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis and not a declaration of an agreement between them. This by itself is a sharp proof of the failure of the Annapolis meeting," he said. In Gaza on Tuesday, tens of thousands of Hamas supporters demonstrated against the talks.

He had been under huge pressure to quit as army chief and is due to be sworn in as civilian president on Thursday. The most serious pressure on the president to give up his uniform had come from the United States, his main international backer. Washington has grown concerned in recent months at the army's inability to rein in pro-Taleban militants and by Gen Musharraf's growing unpopularity.

As a civilian leader, Gen Musharraf will still have considerable powers, including the ability to sack a civilian government. He imposed emergency rule on 3 November in order, he said, to control an unruly judiciary and deal with the growing threat from Islamist militants. General elections are to be held on 8 January, but Gen Musharraf has yet to say when the emergency will be lifted.

According to several well-placed Rome sources, Iranian officials are quietly laying the groundwork necessary TO TURN TO POPE BENEDICT XVI AND TOP VATICAN DIPLOMATS FOR MEDIATION IF THE SHOWDOWN WITH THE UNITED STATES should escalate toward a military intervention. The 80-year-old Pope has thus far steered clear of any strong public comments about either Iran's failure to fully comply with U.N. nuclear weapons inspectors or the drumbeat of war coming from some corners in Washington.

But Iran, which has had diplomatic relations with the Holy See for 53 years, may be trying to line up Benedict as an ace in the hole for staving off a potential attack in the coming months. "The Vatican seems to be part of their strategy," a senior Western diplomat in Rome said of the Iranian leadership. "They'll have an idea of when the 11th hour is coming, AND THEY KNOW AN INTERVENTION FROM THE VATICAN IS THE MOST OPEN AND AMENABLE ROUTE TO WESTERN PUBLIC OPINION. It could buy them time."

The current No. 2 official at the embassy, Vice-Ambassador Ahmad Fahima, said that despite some concern last year about the Pope's provocative speech about Islam in Regensburg, Germany, "relations between Iran and the Holy See are very good. LAST APRIL'S RELEASE OF 15 BRITISH SAILORS HELD BY IRAN - A DECISION THAT AHMADINEJAD CALLED 'AN EASTER GIFT' - CAME JUST A DAY AFTER THE POPE HAD SENT A PRIVATE LETTER ASKING FOR THEIR LIBERATION. There was respect for the request of the Pope," said Fahima, who also cited a Rome meeting in May between Benedict and former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami as a sign of the mutual good will.

"THE POLICY OF THE HOLY SEE IS IMPORTANT THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE WORLD," the diplomat said. "We don't expect the superpower will attack," Fahima concluded. "But if they do, I am sure the Holy See would not be favorable to such a choice." Father Daniel Madigan, a Jesuit scholar of islam said, "Right now, they're isolated because of sanctions, but they really do want to interact with the world." And Rome is one place the interaction has already begun.

Archbishop Chrysostomos II, the church head, urged priests to pray together on 2 December for rainfall to end a drought that had "blighted" the land. The archbishop said Cypriots were "justifiably anxious" over the threat to water supplies and agriculture. Lower-than-average rainfall over the last year has drained the reservoirs on which Cyprus relies heavily for water.

Cyprus' largest dam is expected to run dry if there is no heavy rainfall within the next month, Reuters news agency reports. Prolonged hot weather during the tourist season has further strained supplies, with most reservoirs on average only 8% full - as opposed to 25% last year.

Prayers for rain are rare in Cyprus, with the last one reported when a comparable drought struck the island in 1998. The Orthodox Church is among Cyprus' biggest landowners, with sizeable investments in banking, construction, hotels and wine-making.

The Vatican press office confirmed today that the head of the Holy See delegation to the Tuesday meeting will be Monsignor Pietro Parolin, undersecretary for relations with states at the Vatican Secretariat of State. Monsignor Franco Coppola, a counselor at the office of the nunciature, will accompany him. In Annapolis, with help from the international community, Israelis and Palestinians will try to relaunch negotiations and aim for a just and definitive solution to the conflict that has bloodied the Holy Land for 60 years, the [Pope] said.

In his appeal, the Pope recalled the many "tears and sufferings" the conflict has caused the two peoples. He asked people to "implore the Spirit of God for peace for that region so dear to us and to give wisdom and courage to all the protagonists in this important meeting." The Annapolis encounter "offers a lot of hope," newly elevated Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston, Texas, told the Vatican newspaper. "I hope that those who are involved in this international conference dedicate themselves with diligence to a resolution that effectively assures peace in the regions of the Middle East."

On the one hand we have the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coming up with yet another of its notoriously politicised reports, hyping up the scare by claiming that world surface temperatures have been higher in 11 of the past 12 years (1995-2006) than ever previously recorded.

THIS CAREFULLY IGNORES THE LATEST US SATELLITE FIGURES SHOWING TEMPERATURES HAVING FALLEN SINCE 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level - not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.

On the other hand, we had Gordon Brown last week, in his "first major speech on climate change", airily committing his own and future governments to achieving a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 - which is rather like prime minister Salisbury at the end of Queen Victoria's reign trying to commit Winston Churchill's government to achieving some wholly impossible goal in the middle of the Second World War.

Mr Brown's only concrete proposal for reaching this absurd target seems to be his plan to ban plastic bags, whatever they have to do with global warming (while his government also plans a near-doubling of flights out of Heathrow). But of course he is no longer his own master in such fantasy exercises. Few people have yet really taken on board the mind-blowing scale of all the "planet-saving" measures to which we are now committed by the European Union.

By 2020 we will have to generate 20 per cent of our electricity from "renewables". At present the figure is four per cent (most of it generated by hydro-electric schemes and methane gas from landfill). As Whitehall officials privately briefed ministers in August, there is no way Britain can begin to meet such a fanciful target (even if the Government manages to ram through another 30,000 largely useless wind turbines).

Another EU directive commits us to deriving 10 per cent of our transport fuel from "biofuels" by 2020. This would take up pretty well all the farmland we currently use to grow food (at a time when world grain prices have doubled in six months and we are already facing a global food shortage).

Then by 2009, thanks to a mad gesture by Mr Blair and his EU colleagues last March, we also face the prospect of a total ban on incandescent light bulbs. This compulsory switch to low-energy bulbs, apart from condemning us to live in uglier homes under eye-straining light, is in practice completely out of the question, because, according to our Government's own figures, more than half Britain's domestic light fittings cannot take them.

This year will be remembered for two things:
FIRST, IT WAS THE YEAR WHEN THE SCIENTIFIC DATA SHOWED THAT THE COSMIC SCARE OVER GLOBAL WARMING MAY WELL TURN OUT TO BE JUST THAT - YET ANOTHER VASTLY INFLATED SCARE.

SECOND, IT WAS THE YEAR WHEN THE HYSTERIA GENERATED BY ALL THE BOGUS SCIENCE BEHIND THIS SCARE FINALLY DROVE THOSE WHO RULE OVER US, INCLUDING GORDON "PLASTIC BAGS" BROWN, WHOLLY OUT OF THEIR WITS.

Colleagues of Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, said she made an "innocent mistake" by letting the six and seven-year-olds choose the name. Ms Gibbons was arrested after several parents made complaints. The BBC has learned the charge could lead to six months in jail, 40 lashes or a fine.

It is seen as an insult to Islam to attempt to make an image of the Prophet Muhammad. Mr Boulos said Ms Gibbons was arrested on Sunday at her home inside the school premises after a number of parents complained to Sudan's Ministry of Education. He said police had seized the book and asked to interview the girl who owned the bear.

The country's state-controlled Sudanese Media Centre reported that charges were being prepared "under article 125 of the criminal law" which covers insults against faith and religion.

The parchment scroll, made in the Middle Ages, is the only surviving copy of a road map from the late Roman Empire. The document, which is almost seven metres long, shows the network of main Roman roads from Spain to India. It is normally never shown to the public. The parchment is extremely fragile, and reacts badly to daylight. But it has been on display for one day to celebrate its inclusion in Unesco's Memory of the World Register.

At first sight, it looks very unlike a modern map. Both the landmass and the seas have been stretched and flattened. The Mediterranean has been reduced to a thin strip of water, more like a river than a sea. Instead of being oriented from north to south, the map, which is only 34 centimetres wide, works from west to east.

But despite its unfamiliar appearance, the director of the Department of Manuscripts, Autographs and Closed Collections at the Austrian National Library, Andreas Fingernagel, says it is an intensely practical document, more like a plan of the London Underground than a map. "The red lines are the main roads. EVERY SO OFTEN THERE IS A LITTLE HOOK ALONG THE RED LINES WHICH REPRESENTS A REST STOP - AND THE DISTANCE BETWEEN HOOKS WAS ONE DAY'S TRAVEL." "Every so often there is a pictogram of a building to show you that there was a hotel or a spa where you could stay," he said.

"It was meant for the civil servants of the late Roman Empire, for couriers and travellers," he added. Some of the buildings have large courtyards - a sign of more luxurious accommodation. But Mr Fingernagel says it is very different from other medieval maps and is clearly a copy of a much earlier document, dating back to the 5th century. "IN MAPS FROM THE 12TH OR 13TH CENTURY, JERUSALEM, NOT ROME, WAS IN THE CENTRE," HE SAID.

"THE INTERESTS OF MAP MAKERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES WERE QUITE DIFFERENT. THEY DON'T SHOW ROADS OR REST STATIONS, INSTEAD THEY SHOW THE HOLY PLACES OF CHRISTIANITY." And the map contains other details which indicate the original probably dates back to the 5th century, including the city of Aquileia, which was destroyed in 452 by the Huns.

In a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers show that eating garlic appears to boost our natural supply of hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide is actually poisonous at high concentrations - it's the same noxious byproduct of oil refining that smells like rotten eggs. But the body makes its own supply of the stuff, which acts as an antioxidant and transmits cellular signals that relax blood vessels and increase blood flow.

In the latest study, performed at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, researchers extracted juice from supermarket garlic and added small amounts to human red blood cells. The cells immediately began emitting hydrogen sulfide, the scientists found.

The power to boost hydrogen sulfide production may help explain why a garlic-rich diet appears to protect against various cancers, including breast, prostate and colon cancer, say the study authors. Higher hydrogen sulfide might also protect the heart, according to other experts. Although garlic has not consistently been shown to lower cholesterol levels, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine earlier this year found that injecting hydrogen sulfide into mice almost completely prevented the damage to heart muscle caused by a heart attack.

"People have known garlic was important and has health benefits for centuries," said Dr. David W. Kraus, associate professor of environmental science and biology at the University of Alabama. "Even the Greeks would feed garlic to their athletes before they competed in the Olympic games."

Her warning, made during a closed-door lunch in Brussels, highlighted renewed debate over whether Europe could afford to impose tougher rules on genetically modified, or GM, products than other parts of the world.
Some EU officials say the region should maintain its skeptical stance toward the technology on safety grounds, while others argue for a more pragmatic approach to enhance the region's competitiveness and help the agricultural sector.

"Along with our zero-tolerance policy toward GM feed stuffs in Europe there also is a major potential cost impact," Michael Mann, a spokesman for Fischer Boel, said Monday. One of the reasons why European policies toward GM feeds raise costs is that ships bound for Europe must be thoroughly cleaned to make sure that feeds are not intermingled with feeds grown using GM seeds that have not yet been approved for use in the EU.

Environmental groups that oppose any slackening of the rules on imports of GM products say many of the arguments used to justify a relaxed policy on GM feed in Europe are specious. Helen Holder, a GM expert with Friends of the Earth in Brussels, said prices were rising because more farmers in parts of the world like the United States were growing crops for biofuels at a time when demand was rising for crops to feed livestock.

Holder called on the EU to drop proposals to mandate more use of biofuels and change EU rules so that farmers can use more home-grown feeds rather than relaxing rules on imports from parts of the world like the United States. "The EU needs to stand firm and defend its biosafety rules," she said.