At the invitation of the White House, Chief Rabbis Yonah Metzger and Shlomo Amar, as well as the Chief Rabbi of Haifa and Chairman of the Chief Rabbinate Communications Committee Rabbi She'ar-Yashuv Cohen departed Saturday evening for a series of meetings to explain the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount.

The rabbis are invited to series of meetings set up by the Bush administration ahead of the Annapolis Conference aimed at trying to gauge Israel's "red lines" and examine the possibility of relinquishing the Temple Mount to Islam.

Despite the fact that many rabbis both visit and encourage other Jews to visit the site in the manner permitted by Jewish law, the chief rabbinate holds the position that Jews should not visit the Temple Mount site, which is Judaism's holiest. A large sign is affixed to the path leading to the Mount saying it is "forbidden for Jews to visit the Mount according to Jewish law."

All three rabbis agree that the Temple Mount must remain under Jewish sovereignty. However, the chief rabbis believe the mount should be closed to all until the Temple is rebuilt, whereas Rabbi Cohen believes it should be open to Jewish worship and a synagogue should be constructed there.

The new warning comes after it emerged that one of the UK's top five banks has been forced in recent weeks to order a review of its security arrangements because of fears that it was being targeted by a terrorist cell.

The FT has learnt that at the end of August two people escaped arrest outside the London headquarters of Lloyds TSB in Gresham Street after being identified on what security sources believe may have been a terrorist planning exercise. The individuals were challenged after being seen taking photographs of the building, but ran towards a car and drove away.

A spokesman for Lloyds TSB said on Friday: "We take the security of our staff and buildings very seriously. We aim to have the best possible security arrangements in place and to maintain a high level of vigilance at all times. MI5, the security service, warned earlier this year that terrorist "attack planning" would increase in 2007.

Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country's fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack - the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water - seems to be a more modest worry.

But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government's pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that DIMINISHED SUPPLIES OF FRESH WATER MIGHT PROVE A FAR MORE SERIOUS PROBLEM THAN SLOWLY RISING SEAS.

The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. "THERE'S A TWO-THIRDS CHANCE THERE WILL BE A DISASTER," CHU SAID, - AND THAT'S IN THE BEST SCENARIO."

In the Southwest this past summer, the outlook was equally sobering. A catastrophic reduction in the flow of THE COLORADO RIVER - which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains - has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations.

SOME 30 MILLION PEOPLE DEPEND ON THAT WATER. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government.

In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West's industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, IF SOME OF THE SOUTHWEST'S LARGEST RESERVOIRS EMPTY OUT, THE REGION WOULD EXPERIENCE AN APOCALYPSE, "AN ARMAGEDDON."

Above ground, this city in the North China Plain is having a party. Economic growth topped 11 percent last year. Population is rising. A new upscale housing development is advertising waterfront property on lakes filled with pumped groundwater. Another half-built complex, the Arc de Royal, is rising above one of the lowest points in the city's water table.

"People who are buying apartments aren't thinking about whether there will be water in the future," said Zhang Zhongmin, who has tried for 20 years to raise public awareness about the city's dire water situation.

For three decades, water has been indispensable in sustaining the rollicking economic expansion that has made China a world power. Now, China's galloping, often wasteful style of economic growth is pushing the country toward a water crisis. Water pollution is rampant nationwide, while water scarcity has worsened severely in north China - even as demand keeps rising everywhere.

China is scouring the world for oil, natural gas and minerals to keep its economic machine humming. But trade deals cannot solve water problems. Water usage in China has quintupled since 1949, and leaders will increasingly face tough political choices as cities, industry and farming compete for a finite and unbalanced water supply.

In the 1970s, when many scientists expressed alarm over what they saw as a disastrous change in the earth's climate, their fear was not of warming but global cooling, of "a new Ice Age". For three decades, after a sharp rise in the interwar years up to 1940, global temperatures had been falling. THE ONE THING CERTAIN ABOUT CLIMATE IS THAT IT IS ALWAYS CHANGING. Since we began to emerge from the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago, temperatures have been through significant swings several times.

The hottest period occurred around 8,000 years ago and was followed by a long cooling. Then came what is known as the "Roman Warming", coinciding with the Roman empire. Three centuries of cooling in the Dark Ages were followed by the "Mediaeval Warming", when the evidence agrees the world was hotter than today.

Around 1300 began "the Little Ice Age", that did not end until 200 years ago, when we entered what is known as the "Modern Warming". But even this has been chequered by colder periods, such as the "Little Cooling" between 1940 and 1975. Then, in the late 1970s, the world began warming again.

One of the greatest problems Former US Vice-President Al Gore and his allies faced at this time was the mass of evidence showing that in the past, global temperatures had been higher than in the late 20th century. In 1998 came the answer they were looking for: A NEW TEMPERATURE CHART, devised by a young American physicist, Michael Mann.

This became known as the "hockey stick" because it showed historic temperatures running in an almost flat line over the past 1,000 years, then suddenly flicking up at the end to record levels. Mann's hockey stick was just what the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) wanted. When its 2001 report came out it was given pride of place at the top of page 1. The Mediaeval Warming, the Little Ice Age, the 20th century Little Cooling, when CO2 had already been rising, all had been wiped away.

But then a growing number of academics began to raise doubts about Mann and his graph. THIS CULMINATED IN 2003 WITH A DEVASTATING STUDY BY TWO CANADIANS SHOWING HOW MANN HAD NOT ONLY IGNORED MOST OF THE EVIDENCE BEFORE HIM BUT HAD USED AN ALGORITHM THAT WOULD PRODUCE A HOCKEY STICK GRAPH WHATEVER EVIDENCE WAS FED INTO THE COMPUTER.

When this was removed, the graph re-emerged just as it had looked before, showing the Middle Ages as hotter than today. IT IS HARD TO RECALL ANY SCIENTIFIC THESIS EVER BEING SO COMPREHENSIVELY DISCREDITED AS THE "HOCKEY STICK". YET THE GLOBAL WARMING JUGGERNAUT ROLLED ON REGARDLESS. MORE SERIOUS, however, has been all the evidence accumulating to show that, despite the continuing rise in CO2 levels, global temperatures in the years since 1998 have no longer been rising and may soon even be falling.

It was a telling moment when, in August, Gore's closest scientific ally, James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was forced to revise his influential record of US surface temperatures showing that the past decade has seen the hottest years on record. His graph now concedes that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934, and that four of the 10 warmest years in the past 100 were in the 1930s.

Furthermore, scientists and academics have recently been queuing up to point out that fluctuations in global temperatures correlate more consistently with patterns of radiation from the sun than with any rise in CO2 levels, and that after a century of high solar activity, the sun's effect is now weakening, presaging a likely drop in temperatures.

If global warming does turn out to have been a scare like all the others, it will certainly represent AS GREAT A COLLECTIVE FLIGHT FROM REALITY AS HISTORY HAS EVER RECORDED. The evidence of the next 10 years will be very interesting.

From the book - "Scared to Death: From BSE To Global Warming - How Scares Are Costing Us The Earth" by Christopher Booker and Richard North (Continuum)

In a dramatic move ahead of an expected ruling by the Supreme Court to disqualify him as president, General Musharraf ordered soldiers into the court building to tell the country's chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammed Chaudhry, that he was sacked.

Just 30 minutes after news was broadcast that the government was imposing emergency law, eight judges of the Supreme Court met and declared Gen Musharraf's orders "unconstitutional" and "illegal". But even as they did so, police and soldiers began detaining lawyers.

Aitzaz Ahsan, a leading opposition lawyer who is president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, said outside his home: "One man has taken an entire nation hostage. The time has come for Gen Musharraf to go."

Gen Musharraf blamed the imposition of emergency law on the need for a crackdown which had been prevented by the judiciary. The proclamation order claimed that militants, extremists, terrorists and suicide bombers were being released from prisons on the orders of the judges.

It added: "Some members of the judiciary are working at cross-purposes with the executive and legislature in the fight against terrorism." In a recorded television address last night, Gen Musharraf said emergency powers were needed to defend Pakistan from Islamic fundamentalists.

"Extremists are roaming around freely and they are not scared of law enforcement agencies," he said. "They want to run a parallel government and impose their extremist views on the rest of the country. It is a direct challenge to the stability of Pakistan."

The U.S. dollar fell again on Friday against a basket of six major currencies (.DXY: Quote, Profile, Research), hitting levels not seen in that index's 30-year plus history. It has fallen more than 7.0 percent since the summer's financial ruckus started.

The full toll of the tragedy unleashed by floods that have ravaged Mexico's swampy state of Tabasco will not be clear for some days. One resident has already been found dead and rescue teams fear more corpses may be hidden in the black waters.

About 150 of the state's hospitals and clinics were out of commission due to the flooding.

The flooding has been heaviest in this sprawling oil city of Villahermosa, where the rivers and lagoons broke their banks after a week of pouring rains reclaiming large swaths of the urban area. The scenes of submerged neighbourhoods and boats rescuing residents from their roofs were reminiscent of the flooding of New Orleans two years ago.

Citigroup is seen as a bellwether for the health of the financial system but has been rocked in recent days over concerns that its exposure to America's sub-prime mortgage crisis is bigger than previously thought. News of the board meeting came after the US stock market closed so investors could not react immediately.

The emergency at Citigroup follows the run on the British bank Northern Rock which fell victim to the global credit crunch in September. Just over a week ago, the Bank of England warned that the crunch was far from over and that the UK stock market was "particularly vulnerable" to a downturn.

Citigroup, which globally has more than a billion customers, has operated in the UK since 1902 and employs more than 12,000 people here. As well as banking, in the UK it also provides a range of commercial investment services to corporate, financial institutions and public sector clients.

Citigroup's shares have already slumped 25 per cent over the past three weeks after the bank wrote off $5·9 billion (£2·8 billion) worth of bad debts. Markets will be concerned that Citigroup's growing problems will spread into the economy at large as it, and other large banks, curtail lending which could prompt a slowdown in activity.

British banks are also under pressure and the three leading institutions have seen their share price value plunge by almost £14 billion in two days. Barclays' market value has dropped by a total of 11 per cent amid rumours that it had approached the Bank of England for an emergency loan.

Royal Bank of Scotland shares fell by eight per cent over the two days while those of HSBC, Britain's biggest bank, dropped 4·7 per cent.

Al Khalifa said that at the very least, Iran is attempting to gain the ability to produce nuclear weaponry. The statement would make Bahrain the first Arab nation in the Persian Gulf to claim that Iran is attempting to deceive world leaders in relation to its nuclear aspirations.

Al Khalifa warned that the crisis could worsen and draw the region into military conflict. For this reason, he said, it must be resolved by diplomatic means. Meanwhile, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Thursday tried dispelling fears that Germany is reluctant to back new sanctions against Iran because of its strong commercial ties with Teheran. Steinmeier made it clear that Germany is in sync with other Western powers.

Speaking at a news conference in Tel Aviv after talks with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Steinmeier stressed that Germany would not stand in the way of tougher sanctions. "Germany's position does not differ from that of the United States or some other European countries. If Iran refuses to provide answers, we should think about the possibility of European sanctions," he said.

The Web site quoted Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two strategic US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons carried out an attack on a nuclear site under construction. The sources were quoted as saying that Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets provided cover for the US planes.

The sources added that each US plane carried one tactical nuclear weapon and that the site was hit by one bomb and was totally destroyed. At the beginning of October, Israel's military censor began to allow the local media to report on the raid without attributing their report to foreign sources. Nevertheless, details of the strike have remained clouded in mystery.

The mouse has incredible stamina, running up to 20 yards a minute for five hours or more without stopping. It also has an envious metabolism, eating 60 per cent more food than an ordinary mouse but not putting on weight. Add to that a longer life expectancy than usual and an ability to breed for three times as long as a standard mouse. The technology used to develop the rodent may lead to new drugs or treatments that could "enhance" the natural powers of athletes.

The animal was developed by genetically modifying a single metabolism gene that is shared with humans. The changes made to the mouse gene appeared to have helped the animals turn body fat into energy more easily.

It also stopped them suffering from the burning sensation in their muscles during exercise when lactic acid builds up.

Professor Hanson said: "We humans have exactly the same gene. But this is not something that you'd do to a human. We do not think that this mouse model is an appropriate form for human gene therapy.

However, the scientists have accepted that it may be possible to use the findings to develop new drugs or treatments that could one day be used to "enhance" the natural abilities of athletes. It is also thought that their development could improve understanding about the importance of human diet and exercise.

With a twist of the wrist, he releases the tank's meager water supply, and suddenly this sleepy town is alive with activity. Washing machines whir, kitchen sinks fill and showers run. About three hours later, Reames will return and reverse the process, cutting off water to the town's 145 residents.

The severe drought tightening like a vise across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. But Orme, about 40 miles west of Chattanooga and 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, is a town where the worst-case scenario has already come to pass: The water has run out. The mighty waterfall that fed the mountain hamlet has been reduced to a trickle, and now the creek running through the center of town is dry.

Three days a week, the volunteer fire chief hops in a 1961 fire truck at 5:30 a.m. - before the school bus blocks the narrow road - and drives a few miles to an Alabama fire hydrant. He meets with another truck from nearby New Hope, Ala. The two drivers make about a dozen runs back and forth, hauling about 20,000 gallons of water from the hydrant

"The greatest moral issue of our time isn't abortion, it's robbing our next generation of opportunity," Coburn told reporters at a breakfast meeting Thursday at the National Press Club. "You're going to save a child from being aborted so they can be born into a debtor's prison?"

The state's governor has called on anyone who owns a seafaring vessel to help free the 300,000 people believed to be trapped in their homes. "We have lost 100% of our crops and 70% of the state is under water," he said.

Rescuers have also been using helicopters to try to reach people stranded on rooftops. The heavy rains began at the weekend, forcing rivers to burst their banks in the largely low-lying state. "We are just like New Orleans," Tabasco governor Andres Granier said. "All the water that comes in has to be pumped out."

Flooding has also affected the southern state of Chiapas, where several thousand people have been moved to safety, Mexico's El Universal newspaper reported.