Figures covering three months up to 23 July show more than 387mm (15.2in) of rain fell in England and Wales.

That is more than double the average of 186mm (7.3in) for the period, resulting in two bouts of devastating floods in parts of England in June and July. The previous biggest summer deluge since records started in 1766 came in 1789 when almost 350mm (13.8in) fell.

EXTREME WEATHER CONDITIONS HIT EUROPE
Extreme weather conditions have hit Europe with record-high temperatures
causing deaths in south-eastern Europe while heavy rainfall in northern
Europe is prompting major flooding in some parts of the UK. Around 500
people have died in Hungary in the past week alone.

BRUSSELS EMBRACES LIBYA AFTER MEDICS' RELEASE
Libya is welcomed back into the international community after 20 years out
in the cold, and can look forward to "a new era of relations" with the
European Union following the release of European medical staff from a
Libyan jail.

GERMANY CONSIDERS OPENING UP TO JOB SEEKERS FROM NEW EUROPE
Germany is set to consider relaxing or dropping labour barriers against job
seekers from the new EU member states due to a rising number of vacancies
impossible to fill by domestic workers.

JUST LIKE THE CONSTITUTION, SAY FRIENDS AND FOES OF NEW EU TREATY
Both advocates and critics of the complete draft of the new EU treaty
highlight its similarity with the bloc's failed constitution. While
advocates consider it the argument for a swift ratification through
parliaments, critics maintain it should be decided by public referendum.

EU NEEDS MINIMUM RULES FOR TRANSPARENCY, SAYS OMBUDSMAN
Member states are escaping public scrutiny over decisions they make in
Brussels due to a lack of transparency, according to the EU ombudsman. He
calls for greater access to EU documents and cutting the time it takes for
EU institutions to reply to citizens' complaints.

EU SEEKS BALANCED APPROACH TO THE MIDDLE EAST
Tony Blair, the former UK premier and the newly-appointed envoy of the
Mideast Quartet, has urged Israelis and the Palestinians to capitalize on a
current "moment of opportunity", while the European Union seeks a balanced
approach to the region.

PRESIDENT PUTIN TEACHES EUROPE A LESSON
The diplomatic dispute between Britain and Russia brings back unmistakeable
echoes of the cold war. It is now time for the EU to put foreign policy at
the top of the priority list and speak to president Putin with a clear and
unified voice, argues Richard Laming, who heads the UK's Federal Union.

Every day they recede further, like water running slowly out of an immense bathtub, threatening a worldwide catastrophe. Standing on an island in a quiet channel of the giant river, he points out what is happening. A month ago, the island was under water. Now, it juts 5m above it. It is a sign that SEVERE DROUGHT IS RETURNING TO THE AMAZON FOR A SECOND SUCCESSIVE YEAR. And that would be ominous. New research suggests that one further dry year beyond that could tip the whole vast forest into a cycle of destruction.

The rivers of the Amazon Basin usually routinely fall 9m to 12m - greater than most of the tides of the world's seas - between the wet and dry seasons. But last year they just went on falling in the worst drought in recorded history. AT ONE POINT IN THE WESTERN BRAZILIAN STATE OF ACRE, THE WORLD'S BIGGEST RIVER SHRANK SO FAR THAT IT WAS POSSIBLE TO WALK ACROSS IT.

Millions of fish died, and thousands of communities whose only transport was by water were stranded. And the drying forest caught fire; in September, satellite camera images showed 73,000 blazes in the basin. This year, says Otavio Luz Castello, the water is draining away even faster than last year - and there are still more than three months of the dry season to go.

Flying over the forest - with trees in a thousand shades of green stretching, for hour after hour, as far as the eye can see - IT SEEMS INCONCEIVABLE THAT ANYTHING COULD ENDANGER ITS VERDANT IMMENSITY. Until recently, scientists took the same view, seeing it as one of the world's most stable environments. Though they condemned the way that, ON AVERAGE, AN AREA ROUGHLY THE SIZE OF WALES IS CUT DOWN EACH YEAR, this did not seem to endanger the forest as a whole, much less the planet. Now they are changing their minds in the face of increasing evidence that deforestation is pushing the Amazon and the world to the brink of disaster.

Dr Antonio Nobre, of Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research, told the symposium that the felling was drying up the entire forest and helping to cause the hurricanes that have been battering the United States and the Caribbean.

The hot, wet Amazon, he explained, normally evaporates vast amounts of water, which rise high into the air as if in an invisible chimney, drawing in wet northeast trade winds, which have picked up moisture from the Atlantic. This, in turn, controls the temperature of the ocean - as the trade winds pick up the moisture, the warm water left gets saltier and sinks. Deforestation disrupts the cycle by weakening the Amazonian evaporation which drives the whole process. One result is that the hot water in the Atlantic stays on the surface and fuels the hurricanes. Another is that less moisture arrives on the trade winds, intensifying the forest drought.

The American multinational Cargill built a huge port for soya three years ago at Santarem. This encouraged entrepreneurs to cut down trees to grow soya. The symposium flew to inspect the damage this had caused - vast fields of beans destined to feed supermarket chickens in Europe, where until recently there was lush forest. Brazilian politicians say their country has so many other pressing problems that the destruction is unlikely to be brought under control, unless the world helps. Calculations by Hylton Philipson, a British merchant banker and rainforest campaigner, reckon that doing this would take US$60 billion ($80 billion) a year - less than a third of the cost of the Iraq war.

About a fifth of the Amazonian rainforest has been razed completely. Another 22 per cent has been harmed by logging, allowing the sun to penetrate to the forest floor, drying it out. Add these two figures together and THE TOTAL IS PERILOUSLY CLOSE TO 50 PER CENT, PREDICTED AS THE "TIPPING POINT" THAT MARKS THE DEATH OF THE AMAZON. Nobody knows when that crucial threshold will be passed, but growing numbers of scientists believe that it is coming ever closer.

Studies by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre, carried out in Amazonia, have concluded that the forest cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down.
Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern hemisphere and could massively accelerate global warming with incalculable consequences. The research - carried out by the Massachusetts-based centre in Santarem on the Amazon River - has taken even the scientists conducting it by surprise.

When Dr Dan Nepstead started the experiment in 2002 - by covering a chunk of rainforest the size of a football pitch with plastic panels to see how it would cope without rain - he surrounded it with sophisticated sensors, expecting to record only minor changes.

The trees managed the first year of drought without difficulty. In the second year, they sunk their roots deeper to find moisture, but survived. But in year three, they started dying. Beginning with the tallest the trees started to come crashing down, exposing the forest floor to the drying sun.
By the end of the year the trees had released more than two-thirds of the carbon dioxide they have stored during their lives, helping to act as a break on global warming. Instead they began accelerating the climate change.

The Amazon now appears to be entering its second successive year of drought, raising the possibility it could start dying next year. The immense forest contains 90 billion tons of carbon, enough in itself to increase the rate of global warming by 50 per cent. Nepstead expects "mega-fires" rapidly to sweep across the drying jungle. With the trees gone, the soil will bake in the sun and the rainforest could become desert.

Deborah Clark from the University of Missouri, one of the world's top forest ecologists, says research shows "THE LOCK HAS BROKEN" ON THE AMAZON ECOSYSTEM AND THE AMAZON IS "HEADED IN A TERRIBLE DIRECTION".

"The common thread of the spiritual preparation for the appointment in Sydney is the Holy Spirit and mission," explains the papal message, published in Italian and French by the Vatican press office. Translations into other languages are forthcoming. The message continues: "Therefore it is important that each one of you young people, in your communities and with your educators, reflect on this protagonist in the history of salvation which is the Holy Spirit or the Spirit of Jesus. "THERE ARE MANY CHRISTIANS FOR WHOM HE REMAINS THE 'GREAT UNKNOWN.'"

The [Pope] presents three objectives to the young people -

He invites them to "recognize the true identity of the Spirit by listening to God's word in the revelation of the Bible."

He suggests they "learn about his continuous and active presence in the life of the Church, in particular rediscovering that the Holy Spirit is the 'soul,' the life-giving breath of the Christian life, THANKS TO THE CHRISTIAN SACRAMENTS OF INITIATION -- BAPTISM, CONFIRMATION AND THE EUCHARIST."

Finally, he exhorts them to "deepen their understanding of Jesus and at the same time to implement the Gospel at the dawn of the third millennium."

The Pontiff says that preparation for Sydney should be an opportunity to "verify the quality of our faith in the Holy Spirit, to find it again if we have lost it, strengthen it if it is weakened, to savor it as a companion to our faith in the Father and the Son, Jesus Christ."

He added: "Never forget that the Church, rather, all of humanity, all that which surrounds you and what awaits you in the future, expects much from you, young people, because you have in you the supreme gift of the Father, the Spirit of Jesus."

Emergency teams were today fighting to save Oxford from more widespread flooding. Streets around the city's railway station were submerged under four feet of water in places. So far 800 residents are believed to have been forced out of their homes and it is feared the city's flood defences may be overwhelmed by the rising water.

Fire chiefs have warned that thousands of residents could lose their power, in a repeat of the devastation which affected Gloucestershire at the weekend. Fears are growing today that contaminated floodwater could lead to a major outbreak of disease in affected areas. And even those who have escaped the waters will be affected as farmers warn the price of milk, vegetables and other basic foods is set to soar.

Health bosses say hundreds of thousands of flood victims now face an increased risk from bugs in contaminated water. They claim that the failure of sewage plants could lead to the spread of micro-organisms such as the noroviruses, which cause gastroenteritis and winter vomiting disease.

In stark contrast to scenes here in the UK, Greece and much of south-east Europe is braced for the hottest day of the year with temperatures expected to top 46 degrees in some places. The heatwave sweeping Europe has already claimed hundreds of lives over the past two weeks.

It is almost spotless, a sign that the Sun may have reached solar minimum. Scientists are now watching for the first spot of the new solar cycle to appear. The 11 year long solar cycle is marked by two extremes, solar minimum and solar maximum. Solar minimum is the period of least solar activity in the solar cycle of the Sun.

During this time the sun becomes much calmer, with sunspot and solar flare activity dying down.

When spots begin to appear on the sun once again, scientists know that the Sun is heading into a new season of extreme solar activity.

At the solar cycle's peak, solar maximum, the Sun puts on quite a show. Its surface is continually peppered with spots, solar flares erupt, and it hurls gigantic clouds of electrified gas into space. Solar maximum is much like hurricane season here on Earth. Violent solar events, like flares and coronal mass ejections, are the hurricanes of space weather.

These solar storms can wreak havoc with satellites, power grids, and radio communications systems, including GPS, which car sat-nav systems rely on. It is forecast that the next solar cycle should begin in March 2008 and should peak in late 2011 or mid 2012.

The Prime Minister said the force would comprise next month with officers from the Border and Immigration Agency, Revenue and Customs and UKVisas being brought together, creating a single checkpoint for travellers at ports and airports.

He claimed the new border force would provide a "highly visible, uniformed presence" combining both passport control and customs - but sparked criticism from critics it was a border police 'lite' because it would not comprise any new powers.

Starting from next month when arriving in Britain, people will be met at the border, either sea port or airport, by a highly visible uniformed presence as over the next period we move for the first time to one single primary checkpoint for both passport control and customs." All passengers will have their passports electronically screened as they check in to foreign airports and seaports in a bid to identify terrorist suspects before they start their journey to Britain.

The higher food prices will come on top of a bill to the British economy far in excess of the £3 billion that has been estimated by the insurance industry, economists warned yesterday. Peter Ainsworth, the Tory environment spokesman, said:"When everyone's forgotten about all this flooding, the cost will be counted and it will be astronomical. It is not clear how it will be met. The things I am talking about are collapsed railway embankments, road verges, schools, public buildings, bridges."

Economists were trying to estimate the longer term effect on the British economy, which will almost certainly lead to more expensive food, and higher prices for building and repair work. Deloitte, the accountancy firm, predicts the losses could top £5 billion - "though it could get much worse than that," said Lis Gibson, an insurance partner.

The Processed Vegetable Growers Association estimates that more than two fifths of this year's crop has been wiped out - the equivalent of 61 million bags of frozen peas. The cost to the pea industry is more than £220 million. Broccoli, cabbage and lettuce crops are also being hit heavily. Dairy farmers have been forced to keep cows indoors, forcing the use of scarce silage stocks, pushing up their costs.

The National Farmers Union says that 2,300 cows are at severe risk in Gloucestershire and that many farmers had been forced to throw away milk because lorries could not collect. Food industry experts warn that the lack of supply, combined with the higher costs suffered by farmers, will undoubtedly lead to higher prices on supermarket shelves.

A report from investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort said that food inflation, already running at 4.8 per cent - well in excess of official overall inflation - would continue to surge, especially for seasonal products. A pound of onions now costs 37p compared with 25p a year ago and tomatoes have increased in price by 15 per cent.

Deloitte also warned that plumbers and builders' would increase their bills, with so-called "demand surge" a common phenomenon among tradesman taking advantage of disasters.

Two lesbians desperate for children. One flamboyant drag queen happy to help out. The result? Two proud mums who insist - believe it or not - their babies have had the best start in life. When passers-by see Jo Bartle and Stephanie Burns pushing their two children in a double buggy, they would be forgiven for seeing nothing more than two proud mums out for a walk with their respective babies.

But the truth is rather more remarkable than first meets the eye.

Jo and Steph are a lesbian couple. Thirteen months ago, Steph gave birth to baby Elijah. Three months later, her partner, Jo, had little Martha in the same hospital. They chose the names together. Now they declare that they (each) consider themselves mothers of both babies.

The babies are indeed genetic siblings. Both were conceived with the help of a syringe and a "donation" of sperm from the same man. The father? A drag queen the women met in a nightclub, whose recompense for getting them both pregnant was a cheap flight to Gran Canaria. "Some people will think what we are doing is disgusting, and they are entitled to that opinion, but I believe we're giving all the children the best possible start. There will always be those who don't believe that gay people should have children, but that is their problem, not ours."

She remains convinced that her children are luckier than most. "There can be no doubt about how much they were wanted. We can say to them, hand on heart, that they weren't just 'accidents'. They were planned, and they are surrounded by more love than they will ever need."

But what of the story about how they came into this world. Is that really one any child needs to hear? "We will tell them," say Jo. "I think we'll make it sound like a fairytale, because really, it is."

The little blue engine, created in 1945 by clergymen Wilbert Awdry to entertain his sick son, has been found to help the learning process in autistic children. His large eyes and expressive face are credited with helping victims, who often find it hard to read people's faces, to distinguish between different emotions.

Books, comic strips and films featuring Thomas and his various friends also help youngsters learn about colours, numbers and words, a survey by the National Autistic Society found. Parents of autistic children said the combination of clear facial expressions and simple storylines have helped their children make remarkable progress.

Thomas the Tank Engine: His large eyes and expressive face are credited with helping victims, who often find it hard to read people's faces, to distinguish between different emotions. Thomas was named favourite toy in a survey of 750 parents of autistic youngsters, with Bob the Builder coming a distant second. The poll also found that his appeal endures longer among autistic children -almost 40 per cent of parents said that autistic children liked the character for two years longer than siblings without the condition.

Benet Middleton, of the National Autistic Society, said: "Parents feel that Thomas has played a pivotal role in the early learning of many children who have autism partly due to the clear facial expressions and simple story lines."

Analysts translating the text - WHICH HAS BEEN PUBLISHED ONLY IN FRENCH - have called it the 'cut-and-paste constitution' because they say 96 per cent is the same as its 2005 predecessor. But the Government insists that the concept of a constitution has been ' abandoned', making a referendum unnecessary.

MPS WILL GO ON THEIR SUMMER BREAK WITHOUT EVEN SEEING AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION.

However, the think-tank Open Europe said huge sections of the document are word-for-word the same as the 2005 version, which was abandoned when voters in France and the Netherlands rejected it.

UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage said the refusal to hold a referendum is 'utterly dishonest and totally cynical', adding: 'Only the British government seems to believe this is not the old, rejected and discredited constitution. Nine other European leaders say it is. The Government can bang on about their famous red lines as much as they want, but it will not change the facts. We have surrendered our veto in over 60 areas.'

EUROSCEPTIC MPS ARE ANGRY THAT THEY ARE UNLIKELY TO HAVE A FULL DEBATE ON THE TREATY UNTIL EARLY NEXT YEAR, BY WHICH TIME THE GOVERNMENT WILL ALREADY HAVE AGREED IT.

The decision to send 16,500 employees on an "integrity" course in the wake of the fake TV shows scandal was condemned by MPs. Two of the corporation's top executives appeared before a Commons committee investigating the affair.

Director general Mark Thompson is on a family holiday, so his deputy Mark Byford and chief operating officer Caroline Thomson were asked to explain how viewers were deceived by a string of shows including Children In Need and Comic Relief, as well as the doctored footage of the Queen. They were accused of "fighting a rearguard action" and being "dangerously out of touch" with the way programmes are made.

Tory MP Philip Davies asked: "Is funding a training programme to tell your staff not to lie and cheat viewers a good use of licence-fee payers' money? Perhaps you need to look at your recruitment process if you have to train them on such fundamentals as not lying or cheating?"

There are currently more than 12,000 foreign convicts in Britain's overcrowded prison system - 15 per cent of the 80,000-strong jail population. Mr Brown said: 'We are going to take a far tougher line. I want a message to go out - if you come here you work and learn our language. If you commit a crime you will be deported. You play by the rules or you face the consequences.'

Water levels rose steadily overnight and police said they had cleared up to 250 homes and gave people shelter in Oxford City's soccer stadium. In Gloucestershire, the western English county worst hit by the deluge, up to 350,000 people could be without running water for the next two weeks.

The flooding turned the historic market town of Tewkesbury into an island where only the 12th century abbey stood unscathed on high ground. Lifeboats scudded down the main street, boats moored in car parks.

While Britain struggled with floods, central and southeast Europe faced a heat wave. Up to 500 people are estimated to have died in Hungary as temperatures soared, and the heat also killed 12 Romanians.

Britain's Environment Secretary Hilary Benn warned the crisis was far from over and had "caused considerable human distress."

Alec Rawls' "Crescent of Betrayal: Dishonoring the Heroes of Flight 93," published by World Ahead, documents a long list of Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the Flight 93 National Memorial. The primary feature, he says, is the giant central crescent of what originally was called the "Crescent of Embrace" design. A person facing into this half-mile wide crescent - still present in the superficially altered "Bowl of Embrace" redesign - will be oriented almost exactly at Mecca.

That is significant, Rawls said, because a crescent that Muslims face to point them in the direction of Mecca - called a "mihrab" - is the central feature around which every mosque is built. Rawls said it seems impossible such startling revelations could go unreported, but Pennsylvania newspapers have ignored him.

He learned from a reporter at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that editors knew about the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent in September 2005 when the design was first unveiled. BUT THE EDITORS DECIDED THE INFORMATION SHOULD NOT BE PUBLISHED, ACCUSING CRITICS OF BEING PARANOID BIGOTS. "Like those who look at innocent kids trick-or-treating at Halloween and see only the devil's work," wrote the editors at the time, "A FEW SMALL AND SUSPICIOUS MINDS COULDN'T LOOK PAST THE CRESCENT TO SEE A REMARKABLY SENSITIVE DESIGN."

Defenders of the "Crescent of Embrace" design, Rawls contended, "choose their side first, then avoid or suppress all contrary reason and evidence." "That, of course, is the essence of how political correctness works, and why it is a threat to all of us," he said.

Rawls gave Kirk Swauger of the Johnstown Tribune Democrat the address of an Islamic website " Islam.com " that has a Mecca direction calculator. "While I was on the phone with him, Kirk set the calculator to Somerset, Pa., 10 miles from the crash site, and clicked the 'view qibla direction' button. WHEN HE PLACED THE RESULTING MECCA-DIRECTION GRAPHIC OVER THE ORIGINAL CRESCENT OF EMBRACE SITE PLAN, KIRK SAID TO ME: 'YUP. IT POINTS TO MECCA.'" Swauger said he would include the verification in his news story, but it never appeared, Rawls recounted.

Another feature, he says, is a separate section of the wall - centered exactly on the bisector of the giant crescent - that is in the exact position of the star on an Islamic flag. He says there also are 44 inscribed glass blocks placed along the path that Flight 93 followed to the ground, matching the number of passengers, crew and terrorists.

As WND reported in September 2005, REP. TOM TANCREDO, R-COLO., SENT A LETTER TO THE INTERIOR DEPARTMENT, ASKING OFFICIALS TO RECONSIDER THE "CRESCENT OF EMBRACE" DESIGN DUE TO THE SYMBOL'S TIES TO ISLAM.

"It has raised questions in some circles about whether the design, if constructed, WILL IN FACT MAKE THE MEMORIAL A TRIBUTE TO THE HIJACKERS RATHER THAN THE VICTIMS whose mission the flight's passengers helped to thwart," wrote Tancredo in a letter to Fran Mainella, director of the National Park Service. "REGARDLESS OF WHETHER OR NOT THE INVOCATION OF A MUSLIM SYMBOL BY THE MEMORIAL DESIGNER WAS INTENTIONAL OR NOT, IT SEEMS THAT SUCH A SYMBOL IS UNSUITABLE FOR PAYING APPROPRIATE TRIBUTE TO THE HEROES OF FLIGHT 93 OR THE ENSUING AMERICAN STRUGGLE AGAINST RADICAL ISLAM THAT THEIR LAST HISTORIC ACT AND THE 'LET'S ROLL' EFFORT HAS COME TO SYMBOLIZE."

"This is a memorial to the terrorists who killed those people, not a memorial to the folks who died there innocently," said Rev. Ron McRae, head of the Bible Anabaptist Church near Jerome, Pa.,