Storms caused havoc in suburban Melbourne, while residents in a NSW town were celebrating record drought-breaking rain. Snow fell in Victoria and Tasmania, which are still battling fires that have blackened thousands of hectares this month, and in alpine areas of NSW. In Tasmania, the weather bureau reported five centimetres of snow had fallen at the summit of Mount Wellington in Hobart.

Meanwhile, residents in the drought-stricken NSW town of Goulburn also have celebrated Christmas rain, with a record 27.8mm falling on the southern highlands town yesterday morning. It was a much-needed present for the town's residents, as Goulburn's main Pejar dam was only 1.5-per-cent full on December 17. The town's two smaller dams, which together are two-thirds the size of Pejar, were less than half-full. Goulburn's total usable water supply stood at 9.5 per cent of capacity at the end of last week.

More rain fell yesterday than in the past three months combined.

Conservationists insist the "big dry" is almost certainly the result of climate change and warn that Australia is on the brink of environmental disaster. Other experts believe such hysteria is wildly misplaced and that the country shouldn't panic.

The drought in Australia has lasted for more than five years. The worry for some is that this could be the start of a protracted period of low rainfall that could go on for decades. "The really scary thing is last time we had a drought of this intensity that lasted about five years - it lasted for about 50 years," cautioned Professor Andy Pitman from Macquarie University in Sydney.
"The politicians truly believe this is a five-year or six-year drought that will break sometime in 2007 or 2008. But it might not break until 2050 and we aren't thinking in those terms at this stage," Professor Pitman told the BBC.

Global warming, the drought and the future of dwindling water supplies will undoubtedly dominate talk at barbeques and dinner parties this festive season in Australia. "We're in a state of emergency," said Cate Faehrmann from the Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales. "We need to treat this as a war-like scenario. The people are really worried that we are going to run out of water."

She added: "I can imagine Australia being a desert in a few decades' time in some of these agricultural areas. The soil is blowing away, the rivers are drying up. "I think there will be plots of land abandoned and perhaps whole agricultural practices abandoned."
However, some climate experts believe this drought will also pass and Australians shouldn't be too alarmed.

Veteran meteorologist Bill Kinimonth insists the gradual warming of the earth is part of a natural cycle: "The climate follows patterns which we can read back from our instrument records for about 150 years, and from a lot of the proxy records they go back thousands of years. "The ice cores show the fluctuations of the climate over 100,000-year cycles."

He told the BBC News website: "We're presently in what we might call the optimum period, where the Earth is warmer than it has been for the last 20,000 years, and I think we should be making the most of it.

Wyre Borough Council informed Lancashire Constabulary. Officers then quizzed the couple for over an hour. The council and police said they had now apologised to the Roberts. They also said policies had been revised to protect all parties.

Mr and Mrs Roberts had sued the police and council, claiming the incident last December had breached their rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion. A trial date had been set for January, according to the Christian Institute, which had backed the Roberts' case. But in a joint statement, the police and council said they had come to an agreement regarding the claim and said they had apologised to the couple for "the way the incident was handled".

The institute said the incident began when the couple asked for Christian literature to be displayed alongside gay rights' literature and "were astonished when the council refused". The institute said during her call to the council, Mrs Roberts expressed her religious belief that "homosexual practice is morally wrong". The couple were shocked to receive a subsequent visit from two police officers who questioned them in their home.

Mr Roberts told the BBC he had told Wyre Borough Council he was willing to pay for Christian leaflets himself "but was told a definite no". "Then it snowballed from there and that's why we had to take them to court," he said.

Mr Roberts added: "Morality is the foundation of democracy and when you do away with morality, your democracy goes down the Swannee and you end up with immorality and then anarchy." "And all I was doing was just [to] challenge our council that all we wanted was the same rights as the gays and lesbians have."

The couple will donate the £10,000 settlement to a Christian charity.

Dr Georgina Duckworth, a superbug expert at the government's Health Protection Agency, has compiled a report on the emergence of the strain, known as Extended Spectrum Beta Lactamase (ESBL) E.coli.

She said: "The findings in our report show evidence of people carrying these bacteria in their gut.

"If this is found to be commonplace in the general population, this may point towards the food chain being a potential source."

Richard Young, of the Soil Association, said: "Although scientists do not know exactly what is happening at the moment, one of the most likely explanations is that we have got a flow of these resistant strains into the food chain."

He called for the government to act now and impose tighter controls on the increasing use of antibiotics in farming.

Professor Hugh Pennington, a microbiologist from Aberdeen University, said: "ESBL is spreading in the human population...and in the animal population as well.

"One of the keys to solving this problem is to use antibiotics as little as possible."

Writing in Nature, they say their work underlines the threat the current strain poses to humans worldwide. A second paper in Science reveals another US team has successfully recreated the 1918 virus in mice.

Dr Terrence Tumpey, of the US CDC, defended the decision to recreate the 1918 flu virus. He said: "We felt we had to recreate the virus and run these experiments to understand the biological properties that made the 1918 virus so exceptionally deadly. "We wanted to identify the specific genes responsible for its virulence, with the hope of designing antivirals or other interventions that would work against virulent pandemic or epidemic influenza viruses."

A global flu pandemic could kill 62 million people, experts have warned. The 1918 pandemic claimed 50 million lives, and experts in The Lancet predict the toll today would be higher than this, despite medical advances. It is estimated between 50,000 and 700,000 people could die in the UK if such an event occurred.

To forecast how big the global death toll might be, Professor Christopher Murray and his team looked back at the events of the 1918-20 Spanish flu pandemic. When they extrapolated the mortality rates then to the global population of 2004, they estimated 51-81 million people could die from a similarly severe outbreak and gave a median estimate of 62 million. 96% of these deaths would occur in the poorest countries, where there is overcrowding and access to medical care is limited, they predict.

Connecticut and Vermont also offer civil unions for gay couples, while Massachusetts allows gay couples to marry, and California has domestic partnerships that bring full marriage rights under state law.

"We must recognize that many gay and lesbian couples in New Jersey are in committed relationships and deserve the same benefits and rights as every other family in this state," Gov. Jon S. Corzine said in signing the legislation.
"It's a step forward, but it's not true equality," said Veronica Hoff, 52, of Mount Laurel, as she stood with her partner.

The civil unions law grants gay couples adoption, inheritance, hospital visitation and medical decision-making rights and the right not to testify against a partner in state court.

They won't, however, be entitled to the same benefits as married couples in the eyes of the federal government because of 1996 law that defines marriage as between a man and a woman. Gay partners won't be able to collect deceased partners' Social Security benefits, for example, said family lawyer Felice T. Londa, who represents many same-sex couples.

Social conservative groups and some lawmakers opposed the measure, saying it brings gay relationships too close to marriage, but it easily passed the Legislature.

"It's same-sex marriage without the title," said John Tomicki, president of the New Jersey Coalition to Preserve and Protect Marriage. "It uproots the cardinal values of our culture."

A website for the Practical Homeschool Magazine noted one of the first acts by Hitler when he moved into power was to create the governmental Ministry of Education and give it control of all schools, and school-related issues.

In 1937, the dictator said, "The Youth of today is ever the people of tomorrow. For this reason we have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very early age, at an age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore unspoiled. This Reich stands, and it is building itself up for the future, upon its youth. And this new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing."

"It is beyond belief that Germany is still enforcing a law that was written for one reason only to be used by Hitler to control and indoctrinate German youth. It had no other redeeming value," said Shoshona Bat-Zion on a homeschoolers' blog.

The German government, in a throwback to its National Socialist Workers Party heritage, has declared war on homeschool families, promising to bring those with banned "religious convictions" into alignment with the state regulations.

A government education official says the government is working to avoid future conflicts over homeschooling with one particular family by looking "for possibilities to bring the religious convictions of the family into line with the unalterable school attendance requirement."

The issue has U.S. experts on homeschooling very worried.
Michael Farris, cofounder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, has called for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to protect the right of parents to educate their children at home, in light of what is developing in Europe, and the growing influence of international court conclusions in the U.S.

His concern is that if the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child were ratified by the Senate or adopted by the federal courts as enforceable international law, American home schooling could be banned.
He notes that the parents' rights to control their children's education never were written into the U.S. Constitution because the Founding Fathers recognized that it was the Bible that gave parents a God-given right to educate their children at home or in a private or government school.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, regarded as the right-hand man to Osama bin Laden, made his comments in a video shown by Al Jazeera on Wednesday. In the video, al-Zawahiri said: "Any road other than jihad will only lead to loss." He also said: "Those trying to liberate the land of Islam through elections based on secular constitutions or on decisions to surrender Palestine to the Jews will not liberate a grain of sand of Palestine."

It was not clear when the videotape was recorded but its release comes as tensions are rising in the Palestinian territories after small-scale clashes and a call by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, for early elections.

Walid Batrawi, an Al Jazeera correspondent in Ramallah, said: "It's very hard to predict the effects of the message. It comes at a very sensitive time."

The request, made on Tuesday in a letter to the Security Council, comes after Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, appeared to admit in a TV interview that Israel had nuclear weapons. Javad Zarif, Iran's UN ambassador, said that Olmert's comments had "removed any excuse - if there ever were any - for continued inaction by the council in the face of this actual threat to international peace and security".

He said the council should "compel it [Israel] to abandon nuclear weapons, urge it to accede to the NPT [nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty] without delay and demand this regime to place promptly all its nuclear facilities under IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] full-scope safeguards".

The letter marks the first formal call for action to be taken against Israel and comes at a time when the Security Council is debating imposing sanctions on Iran in an attempt to halt the country's own nuclear programme.
Many have criticised the West as working under a double standard in pressing Iran to suspend its nuclear activities while ignoring Israeli weapons.

Hans Blix, former head of the IAEA, said last June that Israel is thought to have about 200 nuclear weapons. In his interview, broadcast in Israel on Channel 10, Olmert said: "Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?"

Israel has never formally acknowledged that it has nuclear weapons and has not a signed up to the NPT. Iran, which has signed the NPT, says that its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes and will not be used to make nuclear weapons.

The government has ordered the central bank to replace the dollar with the euro to limit the problems of the executive organs in commercial transactions," Gholam Hossein Elham, a government spokesman, said on
Monday. "We will also employ this change for Iranian assets [in dollars] held abroad." Elham said that Iran's budget would in future be calculated in euros.

"Until now the budget has been calculated according to revenues in dollars but this calculation will now change," he said.

The move comes amid pressure from the United States for the UN Security Council to agree sanctions against Iran over its controversial nuclear programme. The US alleges that Iran is covertly building a nuclear weapon. Iran says that its nuclear programme is purely for civilian use. Elham implied that the move to the euro would also apply to Iran's oil revenues.

"Foreign income sources and oil revenues will be calculated in euros and we will receive them in euros in order to put an end to our dependence on the dollar," Elham said. Bankers in Iran have said it has become difficult to receive Iranian-held money denominated in dollars from European bank accounts. They said that this was because of US pressure on European banking giants not to allow dollar-denominated funds to be sent into, or out of, the Islamic republic.

OAO Gazprom asked Georgian authorities to finalize the amount of Russian gas imports they want for next year at a price of $235 per 1,000 cubic meters, or risk receiving no gas at all, Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov said in a statement.

Georgia, which now pays $110, has accused Russia of using its energy resources as "political blackmail" and as a means of punishing the small, ex-Soviet republic for its efforts to join NATO and shake off the Kremlin's influence.

Russia denies the accusations, saying the price is similar to what it charges other European consumers.

His comments were believed to further fuel the outcry prompted by the two-day conference in Tehran finished on Tuesday, which wanted to debate what Iran calls "taboos surrounding the Holocaust." Participants at the event included some of Europe's and the United States' best-known Holocaust deniers and white supremacists.

"The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom," Ahmadinejad said, according to the official IRNA news agency. He also called for elections among "Jews, Christians and Muslims so the population of Palestine can select their government and destiny for themselves in a democratic manner."

Swiss Foreign Ministry spokesman Johann Aeschlimann said Tuesday that it was "unacceptable" to doubt the Holocaust's existence. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday the conference was "shocking beyond belief" and "a symbol of sectarianism and hatred." The White House condemned Iran for convening a conference it called "an affront to the entire civilized world."

Around 6 million Jews are estimated to have been killed by the Nazi regime during the Second World War.

The U.S. dollar has suffered a long process of deterioration," Domingo Maza Zavala, one of seven board members at the central bank of Venezuela, said in a Dec. 14 interview. "The diversification strategy started this year."
Banco Central de Venezuela has slashed the percentage of its $35.9 billion worth of reserves invested in dollars and gold to 80 percent from 95 percent a year ago, said Maza Zavala. The country, the world's fifth-largest oil supplier, has boosted its euro holdings to 15 percent, from less than 5 percent in the same period.

The dollar has slumped against the European currency in 2006 as growth in the euro region outpaced the U.S. for the first time in five years. It rebounded 0.7 percent last week to finish at $1.308 against the euro. The U.S. currency is little changed versus the yen this year, closing on Dec. 15 at 118.17 yen.

Bank Indonesia is boosting euro holdings, said Senior Deputy Governor Miranda S Goeltom in a Dec. 13 interview in Jakarta. Indonesia has $39.9 billion in reserves. Sultan Bin Nasser al-Suwaidi, the governor of the Central Bank of the UAE, last month said he was considering when to shift as much as 8 percent of the nation's $24.9 billion in reserves into euros.

The central banks are changing policy "because the oil price has come down a long way and the U.S. dollar has been declining," said Michael Derks, chief markets strategist at Arch Financial Products LLP, a London-based hedge fund. "The euro stands to benefit."

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which produces 40 percent of the world's crude oil, said at a Dec. 14 meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, that it would cut output by 500,000 barrels a day to boost prices. Crude gained 92 cents on Dec. 15 to $63.43, the highest close since Dec. 1. Prices have fallen from a high of $78.40 in mid-July.

Crude is priced in dollars and the U.S. is the biggest consumer, importing around $400 million worth of the fuel a day in 2005, according to data from BP Plc, Europe's second-biggest oil company.
Oil states will probably buy the European currency at a faster rate to bring their reserves closer in line with other nations, according to David Durrant at Julius Baer Investment Management in New York.

"They've done very little diversification in the past," said Durrant, an investment strategist at Julius Baer, which oversees about $40 billion. "We're at the start."