Medics attending the British Medical Association (BMA) conference voted by 67% to 33% in favour of removing the need for two doctors' signatures to allow an abortion in the first trimester. The move would effectively remove the need for women to meet medical criteria that continuing with the pregnancy poses a risk to their medical or physical health.

The move means that abortion in the first three months of pregnancy would be as easy to obtain as other treatments. However, doctors rejected calls for midwives and nurses to be able to carry out first trimester abortions with suitable training.

They also voted against relaxing laws on what is an "approved" place to carry out first trimester abortions. If doctors had voted in favour, it would have paved the way for abortions to be performed in places like GP surgeries.

The protests presented a rare public challenge to Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the president, whose popularity has been based on his pledge to share oil revenues more fairly and cut living costs for ordinary Iranians.

After attending a closed parliamentary session addressed by the interior and oil ministers, Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, Iran's parliamentary speaker, said fuel rationing, introduced at midnight on Tuesday, had to continue, to thwart US threats and the possibility of sanctions hitting petrol imports.

Though Iran is one of the world's biggest oil producers, its lack of refineries means it must import about 40 per cent of its petrol - of which it consumes about 75m litres a day. Iran imported $4.9bn (£2.45bn) of petrol in the year to March 20. This year, however, the government is authorised by parliament to import only $2.5bn.

Motorists were instructed to use smart cards last month to prepare for rationing but hundreds of thousands of drivers have yet to obtain them, including Tehran's 5,000-strong taxi fleet. The government has imposed rations of 100 litres of petrol a month for private cars, 450 litres for private taxis and 800 litres for shared taxis.

Researchers from Oxford and Cambridge universities have discovered that mice can produce embryonic stem cells very similar to those found in human embryos. The findings will make it easier to use mice, and other animals, to study human diseases and could lead to new treatments for conditions such as diabetes and cystic fibrosis in as little as five years. A steady supply of animal cells will lessen the need for stem cells taken from human embryos, a practice that is mired in controversy, as harvesting the cells from embryos leads to their death.

Stem cells are master cells which can change into every type of tissue. They are seen as a "repair kit" for the body, which can potentially replace the defective, dead and worn out cells behind conditions from diabetes to Alzheimer's. Until now, stem cells taken from mice have been very different to those found in human embryos.

But in two landmark pieces of research, carried out independently from one another, scientists have managed to obtain mouse embryonic stem cells that are virtually indistinguishable from their human counterparts. Not only do they look very similar to human cells under the microscope but they rely on the same proteins for growth and have many genetic similarities, the journal Nature reported.

The armada of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs broke free from a cargo ship 15 years ago. Since then they have travelled 17,000 miles, floating over the site where the Titanic sank, landing in Hawaii and even spending years frozen in an Arctic ice pack. And now they are heading straight for Britain. At some point this summer they are expected to be spotted on beaches in South-West England.

While the ducks are undoubtedly a loss to the bath-time fun of thousands of children, their adventures at sea have proved an innvaluable aid to science. The toys have helped researchers to chart the great ocean currents because when they are spotted bobbing on the waves they are much more likely to be reported to the authorities than the floats which scientists normally use.

And because the toys are made of durable plastic and are sealed watertight, they have been able to survive years adrift at the mercy of the elements. Boxes of the bathtime toys - made in China for the U.S. firm The First Years Inc - were washed overboard in the eastern Pacific Ocean one stormy January night in 1992 and broke open.

In the intervening time an oceanographer, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, has devoted his retirement to tracking the little yellow ducks and their friends over 17,000 miles, and it is he who has predicted that this summer they will land in the West of England. Mr Ebbesmeyer said: 'We're getting reports of ducks being washed up on America's eastern seaboard. "It is now inevitable that they will get caught up in the Atlantic currents and will turn up on English beaches. "Cornwall and the South-West will probably get the first wave of them."

Mr Ebbesmeyer said the toys will be easy for British beachboardcombers to spot because they have largely faded to white and have the words "The First Years" stamped upon them. Mr Ebbesmeyer saw immediately how valuable the little toys would be to scientific research of the great ocean currents, the engine of the planet's entire climate.

He correctly predicted what many thought was impossible - that thousands of them would end up washed into the Arctic ice near Alaska, and then move at a mile a day, frozen in the pack ice, around their very own North-West Passage to the Atlantic. It proved true years later and in 2003, the first "Friendly Floatees" were found, frozen and then thawed out, on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada.

So precious to science are they that the US firm that made them is offering a £50 bounty for finding one.

Eduardo Ermita said the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the rebel group negotiating to end nearly 40 years of rebellion in the south, has also welcomed the appointment of retired Lieutenant-General Rodolfo Garcia.

The government has been talking with Muslim rebels to end a conflict that has killed more than 120,000 people and displaced 2 million in the south of the mainly Roman Catholic country.

Talks over the size and wealth of a proposed homeland for 3 million Muslims have been stalled since September 2006 although backroom discussions continued, resulting in a breakthrough in December when Manila agreed to grant Muslims the right of self-determination.

Some 3.3 billion people will live in cities by 2008, a report by the U.N. population agency report said. By 2030, the number of city dwellers is expected to climb to 5 billion. Without proper planning, cities across the globe face the treat of overwhelming poverty and limited opportunities for youth, said U.N. Population Fund Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid. "In 2008, half of the world's population will be in urban areas, and we are not ready for them," said Obaid told The Associated Press in London.

A revival in religious interest has been a surprising characteristic of rapid urbanization, according to the report.
Urbanization is often associated with a shift toward secular values. But the growth of new religious movements?such as radical Islam in the Middle East, Pentecostal Christianity in Latin America and the cult of Shivaji in India?has been a primarily urban phenomena, the report said.

When cities fail to meet the needs of growing populations, religious beliefs tend to become extreme, said Obaid, who is also a U.N. undersecretary-general. "Extremism is often a reaction to rapid and sudden change or to a feeling of exclusion and injustice, and the cities can be a basis for that if they are not well managed," Obaid said.

The study by the United Nations University suggests climate change is making desertification "the greatest environmental challenge of our times". If action is not taken, the report warns that some 50 million people could be displaced within the next 10 years. The study was produced by more than 200 experts from 25 countries.

This report does not pull any punches - desertification is an environmental crisis of global proportions, it says, and one third of the Earth's population are potential victims of its creeping effect.

The announcement came just hours after he stood down as UK prime minister and shortly before it was announced he was to quit as a member of parliament.

Mr Blair said a solution to Mid-East problems was possible but it required "huge intensity and work".

He faces an uphill task to address Palestinian misgivings over his ties to Israel and the US, say observers.

During his final prime minister's questions on Wednesday, Mr Blair was asked about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

He told MPs: "The absolute priority is to try to give effect to what is now the consensus across the international community - that the only way of bringing stability and peace to the Middle East is a two-state solution."

Never before has there been a summer's day quite like it - but scientists say that Monday's monsoon-like downpours are the increasingly strange shape of things to come. Rain is only to be expected, naturally, in the weeks of Glastonbury and Wimbledon: our traditional summer would be scarcely be the same without either of these very British events suffering at least one washout. But Monday was something else altogether: the wettest day in what looks like being the wettest June on record.

More rain fell across Britain in just 24 hours than we usually receive during the whole of what is supposed to be "flaming June". The Environment Agency officially describes the deluge as "unprecedented" - and adds that, as a result, flooding went "off the scale".

But this is not simply an act of Nature. This flooding was also a result of systematic, shortsighted failings on part of successive governments. Now questions must be answered:

- Why has half the new housing built since the Second World War been built on flood-prone land?

- Why do we keep concreting over the countryside, destroying the natural drainage process?

- Why are less then 50 per cent of our major flood defence systems up to the job?

-Why have so many of our rivers been straightened in a disastrous attempt to control their flows?

- Why do local authorities and ministers continue to flout official planning guidelines?

Ministers have tightened up planning guidance against building in vulnerable land, but have woefully failed to enforce it. Worse, they have flouted their own rules - planning to build 200,000 houses on flood-prone land in the Thames Gateway.

Monday's floods have now sounded another, even louder alarm. The new prime minister, Gordon Brown must heed it. No-one in the Government better knows the value of money , but he has also shown that he appreciates the value of timely investment. He should now put an end to the irresponsibly short-sighted disregard of the Blair years, and start putting the cash aside for what look like being a frightening number of all-too-rainy days.

Blue Gene/P is three times more potent than the current fastest machine, BlueGene/L, also built by IBM. The latest number cruncher is capable of operating at so called "petaflop" speeds - the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

Approximately 100,000 times more powerful than a PC, the first machine has been bought by the US government. "Blue Gene/P marks the evolution of the most powerful supercomputing platform the world has ever known," said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing, IBM. The world's biggest computer-services company has built almost half of the 500 fastest supercomputers.

It is also currently building a bespoke supercomputer for the DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico. Codenamed Roadrunner, it will be able to crunch through 1.6 thousand trillion calculations per second.
The computer will contain 16,000 standard processors working alongside 16,000 "cell" processors, designed for the PlayStation 3 (PS3).

Each cell chip consists of eight processors controlled by a master unit that can assign tasks to each member of the processing team. Each cell is capable of 256 billion calculations per second. The power of the cell chip means Roadrunner needs far fewer processors than its predecessors.

The fallout from mortgage woes in the United States continued yesterday as the country's biggest housebuilder reported an unexpected loss and made a gloomy forecast in the face of mounting evidence that the housing crisis will ricochet across the economy. Lennar reported a dramatic swing in its fortunes, as it announced a $244.2 million (£122 million) loss for the second quarter, down from a $324.7 million profit the year before.

The group heaped further disappointment on its investors, revealing that its average house price fell by 7.5 per cent to $298,000 for the period. Stuart Miller, the chief executive of Lennar, said: "As we look to our third quarter and the remainder of 2007, we continue to see weak, and perhaps deteriorating, market conditions. We currently expect to be in a loss position in our third quarter."

House prices have suffered as a jump in defaults among high-risk sub-prime borrowers has combined with Federal Reserve interest-rate increases to push the average rate for a 30-year mortgage up to 6.60 per cent, reducing demand for properties.

- The near-collapse last week of two Bear Stearns hedge funds with significant exposure to sub-prime mortgages has heightened fears that fallout could be widespread

- Bear Stearns has agreed to inject $3.2 billion (£1.6 billion) into one of the funds, in the biggest hedge fund bailout since Long Term Capital Management collapsed in 1998

- Guy Moszkowski, the Merrill Lynch analyst, said Bear Stearns had not faced a "situation of this magnitude" in two decades as a public company

- The housing slide is hitting consumer confidence. The Conference Board index of sentiment for June fell to a ten-month low. Economists fear rising mortgage costs and falling house prices will restrict consumer spending

"Excess liquidity in the global system will be slashed," it said. "Banks' capital is about to be decimated, which will require calling in a swathe of loans. THIS IS GOING TO AGGRAVATE THE US HARD LANDING."

US property writer Paul Muolo described the Bearn Stearns crisis as the "subprime Chernobyl", saying the bank had created a "cone of silence". Abandoned by fellow banks, Bear Stearns has now put up $3.2bn of its own money to rescue one of the funds, a quarter of its capital. This is the biggest bail-out since the Long-Term Capital Management crisis in 1998, which Bear Stearns refused to join at the time. Bear Stearns is now alone, a case of rough justice being served.

The Mortgage Lender Implode-Meter that tracks the US housing markets claims that 86 major lenders have gone bankrupt or shut their doors since the crash began. The latest are Aegis Lending, Oak Street Mortgage and The Mortgage Warehouse. "THERE ISN'T A RECOVERY ABOUT TO HAPPEN," SAID ARA HOVANIAN, HEAD OF THE BUILDING GROUP HOVANIAN ENTERPRISE.

The worst of the US property crisis has yet to hit since there is an overhang of $2,000bn of mortgages with adjustable rates which have yet to be reset. MANY BORROWERS COULD SEE PAYMENTS JUMP BY HALF, OR EVEN DOUBLE. "WITH DEFAULTS AT THEIR HIGHEST IN THE 37 YEARS THAT RECORDS HAVE BEEN KEPT, IT COULD BE A LONG HOT SUMMER," said Mr Dumas.

Statistics show 23.5 per cent of all babies were born by caesarean section in 2005/6, up from 22.9 per cent the year before. Charities have said that they were concerned at the relentless increase which has seen the proportion of babies born by c-sections more than double since 1989. Midwives blamed staff shortages and ward closures brought on by Health Service deficits for the decline in natural births. Experts say a caesarean birth can increase a baby's chance of breathing difficulties, and mothers may find it harder to bond with a child while recovering.

The World Health Organisation has said there is "no justification" for any country having a higher caesarean rate than 10 to 15 per cent. Britain's rate far exceeds this and is higher than much of Europe, although it is lower than Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.S. It is believed to be partly due to the fact that mothers are getting older. Recent figures showed women over 40 were more than twice as likely to have a caesarean section than those under 20.

Experts have pointed to rising rates of obesity - fatter women are more likely to need a caesarean than those of normal weight - and the escalating number of women having multiple births, largely through IVF. The compensation culture may also be to blame. A recent survey indicated that many doctors carry out more caesareans than in the past because of fear of litigation if a natural birth goes wrong.

Fewer than half of all deliveries - 46.7 per cent - were described as "normal", meaning that there was no surgical intervention, use of instruments, induction or anaesthetic. Mary Newburn of the National Childbirth Trust said: "We are concerned to see that the normal birth rate has decreased, despite the Government's 2004 national service framework for children.

It revealed more than 900,000 Britons buy cocaine, which means the country has overtaken Spain as the biggest user in the continent. In addition, Britain's 350,000 heroin users are the largest number in any country in Europe.

The annual survey from the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime said that across most of the world drug abuse is holding steady or is in decline because of successful law and order campaigns to prevent their distribution, sale and consumption. But the falling tide in many countries is leaving Britain exposed as a thriving drugs market where millions remain addicted to or repeat users of illegal substances.

The report found cocaine use had gone up in Britain and added: "In absolute numbers estimates suggest that the UK's cocaine market, some 910,000 people, is even marginally larger than the market in Spain, some 890,000 people." It added "cocaine is now the second most widely used illegal drug in the UK after cannabis".

Families evacuated from these homes in the South Yorkshire village of Catcliffe were wondering last night how on earth their estate was allowed to be built beside land that would normally act as a flood plain. With thousands still cut off in the aftermath of this week's heavy rains, concerns were also growing over the failure to strengthen flood defences across the country.

Meanwhile, a desperate race against time continued last night to shore up a crumbling dam and save three villages from being swamped by 150 million gallons of water. As a massive clean-up operation was underway across much of Britain after severe flooding, one fireman at the scene in South Yorkshire said: "It's very serious, there's a 75 per cent chance it could burst."

The drama unfolded as many parts of the country were mopping up after some regions received a staggering four inches of rain in less than 24 hours - the wettest June day on record. This month is also on course to be the wettest June since ever.