Mr Gates said on NBC's Meet the Press there was a possibility that the US could begin to withdraw forces by the end of this year. But he also made clear that any decision would depend on the outcome of a progress report by General David Petraeus, the senior military commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador, which is to be released to Congress in September.

The US defence secretary reiterated that he was disappointed with the resignation of Sunnis from the Iraqi cabinet last week and admitted that the administration had underestimated the deep mistrust between Iraq's sectarian factions.

But Mr Gates said that he disagreed with the recommendation by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group last year that the US reduce military and economic support for the Iraqi government if it failed to make substantial progress towards national reconciliation.

Both sides have suggested they are ready to try to sketch at least a partial outline for a peace deal. Palestinian officials said such an outline could be presented to the international conference, which is likely to be held in November. During a recent trip to the Middle East, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sought to gauge the support of moderate Arab states for a conference, and was told it must yield concrete results. She has assured Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that the gathering would have substance.

The Monday meeting will take place in the West Bank town of Jericho, said Abbas aide Nabil Amr. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said Saturday night that he would be meeting Abbas soon but staffers would not give a time or place. A meeting in Jericho would mark the first time Olmert visits a Palestinian town as prime minister. Abbas and Olmert have met periodically in recent months, to improve relations soured by seven years of fighting and to explore ways of resuming peace talks.

In the past week, Olmert said he is ready to discuss issues of substance, signaling a softening of positions. Israel had long insisted that Abbas rein in militants before peace talks resume. Since the radical Islamic Hamas group seized control of Gaza in June, Olmert has faced international pressure to help shore up Abbas and his West Bank-based government of moderates.

By the weekend, it had left at least 7.5 million people and 5 million head of livestock short of drinking water, according to figures from the Office of the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters (SFDH).

The figures also show the sustained drought has affected 11 million hectares of arable land, 1.7 million more than the same period of last year. Among the affected, about 9.8 million hectares, or 89 percent, are crop fields.

Enemies of the state are interrogated, a sex scandal engulfs the church and freak weather tests the nation's endurance. Such were the issues of the day - 320 years ago.

A diary discovered in a London research library has provided a fascinating insight into life in the late-17th century. And while the cast of characters - and the language used to describe them - has changed, it shows that the topics in the news were remarkably similar to today. Such is the detail in the 1,500-page memoir by Roger Morrice, it has been compared to the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who wrote at around the same time.

Historians at Cambridge University revealed extracts from the diary yesterday after spending seven years cracking the shorthand code in which much of it was written. One entry by Morrice, a Puritan priest who became a political reporter after being persecuted under Charles II, describes the arrest of suspected plotters against the King in October 1684.

In a scene bearing striking similarities to the alleged treatment of modern-day terrorist suspects, soldiers were ordered to keep one victim "from sleeping, which they did without intermission for nine or ten days". Writing of the winter of 1683-4, when the Thames froze over, Morrice writes: "Whole street on the Thames and booths set up.

"There were several bear-baitings and a whole ox was roasted. The king came to eat some of it." There is also the London sheriff's decision on hangman Jack Ketch's expenses claim for 'quartering of traitors, boiling their bodies'. "The sheriff thought it was very exorbitant and refused to pay it," he records.

The un-Christian behaviour of one of the country's most senior clergymen is exposed in the line: "The Bishop of London has lain in a bawdy house."

IN TOTAL, A RECORD 18,619 UNDER-18S HAD TERMINATIONS - despite a multimillion-pound Government campaign to bring down the numbers. ONE 18-YEAR-OLD HAD HER SIXTH ABORTION IN 2006. Another 135 girls under 14 terminated their pregnancies. The statistics - released by the Department of Health after a freedom of information request - show the number of teenage abortions has increased by more than 2,500 each year since Labour came to power.

Critics say they prove the Government's strategy, which focuses on sex education and easy access to morningafter pills, is failing. A spokesman for anti-abortion charity Alive and Kicking said: "THESE FIGURES ARE THE RESULT OF THE MODERN ATTITUDE TO SEXUALITY - THAT SEX IS JUST A RECREATIONAL ACTIVITY. The Government never addresses the problem at its roots; it just has the sticking plaster attitude of making abortions easy. ITS SEX EDUCATION CLASSES ARE CLEARLY NOT ENCOURAGING RESPONSIBILITY."

Professor David Paton of Nottingham University Business School said the figures were particularly disappointing "considering the millions that have been spent by the Government over the past few years on their teenage pregnancy strategy".

Reassuring because if the multinational firm Merial Animal Health Labs was responsible for the outbreak, then scientists will know exactly which strain of the virus is responsible and will have a vaccine readily available - indeed, the cause of the outbreak would have been the very foot and mouth vaccines that the scientists are producing in huge quantities. What's more, it will be known exactly where the outbreak began, and when.

Thanks to the prompt action by Surrey organic beef farmer Roger Pride (who should receive a medal for his vigilance), the source of the outbreak has been pinpointed immediately, reducing massively the chance of a nationwide epidemic. We might yet avoid a repeat of the terrible scenes of six years ago. But the news is also worrying because it highlights the fact that huge quantities of viruses and bacteria are held in laboratories all over Britain which we have been led to believe are safe. They include germs which have the potential to cause economic devastation and much worse.

According to Professor John Oxford, one of Britain's leading virus experts, outbreaks from labs are extremely unlikely. His own biosecure laboratory at Queen Mary College in London contains samples of the SARS virus (which killed several hundred people in Asia five years ago) and also the H5N1 bird flu virus which some scientists say has the potential to mutate into a virulent, infectious strain which could kill millions of humans worldwide.

What would be the chances of, say, an animal rights extremist or Islamist terrorist getting a job as a lab assistant or even researcher in the laboratory, smuggling out avian flu or something equally nasty, and causing havoc? "The rules are extremely strict," Professor Oxford says. "I would never allow a student into my lab. I have only three members of staff who are experienced enough to go in there, and they are all personally known to me."

We must assume, and hope, that similar rules are in place at other research establishments where such micro-organisms are kept. It is tempting to say that we should simply close these labs and that the risk they pose is too great. But, of course, such a proposal would leave us in far, far more danger. "You have got to grapple with infectious diseases," says John Oxford. "You can't grapple with them on the Moon, you have to do it on Earth."

The Prime Minister feared a public backlash if too many migrants were allowed to settle, and believed the country was storing up problems for the future. The papers, released yesterday by the National Archives in Kew, west London, show that the debate over what has become one of the nation's hottest political issues actually began half a century ago. At the time, large numbers of immigrants from Commonwealth countries such as the West Indies, India and Pakistan were heading to Britain to find work as the country struggled with the the post-war labour shortage.

Churchill's Cabinet papers gave a figure of 40,000 immigrants living in Britain in 1954, compared with 7,000 before the Second World War. Today, around 6million people living in Britain were born overseas, or one in ten. They include more than 600,000 migrants from Eastern Europe alone. On February 3, 1954, under the Cabinet agenda item 'Coloured Workers', Churchill is quoted as saying: "Problems will arise if many coloured people settle here.

"Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in UK? Attracted by Welfare State. Public opinion in UK won't tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits." Mr Maxwell-Fyfe raised the possibility of immigration control.

The Call To Prayer copied by ten-year-olds at Newlands Primary School in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, included the lines "Allah is the greatest" and "there is no god but Allah". Angry parent Hayley Clayton told the Sun: "The explanation was that the children were learning about Islam in RE.

"But this was like taking an oath. A Muslim child would never be asked to write a Bible passage." Her stepson Billy Darbyshire was one of the classmates told by his teacher, deputy head Helen Green, to copy the prayer. "Why didn't she choose a passage from a normal story book to teach handwriting?"

On July 11, 2000, at the Lome Summit in Togo, the states constituting the Organization of African Unity, signed a declaration to form the 53-nation African Union.

While the African Union professes to respect the sovereignty of the individual countries constituting the group, it still has created executive, legislative, and judicial bodies required for regional government, including an African Union Executive Council, a Pan-African Parliament and an African Union Court of Justice. And while the AU is still in a formative state, it's already officially designated by an emblem, a flag, an anthem, a central bank, and unified continental military force.

The goal of the African Central Bank is to create an African Single Currency. African Union planners are currently calling the African continental currency the "Gold Mandela." The United Nations has strongly supported the African Union as a major solution for the war, poverty, famine, and disease which have plagued the continent for decades.

Prof. Adebayo Adedeji, a former executive secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, has observed successful economic integration in Africa will require successful political integration.

All farms in Timis county belonging to Smithfield Foods - one the largest US meat processors - will be inspected for signs of infection, officials say. Road checks have been set up in the area to prevent the movement of meat. Swine fever is a recurrent problem in Romania, which has been banned from exporting pork to other EU countries.

Timis official Ovidiu Draganescu said that all 25 farms belonging to Smithfield Foods will be tested for swine fever. The virus has already been found in the Cenei farm, where the slaughter of pigs has already been ordered. Swine fever is a highly infectious disease. Infected pigs must be slaughtered and the carcases buried or incinerated

Smithfield - which claims to be the biggest pork producer in the world - bought the Timis farms in 2004. Animal health and food safety standards have been main concerns as Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union on 1 January 2007. The EU told both countries they would have to eradicate swine fever before they could sell pork in the rest of the EU without restrictions.

In April, 1975, NEWSWEEK published a small back-page article about a very different kind of disaster. Citing "ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically," the magazine warned of an impending "drastic decline in food production."

Political disruptions stemming from food shortages could affect "just about every nation on earth." Scientists urged governments to consider emergency action to head off the terrible threat of . . . Well, if you had been following the climate-change debates at the time, you'd have known that the threat was: global cooling.

But is that the right lesson to draw? How did NEWSWEEK - or for that matter, Time magazine, which also ran a story on the subject in the mid-1970s - get things so wrong? In fact, the story wasn't "wrong" in the journalistic sense of "inaccurate." Some scientists indeed thought the Earth might be cooling in the 1970s, and some laymen - even one as sophisticated and well-educated as Isaac Asimov - saw potentially dire implications for climate and food production.

After all, Ice Ages were common in Earth's history; if anything, the warm "interglacial" period in which human civilization evolved, and still exists, is the exception. The cause of these periodic climatic shifts is still being studied and debated, but many scientists believe they are influenced by small changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun (including its "eccentricity," or the extent to which it deviates from a perfect circle) and the tilt of its rotation.

But in any case, climatologists now are mostly agreed that human impacts are the real problem. The question has been, which specific impacts? In the mid-1970s, scientists were focusing on an increase of dust and "aerosols" (suspended droplets of liquid, mostly sulfuric acid) in the atmosphere. These, the result of increased agriculture and burning of coal in power plants, lower the Earth's temperature by reflecting sunlight back into space.

Ironically, clean-air laws in North America and Europe had the effect of reducing aerosols (which cause acid rain), so the predominant influence on climate now is the buildup of carbon dioxide?which traps the Earth's heat in the lower atmosphere and contributes to global warming.

Argos and Woolworths have been forced to withdraw a series of best-selling products made by Mattel, the US toy company, after tests showed they contained potentially dangerous levels of lead.

Argos has removed products based on the popular children's characters Dora the Explorer and Diego, according to the company, while Woolworths has also returned a number of unspecified products.

Tesco, which now also ranks among Britain's biggest toy retailers, said none of its products was affected by last week's Fisher-Price recall.

The bulk of British retailers' sourcing activities are now centred on the Far East, with manufacturing centres located in China and a growing number shifting to fast-emerging hubs such as Vietnam. Worries about the standard of product emerging from parts of Asia is likely to cause a rising number of supply-chain headaches.

The bill, aimed at bolstering security against terrorism, also requires the screening of all air and sea freight at foreign ports before being allowed into the US. The measures were among the recommendations made by the commission set up to investigate the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on the US.

Mr Bush said: "This legislation builds upon the considerable progress we have made in strengthening our defences and protecting Americans since the attacks of September 11 2001."

Visitors from 22 western European countries - including the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain - will be affected by the rule requiring travel plans to be registered online 48 hours before departure for the US.

The measure, expected to be introduced next year, is designed to increase scrutiny of visitors from the 26 developed countries whose citizens do not need visas to enter the US.

The 21 Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation group ministers called for urgent action to save the "Doha round negotiations" on a new world trade agreement and insisted that open and rules-based trade was crucial for sustaining regional growth.

"We regard a rise in protectionist trade and investment sentiment around the globe as a serious threat to growth and living standards in our region," said the ministers, warning that economic integration was generating "new ways of conducting business and new barriers to trade and investment".

The group, which includes the US, Japan, China, Russia, Canada and Australia, called for domestic reforms to ease trade flows and promised to work towards barrier-free trading in financial services, which has been resisted by many countries in the region.

In an apparent reference to concerns about the Chinese and Japanese currencies, Apec ministers called on countries to "dampen protectionist sentiment" by operating flexible exchange rates based on underlying economic fundamentals.

The language echoed Washington's pressure on Beijing for a faster appreciation of the renminbi, although some Apec countries - notably South Korea and New Zealand - have voiced concerns about the impact of the weak yen on the carry trade, in which investors borrow at low Japanese interest rates and invest in countries with higher interest rates. Robert Kimmitt, deputy US Treasury secretary, said there had been progress on currency issues at the talks, adding there was no difference between the US and China on the goal and direction of currency reforms.

His comments were made after Hank Paulson, the US Treasury secretary, visited China this week to discuss the value of the renminbi amid demands from some US Congress members for a faster appreciation of the Chinese currency in order to make US exporters more competitive. However, Jin Renqing, China's finance minister, indicated that his country would not be pressed, adding Beijing had already adopted a more flexible approach to its currency.

"The biggest problem for China is to maintain the good momentum in its economic growth," he said. "The reforms should be self-initiated, controllable and gradual."

Cemetery bosses are in talks with a British firm which plans to turn bodies to dust rapidly by submerging them in water and heating them to 150C (302F). The process - called resomation - is similar to cremation but the company claims it is better for the environment. This is because it uses less energy and does not emit any harmful chemicals.

When a body is cremated, it is heated to up to 1,200C (2,192F) and lets off a number of harmful gases, including high levels of mercury. With resomation, there is also no wooden coffin to be destroyed. Chemically, the process is similar to - but much faster than - natural decomposition. Afterwards, the 'bio-ashes' are returned to loved ones.

The Government is encouraging local authorities to find new ways of disposing of the dead because burial space is running out.