Organisers of the "Family Day" expect at least 100,000 to attend the rally, backed by the Roman Catholic Church. The proposed law would allow all unmarried couples greater rights in areas such as inheritance, but stops short of legalizing gay marriage. The divisive issue is causing problems for Prime Minister Romano Prodi.

A counter-demonstration supporting the new legislation is also planned in Rome. There will be Catholics and Communists within Mr Prodi's coalition standing on opposing sides, magnifying the same divides that brought down his government in February, says the BBC's Christian Fraser. The demonstration has the backing of the Vatican and Italy's Catholic bishops, although neither is involved in organising of the protest.

"Family belongs to believers and non-believers alike," said Gaetano Quagliariello, a centre-right senator. "Family has to do with culture and civilisation." But Franco Grillini, president of Italy's main gay rights group, Arcigay, said the country was "scared of diversity".

Yet Mr Grillini said he welcomed the Family Day rally. "It will be a big protest against us, and that is the best advertisement we could ever have." bout 500,000 unmarried Italian couples are without shared rights or benefits. They miss out on social benefits, property or inheritance, a situation that is now at odds with many countries in Europe.

When Prime Minister Romano Prodi came to power last year he promised his supporters that the government would bring in new laws to protect cohabiting couples. But with only a razor-thin majority in the Senate, Mr Prodi needs the full support of all sides of his coalition, our correspondent says.

They had said Zimbabwe was unsuitable because of its human rights record and economic problems. It is suffering food shortages and rampant inflation. But Zimbabwe has dismissed such criticism, calling it an insult.
The country was chosen by other African nations. The CSD post rotates every year between the world's regions.

Zimbabwe was elected to lead the commission by a 26-21 secret ballot among CSD members at the UN headquarters in New York. There were also three abstentions. Zimbabwe's Environment Minister Francis Nheme will now become chairman of the CSD. Mr Nheme is the subject of European Union travel ban because he is a member of President Robert Mugabe's government.

That means he cannot travel to the EU to meet ministers on commission business.
"It's our right. We're members of the United Nations and we're members of CSD, and the Africa group did make a decision and endorsed Zimbabwe," he told the BBC's Network Africa programme. "They're making a storm out of a teacup."

He said the real objection came down to Britain's criticism of Zimbabwe's controversial land reform programme. Zimbabwe was once a prosperous food exporter, but production has plummeted since land reforms in 2000 that saw thousands of white-owned farms seized.
Meanwhile, Mozambique has threatened to cut electricity to its neighbour for failing to pay its debts.

Mozambique's Cahora Bassa dam supplies Zimbabwe with 500 megawatts of power. The BBC's Jose Tembe in Maputo says Zimbabwe has accumulated debt to the tune of $9m.

lined up at its harbor to board a ferry back to the mainland. Many covered their faces with towels and bandanas as ashes fell. "The city is threatened right now," Los Angeles County fire Capt. Ron Haralson said.

The blaze scorched more than 500 acres, including a commercial building and several storage buildings, but no homes had been destroyed as of Thursday night. Smoke hung over Avalon's quaint crescent harbor, the landmark 1929 Catalina Casino and homes, restaurants and tiny hotels that cling to slopes rising sharply above the waterfront.

Part of the city was under a mandatory evacuation order, Haralson said. "There's an eerie glow over the town, we need to leave," Dan Teckenoff, publisher of the Catalina Islander said earlier in the day during a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Catalina is a long, narrow island covering 76 square miles and is served by ferry boats from Los Angeles, Long Beach and other mainland harbors. Avalon has a population of 3,200 that swells to more than 10,000 on weekends and in summer, according to the Catalina Island Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau.

Researchers from the firm surveyed billions of sites, subjecting 4.5 million pages to "in-depth analysis". About 450,000 were capable of launching so-called "drive-by downloads", sites that install malicious code, such as spyware, without a user's knowledge. A further 700,000 pages were thought to contain code that could compromise a user's computer, the team report.

To address the problem, the researchers say the company has "started an effort to identify all web pages on the internet that could be malicious". "The user is presented with links that promise access to 'interesting' pages with explicit pornographic content, copyrighted software or media. A common example are sites that display thumbnails to adult videos." The vast majority exploit vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to install themselves.

Some downloads, such as those that alter bookmarks, install unwanted toolbars or change the start page of a browser, are an annoyance. But increasingly, criminals are using drive-bys to install keyloggers that steal login and password information.

Other pieces of malicious code hijack a computer turning it into a "bot", a remotely controlled PC. Drive-by downloads represent a shift away from traditional methods of infecting a computer, such as spam and email attachments.It found that the code was often contained in those parts of the website not designed or controlled by the website owner, such as banner adverts and widgets.

Widgets are small programs that may, for example, display a calendar on a webpage or a web traffic counter. These are often downloaded form third party sites. The study also found that gangs were able to hijack web servers, effectively taking over and infecting all of the web pages hosted on the computer.

In a test, the researchers' computer was infected with 50 different pieces of malware by visiting a web page hosted on a hijacked server. The firm is now in the process of mapping the malware threat. Google, part of the StopBadware coalition, already warns users if they are about to visit a potentially harmful website, displaying a message that reads "this site may harm your computer" next to the search results.

State monopoly Russian Railways, or RZD, said last week that the freight route to Estonia was undergoing regular maintenance, but trading sources said the cut in refined-products supplies was a Kremlin reaction to a dispute with Tallinn over the monument's relocation.

Estonian media have quoted industry sources as saying the country's railway firm could cut staff and reduce working hours due to lower cargo shipments from Russia. "I don't have any forecast for June," said the source at one of Muuga's terminals. "Everybody is waiting for a political decision. It has nothing to do with the economy."

In the course of the dispute over the memorial, Moscow has also imposed other trade curbs on Estonia, though it has denied any political motive. Restrictions have affected exports of Russian coal. Russia also canceled a train service and imposed curbs on a road bridge on the main highway into Estonia.

The collection has attracted interest from the military, which is interested in its potential against chemical and biological weapons.

A team at Cornell University in New York state has created a denim jacket that protects against air pollution and a dress that wards off colds and flu.
The clothes' protective qualities are due to microscopic metal particles that cling to the cotton fabric and destroy harmful particles in the air on contact.
The dress is impregnated with tiny particles of silver by dipping it into a special solution.
Silver and copper have antibacterial qualities, which are more effective when the particles are very small.
The dress kills off many harmful bacteria and viruses that touch it by stopping them from reproducing, said the scientists.
Nanotech clothing needs to be washed far less since the tiny size of the particles makes it harder for the fabric to absorb stains.
The nanoparticles in the hooded jacket are made of palladium, one of the metals used in catalytic converters to clean car exhausts.
According to its creators, clothes made from such a fabric would be particularly useful for allergy sufferers and anyone living in an area with high air pollution. Olivia Ong, a fashion student, wanted to create something that would deal with smog.
She approached Prof Juan Hinestroza and Hong Dong in the fibre science department at Cornell.
"Initially, we were just doing this for fun. "We didn't think this was going to make a big noise but it has," said Prof Hinestroza, who has already met with US Army chiefs to discuss the military potential of the project.
He said the process could also be used on fabrics such as carpets, curtains and car seats. However, a square yard of the cotton would cost about £5,000, but its creators expect that figure to drop if the cloth is produced commercially.
Unfortunately, the range only comes in yellow, purple, brown or black because the size of the nanoparticle determines the colour.
Prof Hinestroza said he had been inundated with job offers from fashion companies but he wants to concentrate on his research.
His next goal is to change the colour of a garment by moving the particles around the fabric, so that workers could go out in the evening without having to get changed.

The government is paying for some of the most advanced research into controversial face-recognition technology, which converts photos into numerical sequences that can be instantly compared with millions of photos in a database.

Face-recognition cameras have helped casinos spot known card counters and other unwelcome gamblers, said Walter Hamilton, chairman of the International Biometric Industry Association. More recently, 19 states have adopted the technology and compare driver's-license applicants with a photo database of license holders to see whether an applicant already has a license or is using a false identity, Hamilton said.

The Homeland Security research aims to make the technology work in one area where it has failed: surveillance. Tampa and Virginia Beach police removed face-recognition systems that did not yield a single arrest. During a test at Boston's airport in 2002, the system failed 39% of the time to identify volunteers posing as terrorists at security checkpoints.

Using face-recognition for surveillance is "enormously difficult" because systems photograph people at oblique angles or in weak light, both of which create poor images, said Takeo Kanade, head of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. Terrorists can defeat the systems with disguises or hats that shield their faces.

The Homeland Security research aims to counter shortcomings by creating technology that will "take a partial picture of a face and reconstruct that into a full frontal shot," Boyd said. "No one has done that before." Kanade said the research, by L-1 Identity Solutions of Stamford, Conn., "challenges the most difficult part of face recognition. It's a challenge worth pursuing."

Conveyors of a major world gathering commencing today in the Polish capital argue Europe the progenitor of Western civilization is on a steep population DECLINE That will make the continent increasingly hard to recognize in the coming decades.

WITH PLUNGING BIRTH RATES COINCIDING WITH REJECTION OF THE "NATURAL FAMILY" that for millennia has anchored cultures worldwide, a "demographic winter" is descending over Europe, contends Allan C. Carlson, founder and international secretary of the World Congress of Families, hosting more than 3,500 delegates from 75 nations through Sunday.

"If Europe is lost to demographic winter and radical secularism, much of the world will go with it," says Carlson and the international team that planned the event. Meanwhile, into the vacuum comes A FLOOD OF MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS LED BY MANY ON A MISSION TO SPREAD THE RULE OF ISLAM OVER THE PLANET, writes Mark Steyn in his book "America Alone."

The result already is becoming clear, Steyn insists: "EUROPE WILL BE SEMI-ISLAMIC IN ITS POLITICO-CULTURE CHARACTER WITHIN A GENERATION."
While it takes a fertility rate of at least 2.1 for a nation to replenish itself, countries known for big families, such as Greece and Spain, have fertility rates of 1.2 and 1.1 respectively.

"Poland saved Europe before" by lifting the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 and helping to demolish the Soviet empire three centuries later and it is likely "she will save Europe again," the World Congress planners hope though not without inevitable backlash from the European Union.

Legislation, for example, recently proposed by Polish Education Minister Roman Giertych that limits "homosexual propaganda" in schools was met with a resolution of condemnation in April by the European Parliament 325-124, with 150 abstentions. Arguing for his bill, Giertych, who will address the congress today, explained: "One must limit homosexual propaganda so that children won't have an improper view of the family."

World Congress founder Carlson countered "NORMALIZATION OF HOMOSEXUALITY IS A VALUE OF EUROPE'S ELITE." The Congress has a counterpart, in fact, the Council on Contemporary Families, which says it seeks to "deinstitutionalize marriage" and affirm an increasing number of women who choose not to marry and have children.

Carlson contends "the failure of CCF's vision can be seen in the family crisis in Europe." "Due to the Euro-elite's embrace of the CCF's anti-family ethic, fewer and fewer Europeans are marrying and having children," he said. "Those who do are choosing 'egalitarian unions,' where the emphasis is on self-fulfillment, rather than having and nurturing children. As a result, the European family is disappearing."

Meanwhile, a think tank in the UK published a report this week that urged Britons to have fewer children in order to help save the world from what it sees as the biggest threat to civilization, "global warming."
"The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet," said John Guillebaud, co-chairman of Optimum Population Trust, "would be to have one less child."

They say that the artificial blood is light to carry, does not need to be kept cool and can be kept for longer. The new blood is made up of plastic molecules that have an iron atom at their core, like haemoglobin, that can carry oxygen through the body.

The scientists said the artificial blood could be cheap to produce and they were looking for extra funding to develop a final prototype that would be suitable for biological testing.
Dr Lance Twyman, of the university's Department of Chemistry, said: "We are very excited about the potential for this product and about the fact that this could save lives.

"Many people die from superficial wounds when they are trapped in an accident or are injured on the battlefield and can't get blood before they get to hospital. "This product can be stored a lot more easily than blood, meaning large quantities could be carried easily by ambulances and the armed forces."

Hundreds of troops, some loyal to rival factions Hamas and Fatah, which only recently clashed in Gaza, have reportedly fanned out on the streets. Up to 400 people have died in clashes since the Islamist Hamas won last year's parliamentary elections. But the rival parties agreed to form a coalition government earlier this year.

"There is a full agreement," senior Fatah leader Nabil Shaath said of the deal between Fatah and Hamas. "The determination is there and I think what we will see in the next 48 hours is a full deployment to deal with the lawlessness in the Gaza Strip." He said forces loyal to Fatah and Hamas would now wear the same police uniform and answer to the interior ministry, which has been placed under the control of a political independent in the coalition government.

The first phase was set to last 100 days and to cover traffic and crime fighting, the Associated Press said. Gaza has been in turmoil since Israeli forces pulled out in 2005. Factional rivalry, criminality, and high unemployment have prevented the territory from functioning normally, while the flow of aid has also been hit by Western restrictions.

Kidnapping has become rife in Gaza. One of the recent victims is the BBC's Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston, who was seized at gunpoint more than eight weeks ago and is still being held.

The United Nations has already imposed limited sanctions after Tehran rejected resolutions ordering it to freeze the work. Iran says its nuclear program is for electricity to benefit its economy by allowing it to export more oil and gas. Political directors from the five permanent U.N. Security Council members -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China -- plus Germany assessed the situation on the sidelines of a Group of Eight meeting in Berlin.

It was not immediately clear what decisions, if any, were made at the closed-door meeting. Diplomats from countries attending said the Americans had been eager to discuss possible language for a new sanctions resolution. In Washington, U.S. President George W. Bush tried to keep up the pressure on Tehran, telling a Republican National Committee gathering, "One of the great dangers facing civilization is an Iran with a nuclear weapon."

Urging American resolve in the unpopular war in Iraq, Bush said Iran would be emboldened if the United States withdrew its forces "before the job was done." U.S. officials have accused Iran of meddling in Iraq, a charge Tehran denies.

A recent study revealed that half of them are unable to string a sentence together at age five. As a result, ministers are encouraging the use of the special "early talk" programme, targeted at infants from their earliest months to age five, which uses signing, gestures and symbols to expand vocabulary. Research from the children's charity I CAN revealed last year that half of youngsters - rising to 84 per cent in some areas - begin formal education with "impoverished speech and language".

They are unable to utter a whole sentence and can understand only simple instructions. The charity's spokesman, Clare Geldard, said: "We know from nursery teachers and reception class teachers that children are coming in with fewer speech and language skills, for example they only use short sentences and their vocabulary is not as enriched. "The environment and society in which we live at the moment is less supportive of developing children's language."

She said she knew of one speech therapist who found that none of the three-year-olds she was assessing could say more than one word at a time. Mrs Geldard went on: "The parents think, 'Oh it will be all right when they get to school - the school will bring them up to the right level'. But if a child is not talking before they go to school, they won't be able to springboard into academic learning.

"Half of them will become frustrated at not being able to understand instructions and express themselves. They will be labelled naughty children. "The remainder, the ones I really worry about, will withdraw and nobody will notice they have a problem until much later."

The baby hatch, modelled on a project in Germany, went into operation at a Roman Catholic hospital in the city of Kumamoto, some 900 kilometres (560 miles) southwest of Tokyo. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has urged Japan to return to "family values," opposed the idea but found no legal grounds to stop it.

Advocates say the plan, if replicated, could help boost the dwindling birth rate in Japan, where abortion is widely accepted. The city of Kumamoto approved the Jikei Hospital's plan in April after deciding it did not violate any laws. Called "the cradle of storks," the hatch is set into the wall of the hospital's lobby like a mailbox.

It has a door, 50 centimetres (20 inches) by 60 centimetres (24 inches), with a drawing of two storks carrying a baby and a message reading, "Please leave something with the baby." When the door is opened, a nurse is alerted by an alarm. There is an intercom next to the door to encourage parents to contact hospital staff.

"When I saw a simulation, in which a baby doll was placed into the hatch, I again felt determined that we must build a society in which this hatch will never be needed," Kumamoto Mayor Seishi Kouyama said, as quoted by Jiji Press.

No babies were left in the hatch during the first hours that it was open.

Andrea's winds had helped fan the 225 wild fires burning in Florida, where the winter dry season was the third-driest on record. Much of the state was under water-use restrictions and blanketed with smoky haze from the fires.

Andrea was a subtropical storm, lacking the warm core and thunderstorms characteristic of a tropical storm. All warnings were dropped and the system was downgraded to a depression on Thursday when its sustained winds weakened to 35 mph (55 kph).

Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center said Andrea still could bring an inch of rain to coastal areas as the remnants drifted off the northeast Florida coast.That would hardly be enough to douse the fires that burned in 52 of Florida's 67 counties.

It follows a huge rise in cases of Lyme Disease in Scotland and encephalitis amongst travellers to mainland Europe, spread by ticks. Both infections are severely debilitating and can be fatal.

A decade ago there were just 10 cases of Lyme Disease in Scotland, but last year that figure had risen to 177.
The advice to anyone heading into the countryside is to wear insect repellent and long trousers if possible and to check themselves thoroughly afterwards. Ticks should be removed by gripping them close to the skin with tweezers and pulling backwards without jerking or twisting.

They are common in woodland, heath land and in particular areas in Scotland where deer graze. More recently they have also been found in urban parks. A spokesman for the Tick Alert campaign said: "Ticks are second only to mosquitoes for carrying disease to humans. "Travellers and holidaymakers visiting rural areas are at risk from tick bites, but also when spending time in public spaces including beer gardens, picnic spots and parks and gardens.

"Make sure you know about bite prevention, how to look out for the early symptoms and remember to seek advice well before your travel date." Lyme disease varies widely but can include a rash and flu-like symptoms in its initial stage, followed by the possibility of musculoskeletal, arthritic, neurological, psychiatric and cardiac problems.