The Serious Organised Crime Agency said 73 tonnes of cocaine with a street value of £3bn were uncovered.
In its annual report, Soca also reveals it has prevented 35 potential murders by working with police forces using high-tech surveillance techniques. It says it has arrested some of its list of 1,600 organised crime chiefs.

The agency began operation in April following the merger of the National Criminal Intelligence Service, the National Crime Squad and other law enforcement agencies.

Up to three million are thought to have fled to South Africa, amid a worsening economic and political crisis. There is high unemployment, and fuel and food shortages across Zimbabwe. Addressing parliament, Mr Mbeki said it was not possible to put "a Great Wall of China" between the two countries and stop people walking across the border.

The annual rate of inflation in Zimbabwe has soared to 3,731.9% - by far the highest rate in the world, official figures show. Mr Mbeki has always preferred "quiet diplomacy" to public criticism of President Robert Mugabe's government. But recently, senior ANC official Toxyo Sexwale said he feared that the Zimbabwe government was not listening and the "volume may have to be turned up".

Speaking after an EU-Russian summit, Mr Barroso said the EU was based on principles of solidarity. The summit in the Volga city of Samara was overshadowed by Moscow's rows with countries including Estonia and Poland. Disputes between Moscow and Brussels have also arisen over the status of Kosovo, energy supplies and trade.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency, expressed concern at the difficulties opposition activists were reporting in getting to the summit venue.
Initially the main summit issue was the security of Europe's energy supplies - much of which come from Russia.

But the BBC's Richard Galpin, who was at the summit, says there were now sharp differences over the future status of Kosovo, on how to resolve a trade dispute with Poland and over Estonia's treatment of ethnic Russians.

In a break with previous practice, no joint declaration was prepared. Nor would the two sides be able to begin delayed talks on a new strategic partnership agreement, because of a veto imposed by Poland, now supported by Lithuania. The veto follows Russia's decision last year to block meat imports from Poland over apparent food safety issues.

The EU has also said it could withhold final approval of Russia's bid to join the World Trade Organization until trade tariff problems are resolved. A major factor in the deterioration of relations has been Estonia's removal last month of a World War II monument to Red Army soldiers in central Tallinn.

The event sparked unrest by ethnic Russians in Estonia, and a blockade of the Estonian embassy in Moscow.
More recently, EU leaders have expressed alarm about Russian threats to veto a UN Security Council resolution proposing Kosovo's independence from Serbia.

The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering. Websites and services such as Skype and Google Maps were blocked, it said. Such "state-mandated net filtering" was only being carried out in "a couple" of states in 2002, one researcher said.

"In five years we have gone from a couple of states doing state-mandated net filtering to 25," said John Palfrey, at Harvard Law School, "What's regrettable about net filtering is that almost always this is happening in the shadows. A number of states in Europe and the US were not tested because the private sector rather than the government tends to carry out filtering, it said.

The filtering had three primary rationales, according to the report: politics and power, security concerns and social norms. The survey found evidence of filtering in the following countries: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma/Myanmar, China, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, UAE, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen.

The move could stop 150 babies a year from developing conditions such as spina bifida, the Food Standards Agency said.It could also improve the general health of the 13million Britons who do not consume enough of the essential nutrient.

Critics claim, however, that the measure is the latest excess of the nanny state, as it will over-ride consumers' choice on what they eat. They also fear the fortification of the nation's diet with folic acid could be harmful to some. There are concerns it can mask a vitamin B12 deficiency in the elderly, which can seriously damage the nervous system.

Some reports even suggest particularly high levels of folic acid might speed up the development of a particular type of cancer. The FSA believes, however, that the benefits far outweigh these small risks.

His long-awaited formal switch to the faith of his wife and family will come shortly after he surrenders office, it is claimed.The Prime Minister's decision to formalise his Catholic beliefs was revealed by Father Michael Seed, a leading cleric at Westminster Cathedral, when speaking at a memorial service.Father Seed is regarded as unofficial Catholic chaplain to Westminster and is a regular visitor to Number 10.

Last year Cherie Blair praised him for his "ability to reach out to all kinds of people, whether it is the homeless on the streets to the people in the highest places in the land, including even in Downing Street." Mr Blair has long been expected to complete his conversion to Catholicism after leaving Downing Street. He has regularly attended Catholic services, both with his family and alone, in recent years.But he has not been seen in a church of his professed Anglican faith except on official occasions.

While opposition leader in the mid-1990s Mr Blair regularly took communion with his wife and children at a Catholic church in Islington, a step which signals full loyalty to the faith. Mr Blair is widely considered to have remained an Anglican because of the potential complexities of conversion while in office.

Some lawyers consider that the 1829 Emancipation Act, the law which gave Roman Catholics full civil rights, may still prevent a Catholic from becoming Prime Minister.The Act contains clauses which say no Catholic adviser to the monarch may hold civil or military office.

In recent months the current English Catholic leader, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, has been severely critical of the Sexual Orientation Regulations which the Prime Minister has pushed into law.These, Catholic leaders say, will force Christians to act in conflict with their principles. The Cardinal has threatened to close Catholic adoption agencies if they are forced to place children with gay couples.

Why was the Senate silent?

In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: "What has happened to our country?" People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

It is too easy and too partisan to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us?

Why has America's public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw powe remains the central premise of American democracy.

This premise is now under assault.

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1622015,00.html

The minorities figure stood at 100.7 million, up from 98.3 million a year earlier. Within that, the Hispanic population was the fastest growing at a rate of 3.4 percent between July 2005 and July 2006.

Hispanics were also the largest minority group, accounting for 44.3 million people on July 1, 2006, or 14.8 percent of the overall U.S. population which, according to census data released in October 2006, stood at more than 300 million.

Estonia, one of the most internet-savvy states in the European Union, has been under sustained attack from hackers since the ethnic Russian riots sparked in late April by its removal of a Soviet war memorial from Tallinn city centre. Websites of the tiny Baltic state's government, political parties, media and business community have had to shut down temporarily after being hit by denial-of-service attacks, which swamp them with external requests.

Estonia, he said, depended largely on the internet because of the country's "paperless government" and web-based banking. "If these services are made slower, we of course lose economically," he added.

While the government in Tallinn has not blamed the Russian authorities directly for the attacks, its foreign ministry has published a list of IP addresses "where the attacks were made from". The alleged offenders include addresses in the Russian government and presidential administration.

Anton Nossik, one of the pioneers of the Russian internet, sees no reason to believe in Russian state involvement in the hacking, beyond the fanning of anti-Estonian sentiment. "Unlike a nuclear or conventional military attack, you do not need a government for such attacks," he told the BBC News website. "There were anti-Estonian sentiments, fuelled by Russian state propaganda, and the sentiments were voiced in articles, blogs, forums and the press, so it's natural that hackers were part of the sentiment and acted accordingly."

Hackers, he points out, need very little money and can hire servers with high bandwidth in countries as diverse as the US and South Korea. The expertise is "basic", he says, with virus scripts and source codes available online and there are "hundreds of thousands of groups who have the resources to launch a massive virus attack". "The principle is very simple - you just send a shed load of requests simultaneously," he says.

For Mr Nossik, of more concern is how the global net can protect itself against the big virus attacks like the Backbone Denial-of-Service attack in February which hit three key servers making up part of the internet's backbone.

Populations of seven species have had dramatic declines across the continent since West Nile emerged in the United States in 1999, according to a first-of-its-kind study.

The research, to be published Thursday by the journal Nature, compared 26 years of bird breeding surveys to quantify what had been knowanecdotally."We're seeing a serious impact," said study co-author Marm Kilpatrick, a senior research scientist at the Consortium of Conservation Medicine in New York.West Nile virus, which is spread by mosquito bites, has infected 23,974 people in confirmed cases since 1999, killing 962, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But the disease, primarily an avian virus, has been far deadlier for birds. The death toll for crows and jays is easily in the hundreds of thousands, based on the number dead bodies found and extrapolated for what wasn't reported, Kilpatrick said. It hit the seven species American crow, blue jay, tufted titmouse, American robin, house wren, chickadee and Eastern bluebird hard enough to be scientifically significant. Only the blue jay and house wren bounced back, in 2005.

The hardest-hit species has been the American crow. Nationwide, about one-third of crows have been killed by West Nile, said study lead author Shannon LaDeau, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in Washington. The species was on the rise until 1999. In some places, such as Maryland, crow loss was at 45 percent, and around Baltimore and Washington, 90 percent was gone, LaDeau said.

"It tends to be more suburban areas. Some of the common backyard species including the blue jays, the robins, the chickadees have suffered significant declines," LaDeau said. "That heavily packed urban corridor is a bad place to be a bird. The reason for that is that the mosquito prefers human landscape. They do very well in suburbia."

The birds act as an early warning system for humans, said Wesley Hochachka, assistant director of bird population studies at Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "If you start seeing crows dying and dying in numbers, that means there could be a human outbreak," said Hochachka, who was not involved with the study.

Iraq faces the distinct possibility of collapse and fragmentation, UK foreign policy think tank Chatham House says. Its report says the Iraqi government is now largely powerless and irrelevant in many parts of the country.
It warns there is not one war but many local civil wars, and urges a major change in US and British strategy, such as consulting Iraq's neighbours more.

The report comes as Iran said Iranian and US diplomats would hold talks on 28 May on the security situation in Iraq. Meanwhile, the UK Foreign Office stated that security conditions, although "grim" in places, varied across Iraq. "Most insurgent attacks remain concentrated in just four of Iraq's 18 provinces, containing less than 42% of the population," a Foreign Office spokesman told the Press Association news agency. "Iraq has come a long way in a short time," he added, saying the international community "must stand alongside the Iraqi government".

Mr Stansfield, of Exeter University and Chatham House, argues that the break-up of Iraq is becoming increasingly likely. In large parts of the country, the Iraqi government is powerless, he says, as rival factions struggle for local supremacy. The briefing paper, entitled Accepting Realities in Iraq, says: "There is not 'a' civil war in Iraq, but many civil wars and insurgencies involving a number of communities and organisations struggling for power."

Le Figaro reports that Berlin and Brussels are concerned that trying to get agreement among all 27 member states might result in an EU treaty which would be too minimalist, given the responses to a questionnaire circulated by Angela Merkel last month.

The German presidency is now interested in an alternative French proposal which would involve having TWO TREATIES ONE WHICH DEALS WITH INSTITUTIONAL CHANGES AND A SECOND WHICH DEALS WITH POLICIES, which, Le Figaro reports, could give the EU new powers, on climate, energy and immigration. The idea is that those countries not wanting to adopt this second treaty could remain outside of it without preventing other member states to pursue greater integration.

The front page of the FT reports that Angela Merkel plans TO OFFER BRITAIN AN OPT-OUT arrangement on crime and justice issues in return for giving up the veto in this area in the new treaty. However it also suggests that any SUCH AN OPT-OUT MIGHT BE TIME-LIMITED. Hans-Gert Pöttering, President of the European Parliament and a confidant of Ms Merkel, told Handelsblatt that we can think about time-limited opt-outs if it helped secure a deal. Tony Blair's aides said the Prime Minister had not decided whether he would even want the opt-out.

E Monde notes the German presidency's insistence on keeping the Charter of Fundamental Rights, perhaps as a protocol with full legal value. However, in an article in Die Welt Pöttering sasy that the Charter could be included in the second, 'optional' treaty.

Johnny Dymond, BBC Europe Correspondent, noted on the Today programme that ALTHOUGH THE NEW TREATY WILL NOT BE EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE CONSTITUTION, IT MAY HAVE THE SAME SORT OF INSTITUTIONAL IMPACT. David Heathcoat-Amory, who sat on the original European Convention which drew up the Constitution, was interviewed. HE SAID, THEIR GAME IS TO GET AS MUCH OF THE SUBSTANCE OF THE CONSTITUTION THROUGH, BUT NOT CALL IT A CONSTITUTION IN ORDER TO AVOID REFERENDUMS AT ALL COSTS. He also criticised THE SECRETIVE NATURE OF NEGOTIATIONS, and the refusal of the British Government to even outline its position.

While the idea of a flexible or two speed Europe is good in principle, it sounds like MERKEL AND SARKOZY ARE KEEN TO USE IT AS A THREAT IN ORDER TO PRESSURE MEMBER STATES INTO SIGNING UP TO THINGS THEY DON'T WANT.

or four decades, Israel has pushed to build and expand Jewish neighborhoods, while trying to restrict the growth in Arab parts of the city. Yet two trends are unchanged: Jews moving out of Jerusalem have outnumbered those moving in for 27 of the last 29 years. And the Palestinian growth rate has been high.

In a 1967 census taken shortly after the war, the population of Jerusalem was 74 percent Jewish and 26 percent Arab. Today, the city is 66 percent Jewish and 34 percent Arab, with the gap narrowing by about one percentage point a year, according to the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies.

Jerusalem's profound religious and historical significance makes its status perhaps the single most explosive issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict. And that status clearly would become even more contentious were the balance of the population to tip toward the Arabs. This is a specter that worries Israelis, even as the 40th anniversary of their victory in the June 1967 war approaches.

"The Jewish people dreamed for centuries of getting back their ancient capital," said Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and author of "The Fight for Jerusalem." Nineteenth-century immigration to Jerusalem, site of the biblical Jewish temples, gave the city a Jewish majority that has been in place since the 1860s, he said.

Jerusalem's profound religious and historical significance makes its status perhaps the single most explosive issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict. And that status clearly would become even more contentious were the balance of the population to tip toward the Arabs. This is a specter that worries Israelis, even as the 40th anniversary of their victory in the June 1967 war approaches

Jerusalem's Jewish population is still growing despite the out-migration, but only by a little more than 1 percent a year - not enough to match the annual 3 percent increase among Arabs. The small Jewish increase is a result of an extraordinarily high birthrate among the ultra-Orthodox, who make up about a quarter of the city's population; on average, each of these woman has more than seven children.Yet as the ratio of ultra-Orthodox Jews increases, so does the outflow of secular Jews.

Tennessee was the hardest hit, with 23 deaths reported. Three people died in MISSOURI and one in ILLINOIS..
In ARKANSAS, dozens of people were injured when tornadoes hit the north-eastern part of the state. Heavy storms also battered KENTUCKY and INDIANA, where thousands of concert-goers were forced to flee as tornado sirens went off.

The storms uprooted trees, brought down power lines and overturned mobile homes and cars across wide sections of some central states. "This is a high fatality count," a spokesman for the TENNESSEE Emergency Management Agency said on Sunday. Officials said the death toll there was likely to rise.

Most of the deaths were in Tennessee along a 25-mile (40km) path, stretching from Newbern - about 80 miles (129km) north-east of Memphis - to Bradford, officials said. In Illinois, the search for any other possible victims under the rubble of a collapsed shop - where one man is known to have died - was hampered by a gas leak.

The Arkansas town of Marmaduke suffered extensive damage. Fire department officials told the AP that nearly half of the buildings had been destroyed. The US National Weather Center warned on Monday that severe storms, with tornadoes and large hail, could hit the Carolinas and Virginia later in the day.

The head of the Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, said his presence in Iraq would expose the 22-year-old Prince as well as the troops serving with him to "a degree of risk that I now deem unacceptable".

In a statement, Clarence House admitted that the Prince was "very disappointed" that he would not be going with his squadron in the Household Cavalry.But a spokesman insisted that he would not quit the Army.

Gen Dannatt said that he had finally reached the decision that the risks were too great after visiting Iraq himself at the end of last week.