Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. ALL FOUR MAJOR GLOBAL TEMPERATURE TRACKING OUTLETS (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, GLOBAL TEMPERATURES HAVE DROPPED PRECIPITOUSLY.

The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C to 0.75C -- A VALUE LARGE ENOUGH TO WIPE OUT MOST OF THE WARMING RECORDED OVER THE PAST 100 YEARS. All in one year's time. For all four sources, IT'S THE SINGLE FASTEST TEMPERATURE CHANGE EVER RECORDED, EITHER UP OR DOWN.

Finance minister of the group, which supplies 40 percent of the global crude demand, will meet to study the proposal, the organization's President Chakib Khelil said. Khelil, however, did not say when the ministers are scheduled to discuss the proposal amid the ongoing depreciation of the dollar. The idea was floated by Tehran and Caracas since the dwindling dollar has fallen 16.2 percent against a basket of major currencies since two years ago. Iran, the OPEC's second largest exporter, has already cut all of its ties with the greenback with respect to oil transactions.

Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani had also said earlier that amid concerns about the weakness of the US dollar in recent months, the oil-rich Persian Gulf littoral state would shift Qatari riyal from the US currency over the next six months. "The dollar lost a lot of value and energy worldwide is priced in the dollar, so all the producers are affected by the development on the dollar. This is a cycle so we have to live with it," Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah said.

The UAE is also likely to follow the lead, as Kuwait did last May.

French and German officials sought yesterday to play down the significance of the abrupt postponement - both by Paris - of two meetings between the countries' most senior politicians. Privately, and not so privately, the talk in both capitals is of a serious rift in the single most important national partnership in Europe. Officials blame an increasingly difficult relationship between President Nicolas Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel.

With France scheduled to take the presidency of the European Union in July, the Franco-German tiff could not be timed worse. There have also been tensions over the management of the euro and on foreign and defence policy. France has repeatedly criticised the monetary policy of the European Central Bank while ignoring its European commitments to restrain its budget deficit. Germany has refused to join a French-sponsored EU military mission to Darfur.

At the heart of the quarrel - not yet an overt crisis - is the strained relationship between the two leaders. German officials say that the hyperactive and boastful behaviour of the French President - and his over-familiar personal style - has irritated Ms Merkel. French officials suggest M. Sarkozy finds Ms Merkel too cautious and too ponderous. French diplomats also complain that M. Sarkozy - in his determination to shake up all aspects of French government - wants to play down the Paris-Berlin relationship that has been the bedrock of France's domestic and European policy for half a century. "For Sarkozy, the West very much means UK and the US," one French source said.

Known as ADIA (pronounced ah-DEE-ah), the fund recently formed a small team that is now buying big stakes in Western companies. This unit masterminded ADIA's $7.5 billion investment in Citigroup, the nation's largest bank, in November. It has also taken a large position in Toll Brothers, one of the country's biggest home builders. ADIA is the largest of the world's sovereign wealth funds, giant pools of money controlled by cash-rich governments, particularly in Asia and Middle East. But Abu Dhabi, the wealthiest of the seven Arab emirates, says little about its fund. Few outsiders know for sure where ADIA invests - or even how much money it controls. And secrecy breeds hyperbole; some estimates of the fund's size surpass $1 trillion.

The United States is not a big buyer of Abu Dhabi's oil, most of which goes to Asia, but the surplus is a vivid reminder of the American economy's own fiscal imbalance, to say nothing of its diminishing global stature, a theme that underpins much of the political worry surrounding sovereign fund investments. "In the short run, that they are investing here is good," Senator Bayh said. "But in the long run it is unsustainable. Our power and authority is eroding because of the amounts we are sending abroad for energy and consumer goods."

Between 2005 and 2006 the number of death certificates which mentioned the infection rose by 72% to 6,480, most of which were elderly people. In over half of cases, it was listed as the underlying cause of death.

C. difficile usually affects the elderly, and can prove fatal if antibiotic treatment fails to kill all the spores in the gut, and they take hold again before the patient's own gut bacteria have had chance to mount a resistance. It is also very difficult to eradicate from the ward environment, which means it is easy for other patients to become infected.

It wasn't hurricane season, either, when tropical storms regularly knock out power lines. It was a tranquil, balmy afternoon by the beach - the sort of "paradise" so many thousands of people migrate here for each winter.

But it was shattered by what should have been a small, isolated fire in an electrical substation on Miami's western fringe. A breaker shut down the facility, as it's programmed to do; but it failed to contain the problem, as it also should have, and so in response more than a dozen other substations in South Florida's electrical grid shut down as well. THAT CAUSED A CASCADING REGIONAL GRID COLLAPSE - INCLUDING THE TURKEY POINT NUCLEAR POWER PLANT SOUTH OF MIAMI - AS ELECTRICITY DEMAND SUDDENLY OUTSTRIPPED WHAT WAS BEING PRODUCED. Some 3 million people from South Beach to Tampa to Daytona Beach lost power. No one was hurt; but Miami's already dysfunctional traffic was rendered hopelessly snarled for rush hour.

Aside from the transit nightmare, the Florida blackout also revived the awful memory of August, 2003, when an even larger grid failure in the Northeast left 15 million people in the dark. Improvements to America's electrical reliability system have been put in place the past five years; but Tuesday was a reminder that THE COUNTRY'S POWER INFRASTRUCTURE IS STILL MORE VULNERABLE THAN MANY FEEL IT OUGHT TO BE.

President Mwai Kibaki's disputed re-election in a Dec. 27 vote sparked ethnic violence that killed 1,000 people and displaced 300,000, wrecking Kenya's reputation as one of Africa's most stable countries. Talks to end the crisis reached standstill earlier this week. But there were signs of progress on Wednesday when the opposition called off street protests and former U.N. chief Kofi Annan, who is mediating, said he believed Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga could still strike a deal.

John Githongo, who quit as Kenya's first anti-corruption adviser in 2005, said he was afraid there could be a new outbreak of violence if the stalemate persisted. Failure to end the crisis could also have serious economic consequences for Kenya, east Africa's fastest-growing economy, which Githongo said depended on its people's skills rather than gold, diamonds or oil. "If confidence goes, the most devastating thing that could happen to Kenya is for there to be not capital flight, but Kenyans leaving," he said.

The post-election violence has left Kenya increasingly divided along tribal lines. Asked if failure to end the crisis could eventually lead to the breakup of Kenya, Githongo said: "It is a horrific thought but for the first time I think everything is on the table. We are in completely uncharted water.

Latest - time.com - NAIROBI, - Kenya's rival politicians reached an agreement Thursday on a coalition government after weeks of bitter negotiations on how to end the country's deadly postelection crisis, mediator Kofi Annan said. "We have come to an understanding on the coalition government." He added: "All I can say is that we do have an agreement."

The University of Southern California found a lack of zinc, iron, vitamin B and protein in the first three years caused bad behaviour later on. At eight years old, children fed poorly were more likely to be irritable and pick fights than those fed healthily. Aged 11, they swore, cheated and got into fights, and at 17, they stole, bullied others and took drugs.

The researchers analysed the development of more than 1,000 children on Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Africa, over 14 years. They found the more malnurished the children were, the greater the anti-social behaviour later on. Report co-author Adrian Raine said parents could prevent their children developing bad behaviour by ensuring they get better diets.

"Poor nutrition leads to low IQ, which leads to later anti-social behaviour." At a societal level, should parents be thinking more about what kids are eating? "There's more to anti-social behaviour than nutrition, but we argue that it is an important missing link." Fellow researcher Jianghong Liu, of the university's Social Science Research Institute, agreed. "Identifying the early risk factors for this behaviour in childhood and adolescence is an important first step for developing successful prevention programmes for adult violence."

But Dr Ann Hagell, research development adviser at the Nuffield Foundation, a charitable trust which funds social and education research, raised doubts about the findings. "I would not dismiss the study out-of-hand but I would be surprised if diet plays a big role. In my experience diet is not part of the explanation. It can cause hyper activity disorders, but anti-social behaviour is more influenced by parenting and genetics and teen peer pressure in teenage groups."

Insurance experts said claims for structural damage and broken belongings were set to run into tens of millions of pounds. People across the UK reported feeling the tremor just before 0100 GMT. The epicentre of the 5.2 magnitude quake was near Market Rasen in Lincolnshire. The British Geological Survey (BGS) said it had received reports of people having felt the tremor from as far as Bangor in Northern Ireland, Haarlem in Holland, Plymouth and Edinburgh.

Scientists said while the tremor was small on a global scale, they described the earthquake as a "rare beast" and "significant" for the UK. They said they believed the earthquake could have been caused by an old fault line in the East Midlands rupturing.

The pharmaceutical industry came under assault from senior figures in medical research yesterday over its practice of withholding information to protect profits, exposing patients to drugs which could be useless or harmful. Experts criticised the stranglehold exerted by multinational companies over clinical trials, which has led to biased results, under-reporting of negative findings and selective publication driven by the market, which was worth £10.1bn in the UK in 2006, amounting to 11 per cent of total NHS costs.

The latest attack was triggered yesterday by an analysis of published and unpublished trials of modern antidepressants, including Prozac and Seroxat, showing they offer no clinically significant improvement over placebos (dummy pills) in most patients.

It was the first time researchers - from the UK, Canada and the US - had successfully used freedom of information legislation to obtain all the data presented to regulators when the companies applied to license their drugs. In some cases it had not been made public for 20 years. Over the past two decades the drugs, known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), have been among the biggest selling of all time, earning billions of pounds for their makers.

Yesterday's finding suggests that the money may have been misspent.

According to the report, by the year 2050 there will be 6.4 billion people living in cities, up from 3.3 billion at present. The world's total population is expected to rise to 9.2 billion in 2050 from the current figure of 6.7 billion.
As urbanization increases, the world's rural population is expected to begin declining in around a decade and should fall to 2.8 billion people in 2050 from 3.4 billion in 2007, the report said.

Some countries, like India -- home to two of the world's biggest metropolises, Mumbai and Delhi with 19 and 18.8 million people respectively in 2007 -- aim to slow down the process of urbanization by encouraging development of rural areas. Despite the challenges urbanization poses for governments and local authorities, Hania Zlotnik, head of the U.N. Population Division, told reporters urbanization is generally a sign of a lively economy. "Governments would be well advised that urban growth is a proof of economic dynamism," Zlotnik told reporters.

Tokyo is projected to remain the most populous city in the world. With 35.7 million people in its urban agglomeration at last count.

Annan suspended negotiations between government and opposition representatives on Tuesday when they failed to agree on details of a prime minister post in a planned power-sharing deal. He said he would "take the matter up" with President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga. "The leaders have to assume their responsibilities and become directly engaged in these talks," the former UN secretary general said.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday there was "no excuse" for the delay in resolving the crisis. "I am disappointed by the failure of leadership necessary to resolve all the remaining issues," Rice said in a statement. "There can be no excuse for further delay." Rice, who attended talks in Kenya earlier this month in a bid to help broker a compromise, said different options were being explored. But she added: "We will draw our own conclusions about who is responsible for lack of progress and take necessary steps. I want to emphasise that the future of our relationship with both sides and their legitimacy hinges on their cooperation to achieve this political solution."

Once seen as a beacon of peace among its war-wracked neighbours, Kenya is now reeling from one of its worst political crises since it gained independence from Britain in 1963.

"Ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable to see rates like this," said Dr. Mario Raviglione, director of WHO's "Stop TB" department. "This demonstrates what happens when you keep making mistakes in TB treatment." In Africa, where experts are particularly worried about a lethal collision between TB and AIDS, only six countries provided information. "We really don't know what the situation is in Africa," Raviglione said. "If multi-drug resistant TB has penetrated Africa and coincides with AIDS, there's bound to be a disaster."

Globally, there are about 500,000 new cases of drug-resistant TB every year, about 5 percent of the 9 million new TB cases. In the United States, 1.2 percent of TB cases were multi-drug resistant. Of those, 1.9 percent were extensively drug-resistant. The highest rates of drug-resistant TB were in eastern Europe. Nearly a quarter of all TB cases in Baku, Azerbaijan, were drug-resistant, followed by about 20 percent in Moldova and 16 percent in Donetsk, Ukraine, WHO said.

High rates of drug-resistant TB were also found in China and India, the world's two most populous nations that together are home to half the world's cases. "Multi-drug resistant TB is a threat to every person on the planet," Harrington said. "It's not like HIV, where you are only infected through specific actions. TB is a threat to every person who takes a train or a plane."

In comments published on Wednesday, Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa called for renewed Arab and regional efforts to end the standoff between the rival sides, whose power struggle is Lebanon's worst crisis since the 1975-90 civil war. Lebanon has been without a president for three months and the two sides are at odds over how to share seats in a new cabinet.

Moussa brokered two days of talks this week but failed to make progress towards resolving a conflict that continues to poison Arab ties ahead of an Arab summit in Syria next month. The governing coalition is backed by foreign powers including the United States and its Arab allies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The opposition is supported by Syria and Iran.

"The Arab League has accomplished what could be accomplished," he said. "The rest requires new Arab and regional efforts," As-Safir quoted the former Egyptian foreign minister as saying. The standoff is at the heart of a diplomatic rift between Syria and Saudi Arabia, whose King Abdullah is unlikely to attend the Arab summit unless the conflict is resolved.

It was Raul Castro's first meeting with a foreign visitor two days after succeeding his ailing brother Fidel Castro as the new leader of the communist-run country.

"With the greatest respect for the sovereignty of the country and its citizens, I expressed to President Raul Castro the concern of the Church over the prisoners and their families," Bertone said at Havana airport before his departure. Human rights groups say 320 Cubans are behind bars for expressing political views and are being held in overcrowded prisons.

Bertone said he hoped his six-day visit had given a new push to once strained ties between the Cuban state and the Catholic Church 10 years after Pope John Paul's historic trip to the island. But he said the relations would always be "challenging." Bertone's visit brought a welcome boost to the Church in Cuba through greater exposure in the state-controlled media.