They range from the very young to a woman of nearly 101 and had already started arriving last night, by train, foot, bicycle and on horseback. A multitude of protesters, harbouring anger and indignation over some of the most basic tenets of the Government's foreign, environmental and judicial policies, will gather today, on the eve of the Labour Party conference in Manchester, for one of the biggest public protests the city has seen in modern times.

About 30,000 people are expected to mass in the city ahead of a three-hour march, under the banner "Time to Go", aimed at challenging Tony Blair's stance on a number of emotive issues: the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Government's response to the bombing of Lebanon this summer, the next generation of nuclear weapons, the building of new nuclear power stations and the deportation of failed asylum-seekers.

The protest was well under way at lunchtime yesterday as scores of people joined an anti-war "peace camp", set up by Military Families Against the War (MFAW) on Thursday afternoon. The protesters appear to have benefited from Manchester City Council's decision to refuse them permission to camp at Albert Square in the city centre on safety grounds. Facing a showdown with MFAW's Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon died in Iraq two years ago, the council found a compromise location in St Peter's Square on the opposite side of Manchester town hall. The Labour council leader, Richard Leese, tried to smooth things over by arriving to declare the camp open, but the furore created by the initial refusal had boosted the camp's tents to more than 20 by yesterday afternoon.

At 1pm today, their occupants will join the protest march on a route which circles the large city centre "island" - encompassing the Manchester International Conference Centre, the G-Mex centre and the Midland and Radisson hotels - which has been closed to the public for the duration of the conference.

MICHAEL Dickinson, the British artist accused of "insulting" the Turkish prime minister, was released from custody yesterday.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) -- Europe's soil is rapidly deteriorating from industrial and agricultural use and new laws are needed to preserve it for future generations, the European Commission warned on Friday.

The European Union's executive proposed new rules to preserve and restore soil quality, urging EU governments to tackle a problem it said cost society billions of euros a year.

"The quality of European soils is declining at an alarming rate," Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said.

Only nine of the EU's 25 member states had laws to protect soil, he told a news conference.

The Commission's proposal will require EU countries to identify areas that are at risk of erosion, landslides and other threats. Targets to reduce the risk must be set and strategies drawn up to achieve the targets.

MOSCOW (RIA Novosti) - September saw new signs of Italy's interest in close energy partnership with Russia. Prime Minister Romano Prodi has said that Italy intends to buy assets of Gazprom and the issue has been discussed with President Vladimir Putin.

Prodi said the assets of the Russian state-owned gas monopoly were of priority significance for Italy.

This stand of the Italian leader is confirmed by the actions of the country's leading energy concerns and their unflagging interest in investment in Russia and acquisition of its production assets.

Enel SpA has announced its plan to invest 2-4 billion euros in Russia. It intends to buy a number of electric power plants and gas assets that would supply resources to them by the end of 2007.

Another Italian energy giant, ENI, hopes to sign a major partnership agreement with Gazprom in October 2006. ENI CEO Paolo Scaroni said he hoped the contract would be drawn up in the spirit of close and preferential partnership. As a result, Russian companies will get direct access to Italy's energy market in exchange for giving Italian companies access to oil and gas production in Russia.

Paris: Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Paris yesterday on a visit that will test Western responses to Moscow's push to use its booming oil and gas revenues to gain a foothold in some of Europe's key industries.

Putin is due to dine with French President Jacques Chirac before the two leaders join German Chancellor Angela Merkel for a three-way meeting today where Moscow's aim of joining the core of aerospace group EADS will be a top issue.

That will add an extra twist to the familiar themes of energy policy and Iran's nuclear programme that have dominated recent diplomacy between Russia and the West.

Moscow has caused concern in the West by flexing its economic muscle with such firms as Royal Dutch Shell over huge oil and gas projects in the remote Sakhalin region.

Ominously for Paris, the dispute has also threatened to affect French oil group Total over production sharing at its Kharyaga project in West Siberia.

European Union countries have refused to surrender their national vetoes in security matters, though they are thwarting EU ambitions to fight terrorism efficiently.

"There is a hard core group of countries that are blocking," said an EU diplomat, on condition of anonymity, after informal talks between the bloc's justice and interior ministers in the southern Finish city of Tampere.

The issue of national vetoes on cross-border police cooperation in criminal affairs has festered into a major obstacle to the European Union's security ambitions.

While only around four of the 25 EU countries were against a move from unanimity decision-making to qualified majority voting to decide such matters, only three member states appeared to be fully in favor, diplomatic sources said.

Those states that diplomats most often named as being against the move included Germany, the Czech Republic, Ireland and Malta, while France, Luxembourg and Spain were cited as most ready to take the leap.

Some countries fear that a change to majority voting would surrender control over or water down national security legislation. Others are concerned that it may conflict with their constitutions.

The European Commission is expected to confirm that Bulgaria and Romania can join the European Union next January, rather than in 2008.

But, according to a draft report seen by the BBC, both countries may face sanctions without deep reforms.

Romania and Bulgaria risk food export bans and cuts to EU funds, says the report, due to be published on Tuesday.

They will also be checked on corruption and judicial reform in some of the EU's toughest-ever entry conditions.

The threat of a one-year delay no longer hangs over Bulgaria and Romania, but they will be watched like no other EU member.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbollah, said in a triumphalist speech to a rally of several hundred thousand people that "no army in the world" would be able to disarm its forces.

And in a direct warning to the Western-supported government of Lebanon, he called for a new "unity government" and declared that the administration of the Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, was "unable to protect Lebanon, or to reconstruct Lebanon or to unify Lebanon." He said Hizbollah would only consider giving up its weapons when a "strong, capable and just government" was in place.

He insisted that Hizbollah - whose infrastructure, the Israeli government has argued, was severely eroded by the conflict - had emerged from the war stronger than it had been before it. "[It] has recovered all its organisational and military capabilities," he said. "It is stronger than it was before 12 July."

"There is no army in the world that can [force us] to drop our weapons from our hands, from our grip," he told the rally in the southern suburbs of Beirut. "Today we celebrate a great divine, historic and strategic victory."

While Israeli officials have said they would continue to target Hizbollah's leadership, the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's administration appears to have decided to make no attempt to assassinate him in such circumstances.

Once the most progressive city in the Arab world, Baghdad has been ravaged by war and bombings. Everyone wants out, but not everyone can afford to leave -- and car bomb explosions are a daily fact of life.

From an altitude of 15,000 feet, it's just a pale patch on the landscape, a soft and amorphous silhouette, exposed on every flank. It has no protective features: no city wall, no shoreline, no hill from which a fortress might rise. Its edges peter out like the threads of a frayed rug, the sandy brown of houses merging seamlessly with the green of Mesopotamia's meadows. Falluja is visible to the west, Baqubah to the northeast.

Once the fertile fields surrounding Baghdad overflowed with melons, dates and grapes - a rich bounty for the city. Nowadays they ooze death onto the capital's streets. Terrorism and insurgency have taken root in the fields and palm groves between Abu Ghraib and Baghdad International Airport in the western part of the city. Even military pilots dare not approach normally, while civilian planes remain at cruising altitude before dipping into a last-minute descent towards the runway. Only a very narrow strip of airspace is considered secure.

Iraqis arriving from Cairo, Amman or Dubai book the window seats on the left. For good reason. It's the best place to endure the hair-raising nose-dive towards terra firma: keeping your eyes glued to the horizon helps stave off the nausea. In a maneuver known as "the corkscrew," the pilot banks the plane steeply to the left. Fifteen minutes and several thousand feet later, the aircraft finally levels off and prepares to land: conversation stops as the centrifugal forces hit passengers in the stomach. The downward spiral into Baghdad seems to last an eternity.

The tabloids in New York had a message for Hugo Chavez of Venezuela: the "Crackpot of Caracas" should "zip it" and go home.

They didn't care for him calling President George Bush the "Devil" at the United Nations on Tuesday, or "an alcoholic and a sick man" as he did at a church in Harlem on Thursday.

If President Chavez hoped last week to add to Mr Bush's political troubles at home he surely failed. So crude were his insults even Democrats were falling over one another to condemn them.

"Even though many people in the United States are critical of our President, we resent the fact that he would come to the United States and criticise President Bush," said a New York Democrat, Charles Rangel.

With the help of Iran's equally unflinching leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and a few others, Mr Chavez successfully hijacked this year's UN General Assembly and turned it into a raucous carnival of anti-Americanism. It perhaps will not hurt Mr Bush's domestic standing, but for American diplomacy abroad it was, at the very least, unsettling.

WALLACE: When we announced that you were going to be on fox news Sunday, I got a lot of email from viewers, and I got to say I was surprised most of them wanted me to ask you this question. Why didn't you do more to put Bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business when you were President. There's a new book out which I suspect you've read called the Looming Tower. And it talks about how the fact that when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, Bin Laden said I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of US troops. Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole.

CLINTON: OK..

WALLACE: ...may I just finish the question sir. And after the attack, the book says, Bin Laden separated his leaders because he expected an attack and there was no response. I understand that hindsight is 20 20.

CLINTON: No let's talk about...

WALLACE: ...but the question is why didn't you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?

CLINTON: OK, let's talk about it. I will answer all of those things on the merits but I want to talk about the context of which this...arises. I'm being asked this on the FOX network...ABC just had a right wing conservative on the Path to 9/11 falsely claim that it was based on the 911 commission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 commission report. I think it's very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn't do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush's neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn't have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn't do enough said that I did too much. Same people.

They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day after we were involved in black hawk down and I refused to do it and stayed 6 months and had an orderly transfer to the UN.

Ok, now let's look at all the criticisms: Black hawk down, Somalia. There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Bin laden had anything to do with black hawk down or was paying any attention to it or even knew al Qaeda was a growing concern in October of 1993.

Biofuels could end up damaging the natural world rather than saving it from global warming, argues Jeff McNeely in the Green Room. Better policies, better science and genetic modification, he says, can all contribute to a greener biofuels revolution.

With soaring oil prices, and debates raging on how to reduce carbon emissions to slow climate change, many are looking to biofuels as a renewable and clean source of energy.

The European Union recently has issued a directive calling for biofuels to meet 5.75% of transportation fuel needs by 2010. Germany and France have announced they intend to meet the target well before the deadline; California intends going still further.

This is a classic "good news-bad news" story.

Of course we all want greater energy security, and helping achieve the goals (however weak) of the Kyoto Protocol is surely a good thing.

However, biofuels - made by producing ethanol, an alcohol fuel made from maize, sugar cane, or other plant matter - may be a penny wise but pound foolish way of doing so.  

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she is shocked at the scale of the country's monorail accident, in which 23 people were killed.

The magnetic train was on a test run when it hit a maintenance wagon, near the northern town of Lathen, at a speed of nearly 200km/h (120mph) on Friday.

An inquiry will examine why they were on the track at the same time.

Prosecutors said the crash appeared to be the result of human error, possibly due to a radio communication failure.

Damaged carriages were left balancing on track 5m (16ft) above the ground following the collision.

Rail officials said the service vehicle was used every day to clean the track but it should not have been in operation while the train was running.

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain is importing far more wheat from outside the European Union this year and practically none from the UK, which last year was one of its biggest suppliers, traders said.

The UK exported 1.3 million tons of wheat to Spain in the crop year to the end of June. Traders say this year UK prices are too high and Spain's import needs are lower.

"UK imports were exceptional last year...this year the domestic harvest is better and we started out with substantial stocks so the situation is different," a trader said on Friday.

Wheat for feed, milling and biofuel production has been coming in from France and Eastern Europe, but not from the UK.

"The harvest has not been so good there and the price is very high," she said.

A rise in prices from other destinations had narrowed the gap in recent weeks. Feed makers use national wheat when available, but much of the milling wheat is imported.

If it's true, good riddance.

In any case, good catch.

That'll play well in Peoria.