Gordon Brown and Irish premier Brian Cowen are chairing the discussions in an attempt to find agreement and avert the collapse of the Northern Ireland Assembly. The prime minister's spokesperson said: "It was hard going but the parties engaged in good faith. There was frank discussion across a range of issues."

The prime minister's spokesperson said: "The prime minister and taoiseach (Irish prime minister) remain determined that progress can be made, so discussions will continue on Tuesday morning. The PM is meeting the taoiseach this morning, followed by further meetings with the leadership of Sinn Fein and the DUP leadership later this morning."

Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party - Northern Ireland's two biggest political parties - have been arguing for months over the transfer of policing and justice powers from Westminster to Stormont. Sinn Fein want the completion of devolution to happen as soon as possible, but the DUP argues there must be unionist "community confidence" before powers are put in the hands of local politicians.

The "confidence" issue causing most division is over the handling of parades. The DUP wants to scrap the Parades Commission, which puts conditions on some of the most contentious marches, but Sinn Fein has accused the party of giving the Orange Order a talks veto.

Talks between the DUP and Sinn Fein had intensified in recent weeks, before collapsing in acrimony last week. If Sinn Fein were to decide Martin McGuinness should resign as deputy first minister, the joint nature of the roles of first and deputy first ministers would mean that DUP leader Peter Robinson would also be forced out of office, collapsing the executive.

But the public is taking a tougher line on cannabis the survey of 4,486 adults, which was conducted in 2008, found. More people see themselves as Tory rather than Labour supporters for the first time since the 1980s, it adds. The survey also suggested the number of people who felt a pressing need to vote in general elections was declining. Some 56% of those questioned thought it was "everyone's duty to vote" - down from 68% in 1991.

He told the inquiry, in person, that he thought a further UN resolution was needed to sanction military action. Attorney General Lord Goldsmith advised ministers force was permissible on the basis of existing UN resolutions. Arguments about the legality of the war are taking centre stage this week as former Lord Goldsmith gives evidence on Wednesday, ahead of former prime minister Tony Blair's appearance on Friday.

Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the Foreign Office lawyer who resigned because she thought the invasion was illegal, is appearing later on Tuesday. In documents published by the inquiry, Sir Michael - chief legal adviser to the Foreign Office between 2001 and 2006 - said he believed the March 2003 invasion did not have a legal basis. "I considered that the use of force against Iraq in March 2003 was contrary to international law," he wrote.

"In my opinion that use of force had not been authorized by the Security Council and had no other legal basis in international law." Sir Michael said he had raised his concerns about legal issues with Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary at the time. However, Sir Michael said he had made it clear that it was ultimately up to Lord Goldsmith to advise ministers on whether the use of the force against Iraq would be lawful. On the eve of the conflict, Ms Wilmshurst argued that "an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression".

Trading in equities and derivatives is being driven increasingly by mathematical algorithms used in computer programs. They allow trading to take place automatically in response to market data and news, deciding when and how much to trade similar to the autopilot function in aircraft. Analysts estimate that up to 60 per cent of trading in equity markets is driven in this way.

Concerns have been highlighted by news that NYSE Euronext, the transatlantic exchange operator, has fined Credit Suisse proprietary trading arm for the first time for failing to control its trading algorithms. In the Credit Suisse case, its system bombarded the NYSE's systems with hundreds of thousands of "erroneous messages" in 2007, slowing down trading in 975 shares.

Last year, the London Stock Exchange suffered a three-hour outage after its trading system collapsed under the strain of a huge volume of orders. Some traders blamed the spike in volumes from algorithmic trading. Frederic Ponzo, managing partner at GreySpark Partners, a consultancy, said: "It is absolutely possible to bring an exchange to breaking point by having an 'algo' entering into a loop so that by sending them at such a rate the exchange can't cope."

Regulators say it is unclear who is monitoring traders to ensure they do not take undue risks with their algorithms. The Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed new rules that would require brokers to establish procedures to prevent erroneous orders. Mark van Vugt, global head of sales at RTS Realtime Systems, a trading technology company, said: "If a position is blowing up so fast without the exchange or clearing firm able to react or reverse positions, the firm itself could be in danger as well."

Thousands of anti-war protesters are expected to form a gauntlet of hate for the former Prime Minister on Friday as he attempts to justify Britain's involvement in the controversial conflict. He is also a target for Muslim extremists raging at his decision to invade Iraq. Mr Blair's six-hour appearance before the Chilcot Inquiry is being described as his 'Judgment Day' for sending British forces to topple Saddam Hussein, which cost the lives of 179 troops.

Demonstrators will be met by police road blocks, exclusion zones, armed officers and rooftop surveillance teams. The operation will cost at least 150,000 pounds and could reach 250,000 pounds depending on the number of protesters. Mr Blair's long-awaited testimony comes days after security chiefs advised the Government to raise the level of terrorist threat from 'substantial' to 'severe' following the Christmas Day attempted plane bombing.

The Inquiry has already heard a welter of evidence suggesting Mr Blair exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq during the build-up to war. In developments yesterday:

- Sources close to the inquiry pledged that Mr Blair would not be allowed to 'bluster and smile' his way through tricky questions.

- Families of servicemen killed in Iraq demanded a face-to-face meeting with the ex-PM to bring about 'closure'.

- Mr Blair was revealed to have been staying up as late as 3am reading through piles of documents to 'revise' for his appearance.

- Two senior Foreign Office legal advisers at the time of the invasion were said to have told the Government that the war was illegal under international law.

Several witnesses, including the former Cabinet Secretary Lord Turnbull, have suggested that Mr Blair was intent on regime change in Iraq from the spring of 2002 onwards, and used Saddam's supposed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction as a smokescreen to justify military action. Mr Blair will also be questioned intensively on why he claimed intelligence had 'proved beyond doubt' that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction while some witnesses have said the facts did not support this.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research. In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report's chapter on Asia, said: 'It related to several countries in this region and their water sources.'

'We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action. It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.' When this report was issued, Raj Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, denounced it as 'voodoo science'. Having been forced to apologise over the 2035 claim, Dr Pachauri blamed Dr Lal, saying his team had failed to apply IPCC procedures.

It was an accusation rebutted angrily by Dr Lal. 'We as authors followed them to the letter,' he said. 'Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.' However, an analysis of those 500-plus formal review comments, to be published tomorrow by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the new body founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, suggests that when reviewers did raise issues that called the claim into question, Dr Lal and his colleagues simply ignored them.

For example, Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, suggested that their draft did not mention that Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram range are growing rapidly, citing a paper published in the influential journal Nature. In their response, the IPCC authors said, bizarrely, that they were 'unable to get hold of the suggested references', but would 'consider' this in their final version. They failed to do so.

The 80-year-old is considered a moderate who is open to modernisation. He has said he would not be opposed to Pope Benedict XVI visiting Serbia, suggesting a possible rapprochement with the Roman Catholic Church. The Serbian Orthodox Church has about 11 million members worldwide. Most of Serbia's seven million people are Orthodox Christians.

President Obama's deployment of 30,000 extra US troops to Afghanistan would weaken the Taliban enough to force it to agree a peace deal, he said. He added that the Taliban could help run the country in future. His comments come ahead of an international conference on Afghanistan due to be held in London later this week. "I'd like everybody to walk out of London with a renewed commitment, and that commitment is to the right outcome for the Afghan people," General McChrystal said.

Recently, Afghan President Hamid Karzai told the BBC that he planned to introduce a scheme to attract Taliban fighters back to normal life by offering money and jobs. He said he would offer to pay and resettle Taliban fighters to come over to his side. Mr Karzai said he hoped to win backing for his plan from the US and UK at the London conference.

"It's not my job to extend olive branches, but it is my job to help set conditions where people in the right positions can have options on the way forward," General McChrystal said. He also said that the Taliban could have a role in a future Afghan government.

The Futenma base was originally scheduled to move to Nago from a more crowded part of Okinawa. Talk of moving the base out of Japan altogether has threatened the long-standing US-Japan security alliance. Mr Hatoyama said the results of Sunday's election reflected the will of the people, and that Japan would completely re-examine its commitment to relocate the air base. "The country will start from scratch on this issue and take responsibility to reach a conclusion by the end of May," he told reporters.

Correspondents said the prime minister's comments highlighted the difficulties involved in fulfilling an agreement with the US to relocate the base against strong local opposition. Japan signed a deal with the US four years ago that was part of a broader realignment of American troops. A key part of the plan was to relocate the Futenma air base, home to about 2,000 Marines, to the smaller city of Nago.

Okinawa is home to most of the 47,000 American troops based in Japan.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny - and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link was too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month's Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.

Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods - such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 - could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: "More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent."

Last month Gordon Brown, the prime minister, told the Commons that the financial agreement at Copenhagen "must address the great injustice that ... those hit first and hardest by climate change are those that have done least harm". The latest criticism of the IPCC comes a week after reports in The Sunday Times forced it to retract claims in its benchmark 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would be largely melted by 2035. It turned out that the bogus claim had been lifted from a news report published in 1999 by New Scientist magazine.

The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report. When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses." Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month.

The border region of Costa Rica and Panama experienced two quakes in the same time period, one a magnitude of 5.2 and the other 4.7. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage. The earthquake that devastated Haiti on January 12 registered 7.0 on the Richter scale.

The Times understands that the decision to raise the threat level is connected to the conference on Afghanistan taking place at Lancaster House, London, next Thursday. Sources said there had been intensive discussions throughout the day relating to intelligence suggesting a possible attempted "spectacular" by an al-Qaeda affiliated group. But the shift was also described by one source as "precautionary" rather than rooted in any firm information that an identified terror cell was plotting an attack.

Mr Johnson said: "The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre has today raised the threat to the UK from international terrorism from substantial to severe. This means that a terrorist attack is highly likely, but I should stress that there is no intelligence to suggest than an attack is imminent. JTAC keeps the threat level under constant review and makes its judgments based on a broad range of factors, including the intent and capabilities of international terrorist groups in the UK and overseas."

MI5 says the threat levels give "a broad indication" of the likelihood of an attack and assessments are based on "a range of factors including current intelligence, recent events and what is known about terrorist intentions and capabilities".

The European Union will not imitate Obama's plan, because it aims to reduce risk in the sector through other means, an EU source said on Friday."Look, we understand the US position and we understand his reasons. But I can't see the EU going down this route," the source, who is close to EU financial policymaking, told Reuters. "The US finds itself a little behind us on this. The Obama plan is not fit for the purpose in the EU."

Obama made his proposals on Thursday, saying he was ready to fight resistance from Wall Street banks he blamed for helping cause the global financial crisis. The plan would prevent banks from investing in, owning or sponsoring a hedge fund or private equity fund. It would set a new limit on banks' size in relation to the overall financial sector and, perhaps most dramatically, could also bar institutions from proprietary trading operations, which are unrelated to serving customers, for their own profit.

Proprietary trading involves firms making bets on markets with their own money and has been the source of much of banks' bumper profits before and after the financial crisis. French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde welcomed the proposal, saying it was a "very, very good step forward." UK Treasury Minister Paul Myners said Britain already had acted to address problems in its banking industry. "He's developing a solution to what he sees as the American issues, we've already taken the necessary action in the UK," Myners said in an interview with Reuters Insider TV.

Michael Wood, the top legal advisor to the Foreign Office at the time, and his then deputy Elizabeth Wilmshurst, who quit her job in protest at the invasion, are both due to give evidence on Tuesday. According to The Independent on Sunday, Wilmshurst will reveal infighting between officials and ministers over the legality of deposing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein without explicit United Nations support.

She will say she was far from alone in having doubts about the case and say her boss, Wood, "clearly advised" that the war was illegal under international law, the paper said. He did not make this view public at the time. A report in The Observer Weekly confirmed that Wood was planning to tell the inquiry that the war was illegal because of the absence of a second resolution from the UN Security Council explicitly authorising the use of force in Iraq.

Britain's top legal advisor at the time, attorney general Lord Peter Goldsmith, gave the green light for military action under a UN resolution passed in November 2002, but critics claim he was pressured into it. Goldsmith is due to give evidence to the Chilcot inquiry on Wednesday.

Today's volatility is a sign of things to come, said Jeff Kleintop, chief market strategist at LPL Financials, as the market grapples with earnings, China and a tighter grip from Washington. "Volatility is going to be a key characteristic of 2010," Kleintop said. "I think we've got to get used to that kind of market."

Obama proposed limiting banks' size and risk-taking ability, including preventing them from trading with their own money and owning hedge funds. "While the financial system is far stronger today than it was one year ago, it is still operating under the exact same rules that led to its near collapse," Obama said Thursday. "Never again will the American people be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail."

This could be the first in a string of global moves to clamp down on banks, Pimco's Mohamed El-Erian said on CNBC this morning. "We as investors have to be able to navigate these new factors, because that's the reality," said El-Erian, CEO of the world's largest bond fund. "This thing is going to intensify. You're going to read about it in other countries."