ROME (AFP) - Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Turkey next month will be a chance for dialogue between religions in the wake of the row stirred up by his recent remarks about Islam, according to a senior Vatican official.

Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said in a religious television programme that "the desire of the pope, the holy see and the Catholic church is to continue dialogue," the Ansa news agency reported.

Catholics and Muslims can and should share values "which are essential for the fate and future of humanity," he said, adding that this was what should be read into the pope's controversial address last month.

By Frances Harrison
BBC News, Tehran

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has reportedly delivered a scathing attack on US President George W Bush, saying he is inspired by Satan.

Speaking to a group of supporters, Mr Ahmadinejad said he himself had inspirational links to God, Iranian media reports.

...According to the Iranian media, Mr Ahmadinejad said he had inspirational links to God, and went on to say that if you were a true believer, God would show you miracles.

Then the Iranian president said Mr Bush was similar to him.

According to Mr Ahmadinejad, the US president also receives inspiration - but it is from Satan.

He repeated: "Satan inspires Mr Bush."

Airport security chiefs and efficiency geeks will be able to keep close tabs on airport passengers by tagging them with a high powered radio chip developed at the University of Central London.

The technology is to be trialled in Debrecen Airport in Hungary after being in development for two- and-a-half years by University College London as part of an EU-funded consortium called Optag.

People will be told to wear radio tags round their necks when they get to the airport. The tag would notify a computer system of their identity and whereabouts. The system would then track their activities in the airport using a network of high definition cameras.

The project, called "Improving airport efficiency, security and passenger flow by enhanced passenger monitoring," is using 2m of European funding so airports can herd people through the airport system.

Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said.

Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.

The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology.

People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims.

By Nadav Shragai, Haaretz Correspondent

The project of sifting layers of Temple Mount dirt has yielded thousands of new artifacts dating from the First Temple period to today. The dirt was removed in 1999 by the Islamic Religious Trust (Waqf) from the Solomon's Stables area to the Kidron Stream Valley. The sifting itself is taking place at Tzurim Valley National Park, at the foot of Mount Scopus, and being funded by the Ir David Foundation. Dr. Gabriel Barkai and Tzachi Zweig, the archaeologists directing the sifting project with the help of hundreds of volunteers, are publishing photographs and information about the new discoveries in the upcoming issue of Ariel, which comes out in a few days.

The bulk of the artifacts are small finds - the term used for artifacts that can be lifted and transported, rather than fixed features. The dirt was removed in the course of excavating the mammoth entrance to the underground mosque built seven years ago in the southeastern corner of the Temple Mount. The Waqf and Islamic Movement in Israel separated dirt from stones, then used the ancient building blocks for rebuilding, in case the police barred construction materials from being brought in.

...The oldest artifacts found are remnants of tools like a blade and scraper dating back 10,000 years. Some potsherds and shards of alabaster tools date from the Bronze Age - the 3rd and 2nd millennia B.C.E. (the Canaanite and Jebusite eras). Only a handful of potsherds were found from the 10th century B.C.E. (the reigns of King David and King Solomon), but numerous artifacts date from the reigns of the later Judean kings (the 8th and 7th centuries B.C.E.), such as stone weights for weighing silver.

The most striking find from this period is a First Temple period bulla, or seal impression, containing ancient Hebrew writing, which may have belonged to a well-known family of priests mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has predicted Israel will collapse and warned that its allies face the "boiling wrath" of the people if they continue to support the Jewish state.

The renewed assault on Israel by Ahmadinejad -- who has been castigated by world powers for his frequent anti-Israeli outbursts -- came as tens of thousands marched through Tehran in an annual pro-Palestinian protest.

"This regime (Israel) will be gone, definitely," Ahmadinejad, who has previously called for Israel to be "wiped from the map" and described the Holocaust as a myth, told the protestors.

"You (the Western powers) should know that any government that stands by the Zionist regime from now on will not see any result but the hatred of the people," he added. "The wrath of the region's people is boiling."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Monday Western powers were wrong if they thought Iran would retreat under political pressure from its nuclear plans, even as the country faces possible sanctions.

Iran faces the prospect of penalties after its case was sent back to the U.N Security Council for failing to heed a U.N. demand to suspend uranium enrichment, a process the West believes Tehran is using to develop atomic weapons.

France, Britain and Germany are drafting a Security Council sanctions resolution. But Iranian officials have shrugged off the threat, and say Iran will press ahead with its program.

One of the world's most famous fossils, the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974, will go on display abroad for the first time in the United States, officials said Tuesday.

Even the Ethiopian public has only seen Lucy twice. The Lucy exhibition at the Ethiopian Natural History Museum in the capital, Addis Ababa, is a replica while the real remains are usually locked in a vault. A team from the Museum of Natural Science in Houston, Texas, spent four years negotiating the U.S. tour, which will start in Houston next September.

The creature was a member of Australopithecus afarensis, which lived in Africa between about four million and three million years ago, and is the earliest known hominid.

Most scientists believe afarensis stood upright and walked on two feet, but they argue about whether it had ape-like agility in trees. The loss of that ability would suggest crossing a threshold toward a more human existence.

Debate still rages over how close an ancestor to man Lucy would be, as many experts suspect she was anatomically far closer to apes than humans.

Comment from Understand The Times:

Please note how "scientists" are able to reconstruct what Lucy looked like when she was alive.

Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets' worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends, the WWF conservation group said on Tuesday.

Populations of many species, from fish to mammals, had fallen by about a third from 1970 to 2003 largely because of human threats such as pollution, clearing of forests and overfishing, the group also said in a two-yearly report.

"For more than 20 years we have exceeded the earth's ability to support a consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable and we cannot afford to continue down this path," WWF Director-General James Leape said, launching the WWF's 2006 Living Planet Report.

"Humanity's footprint has more than tripled between 1961 and 2003," it said. Consumption has outpaced a surge in the world's population, to 6.5 billion from 3 billion in 1960. U.N. projections show a surge to 9 billion people around 2050.

At the direction of Pope Benedict XVI, extraordinary ministers of holy Communion will no longer be permitted to assist in the purification of the sacred vessels at Masses in the United States.

In an Oct. 23 letter, Bishop William S. Skylstad, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, asked his fellow bishops to inform all pastors of the change, which was prompted by a letter from Cardinal Francis Arinze, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments.

The U.S. bishops had asked the Vatican to extend an indult -- or church permission -- in effect since 2002 allowing extraordinary ministers of holy Communion to help cleanse the Communion cups and plates when there were not enough priests or deacons to do so.

Bishop Skylstad, who heads the Diocese of Spokane, Wash., said Cardinal Arinze asked Pope Benedict about the matter during a June 9 audience, "and received a response in the negative."

Noting that the General Instruction of the Roman Missal "directs that the sacred vessels are to be purified by the priest, the deacon or an instituted acolyte," the cardinal said in his Oct. 12 letter that "it does not seem feasible, therefore, for the congregation to grant the requested indult from this directive in the general law of the Latin Church."

Although receiving Communion under both kinds is a "more complete" sign of the sacrament's meaning, Cardinal Arinze said, "Christ is fully present under each of the species."

"Communion under the species of the bread alone, as a consequence, makes it possible to receive all the fruit of eucharistic grace," he added.

By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website

Climate change threatens supplies of water for millions of people in poorer countries, warns a new report from the Christian development agency Tearfund.

Recent research suggests that by 2050, five times as much land is likely to be under "extreme" drought as now.

...One of Britain's leading climate scientists, Sir John Houghton, said the severity of climate change was getting through to world leaders "at a level of rhetoric", but not yet at a level of action.

"There were promises made at the G8 summit and at the last UN meeting in Montreal about money for adaptation," he told the BBC News website, "but I understand that very little of that has come through."

If you plot the number of earthquakes, tectonic disturbances and under ocean volcanoes with that in 1995, you will get scared. The numbers are rising exponentially.

The biggest problem, according to geophysicists is that the tectonic plate shifts have increased the number of serious earthquakes in the past one-year an enormous amount and the rate is exponentially increasing. Scientists are blaming the Polar reversal and these will continue till 2012.Very rarely the Sun and the Earth simultaneously reverses polarity. That is exactly what is happening now. When this happens catastrophes happen in the earth. If history is a guide of anything, these earthquakes and volcanoes will continue to increase till 2012.

According to scientists, all hot spots - Sumatra. Yellowstone and many others are showing signs of extreme disturbance - even harmonic tremors.

According to some, we are really sitting in front of a series of very catastrophic series of earthquakes all over the world.

Human beings may be forced to be 'microchipped' like pet dogs, a shocking official report into the rise of the Big Brother state has warned.

The microchips - which are implanted under the skin - allow the wearer's movements to be tracked and store personal information about them.

TEHRAN, Iran -

Iran test-fired dozens of missiles, including the Shahab-3 that can reach Israel, in military maneuvers Thursday that it said were aimed at putting a stop to the role of world powers in the Persian Gulf region.

The show of strength came three days after U.S.-led warships finished naval exercises in the Gulf that Iran branded as "adventurist." Iran remains locked in dispute with the West over its nuclear program, which Washington says is geared to producing atomic weapons but Tehran says is only for generating electricity.

Iranian state television reported that several kinds of missiles were tested, and broadcast footage of them being fired from mobile launchers.

There will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century if current trends continue, according to a major scientific study.

Stocks have collapsed in nearly one-third of sea fisheries, and the rate of decline is accelerating.

Writing in the journal Science, the international team of researchers says fishery decline is closely tied to a broader loss of marine biodiversity.