Gordon Brown has been in Afghanistan today en route for Beijing - meeting President Karzai in Kabul, but first talking to UK troops in Helmand province where Taleban fighters have upped their attacks on NATO forces, in a determined and ruthless new strategy, fuelled by money from the poppy harvest. Today three Canadian soldiers were killed while doing reconnaissance, following the deaths two days ago of ten French soldiers in a Taleban ambush. The Prime Minister reiterated his commitment to ending the conflict in Afghanistan but seven years on, can coalition forces in the country - of which there are around eight thousand British troops - ever beat the Taleban, or is negotiation the only way forward? I'll be speaking to the Defence Secretary live.

A British resident held in Guantanamo Bay facing terrorism charges today won a court ruling that the UK government is under a duty to disclose material to Binyam Mohamed's legal team which he says supports his case that evidence against him was obtained through torture. Mohamed is facing a US military trial and possibly the death penalty if found guilty. During the recent hearing of the case Dinah Rose QC for Mr Mohamed said he was tortured following his detention in Pakistan and then "rendered" to Morocco where he alleges he was repeatedly slashed in the genitals with a razor blade. The judges found that the British security service had colluded in the unlawful detention of Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan.

Crash investigators have recovered the black box date recorder from the Spanair flight which crashed at Madrid airport yesterday on takeoff killing one hundred and fifty three people on board. We'll have the latest from the Spanish capital.

And we'll be taking a look at the impact the internet has had on the race for the White House - it can build grassroots support as never before, but is also the perfect vehicle for attack ads and smears. Plus I'll be speaking live to the author of the current New York Times bestseller "The Obama Nation". Jerome R Corsi claims that Barack Senior was an alcoholic polygamist who abandoned his pregnant wife in Africa before marrying Obama's mother in Hawaii and then leaving her behind there with their son. Corsi claims Obama's relatives are the sources for much of his information which is repeated here - apparently at second hand. So is this a thorough piece of investigative work - or a hatchet job?

Do join us at 10:30

Kirsty

Why a book about a world without bees?

For as far as the eye can see everything is pale pink. The valley that stretches across central California for the best part of 500 miles is blanketed with salmon-coloured orchards.

Welcome to almond country. The trees -- all 60-odd million of them -- are heavy with blossom. Other than a constant stream of cars and trucks along Route 5 and ubiquitous fast food joints hugging the highway, there is little else to see in this flat, monotonous landscape, other than row upon row upon row of the blossom-bearing trees.

When we told people we were coming here for research, the usual response was "Wow, that's going to be beautiful". They were right about the "wow" factor, almond-growing on this scale is mind-boggling. But where is the beauty in such a regimented landscape?

The trees are planted in symmetrical rows, at regular intervals, so many inches apart. Early-blooming and late-blooming varieties are laid out in separate blocks, in uniform, repetitive patterns. Coupled with improvements in irrigation, better pest and disease control, and the development of high-yield crops, this standardised, large-scale method of producing a single crop, known as monoculture, has become the hallmark of modern, efficient agriculture.

Adopted across the globe, it has led to substantial increases in the world's food supply. Yet few crops can match the inexorable rise of the Californian almond, which is now the United States' most valuable horticultural export. Last year, more than $1.9bn worth of Californian almonds were sent to the global marketplace, more than double the revenue from its Napa Valley wine exports. In fact, 80% of the world's almonds now come from the sunshine state.

This was not the case just 30 years ago when an acre of almond orchard produced around 500 pounds in weight of nuts. Today, average yields six times that -- 3,000 pounds of nuts per acre -- are not unusual. But it is not just better management or new varieties that explain these record-breaking harvests.

If you look closely at the blossom-laden branches you will see the reason for the explosion of fruit. And if you listen you will hear the unmistakeable buzz that accompanies the diligent work involved. For each flower has on it a honeybee. She is drinking its sweet nectar. As she crawls around to find the perfect sucking position, her furry body is dusted with beads of pollen that are transferred from blossom to blossom as she flies from one to another, pollinating the plant in her search for more nectar. The plant's ovaries swell into fruit, which by late August are ripe, oval-shaped nuts.

The Apis mellifera, or western honeybee, as it's more commonly known, has been revered for thousands of years for its ability to make a deliciously sweet substance that has delighted the human palate since prehistoric times. The earliest record of humans' use ofhoney is a cave painting in Valencia, Spain, that depicts a man climbing a cliff to rob a swarm of wild bees. It is dated to 15,000 years ago, just after the ice age, and the love affair has continued ever since. The Greeks and Romans called honey the food of the gods, and Egyptian pharaohs had it buried in their funeral vaults. Cleopatra ensured its rejuvenating powers became legendary with her baths of asses' milk and honey, and its medicinal qualities, which were used to heal wounds before the event of modern medicine, are still prized today for soothing coughs.

But the honeybee has an even more important role -- as nature's master pollinator. All flowering plants need animals to pollinate them and the honeybee is perfectly engineered to perform the task, with a body designed to trap pollen and a methodical work ethic that leaves no petal unturned. Without the honeybee all the vitality and colour of the planet would be lost. A point that is well illustrated in Jerry Seinfeld's animated film, Bee Movie, in which Central Park is reduced to a grey, barren wilderness when the bees go on strike.

And it's not just pretty blossoms we need to thank honeybees for. Approximately one third of all the food we eat is pollinated by them.
Nuts, soybeans, onions, carrots, broccoli and sunflowers all require honeybee pollination, as do numerous fruits including apples, oranges, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, melons, avocados and peaches. Alfalfa, the clover-like plant widely grown as cattle feed is also dependent on the honeybee, as is cotton. In all, some 90 different crops worldwide are pollinated by honeybees. Globally, that makes honeybee pollination worth more than $60bn a year, of which some $15bn is in the US alone, according to a Cornell University study.

Pollination is big business and nowhere more so than across the 600,000 acres of Californian almond trees. Each February, they play host to around 1.2 million honeybee colonies. Each acre houses two hives, which is around 80,000 bees per acre, or more than 40 billion bees in total, making it the largest pollination in history.

We'd been told it was a truly amazing spectacle. But unlike the sight of tens of thousands of migratory birds flying south for the winter, the arrival of billions of honeybees to the warm climes of California's Central Valley is not a natural phenomenon. They are guided neither by the position of the sun, nor by the Earth's magnetic fields. Instead they are driven thousands of miles on the backs of huge trucks from the far corners of the United States, their hives stacked five-high.

Half of all the 2.5 million honeybee colonies in the US make this annual cross-country trek from as far afield as Massachusetts in the east and Florida in the south. They are now joined in the Central Valley orchards by honeybees flown in from Australia to boost the numbers taking part in this mammoth event.

And it doesn't end there. California is just the first port of call on most of these bees' five-month criss-cross tour of North America to more than 3.5 million acres of orchards and fields. After three weeks spent feeding on almond nectar, many will be back on the trucks heading south to the citrus plantations of Florida, then north for apples and cherries, and as far east as Maine for the blueberries.

This intensive, migratory beekeeping is a far cry from the hobby we pursue in our small back garden in south London. The only move for our bees was from the apiary where we collected them to the spot by the wall where their hive has sat for a couple of years. From this sheltered location, they happily forage from spring right through to the end of autumn for nectar and pollen among the parks, gardens, railway sidings and tree-lined roads that dot the Battersea landscape. In the process they make enough honey to keep us and them well fed throughout the year.

There is something magical about watching your bees return home after a hard day's foraging on a balmy summer evening. For many urban apiarists who work all day in an office, they are an antidote to the stresses of city life. Creating a rural idyll in a corner of a housing estate was our small way of trying to reconnect with nature. It fulfilled something we knew was missing from our lives, a feeling we couldn't quite put our finger on, but is now being termed "nature-deficit disorder".

We had also heard about the vital role honeybees play by pollinating food and flowers but that they were under threat because of the same combination of factors that afflicts much of our wildlife in Britain -- urban development, loss of biodiversity and destruction of their habitat. So giving bees a home in the city felt as if we were doing our bit for the environment.

There is nothing vaguely eco-friendly, however, about trucking millions of bees thousands of miles across the States. The contrast between our "back to nature" vision of keeping bees and the harsh reality of commercial beekeeping is unfathomable.

What is happening in California is nothing short of the industrialisation of pollination. And like any industry it is driven by profit. In a good year commercial apiarists can clear $100,000 and the farmers' income rises as yields increase.

Joe Traynor is a bee broker. For six weeks every year, his company Scientific Ag match-makes migratory apiarists with Californian almond farmers in need of bees. It is testimony to the scale of the almond industry that it has spawned a new career for Traynor and other former beekeepers.

But now it, and other crop pollination, is threaten by a mysterious illness that has led to the disappearance of millions of honeybees around the world and is fuelling fears of an environmental crisis bigger than climate change.

Albert Einstein is thought to have said: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

In truth, it is more likely to have been French beekeepers who put these words posthumously into Einstein's mouth a few years ago during a fierce battle to get a pesticide (more of which later) banned from their country.

Whoever said it, the apocalyptic sentiment chimes with the view that bees are the "canary in the coalmine", a barometer for the health of the planet, and that their predicament is a warning to us all.

In the past two years, around a third of all honeybees in the States have mysteriously vanished -- around 800,000 hives. Some commercial beekeepers have reported losses of up to 90% since the end of 2006. The disappearance, which has baffled researchers and academics, is not limited to the States. Large numbers of colonies have also been wiped out in parts of Canada, Europe, Asia and South America. In Croatia, it was reported that five million bees disappeared in less than 48 hours.

Bees have a sophisticated navigation system that uses the sun and landmarks as points of reference. It allows them to travel up to three miles from the hive in search of food without losing their way back home. They are able to direct other bees in their hive to the food source through a remarkable form of communication called the "waggle dance".

But in a hive suffering from this strange plague, the adult bees do not return home, leaving their queen, eggs and larvae to starve to death. Moreover, young nurse bees, whose job it is to stay in the hive and care for the new brood while the adults are out searching for food, desert their post and fly away. Such a dereliction of duty is unheard of unless the bee is diseased and leaves the hive to prevent it from infecting others.

When news of the vanishing bees, a phenomenon soon dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), started to filter through in newspaper reports at the beginning of 2007, some of the more fanciful theories for their disappearance ranged from cell phones messing up their navigation system to an elaborate al-Qaida plot to wreck US agriculture.

Although no one knew for sure what was causing the bees to perish, it spurred the launch of a global investigation. More credible suspects included exposure to genetically modified crops, pesticide poisoning, invasive parasites, malnutrition from pollinating vast tracts of crops with little nourishment, and the stress of being moved long distances.

Entomologists were convinced that the culprit was either a new virus, a virus that had mutated into a more virulent strain, or a virus that had combined forces with another pathogen, such as a fungus, to create an AIDS-like virus that destroyed the bees' immune system.

To date, a CCD working group in the States, made up of scientists from six universities and led by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), has focused its efforts on trying to identify a virus or fungus.

A team led by Pennsylvania State University, the Pennsylvania State Department of Agriculture and Columbia University made a breakthrough in September 2007 when they linked CCD with a virus that was identified in 96% of the hives affected by the disorder. But Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV), which was first discovered in Israel in 2004, may prove to be a symptom rather than the cause. By recreating CCD in healthy hives, scientists hope to be able to determine what's triggering it.

With billions of dollars at stake, and the further expansion of the Californian almond crop in peril, the US government has approved increased funding totalling around $85m for bee research. But apiarists increasingly believe that the scientists, supported by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Defense, are backing the wrong horse.

Dave Hackenberg, the Pennsylvania beekeeper who first discovered CCD in his Florida hives in November 2006, puts pesticides in the dock. He argues that bees have had viruses for years but a new type of nicotine-based pesticide is breaking down their immune system and causing CCD.

Imidacloprid is his prime suspect. Not licensed in the US until 1994, it is now found almost everywhere from front lawns to apple orchards and sunflower fields. Bayer CropScience, the manufacturer, denies that its product is responsible for CCD and cites studies that support its conclusion. But other studies in France and Italy found that the chemical disorientates bees, impairs their memory and communication and causes nervous system disorders. The French government was so concerned that it backed protests by French beekeepers and partially banned imidaclopridin 1999, pending further studies. Brazil has also pulled it from its shelves.

Many experienced beekeepers support Hackenberg's thesis, but scientists remain unconvinced. If pesticides are the culprit, they ask, why have bees disappeared from areas where no pesticides are used?

Instead, they point the finger at beekeepers for overworking and under nourishing their bees. Hackenberg's 2,200 hives were logging 5,500 miles a year on the road before he lost two thirds of them to CCD. In his defence, he says it hasn't troubled the bees before in all the 30 years that he's been doing it.

Bees have been disappearing long before pesticides or the stresses of modern life were invented. The first recorded unexplained loss was in the United States in 1869, and thereafter large numbers mysteriously vanished in the US and Australia at intervals throughout the 19th century. Between 1905 and 1919, an epidemic wiped out 90% of the honeybee colonies on the Isle of Wight in the UK. Throughout the 20th century, large-scale losses were reported throughout the States, and in neighbouring Canada and Mexico. Then as now, the main suspects were colony mismanagement, deficiencies in bees' diet and chemicals in the environment, but the mystery was never solved.

Today's scientists are confident that, armed with many new tools of detection, such as a complete mapping of the honeybee genome and modern molecular techniques, they will be able to nail the culprit behind this latest outbreak. But more than a year after they began their investigations, they are still following leads and are unable to point to one single cause.

Meanwhile, US beekeepers are reporting a second year of CCD. Hackenberg, who restocked after losing two thirds of his bees in the winter of 2006/07, was dismayed to find that 80% of his colonies had vanished again when he opened his hives in Florida in November2007.

If bees continue disappearing at this rate, it is estimated that by 2035 there will no honeybees left in the US. In the UK, an 11% decline in honeybees is not officially attributed to CCD, but that hasn't stopped the farming minister, Lord Rooker, from warning that its 260,000 colonies could disappear from its shores in 10 years' time.

There is a province of China where life already exists without bees -- the uncontrolled use of pesticides in southern Sichuan is reported to have killed them off in the 1980s. As a result, the area's pear trees have to be pollinated by hand; a slow, labour-intensive process that comes nowhere near to matching the bees' productivity in pollinating three million flowers a day. If such a process was tried in the US, it would cost an estimated $90bn a year.

In addition to fewer, and more expensive, fruit and vegetables in the shops, no honeybees means no honey. Although migratory beekeepers have raised the alarm about bee disappearances, there are already reports of honey production being affected by large-scale bee loses in Argentina, one of the world's largest exporters of honey.

Undeterred, scientists are now exploring a hi-tech solution to the vanishing Apis mellifera. They want to engineer a new, virus-resistant super bee that would combine the hardiness of the aggressive Africanised bee with the docile nature of the western honeybee. While not beyond the realms of possibility, a such a bee is not a panacea. If we put our faith in a hi-tech fix, we are ignoring the bees' environmental wake-up call.

We wanted to write a book that alerted people to the wonders of the honeybee and unravelled the mystery of its disappearance. In all the excitement generated in the press about vanishing bees, had some basic questions been overlooked, and were scientists, in their desperate search for a virus to pin the disorder on, looking in the wrong? Why, for example, was a pesticide proven to be highly toxic to adult bees still widely used in most countries?

We chose California as a focal point because the almond orchards are a major crime scene -- most of the bees that disappear in the States have been here and mixed with other bees who suffered a similar fate. What happens in this corner of North America could hold clues to the worldwide wipe-out of bees. And with the number of bee experts likely to descend on this year's behemoth pollination operation, it was also the place to cross-examine key witnesses.

California also provides a horrifying glimpse into what the future could hold for honeybees -- if there are any left. Demand for honeybees here is projected to grow to 2.1 million colonies by 2012, nearly equal to all the colonies in the US.

So, to understand what is happening to the western honeybee, how we can urgently stop its demise, and what lessons this has for the future stewardship of the planet, our journey had to start in the Central Valley.

Good morning everyone

Gordon Brown's in Afghanistan visiting troops ahead of attending the closing ceremony in Beijing. But with the situation in Afghanistan continuing to deteriorate, is this actually a war we can win?

We're expecting a High Court ruling any minute on whether the UK Government has to release evidence which British resident Binyam Mohamed - currently in Guantanamo awaiting trial - says supports his claim that the US is trying to convict him on evidence obtained under torture. Peter Marshall is on the case.

Katty Kay has a report looking at the key role the internet has played in the US election campaign. Could the medium that helped propel Obama to Democratic nominee also do damage to his campaign. Plus we have an interview with Jerome Corsi, author of the less-than-flattering biography "The Obama Nation".

Other stuff around - Madrid plane crash aftermath; GCSE results - large rise in A-Cs, big fall in entries.

And the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev - fresh from conducting in London last night - is flying out to South Ossetia to give a concert there.

Anything else you fancy - other domestic stories would be good.

Richard

Hello viewers,

Tonight we will of course be keeping you up to date with the plane crash at Madrid's Barajas airport - a Spanair flight JK5022 taking off from Madrid to the Canary Islands. We've been told that it could turn out to be one of the worst European air crashes in the last 20 years. The plane had already made an aborted attempt to take off and following a mechanical review was attempting its second departure when it crashed.
Condoleezza Rice was in Warsaw to put her signature to America's pact with Poland for the siting of a US Missile Defence system on Polish soil. This pact has long been deliberated, but the crisis in Georgia may have been the defining factor - Russia has already warned Poland that this will make the country a target for a strike "100%". Does the Star Wars programme - launched by the then US President Ronald Reagan - lie behind the constantly simmering tension between the US and Russa, and is it worth the investment so far of $100 billion - when we really don't know if it would ever work?

There were huge hopes for Britain's biotech industry when the Genome was mapped in a blaze of publicity at the turn of the last century. It was hoped that it would cure many ills and make huge amounts of money for our science companies - so why has it gone so horribly wrong?

And with our great medals haul at Beijing, Sunday's closing celebrations will be watched by millions here in the UK -we have an eight minute slot in the Birds Nest stadium which will be watched by billions around the world. We are promised an old red double decker bus and a double act from Jimmy Page - but could we do better? What should London 2012's opening ceremony be? What image of Britain should we project? Please send us your ideas. Grayson Perry and Ken Livingstone will be on the show to give their thoughts
Kirsty

Some good stories today.

Star Wars
Poland will finally sign up to the Missile Defence System with Condi Rice in Warsaw today, despite warnings from Russia that this will make them a target for a strike "100%". Does the "Star Wars" programme lie behind many of the recent tensions between Russia and the US? Will it upset the balance of power in Europe and after an investment of well over $100bn since the 1980s are the Pentagon much closer to an effective shield in any case?

Gary Glitter is holed up in a Thai airport; the government has announced new proposals on preventing sex offenders from travelling abroad, but why are so few of the existing laws enforced anyway? The Competition Commission verdict on BAA is particularly strong today - how could we move this on? We have a film on the high hopes and subsequent failures in the British Bio-tech sector and... what would make the perfect British Olympic opening ceremony in 2012? Is a double decker bus, David Beckham and Jimmy Page (all due respect to Peter B) the best we can do (the reported line up for Britain's eight minute slot during Sunday's closing ceremony)? Which guests could discuss this?

Dan

Tonight a Newsnight exclusive: we have an extraordinary story about one of Britain's leading charities and its link to the 7/7 bombers.

NATO:

Is it time to assess just what the NATO strategy really is on Russian aggression and just how strong the alliance is looking. Today Nato foreign ministers gathered in Brussels to discuss a way forward on the situation in Georgia. They said there will be no business as usual with Moscow and then insisted Russia must not be isolated. What does this mean? And will divisions within the institution mean it is powerless to act decisively? Tonight, we'll be speaking to the Foreign Secretary David Miliband, now in Tbilisi, and asking what the future holds for new democracies and Nato.

Gordon Brown:

Is back from his holidays and preparing for an autumn relaunch. Will he have a spring in his step and new ideas after the summer break? We'll have the latest from our political correspondent.

Olympics:

And what, exactly, is going on? Even the pointiest pointy heads in our newsroom and elsewhere have been tuned into sport and roaring at the television. Britain now has 16 gold medals. Third in the medals table. What is this doing to the British psyche - and what does success do to the happiness of a nation. We'll hope to be speaking to a leading psychologist and Jeffrey Archer - one time sprinter and hurdler.

Do join us on BBC Two at 10.30pm

"There are a few good stories around today. As Nato foreign ministers meet in Brussels to discuss the conflict between Russia and Georgia, there are few signs yet that Moscow is honouring its commitment on withdrawing its forces.

Let's discuss ways to do this story. Richard and Meirion have an extraordinary story which I'll tell you more about in the meeting.

There are some good Olympics stories to get our teeth into. Any other ideas welcome.

Robert"

Musharraf's Mixed Legacy:
It took him a good hour to get there - but finally, at the end of a televised address - the President of Pakistan - who took the country in a bloodless military coup nearly a decade ago - resigned. He was facing impeachment on charges drawn up by the coalition government, and said whilst confident any charges against him would not stand, he was stepping down in the best interests of Pakistan.
Internationally, the questions raised by his going are huge. He has long been considered by the West - and particularly America - as a key ally in the fight against Islamic extremists. Yet $10bn has been spent helping Pakistan fight Al Qaeda - perhaps more, covertly - but protagonists Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri are still at large.
Tonight we ask, what does this resignation mean: a set-back for the War on Terror? Or an opportunity?

Georgia:
It was the day the Russians promised to pull out of Georgia - yet as I write, this is far from clear. International pressure has been growing on them to do so - but it still doesn't seem to be having much effect. President Sarkozy has threatened to call an EU emergency summit. But Russia's not exactly looking scared. We talk to our correspondent in Tbilisi about the latest movements on the ground and what happens next.

Is Water the New Oil?
Water scarcity - and its consequent problems - has leapt up the list of concerns of the military and defence world. We report from Mexico City - where water levels are dropping faster than Venice, Kenya - where it's estimated half the African continent could be suffering from 'water stress' within 25 years and the West Bank, where water consumption has become one of the main obstacles to peace. As World Water Week kicks off in Stockholm we ask whether there is a real water shortage or just too much bad political management. And could a lack of water really lead to war in future?

Do join us for all that and (a little bit) more at 10.30pm on BBC Two
Emily

Richard"

"Hello to viewers at home and abroad,

The Georgian crisis still dominates the headlines tonight, but as well as analysing today's developments - including US Defence Secretary Robert Gates' statement that there will need to be some consequences for Russia's actions in Georgia - Newsnight's team in Georgia set off to find out more about what's really going on the front line. They track down a family they met earlier this week just after they were shot at in Gori by South Ossetian militia - they have a terrifying story to tell.
Then, with continued sporadic fighting on the ground and Russian forces still on Georgian sovereign territory, we'll be speaking to senior Russian and US politicians about the future of a very difficult relationship.

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland pupils have been enjoying record A level results today, but as far as the Government's concerned A levels in England could - eventually - be on their way out... A new diploma marrying academic and vocational skills is being rolled out from September. However, such is the resistance to this in some quarters, that for the foreseeable future there is to be a parallel system - which some people view as a two-tier system. We'll be asking the Education Minister whether this is going to lead to clarity or confusion.

The anatomy of Hillary Clinton's failed election campaign is laid bare in private correspondences exposed in the latest edition of Atlantic Monthly, and it gives the impression of a ruthless, backstabbing, contradictory and faulty machine. The magazine asked for emails from the key players and they came zinging back. They paint a picture of indecision and disagreement over how to attack Obama, how to position their candidate and what her message should be.

And finally - it's so valuable it's known as "black gold". Yvonne Murray has been investigating the bright future for onshore oil drilling in the UK.

See you at 22.30

Kirsty"

"Caucasus crisis. Andrew and Warwick are on the ground and there should be important diplomatic developments. How should we move this on? What guests would you like on ?

Diplomas - high hopes but will they just become another vocational qualification?

The inside story on how the Clinton nomination campaign collapsed, and onshore oil drilling in the UK.

What else?"

"Dear Viewers,

Tonight we begin with the crisis in Georgia. In a forthright speech, President Bush made it clear this afternoon that the US will have direct engagement in the conflict. In pursuit of "solidarity with the Georgian people" he said Russia must cease all military action and respect Georgia's territorial borders. He is sending Condoleezza Rice to Paris and on to Tbilisi, and he announced a humanitarian aid mission headed by the United States military. Russia insists that its intervention in South Ossetia was a humanitarian action, but if the EU is divided over blame for the crisis, America is clearly 100% behind President Saakashvili.

We'll be reporting on the significance of President Bush's speech, and our reporter Andrew North will bring us the latest of his extraordinary eye-witness reports from Georgia. If you've missed his previous films you can catch them on our website. Today he and his team have watched people in panic, and a deterioration of order on the outskirts of the capital Tbilisi, as rumours grew of a Russian tank column heading for the city.

From Hezza to Prezza, the big idea was regeneration but today the Policy Exchange - a Conservative-leaning think tank - published a report claiming that some northern cities were "beyond revival" and that there had been a decade of "failed" efforts at regeneration. The report wasn't exactly a winner with the Tory leader David Cameron who has just begun a two-day visit to Cumbria and the North West of England, and he described it as "complete rubbish". I wonder if John Prescott's language was as temperate when he first read it? I'll ask him when he speaks to us live.

More summer-time blues for the economy - Mervyn King the Governor of The Bank of England warned there could be a recession looming and today's unemployment figures showed an increase of 60,000 out of work. But he predicted that although inflation would rise, it will fall sharply next year - and dip below the official 2% target in two years time. Tonight our Economics editor Paul Mason tells us if it's not all bad news!

And we bring you the extraordinary story of Sidney Rittenberg who's watching the Beijing Olympics with particular interest. As a young American, he joined China's communist party only to be jailed for 16 years by Chairman Mao. But instead of shunning the nation, Sidney Rittenberg, now a 70-something multi-millionaire guru, is back playing a key role in building bridges between the US and China.
I hope you'll be watching,

Kirsty"

"Andrew North, Warwick and Peter are still in Georgia. They will be looking at the internal situation in Georgia. Is it curtains for Saakashvili? What do people really think about him, and the way the conflict has panned out?

There's deep disagreement about the way forward at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels. They're expected to endorse the French peace plan, and send it to the UN - but apart from that there are divisions over what to do next - whether to send in international peacekeepers for instance, and divisions over who was really to blame in the conflict. What shall we do on all this?

The Bank of England publishes its latest report on inflation in a minute. Tougher times ahead are expected. The number of people claiming jobless benefits rose in July by the largest amount since 1992. Paul Mason is on the case.

Prince Charles is warning that companies developing genetically modified crops could cause what he calls the "biggest environmental disaster of all time". What's he talking about?

The Policy Exchange suggests that people from Liverpool, Sunderland and Bradford should move to London, Oxford and Cambridge. Everyone will be talking about it all day, but should we?

John MacDougall, MP for Central Fife has died. Another Scottish by-election.

What's going on with Zimbabwe?

What else?

Yours, Shaminder"

"Conflict in the Caucasus:We're live in Georgia tonight with an incredibly powerful film that details the horrific aftermath of attacks in the frontline town of Gori just hours before the Russian President Dmitri Medvedev called for an end to military operations.

This afternoon French President Nicolas Sarkozy - who currently holds the EU presidency - offered to send peacekeeping forces to the region. Medvedev has said the key elements of the plan are the agreement on the non use of force and the cessation of all military action. More ambiguous is the line that Russian peacekeepers will be taking additional security measures until international mechanisms are worked out. So what should we understand by that and just how would EU peacekeeping operations come into force? We'll be interviewing one of the chief negotiators - the chairman of the OSCE - and asking whether Russia hasn't in fact won this dispute hands down.

And we'll have the latest from our Andrew North in Georgia - he's spent the day in the key Georgian city of Gori - which came under attack from Russian jets.

Inflation:
When you prepare for bad news but it's even worse than you thought, you know things are pretty tough. Inflation is now at its highest for 16 years - reaching 4.4%. This now makes the next interest rate decision by the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee an even harder balancing act. Our Economics Editor, Paul Mason reports.

Faking It:
The Beijing Olympics may be giving a whole new twist to the words Chinese manufacturing. Yesterday they confessed that some of their opening night fireworks were computer generated. Now we learn that they have faked the weather - even faked the crowds a little by bussing in a rent-a-crowd to some events. And this evening, a rather sobering story that the pretty pig-tailed soloist at the opening ceremony was actually lip synching her words, after the real child prodigy was deemed 'too ugly' to sing at the ceremony by Chinese officials. Do you admire their guile, or feel, bluntly, cheated? And to what dizzy heights of fakery must London aspire to in 2012 just to keep up? We'll debate that here tonight.

Elephant Meat:
The horrific slaughter of endangered elephants for their ivory has long been documented but now the animals are under threat from another trade. Renowned conservationist and wildlife photographer Karl Amman is credited with almost single-handedly raising awareness of the issue of bush meat, the slaughter and consumption of wild - and often protected - animals. He has now turned his camera on the butchering of elephants for their meat in the Central African Republic - one of the poorest countries in the world.

Do join me at 10.30,

Emily"

"There's lots around today. Georgia, inflation, rape compensation seem like prime candidates. Do come to the meeting armed with lots of ideas on how to do these stories and others.

The Elephant Meat film might make it tonight!

Robert"