PARK FESTIVAL SELLS OUT A sell-out crowd of 48000 attended the T in The Park festival

PARK FESTIVAL SELLS OUT A sell-out crowd of 48,000 attended the T in The Park festival in Perthshire (above) Police arrested one person for a drugs related offence First aiders warned the public to avoid dehydration.. JUDGE BACKS MARIJUANA One of Scotland's leading judges, Lord McCluskey, has called for a Royal Commission to look at the decriminalisation of cannabis and the sentencing of drugs offenders because prison sentences were failing.. TINDERBOX TOWN Two minor fires in Marlborough, Wiltshire, have lead to warnings that the historic market town with its 17th-century wooden buildings could go up in smoke... CONDON VISITS ASIANS The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Condon, will visit the Asian community in Southall, London, tomorrow in a drive to recruit constables from ethnic minorities.. V&A WANTS POSH DRESS The pounds 60,000 dress worn by singer Victoria Adams at her wedding to footballer David Beckham could be bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum.. .

LOTTERY SYSTEM CRASHES Camelot's nationwide network of 35,000 terminals crashed between 330pm and 430pm denying thousands of punters a chance at becoming millionaires and contributing to a smaller than usual jackpot The winning numbers were 5, 7, 15, 26, 35, 40, and bonus 45 The jackpot was pounds 64m. GOLD MEDALLIST HAS BABY The Irish athlete Sonia O'Sullivan, the two-times world cross country and European 5,000 metres and 10,000 metres gold medal winner, has given birth to her first child, a girl, at a London hospital.. HUNT FOR LOST POLICEMAN A hunt was under way last night for a 32-year-old Glasgow policeman, thought to be suffering from a stress-related incident, who went missing on his way to work a night shift on Thursday.. Duff's ditch eventually saved the city billions of dollars worth of damage, for an initial cost of pounds 40m.n Last week's conference heard how the Swiss were rolling rocks down mountain sides to see what kind of vegetation was best at stopping landslides.n The authorities in Kazakhstan have set aside a whole valley where they deliberately start mud slides so as to work out how to cope with them.n Other countries are putting meanders back into rivers to slow them down and trying to recreate flood plains as safety valves.. Then, two years ago, the waters rose again, far faster than in 1950. Other cities were soon under water, but Winnipeg stayed high and dry; without the channel it would have been submerged.

For nearly 50 years the channel - dubbed Duff's Ditch - was a local joke. The people then retreat to mounds the size of football pitches where they have sunk wells for water, dug fish ponds for food, and planted trees for fuel - sitting it out until the waters subside.n After floods completely inundated Winnipeg in Canada in 1950, the premier of the province of Manitoba, Duff Roblin, ordered that a diversion channel should be dug around the city to prevent it ever happening again. When the waters begin to rise warnings are broadcast to 30,000 volunteers from the Red Crescent. Equipped with hand-held radios and megaphones, the volunteers pick up the message and set off to warn the people of their areas - and as they are all local villagers, they are believed.

Everyone that is, except perhaps the optimists of the conference who, undaunted by their experience with the International Decade, headed their final declaration: "A Safer World in the 21st Century".THE GOOD NEWSIT'S NOT all bad news - there have been a few successes in staving off the deluge of disasters:n Drownings in Bangladesh have dropped dramatically, even as flooding has increased, thanks to a unique early warning system. And the devastating floods of the Rhine in 1993 and 1995 were exacerbated because 90 per cent of the upper part of the river had been cut off from its natural flood plains.Lastly, many scientists believe that global warming is already bringing more extreme storms and more frequent floods as sea levels rise - and almost all expect this to happen at an ever increasing pace in the future."This sets alarm bells ringing all over the place," says Peter Walker, Head of Disaster Policy at the International Red Cross.Everyone expects disaster to increase in the next century as population growth, environmental damage and global warming continue: by 2025, 60 per cent of the world's people are expected to be "highly vulnerable" to catastrophes. The Red Cross's latest World Disasters Report, published last month, says that, by the time it reached Central America, Hurricane Mitch was "not an exceptionally severe storm": the catastrophe occurred because its rains hit denuded hillsides, causing floods and mudslides.Last year's floods of the Yangtze were made much worse, says Washington's Worldwatch Institute, because more than four fifths of the forests around it had been cut down: after the disaster the Chinese government banned further logging and ordered that recently cleared hillsides should be replanted. For example as poverty and population increases, more and more people in the Third World - which takes more than 90 per cent of the damage from natural disasters - are having to live on vulnerable land from sandbars on the Bangladesh coast to Rio's hillside slums.Forty of the world's 50 fastest growing cities, one study concludes, are in earthquake zones and the inquiry into last year's record floods in Britain was told that half of all the houses built in the country since the Second World War had been "imprudently" sited in areas prone to inundation.Second, the world's natural defences against disaster are being destroyed, for example by cutting down forests - which soak up rain - and straightening rivers making them flow faster and break their banks more frequently.