Illegal logging is threatening the livelihoods of millions of the world’s poor, robbing governments of billions of dollars in revenue and undermining legitimate logging businesses, the World Bank said on Saturday. In developing countries, illegal logging of public lands alone causes estimated losses in assets and revenue in excess of -billion a year.

Reedi Gul is probably dead now. Two weeks ago masked gunmen abducted the 24-year-old on a lonely mountain road in central Afghanistan. The next day his father, Saleh Gul, received a phone call, and realised he was the real target. ”I am an Afghan Muslim Talib,” the voice announced. ”If you want to see your son alive, listen carefully.”

DDT, a pesticide banned in the developed world, should be used to spray houses in all countries where people suffer from malaria, the World Health Organisation said on Friday, 30 years after it phased the practice out. The new push to use DDT to kill the malaria-transmitting mosquito in Africa and other parts of the world with severe death tolls from the disease will dismay many environmentalists.

Pope Benedict XVI was on Friday night facing angry demands from Muslims that he apologise for a speech in which he appeared to say the concept of jihad was ”unreasonable” and quoted a medieval ruler who said Muhammad’s innovations were ”evil and inhuman”. Protests swept across the Islamic world and the furore threatened a scheduled visit by the pope to Turkey.