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Around 20,000 people marched through central London on Saturday to demand action on climate change, police said, as rallies took place in other cities.

The demonstration organizers called for a tough agreement on reducing emissions at the forthcoming Copenhagen summit.

The London rally was organized by the group Stop Climate Chaos, a coalition of non-governmental organizations including Oxfam and Greenpeace.

SCC director Ashok Sinha urged British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to “make Copenhagen count by committing rich countries to reduce their emissions by at least 40 percent in the next 10 years, finally putting the right sort of money on the table to help poor countries, and urgently starting the process of decarbonizing our energy supply.

“With bold leadership at home, Mr Brown can help inspire a fair, effective and binding international deal at Copenhagen.”

A spokesman for London’s Metropolitan Police told AFP the demonstration had “passed off peacefully so far”, with no reported arrests.

About 7,000 people marched in Glasgow, while another rally took place in Belfast. A protest was also planned for Dublin.

From the London rally, Britain’s Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband told BBC television: “We’re going to go all out, the whole of the British government, over the next two weeks to make sure we get the most ambitious agreement that we can.”

He added: “We are very clear that we need a treaty within months of any agreement at Copenhagen.”

Meanwhile Oxfam chief executive Barbara Stocking said: “The UK government must fight for a comprehensive, fair and binding deal at Copenhagen.

“They must return home with a strong, effective climate deal both for our own sakes in the UK and for the millions of poor people already suffering from the effects of climate change around the world.”

Earlier, at a tie-in ecumenical service at Westminster Central Hall, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the leader of the world’s Anglicans, said: “We are part of a great interwoven system of life.

“Don’t please listen to those that say there is some kind of choice to be made between looking after human beings and looking after the Earth.”

Meanwhile the Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, the leader of England’s Catholics, said: “Only when we are prepared to change the way we live will politicians be able to achieve the change that we want to see.

“Live simply so others may simply live.”

At least 109 people were killed and dozens injured overnight to Saturday when a blaze sparked by indoor fireworks swept through a nightclub, in one of the deadliest tragedies to hit Russia in recent years.

Flames ripped through the Lame Horse nightclub in the Ural city of Perm as around 230 people celebrated the popular venue’s eighth anniversary, local police said, quoted by Russian news agencies.

Russian television showed bodies being piled up outside the club by rescue workers. The windows of the one-story building were shattered and charred.

Local residents told AFP the fire could have spread quickly because a barn theme meant the club was decorated with highly flammable straw panels.

Russian authorities said they had arrested the owner and manager of the club on Saturday.

Emergency Services officials in a televised meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev said managers at the venue had violated fire safety laws and repeatedly ignored orders to comply with standards.

“Warnings were issued, but they didn’t react,” Medvedev said, urging swift punishment for those responsible. “They have neither brains, nor conscience!”

Premier Vladimir Putin ordered a government commission to probe the causes of the tragedy, saying in a statement: “It is necessary to launch a minute investigation, punish the culprits and discovered the causes of this monstrous disaster.”

The death toll from the tragedy reached 109 after another seven burn victims died in hospital, a spokesman for local investigative committee said, quoted by news agencies RIA Novosti and Interfax.

Some 200 relatives of the victims waited in anguish outside a morgue on the outskirts of the city for the slow work of identifying the bodies. A regional emergency situations ministry spokeswoman told AFP so far 57 people had been identified. Related article: Families’ agonising wait

She said a further 130 people were injured in the blaze overnight from Friday to Saturday, and local residents said hospitals had put out an urgent call for blood donors in the wake of the tragedy.

Many of those killed died of smoke inhalation or were crushed to death as party-goers rushed to flee, officials said.

A local resident, who gave her name only as Nelly, said staff and performers, including a friend’s daughter, had for the most part escaped through a back door.

“The lights went out and she crawled out through a back exit. Her clothes were all charred from the fire and black,” she said.

“There were fireworks set off at the scene, and one hit the plastic ceiling, setting everything ablaze. People panicked and succumbed to burns, the crush and gas poisoning,” the Perm region’s public security minister Igor Orlov was quoted as saying.

Officials ruled out the possibility that the tragedy was due to a terrorist attack as FSB security service experts found no trace of explosives or other evidence at the scene.

The tragedy came a week after a train blast on a busy railway from Moscow to Saint Petersburg killed 26 people and renewed fears of terror attacks in Russia’s heartland.

A grainy video from inside the club broadcast on Vesti showed the ceiling starting to blaze. Smoke wisped through the crowd of young party-goers with drinks, who slowly realize what is happening and rush toward an exit.

Enforcement of fire safety regulations is known to be lax in Russia, where thousands of blazes are recorded every year and the death rate from fires is several times higher than in the West.

Perm is a city of around a million people and lies about 1,200 kilometres (700 miles) east of Moscow in Russia’s Ural mountains.

Leaked climate e-mails make waves in Congress

A row over leaked emails from a British scientist hinting at a global warming cover-up has reached the US Congress, where climate change skeptics are seeking to thwart key legislation.

British Professor Phil Jones has stood aside as director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, after his emails calling into question the scientific basis for climate change fears were leaked.

Hackers had penetrated the center’s network and posted online thousands of emails from researchers, including Jones, ahead of a landmark Copenhagen summit which opens next week.

The leader of a US group of so-called “climatology skeptics”, Republican Representative James Sensenbrenner, said “if the emails are genuine it is very disturbing because they call into question the whole science of climate change.”

He told the House committee on energy independence and global warming that data from the East Anglia university had “been used as a basis for the IPCC report as well as for the US global research program.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) benchmarks for CO2 concentrations in a 2007 report serve as a guidepost for the UN-backed talks in Copenhagen.

The e-mails showed “an increasing evidence that scientific fascism is going on,” Sensenbrenner added.

“As policy makers are making decisions about the state of the American economy for the next several generations, we have to have accurate science and it appears that there is enough questions on whether the science we have is accurate.”

Skeptics, including many Republicans, say global temperatures may be warming naturally, and argue the costs of implementing legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions will be too heavy for American industry.

US President Barack Obama is to attend the Copenhagen climate conference next week with an offer to cut US emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.

The White House has said Obama would also lay out a longer-term plan for a 30 percent reduction of US emissions from 2005 levels by 2025, a 42 percent reduction by 2030 and an 83 percent cut by 2050.

The United States is the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter.

The transgressions of Tiger Woods have proved too much to take for one of the golf superstar’s most fanatical fans who is now disbanding a church set up in praise of the sports icon.

John Ziegler, the pastor of the “First Church of Tiger Woods” — www.tigerwoodsisgod.com — has announced in a statement on the blog that the organization is being dissolved because of the golfer’s “personal sins.”

The church, whose home page has now been rechristened “The Damnation of Tiger Woods,”was launched by radio host Ziegler in 1996 to “celebrate the emergence of the ‘true messiah.’”

However the lurid revelations that have swirled around Woods since last week have left Ziegler so disenchanted that he is now ending his church, which has its own “Prayer for Tiger” and “Ten Tiger Commandments.”

“After several days of evaluation, I have decided to disband the First Church of Tiger Woods,” Ziegler wrote.

“Tiger is clearly no longer deserving of being seen as a role model or a hero and he has needlessly squandered his unique potential to be a positive force in our country and the world.

“While I am relatively sure that Tiger will make a comeback from this sad episode and that there will be great moments for him in the future, I personally am done with Tiger Woods.”

However Ziegler’s reaction appears to fly in the face of the 10th of the “Tiger commandments” — “Thou shall pay no attention to Tiger’s apparent flaws.”

A home movie purporting to show Marilyn Monroe smoking a marijuana joint has surfaced some five decades after being shot at a gathering with friends in New Jersey.

Collector Keya Morgan uncovered the color footage while researching an documentary which he says will prove Monroe was murdered in August 1962.

The reel-to-reel film, which has no sound, shows Monroe relaxing with female friends in a house and smoking.

Morgan said he bought the footage for 275,000 dollars from one of the women present at the meeting in the late 1950s.

Both that woman and a former FBI agent who knew of the footage told him that marijuana, not tobacco was being smoked.

“The reason we know for a fact it’s marijuana is the lady who shot it, she’s still alive,” Morgan told AFP. “She rolled up the joint and handed it over to Marilyn.”

The film shows the Hollywood superstar looking happy and playful.

Morgan said his documentary, “Marilyn Monroe: Murder on Fifth Helena Drive,” will show that the FBI believed the actress posed a security risk because she was seeing president John F. Kennedy and dabbling in drugs.

“They felt that Marilyn Monroe posed a security threat to the presidency because she was under the influence of marijuana and under the influence of alcohol, and could be a danger not only to herself but also to the presidency,” he said.

For that reason, the FBI at the time sought a copy of the footage from New Jersey, he said.

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