Uncertainty deepened over the Turkish proposal, which diplomats said had been made only orally by Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul to his Finnish counterpart, Erkki Tuomioja, and still did not exist in writing.

Finland holds the EU's rotating presidency and Tuomioja said on Thursday he would seek clarification on whether the Turkish offer was unconditional.

"Our ambassador doesn't have any additional information to give to his colleagues," a Finnish official said as the 25 EU envoys met to prepare for Monday's foreign ministers' meeting, due to decide on the future of Turkey's accession talks.

Other diplomats said the Finnish envoy had reported that the presidency still had no written text or clarification to offer.

Cyprus, meanwhile, blocked an effort to have foreign ministers call next week for an early resumption of
United Nations peace talks on the divided island. Diplomats said Nicosia had successfully argued that the EU did not issue statements about its own member states.

TOO HARSH?

The executive
European Commission has recommended a partial suspension of the negotiations because Turkey has not met a treaty obligation to open its ports and airports to traffic from Cyprus, one of the 10 new members which joined the EU in 2004.

"We still need to seek further clarification to know what exactly the Turkish offer on the table is," a Commission spokeswoman said. "For the time being our recommendations of November 29 remain on the table."

Turkey's supporters, led by Britain, called those too harsh and seized on Ankara's latest move to urge the EU to wait before acting against the Turks.

Cyprus, represented in the EU by the Greek Cypriot government in Nicosia, has already rejected the Turkish offer, saying it comes with conditions unacceptable to their side.

"It was a big bang from Ankara, which I think has now deflated," Lillikas said.

Ankara has previously said it will only comply if the EU makes good on a promise to ease the economic isolation of Turkish Cypriot northern Cyprus, which the Greek Cypriot government in Nicosia has so far prevented.

Its latest proposal appeared to offer the opening of one port provisionally for a year, while stating readiness to open an airport to flights from Cyprus if the EU allowed direct trade with northern Cyprus through a port and an airport.

Nicosia has categorically ruled out allowing the opening of Ercan airport for international flights, which could bring a tourism bonanza to the economically backward north of the divided island.

Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat, whose self-declared state is recognized only by Ankara, was in Brussels on Friday to urge EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn not to go ahead with sanctions against Turkey, his office said.

Cyprus has been divided since Turkish troops invaded in 1974 in response to a coup by Greek Cypriot militants seeking union with Greece.

The EU admitted the divided island as a member in 2004, represented only by the Nicosia government, which Turkey does not recognize. The Turkish Cypriot administration, by contrast, is recognized only by Turkey.

'It's about time,' said Garry Hindle, terrorism expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London. 'Military terminology is completely counter-productive, merely contributing to isolating communities. This is a very positive move.'

A Foreign Office spokesman said the government wanted to 'avoid reinforcing and giving succour to the terrorists' narrative by using language that, taken out of context, could be counter-productive'. The same message has been sent to British diplomats and official spokespeople around the world.

'We tend to emphasise upholding shared values as a means to counter terrorists,' he added.

Many senior British politicians and counter-terrorism specialists have always been uneasy with the term 'the war on terror', coined by the White House in the week following the 9/11 attacks, arguing that the term risked inflaming opinions worldwide. Other critics said that it was too 'military' and did not adequately describe the nature of the diverse efforts made to counter the new threat.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, recently stressed the threat from growing radicalisation among young British Muslims. Whitehall officials believe that militants use a sense of war and crisis and a 'clash of civilisations' to recruit supporters, and thus the use of terms such as 'war', 'war on terror' or 'battle' can be counter-productive.

Though neither Blair nor Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, has used the term 'war on terror' in a formal speech since June, President Bush continues to employ the term liberally. The American leader spoke of how he hoped that Iraq would become 'an ally in the war on terror' during a joint press briefing with Blair in Washington last Friday.

A spokesman for the US State Department yesterday told The Observer that there was no question of dropping the term. 'It's the President's phrase, and that's good enough for us,' she said.

The White House website has a page devoted to explaining the 'war on terrorism', the terminology preferred by the Pentagon, and how it will be won. In April this year Bush compared the 'war on terror' to the Cold War in a keynote speech.

Not all British government figures are abiding by the advice, issued by the Foreign Office's Engaging with the Islamic World Unit. Writing in the Sun recently, Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, referred to 'our police and armed forces in the front line of the war on terror'.

'One of the problems will be getting all parts of government to abide [by the new guidelines],' said Hindle, the RUSI expert. 'Whether the Home Office will want to follow remains to be seen. And politicians all have their own agendas.'

The key variable is the power of political parties. In these three countries, competition between two hegemonic parties tends to squeeze opponents to the margins or subordinate them to alliance-seeking with one of the major players (as with the Die Grunen or Freie Demokratische Partei in Germany) in a coalition government system. The result is that the political extremes are eliminated, ostracised or co-opted.

France, by contrast, is characterised more by a rainbow spectrum of political parties in which even the leading players face more-or-less-serious competition from those to their right and left. The influence of these currents, moreover, derives less from ideological conviction (albeit a minority of adherents do zealously uphold the respective causes of exclusivist nationalism or doctrinal Marxism) than from the desire to protest.

The massive numbers voting in France for "fringe" parties reflect the embitterment of the politically, economically or socially disenfranchised: those who feel that an incestuous political system only interested by its own survival has marginalised them and establishment parties seeking only to woo the centre and the social "insiders" have discarded them. In the United States, such alienated citizens may stay at home in sullen indifference; in Britain, they might adapt Shakespeare and rail "a plague on all your houses"; in France, they tend to express their anger through the ballot-box.

This participating opposition is well-entrenched tradition which, from the 19th century, has nurtured populists who have tried to ride on a wave of discontent by making loads of promises that they would never be in a position to have to deliver.

They exist, too, on both right and left. In the mid-1950s, the small-business and peasant populism of Pierre Poujade briefly shook the establishment in the febrile years of the fourth republic. A protest vote that both predated and outlasted the Poujadistes, however, was that of the Parti communiste franˆßais (PCF); after the second world war, the communists regularly garnered 20%-25% of voters, though for the most part its electoral supporters wished to express their dissatisfaction - knowing the party had no chance of winning power - than to see France being made a laboratory of the Stalinist paradise.

The allure of communism began gradually to crumble with the revelations (following Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" of February 1956) about Stalin's crimes. It took a long time, however, for its rival (and occasional partner) on the left, the Parti Socialiste (PS), to reap electoral dividends from the PCF's decline.

The slow renovation of the PS was accelerated after the accretion of several leftist republican groups at the Epinay congress in 1971 that brought Francois Mitterrand to the leadership, and the agreement on a "common programme" with the PCF that followed. The party established itself as the dominant force in a Union de la Gauche (Union of the Left) which helped win Mitterrand the presidency in May 1981, and proceeded to eclipse its communist allies (whose ministers resigned from the government in 1984 and went into enfeebled opposition).

The debilitation of the communists - the PCF's vote in presidential elections declined from 21% (Jacques Duclos, 1969) to 15.3% (George Marchais, 1981) to 3.4% (Robert Hue, 2002) - had the curious effect of encouraging the protest vote to started shifting to the far right. By 2002, the PCF was polling only 3.4% in the legislative election, and its presidential vote was less even than the Trotskyist groupuscules; today, it requires a little help from its PS "friends" (in the form of non-competition in certain districts of diehard communist voters) to be guaranteed a parliamentary group in the French national assembly at all.

The right of the right This slow but significant transfer of votes from the extreme left to the extreme right saw the latter win no less than 30% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election in 2002. The stunning result was that veteran rightist Jean-Marie le Pen - the leader of the rightwing Front National (FN) - eliminated Lionel Jospin of the PS, and himself reached the second-round ballot against Jacques Chirac.

The trajectory of Le Pen's support since his first contest in 1974 tells the story: from 0.74% to 14.4% in 1988 (he was unable in 1981 to gain the support needed to qualify for the campaign) to 15% in 1995 and 16.86% in 2002 - when Jacques Chirac benefited from the disarray by crushing Le Pen with 82.21% of the decisive ballot). Today, the 78-year-old - first elected as an MP in 1956 - is basking in 13%-17% opinion-poll support for a campaign that announces his jingoism, opposition to immigration, and distaste for Arabs and black people.

There is a snag - the same one that derailed his efforts in 1981. By law, each candidate needs the support of 500 elected representatives (from national or local assemblies, or mayors) to enter the contest; for the FN this is always difficult, as the party has few elected members (none in parliament), and Le Pen has always relied on courting rightwing village mayors.

But if he can stand in the first round on 22 April 2007, he will introduce again a "wild card" into a race likely to be between the socialist candidate Segolene Royal and (most probably, if not yet certainly) head of the government party Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) and interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Jean-Marie Le Pen combatively proclaims a determination to win; and if he can't reach the ballot, he threatens to unleash "his" voters against forces on the right he accuses of betrayal (thus the covert efforts from Sarko's" camp to help him obtain the 500 signatures he needs).

Le Pen rules the FN as he dreams of ruling France - single-handedly, brooking no dissent. He intends to stand as long as he lives and is grooming one of his three daughters, Marine, to succeed him. At the same time, there is no one on the far right with his amazing charisma (without which he would have remained an obscure, one-eyed, neo-fascist agitator). Where will all his supporters turn to when he dies?

The left of the left An obvious answer would be: forward to the past, and (as it was before Le Pen) into the arms of the extreme left. Both tendencies, after all, have campaigned against the European constitution and against globalisation. There is indeed, in the galaxy of movements of all shades of red or green, a rich reservoir of protest votes.

Some, Les Verts (Greens) as well as the PCF, have in the past joined the socialists as junior partners in coalition governments; they seem ready to do the same if "Sego" wins, although they loath her social- democratic leanings. Others, like the three Trotskyist parties remain adamantly opposed to class collaboration with those Stalin used to call "social traitors"; two are preparing to field their own candidates, the 29- year-old postman Alain Besancenot (Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire / LCR) and (fighting what will be her sixth presidential campaign) the 66-year-old Arlette Laguiller (Lutte Ouvriere / LO).

As the economist Jean Matouk wrote in Liberation, part of the self-styled "anti-liberal-left" parties don't really wish to see the PS win next year as "they never fare better than when the right is in power" (see Qui veut vraiment vaincre la droite?, 27 November 2006). This Realpolitik is in stark contrast to the idealism many far-left and green militants proclaim. Their rhetoric says that "ultra-liberalism", globalisation, the United States (and a corporate, Lisbon-agenda-led Europe) are the scourge of humanity, and that the PS's moderate bourgeois reformism has nothing anymore to do with socialism; their logic says that they would prefer the right rather than the centre-left to win.

Among the forty current self-proclaimed presidential candidates, a dozen come from the "left of the left". Three are jostling to represent the greens, and another - the popular TV presenter Nicolas Hulot - appears ready to join the field. But a further altermondialiste candidate (in addition to those of the PCF, LCR and LO) has left in disgust on 28 November; Jose Bove - the farmer who became famous by dismantling his local McDonald's and uprooting GM crops - is dismayed by internal leftist bickering.

He accuses the leadership of the PCF and the LCR (the LO is too pure to mingle with other soi-disant comrades) of hijacking the decision of a congress of the "left of the left" scheduled for 9-10 December to select a joint candidate (as well as Besancenot, Marie- George Buffet has already been anointed as the PCF's choice). There are further disputes over strategy; Bove charges Buffet of manipulating the 700 independent committees where all leftists are supposed to ingather to make the decision; and the LCR demands that each potential partner in the leftist alliance vouches not to compromise with the PS (an anathema for the communists, who could be wiped out of parliament).

The rationale of the "left of the left" strategy is to consolidate a force that could be matched by a counterweight on the left of the PS (which as a whole represented 26% of voters in 2002 and now stands at 14% in the opinion-polls). The left's leaders want to draw support from many of the 54% of French citizens who voted "no" to the European constitution in the referendum of May 2005; then negotiate with the PS on an equal footing, thus forcing it to lean further to the left.

So far, the political ambitions and rivalries of its main leaders - no less than a wildly unrealistic platform - mean that this strategy has got nowhere.

Any readers still able to follow these Byzantine intricacies of the far left may also wonder whether this "strategy" - if that is not too grand a word in the circumstances - for fighting Segolene Royal on her left has any chance of success. In this case, "success" appears to mean derailing a popular female candidate from the left and displaying an electoral weight able to force the PS into negotiation. The risks are evident: torpedoing the traditional left and sabotaging its chances of power, looking like another bunch of politicians trapped by petty rivalry and personal ambition, and guaranteeing another presidency of the right in the Elysee palace.

Segolene Royal is depending on the fact that enough elements on the left are burdened by a guilt-tinged feeling of responsibility for Jospin's defeat in 2002 and are prepared to vote against their preferred candidate to avoid a similar outcome. The question is: how many of those who don't share her social democracy, or who (unlike her) voted "no" to Europe's constitution will turn to her as the only force capable of crushing Sarkozy?

If Sego survives a six-month-long election campaign - and some of her friends as well as her enemies still believe she won't - how many leftists will remain faithful to their own parties, how many could jump on her bandwagon? How far left - and right - will the Royal circus be able to cast its net? The ball is in play.

Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde.

Royal, he said, "wants this trip to be useful for the French and wants concrete benefits to emerge that might take the form of acts or reflection... on globalisation, economic trade, health."

The US visit, which aims to bolster Royal's stature on the world stage ahead of France's April-May 2007 presidential elections, had originally been planned for December 13-14 but was postponed.

Royal has frequently criticised US policies, in contrast with her likely chief rival from the ruling right, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been firmly pro-US in his stance and who met President George W. Bush in Washington in September.

At the beginning of December, Royal sparked a furore during a visit to Lebanon by telling a Hezbollah member of parliament that she agreed with his view that US foreign policy smacked of "insanity".

She later amended her comments to say they referred only to the US-led war and occupation of Iraq, and that she drew a distinction between Bush's policies and "the wider policies of the United States."

Last month, when she officially launched her presidential campaign after easily winning her party's nomination, Royal also criticised the US conception of market-driven globalisation.

She said France must "resist the bad wind of unchecked liberalisation and at the same time seize the opportunities of a globalisation, which carries with it the worst and the best." Worker protection, she said, should be "reinforced".

One of the policy areas she does agree with the United States, however, is Iran and the efforts being made to block its nuclear ambitions.

In a television interview Friday, Royal reaffirmed that she believed Iran should be denied a civilian nuclear programme because it refused to accept international controls.

But French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said her comments "lacked credibility" because they failed to take into account the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty that allowed signatory states to use nuclear technology for peaceful ends.

A former conservative French president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, also said "no-one can challenge" that article of the treaty.

Most other French politicians have limited their criticism of Iran's nuclear programme to saying Tehran must not be allowed to develop an atomic arsenal - something it insists it is not doing.

As other children, mostly from Year 7, at Royston High School in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, joined the sick list, staff reported a domino effect. When the entire class began feeling faint and nauseous, they called in the emergency services, fearing a gas leak.

All students and staff were assembled in the hall and sports hall before it was decided, on the advice of paramedics, that everyone at the 627-pupil school should be removed.

Eventually 32 pupils were taken by ambulance and patient transfer vehicles to Barnsley District Hospital for check-ups, as emergency services monitored the school. A hospital spokesman said: "The children were brought into our emergency department. We checked their blood pressure, pulse and blood sugar levels. I have never come across anything like this before."

Two hours after the evacuation the all-clear was given and lessons for the older children unaffected by the scare resumed as normal after the lunch break.

Kay Jenkins, the head teacher, said: "I must emphasise that no children were ever in danger because of the fast, effective, co-ordinated response from the school and the joint emergency services."

She said that no gas leak had been found and that there were no experiments taking place in the science laboratory at the time. "We are still unsure about what happened, but a group of 30 students were watching a human biology video which is regularly shown in a science class," she said. "It is about the human body and how it works and no blood is shown on the screen.

"Three children asked to leave and came down to the medical room feeling a bit queasy. Then another couple came down and at that point, as a few pupils were showing similar symptoms. We contacted the ambulance service and on the advice of the emergency services the school was evacuated as a precaution.

"The police and fire services searched the building while the paramedics stayed with us to see it through. We evacuated the school because there was a lot of upset."

All the children were discharged within four hours of arrival at hospital. Many were picked up by anxious parents.

The incident was the latest of several ascribed to mass hysteria.

Almost 300 children in Holinwell, Nottinghamshire, collapsed and were taken to hospital while competing in a brass band competition in a field in 1980.

But the biggest outbreak was in 1955 when 300 nurses at the Royal Free Hospital in London complained of paralysis.

Psychiatrists wrote a description of events for the British Medical Journal and described it as mass hysteria.

But since then, the history of mass hysteria has become divisive. Some claim it to be all in the mind while others assert that there may yet be an agent, infective or chemical, that could cause such symptoms.

The scientists said that tens of millions of people owed their lives and health to studies pioneered by Sir Richard. "It is with dismay that we now hear allegations against him that he cannot rebut for himself," the scientists say in an open letter.

Sir Richard, who died last year aged 92, had received consultancy fees of $1,500 a day from Monsanto during the 1980s and several thousand pounds from the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Dow Chemicals and ICI. Although friends and colleagues insist that Sir Richard made no secret of his private consultancies, his close links with the chemicals industry were not widely known.

However, unlike today, there were no rules then about declaring financial interests. Colleagues of Sir Richard point out that it is only in recent years that scientists have been required to disclose financial interests. In any case, they argue, Sir Richard donated his fees to charity.

They also point out that the news of his dealings with the chemicals industry came from his own papers which he had donated to a museum of medical history.

In the open letter, the head of the Medical Research Council, Professor Colin Blakemore, and five other leading scientists strongly support Sir Richard against allegations that his science was compromised. "We feel it is our duty to defend Sir Richard's reputation and to recognise his extraordinary contribution to global health, which began in 1950 with his first [scientific] paper demonstrating a link between smoking and lung cancer," they say.

"He played a key role in the development of randomised controlled clinical trials - now the standard method by which new treatments are evaluated. He also helped identify several occupational hazards, most notably asbestos, and assess reliably the dangers of radiation," they say.

The letter is co-signed by Lord Rees, the president of the Royal Society; Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust; Professor John Bell, president of the Academy of Medical Science; Professor Alex Markham, head of Cancer Research UK and Sir Richard Peto of Oxford University, who worked alongside Sir Richard for 30 years.

The authors say that Sir Richard willingly made his expert advice available to industry and to government.

"On the basis of those papers, it has recently been suggested that Sir Richard's advice to industry somehow compromised his own publications.

"We know of no evidence to support this allegation. Sir Richard was open about these consultancies and felt it appropriate that companies should seek expert advice on the safety of their products," the letter says.

Professor Peto said: "Twenty years ago people often did not disclose funding when writing scientific papers. Nowadays, it is not only standard practice, it is mandatory. I think this change is an improvement, and so did Richard Doll."

The letter

Sir Richard Doll was one of the world's greatest cancer researchers. It is with dismay we hear allegations against him he cannot rebut. His extraordinary contribution to global health began in 1950 with his first paper demonstrating a link between smoking and lung cancer. He played a key role in developing randomised controlled clinical trials, among many other invaluable contributions. It has been said his advice to industry compromised his publications. We know of no evidence for this. He was open about consultancies and felt companies should seek expert advice on the safety of products.

Professor Colin Blakemore; Dr Mark Walport; Lord Martin Rees; Professor John Bell; Professor Alex Markham