The plans lay dormant for a while before being recently revived. Since then, the intifada and the arrival of new residents strongly opposed the scheme had changed the balance of opinion against the scheme.Mr Kuller, who voted for the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the last election, said that while he had opposed the plan from the start, the opinions of many residents had also been hardened by the discovery that 50 houses were the start of a planned expansion of the settlement by more than 1,000 homes.Ilan Niv, a civil engineer who chairs the Nirit residents’ committee and is leading the fight against the scheme, said it would it be different if Alfe Menashe had been allocated to Israel under a lasting peace deal with the Palestinians. The case has taken on a national importance partly because the Israeli government has used a court deposition to defend the settlement expansion – despite the stipulation under the road map that building should be frozen – claiming it was approved before 2003 when the road-map was drawn up, so strictures against further settlements do not apply.Even residents in this mainly white-collar professional community who are not as strongly against settlements on principle as Ms Blackburn, share her opposition to the scheme. But if we had known we were going to find ourselves in a settlement we would never have come.” Seventy per cent of the people voted to oppose the building of the new satellite of Alfe Menashe and to fight it in the Israeli courts.But bulldozers have already began to flatten the land for the new community, named Nof Hasharon, and lots have been laid for 50 new houses bordering the green line on the other side. They say the Israeli army also told them they will have to extend their neighbourhood security patrol to protect people who live in the occupied West Bank and with whom many of the Nirit residents disagree on principle.Nicky Blackburn, a freelance journalist who is bringing up two boys aged six and four in Nirit, said she was strongly opposed to plans to build 50 houses on the other side of the green line as part of a much bigger planned expansion of Alfe Menashe, three kilometres away.She said: “I don’t agree with settlements I think they are wrong I love living here because it is such a warm community It’s a great place to bring up children. The people of this tranquil little community on the Israeli side of the “green line” border between the West Bank and Israel are in a fierce legal battle to halt plans which would force them to join a Jewish settlement in occupied territory.

What is unusual about the case of the Alfe Menashe settlement is that the neighbouring residents are Israeli, not Palestinian. The people of the 232 homes in Nirit, in the eastern Sharon, are outraged by plans to expand the settlement, which opponents say are against Israel’s commitments under the agreed road-map to peace, in their direction and in ways they say will create a single, and highly controversial, neighbourhood divided by the pre-1967 green line.The people of Nirit, nearly all of whom deliberately chose not to be in occupied Palestinian territory, are furious after the authorities told them they will have to share their kindergarten and small grocery store with the settlers. He has more than once in the past few days offered a personal apology to the White House for his role in pushing the nomination of Mr Kerik.Since Mr Kerik and Mr Giuliani left their positions in the New York City government at the end of 2001, both have been running a security and financial consultancy and have accumulated substantial private wealth in the past three years.Described in the American media as a tough-talking former street cop whose years as an undercover narcotics officer were very successful, Mr Kerik earned the admiration of Mr Bush after the 2001 attacks, by training local police officers in Iraq last year and energetically campaigning for the President in the recent campaign.. The apartment in Battery Park City, now being described as a love nest, has views directly onto the hole at ground zero.The affair with Ms Regan reportedly spanned about a year when she was publishing Mr Kerik’s 2001 memoir, The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice. Among those suffering from the fall-out of the nomination debacle is Mr Giuliani, considered by some to be a future Republican presidential candidate.

The apartment is said to have been one of several in the neighbourhood donated as space for emergency service, rescue workers and Red Cross personnel to use for rest in the weeks after the 11 September tragedy.It seems that quite soon after the attacks, however, Mr Kerik asked that one be set aside for his personal use. The murk surrounding Bernard Kerik, whose nomination to be homeland security chief by President George Bush fell apart a week ago, thickened yesterday amid reports he used an apartment that had been donated for use by exhausted 11 September rescue workers for conducting his extra-marital liaisons. It threatens to make a reality of the ancient dream of a north-west passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. By 2100, scientists have warned, species including the polar bear could be extinct..

Joe Braach, the headteacher of Shishmaref school, says: “When I moved here, the sea was 40ft from the house. Now it’s about 10ft.”Storms have destroyed some of the homes and the community now has little option but to move to the mainland, at a cost of $400m (£210m).And global warming has raised the prospect of developing the Arctic’s vast resources of oil and natural gas. The permafrost on which their homes were built has melted and the ice that used to stop waves reaching the shore has nearly disappeared. Even our lives are threatened, as traditional travel routes become more dangerous.”One Inuit community of nearly 600 people in the Alaskan barrier island of Shishmaref is faces becoming the world’s first “global warming refugees”. “It makes it hard to hunt in fall time when the ice starts forming,” he says “It’s kind of dangerous to be out It’s not really sturdy And after it freezes there’s always some open spots.

Sometimes it doesn’t freeze up until January.”Chief Gary Harrison of the Arctic Athabaskan Council, said: “Our homes are threatened by storms and melting permafrost, our livelihoods are threatened by changes to the plants and animals we harvest. Much of the ice that remains is far thinner than it was and is liable to disappear more rapidly as temperatures rise.Five years ago, at a conference on the Arctic organised by Greenpeace, Inuit elders told of problems caused by retreating ice and the difficulty of finding seals to hunt for food and clothing.Benjamin Neakok, who lives in the northern Alaskan outpost of Point Lay, said the end of summer was a difficult time. On present trends, the Arctic will have ice-free summers by the end of the century.Measurements of the sea ice taken by sonar instruments on British and American submarines between the 1950s and 1990s have shown it has thinned by more than 40 per cent in that period. The latest estimates suggest the Arctic sea-ice has reduced from an average thickness of four metres to about 2.7 metres in just 30 years.Satellite pictures show the surface area covered by Arctic sea ice has reduced by 4 per cent per decade. Average temperatures in the Arctic are rising at 1.2C each decade. A warmer climate has extended the period of summer melting by an extra five days every decade. In Alaska, western Canada and eastern Russia, average winter temperatures have risen by 3C or 4C in the past 50 years, and they are projected to increase to between 7C and 13C over the next 100 years.The area of the Arctic sea covered by ice naturally expands and retreats with the seasons but all the evidence indicates this floating cap of ice has gone into permanent retreat.