If this finds its way into nearby rivers or seeps into the water table the results are dramatic. Activists point to US studies which they claim show that factory farm workers and their neighbours contract lung disease, eye infections, nosebleeds and gastro intestinal illness.Hogs produce up to ten times the amount of waste as the average human. They are angry for the same reason that the windows in Wieckowice's school are never opened: the smell."The stench got so bad that they couldn't open the windows of the school," says local activist Jurek Dusczynski. "The bus drivers refuse to stop here." People who live near the factory farms complain of nausea, asthma attacks and blackouts Children at the school village began vomiting. Now Smithfields has forged a bridgehead in Europe and Joseph W Luter III, the company's chief executive, boasts that he will turn the former communist country on the brink of full EU membership into the "Iowa of Europe". In Iowa there are five times as many pigs as people living in the rural state, 14 million in total, and local anger at the mega-farms is dominating the Democratic Party primaries. "Factory farms are more dangerous for our lifestyle and democracy than Osama bin Laden and global terrorism," he said.

The consequences for the environment, independent farmers and rural communities from North Carolina to Iowa have been catastrophic.According to the US Senator Robert Kennedy Jnr, what is at stake is impossible to exaggerate. Moreover, it's doing so with EU money.Smithfield Foods, based in Virginia, has made millions in the US by industrialising farming, creating hog factories holding tens of thousands of pigs. The metal hangar juts into the autumnal mist - a 21st century blot on the otherwise medieval landscape of rural western Poland. Mr Carod's plans match those by the Basque nationalist government for independence. But Jose Maria Aznar's conservative government condemns it as the "mutilation" of Spain.. All parties have been swept by the more strident nationalism of a post-Franco generation of Catalans.

Fired by ideals of anti-globalisation, environmental sustainability and desire for peace, they strain against controls from the centre And Madrid fears the worst. Mr Mas too is courting ERC, with his own party's nationalist credentials. But Catalan Socialists and CiU, bitterly divided along class lines, have little in common. Mr Maragall urged a left-wing pact between Socialists, ERC, and the green-communist Initiative for Change that won nine seats. But as Spain's richest region, it feels short-changed by contributing disproportionately to poorer regions. Prosperous Catalonia wants to wrench from Madrid remaining powers it claims are Catalan. All main regional parties agree that the statute is outdated.

• But it is happening at five times the speed
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• From a British perspective the relationship is less fraught
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• It is also slashing costs across the group
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• A lot of time is spent thinking how we can stop this happening
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• 4bn acquisition last year of Germany's Reemtsma
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• Gold producers were hit by a wave of profit taking
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• 9m including an exceptional gain of £18
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• If he was a desperately worried man he did not look like it
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• Even his version of ObLaDi ObLaDa was popular in the clubs
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• He also danced it more often than anyone else 269 times
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