As director of rabbinical services at the Institute of Southern Jewish Life in Jackson, Mississippi, Mr Klaven, a 31-year-old former military chaplain, presides over 133 such congregations throughout the south, from Odessa, Texas in the west to Brunswick, Georgia in the east, and north as far as Leesburg, Virginia.

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To the west of Newfoundland is New Brunswick, where great forests of maples, poplars and larches are busy turning bright shades of red, gold and fuchsia in the chilling air.

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And that is what Karen Kidd, an ecotoxicologist at the University of New Brunswick, has just done to a small lake in north-west Ontario.

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