For the Socialists in their current state though splitting their vote could be suicidal and the party

For the Socialists in their current state, though, splitting their vote could be suicidal, and the party decided two weeks ago to hold a formal contest - a sort of primary election - to decide who should go forward.So this evening, card-carrying members will vote in their departement party organisations; the votes will be counted tomorrow, and on Sunday, departement delegates will meet in Paris at an "extraordinary national congress" to vote on the final nomination. The number of delegates from each departement will be in proportion to the strength of the local organisation and their congress votes are supposed to reflect the vote at local level. The winner will be the candidate who obtains at least 50 per cent ofthe votes cast at the congress.To the outsider there seems little to choose between Mr Emmanuelli and Mr Jospin. Compared with the non-candidates, they are uninspiring figures and neither has fired enthusiasm in the party or among the wider electorate.In theory, both could stand directly for president - after all, the right will have two candidates (Mr Balladur and Jacques Chirac). They will be satisfied with one who stands half a chance of surviving into a second round. With the decision of Jacques Delors, the newly retired head of the European Commission, not to stand, the withdrawal after less than a week of the former culture minister Jack Lang and the disqualification - for bankruptcy - of the Radical Party's Bernard Tapie, there are only two declared presidential candidates on the left. One is the Socialist Party leader, Henri Emmanuelli; the other a former Socialist leader and ex-education minister, Lionel Jospin. The Socialists' ambitions have fallen so low that no one is talking about finding a candidate who will actually beat the right-wing favourite, the Prime Minister, Edouard Balladur, in the first round in April.

Disunited and deeply demoralised, the French Socialist Party today begins a three-day process to select the left's candidate for the presidency. In the second day of peace talks here , the Peruvian and Ecuadorean delegates met face to face for the first time Reuter. Rio de Janeiro - Negotiators from Peru and Ecuador failed to reach a ceasefire agreement over their border clash, and Ecuadorean officers said Peruvian troops had renewed their attacks on Ecuadorean positions. Prosecutors alleg e the Egyptian cleric and 11 others planned to "wage a war of urban terrorism" in the United States Reuter. New York - FBI agents found $62,000 in cash, a bulletproof vest and an electronic anti-bugging device in the bedroom of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, accused of leading a conspiracy to bomb US landmarks, an agent testified yesterday.

The drying out to desert of formerly fertile land costs 30bn pesetas a year. The cancellation last week of the world Alpine skiing championship due to take place in the Sierra Nevada - "snowy mountains" - has cost the resort more than 1.5bn pesetas, as well as 160bn pesetas the region had expected in grants.In the little village of Monachil at the heart of the skiing area, the Communist mayor organised a procession of 1,500 villagers who carried a gilded image of the village's patron, St Anthony, and prayed for rain, but to no avail.Ideas to overcome the water-shortage problem include increasing water rates, digging new wells, supplying mobile reservoirs, and even a desalination plant on the Cadiz coast.. Some 800,000 people in the south-western province of Cadiz have water restricted for up to 10 hours a day.The economic damage has been enormous, in a region that is one of the poorest in Spain. Near Valencia, farmers are reopening 1,000-year-old Moorish wells, while in the south reservoirs will dry up by summer unless it rains soon. Rescue workers there had evacuated thousands of residents amid fears that a dike over the border could collapse. "We are cautiously optimistic," said a local official.Some flood victims are facing new repair bills when they have barely finished paying off loans they took out after the floods of Christmas 1993.Barbara Hendricks, a Social Democrat MP, said flood victims had been disappointed with the lack of sufficient public help after the 1993 floods "This cannot happen again," she said.

"The federal and regional governments are obliged to give swift and unbureaucratic help."In France, flood damage to a key foundry owned by Peugeot-Citroen has brought the car manufacturer's assembly operations to a halt, affecting about 50,000 workers. The foundry at Charleville near the Belgian border shut down on Monday night after the river Meuse overran its banks. The foundry is not expected to be back in operation before next Tuesday.. While flood waters inundate northern Europe, Spain is suffering one of the worst droughts this century, bringing despair and ruin to Andalucian farmers and economic catastrophe to the snow-free ski resorts of the Sierra Nevada. The drought that has afflicted the southern half of Spain since 1991 has caused water shortages for more than 2 million Andalucians - one in four inhabitants of the region - and Andalucian farmers, who have reaped poor harvests for three years running, reckon they lost 200bn pesetas (£950m) last year because of the drought. Rainfall in recent years has reached less than half the usual levels. Preliminary estimates put the damage at around 1.5 bn marks (£640m), little of which is covered by insurance.Cologne's Catholic Archbishop, Joachim Meisner, said the church would provide DM1m in aid.Although flooding ebbed in most of Germany, a state of emergency was still in force in the town of Kleve near the Dutch border. The rivers Rhine, Main and Mosel, which had submerged whole towns and villages when they burst their banks last week, continued falling by up to five centimetres an hour helped by dry, bright weather. Long-suffering residents from Cologne to Koblenz and small Bavarian communities in the south knuckled down to work, scraping thick layers of mud off their walls and counting the cost of the damage to their homes and businesses.