Protestant and Catholic officials returned to Northern Ireland’s Cabinet table yesterday and warned Protestant hard-liners who boycotted the meeting not to wage a political “guerrilla war.”

The four-hour round-table session at Stormont in east Belfast was the first government session since Britain returned self-rule to the troubled province on Tuesday.

Ten of the 12 ministers in the coalition attended – four each from the Protestants’ Ulster Unionist Party and the Catholics’ Social Democratic and Labor Party, and two from the IRA-allied Sinn Fein.

But the two Protestant ministers from the Democratic Unionist Party boycotted the meeting because of Sinn Fein’s presence.

The Democratic Unionists are threatening to destabilize the government by having party activists hold, then resign from, the two ministries allotted the party.

The province’s senior Protestant and Catholic officials – DavidImage caption The harsh winter in America was caused by a rare coincidence of weather events, say scientists

Scientists have shown that a severe snowfall in North America and Northern Europe in the winter of 2009-10 was caused by a rare, once-in-a-century, collision of two weather systems.

They concluded the harsh winter and heavy snow was an example of hard to predict weather events, not a change in climate.

They analysed historical snow records.

The research was published in Geophysical Research Letters.

In the winter of 2009-10 much of Northern Europe experienced heavy snow and temperatures were at the lowest they had been for nearly 30 years. At the same time, record snowfall hit Washington DC and other parts of America's "Mid-Atlantic states".

This was a once-in-a-century type of event Richard Seager, Lamont Doherty