HERE TODAY AND GONE TOMORROW.

Far outshining the recent discovery of an extinct race of tiny near-humans in Indonesia, the world of social anthropology has been yet again rocked to its foundations - this time by evidence from Brussels of a civilization able to make things disappear.

The area now occupied by the European Union institutions has revealed traces of a highly sophisticated society - understood to have been known in its time as Barroso - which enjoyed para-normal powers.

The latest reports from the site under investigation indicate that this was a society which could even make events cease to exist.

In this arcane world what happened ten years ago might, ten years later, never have happened. And what was true on Monday, for instance, might no longer be true by Tuesday.

Some groups in this society - which stretched as far as modern-day France, it is believed - went so far as to invent strict local codes that outlawed any reference on Tuesday to what had happened on Monday, even when it had been widely known.

The data now being unearthed point to a historic conflict within this lost society.

A dispute over its rules arose during the appointment of the civilization's ruling council - quaintly known, according to experts in...