Rafa Benitez has offered his full backing to Steven Gerrard after the Liverpool captain was charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm and affray.

Gerrard was charged with assault and affray after an incident at a bar in Southport in the early hours of Monday.

Benitez also confirmed that Gerrard, 28, took part in training on Wednesday.

“Steven is our captain and a key player for us, but more than this, I know him as a nice person,” Benitez said.

“I sat down with him this morning and had a very good talk with him about the situation and I was also able to speak at length with our club lawyer.

“Steven explained to me what had happened and I told him he has my full support and backing, along with everyone else at the football club.

“He’s trained with the other lads this morning after a couple of days off for the squad and is keen now to focus solely on his football.

“We’ve worked very hard to get into the position we’re in going through to the New Year and all of us are determined to keep that progress going.

“We’ll do whatever we can to support Steven in the weeks ahead, but we’re now concentrating on our preparation for the FA Cup game at Preston this weekend.”

With all the talk about global warming, is it actually happening.

Here are some interesting facts that might leave you wondering.

These have been put forward by people who don’t believe in global warming

Temperatures are falling, not rising

As Christopher Booker says in his review of 2008, temperatures have been dropping in a wholly unpredicted way over the past year. Last winter, the northern hemisphere saw its greatest snow cover since 1966, which in the northern US states and Canada was dubbed the “winter from hell”. This winter looks set to be even worse.

The earth was hotter 1,000 years ago

Evidence from all over the world indicates that the earth was hotter 1,000 years ago than it is today. Research shows that temperatures were higher in what is known as the Mediaeval Warming period than they were in the 1990s.

The earth’s surface temperature is not at record levels

According to Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies analysis of surface air temperature measurements, the meteorological December 2007 to November 2008 was the coolest year since 2000. Their data has also shown that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s but the 1930s.

Ice is not disappearing

Arctic website Crysophere Today reported that Arctic ice volume was 500,000 sq km greater than this time last year. Additionally, Antarctic sea-ice this year reached its highest level since satellite records began in 1979. Polar bear numbers are also at record levels.

Himalayan glaciers

A report by the UN Environment Program this year claimed that the cause of melting glaciers in the Himalayas was not global warming but the local warming effect of a vast “atmospheric brown cloud” over that region, made up of soot particles from Asia’s dramatically increased burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

Temperatures are still dropping

Nasa satellite readings on global temperatures from the University of Alabama show that August was the fourth month this year when temperatures fell below their 30-year average, ie since satellite records began. November 2008 in the USA was only the 39th warmest since records began 113 years ago.