The fashion industry has come to Berlin this week, with the German capital hosting four major fashion events. Millions are being made, thousands have come to take part. But it's not high fashion that's making all the money -- a trade fair is coming to the rescue of German designers.

In Berlin, a city of casual creativity and sensible civil servants, there are not too many wildly dressed women wearing high heels. But this week the central streets of the German capital have been alive with the clickety-clack of designer heels. The bold, the beautiful and the fashion-obsessed have been in town due to not one, but four fashion events taking place in the German capital this week.

This is some of the most frenetic fashion trade show activity the city has seen for years. There are three trade fairs dedicated to the garment industry running between July 1 and 4 -- Premium for the fashion industry in general, Boudoir, a lingerie trade show and Bread & Butter, a streetwear trade show. And at the same time Berlin is also putting on its bi-annual fashion week, during which local and international designers show their wares on runways around the city.

Australian palaeontologists say they have discovered three new dinosaur species after examining fossils dug up in Queensland.

Writing in the journal PLOS One, they describe one of the creatures as a fearsome predator with three large slashing claws on each hand.

The other two were herbivores: one a tall giraffe-like creature, the other of stocky build like a hippopotamus.

The fossils date back nearly 100m years to the middle of the Cretaceous period.

They were found in rocks known as the Winton Formation.

David Taylor, a business psychologist, told workers at design and marketing onebestway, in Newcastle upon Tyne, that a Naked Friday idea would boost their team spirit.

He was called in to help the firm after six staff members were forced into taking redundancies at the start of the credit crunch.

It started with Star Trek fans writing stories about a Kirk/Spock love affair, and it quickly became a craze. Fantasy fiction, or "fanfic" websites now attract contributions from large numbers of obsessive fans, and new genres are emerging at a remarkable rate: "slash" fanfic focuses on gay relationships (the Lord of the Rings characters provide particularly fertile ground), with "femslash" for lesbian characters; and then there's "real person popslash", where the unlucky subjects are celebrities in the music business.

One popslash fantasy came to public attention this week when, most unusually, its author found himself in court. Darryn Walker's writing is darker than most. The 35-year-old former civil servant's story, a 12-page article called "Girls (Scream) Aloud", depicted the kidnap, rape and murder of each member of girl band Girls Aloud by their coach driver.

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And although the impracticality of Walker's prosecution attracted outrage amongst freedom of expression experts, they are slower to defend the material itself. "One of the problems with fanfic is that it is just so appallingly bad," says Sutherland. "In previous cases, such as Lady Chatterley's Lover, you could argue there was some redeeming social merit or literary quality. This has neither - it is rather unpleasant, sadistic fantasy.

"I think when they raided Walker's house the police were expecting to find a lot of horrific stuff on his computer," he added. "It just wasn't there. He was actually a rather dull man ... with the literary sensibility of a toilet seat. It's a pity a case was fought with such an objectionable and crass piece of fiction."

This Monday, in the New Haven, Conn., firefighters case Ricci v. DeStefano, the Supreme Court held that it's unlawful race discrimination for an employer to refuse to act on the results of a promotion exam because the test eliminated a disproportionate number of minority candidates (in the New Haven case, all the black firefighters up for promotion). I've written before that this argument threatens to burn down civil rights law. Now that the fuse has been lit, I'm writing to explain just how far the fire could spread.

The plaintiffs in Ricci were undoubtedly sympathetic: hardworking public servants--17 of them white, one Hispanic--who expected that the exam they studied for and did well on would determine their eligibility for moving up the ranks. But their legal argument is the latest in a long-standing campaign to turn civil rights laws against themselves. There's a striking progression in the attacks on civil rights. In the early 1970s, affirmative action was widely considered to be a logical extension of civil rights principles: Even President Nixon--a man not known for his enlightened racial attitudes--supported it. But by the end of the decade, affirmative action was under attack as reverse discrimination. And now we see the next step in the march against civil rights with the part of federal civil rights law--Title VII--called "disparate impact" that prohibits employers from using promotional or hiring procedures that screen out minorities unless they can prove that the procedure is closely job-related.

Until this Monday, lawyers and judges thought of disparate impact law as a logical extension of the law against intentional discrimination: The premise of the discriminatory impact prohibition is that an employment practice that unnecessarily screens underrepresented groups from the work force is, in effect, just as discriminatory as a "whites only" sign. As I've argued, plaintiff Frank Ricci's case was a loser under established law until this new Supreme Court ruling, which is why the district court was right to dismiss it on summary judgment and why the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit Court was right to reject Ricci's appeal. Now the Supreme Court has changed the law, recasting disparate impact law as a kind of affirmative action--an unfair racial preference--rather than an equal-opportunity law.