At least four people were killed and dozens injured by an explosion on Wednesday on a bus carrying Israeli tourists outside an airport in Bulgaria that the Israeli prime minister immediately blamed on Iran.

The mayor of Burgus, on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast, said the bus was carrying Israeli tourists. Police said several other buses at the site had been damaged.

"I do not know what it was, but it was a very powerful blast, and I think it was something placed on purpose in the bus, which carried 47 Israeli tourists," Burgus mayor Dimitar Nikolov told BTV television, adding 33 people were injured.

An Israeli witness said in an interview with Israeli army radio that the explosion was probably caused by a suicide bomber at the entrance of the bus.

Border officials have voted for industrial action, raising the spectre of strikes affecting passport queues at Heathrow during the busiest days of the Olympics.

Members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union have agreed to a one-day strike as well as an ongoing work-to-rule in protest against eroded pay and working conditions and the privatisation of civil service jobs, and to highlight what they describe as a "public service falling apart at the seams".

The Border Force is already stretched with supplementary staff enlisted to ensure there is no repeat of the reported three- or four-hour waits that made embarrassing headlines internationally earlier this year.

Emergency staff drafted in by the Home Office took the place of striking officials during action in May and last November. But while those strikes did not lead to significant extra queues, the PCS claims that untrained replacements waved through many passport holders to avoid lines building up. And Theresa May, already under fire for the G4S Olympic security fiasco where police and soldiers have had to step in for absent guards, will not wish to face further questions over security.

Asylum seekers in Germany are currently entitled to 224 euros per month. The Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe has ruled this must be increased, saying it falls below what's needed for a dignified human existence.

Germany's top court ruled on Wednesday that refugees living in the country must be paid more than the 224 euros ($275) per month they currently receive. The court ruled that asylum seekers should instead be given 336 euros per month, with 130 euros paid in cash to meet "the personal requirements of daily life."

The German constitution guarantees that people should be able to live with dignity befitting a human being, and the court said the current sum falls short of that margin.

Instead of spending the day with their families on summer vacation, German parliamentarians have been dragged back for a special session on Thursday in Berlin to debate whether to approve aid for troubled Spanish banks.

"Don't swim out too far," said President of the German Bundestag Norbert Lammert at the last session of parliament before the summer break on the evening of June 29.

Lammert was dropping a hint that lawmakers could well be called back for a special session as a result of the twists and turns of the eurozone crisis.

Plenty is happening this summer, too much, in fact, for German parliamentarians to wander to far from home shores.

The Hungarian Nazi war crimes suspect Laszlo Csatary is to be placed under house arrest for 30 days following questioning, his lawyer said. The 97-year-old had been on top of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's wanted list.

Accused by the Simon Wiesenthal Center of helping to deport as many as 16,000 Jews to their deaths from the Kosice ghetto in present-day Slovakia between 1941 and 1944, Csatary has protested that he is innocent, prosecutors said after arresting him on Wednesday.

"He denies being guilty of the crimes he is accused of," state prosecutor Tibor Ibolya said. "One of his arguments in his defense is that he was obeying orders."

Csatary was detained for questioning and prosecutors have ordered him to be placed under house arrest for 30 days.

The BBC is considering making an appeal against a court order which stopped it from broadcasting a dramatized film on last year's riots in London.

The film, which features actors portraying anonymous rioters sharing their experience of the events, was due to be broadcast on Monday evening, but was banned by a court order hours before hitting the airwaves

Its script was written by award-winning playwright Alecky Blythe and is based on interviews from some 270 people conducted by the Guardian and London School of Economics as part of a study into the massive public disorder.

The first installment of The Riots: In their own Words focuses on rioters, while the second film of the two-part series shares the impressions of police officers on duty at the time.

Both were banned from being broadcast by a court ruling, which BBC lawyers now plan to appeal against, reports the Guardian. The newspaper says for legal reasons it cannot report the name of the judge who made the controversial ruling, the court in which it was done or the case he was presiding over.

As Europe struggles through its sovereign debt crisis, Germany is considered the strong arm of the region.

But before the formation of the eurozone the country had quite the current account deficit, compared with Ireland, Italy and France.

Stephanie Kelton, Associate professor of Economics and University of Missouri, and Avraham Baranes, a Ph.D student, have put together a brilliant presentation titled "How Germany's Labor Market Reforms Crushed The French and the PIIGS".

The existence of an email of "enormous significance" written by a News International (NI) executive that refers to the phone hacking of a "well-known individual" has emerged in the high court, in a hearing to discuss the progress of civil claims against the publisher of the News of the World.

Mr Justice Vos said the email was "sent by an executive whose identity you know" - but the author's name, the precise content of the message, and who it was discussing remain confidential for legal reasons. But that did not stop lawyers representing hacking victims from asserting the importance of the communication.

But David Sherborne, representing hacking victims in the court on Wednesday, said Vos should "understand the enormous significance of that email" which referred to a "well-known individual victim" and the message contained "an instruction relating to an individual's phone"

I am in transit most of today and so have very limited time to write. An ECB Executive Board member, one Jörg Asmussen, gave a speech at the European Policy Centre in Brussels on July 17, 2012 - Building deeper economic union: what to do and what to avoid - where he admitted that the European policy leaders "had made mistakes in the way economic policies and governance were managed inside the monetary union". I thought that was an understatement but credit for the admission. However, his speech was then steered towards "how best to" strengthen "(p)olicies and governance" - "(w)hat to do and what to avoid". When he mentioned that the "six pack" and the Fiscal Compact constituted "significant progress" towards what to do and what to avoid I concluded he hasn't learned much at all from the huge mistakes that the policy elites in Europe have made. The suggestion for a fiscal union is definitely a step forward but the way in which this idea is being constructed represents several steps backwards. The Europeans seem intent on extinguishing their democracies.

...

I am also against unelected and unaccountable bodies being the vehicles for the implementation of macroeconomic policy. This is the trend everywhere as the neo-liberals seek to vest these powers and responsibilities in bodies that are stacked with ideologues of the same persuasion. They want to limit the elected government because they know that the policies that they advocated - self-regulating markets - ultimately increase unemployment and poverty - a recipe for disaster for the elites in a democratic state.

...

Even within the current flawed European model, the only way a fiscal union will work is if the ECB (the currency-issuer) cooperates with the "federal fiscal arm" in Brussels, to underwrite a Euro-bonds issue. This central bank underwriting is implicit in all effective federal systems such that the "financial markets" form the view that the federal entity and its debt is always solvent. The markets know that, ultimately, the central bank will ensure the obligations are always met.

...

The world is obsessed with financial assets and forgets that there is massive asset destruction going on every day as a result of this misplaced emphasis. I am referring to the entrenched mass unemployment which is wasting the most valuable assets that an economy ever has.

...

There have certainly been mistakes made in Europe. But the proposals for their resolution suggest to me that the leadership doesn't fully understand the nature of the mistakes.

They know the system has failed - youth unemployment above 50 per cent in several nations tells them that. But their distorted view of what has gone wrong and what might work is only leading to more failure.

The problem is that democracy is being further eroded each step they take towards a resolution.

El Pais has dug up the details on the Spanish ESM programme, which allows Spain a lot more flexibility than is generally recognised; in particular it allows Spain to earmark the fund for primary and secondary market bond purchases; the Dutch version of the document says that if current rates persist, Spain will not be able to repay its debts; documents imposes a very low level of bureaucratic procedures to ensure that Spain can change the programme if it wants to; El Pais wonders why this documents is published in Germany, the Netherlands and Finland, but not in Spain; Spain will today issue €3bn in new bonds; Spanish 10-year spreads reach a new eurozone record of 5.8%; Spanish house prices are accelerating their fall during Q2; house prices are also beginning to fall in the big cities; Xavier Vidal-Folch criticises Mariano Rajoy's handling of the crisis, based on a combination of a  lack of understanding and self-pity; Wolfgang Munchau says he cannot see how the Spanish ESM programme will ever be transformed into an equity-programme; Christian Noyer warns that a banking union is needed within months, and says the ECB is going to work on it through the summer; Jorg Asmusses warns that a negative ruling by the German constitutional court would mean the end of the ESM; Jens Weidmann opposes Spanish and Italian bond purchases by the ECB; Angela Merkel expresses optimism that the Bundestag will vote in favour of the Spanish programme; Vittorio Grilli rules out a further austerity; a recession-struck Fiat is halting production of its latest model during August; the Greek coalition has agreed an outline for spending cuts, but leaves details for later; in Switzerland, meanwhile, the strains of the currency peg are showing, as the central bank is accumulating bunds, and has become Germany's largest creditor.

Spain's risk premium jumps after Montoro says that civil servants know wages depend on tax hikes

FRANKFURT -- The International Monetary Fund warned Wednesday of "a sizable risk" of deflation in the euro zone, and called on the European Central Bank to begin buying huge amounts of government bonds to help hold down borrowing costs for troubled countries.

In a report on the state of euro zone policy, I.M.F. staff said there was a 25 percent risk of consumer price deflation before 2014, and that the danger was greatest in countries like Italy where growth is slow and tax increases have made inflation appear higher than it really is.

Deflation, a destructive decline in prices that can be extremely difficult to reverse, would make it even harder for countries like Greece, Italy and Spain to get government debt under control, the I.M.F. said, because falling prices and wages would further depress tax receipts.

The warning came as part of a report on euro zone policies in which the I.M.F. again criticized European leaders for the way they have handled the euro crisis.

The nation's consumer watchdog on Wednesday delivered its first enforcement action against the financial industry, fining Capital One for pressuring and misleading more than two million credit card customers.

Capital One, one of the nation's biggest banks and credit card lenders, agreed to pay $210 million to resolve a pair of regulatory cases, the latest legal setback for the financial industry.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Wall Street's newest regulator, accused Capital One of "deceptive marketing tactics." The credit card company -- which is known for its catchy television ads, asking "what's in your wallet" -- received a regulatory rebuke for misleading card customers into buying unnecessary products like payment protection and credit monitoring, according to the consumer agency.

U.S. public pensions are $4.6 trillion short of the amount of assets needed to cover projected liabilities, an advocacy group said, more than twice what Moody's Investors Service estimated this month.

The average plan is 41 percent funded, State Budget Solutions said in a report today. The Alexandria, Virginia, group's partners include the American Legislative Exchange Council, which advocates "conservative public policy solutions," the Freedom Foundation and the State Policy Network, which is composed of "free-market think tanks."

State Budget Solutions said that taxpayers must make up the difference between investment performance and promised benefits. The group, using its report to advocate pension cuts, called the gap "a hole that will overtake local and state governments."

"Without government actions, states, counties, cities and towns all over America will go bankrupt," said Bob Williams, president of State Budget Solutions, in the release. "Failing to understand the scope of the pension crisis sets taxpayers up for a bigger catastrophe in the future."

Ecuador is in talks with Iran to buy $400 million of fuel amid growing efforts by the U.S. and European Union to crack down on the Islamic republic's crude sales.

Ecuador's central bank President Pedro Delgado said negotiations are still underway though insisted his government is free to trade with whomever it wishes.

"Ecuador is a sovereign nation and can have relations with any country in the world," Delgado told reporters in Quito today.

Ecuador's President Rafael Correa is among a number of allies of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez that have courted closer economic and diplomatic ties with Iran in the face of Western- led sanctions. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Quito on a four-nation tour of Latin America in January, and the two countries have pledged to build a refinery together in South America's fifth-biggest oil producer.

Syria's defence minister and Interior minister are among those who were killed after a suicide bomber struck the National Security building in Damascus during a meeting of cabinet ministers and senior security officials, state media reported.

Defence minister General Rajha and his deputy Assef Shawkat - the brother-in-law of President Bashar al-Assad - were killed on Wednesday in the deadliest assault on government officials since the violence began 16 months ago.

Also killed were Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim al-Shaar and General Hassan Turkmani, a former defence minister and currently Syria's deputy vice president, who later died of his injuries, 

The head of the national security office Hisham Bekhtyar were among those seriously wounded in the bombing, state television said.

The attack took place as government ministers and a number of security officials were meeting at the building in the district of Rawda, according to state TV.

WASHINGTON -- One of the nation's most secretive intelligence agencies is pressuring its polygraphers to obtain intimate details of the private lives of thousands of job applicants and employees, pushing the ethical and legal boundaries of a program that's designed instead to catch spies and terrorists.

The National Reconnaissance Office is so intent on extracting confessions of personal or illicit behavior that officials have admonished polygraphers who refused to go after them and rewarded those who did, sometimes with cash bonuses, a McClatchy investigation found.

The disclosures include a wide range of behavior and private thoughts such as drug use, child abuse, suicide attempts, depression and sexual deviancy. The agency, which oversees the nation's spy satellites, records the sessions that were required for security clearances and stores them in a database.

Even though it's aggressively collecting the private disclosures, when people confess to serious crimes such as child molestation they're not always arrested or prosecuted.

"You've got to wonder what the point of all of this is if we're not even going after child molesters," said Mark Phillips, a veteran polygrapher who resigned from the agency in late May after, he says, he was retaliated against for resisting abusive techniques. "This is bureaucracy run amok. These practices violate the rights of Americans, and it's not even for a good reason."

Strikes have brought a swathe of Egypt's state textile industry to a halt, disrupting production of a key export as the country hovers on the brink of a balance of payments crisis.

On Wednesday, around 23,000 employees of Misr Spinning and Weaving, Egypt's biggest textile company, took their strike into a fourth day and were joined by some 12,000 workers at other state firms, labour activist Hamdy Hussein said.

A sprawling complex in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla, Misr Spinning and Weaving was the focus of protests in 2008 that sparked a wave of strikes now widely seen as a catalyst for the street revolt that ended the rule of Hosni Mubarak last year.

Mubarak's overthrow, driven by popular anger at poverty and corruption, raised hopes for better pay and conditions among workers, especially in the textile sector which has suffered from tough competition from private and overseas rivals.

After three years in a suburban house, Nathaniel Wallace bought a loft in Detroit's midtown, where major crime has dropped 38 percent in three years.

The 32-year-old computer contractor paid less than $200,000 for the restored three-level building with stainless-steel appliances and a rooftop view of the Comerica Park baseball stadium.

"People see Detroit as the cool place to be," he said.

Six miles north, state Representative Jimmy Womack, 58, was robbed at gunpoint July 8 near his Detroit home. He said three men stole $300 from his pocket after he refused to give them his 2011 Cadillac SRX, then laughed as they walked away.

"We're falling apart as a community," said Womack.

Colombia:

Colombia Reports: Sources within the indigenous movement in Colombia's southwestern Cauca department claimed one person was killed and 23 people wounded as the army retook a base that was occupied by protesters Tuesday, various media reported Wednesday. Special forces seized control of the army base at around 5AM Wednesday morning, according to Ricardo Augusto Alarcon, police commander in the Cauca department.

AP, TORIBIO, Colombia -- Indigenous Colombians who say they are fed up being in the crossfire of the country's long-running conflict have forcibly removed soldiers from a strategic hilltop, at least temporarily. Several hundred Nasa Indians massed Tuesday against the six soldiers guarding the hilltop. Then a few dozen Indians attacked the soldiers with sticks and rocks. When the soldiers refused to budge, the Indians dragged them off.

Boz comments.

Colombia Reports: Members of paramilitary organization AUC told the U.S. embassy that the 1997 Mapiripan massacre in central Colombia was "well coordinated in advance" with (elements of) the army, according to a released diplomatic cable.

MercoPress: Peruvian President Ollanta Humala has begun sounding out replacements for his prime minister as part of a widely expected Cabinet shuffle designed to calm a wave of violent anti-mining protests in one of the world's leading exporters of minerals.

BBC: Two former Chilean military officials, Ramon Caceres and Edgar Ceballos, have been arrested on charges of torturing to death the father of former president, Michelle Bachelet.

AP, MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's special prosecutor for crimes against journalists says 67 journalists have been killed and 14 have disappeared in the country since 2006.

WASHINGTON -- Yosemite National Park in California would grow by 1,575 acres under a bill seeking traction on Capitol Hill.

Written by a Democrat and backed by local Republicans, the Yosemite expansion legislation could have a leg up on some of the myriad other national park bills being shopped around Congress. But in an environment where public lands ownership also can push political buttons, advocates still have their work cut out for them.

"This is a challenging Congress to move things through," Laurie Wayburn, president and co-chief executive officer of the San Francisco-based Pacific Forest Trust, said Tuesday. She added, though, that "this is one of those rare, common-ground movements. Yosemite has a very special place in Californians' hearts."

The legislation introduced last month by Rep. Jim Costa, D-Calif., authorizes the National Park Service to expand Yosemite's western boundary through the addition of several adjacent Mariposa County parcels. The park service could buy the designated land, located near an existing resort development called Yosemite West; in theory, the agency also could accept donated property or acquire it through a land swap.

ScienceDaily (July 18, 2012) -- An international research team has published the results of an ocean iron fertilization experiment (EIFEX) carried out in 2004 in the current issue of the scientific journal Nature. Unlike the LOHAFEX experiment carried out in 2009, EIFEX has shown that a substantial proportion of carbon from the induced algal bloom sank to the deep sea floor. These results, which were thoroughly analysed before being published now, provide a valuable contribution to our better understanding of the global carbon cycle.

An international team on board the research vessel Polarstern fertilized in spring 2004 (i.e. at the end of the summer season in the southern hemisphere) a part of the closed core of a stable marine eddy in the Southern Ocean with dissolved iron, which stimulated the growth of unicellular algae (phytoplankton). The team followed the development of the phytoplankton bloom for five weeks from its start to its decline phase. The maximum biomass attained by the bloom was with a peak chlorophyll stock of 286 Milligram per square metre higher than that of blooms stimulated by the previous 12 iron fertilization experiments. According to Prof. Dr. Victor Smetacek and Dr. Christine Klaas from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association, this was all the more remarkable because the EIFEX bloom developed in a 100 metre deep mixed layer which is much deeper than hitherto believed to be the lower limit for bloom development.

The bloom was dominated by diatoms, a group of algae that require dissolved silicon to make their shells and are known to form large, slimy aggregates with high sinking rates at the end of their blooms. "We were able to prove that over 50 per cent of the plankton bloom sank below 1000 metre depth indicating that their carbon content can be stored in the deep ocean and in the underlying seafloor sediments for time scales of well over a century," says Smetacek.

The renewable ethanol fuel blended into the United States' gasoline supply does not lower prices at the pump as advocates have claimed, according to a study released this week by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The paper critiques earlier studies sponsored by the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA), which found that mixing ethanol with transportation fuel reduced gasoline prices by 89 cents in 2010 and $1.09 in 2011.

"The RFA and Secretary of Agriculture are relying on the [papers] for policy recommendations, and once I started seeing signs and billboards all around D.C. pop up with the same numbers, it became important for me to set the record straight," said Christopher Knittel, a professor of energy and economics at MIT and lead author of the report.

Today, ethanol made from corn makes up about 10 percent of all U.S. gasoline, up from 3 percent in 2003. Industry groups have maintained that increased ethanol production supports farmers, improves energy security, lowers greenhouse gas emissions and saves money at the pump.

Immediate and future radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster may result in hundreds of deaths and emerging cancer cases, according to a yearlong modeling project undertaken by researchers at Stanford University.

Started within a week of the Fukushima meltdown, the project is the most detailed model yet of the emission, transport and deposition of radioactive material from the site, accounting for complex interactions between atmospheric conditions and the microphysics of radioactive particles.

Combining the projected spread of radioactive material with a standard radiation health-effects model, co-authors John Hoeve, a recent Stanford Ph.D. graduate, and civil engineering professor Mark Jacobson calculated that between 15 and 1,300 premature deaths would occur as a result of the accident.

Within that wide range, the team poses a best guess of 130 direct deaths resulting from radiation inhalation and exposure.

The global Aids epidemic is steadily being turned around, with the number of deaths and new infections coming down, but progress is worryingly slow, according to a major report from the UN.

Deaths dropped from 1.8 million in 2010 to 1.7 million last year, while new infections came down from 2.6 million to 2.5 million, according to the 140-page report from UNAids published before the international Aids conference, which begins this weekend in Washington. It is progress, but slower than experts would like, especially at a time when funding is under pressure because of the global economic downturn.

"These are positive numbers but the trend needs to be accelerated," said Paul De Lay, the deputy executive director of UNAids. "It is moving in the right direction, but just not fast enough. If we map it out on a graph, we are still looking at a significant epidemic for the next 40 to 50 years.

"It is something of a depressing message, but it could be worse. It could be that the numbers are going up."

News organisations in the US are reviewing their policies on quote approval after the New York Times blew the whistle on the draconian methods deployed by campaign officials to control their media messages.

The New York Times and the LA Times have confirmed to the Guardian that they are reviewing the practice of allowing reporters to submit quotes for approval by the Obama and Romney camps before publication.

Reuters said it opposed the "wholly unacceptable" practice, as did the Associated Press. Web publisher Buzzfeed said it tried to avoid it, and RealClearPolitics said it was discussing the issue with staff.

The pushback on quote approval followed a front-page article in Monday's New York Times, revealing that the Obama and Romney campaigns frequently insist on reading and redacting quotes given by interviewees before permission is given to publish.

NB: This is standard practice in Germany. Can anyone name other countries where this is true as well?

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- University of California medical researchers slipped an ingredient in chili peppers beneath the skin of marijuana smokers to see if pot could relieve acute pain. It could - at certain doses.

They monitored patients with AIDS and HIV as they toked on joints or placebos to determine whether marijuana could quell agonizing pain from nerve damage. It provided relief.

They tested a "Volcano Vaporizer" to see whether inhaling smokeless pot delivered healthier, low-tar cannabis. It did.

Over a dozen years, California's historic experiment in medical marijuana research brought new science to the debate on marijuana's place in medicine. State-funded studies - costing $8.7 million - found pot may offer broad benefits for pain from nerve damage from injuries, HIV, strokes and other conditions.

US regulators took a step into the unknown this week when they approved the first drug to prevent HIV infection. US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner Margaret Hamburg hailed the pill, Truvada, as a tool for reducing the rate of infection in the United States, where 50,000 people are diagnosed each year. But the drug combines low doses of two anti­retroviral agents normally used to treat infection, and some researchers fear that its use in healthy people could have unacceptable side effects and spark the emergence of resistant viruses.

US insurers must now decide whether they will pay for Truvada, which costs roughly US$10,000 for a year's supply. Moreover, health-policy experts must script guidelines on how to prescribe it, and how to monitor side effects and HIV infections in people using the drug. "There are a lot of questions about how to implement it," says Connie Celum, an HIV researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, who led a large trial of the drug in East Africa and has begun studies to answer practical delivery questions, such as which subsets of people are at highest risk.

Developed by Gilead Sciences in Foster City, California, Truvada proved particularly effective in the East African trial, published last week: it reduced the incidence of HIV by 75% in people with partners who had been infected. In an earlier trial in the United States, HIV incidence dropped by 44% in men who have sex with men.

So - is it worth it?

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

Between October and June they shuffle out of auditoriums, gymnasiums and classrooms, their eyes adjusting to the sunlight as their fingers fumble to awaken cell phones that have been silent for four consecutive hours. Some raise a hand to their foreheads, as though trying to rub away a headache. Others linger in front of the parking lot, unsure of what to do next. They are absolutely exhausted, but not because of any strenuous physical activity. Rather, these high school students have just taken the SAT. "I was fast asleep as soon as I got home," Ikra Ahmad told The Local, a New York Times blog, when she was interviewed for a story on "SAT hangover."

Temporary mental exhaustion is a genuine and common phenomenon, which, it is important to note, differs from chronic mental fatigue associated with regular sleep deprivation and some medical disorders. Everyday mental weariness makes sense, intuitively. Surely complex thought and intense concentration require more energy than routine mental processes. Just as vigorous exercise tires our bodies, intellectual exertion should drain the brain. What the latest science reveals, however, is that the popular notion of mental exhaustion is too simplistic. The brain continuously slurps up huge amounts of energy for an organ of its size, regardless of whether we are tackling integral calculus or clicking through the week's top 10 LOLcats. Although firing neurons summon extra blood, oxygen and glucose, any local increases in energy consumption are tiny compared with the brain's gluttonous baseline intake. So, in most cases, short periods of additional mental effort require a little more brainpower than usual, but not much more. Most laboratory experiments, however, have not subjected volunteers to several hours' worth of challenging mental acrobatics. And something must explain the feeling of mental exhaustion, even if its physiology differs from physical fatigue. Simply believing that our brains have expended a lot of effort might be enough to make us lethargic

ScienceDaily (July 17, 2012) -- Two powerful brain chemical systems work together to paralyze skeletal muscles during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, according to new research in the July 18 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The finding may help scientists better understand and treat sleep disorders, including narcolepsy, tooth grinding, and REM sleep behavior disorder.

During REM sleep -- the deep sleep where most recalled dreams occur -- your eyes continue to move but the rest of the body's muscles are stopped, potentially to prevent injury. In a series of experiments, University of Toronto neuroscientists Patricia L. Brooks and John H. Peever, PhD, found that the neurotransmitters gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and glycine caused REM sleep paralysis in rats by "switching off" the specialized cells in the brain that allow muscles to be active. This finding reversed earlier beliefs that glycine was a lone inhibitor of these motor neurons.

"The study's findings are relevant to anyone who has ever watched a sleeping pet twitch, gotten kicked by a bed partner, or has known someone with the sleep disorder narcolepsy," said Dennis J. McGinty, PhD, a behavioral neuroscientist and sleep researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study. "By identifying the neurotransmitters and receptors involved in sleep-related paralysis, this study points us to possible molecular targets for developing treatments for sleep-related motor disorders, which can often be debilitating," he said

Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. (OMEX), a deep-ocean exploration company, said it recovered about 48 tons of silver from a World War II shipwreck three miles (4.8 kilometers) beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

The company retrieved 1,203 silver bars, or about 1.4 million ounces of the metal, from the SS Gairsoppa, a 412-foot (126-meter) British cargo ship that sank after being torpedoed by German U-boat in February 1941, Tampa, Florida-based Odyssey said today in a statement. The metal, worth $38 million at today's prices, is being held at a secure facility in the U.K.

Odyssey said the recovered silver represents about 20 percent of the bullion that may be on board the Gairsoppa, which lies about 300 miles off the coast of Ireland. The operation, the largest and deepest recovery of precious metals from a shipwreck, should be completed in the third quarter, Tampa, Florida-based Odyssey said.

"With the shipwreck lying approximately three miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, this was a complex operation," Greg Stemm, Odyssey chief executive officer, said in the statement. "Our success on the Gairsoppa marks the beginning of a new paradigm for Odyssey in which we expect modern shipwreck projects will complement our archaeological shipwreck excavations."

Germany's Nürburgring racetrack is facing an uncertain future as its owner is set to file for insolvency, the state premier of Rhineland-Palatinate, where the track is located, has announced.

Kurt Beck, the state premier, blamed the EU for dithering over a decision on state aid to the struggling Nürburgring GmbH, which owns the iconic German racetrack. Rhineland-Palatinate and the municipality of Ahrweiler in turn own Nürburgring GmbH.

Beck had hoped that the European Commission would swiftly approve 13 million euros ($16 million) in aid, which could have kept the company going for another six months.

"But at the end of last week, [the Commission] indicated that it may not reach a positive decision on the application for aid before July 30," a statement by the state said.

After 18 months of having its funding nearly completely cut off by a payment industry blockade, WikiLeaks says it's finally found a new workaround that allows it to receive credit card donations. And after a legal victory against Visa in Iceland, the group is literally daring the card companies to shut down payments to his site again.

In a statement to press Wednesday morning, WikiLeaks writes that the Fund for the Defense of Net Neutrality (FDNN) has agreed to accept donations on behalf of WikiLeaks, and that the group can receive payments through the French payment card system Carte Bleue. WikiLeaks claims that Visa and MasterCard and from blocking payments to the site as they've done in the past.

Contractual obligations haven't necessarily stopped the card companies from cutting off WikiLeaks before. Following its release of classified State Department cables in late 2010, PayPal, Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard and Western Union all blocked payments to the site, some claiming that it had violating their terms of service by engaging in illegal activities despite the fact that no WikiLeaks staffer had been charged with a publishing-related crime. In July of last year, the Icelandic firm Valitor, then Visa Iceland, briefly opened payments to WikiLeaks through its partner firm DataCell.  Visa blocked that payment channel again within less than 24 hours.

Then last week, an Icelandic court ruled that Visa Iceland had violated its contract with DataCell by unilaterally blocking payments to the firm, and ordered Valitor to re-open payment before July 26 or pay fines of more than $6,000 per day.

Here we go again.

A woman becomes CEO of one of the most high profile tech companies in the world, and the topic everyone is discussing the next day? She is pregnant. Six months pregnant.

Suddenly, we all have an opinion about her very personal decision to have a baby as if Marissa Mayer is one of our family members. My office is abuzz: "It is her first baby, she does not know what she in for," "you can't breastfeed in an office," "maybe she will change things for working women." The comments keep on coming.

Hmmm. Can anyone tell me the parental status of the former CEO's of Yahoo (YHOO). How about the late Steve Jobs or the current Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook, or Google's (GOOG) Larry Page?

Probably not, because besides Carol Bartz, all these top execs are men, and as a society, we don't feel the need to advise them or judge them about the reproduction decisions they make outside the office. We reserve that for women.

Hard to choose among so many fossils of Paradise. Highways that lead nowhere, ski slopes amid barren plains, desolate aerodromes used only by crows... Such are the modern Spanish ruins enumerated in the book Ruinas modernas, by the German architect Julia Schulz-Dornburg. Some of them bear comparison with Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons. Schulz-Dornburg has done a thorough job of archeology. But the constructive and destructive voracity of our own time has created a "recent antiquity," where ruins overlap with new foundations. The cycle studied in the book extends approximately from 1992 to 2012. The collection of disasters, each more spectacular than the last, is so huge that the question arises: how could these things even be conceived, when they were so obviously doomed to failure?

South African peace icon Nelson Mandela has been flooded with birthday wishes from around the world. School children and world leaders have been expressing their appreciation for the leader, who has turned 94.

Wednesday began in South Africa with millions of school children singing "Happy Birthday" to former President Nelson Mandela, who turned 94.

"This is a very important day for all of us," Paul Ramela, a principal at a primary school in Soweto told AFP. "We are here to celebrate the birthday of a very important person, a person who has liberated us from apartheid."

Mandela was scheduled to spend the day with family at his home in Qunu.

The birthday menu would consist of Eastern Cape food, Ndileka Mandela told the Sowetan newspaper. "We will probably have food like samp and tripe, his favorite food," she said.

Let's hope he can tune out the "Happy Birthday" singers and enjoy something like this:

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

A woman who got a new tattoo to celebrate her role in the Olympic torch relay was shocked to discover it had been spelt incorrectly.

Jerri Peterson, from Atlanta, US, carried the torch through Derby on 30 June after being nominated by the hotel chain she worked for.