LONDON -- To understand the gargantuan security operation that authorities have prepared for the Olympic Games that open here Friday - nearly twice as many military troops are on the streets as Britain has deployed in Afghanistan, for starters - it helps to remember what happened the morning after London won the right to host these games seven years ago.

On July 7, 2005, homegrown militants detonated bombs in the city's Underground subway and on a passenger bus, killing dozens in one of the worst terrorist attacks in the country's history.

While there's no evidence that attack was linked to the Olympic bid, it's had an unmistakable impact on planning for these games. The 10,000 athletes competing for medals will be dwarfed by a contingent of more than 36,000 soldiers, police officers and private security staff, backed by American law enforcement agents, thousands of closed-circuit cameras, unmanned drones, at least six missile batteries positioned on rooftops in East London and the Royal Navy's largest warship, the HMS Ocean, floating in the Thames.

"Lockdown London," read one headline in the Guardian newspaper.

Authorities stress that there's no specific threat to the games, but any attempt to deflect attention from the combat-grade planning evaporated last week, when the private security firm G4S shamefacedly admitted that it would fail to deliver all of the 10,000 personnel it had promised to guard Olympic venues.

The German Constitutional Court has declared a reform of parliamentary electoral law unconstitutional. The decision is being seen as a blow to Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition.

The Karlsruhe court ruled on Wednesday that the reforms pushed through by Merkel's coalition in November 2011 ran contrary to principles of equality and direct suffrage.

It also ruled that the changes did not offer an equal opportunity to all parties in a fair manner.

The result is viewed as a victory for the parliamentary groups of the opposition SPD and the Greens, as well as the more than 3,000 citizens who brought the case.

US ratings company Moody's still maintains its Aaa status for Germany but has changed the outlook from stable to negative. Berlin insists it is unfazed by the news but Moody's has also changed the outlook for the EFSF.

For France's former President Nicolas Sarkozy it was a question of national and probably personal pride: A downgrade of France's top-notch credit rating was simply unacceptable. Sarkozy was upset about the idea that the three leading ratings agencies had the power to question the credit worthiness of entire countries. At times, the US-based agencies were perceived even as enemies of France that needed to be fought off. But in January, the dreaded downgrade was issued after all: Standard & Poor's cut France's rating from "AAA" to the second-best level, "AA+".

More than just a question of prestige

Germany is no doubt increasingly affected by the euro crisis

Germany so far still enjoys a top rating from all the three major agencies - and the government in Berlin quickly said it was not concerned about the warning from Moody's that this might change in the future. But ratings are more than just a question of prestige: if a country is hit with a downgrade it will have to pay higher interest when borrowing on the international financial markets. The possible consequences of which can be seen in the case of Spain: the country is already plagued by excessive debt and now has to pay around seven percent interest on its freshly-issued government bonds.

The Scottish government is to introduce new powers to legalise same-sex marriages in churches and in civil ceremonies, despite vigorous and bitter opposition from church leaders.

A draft bill that will enable gay and lesbian couples to marry with the same legal rights as heterosexual couples will be published later this year and is expected to be enacted next year, after Scottish ministers resisted intense pressure from the Catholic church to drop the proposals.

The legislation will include significant new protections and "conscience clauses" for churches and individual clergy who object to gay marriage on religious grounds, said Nicola Sturgeon, the deputy first minister.

But she added that opposition to the bill - which included 64% of the 62,000 responses from within Scotland to the Scottish government's consultation - had not persuaded her to drop or dilute the measures.

A high-profile trial against several German members of al Qaeda has begun. Investigators have charged the men with planning a terrorism attack on German soil.

A German regional appeal court began proceedings on Wednesday against several alleged Islamist terrorists. Public prosecutors have charged the four with plotting a "sensational" terrorist attack on Germany. They have also been charged with belonging to al Qaeda.

Police apprehended three alleged members of the terror cell in April 2011 in Germany's northwest city of Düsseldorf. The following December, the police arrested a fourth supposed member of the so-called "Düsseldorf Cell" in a nearby city.

Investigators have said that the German group had begun building explosives, but had not yet chosen a specific target.

SLOVAK officials discovered a 700-metre tunnel complete with its own train used to smuggle goods and maybe people from neighbouring Ukraine into the European Union (EU). They seized some 13,100 boxes of cigarettes and arrested a pair of men caught in the act. This has never happened before. "It is as if this has been cut out of a movie from the Mexican-American border," Peter Kažimír, the finance minister, said.

The bust came as a joint effort between tax and customs officials in an operation code named "Tax Cobra." Robert Kaliňák, the interior minister, said officials detained two men loading a truck on July 18th, confiscating a tobacco haul that would have bypassed some €350,000 in excise tax. Police had to fire warning shots as the 59-year-old alleged ringleader - who was renting the industrial property where the tunnel emerged -- sought to flee the scene.

The tunnel begins in a house in the Ukrainian city of Uzhorod and exits inside a building some 220 metres into Slovak territory on private property between the villages of Vyšné Nemecké and Nižné Nemecké. Officials estimate the tunnel could have helped dodge up to €50 m in tobacco tax over the past year.

Meanwhile, the government is considering dropping 14 TGV line projects which would mean handing traffic over to air. Grrrrr.

This is our last briefing before the summer break - back on Monday, August 13; Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that the eurogroup is considering direct EFSF purchases of Spanish bonds from Spanish banks; the purchases would be conducted by the ECB on behalf of the EFSF; Germany is ready to support this operation, but officials warn they are not certain of whether a Bundestag would approve it given the faltering support for rescue operations; it might also take some time until the purchases happen, as Spain needs to make a formal application, and the ECB has to issue a formal recommendation, before this is put to a vote; Ewald Nowotny yesterday moved markets when he said in an interview that the ESM should get a banking licence; Spanish yields improved for the first time in 10 days, and the euro rose back to over $1.21; El Pais writes the ECB is currently studying a number of options to help Spain and Italy, including new collateral rules; it writes that attempts to endow the ESM with a banking licence are likely to hit severe opposition by the Bundesbank and other central banks; Neal Kimberley writes that a banking licence would increase the ESM's contingent liabilities that fall disproportionately on Germany; the Ifo index fell to 103.3, the lowest level since March 2010, amid rising evidence that Germany may have entered a recession; Christian Noyer says ECB policy is not working, as the transmission channels are blocked, which is why a banking union is urgently needed; Gene Frieda, meanwhile, argued that the size and structure of Europe's firewall needs to be changed.  

Paying a plumber cash in hand is "morally wrong" because it denies the revenue vital funds, a Treasury minister said as the government outlined new ways of cutting down on £5bn in tax avoidance.

David Gauke, the exchequer secretary to the Treasury, risked shining a spotlight on whether any of his government colleagues have ever made cash in hand payments to plumbers when he described the practice as a large part of Britain's "hidden economy".

David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Nick Clegg all admitted that they have made cash-in-hand payments to tradesmen as Downing Street struggled to control a debate on the morality of tax.

The comments will add further woe to Mr Gauke who found himself accused of hypocrisy after it emerged that in 2006/7 he used his parliamentary expenses to cover the cost of the stamp duty when he moved home.

He claimed £10,248.32 in payments for his second home which included "Inland Revenue Stamp Duty" of £8,550. The rest was made up of solicitor's fees, land registry and property searches.

Mr. Draghi noted that in so far as the premiums on government borrowing hurt monetary-policy transmission, the ECB has the mandate to lower those premiums. It is quite clear that sovereign-debt yields in Spain, Italy and Greece are at levels crippling to the private sector.

In order to ensure the transmission of credit to households and businesses in the financially-stressed euro-zone nations, the ECB needs to drive down sovereign-debt yields from their current crippling levels-yields on Spanish two-year paper spiked above 7% this week. Set against an inflation rate of below 2%, five percentage point real yields are stifling the Spanish economy and defeating the ECB's various measures to kick-start it back into growth. A similar story is happening elsewhere.

How can the ECB reverse these extraordinarily high real yields? By buying bonds.

There are restrictions on this sort of intervention-the ECB is prohibited from monetizing debt, or buying bonds directly from issuing governments.

Now it seems Mr. Draghi is willing to ignore restrictions on debt monetization.

The best way for the ECB to drive down yields across the region is to throw itself into wholesale purchases of Spanish and Italian debt. In theory the ECB is only limited by how fast it can run its printing presses. And in the days of electronic finance, that's essentially the speed of light.

Legally, this might be subject to challenge, although Mr. Draghi presented the ECB's defense: direct buying of debt is necessary for the ECB to keep its mandate to generate monetary policy appropriate to the needs of the euro zone.

The errors of recent months are very clear today and the analysts of both the left and the right share the same diagnosis. Rajoy made a mistake when he did not name a shadow government more than a year ago to prepare for the transition. Instead of that, he preferred to keep quiet about who his ministers would be until the very last minute, so as not to have to give explanations to those he left out. The whole cabinet only knew what their portfolios were the day before taking possession of them, which delayed most of the appointments and the most urgent decisions.

Rajoy also made a mistake when he did not want to appoint a vice-president for economic affairs, at the very moment when this figure was most necessary. He did this so as not to go against treasury minister Cristóbal Montoro - a party man - who refused to accept Luis de Guindos, today minister of the economy, as his boss as vice-president. Montoro and De Guindos have a terrible relationship. But instead of resolving that problem and opting for one or the other, Rajoy decided to place both at the same level and not to appoint either above the other. This has caused numerous conflicts, because Montoro and De Guindos have totally contrasting views on many crucial topics - such as the raising of VAT or the bad bank - and they cannot work as a team.

Rajoy made another mistake when he delayed the state budget until after the Andalucía elections. Instead of approving it as soon as possible, he preferred to wait until March, to see whether the PP candidate would triumph in Andalucía - an autonomous region that has historically been in the hands of the socialists. This was a twofold mistake: not only did he lose those elections again, but he also lost some months that proved vital later. The budget came into effect just a few weeks ago and it has been necessary to amend it urgently at the last minute, by decree-law.

Britain's economic output collapsed by 0.7% in the second quarter of 2012 as the country's double-dip recession extended into a third quarter.

Across-the-board weakness in manufacturing and construction coupled with the loss of output caused by the extra bank holiday to mark the Queen's diamond jubilee were responsible for the setback, according to data from the Office for National Statistics.

Analysts in the City had expected a 0.2% drop in gross domestic product in the three months to June and were stunned by the scale of the fall in activity. The decline followed the 0.3% fall in the first three months of 2012 and a 0.4% decline in the final quarter of 2011.

Construction output dropped by 5.2% between the first and second quarters of 2012, with industrial production falling by 1.3% and service sector output by 0.1%

The mood in German businesses has dropped for the third month in a row as companies grow increasingly pessimistic about the eurozone debt crisis. But German consumers appear to ignore the dire signs.

The German Business Climate Index (BCI) dropped to 103.3 points in July, from 105.2 points in the previous month, the Ifo economic institute said Wednesday.

The fall in the institute's closely watched business sentiment barometer was steeper than analysts had expected. They predicted a drop to 104.5 points in a poll made by Dow Jones Newswires.

"The euro crisis is having an increasingly negative impact on the German economy," said Ifo President Hans-Werner Sinn, as he explained the third consecutive monthly drop of the index.

Euro Exit Risk Prompts JPMorgan to Set Up Contingency Plans By Anchalee Worrachate - 2012-07-25T15:14:25Z

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has set up a contingency plan allowing it to resume trading the bonds of any nation exiting the euro area to avoid disruption to its clients.

The largest U.S. bank by assets said while a break-up of the 17-nation currency zone was not its central view, the possibility has convinced it to establish procedures to limit any disruption to its bond-trading activities. The implied probability of a country leaving the monetary union is 59 percent for next year, and 66 percent by the end of 2014, based on bets at Intrade.com. Spain hasn't ruled out quitting the euro, El Confidencial reported this week.

"We've been doing some contingency work to ensure that we have a robust system and ability to absorb shocks if on a Sunday night a sovereign decides to leave the euro," Carl Norrey, head of European rates securities at JPMorgan in London, said in interview on July 23. "The probability of a country exiting the euro is no longer zero."

Financial turmoil in the euro area deepened this week as the Spanish region of Valencia said it will need aid from the central government, and Moody's Investors Service put a negative outlook on the Aaa ratings of Germany, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, saying they may need to spend more bailing out other member nations.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has said that he sounded the alarm four years ago to regulators about problems with the benchmark interest rate known as Libor.

But Geithner, who was then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, did not communicate in key meetings with top regulators that British bank Barclays had admitted to Fed staffers that it was rigging Libor, according to people familiar with the matter.

Instead, regulators at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Justice Department worked largely without the Fed's help to build a case against Barclays. That work has culminated in a massive scandal rocking the banking industry on both sides of the Atlantic.

As Geithner prepares to testify Wednesday morning on Capitol Hill, he returns to a familiar position as a lightning rod for critics on the left and the right who find fault in his work as a banking regulator before he joined the White House and as a bailout architect under President Obama.

Activists say thousands of troops have been sent to Syria's second city, Aleppo, as clashes were reported in the city for the sixth consecutive day.

Fighting was reported in the central al-Jamaliya neighbourhood on Wednesday, close to the local headquarters of the ruling Baath party. In Kalasseh, in the south of the city, rebels set fire to a police station, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The 16-month revolt against President Bashar al-Assad has in recent weeks been transformed from an armed uprising in remote provinces into a battle for control of the two main cities, Aleppo and the capital, Damascus, which have been the regime's main bases of support.

A spokesman for rebel Free Syrian Army said thousands of Syrian soldiers had been moved from the northwestern province of Idlib to fight in Aleppo.

"A large number of troops is being redeployed from Jabal al-Zawiyah to Aleppo, which is strategically more important for the regime than Idlib," Colonel Abdel Jabbar al-Oqaidi, the FSA's Military Council spokesman in the city told AFP.

Violence is spreading in northeast Assam state after nine more people were killed in overnight clashes between ethnic groups in India's northeast, bringing the death toll to 36 with about 170,000 villagers displaced by the unrest, officials say.

"The situation is tense and we are getting additional paramilitary troopers," Assam police chief JN Choudhury told reporters on Wednesday.

Rioting between Bodo tribespeople and Muslim settlers has raged for days in a region near Bangladesh.

Indian security forces patrolled deserted streets on Wednesday, and were given orders to shoot on sight, officials said.

Senate Democrats, who are united in support of higher income tax rates for millionaires and billionaires, are paralyzed by disagreements on how to tax the estates of the wealthiest Americans.

Lobbied by business owners and billionaires, Democrats including Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana resisted a proposal from President Barack Obama to tax individual estates of more than $3.5 million -- roughly three in 1,000 -- at a top rate of 45 percent. The split among Democrats, who control the Senate, will give Republicans more influence on the issue after the Nov. 6 election.

"It's something that's really divided and perplexed our caucus about what's the fair way to move forward," said Landrieu, who supports repealing the estate tax and wants to reach a compromise with Republicans. "We don't have the votes to do anything, really, with it."

As a result, when the Senate votes as scheduled at 2:15 p.m. in Washington today on a bill to extend income tax cuts that expire Dec. 31, the proposal will be silent on the estate tax. Democratic leaders in the Senate sidestepped the estate tax to focus on an issue on which almost all of them agree: Obama's plan to let income tax cuts expire for the top 2 percent.

FANGSHAN, China -- It took just one glance at a jumble of cars mired in the brown waters covering the G4 expressway late on Monday afternoon to cast doubt on Chinese government estimates that only 37 had died in flash flooding over the weekend.

A casual count of one patch of road came up with 33 vehicles - buses and taxis, and cars thrown on top of each other and over highway railings. Most passengers may have escaped, but many in the crowd of onlookers voiced something between quiet skepticism and open derision that the official numbers were true.

"They must hide this," said one old man who was hustled away from a perch overlooking the scene by uniformed police yelling that photography in the area needed prior consent. With plainclothes security milling around the area, he and other onlookers didn't give their names.

The man said that he'd already heard how many were killed in Fangshan, a district roughly 20 miles southwest of downtown Beijing, after heavy rains on Saturday night: "More than 300."

Not long ago, such grumbling would have stayed among locals, something to mull over with family at the dinner table. With an estimated 538 million Internet users in China today, however, the Chinese Communist Party is increasingly finding its propaganda apparatuses, designed for top-down messaging, tested by a very public flurry of fact and rumor alike.

The number of people seeking to buy guns in Colorado has soared since last week's mass shooting in the US state's town of Aurora, say law officials.

In the three days after the shooting, applications for the background checks needed to buy a gun legally were up 43% on the previous week.

The shooting at a cinema showing the new Batman movie left 12 people dead and 58 injured - 20 remain in hospital.

The suspected gunman appeared in court for the first time on Monday.

James Holmes, 24, is accused of throwing two canisters of gas into a busy midnight showing of the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises, before firing at random into the crowd.

That Batman fella must be one scary guy.

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

MIAMI -- Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya was buried Tuesday as police dragged off and allegedly beat at least 40 supporters who shouted "Freedom!" after his funeral mass, in a clash watched by a large and impassive crowd in Havana. Relatives and supporters voiced new allegations that Paya was killed in a car crash caused by another vehicle, but a Madrid newspaper reported the Spaniard at the wheel of the car carrying the dissident told police the accident was his fault.

HAVANA, Cuba (ACN) -- The US Department of Homeland Security has announced the setting up of a drone squadron for surveillance activity over the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, ostensibly for the purpose of fighting drug trafficking. (...) According to the FAA plan, a 2,000-kilometer area will be covered by the drones, which includes The Bahamas, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands.

Tim's El Salvador Blog: It was a scene you don't often see in El Salvador.   All the top leaders of the country's political parties coming together in one room.  From the ex-president from ARENA Alfredo Cristiani to Medardo Gonzalez, of the FMLN,  President Mauricio Funes had summoned them all to the Presidential House today  to attempt to resolve El Salvador's constitutional crisis.  (See a gallery of Funes shaking hands with all the various party leaders here).

WASHINGTON, Jul 24 2012 (IPS) - Two months after a free-trade agreement between the United States and Colombia went into effect, workers and activists are warning that U.S.-stipulated labour reforms have not been fully implemented and have yet to result in promised improvements in the lives of workers.

Miami Herald, ASUNCION, Paraguay -- Paraguay's former President Fernando Lugo must testify in an investigation over alleged Venezuelan meddling during his impeachment, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Last week the Obama administration announced its support for a moment of silence at the London Olympics to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the massacre of 11 Israeli Olympians at the 1972 Olympics.

This week the Romney campaign followed suit.

At first glance, this would seem to be an easy political score for both candidates. But unfortunately for Romney, there was that stint running the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002. And at least one Obama supporter is slamming the GOP candidate for not taking a stand on the issue back then:

Deborah Lipstadt, a prominent Holocaust historian, faulted Romney for not expressing support for such a moment in 2002, when his position directing the Winter Olympics would have weighed heavily with the International Olympic Committee.

The historic windmill in Jerusalem is expected to resume grinding wheat with wind energy in about two weeks time, 119 years after it stopped operating.

[...]

Just to be on the safe side, a small electric motor was installed as well, despite the protests of the Dutch engineer who assembled the mill, and who had faith in the power of the Jerusalem wind to spin the blades.

The Greenland ice sheet melted at a faster rate this month than at any other time in recorded history, with virtually the entire ice sheet showing signs of thaw.

The rapid melting over just four days was captured by three satellites. It has stunned and alarmed scientists, and deepened fears about the pace and future consequences of climate change.

In a statement posted on Nasa's website on Tuesday, scientists admitted the satellite data was so striking they thought at first there had to be a mistake.

"This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result: was this real or was it due to a data error?" Son Nghiem of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said in the release.

He consulted with several colleagues, who confirmed his findings. Dorothy Hall, who studies the surface temperature of Greenland at Nasa's space flight centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, confirmed that the area experienced unusually high temperatures in mid-July, and that there was widespread melting over the surface of the ice sheet.

Vibrio bacteria are usually found in warm waters, but new research has found them in the cold Baltic Sea as a result of rising temperatures. Controlling the spread will be hard.

A team of scientists from Britain, Finland, Spain and the United States says it has the first hard evidence to link rising ocean temperatures in Northern Europe with the emergence of various strains of Vibrio bacteria.

Vibrio bacteria is normally found in warm, tropical marine environments but has been detected in the usually cold Baltic Sea.

It belongs to a group of bacteria which - depending on the strain - can cause gastroenteritis or cholera in humans if raw or undercooked shellfish are consumed, or through exposure to contaminated seawater.

WASHINGTON -- The worst drought in the United States in nearly a half-century is expected to drive up the price of milk, beef and pork next year, the government said Wednesday, as consumers bear some of the brunt of the sweltering heat that is driving up the cost of feed corn.

Poultry prices are expected to rise more immediately, the government said in a report. It estimated that consumer price indexes for chicken and turkey would rise 3.5 percent to 4.5 percent later this year.

"The poultry category is the smallest animal category, and we expect to see more of an effect this year because they grow the fastest and will be first to be impacted by higher feed prices," said Richard Volpe, an economist with the Department of Agriculture.

Figures released Wednesday by the department showed the largest percentage increase next year in its price indexes is expected for beef, a rise of 4 percent to 5 percent. The price of dairy products will increase 3.5 percent to 4.5 percent and eggs by 3 percent to 4 percent. Pork is expected to rise 2.5 percent to 3.5 percent.

An exhibition entitled "Silenced Voices" during the Bayreuth Festival's current season explores a dark chapter in German history. Nazis used the music festival as a means of spreading anti-Semitic propaganda.

The plaster is crumbling off part of the façade of Bayreuth's opera house. Flower beds adorn the park in front of the building, which is beleaguered by curious onlookers as the Bayreuth Festival kicks off on July 25. Shrubs encircle freshly mown lawns. Wind blows through the leaves of the stately trees. A few visitors stroll across the manicured grounds.

It almost feels like it does every summer up on Bayreuth's fabled Green Hill - except for the 40 or so gray panels standing in the park near the sunken-eyed bronze bust of Richard Wagner. The bust itself was created by one of the Nazis' preeminent artists, Arno Breker.

Franz Allers was one of the first Jews to be banned from the Wuppertal Theater

From a distance, the panels resemble modern-day gravestones and, actually, that impression is not far off the mark. Black-and-white pictures and texts adhere to the panels, displaying brief biographies of long-passed musicians who once participated in the Bayreuth Festival, but who were persecuted due to their Jewish heritage.

The controversial exoplanet Gliese 581g is the best candidate to host life beyond our own solar system, according to a new ranking of potentially habitable alien worlds.

Gliese 581g shot to the top of the list -- which was published Thursday (July 19) by researchers at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo's Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL) -- after a new study marshaled support for its long-debated existence.

The exoplanet was discovered in September 2010, but other astronomers began casting doubt on its existence just weeks later. Now Gliese 581g's discoverers have rebutted their critics' charges in a new paper, and have done so effectively enough to get the PHL onboard.

Here's a brief rundown of the PHL's top five habitable alien planets

ScienceDaily (July 23, 2012) -- Severe psychological and physical neglect produces measurable changes in children's brains, finds a study led by Boston Children's Hospital. But the study also suggests that positive interventions can partially reverse these changes.

Researchers led by Margaret Sheridan, PhD, and Charles Nelson, PhD, of the Labs of Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston Children's Hospital, analyzed brain MRI scans from Romanian children in the ongoing Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), which has transferred some children reared in orphanages into quality foster care homes.

Their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Early Edition, online the week of July 23), add to earlier studies by Nelson and colleagues showing cognitive impairment in institutionalized children, but also showing improvements when children are placed in good foster homes.

"Increasingly we are finding evidence that exposure to childhood adversity has a negative effect on brain development," says Sheridan. "The implications are wide ranging, not just for institutionalized children but also for children exposed to abuse, abandonment, violence during war, extreme poverty and other adversities."

The curlicue compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) oft touted as an Earth-friendly alternative to standard incandescent bulbs may cause skin damage, according to a new study by researchers at Stony Brook University.

The bulbs are already known to pose hazards from using mercury, a toxic element, though in very small quantities, as lighting manufacturers are quick to point out. Regulations in parts of the United States and in the European Union limit mercury to 3.5 milligrams per bulb, with the limit dropping to 2.5 mg next year.

Now researchers have found that ultraviolet radiation seeping through CFLs may damage skin cells. Miriam Rafailovich, a professor of materials science and engineering at Stony Brook, led the research after reading an article in an Israeli newspaper that reported a spike in skin cancer on a communal farm when residents switched to fluorescent bulbs.

"In the past two years some disturbing reports have surfaced mostly in the European Union literature, which indicate that exposure to CFL bulbs might be responsible for exacerbating certain skin conditions, such as photodermatoses and skin cancer in humans," says the paper, published last month in the journal Photochemistry and Photobiology.

Poachers' snares pose one of the biggest threats to mountain gorilla populations according to campaigners - and it seems that the gorillas themselves have worked this out, because they've been observed dismantling traps.

Field staff of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Rwanda report that on Monday they saw several young gorillas destroying snares - which maim and often kill gorillas - with their bare hands.

"We knew that gorillas do this but all of the reported cases in the past were carried out by adult gorillas, mostly silverbacks," said Veronica Vecellio, gorilla program coordinator at the Karisoke Research Center.

"Today, two juveniles and one blackback worked together to deactivate two snares and how they did it demonstrated an impressive cognitive skill."

There's not much doubt that autism, along with Asperger Syndrome, is finally becoming accepted as a normal part of the human fabric. Even if some people still see autism as a condition that needs to be "treated," it's increasingly obvious that people on the autism spectrum are finding ways to succeed in our neurotypical-based society.

Not only that, but autistic people are changing the nature of our society as well -- in many ways, for the better.

Modern culture is clearly being defined and influenced by our willingness to celebrate and learn from those who think and act differently -- a clear sign that tolerance, accommodation, and understanding benefits all of us.

But not only that, the rise of autistic culture shows how important it is to have alternative psychological modalities as a part of the cultural fabric. In an age when economic globalization and other factors threaten to homogenize human culture, it's good to know that different minds can still give rise to new ideas.

NK unveils Kim Jong-un 'mystery' marriage - Asia-Pacific - Al Jazeera English

North Korea has said its new leader is married, announcing the union for the first time in routine state TV report.

The bulletin, which aired on Wednesday evening, ended weeks of speculation about a woman who accompanied Kim Jung-un to recent public events.

Kim toured an amusement park with his "wife, comrade Ri Sol-ju'' on Tuesday, while a crowd cheered for the leader, the speaker said without giving any more details about Ri, including how long they had been married.

Seven months after inheriting the country from his father, Kim Jong-il, the 20-something leader has been shown in the media several times with the young woman, including at a concert where Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters appeared and at tours of various North Korean sites.

While the woman has no been identified until now, media and analysts in South Korea were quick to guess that she was his wife.

Boris: "let's hear it for the financial services sector".... Muted applause from the delegates of the Olympic trade summit