Speaking in Downing Street, Prime Minister David Cameron said Britain was ready to welcome "the greatest show on earth". "It's a great opportunity to show the world the best of Britain, a country that's got an incredibly rich past but also a very exciting future," he said.

Europe's largest bell will ring inside the Olympic stadium at 21:00 BST at the start of the £27 million extravaganza, featuring a cast of 10,000 volunteers and said to be a quirky take on British life. Some 15,000 square metres of staging and 12,956 props will be used, and the event will boast a million-watt PA system using more than 500 speakers.

The crowd of about 80,000 will include the Queen and a host of dignitaries and celebrities. As late as Thursday night, Games organisers said that the ceremony had not sold out and tickets in the two highest price categories - costing £2,012 and £1,600 - were still available.

The comments by Dahi Khalfan, one of the most outspoken security officials in the United Arab Emirates, follow the detention in the UAE since April of at least 20 dissidents, according to relatives of the detainees and activists. "There's an international plot against Gulf states in particular and Arab countries in general... This is preplanned to take over our fortunes," Khalfan told reporters at a gathering late on Wednesday marking the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

"The bigger our sovereign wealth funds and the more money we put in the banks of Western countries, the bigger the plot to take over our countries... The brothers and their governments in Damascus and North Africa have to know that the Gulf is a red line, not only for Iran but also for the Brothers as well." Most of the detainees since April are Islamists, targeted by an official clampdown amid concern they may be emboldened by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in other Arab countries such as Egypt.

Barclays said on Friday that Britain's financial regulator has started an investigation involving the bank and four current and former senior employees, including finance director Chris Lucas. The Financial Services Authority is investigating whether the bank made sufficient disclosures about the fees it paid under commercial agreements related to its capital raisings in June and November 2008. The bank said it is satisfied with its disclosures, but refused further comment.

It also faces more US lawsuits after a record £290 million ($455.3 million) fine last month for rigging the Libor interest rate benchmark, sparking fierce criticism about its culture and risk-taking. More than a dozen other banks are expected to be drawn into the global Libor investigation and could also be fined.

The bank reported an underlying pretax profit of £4.2 billion ($6.6 billion) for the six months to the end of June, above an average forecast of £3.8 billion from analysts polled by the company and up 13 percent from a year ago. It said it faces a bill of £450 million to pay compensation to customers misled about interest-rate hedging products to small businesses. The figure is based on initial estimates and Barclays said the ultimate cost is uncertain. UK banks agreed last month to pay compensation to customers who were misled about the products.

It has one of the longest runways in Europe but today there are no planes, only hawks and falcons gliding in the still heat over the arid yellow landscape of Don Quixote's Castilla La Mancha. Rabbits pop up around the state-of-the-art terminal, built of steel, glass and gleaming white concrete.

The airport of Ciudad Real opened in 2008 but it closed in April 2012. The luggage trolleys are now trussed together in the car park gathering dust and cobwebs. It is not the only white elephant to stomp across Spain's landscape. It is merely one of the herd, a monument to the country's burst construction bubble which brought down its banks.

"You might think the airport failed because of the crisis, but I am convinced that the shareholders never thought it (the airport) would work. The only profit in this airport was the building of it," says local investigative journalist Carlos Otto. The official bankruptcy report for the airport seems to back this up. It says: "The loans taken out were enough to cover the construction phase but no thought was given to the investment needed to make the airport function as a business."

If the bill is successfully put into law, around half of all Church property nationalized by the communist government (worth about $4 billion) would be returned, and any property that cannot be returned would be compensated financially (around $2.8 billion), over the course of the next 30 years. Churches would, however, need to prove that they owned the property before February 25, 1948, the day of the communist revolt. The Catholic Church would receive 80% of the property.

The Church property had been seized by the communist government between 1948 and 1989.

The video, which the Temple Institute says is designed to "change the way people think about the Temple and the commandment to rebuild it," has garnered almost 200,000 hits in five days. It depicts two children building a sand-castle model of the Temple on a beach, and fleetingly features a copy of The Jerusalem Post open to an article about new Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi.

Tisha Be'av, the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av, which falls out on Saturday night and Sunday this year, is the second most important fast in the Jewish calendar and commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples, as well as several other tragedies that befell the Jewish people during its history.

According to its website, the Temple Institute's "long-term goal is to do all in our limited power to bring about the building of the Holy Temple in our time," while in the short term seeking to "rekindle the flame of the Holy Temple in the hearts of mankind through education." The organization has reproduced the Temple vessels in strict accordance with Jewish law, including a golden Menora costing $2 million, and also strongly advocates Jewish prayer rights on the Temple Mount.

The ninth of Av this year actually falls on Friday night and Saturday, but Jewish law forbids fasting on Shabbat, except on Yom Kippur, so the fast will be observed on Sunday instead.

Video At - http://www.templeinstitute.org/news.htm

Holmes's past association with government research projects has prompted police and federal law enforcement officials to order laboratories and schools with which Holmes has had a past association not to talk to the press about Holmes.

Holmes was one of six recipients of a National Institutes of Health Neuroscience Training Grant at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver. Holmes is a graduate of the University of California at Riverside with a Bachelor of Science degree in neuroscience. Although Holmes dropped out of the PhD neuroscience program at Anschutz in June, police evacuated two buildings at the Anschutz center after the massacre at the Aurora movie theater. Holmes reportedly gave a presentation at the Anschutz campus in May on Micro DNA Biomarkers in a class titled "Biological Basis of Psychiatric and Neurological Disorders."

According to his LinkedIn profile, James Holmes's father, Dr Robert Holmes, who received a PhD in Statistics in 1981 from the University of California at Berkeley, worked for San Diego-based HNC Software, Inc from 2000 to 2002. HNC, known as a "neural network" company, and DARPA, beginning in 1998, have worked on developing "cortronic neural networks," which would allow machines to interpret aural and visual stimuli to think like humans. Robert Holmes continues to work at FICO.

The links between the younger and elder Holmes and US government research on creating super-soldiers, human brain-machine interfaces, and human-like robots beg the question: "Was James Holmes engaged in a real-life Jason Bourne TREADSTONE project that broke down and resulted in deadly consequences in Aurora, Colorado?"

New Open Europe briefing: Greece-style bailout for Spain is impossible, as it could cost up to €650 billion;

Standoff between Commission and net contributors over 2013 EU budget intensifies;

Mats Persson: Cameron should veto EU budget unless he gets a better deal:

EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso has written to all EU Heads of State and Government warning that the 2.79% increase in next year’s draft EU budget agreed by member states on Tuesday was insufficient to meet the EU’s “legal obligations to pay beneficiaries as a result of past commitments”. Die Welt reports that German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle issued an immediate rebuttal, arguing that given the tough savings enacted by member states, the “EU budget can't grow disproportionately”.

Talks of Greek exit from the euro increases within EU institutions:

The WSJ quotes a senior unnamed eurozone government official as saying, "The euro exit scenario is increasingly being examined, although the top priority remains to avoid it… But there's a real sense that this actually is Greece's last chance."

Le Figaro reports that allies of junior finance minister Benoît Hamon in the governing socialist party could vote against the eurozone’s fiscal treaty in the French parliament.

Reuters reports that France is considering asking the European Commission to place the EU’s trade agreement with South Korea under surveillance to limit rising imports of South Korean vehicles, French Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg said yesterday.

Reuters Open Europe research:

Speaking at yesterday’s launch of Commission proposals to crackdown on the manipulation of benchmark rates, such as LIBOR, EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said, “I was not very much convinced by the action of the Bank [of England]. It has already got, years before, a warning that things were going wrong. It has not acted.”

“If it needed to go today, we would be ready to do that,” said Donley. “We continue to do testing on the bomb to refine its capabilities, and that is ongoing. We also have the capability to go with existing configuration today.” The Pentagon has spent $330 million to develop and deliver more than 20 of the precision-guided Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bunker-busters, which are designed to blast through up to 200 feet of concrete. The only other weapon capable of destroying such a facility from the air would be a tactical nuclear missile.