Fifty rainstorms were created last year in the state's eastern Al Ain region using technology designed to control the weather. The sand dunes of the United Arab Emirates sees no rain at all for months. Now a secret project has brought storms to Abu Dhabi. Most of the storms were at the height of the summer in July and August when there is no rain at all. People living in Abu Dhabi were baffled by the rainfall which sometimes turned into hail and included gales and lightening.

The scientists have been working secretly for United Arab Emirates president Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan. They have been using giant ionisers, shaped like stripped down lampshades on steel poles, to generate fields of negatively charged particles. These promote cloud formation and researchers hoped they could then produce rain.

In a confidential company video, the founder of the Swiss company in charge of the project, Metro Systems International, boasted of success.

Helmut Fluhrer said: 'We have achieved a number of rainfalls.' It is believed to be the first time the system has produced rain from clear skies, according to the Sunday Times.

In the past, China and other countries have used chemicals for cloud-seeding to both induce and prevent rain falling. Last June Metro Systems built five ionising sites each with 20 emitters which can send trillions of cloud-forming ions into the atmosphere. Over four summer months the emitters were switched on when the required atmospheric level of humidity reached 30 per cent or more. While the country's weather experts predicted no clouds or rain in the Al Ain region, rain fell on FIFTY-TWO occasions. The project was monitored by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the world's major centres for atmospheric physics.

The savings using the Weathertec technology are huge with the system costing 6 million pounds a year while desalination is 45 million pounds.

Building an ionising system is about 7 million pounds while a desalination plant would be 850 million pounds and costs a lot more to run.

It took just 7 months for the National Debt to increase from $13 trillion on June 1, 2010 to $14 trillion on December 31. It also means the debt is fast approaching the statutory ceiling $14.294 trillion set by Congress and signed into law by President Obama last February. The federal government would have to stop borrowing and might even default on its obligations if Congress fails to increase the Debt Ceiling before the limit is reached.

Some Republicans in the new Congress have said they'll seek to block an increase in the Debt Ceiling unless a plan is in place to significantly reduce federal spending and unfunded government liabilities on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee warned yesterday that it would be "catastrophic" if the US Government were to default on its financial obligations. "That would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity," said Goolsbee of plans to block an increase in the Debt Ceiling.

The German presence in Afghanistan is one sign of how the Bundeswehr is throwing off the constraints imposed after its disgrace and defeat in 1945. The end of conscription, due in July, is another. After the end of World War II, the idea was that a military of the people would not bow easily to another dictator.

Inside and outside Germany the mantra was: "No German boots on foreign soil." It was also part of the constitution. German forces would be purely defensive, and defensive at the border. But in the new world, two decades after the end of communism, the military is being re-formed. Conscription is due to disappear in July as the military prepares to step a little further afield. Now the country has decided to get more involved partly because that is what its allies want.

"We can't say, as we did before, that nobody wants German boots on their territory. Even Israelis have said that they would prefer German soldiers in peacekeeping missions in the region. We were not prepared to do this at that time but in the future we will be a normal partner among others like France or Britain."

While the original idea of conscription was to build a military that reflected wider society, German leaders now feel that democracy is so embedded that constraints on its role can be loosened. The economic giant will start to punch its weight - though carefully. According to the thinking in Berlin, there will be more German boots on foreign soil, but they will tread with sensitivity.

Investigators from local and state agencies took samples from the affected area. Stephens says fish kills occur every year, but the magnitude of this one is unusual, and disease could be the cause. A pollutant would have affected cross species. Stephens says, "Ninety-nine percent of them were Drum, which is a bottom feeder. It's not a game fish in Arkansas." Some fish collected were alive and visibly sick. They have been taken to the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff for testing. As for clean up, nature is taking its course. "We'll have raccoon and birds and things like that will take care of it so there is really no clean up, it's really too big. It's contained along the river channel."

Just 150 miles away, bemused US officials are looking into why more than 1,000 blackbirds crashed from the sky in Arkansas on the final day of 2010. In scenes reminiscent of the FlashForward drama series, state wildlife employees were searching the town of Beebe after scores of birds fell to the ground late on New Year's Eve, continuing into the early hours of the morning. High winds and tornadoes swept through Arkansas on New Year's Eve, killing seven people, and state staff believe the bizarre incident could be down to the severe conditions.

Jamel is an example of the far-right problem that has plagued Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania for years. The rural region, once part of communist East Germany, has a poor reputation in this regard - the NPD, which glorifies the Third Reich, has been in the state parliament since 2006 and neo-Nazi crimes are part of daily life. In recent months, a series of attacks against politicians from all the democratic parties has shaken the state. Sometimes hardly a week goes by without an attack on another electoral district office, with paint bombs, right-wing graffiti and broken windows.

Norbert Nieszery, leader of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the state parliament, calls it an "early form of terror." Nieszery's own office windows have been smashed twice. State Interior Minister Lorenz Caffier of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) says he has registered a "new level" of right-wing extremist violence. He believes the NPD is trying to raise its profile through aggressive behavior ahead of state parliament elections in September.

One local mayor requested police protection after receiving repeated right-wing threats. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, has warned that the NPD is becoming increasingly influential in local municipalities and that the neo-Nazis are trying to entrench themselves in daily life.

Nowhere have they succeeded as well as in Jamel. If the right-wing extremists left, the village would be empty. Jamel is no longer just a problem at the regional or federal state level - even Berlin is growing concerned about the situation. Jamel has come to symbolize the fact that there are places in Germany where right-wing extremists can do virtually whatever they want.

The discovery has fuelled fears that urban foxes are hunting new prey after getting bigger and bolder as they gorge themselves on leftovers, including treats put out for them by animal lovers. The animals' rise was highlighted last year after twin babies were mauled in their east London home. Nine-month-old Lola and Isabella Koupparis were left scratched and scarred after a fox jumped into their cot in the night, leading to calls for the animals to be culled as pests.

The new giant was caught by vet Keith Talbot at his parents' home in Maidstone, Kent, on Boxing Day after they told him they believed a fox had killed their black and white pet cat, Amber. Mr Talbot, 28, who works in Scotland, went to stay with his parents for Christmas and put down a trap to try to catch the offender. On the first night, he caught a 14lb fox and the next night the giant specimen, which weighed 26.5lb. Both were humanely destroyed.

Mr Talbot said: 'I'm not against foxes, I think everything in nature has a place. But there is a limit and when something like that happens and they start eating cats, it probably tells you that the balance of nature has been upset by humans feeding them and that it's time for controls to come in.' The worrying aspect is that the urban fox's behaviour is changing. 'They are getting bigger because some people feed them because they like to see them in their gardens. With the additional size comes added confidence and then they start taking on new prey - and once they find an easy food source they will capitalise on it.'

The system, made up of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, can transmit live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements. It can send up to 65 different images to different users; by contrast, Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a "soda straw" area the size of a building or two.

With the new tool, analysts will no longer have to guess where to point the camera, said Major General James O Poss, the Air Force's assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. "Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything."

The Air Force is exponentially increasing surveillance across Afghanistan. The monthly number of unmanned and manned aircraft surveillance sorties has more than doubled since last January, and quadrupled since the beginning of 2009.

The document, dated November 15, 2009, was quoted Sunday in Norwegian by Oslo-based daily Aftenposten, which said it had obtained WikiLeaks' entire cache of 251,187 leaked US embassy cables. "The rocket threat against Israel is more serious than ever. That is why Israel is putting such emphasis on rocket defence," Ashkenazi told the US delegation led by Democrat Ike Skelton, the cable showed.

The army chief lamented that Iran has some 300 Shihab rockets that can reach Israel and stressed that the Jewish state would have only between 10 and 12 minutes warning in case of an attack. However, it was Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon that posed the most acute threat, he cautioned. According to the quoted cable, Hezbollah is thought to have more than 40,000 rockets, many of which are believed capable of reaching deep into Israel.

US officials meanwhile reportedly estimate the militant group has acquired an arsenal of around 50,000 rockets. And in his comments made nearly a year after Israel on December 27, 2008 launched the deadly Gaza war, Ashkenazi said "Israel is on a collision course also with Hamas, which rules Gaza. Hamas will have the possibility to bombard Tel Aviv, with Israel's highest population concentration," he was quoted as saying.

"When you hand out $1 trillion in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) just before this president came in, most of it unspent, $1 trillion nearly in stimulus, that this president asked for, plus this huge expansion in health care and government, it has a corrupting effect," Issa said on CNN's "State of the Union."

Although TARP - the program passed in 2008 intended to strengthen the financial sector by purchasing assets from financial institutions - was passed by Congress under the Bush administration, Issa said the unregulated funds were used by Obama like "presidential earmarks."

But the California Republican also admitted Congress shares some of the blame.

"All of that would not have been possible if Congress had done its job," Issa told CNN Chief White House Correspondent Ed Henry. "Instead what happened was we gave President Bush (the money and) President Obama inherited $800 billion worth of walking-around money with no guidelines."

And a woman seriously hurt on Friday near the south-east Missouri town of Rolla died in hospital on Saturday. Several other people in Arkansas and Missouri were injured. The tornado in Cincinnati caused damage near a local highway in the town's centre and points west of Washington County in Arkansas, county dispatcher Josh Howerton said, adding that there were "lots of injuries".

"It sucked me out of my house and carried me across the road and dropped me," Chris Sizemore, a resident of Cincinnati, told the Associated Press news agency. The tornado hit the town, located about 20 miles (32km) west of the city of Fayetteville, around 0610 local time (1210GMT) on Friday, said Joe Sellers, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oklahoma.

Emergency responders were experiencing difficulties early on Friday in reaching damaged areas in the region because of power lines that had been knocked down, Rick Johnson, the deputy emergency manager for Washington County, said. The Arkansas Department of Emergency Management said that power was out throughout Washington County. A local airport cancelled flights due to debris on its runway in Benton County, a region near the Arkansas state lines with Oklahoma and Missouri, Matt Garrity, the county's manager of emergency services, told the CNN news network.

Authorities have now confirmed three deaths caused by flood waters in the past few days. Officials have said that the crisis could last another month. "Given the scale and size of this disaster and the prospect that we'll see waters sitting for potentially a couple of weeks," said Queensland Premier Anna Bligh. "We will continue to have major issues to deal with throughout January."

Rockhampton has already been badly hit, with many people being forced to flee. Rockhampton's airport, a major regional hub, was closed to commercial traffic due to flooded runways, while many main roads and railways into the town have been cut off, and power supplies disrupted.

"Today we'll see resupply of Rockhampton by military aircraft taking supplies into Mackay and then road transporting them down to Rockhampton," the state's emergency coordinator, police Deputy Commissioner Ian Stewart, said on Monday. "That will continue until such time as the road is cut." Flood waters are expected to reach nine metres (30 feet) on Monday and peak at 9.4 metres on Wednesday, threatening as many as 4,000 homes.

Hundreds of people in coastal areas fled to higher ground for fear of a tsunami, but no alert was issued. An 8.8-magnitude quake in the same area last February caused huge destruction. Chile's national emergency agency (Onemi) said there was no danger of a tsunami. "Up until now we don't have any reports of injuries, there's no damage, just overloaded telephone lines and some partial power cuts," said Onemi's director, Vicente Nunez.

"We've told people to go back to their houses because there's no tsunami alert." The quake hit at 1720 (2020 GMT) and was centred about 600 kilometres (370 miles) southwest of the capital, Santiago. Chile is still rebuilding after February's massive quake, which smashed infrastructure and triggered a tsunami that devastated several coastal towns, killing more than 400 people.

One major risk facing the world economy at the moment is related to a slow transition of economic power from the West to the East. The rise of the emerging world, in particular China, and the coinciding weakening of the West, in particular the US, has resulted in a "collapse of consensus of how the global monetary system should be run", Mr Ward continues.

In simple terms, China favours tight controls of the economy whereas the US prefers free market solutions, "hence the volatility here", he says. The tension has resulted in a currency war, where major economies seek to devalue their own currency in order to boost their own competitiveness; China through central controls, the US by way of "printing money on a scale we've never seen before".

In turn, this has made life tough for small countries, which have responded by introducing capital controls. Add a high risk of deflation in the US, which could result in more quantitative easing (essentially printing money) and thus more pressure towards currency wars and capital controls, and there are reasons to be concerned about whether the world economy can cope, Mr Ward reasons.

"The European crisis is yet another source of concern for us," Mr Ward agrees. "Spain is the really big one, and it is really sick as well," he says. "If Spain wobbles and collapses, it'll be very bad news for everyone, not just in Europe but all over the world," reasoning that it could result in the collapse of the euro. "If the euro did collapse, it would make Lehman Brothers look like a tea party.

Banks alone must refinance about 400 billion euros (343 billion pounds) of debt in the first half of the year, but add in the more than 500 billion euros European governments must replace over the same period, as well as further hundreds of billions of euros of mortgage-backed debt maturing and there is the potential for chaos in the credit markets.

"What we are looking at here clearly has the potential to become a second credit crunch. However, this time it would be much worse than before," said Celestino Amore, founder of IlliquidX, which specialises in trading hard-to-price debt. "Governments have been able to slow down the process, but the problems did not go away. There remains trillions of dollars of debt that must be refinanced or sold."

Mr Amore predicts a rush to sell assets, much like that which kicked off the first credit crunch in the summer of 2007. However, many fund managers and other large institutional investors are looking to reduce their exposure to bonds, leading to warnings that there will not be enough demand to buy all the debt banks and governments will need to sell.

Last week the Centre for Economic and Business Research said a new eurozone crisis was its top prediction for 2011, pointing out that Spain and Italy alone must refinance more than 400 million euros of bonds in the spring. "I think you're going to see everyone rush to sell bonds very early in January, because no one wants to take the chance of missing whatever funding window is available," said the banker.

* AB 119 prevents insurance companies from charging different rates for men and women for identical coverage.

* SB 782 prevents landlords from evicting tenants who are victims of domestic or sexual abuse or stalking.

* AB 1844 informally known as 'Chelsea's Law' and authored by local Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher - will increase penalties, parole provisions and oversight of sex offenders, including a "one-strike, life-without-parole penalty" for some.

* AB 1871 allows people to lease out their cars when they are not being used - alleviating the need to purchase additional insurance.

And so the list goes on and on... California now has over 57,000 laws on the books.