The "pledge of allegiance" to a Jewish Temple Mount and a united Jerusalem was part of the monthly "March around Old City Temple Gates," a colorful event featuring the recital of Psalms at various closed gates around the Temple Mount. The monthly march usually attracts 2,000-3,000 people, but organizers successfully brought out thousands more Monday night as Jews around the world marked the beginning of the Hebrew month of Av.

The Ninth of Av is marked every year as the day when foreign invaders destroyed the First and Second Holy Temples. The marches feature music and dancing and are peaceful, but police have barred several of the monthly prayer rallies during the past year because of fears of Arab violence.

National Union Knesset Member Uri Ariel told the crowd that deterioration in security and the increasing discrimination against Jews in Jerusalem prompted the unusually large turnout. In his speech he described the "surrender of Jerusalem to Arabs," the worsening security in several Jewish neighborhoods, disturbances by anarchists and the discrimination by police who severely restrict the ability of Jews to ascend the Temple Mount.

(The fast of Tisha b'Av falls on the Hebrew calendar date of 9 Av - 20th July 2010.)

They follow similar tactics in villages across southern Lebanon, essentially using the residents as human shields, in gross violation of UN Resolution 1701. Al-Khiam was used as a rocket launching site during the Second Lebanon war.

During the Second Lebanon war, Hezbollah stored their weapons in open areas for the most part, which enabled the IDF to locate and destroy their stores. In the four years since then, Hezbollah has pursued a tactic of moving their weapons into civilian villages, essentially institutionalizing the tactic of using human shields on a large scale.

In an incident on 12 October 2009, there was an explosion at a Hezbollah weapons storehouse in the village of Tayr Filsay. Aerial footage, taken shortly after the explosion, shows Hezbollah operatives closing down the area around the warehouse, driving in two trucks and removing weaponry from the site. They then took the weapons to a known weapons storage facility in the center of the village of Dir a-Nahar about four kilometers away. Only after Hezbollah removed the weaponry did they allow UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army to enter the site of the explosion.

Pawning gold with the BIS, usually rare, is occurring at a record rate in 2010. The central banks plan to buy the gold back later in swap agreements, but if they don't, the BIS would need to sell the gold, which could then flood the market. This flies in the face of conventional market wisdom that the gold rush has been a "flight to safety" by governments: their central bankers considered gold more trustworthy than holding foreign currencies.

Yet, we have central banks offloading their gold, right in the middle of a sovereign debt crisis, to pay their governments' bills or prop up their commercial banks. Is gold losing its charm given the dire necessity of possessing hard cash to pay for emergencies? If central banks are trading their gold in, it might be bad news for the price of gold, but looking deeper, it may be even worse news for the world banking system.

For one, it means that central banks are actually having trouble paying their governments' bills and are finding it difficult to raise sovereign debt by issuing IOU paper. For another, gold is well-known as a fallback in times of extreme crisis - and if central banks are selling gold, could they be leaving themselves and their national banking system wide open to an even more severe liquidity crisis?

Key Question - If some central banks are trading their gold for cash, what are those central bankers thinking? What do they know, that we don't know yet?

During my time on the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, which makes quarterly economic prognoses, Governor Mervyn King controlled the hiring and firing of the forecast team, who did his bidding. They had to produce a result that was consistent with King's views, or else they would be history. A patchwork of arbitrary fixes and prejudices frequently drive forecasts, which for the uninitiated are hard to see.

King always emphasized the importance of top-down judgments, which means you can just make stuff up as you go along. Worryingly, this was often only loosely based on the workings of the real world. Such glorified guesswork operated reasonably well during the boom years, but failed miserably when the recession hit. To put it bluntly, it isn't that hard to manipulate a forecast. I have seen it done.

David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, is professor of economics at Dartmouth College and the University of Stirling.

The President of the European Commission told The Times that the new era at the White House was in danger of becoming a "missed opportunity" for Europe. Jose Manuel Barroso said that the EU-US relationship was not living up to its potential.

The criticism follows a series of fundamental disagreements on how to deal with the economic crisis, climate change and trade reform. The feelings of a deepening rift are mutual. Senior US figures said last night that Mr Obama could never live up to Europe's sky-high expectations.

The view from Washington is that communication with Europe on a range of crucial issues is difficult because the EU still lacks "a clear foreign policy apparatus."

The proposed law does not name BP, but would apply to any company that has experienced 10 or more deaths in the last seven years. The April explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers.

According to the draft legislation, the deaths must have taken place at drilling, production facilities, or refineries, and must have broken US health and environment laws. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is still being investigated. BP has already accepted its guilt in a separate accident in Texas in 2005 that killed 15 people. The proposal would need to be passed by both houses of Congress before it can be signed into law.

Built deep inside a mountain, the vault is designed to protect the world's main food plants from future disasters. Since opening in 2008, it has stored seeds from more than half a million of the planet's crops. The group delivering the seeds was led by Benjamin Cardin, Democrat Senator for Maryland, who said that all parts of the world were interdependent when it came to crop diversity. "As we manage the impact of climate change around the world, the seed vault in Svalbard will be the safety deposit box that ensures that we can keep that food supply intact," he said.

The seeds from the chilli plants, along with other samples such as soy, melon and sorghum, were provided by the US Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Plant Germplasm, based in Colorado. "[We] have a strong commitment to sharing our crop diversity to ensure that Svalbard is well positioned to protect the world's genetic diversity," explained Edward Knipling, administrator for the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS). The seeds are preserved at a temperature of -18C (-0.4F) in two secure store rooms located 130m (426ft) inside a mountain.

The vault has been designed to store duplicates of seeds from collections from all around the world. If the nation's seeds are lost as a result of a natural disaster, such as widespread flooding, the seed collections could be re-established using the specimens stored in the Arctic. The 5 million pounds ($7 million) facility took 12 months to build and opened in February 2008.

Svalbard is an archipelago in the Arctic, constituting the northernmost part of Norway. Located north of mainland Europe, it is about midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole.

The government had earlier delayed the whole procedure amid fears that a failure could make the situation worse. But after experts reviewed BP's plans, officials approved the operation. "There is a tremendous sense of urgency," said Admiral Thad Allen, the US incident commander. But he warned that nobody wanted to make "an irreversible mistake". BP hopes the series of valves will be capable of holding back all of the oil from the well.

Once the leak in the choke valve has been fixed, experts will begin to test the integrity of the new capping device by monitoring seismic, acoustic and temperature changes in the well and the surrounding area. The purpose of testing is to check whether oil will leak out of other areas if valves on the blow-out preventer and new cap are closed.

Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal's life. Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg. Professor John Brookfield, a specialist in evolutionary genetics at the University of Nottingham, told the UK Press Association the pecking order was clear. The living organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the chicken it would develop into, he said. "Therefore, the first living thing which we could say unequivocally was a member of the species would be this first egg," he added. "So, I would conclude THAT THE EGG CAME FIRST."

The same conclusion was reached by his fellow "eggsperts" Professor David Papineau, of King's College London, and poultry farmer Charles Bourns. Mr Papineau, an expert in the philosophy of science, agreed that the first chicken came from an egg and that proves there were chicken eggs before chickens. He told PA people were mistaken if they argued that the mutant egg belonged to the "non-chicken" bird parents.

The debate, which may come as a relief to those with argumentative relatives, WAS ORGANIZED BY DISNEY TO PROMOTE THE RELEASE OF THE FILM "CHICKEN LITTLE" ON DVD.

Meanwhile, A team from University of Sheffield and University of Warwick has found that a protein called ovocleidin (OC-17) is crucial in the formation of eggshells.

It is produced in the pregnant hen's ovaries so the correct reply to the egg riddle must be that the chicken came first, the scientists say. The team used a hi-tech computer, called HECToR, to look at the molecular structure of a shell. They discovered that OC-17 acts as a catalyst, kick-starting the conversion of calcium carbonate in the chicken's body into calcite crystals. It is these that make up the hard shell that houses the yolk and its protective fluids while the chick develops. Lead scientist Dr Colin Freeman of Sheffield University said: "It had long been suspected that the egg came first but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact THE CHICKEN CAME FIRST. However, the research does not come up with how the protein-producing chicken existed in the first place, the 'Daily Express' reported.

Two members of the Royal Gurkha Rifles, one a British-born junior officer and the other a Nepalese Gurkha, were also killed by the Afghan, who fired a machinegun and a rocket-propelled grenade. The killings happened at a British patrol base in Nahr-e Saraj, just eight months after five British soldiers were shot dead and several others seriously wounded by an Afghan police officer, also in Helmand province. The Afghan soldier who carried out the latest attack fled the base and was being hunted last night by British units including the Special Forces. Last night the Taliban claimed the Afghan soldier had joined its insurgency.

Professor Michael Clarke, the director of the Royal United Services Institute, warned that the latest killings could undermine British commitment to the Afghan deployment. He said: "The betrayal of trust has a very high symbolic value and the danger is that is corrosive of public opinion and public support for the mission. That genuinely worries senior commanders."

"The fact that he [the killer] was a senior NCO is a worry - he was not a raw recruit just out of basic training, he was a senior man, someone who was trusted and respected." One British Army source said: "It massively undermines our exit strategy. Without a functioning Afghan police and army there is no way we can begin reducing our forces."

Questions have been raised about the loyalty of rank-and-file ANA soldiers, who receive only two months of basic training and often go absent without leave. A Pentagon audit last month found that Nato commanders had exaggerated the quality of many ANA units.

Such a crash has never before been seen. Fewer than 12 weeks ago, the multinational oil giant BP still held an uncontested fourth place on the list of the world's largest companies. Its impressive balance sheet boasted annual sales of roughly $246 billion (195 billion euros), a market value of more than $190 billion and after-tax profits of almost $17 billion. Indeed, insurance companies, retirement funds and pension funds worldwide viewed BP as a safe haven, an almost risk-free investment in an otherwise turbulent market.

The company, many believed, would have no trouble weathering even the severest of crises. BP's global earnings appeared safe, its cash and petroleum reserves seemed impervious. But April 20, the day that the company's Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, marked an end to the once unshakable faith the financial markets had in the oil giant. The company has made several attempts to staunch the ensuing leak, all of which have failed.

On Tuesday, the company was voicing optimism that yet another effort - the installation of an enormous cap said to be an improvement over its predecessors - may stop the leak entirely. Few are holding their breaths. Experts estimate that more than 60,000 barrels of crude oil are surging out of the well and into the Gulf of Mexico each day.

Already, the accident is one of the largest environmental catastrophes in US history - one that will have immeasurable effects on wildlife, eco-systems and the economy. Experts have estimated that it will cost more than 60 billion euros to repair the damages. With every extra day that goes by without a solution to the gushing oil, the threat facing the environment, and BP itself, increases. BANKRUPTCY IS NO LONGER SEEN AS AN IMPOSSIBILITY.

"The system takes three to five times as long as walking through a metal detector," says Phil Bush of Atlanta, one of many fliers on 'USA Today's Road Warriors' panel who oppose the machines. "This looks to be yet another disaster waiting to happen."

The machines - dubbed by some fliers as virtual strip searches - were installed at many airports in March after a Christmas Day airline bombing attempt. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has spent more than $80 million for about 500 machines, including 133 now at airports. It plans to install about 1,000 by the end of next year.

Passengers can refuse screening by the machines and receive a pat-down search by a security officer, screening by a metal detector, or both, the TSA says.

That's down 7.6 percent from the $1.09 trillion deficit run up during the same period a year ago. Worries about the size of the deficit have created political problems for the Obama administration. Congressional Republicans and moderate Democrats have blocked more spending on job creation and other efforts. Republicans also have held up legislation to extend unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless because of its effect on the deficit.

Another failed effort would have provided cash-starved states with money to help avoid layoff of public employees and finance the Medicaid program for the poor and disabled. President Barack Obama also encountered resistance to further stimulus spending at a meeting of the Group of 20 major industrial nations last month in Toronto. Obama expressed concerns about the risks to a fragile global recovery from withdrawing spending too soon. But the G-20 adopted targets to cut deficits in half as a percentage of their economies over three years.

The heads of the panel told the National Governors Association on Sunday that everything needs to be considered including curtailing popular tax breaks, such as the home mortgage deduction.

"The debt is like a cancer," Democrat Erskine Bowles told the governors. "IT IS GOING TO DESTROY THE COUNTRY FROM WITHIN."

The Energy Department document provides details of the reductions that President Barack Obama has called for on a path to eliminating nuclear weapons. The reductions continue a trajectory of cuts that already has reduced US stockpiles by about 75 percent since 1989.

In May the administration said that it had 5,113 nuclear warheads. The new document says the administration would like to reduce that number to a range of 3,000 to 3,500. The document was presented to Congress in May and posted Tuesday on the websites of the Federation of American Scientists and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio, who has sought an investigation into the funding of the mosque, was among the witnesses who testified in support of giving the building landmark status, which could complicate plans by Muslim groups to develop a community center and mosque there.

After noting the lower Manhattan building's history and architectural significance, Lazio said it also warranted landmark designation because on September 11, 2001, it was struck by airplane debris from the terror attacks against the nearby World Trade Center. That connection to the attacks, he said, made it "a place of deep historical significance and a reminder of just what happened on New York's darkest day."

Lazio has called on state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, his Democratic opponent in the governor's race, to investigate the funding of the project. On Tuesday, he repeated that request and said the pace of the landmark designation process should be slowed to allow time to thoroughly investigate the matter.