The violence in Afghanistan was sparked off by the burning of the Koran in the US. The rioting began in Mazar-e-Sharif when the UN office was ransacked and seven UN officials and guards were brutally murdered. The demonstrations then spread south to Kandahar where over two days some 13 people were killed. After six days it had spread to the eastern provinces and the capital, Kabul.

There was anger among some Western observers at President Hamid Karzai, who drew attention to the Koran burning. Most Afghans did not know about it until he condemned the burning publicly a few days before the riots started. However there is also little doubt that the Taliban have taken enormous advantage of the issue in their heartland of southern Afghanistan and it is they who have been whipping up the crowds.

The out-of-control violence comes as the Kabul government is supposed to take charge of some areas of Afghanistan from US forces in July in the transition process that will extend to 2014.

Production in Libya, the world's 17th largest oil producer, has been severely affected as fighting between the government and rebels continues. While there has been concern about a shortfall in supplies from the oil producing nations, the demand for oil has been increasing. The economic growth of emerging nations is producing a surge in demand, fuelled by a need for oil to power the industrial sector, as well as an ever growing number of vehicles on the road.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued a warning that the disparity in demand and supply of oil is likely to push prices even higher. "There is a risk that the tensions between demand and supply trends could intensify again and prices could rise rapidly," said Thomas Helbling an advisor to IMF's research department.

The IMF also warned that the markets are likely to face further scarcity in oil supplies. "The increase in the trend component of oil prices suggest that the global oil market has entered a period of increased scarcity," the IMF said.

The area was ravaged by an earthquake and tsunami last month which severely damaged the Fukushima nuclear plant. Thursday's quake was 118km (78 miles) north of Fukushima, 40km offshore. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), which operates Fukushima, says it is checking on the situation at the damaged plant following the latest earthquake. The quake was strong enough to shake buildings in Tokyo.

Portugal's caretaker Prime Minister Jose Socrates said on Wednesday he had asked the EU for financial assistance. Portugal follows Greece and the Irish Republic in seeking a bail-out. However, Spain was quick to say it would not be following these countries in seeking assistance.

Spain's Economy Minister Elena Salgado said that financial markets were perfectly capable of distinguishing between the situations in Portugal and Spain. In an interview on the national radio station SER, she said that the risk of contagion was "absolutely ruled out", and added it was clear that Spain's economy was much more competitive than Portugal's. Spain has the EU's highest unemployment rate and is struggling to deal with a banking crisis and the collapse of its property boom.

In Portugal, Mr Socrates put off a bail-out request as long as he could, having stepped down as prime minister after failing to pass austerity measures. "I always said asking for foreign aid would be the final way to go but we have reached the moment," he said. "Above all, it's in the national interest."

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said in a statement that Portugal's request would be processed "in the swiftest possible manner, according to the rules applicable". He also reaffirmed his "confidence in Portugal's capacity to overcome the present difficulties, with the solidarity of its partners". Mr Socrates did not say how much aid Portugal would ask for. Negotiations will now be underway and the BBC's business editor Robert Peston said rescue loans could amount to as much as 80 billion euros ($115 billion; 70 billion pounds).

The first gathering in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, is an economic conference Soros once described as "a grand bargain that rearranges the entire financial order." In October 2009, Soros committed $50 million to the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). A week later, the glib lefty investor wrote a column calling for a new Bretton Woods event, to recreate the one that helped design the post-WWII economy. Only he wants this one to knock America down a peg or three. Of course, Soros will also be speaking in Bretton Woods about "The Emerging Economic and Political Order."

Just down the road in Boston, a Soros-funded media conference is trying to manipulate that emerging order as well. Close to 350 left-wingers from a variety of organizations are gathering there for the National Conference for Media Reform. That "change the world" conference includes two commissioners from the FCC, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, Senator Bernie Sanders, four Democratic representatives, the head of Columbia University, and assorted left-wing journalist types, from Salon's Glenn Greenwald to disgraced former MSNBC host David Shuster, who now works for a Soros-funded investigative operation.

Everywhere they go in Boston, they'll be making more left turns than NASCAR. It's an event filled with lefties dissatisfied that the news media aren't even more liberal, and their goal will be to make that happen. Whether it's "Beyond Pronouns: Creating Real Stories About Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming People" or pushing for illegal immigrant rights, the conference is a predictable liberal take on pretty much everything. This weekend, we get two visions of taxpayer-funded solution, only most in the news media are too short-sighted to see them.

The dire message, delivered two days before the federal government's spending authority expires, appeared aimed at jolting congressional Republicans into a budget compromise. Billions of dollars apart, congressional negotiators were working to strike a deal by Friday to avert a shutdown by setting spending limits through the end of September. The last such shutdown took place 15 years ago and lasted 21 days.

President Barack Obama telephoned House Speaker John Boehner on Wednesday, and Boehner's office said the speaker told Obama he was hopeful a deal could be reached. As the talks continued, the White House sought to put the prospect of a shutdown in terms people would care about, warning even that the beloved National Cherry Blossom Festival Parade in the nation's capital would be wiped out. The Smithsonian Institution and national parks around the country would also be closed.

A shutdown would come at an especially busy time for the Smithsonian. The Cherry Blossom Festival, which concludes this weekend, draws many tourists to an area near the museums. The Smithsonian counts about 3 million visits each April and has already sold 23,000 IMAX movie and lunch combos to school groups for the month.

Yet the renewable energy industry claims their turbines work at 28 to 30 per cent efficiency on average. The Trust also found that for extended periods all the UK's wind turbines linked to the National Grid muster less than 20 megawatts of energy at a given point, enough power for fewer than 7,000 households to boil their kettles.

Stuart Young, author of the report, said: 'Over the two-year period studied, the wind farms in the UK consistently generated far less energy than wind proponents claim is typical. Sadly, wind power is not what it's cracked up to be and cannot contribute greatly to energy security in the UK.'

The UK has more than 3,100 working wind turbines. According to the wind industry, they are capable of generating more than 5.2 gigawatts of electricity - enough for nearly three million homes. Another 10,000 are planned for the next decade to meet EU climate change targets.

Oklahoma was drier in the four months following Thanksgiving than it has been in any similar period since 1921. That's saying a lot in the state known for the 1930s Dust Bowl, when drought and high winds generated severe dust storms that stripped the land of its topsoil.

Neighboring states are in similar shape as the drought stretches from the Louisiana Gulf coast to Colorado, and conditions are getting worse, according to the US Drought Monitor. The area in Texas covered by an extreme drought has tripled in the past month to 40 percent, and in Oklahoma it nearly doubled in one week to 16 percent, according to the monitor's March 29 update.

An extreme drought is declared when there's major damage to crops or pasture and widespread water shortages or restrictions. While dozens of people in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas have lost homes to the hundreds of grassfires that have torn through the parched landscape in the past month, Oklahoma officials said more fires caused more damage as recently as 2009. This year, the biggest losses are likely to come from the drought's effect on the wheat farmers planted last fall and hoped to harvest in June, they said.

Almost all of Oklahoma is covered in some degree of drought. Only the far northeastern corner has escaped, thanks to a few big winter snowstorms.

After remarking on the difficulty of establishing democracy in the Middle East, Brokaw said that Defense Secretary Robert Gates "will face some tough questions in this region about the American intentions going on now with all this new turmoil, especially in an area where the United States has such big stakes politically and economically."

"And a lot of those questions presumably will come from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia," reported Brokaw on the Nightly News. "I was told on the way in here that the Saudis are so unhappy with the Obama administration for the way it pushed out President Mubarak of Egypt that it sent high level emissaries to China and Russia to tell those two countries that Saudi Arabia now is prepared to do more business with them."

The World Health Organization says the situation has reached a critical point. A united push to make new drugs is urgently needed, it says. Without a concerted effort, people could be dealing with the "nightmare scenario" of worldwide spread of untreatable infections, says the WHO.

One example is the New Delhi or NDM-1 superbug recently found in UK patients. They brought the infection back with them from countries like India and Pakistan, where they had visited for medical treatment and cosmetic surgery. These superbugs are resistant to carbapenem antibiotics, which is concerning for experts because they are some of our most powerful weapons and are used for hard-to-treat infections that evade other drugs.

The Cardiff University researchers, who made the discovery last August, now say bacteria with this new genetic resistance to antibiotics have contaminated New Delhi's drinking water supply, meaning millions of people there could be carriers. Worryingly, the gene had spread to bacteria that cause dysentery and cholera, which can be easily passed from person to person via sewage-contaminated drinking water.

"Oral-faecal transmission of bacteria is a problem worldwide, but its potential risk varies with the standards of sanitation. In India, this transmission represents a serious problem... 650 million citizens do not have access to a flush toilet and even more probably do not have access to clean water," the researchers warn in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Price pressures were rising in Asia's emerging economies - which had been the catalyst for the world's recovery from the financial crisis - and were unlikely to subside soon, the Asian Development Bank cautioned. "High and volatile oil and food prices will, in particular, reverberate through the world economy, and they are likely to stay that way in 2011-2012," the ADB said. "They will thus be a significant source of global inflation, especially in developing countries where recovery is firmly under way," the Manila-based agency said in a report.

The Reuters-Jefferies CRB index, a global benchmark for commodities, hit a one-month high, responding to the broad rally in the 19 markets it tracks, including oil and gold. Gold has become more of a currency than a commodity these days, acting as a hedge against a weaker dollar and political troubles that weigh on currency values.

"If something happens in Saudi Arabia it will go to $200 to $300. I don't expect this for the time being, but who would have expected Tunisia?" Yamani told Reuters on the sidelines of a conference of the Centre for Global Energy Studies (CGES) which he chairs. "The political events that took place are there and we don't expect them to finish. I think there are some surprises on the horizon," he said in a speech.

Saudi King Abdullah offered $93 billion in handouts in March in an effort to stave off unrest rocking the Arab world. So far, demonstrations in the Kingdom have been small in scale and police were able to easily disperse a Shi'ite protest in the oil-producing eastern province last month. But Yamani said that the reluctance of people to participate in popular protests was merely concealing underlying discontent. "Some people relax about the situation in Saudi Arabia because the Saudi Islamic brand prohibits people to go to the street and to talk," he said in a speech.

Ethiopia is planning to construct a nearly $5 billion dam, called the Great Millennium Dam, along the Nile River about 25 miles from the Sudan border. The dam will section off a larger portion of the Nile than is used now by Ethiopia. Egypt is adamantly opposed to the dam or any deal that would reduce its share of the Nile and give more access to other countries.

A 1929 colonial-era treaty gives Egypt majority rights to the Nile's waters. But six African countries have signed a petition, the Entebbe Agreement, calling for all Nile Basin countries to modify the old pact and re-allocate the shares of water from the Nile River. Egyptian security sources say Cairo is appealing to the US and European Union to oppose the proposed Ethiopian dam.

The sources said the Egyptian military believes Israel is encouraging Ethiopia to build the dam as a way to weaken the caretaker Egyptian government following the toppling of Hosni Mubarak's regime. Mubarak was a stanch US ally. The sources further said the Egyptian military has been told to prepare for any eventuality regarding the situation. While the Egyptian security sources said they hoped the confrontation did not escalate to a military level, one source told WND "the regime may be inching closer to a water war."

The X-47B, according to CNN, "requires almost no human interaction. It can take off and land by itself... It will be able to find its target by itself. The only thing it needs a carbon-based life form for is to let it know it's OK to drop the bomb." The terrifying almost-automated death machine flew its first test flight in February, and is expected to complete its three-year test program with sea trials in 2013 to demonstrate its ability to autonomously refuel in mid-flight.

For those wondering at home, yes, this would probably be a great time to get a little unsettled. After all, we all know how easy it is to hack into military systems.

The 59-year-old did however admit that he now carries a gun everywhere he goes because he has received more than 300 death threats and has a $2.4 million bounty put on his head by the Taliban. Seven UN workers and at least 13 others in Afghanistan were killed over the weekend when an anti-Jones mob attacked their compound in Mazar-e Sharif, the largest city in the north of the country.

More than 150 others were injured in related protests that spread to the capital Kandahar over three days. They were furious after Jones burned a copy of the Koran at his Dove Outreach Centre in Gainesville, Florida, on March 20. He had called off a previous attempt in the face of an international outcry but then staged a mock 'trial' of the Prophet Muhammad and burned the Islamic holy book as 'punishment'.

Having been deserted by his parishioners he is now left with just one assistant to spread his hate-filled message. In an interview with ABC News Jones was asked if he was willing to die for his cause. He said: 'Yes we are, very definitely. That's how important we feel about it.' He said he would carry on speaking out even if it lead to the death of American soldiers. 'Perhaps in the long run, we may save hundreds or thousands (of lives),' he said. 'We wanted to raise awareness of this dangerous religion and dangerous element,' Jones said. 'I think today's attack proves that there is a radical element of Islam.'