The People's Liberation Army's Third Guard Division gave journalists a tour of their living and dining quarters and a display of marksmanship and artillery firepower at their base, about an hour's drive north of Beijing. "I am confident this will give you more exposure to China, the PLA, and our men and women in uniform and A GOOD UNDERSTANDING OF OUR SINCERITY, HOSPITALITY, OPENNESS AND FRIENDSHIP," said Senior Colonel Leng Jiesong.

Visits by foreign journalists to Chinese military facilities are rare. China has roughly doubled its military budget since 2006, according to official government figures that some overseas analysts say vastly downplay what Beijing actually spends. The build-up has prompted concern overseas about China's military ambitions and transparency, but Tuesday's base visit was the latest in a series of moves that state media has said are aimed at countering such worries.

As concerns have mounted over why China needs a high-tech military, the government has increasingly STRESSED THE NEED FOR COUNTER-TERRORISM FORCES. The Pentagon in recent years has raised concerns about China's development of CRUISE AND BALLISTIC MISSILES, its 2007 test of a SATELLITE-STRIKING WEAPON, an apparent rise in cyber-espionage by China's military, and other issues.

The Obama administration has questions it wants answered as well in such areas as China's long reliance on massive trade surpluses with the United States to bolster its domestic economy. Both sides are expected to wrap up two days of high-level talks Tuesday with a joint communique that will lay out a work plan that both sides will tackle in upcoming meetings.

Officials from both nations played down the prospects for any breakthroughs this week on the major issues that separate the two nations, including America's massive trade deficit with China. Critics have blamed the trade deficit over the years for the loss of millions of US manufacturing jobs. President Barack Obama opened Monday's discussions by declaring that the United States sought a new era of "cooperation, not confrontation" with China and that management of the US-China relationship would be a major factor in defining the history of the 21st century.

Geithner traveled to Beijing last month to assure Chinese officials that federal budget deficits, which have ballooned because of government efforts to deal with the recession and stabilize the financial system, would be reined in once those crises have passed. Many private economists have said THE CHINESE ARE RIGHT TO WORRY ABOUT A US BUDGET DEFICIT THAT IS PROJECTED TO HIT $1.85 TRILLION THIS YEAR, four times the previous record.

Senior ministers and commanders on the ground believe they have created the right conditions to open up a dialogue with "second-tier" local leaders now the Taliban have been forced back in a swath of Helmand province.

They are hoping that Britain's continuing military presence in Helmand, strengthened by the arrival of thousands of US troops, will encourage Taliban commanders to end the insurgency. There is even talk in London and Washington of a military "exit strategy".

Speaking at the end of the five-week Operation Panther's Claw in which hundreds of British troops were reported to have cleared insurgents from a vital region of Helmand province, Lieutenant-General Simon Mayall, deputy chief of defence staff, said: "It gives the Taliban 'second tier' room to reconnect with the government and this is absolutely at the heart of this operation."

The dead servicemen were set to be honoured a day after the government announced the end of a deadly offensive in southern Afghanistan and outlined a change of strategy there following a sharp spike in deaths. Foreign Secretary David Miliband signalled on Monday that Britain would back talking to moderate Taliban representatives in a bid to isolate militant insurgents who have killed 191 British troops since 2001.

A total of 22 have been killed this month alone after British forces went on the offensive in Operation Panther's Claw, just weeks before crucial presidential elections. The surge in troop deaths has sparked a political row over resources for troops in Afghanistan, with Prime Minister Gordon Brown forced to defend Britain's strategy after calls for more equipment and boosted soldier numbers.

But according to a poll in the Independent on Tuesday, THE MAJORITY OF BRITONS NOW THINK THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN IS "UNWINNABLE" AND WANT TROOPS TO BE WITHDRAWN IMMEDIATELY. There are about 90,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan helping local forces, with thousands most recently deployed to the south to try and secure the restive area ahead of presidential polls on August 20.

Mr Netanyahu has previously rejected such a freeze, saying "natural growth" of settlements must be allowed. Mr Mitchell is one of several senior US officials in the region pushing for a comprehensive Middle East peace deal. The Palestinians have said all Israeli settlement building on occupied territory must cease before talks can resume.

The informed view is that both sides are groping for a common ground that will allow THE AMERICANS TO SAY THEY HAVE FORCED A FREEZE IN SETTLEMENT BUILDING AND FOR THE ISRAELIS TO SAY THAT NORMAL LIFE CONTINUES. Officials from the Palestinian Authority say they are frustrated. There was a vague hope, in some quarters, that the PA might have won some fresh political ground from Israel ahead of the long-delayed Fatah conference, which is due to start a week today.

The figure only drops to 12% for those who remarry, researchers write in the Journal of Health and Social Behaviour. They say we start adulthood with a "health stock" that is kept or eroded depending on our marital experience. Only those who are continuously married can expect the same rate of chronic health problems as the never-wedded, the study suggests.

Anastasia de Waal, of the think tank Civitas, said: "This research highlights the fact that whilst divorce has become much more common, IT CAN TAKE NOT JUST A TREMENDOUS EMOTIONAL AND FINANCIAL TOLL, BUT ALSO A HEAVY HEALTH ONE."

Christine Northan, a counsellor for Relate, said: "I'm not surprised by the findings. It's another reason to work hard to make marriages last, unless it is a very destructive relationship. She said a surprising number of people unconsciously look for someone like their first wife or husband and that the chance of a second marriage ending in divorce was two-fold."

The Chancellor met the chief executives of seven of the country's biggest banks in the Treasury yesterday along with Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, Baroness Vadera, Minister for Competitiveness, Small Business and Enterprise, Lord Myners, the City Minister, and senior officials from the Bank of England. Mr Darling presented the bankers with official data showing that THEY HAD FAILED TO PASS ON CHEAP LENDING FACILITIES TO MORTGAGE BORROWERS AND TO SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZE BUSINESSES. He is concerned that the banks are exploiting historically low base rates in order to beef up their profit margins.

Mr Darling told the financiers that Lord Myners would summon each of the banks to the Treasury over the coming weeks to comb through their lending books to ascertain how much they are charging for borrowing facilities. He warned them that the Treasury would be "looking over their shoulder" to monitor whether they were failing to offer loans at fair rates to businesses and mortgage borrowers.

Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay, a Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said: "BRITAIN IS STILL DEEP IN A RECESSION BECAUSE THE BANKS ARE NOT LENDING TO BUSINESS. Alistair Darling must stop playing Pontius Pilate and abdicating responsibility for the banks when HE HAS THE POWER AS A CONTROLLING SHAREHOLDER to compel RBS and Lloyds. If he fails to do so, thousands of sound businesses will go down, and hundreds of thousands of jobs will be needlessly lost."

But Gibbs, sounding alternately bemused and exasperated, told White House reporters that conspiracy theories about the president's birthplace would never go away. "I hate to indulge, in such an august setting as the White House briefing room... the made-up, fictional nonsense whether the president was born in this country," Gibbs said. "If I had some DNA, it wouldn't assuage those who believe he wasn't born here."

Attempting to put the issue to rest, once more, Gibbs assured reporters: "The president was born in Honolulu, in the 50th state of the greatest country on the face of the earth... There are 10,000 more important issues for people in this country to discuss, than whether or not the president is a citizen when it's been proven ad nauseam."

Asked to speculate on why conspiracy theorists continue to fixate on the issue, Gibbs joked: "Because for $15 you can get an Internet address and say whatever you want."

The nation's most drought-stricken state is deep-frying under relentless 100-degree days and waterways are drying up, especially in the hardest-hit area covering about 350 miles across south-central Texas. THAT'S MAKING FOLKS WORRIED ABOUT THE WATER SUPPLY — AND HOW LONG IT MIGHT LAST. "The water table's fallin' and fallin' and fallin,' like a whole lot of other people around here," said Wendell McLeod, general manager of Liberty Hill Water Supply Corp and a 60-year resident of the town northwest of Austin. "THIS IS THE WORST I CAN RECALL SEEING IT. I TELL YOU, IT'S JUST PRETTY BLEAK."

There are 230 Texas public water systems under mandatory water restrictions, including those in and near San Antonio, Dallas, Houston and Austin. Another 60 or so have asked for voluntary cutbacks. Water levels are down significantly in lakes, rivers and wells around Texas. Liberty Hill's website urges its 1,400 or so residents in all-red letters to stop using unnecessary water with this plea: "IF WE FOLLOW THESE STRICT GUIDELINES, WE MAY HAVE DRINKING WATER." The town's shortage eased some with the arrival this week of 35,000 gallons a day from a nearby water system, but residents are still worried.

Lake Travis is more empty than full, down 54 percent. All but one of the 12 boating ramps are closed because they no longer reach the water, and the last may go soon. The receding waters have even revealed old stolen cars shoved into the lake years ago, authorities said. There's no threat to the area's drinking water supply, Rose said, but there are increased boating hazards from the "sometimes islands" that pop up when the water's low, increased risk of wildfires, AND MORE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN HUMANS AND WILDLIFE.

"We're seeing deer and armadillo and other animals in places we don't typically see them," he said. "THEY'RE STARVING FOR WATER AND FOOD." At the Oasis, a popular restaurant with a deck overlooking Lake Travis, the islands are even starting to grow heavy vegetation.

Obama said that Washington and Beijing needed to forge closer ties to address a host of challenges from lifting the global economy out of a deep recession to nuclear proliferation and global climate change. "I believe that we are poised to make steady progress on some of the most important issues of our times," the president told diplomats from both countries assembled in the vast hall of the Ronald Reagan Building.

Obama said he was under "no illusions that the United States and China will agree on every issue" but he said closer cooperation in important areas was critical for the world. "The relationship between the United States and China will shape the 21st century, which makes it as important as any bilateral relationship in the world," Obama said.

With the global economy trying to emerge from a deep recession, the United States and China have enormous stakes in resolving tensions in such areas as America's huge trade deficit with China and the Chinese government's unease over America's soaring budget deficits.

"It is critical that we take effective steps to contain and reduce the enormous burden of obesity on our nation," Dr Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a news conference at a CDC obesity meeting where the study was presented.

More than 26 PERCENT OF AMERICANS ARE OBESE, which means they have a body mass index of 30 or higher. BMI is equal to weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. A person 5 feet 5 inches tall becomes obese at 180 pounds (82 kg)

For the study, Eric Finkelstein of the non-profit RTI International and researchers at the CDC and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality analyzed medical cost data from 1998 and 2006. They found US OBESITY RATES ROSE 37 PERCENT BETWEEN 1998 AND 2006, driving an 89 percent increase in spending on treatments for obesity-related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and arthritis. OBESITY NOW ACCOUNTS FOR 9.1 PERCENT OF ALL MEDICAL SPENDING IN THE UNITED STATES, up from 6.5 percent in 1998.

A graduate of Innsbruck, Zurich and Harvard universities, Dr Bischofberger headed a research team to create Tamiflu, the first orally active commercially developed anti-influenza medication, for US company Gilead Sciences in the 1990s. He is now a director of research and vice-president of Gilead in California which owns the intellectual rights to Tamiflu and outsources it to Swiss pharma giant Roche to manufacture and distribute.

He earns about £450,000 a year but has STOCK OPTIONS AND BONUSES IN THE TENS OF MILLIONS OF POUNDS. And he takes a handsome percentage of Tamiflu profits as governments around the world stockpile it as the virus spreads. But in an interview with a German Sunday newspaper it was reported he "gets quite angry" if it was suggested he had become rich through the deadly virus.

Swine flu has killed more than 700 people globally, and Dr Bischofberger predicted the death toll would rise. He warned that pandemics were one of the biggest threats to the human race. "I THINK THE THREAT BY NEW BACTERIAL OR VIRAL AGENTS IS HIGHER THAN THE POTENTIAL OF A NUCLEAR WAR."

Mr Ma responded, suggesting that they had "put aside disputes", a statement from Mr Ma's KMT party said. Mr Ma was elected president last year on pledges to improve ties. The two sides split in 1949 amid civil war. Taiwan's Nationalist Party (KMT) elected Mr Ma as its chairman on Sunday, giving him more control of the island's legislative agenda as well as its China policy.

"I hope our two parties can continue to promote peaceful cross-Strait development, deepen mutual trust, bring good news to compatriots on both sides and create a revival of the great Chinese race," said Mr Hu's message. As well as being China's president, Mr Hu is also head of the country's Communist Party. Neither man used their presidential titles in their messages; CHINA DOES NOT RECOGNISE TAIWAN AS AN INDEPENDENT COUNTRY AND SO DOES NOT RECOGNISE ITS PRESIDENCY.

China and Taiwan have signed trade and travel deals recently, but contacts have always taken place at a lower level than that of president, and have avoided political issues. Although ties have improved in the past year, BEIJING HAS NOT PUT ASIDE ITS TERRITORIAL CLAIM TO TAIWAN, insisting the island is a breakaway province of China. Taiwan is self-governing, but holds no seat at the UN and is recognised by only about two dozen states - most of them small Caribbean and Pacific nations.

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society's workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone. Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

They focused particular attention on the specter that criminals could exploit artificial intelligence systems as soon as they were developed. WHAT COULD A CRIMINAL DO WITH A SPEECH SYNTHESIS SYSTEM THAT COULD MASQUERADE AS A HUMAN BEING? What happens if artificial intelligence technology is used to mine personal information from smart phones?

The idea of an "INTELLIGENCE EXPLOSION" in which smart machines would design even more intelligent machines was proposed by the mathematician I J Good in 1965. Later, in lectures and science fiction novels, the computer scientist Vernor Vinge popularized the notion of a moment when humans will create smarter-than-human machines, causing such rapid change that the "human era will be ended." He called this shift THE SINGULARITY.

This vision, embraced in movies and literature, is seen as plausible and unnerving by some scientists like William Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. "Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years," Dr. Horvitz said. "TECHNOLOGISTS ARE REPLACING RELIGION, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture."

Father Vlasic was named as the 'creator' of the phenomenon by Pavao Zanic, the local bishop at the time the apparitions began in 1981. In the midst of a spat with the local bishop and the Vatican, he had earlier made a prophecy that the Virgin Mary would appear in Bosnia. Months later, six local children said they had seen the Virgin on a nearby hillside. Soon after Father Vlasic announced he was 'spiritual adviser' to the 'visionaries' who now claim that Our Lady has visited them 40,000 times over the last 28 years.

AN ESTIMATED 30 MILLION PILGRIMS HAVE VISITED THE SHRINE SINCE 1981, including many from Britain and Ireland. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, issued a ban on pilgrimages to the site but this has been widely ignored. Father Vlasic was suspended last year by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith amid an inquiry into his conduct after three commissions failed to find evidence to support the visionaries' claims.

The defrocking of Father Vlasic means he is stripped of his priest status. This represents a massive blow to millions of Medjugorje followers worldwide who were hoping that the Vatican would one day legitimise the controversial shrine. THE SEERS HAVE GROWN WEALTHY AS A RESULT OF THEIR CLAIMS – and so has their town, which has boomed as a result of the 'Madonna gold rush'. Some today own smart executive houses with immaculate gardens, double garages and security gates, and one has a tennis court. They also own expensive cars and have married, one of them, Ivan Dragicevic, to an American former beauty queen.