BRUSSELS - The FT reports that in a secret meeting, MEPs have blocked moves to force them to account for how they spend their expenses.
DHARAMSALA, INDIA - A restless young generation of Tibetans is warning that a failure to achieve Tibet's independence is creating a deep well of frustration, offering space for more radical groups in coming years.
USA - Fingerprints are considered to be among the most personal of information, and fingerprint databases created and proposed in the name of national security have generated much debate.
JUPITER - For about 300 years Jupiter's banded atmosphere has shown a remarkable feature to telescopic viewers, a large swirling storm system known as The Great Red Spot.
SANTIAGO - Heavy rains and flooding that killed five people and displaced thousands in south-central Chile have collapsed road and rail bridges, closed the world's largest underground copper mine and left many in the capital without drinking water, the government said on Friday.
UK - The fortune-tellers, at least, must have seen it coming. The biggest overhaul of consumer laws for 40 years takes effect on Monday, tightening controls on everything from door-to-door salesmen to children's advertising.
MISSOURI, USA - A car dealership in the United States is offering a free handgun with every vehicle sold. Max Motors in Butler, Missouri, says sales have quadrupled since the start of the offer.
UK - Record number of patients are dying in hospitals and nursing homes after contracting superbugs, MRSA and Clostridium difficile, new figures show.
CHINA - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has arrived in Beijing as he continues his first official foreign tour.
WESTMINSTER - Ruth Kelly, the Transport Secretary, has threatened to defy Gordon Brown by voting against the controversial Embryology Bill when it receives its final reading next month.
LONDON - Britain was facing "the first real economic crisis" in a generation, a senior Government minister has admitted.
VENEZUELA - OPEC chief Abdala El Badri on Thursday said members were unhappy with surging prices he blamed on speculators and a weak US dollar.
SAN ANGELO, TEXAS - A Texas appeals court said Thursday that the state had no right to take more than 400 children from a polygamist sect's ranch, a ruling that could unravel one of the biggest child-custody cases in U.S. history.
ISRAEL - Writing in the May 8th edition of Newsweek, Benny Morris - long known as a Revisionist, even anti-Israel, historian - says ARAB-MUSLIM HATRED OF ISRAEL CONTINUES TO PRECLUDE PEACE
ISRAEL - A recent report by a senior Palestinian Authority journalist in the PA daily Al-Ayyam documented the decision by masses of Arabs in 1948 to leave their homes in the hopes that they would return once Israel was defeated.