Lavoie decided to hold off watering the fruit trees so he could quench the tomato and berry plants before they succumb to the heat. "We need some rain pretty quick," Lavoie said. "There is just some corn that won't make it. A lot of things we would like to give water to, we can't."

The dry blast in New Hampshire is being felt throughout the Northeast, from Maine to Pennsylvania, driven by a second year of below-average rainfall. Though not as dire as the West Coast drought of five-years running, the dry, hot weather has stressed farms and gardens, prompted water restrictions and bans in many towns and threatened to bring more wildfires than usual.

In the hardest hit areas of western New York, Massachusetts and southern parts of New Hampshire and Maine, it's been dryer than in a decade or more. And national weather experts predict the drought will persist at least through the end of October.

“The Office of Congressman Keith Ellison is looking for enthusiastic interns for our Washington and Minneapolis offices. We seek interns who are curious, hardworking, and passionate about serving Minnesota’s 5th district,” Ellison’s Congressional website states.

“While Congressman Ellison encourages all individuals to apply, applicants with strong ties to the Fifth District or Minnesota are preferred,” the page states before adding one final note: “People of color, LGBTQ individuals, women, and people with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply.”

The only people not possessing any of the “strongly encouraged” characteristics are white, straight, men without disabilities.

The board is now urging the reservoirs' owners to post voluntary warnings about eating the fish that are at the top of the food chain, such as bass. These fish tend to accumulate the most mercury, posing a particular risk to children and pregnant women. Even though the warnings are intended to help protect human life, those who depend on the income brought by tourists and sportsmen to the bodies of water in question are reluctant to post voluntary warnings and draw attention to the matter.

Big Bear Lake, which is nestled in the San Bernardino Mountains, welcomes millions of visitors each year for recreational activities that include not only fishing but also sailing and jet skiing. Some anglers believe that the bass are being unfairly singled out in an effort to protect the endangered and native species they consume. On the other hand, one real estate agent in Big Bear points out that mercury advisories could adversely affect property values, saying that he would not be opposed to getting rid of the bass altogether to skirt the problem.

It is believed the group are taking action as part of #BlackAugust, a campaign to raise awareness of racism. The entrance to the airport was blocked by the group who unfurled a giant banner saying Black Lives Matter. A group of protesters had earlier blocked the main road leading to Birmingham Airport and Black Lives Matter campaigners said further action was planned as traffic also ground to a halt in Nottingham as people lay on the tram tracks.

Around 205,400 passengers a day travel to Heathrow airport to jet off to destinations around the world. A Heathrow Airport spokesman: “Heathrow supports the right to peaceful protest within the law, but the safety and security of our passengers, aircraft and colleagues together with the smooth running of the operation is paramount.

"We are sorry to those passengers whose journeys are being disrupted and we are working with the authorities to resolve the issue.” A Metropolitan Police spokesman said they had arrested a number of people near Heathrow but the situation was ongoing.

1. Elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin, September 4 and 18

Germany is facing two key local elections at a time when the country is reeling from a horrifying week of bloody terror attacks, some of which were linked to recently arrived asylum seekers. Voters will go to the polls in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, on Germany's north coast, and in the capital Berlin and could give Angela Merkel a kicking over her open door immigration policy.

2. Parliamentary elections in Croatia, September 11

Croatians will head to the polls for the second time in less than a year after the country's fragile ruling coalition collapsed in June. One of the newest members of the bloc, having only joined the 28-nation bloc in 2013, the country is seen as one of the most immune to the growing eurosceptic tide sweeping the continent.

3. Regional elections in the Basque country, Spain, September 25

Basque separatists, who want to declare independence from Spain, are expected to sweep the board once more in their region's parliamentary elections at the end of September. The growth of separatist movements across Europe provides a massive headache for the EU, which may ultimately have to decide whether newly independent regions are eligible to join the Brussels club.

4. Referendum in Italy, October

Probably the biggest immediate crisis facing the EU is an upcoming referendum in Italy which will decide the fate of the country's prime minister Matteo Renzi. There are growing fears in Brussels that the Italian people, disenchanted with the EU following years of economic stagnation, could use the referendum to give the Government and Brussels a bloody nose.

5. Presidential election in Austria, October 2

In October, Austria will hold a re-run of the April presidential election, which was declared null and void over ballot counting irregularities after far-right candidate Norbert Hofer lost out by just a few hundred votes. Mr Hofer, the candidate for the anti-EU, anti-immigrant Austrian Freedom Party (FPO) currently holds a four point lead in the polls and could become the EU's first far-right leader.

6. Referendum in Hungary, October 2

Brussels could face a double dose of pain on the same day with voters in Hungary also set to go to the polls on October 2 for a controversial referendum on migration. Opinion polls show that the majority of voters will opt to reject the EU's relocation plan, sparking the possibility of yet another protracted legal battle between Brussels and one of its member states.

7. Regional elections in the Czech Republic, October

The Czech Republic is facing a slew of regional elections at a time when the position of the country's left-leaning Prime Minister, Bohuslav Sobotka, is becoming increasingly precarious. The Czech Republic has largely escaped the worst of the migrant crisis compared to neighbour Austria, but eurosceptic feeling is still growing in the central European country.

8. Parliamentary elections in Lithuania, October 9

Parliamentary elections in Lithuania may provide Brussels with some welcome good news, with broadly europhile parties expected to perform well.

9. Parliamentary elections in Romania, November or early December

Romanians are likely to vote for the resignation of the current technocratic Government, which was appointed in November 2015 and is led by former EU Commissioner Dacian Ciolo. The issues at stake are entirely domestic and not linked to Romania's EU or NATO memberships, but the election will still be watched closely for any indicators of eurosceptic sentiment.

Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen does not completely understand the recent uproar in Germany over the proposal to deploy Bundeswehr troops within the country. The constitution clearly allows for such action, she said during a visit to the Berlin-based "Command Center for Territorial Missions." Under the umbrella of "mutual assistance," German police can request assistance from the military for reasons including "large-scale terrorism."

More specifically, for "large-scale terrorism of catastrophic proportions," said von der Leyen, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). That is how it is described in the Bundeswehr's new "White Paper," she said, adding that in such cases there is no question that it is the police who take the lead role.

A German newspaper has quizzed various departments on how much taxpayers’ money they expect to spend on the excess of a million migrants who arrived in the country last year. Integration will be the government’s biggest outlay, accounting for two thirds of the total €30 billion figure. Teachers, day care centres, schools, language courses, and housing all come under this umbrella.

The Federation of German Towns and Municipalities estimate that the cost of providing these services to migrants will cost taxpayers €20 billion a year. It warned that by 2018 there would also be €2.6 billion additional costs for accommodation.

Israeli investigators arrested an alleged Hamas operative who they said infiltrated the charity and rose to become its director in Gaza, only to use his position to funnel £5.3 million a year to the militant group.

Around 60 per cent of the funds meant to ease suffering in the Gaza Strip were instead diverted to paying Hamas salaries and readying the group for war with Israel, according to the Shin Bet, the Israeli equivalent of MI5.

World Vision denied the allegations but the case casts a harsh spotlight on one of the world’s biggest charities. The group has an annual budget of more than £2 billion and a roster of celebrity backers that includes Bill Clinton, Scarlett Johansson and Justin Bieber.

For the first time, the agency obtained a series of temperatures from the base of the sheet - the second biggest in the world after that in the Antarctic - and found it was up to tens of degrees warmer at the base than the surface. The Greenland ice sheet is around 1,500 miles north to south and up to 680 miles across.

Scientists found alarmingly high areas of ice at the base of the sheet had melted and come free from the bedrock below. But they also said it was heat coming out of the bedrock itself which was causing the melting. In July 2012 a large ice sheet twice the size of Manhattan (46 square miles) broke free from the Petermann glacier in northern Greenland.

The devices, dubbed "neural dust", could be used to continually monitor organs like the heart in real time and, if they can be made even smaller, implanted into the brain to control robotic devices like prosthetic arms or legs. It is believed they could help treat conditions like epilepsy by stimulating nerves and muscles, help people with incontinence control their bladder and even suppress appetite. They could also potentially either be used to prompt the immune system into action or reduce inflammation.

One of the inventors, Professor Michel Maharbiz, of University of California, Berkeley, said: “I think the long-term prospects for neural dust are not only within nerves and the brain, but much broader. Ultrasound vibrations, which can penetrate almost every part of the body, are used to power the sensors, which are about a millimetre across. They contain a special crystal that converts ultrasound into electricity to power a tiny transistor.”

“If there is a voltage spike in a nerve or muscle fibre this alters the vibration of the crystal, changing the way the sound echoes back to an ultrasound receiver. So far, experiments have been carried out on muscles and the peripheral nervous system of rats, but the researchers believe the dust could also work in the central nervous system and brain to control prosthetics.”

Experts at the University of Washington have revealed how hackers could insert images into dodgy apps and record our brain's unintentional reaction using brain-computer interfaces. These cyberthieves can find out what political party you affiliate with, religious beliefs or sexual orientation – things that could one day be used to damage your reputation.

'Broadly speaking, the problem with brain-computer interfaces is that, with most of the devices these days, when you're picking up electric signals to control an application… the application is not only getting access to the useful piece of EEG needed to control that app; it's also getting access to the whole EEG,' explained Engineer Tamara Bonaci. 'And that whole EEG signal contains rich information about us as persons.'

Electrical Engineer Howard Chizeck also explained that it isn't the invisible hackers that reap the benefits of this technology, police officers and government agencies could also gather information about someone in order to convict them or use as a 'remote lie detector', he said.

The National Institute of Health is proposing a new policy to permit scientists to get federal money to make embryos, known as chimeras, under certain carefully monitored conditions. The NIH imposed a moratorium on funding these experiments in September because they could raise ethical concerns.

One issue is that scientists might inadvertently create animals that have partly human brains, endowing them with some semblance of human consciousness or human thinking abilities. Another is that they could develop into animals with human sperm and eggs and breed, producing human embryos or fetuses inside animals or hybrid creatures. But scientists have argued that they could take steps to prevent those outcomes and that the embryos provide invaluable tools for medical research.

Industry chiefs said they expect other institutions to follow their lead shortly, raising the spectre of tens of millions of Germans being forced to dip into their own pockets to pay for the EU's failures. The stricken bank, whose shares plunged to record lows today, said it had been severely weakened by the European Central Bank (ECB) setting negative interest rates.

It had already performed poorly in a stress test of Eurozone financial institutions last week alongside compatriot Deutsche Bank, raising fears about the strength of the German economy post-Brexit. With anti-EU sentiment on the rise in Germany and the growth of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AFD) party, the very real impact banking fees will have on average families will provide a major headache for Angela Merkel.

The German leader is already under huge pressure over her refusal to budge on her controversial open door immigration policy, and will have to face voters in a General Election next year. Customers of Commerzbank - Germany's second largest bank - in future will have to pay higher fees for credit cards and making deposits. They will also be charged for over-the-counter transfers in branches, according to respected German newspaper Die Welt.

Commerzbank has lost more than 35 per cent of its value since May whilst shares in Deutsche Bank - the country's biggest financial institution - have plunged by 60 per cent in the same period. They have been dragged down in part by the shocking state of the banking sector across the Eurozone as a whole, with Italian banks in particular struggling to keep their heads above water.

“At the end of summer at the conference of interior Ministers of the Federal States, we will decide which scenarios of the Bundeswehr we need to train,” said Tore Von Leyen. According to her, in case of emergency all responsibilities should be allocated clearly and there should be enough staff to perform the tasks. In addition, the Minister announced command and staff exercises, “which will test the interaction between the Federal level and police range land.”

Adding that three Federal lands already expressed interest. “In urgent situations, the police decide the needs to deal with the terrorist situation. However, in principle, the constitutional court of Germany explained that in an emergency case you can use the military,” said Tore Von Leyen.