USA - If you need another reason to kick the junk food habit this should do it. A Utah man has unearthed a McDonald's hamburger he bought in 1999 - and the sandwich looks exactly the same as the day it was first flipped.
GERMANY - A new German protest party is proposing the gradual re-introduction of the national currencies of highly indebted euro-zone countries. While the party's spokesman insists the idea solves everyone's problems, it has one major drawback: Economists agree it won't work.
JORDAN - Jordan has opened two corridors of its airspace to Israeli Air Force drones seeking to monitor the ongoing conflict in Syria, French daily Le Figaro reported on Sunday, citing a Western military source in the Middle East.
USA - University of Missouri engineer Randy Curry and his team have developed a method of creating and controlling plasma that could revolutionize American energy generation and storage. Besides liquid, gas and solid, matter has a fourth state, known as plasma. Fire and lightning are familiar forms of plasma.
UK - Children as young as four are becoming so addicted to smartphones and iPads that they require psychological treatment. Experts have warned that parents who allow babies and toddlers to access tablet computers for several hours a day are in danger of causing “dangerous” long term effects.
UK - A strain of bacteria has been created that can produce fuel, scientists say. Researchers genetically modified E. coli bacteria to convert sugar into an oil that is almost identical to conventional diesel. If the process could be scaled up, this synthetic fuel could be a viable alternative to the fossil fuel, the team said. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Professor John Love, a synthetic biologist from the University of Exeter, said: "Rather than making a replacement fuel like some biofuels, we have made a substitute fossil fuel."
SPAIN - Spain's population fell last year for the first time in decades, as immigrants left the country amid a major economic crisis, officials say. The National Statistic Institute (NSI) says the number of residents dropped by almost 206,000 to 47.1 million - the decline entirely accounted for by foreigners. Immigrants from Ecuador and Colombia showed the biggest fall. The figures do not take into account many Spaniards who have left in search of work but are still on the census.
GERMANY - Angela Merkel has made Germany master of Europe in a way Hitler and Kaiser Wilhelm only dreamt of. The implications are frightening!
UK/EUROPE - New powers will give the European Union's criminal intelligence agency Europol access to all information held by the police, including evidence files on children, victims, witnesses and other people never even suspected of a crime.
UK - A group of 500 business leaders have called on the Coalition to negotiate a better deal for Britain with Brussels. David Cameron has pledged to claw back powers and then offer voters a choice of staying in the European Union in a referendum by the end of 2017, if the Conservatives are returned to power at the next election. The new Business for Britain campaign backed the Prime Minister’s approach to renegotiation and called for a cross-party “national drive to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s membership of the EU”.
BOSTON, USA - The events related to the Boston Marathon bombings are moving increasingly fast. Yesterday afternoon the FBI posted photos and video of two men that they claimed were connected to the bombings. Curiously enough the FBI said that people should pay attention only to the photos of these two men.
USA - Terrorism. Chaos. Fear of the future. In the age of Obama, America is undergoing a “fundamental transformation” – that much everyone knows. But what few seem to realize about this transformation is that the sheer stress of living in today’s America is driving tens of millions to the point of illness, depression and self-destruction.
TEMPLE MOUNT, ISRAEL - Several of the Muslim women who repeatedly attempted to physically block Jews from visiting the Temple Mount were arrested, police have said. Police commander Avi Biton reported the arrests in a letter to Michael Puah, who had sent a letter of complaint over the women’s provocative actions.
UK - One in four meat products tested by the Food Standards Agency last year contained traces of the “wrong” animal, it was revealed yesterday. It also emerged that the FSA was aware of the huge extent of food mislabelling months before the horsemeat scandal was exposed by inspectors in Ireland. DNA testing showed consumers were unwittingly eating food from a wide variety of animals never mentioned on any of the packaging. Last year the FSA was notified of cases where rogue pork meat was found in beef and chicken products; undeclared beef and poultry was uncovered in lamb, while unlabelled lamb, pork and poultry were all found in beef products.
USA - Ben Bernanke will be the first Federal Reserve chairman not to attend Jackson Hole in 25 years. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke will not attend the central bank’s flagship conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, this year because of a a personal scheduling conflict. Last year, Mario Draghi, president of the Eurpean Central Bank was forced to pull out of the symposium to address the unfolding euro crisis.