Aisha is a victim of Taliban brutality, her nose and ears barbarically hacked off by her own husband in a warped punishment for attempting to flee her cruel in-laws. Held down by her brother-in-law, the young bride endured the agony of the man she married disfiguring her face with a knife. Aisha's striking image stares out from the cover of US news magazine Time.

The photograph is a stark reminder of the fate awaiting independent-minded women if the Taliban regain power.

The magazine is running the front page, with the headline 'What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan', as coalition countries set a timetable for the withdrawal of international forces from the country.

An interminable sawing, screeching, drilling and hammering rips through the oppressive summer heat and humidity in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin. Here, on the city's dusty outskirts, hundreds of new apartment buildings and houses in every imaginable style are springing up.

In an air-conditioned showroom, salespeople in yellow uniforms take potential buyers on tours of the facility. "In one year, we already sold 90 percent of North America, Asia and Europe," customer consultant Qi Yunbu says proudly. "Now we're preparing Africa, Oceania and South America for sale."

"Xingyao Wuzhou," loosely translated as "Shining Star over Five Continents," is the name of this Chinese blend of Dubai and Disneyland, a 2.3 billion euros ($3 billion) development designed to imitate the world map. The gigantic residential and leisure complex is being built around and within an artificial lake.

The developers apparently want to make sure that the residents of this aquatic paradise will lack for nothing. The plans include the world's largest indoor ski center, golf courses, a seven-star hotel, the world's largest musical fountain and miniature replicas of famous structures like the Tower Bridge in London and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

Calculated optimism forms the fragile base on which similar projects are thriving all across China. Doubts are taboo, especially now that the mood is beginning to shift, at least outside the flashy showrooms. There is more and more talk of the bubble bursting soon, with some saying that the tipping point has already been reached - with uncertain consequences for the rest of the global economy.

Chen Lei, a senior official at the China Three Gorges Corporation, told the China Daily that 3,000 tons of rubbish was being collected at the dam every day, but there was still not enough manpower to clean it all up. "The large amount of waste in the dam area could jam the miter gate of the Three Gorges Dam," Chen said, referring to the gates of the locks which allow shipping to pass through the Yangtze River.

The river is a crucial commercial artery for the upstream city of Chongqing and other areas in China's less-developed western interior provinces. Pictures showed a huge swathe of the waters by the dam crammed full of debris, with cranes brought in to fish out a tangled mess, including shoes, bottles, branches and Styrofoam.

Some 50,000 square meters of water (more than half a million square feet) had been covered by trash washed down since the start of the rainy season in July, the report said. The trash is around 60 centimeters (two feet) deep, and in some parts so compacted people can walk on it, the Hubei Daily added.

The Three Gorges Dam is the world's largest hydropower project, and was built partly to tame flooding along the Yangtze, which killed over 4,000 people in 1998 and countless more over the centuries. Enormously expensive and disruptive, the dam has cost over 254 billion yuan ($37.5 billion) and forced the relocation of 1.3 million people to make way for the reservoir. Towns, fields and historical and archaeological sites have been submerged.

The leaked comments by Barak cast doubt on how much Israel is willing or able to reconcile with Turks outraged at its navy's killing of nine of their compatriots aboard an aid ship that tried to run the Gaza Strip blockade on May 31. Until relations soured, Turkey had been the Muslim power closest to the Jewish state, a friendship largely based on military cooperation and intelligence sharing.

In a closed-door briefing to activists aligned with his centre-left Labour Party at a kibbutz near Jerusalem on July 25, Barak still called Turkey a "friend and major strategic ally". But he described Hakan Fidan, the new head of its National Intelligence Organisation, as a "friend of Iran".

"There are quite a few secrets of ours (entrusted to Turkey) and the thought that they could become open to the Iranians over the next several months, let's say, is quite disturbing," he said in a segment of the speech broadcast by Army Radio.

The pastor voiced his concern on Friday at a raucous special City Council meeting at which East St Louis Mayor Alvin Parks announced that the city will layoff 37 employees, including 19 of its 62 police officers, 11 firefighters, four public works employees, and three administrators. The layoffs take effect on Sunday.

Parks said the weak economy has robbed the city of badly needed money. For example, revenue from the Casino Queen was $900,000 below budget expectations last year. "There are no signs of improvement," Parks said. "I want our citizens to know we have some of the bravest police officers and firefighters in the country but we don't have the money to pay them. We have to have fiscal responsibility."

City officials wanted police and fire unions to accept a furlough program that would have required employees to take two unpaid days in each twice monthly pay period. If accepted, emergency responders would have seen a pay cut of about 20 percent for the rest of the year.

"What's very troubling is the fact that at a time when we in law enforcement and our state need help from the federal government, instead of sending help they put up billboard-size signs warning our citizens to stay out of the desert in my county because of dangerous drug and human smuggling and weapons and bandits and all these other things and then, behind that, they drag us into court with the ACLU," Babeu said.

The sheriff was referring to the law suits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the US Department of Justice challenging the state's new immigration law. "So who has partnered with the ACLU?" Babeu said in a telephone interview with CNSNews.com. "It's the president and (Attorney General) Eric Holder himself. And that's simply outrageous."

Last week, US District Judge Susan Bolton placed a temporary injunction on portions of the bill that allowed law enforcement personnel during the course of a criminal investigation who have probable cause to think an individual is in the country illegally to check immigration status. The state of Arizona filed an appeal on Thursday with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

"Our own government has become our enemy and is taking us to court at a time when we need help," Babeu said. According to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), about 250,000 people were detained in Arizona in the last 12 months for being in the country illegally. Babeu said that that number only reflects the number of people detained and that thousands more enter the country illegally each year. The CBP also reports that 17 percent of those detained already have a criminal record in the United States.

The Russian emergencies ministry said 500 new blazes had been discovered over a 24-hour period, but most had been extinguished. Homes have been burnt in 14 regions of Russia, the worst-hit being Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh and Ryazan. Nineteen of the 40 deaths recorded were in Nizhny Novgorod, the health ministry said.

The state of emergency was announced in a decree that also restricted public access to the regions affected. Moscow is again shrouded in smoke from peat and forest fires outside the city. The fires, caused by record temperatures and a drought, have affected cereal harvests, driving wheat prices up.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin saw some of the fire damage for himself in Nizhny Novgorod region last week. On Monday, he held meetings with regional leaders in Moscow to discuss further help for affected communities. Russians are bracing themselves for another week of high temperatures, with forecasts of up to 40C (104F) for central and southern regions.

Officials also expect stronger winds in some regions, which will fan the flames. By Sunday night, wildfires were still raging across some 128,000 hectares (316,000 acres). Thousands of people have lost their homes and nearly a quarter of a million emergency workers have been deployed to fight the flames.

"In the worst-affected areas, entire villages were washed away without warning by walls of flood water," the Red Cross said in a statement. There are fears diarrhoea and cholera will spread among the homeless. Food is scarce and water supplies have been contaminated by the floods. Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the Information Minister of Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa (formerly North West Frontier Province), one of the worst-hit regions, said rescue teams were trying to reach 27,000 stranded people, including 1,500 tourists in the Swat Valley, the scene of a major military offensive against the Taliban last year.

"We are also getting confirmation of reports about an outbreak of cholera in some areas of Swat," he added. The Pakistani military says it has committed 30,000 troops and dozens of helicopters to the relief effort, but winching individuals to safety is a slow process. The army - which says it has rescued 28,000 people in recent days - predicts the initial search and rescue operation will take up to 10 days, says the BBC's Orla Guerin, who has been on board a military helicopter over the Swat Valley. But the army says rebuilding the damaged areas could take six months or more.

A spokesman for the UK-based charity Save the Children told the BBC that the infrastructure damage in Swat may be worse than in the earthquake which devastated the region in 2005. "We fear that in places that have not been accessed as yet there are people that were trapped, and there is a possibility of more deaths taking place," the spokesman said.

'I don't want my grandchildren or yours to come along and say to me, "Why the hell didn't you come and do something about this? You knew what the problem was". That is what motivates me. 'I wanted to express something in the outer world that I feel inside... We seem to have lost that understanding of the whole of nature and the universe as a living entity.'

His impassioned comments come during a film about his belief that unbridled commerce has led to the destruction of farmland and countryside. The documentary, called Harmony, is due to be aired on the US network NBC in November to coincide with the launch of a book of the same name by the Prince. Charles is understood to have waived his author's fee, and all royalties will go to his charity, the Prince's Trust.

But the Prince has previously come under fire for hypocrisy over his eco-values. Last year he commandeered a jet belonging to the Queen's Flight to attend the Copenhagen climate change summit, generating an estimated 6.4 tons of carbon dioxide - 5.2 tons more than if he had used a commercial plane. Critics condemned his words as 'delusional'.

New fires are appearing as temperatures in central Russia approach 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and winds reach 20 meters per second (45 miles per hour).

Fourteen regions have declared a state of emergency after wildfires engulfed entire villages, leaving 28 people dead and thousands homeless, state-run broadcaster Rossiya-24 reported today. Almost 30,000 rescuers are battling the fires, aided by 18 aircraft, according to the Emergency Situations Ministry.

Moscow has already broken several heat records this season and a drought in agricultural regions has scorched more than 10 million hectares of cropland. High temperatures of at least 36 degrees Celsius are forecast for Moscow in the coming week, according to Gidromettsentr, the state weather service.

They found that the quake raised the land by as much as 2.5 metre near the coast and shifted the coastline out to sea. The findings appeared in the journal Science. An international team of scientists, led by University of Chile geologist Marcelo Farias, measured land-level changes at 24 sites along the country's coast and in nine estuarine valleys.

They said the 8.8-magnitude earthquake was "the fifth largest event in modern seismology". Daniel Melnick, a geologist from Potsdam University, Germany, said seismologists had warned the Chilean authorities a possible disaster could happen at any given moment - but the state did not act.

"Scientists met with authorities in Talcahuano several months before the earthquake," he told BBC News. "And they warned them that there was a possibility of an earthquake and of a big tsunami. The team measured the coastal level changes right after the earthquake to calculate the size of the rupture and then determined how much "slip" was released during the shaking.

Slip is the displacement that results when the tectonic oceanic plate jumps back like a spring during an earthquake after years of compressing the continental plate. They found an average slip of 10 metre - very similar to the forecasted data of 11.9 metre.

He said that scientists determined another area that was "ready" for a potentially devastating shaking - northern Chile, close to the border with Peru. "The region hasn't ruptured since 1877. We can estimate that it is ready for another magnitude 8 or 8.5 earthquake any day - it could happen tomorrow or it could happen in the years to come," he said.

Bank of England figures show that net lending to businesses was negative for ten of the last 12 months. Over this period, 46 billion pounds more was paid back by small businesses to banks than loaned in the other direction. In contrast, the banks are paying ever rising amounts in bonuses to their staff and dividends to their shareholders.

Banks forked out a large chunk of the 6 billion pounds of bonus payments to City workers last year, said the Centre for Economics and Business Research. Royal Bank of Scotland handed out a staggering 1.3 billion pounds to its 16,800 investment bankers, with more than 100 of them scooping a bonus of at least 1 million pounds. This is despite the fact the bank had just been rescued by taxpayers who own 84 per cent of RBoS.

At HSBC, the five best-paid executives earned a total of 40 million pounds last year. The total bonus pool of 6 billion pounds for 2009 was up from 4 billion pounds the year before - and is expected to rise to 6.75 billion pounds this year. As well as rewards to staff, banks handed out a total of 5.8 billion pounds in dividend payments to their shareholders last year, according to experts Capita Registrars.

A spokesman for the British Bankers' Association said: 'Banks link pay and bonuses to the long-term success of the business and do not reward staff in ways which encourage undue risk taking.'

Fort Dimanche, a former prison in the hills above the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, is a hell on earth. In the past, it was home to the torture chambers of former dictator "Baby Doc" Duvalier's death squads, the Tontons Macoutes. Today thousands of impoverished Haitians live in the prison's grounds, digging through piles of garbage for food. But even dogs find little to eat there.

On the roof of the former prison, enterprising women prepare something that looks like biscuits and is even called by that name. The key ingredient, yellow clay, is trucked in from the nearby mountains. The clay is combined with salt and vegetable fat to make dough, which is then dried in the sun.

For many Haitians, the mud biscuits are their only food. They taste of fat, suck the moisture out of the mouth and leave behind an aftertaste of dirt. They often cause diarrhoea, but they help to numb the pangs of hunger. "I'm hoping one day I'll have enough food to eat, so I can stop eating these," Marie Noel, who survives with her seven children on the dirt cakes, told the Associated Press.

Even by the standards of London's exclusive Mayfair neighborhood, businessman Anthony Ward leads a luxurious lifestyle. He and his family live in a 500-square-meter (5,380-square-foot) townhouse with five bedrooms, each with its own bath. There are separate quarters for the staff. When Ward opens a bottle of wine on his veranda in the evening, it's likely that it comes from his own vineyard at the foot of Paardeberg Mountain near Cape Town.

Ward's fabulous wealth comes as a result of his involvement in the cocoa business. The 50-year-old Briton with the nickname "Choc Finger" heads Armajaro, a commodities business and hedge fund he co-founded in 1998. In recent weeks, the hedge fund has caused a furor in the commodities markets. Traders report that Ward has purchased a vast number of futures contracts for the delivery of 241,000 tons of cocoa worth $1 billion (770 million euros).

The cocoa represents about 7 percent of annual world production, enough to supply Germany with chocolate for an entire year. It was also enough to substantially drive up prices on the cocoa market. Last week, the price of cocoa climbed to a 33-year high.

What is so unusual about the British investor's coup is that he did not resell the contracts on the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE) before they expired, but instead took delivery of the beans. As a result, Armajaro now controls almost all the cocoa beans currently stored in registered warehouses in Europe, from Liverpool to Rotterdam to Hamburg.

The turbulence in the cocoa market is the most recent sign that speculation is back, and that the international financial markets have rediscovered agricultural commodities. They are now betting big again on commodities like wheat, coffee, rice and soybeans. As a result, prices are no longer determined by supply and demand, but by investment banks and hedge funds.

Al-Houl's story of his trip to Gaza and his realization that "in actual terms, Gaza is not under siege" was written up in the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). "A sense of absolute prosperity prevails, as manifested by the grand resorts along and near Gaza's coast. Further, the site of the merchandise and luxuries filling the Gaza shops amazed me," he reported.

Concerned that his initial impression of prosperity may have been misleading, "I toured the new resorts, most of which are quite grand, as well as the commercial markets, to verify my hypothesis. The resorts and markets have come to symbolize prosperity, and to prove that the siege is formal or political, not economic," Al-Houl said.

Gaza's markets are filled with a "plethora of goods," he wrote. Prices on many items, particularly food, are much lower than they are in Egypt, he said. With goods entering Gaza from both smuggling tunnels to Egypt and humanitarian aid shipments coming in via Israeli crossings, "supply is much greater than demand," he stated.

The evident prosperity is not enjoyed by all, or even most, of Gaza's residents, according to Al-Houl. The problem is the vast differences in the distribution of wealth. The luxury resorts and wide range of consumer goods are enjoyed by "only a few groups," he said, primarily those who own smuggling tunnels to Egypt and those who work for international organizations such as the United Nations' UNRWA and who do not include or aid the rest of the population.