The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted 11-0 with one abstention to recommend yearly flu vaccination for everyone except for children under the age of six months, whose immune systems have not yet developed enough for vaccination to be safe, and people with egg allergies or other health conditions that are known to make flu vaccines hazardous. If accepted by the CDC, this recommendation will then be publicized to doctors and other health workers. The CDC nearly always accepts the advisory committee's recommendations.

Current CDC recommendations call for the yearly vaccination of all children over the age of six months, all adults over the age of 49, health care workers, people with chronic health problems and anyone who cares for a person in one of these groups. These recommendations cover 85 percent of the US population.

Under the guise of "cybersecurity," the government is moving to discredit and shut down the existing Internet infrastructure in the pursuit of a new, centralized, regulated world wide web.

It is important to stress that "cybersecurity" has nothing to do with protecting the infrastructure of the United States and everything to do with taking over the Internet. Cybersecurity is about attacking non-compliant Internet users, not defending against hackers. Non-compliance equates as using the Internet as a political tool to dissent against the policies of the US government. Having already tried and failed in flooding the web with paid disinformation agents, the government is now turning to its only recourse, exploiting hyped or outright staged cyberattacks as an excuse through which to implement an Internet 2 system controlled and regulated solely by the authorities.

We are constantly told that the Internet needs to be subject to government control because cyberterrorists could hack in and bring down the national power grid. However, the vast majority of the US power infrastructure is not connected to the Internet. It will only be connected to the Internet if the government accelerates the implementation of "smart grid" technology, so in this sense, the government itself is leaving the power grid more vulnerable to hackers by its own programs.

Consultant reconstructive surgeon Raj Ragoowansi said despite seeing hundreds of dog bites in his career and one other fox bite, Isabella's injuries were the most severe animal bites he had ever seen: "The bite was a very strong bite because as far as the upper arm was concerned the wound was down to the bone." As she grows, doctors say she will require further surgery into her teenage years.

"We had a police guard on the front door 24/7 for about three or four days and a panic alarm installed in the house because there were lots of things on websites... and they were just concerned that it could potentially be animal activists." They stressed that they had not had a family pet since their eldest child was born and, while they had seen foxes in their back garden and their neighbourhood, they had never fed or encouraged the animals.

Wildlife expert John Bryant said that while rare, the attack on the Koupparis twins should serve as a warning to the general public "that making pets of foxes, feeding foxes, getting them too used to people and certainly going into houses is not a good idea".

But critics fear the move could threaten crucial infrastructure projects in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, General David Petraeus, who has replaced General Stanley McChrystal as the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, is on his way to brief US allies at Nato headquarters in Brussels. He will then travel to Afghanistan to take up his new post, after he was confirmed by the US Senate on Wednesday.

US Congresswoman Nita Lowey, chair of the subcommittee responsible for aid appropriations, has demanded that an audit is carried out of billions of dollars of past funds. She said that alleged corruption in the Afghan government made taxpayer money hard to justify. "I do not intend to appropriate one more dime for assistance to Afghanistan until I have confidence that US taxpayer money is not being abused to line the pockets of corrupt Afghan government officials, drug lords and terrorists," Ms Lowey said. The money could be reinstated in a few months after a review of Kabul's efforts to tackle the issue.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal claimed that US investigators believed that "Afghan officials and their associates were sending billions of diverted US aid and logistics dollars and drug money to financial safe havens abroad". The BBC's Jane O'Brien in Washington says that the aid cuts will send a very strong message to the Karzai government that they need to do more about corruption.

They believe they are winning the war, and cannot see why they should help Nato by talking to them. They assume, perhaps wrongly, that the Americans are in disarray after the sacking of the Nato commander General Stanley McChrystal last week, and regard any suggestion that they should enter negotiations with them as a sign of Nato's own weakness. June, they point out, has seen the highest number of Nato deaths in Afghanistan: 102, an average of more than three a day.

Nowadays it is extremely hard for Westerners to meet Taliban leaders face to face, either in Afghanistan or in Pakistan. But a trusted intermediary conveyed a series of questions to Zabiullah Mujahedd, the acknowledged spokesman for the Afghan Taliban leadership, and gave us his answers.

The text runs as follows:

"We do not want to talk to anyone - not to [President Hamid] Karzai, nor to any foreigners - till the foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan. We are certain that we are winning. Why should we talk if we have the upper hand, and the foreign troops are considering withdrawal, and there are differences in the ranks of our enemies?"

This is propaganda, of course - yet many Afghans, even those who hate and fear the Taliban, are coming round to exactly the same view. There is an instinctive and widespread dislike of having foreign troops, and especially non-Muslim ones, based in Afghanistan. People who do not support the Taliban know that the Nato-led force is preventing the Taliban from returning to power. But the dislike of occupying forces goes very deep.

Simultaneously there are "diverse discussions of dictatorial powers and measures" even if usually in terms of a temporary dictatorship. They see as the primary question, whether "beyond the system of rule of law, legitimacy reserves can be tapped" to "rejuvenate the system (- democracy -) that has grown old" is the formulation of the journal, a terminology used in the 1930s by the key Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt to justify the annulment of the democratic constitution.

This article suggests that some business representatives are in no way adverse to authoritarian measures and are questioning whether "the constitutional state can still hold its own" in the competition of systems against China and Russia. The author, a member of the advisory board of Berlin's Federal College for Security Studies, considers that the dictatorship "has been proven to be the wrong route to take," but he does not refuse to participate in a discussion of principles on the advantages of dictatorial methods.

Herfried Munkler, a political science professor in Berlin writes that, "according to some observers," the West finds itself today in a "state of democratic fatigue and an erosion of democratic institutions." Munkler is referring to the British political scientist, Colin Crouch, who, in his work entitled "Post-Democracy," detects an internal decomposition of western democracies. Crouch defines post-democracy as "a commonwealth, where, although elections still take place, competing teams of professional PR experts have such tight control over the public debate during the electoral campaign, that the whole thing is reduced to a spectacle". He sees western nations headed toward this sort of social formation. Munkler, then detects that a "spreading discomfort with democracy" provides "a certain seductiveness for a flirt with dictatorships."

Not long after publicly blaming GM critics for prolonging hunger in Africa, Gates announced that his foundation is partnering with DuPont subsidiary Pioneer Hi-Bred to develop higher yield GM strains of corn. Two years ago, the Gates Foundation also partnered with Monsanto to develop drought-tolerant GM corn.

The companies claim that these GM seeds will be delivered to small farmers free of charge. Yet Monsanto says its drought-tolerant corn will not be ready until 2012, at which point it will be introduced into the commercial market. It will not be made available to poor African farmers until 2016.

The Nigeria National Variety Release Committee has already developed - without the use of biotechnology - various new corn strains that are resistant to drought, pests, disease, and poor soil fertility. These conventionally bred seeds do not pose any of the well-documented risks of GM crops, such as toxic health and environmental effects; the production of "super-weeds" and contamination of organic crops through cross-pollination; increased pesticide use; or encouraging monocultures and a loss of seed diversity.

"If only Bill Gates, not to mention USDA Chief Tom Vilsack or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, would spend some of their money getting those Nigerian seeds into farmers' hands today," Laskawy writes. "Instead, they'd prefer to funnel billions of dollars to biotech giants because, well, 2016 isn't really so long to wait."

Arguments earlier had been scheduled for June 29 in the dispute, but a court order recently cancelled the hearing and instead announced the case would be decided based on the merits of the legal briefs submitted by attorneys. A document from court clerk Marcia Waldron said the case will be decided by Judge Dolores Sloviter, who was appointed by Jimmy Carter; Maryanne Trump Barry, who was appointed by Bill Clinton; and Thomas Hardiman, who was appointed by George W Bush.

The filings were due on the day the hearing would have been held, but there's no published timetable for a decision to be released. The case argues Obama probably is not even a US citizen, much less a "natural born citizen" as required by the US Constitution of the chief executive officer,

The case has argued, "Under the British Nationality Act of 1948 his father was a British subject/citizen and not a United States citizen and Obama himself was a British subject/citizen at the time Obama was born. We further contend that Obama has failed to even conclusively prove that he is at least a 'citizen of the United States' under the Fourteenth Amendment as he claims by conclusively proving that he was born in Hawaii," the arguments have claimed.

It was 7.45am on June 30 last year when the senior, longstanding broker for PVM Oil Futures was contacted by an admin clerk querying why he'd bought 7 million barrels of crude in the middle of the night. The 34-year old broker at first claimed he had spent the night trading alongside a client. But the story began to fall apart when he refused to put the customer in touch with his desk for official approval of the trades.

By 10 am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a "drunken blackout". Prices leapt by more than $1.50 a barrel in under half an hour at around 2 am - the kind of sharp swing caused by events of geo-political significance. Ten times the usual volume of futures contracts changed hands in just one hour.

By the time PVM realised the trades were not authorised and swiftly began to unwind the positions, losses of exactly $9,763,252 had stacked up. According to the regulator, Mr Perkins first started trading irregularly the day before the enormous price spike. He had been drinking heavily over the weekend at a PVM golf event and was returning to a day off work.

The investigation shows that he was able to trade huge volumes with very little cash up front and no position limit, exposing how it easy it was for a single British broker on a bender to cause chaos in the oil market.

Most economists believe the housing market will cool in the second half of this year as Britain's economy struggles to recover after an 18-month recession as the government tackles a record budget deficit of around 11 per cent of national output. The slowing of the property market, combined with signs of consumer retrenchment across the globe, have raised fears of a "double-dip" in the economy.

The FTSE yesterday dropped below the crucial 5,000 mark, hitting its lowest level in 10 months, on concerns the recovery may be faltering. However Martin Gahbauer, Nationwide's chief economist, said part of the housing slowdown could be due to an increase in the number of homes on the market, "perhaps in response to the abolition of HIPs in the opening days of the new coalition government".

"I'm not going to pretend a faith I don't feel," she said. Ms Gillard's views on religion are in stark contrast to those of Mr Rudd, who was a regular at Canberra church services, and those of her rival, Tony Abbott, who once trained as a priest and is known as a devout Catholic.

Since taking over from Mr Rudd and becoming the country's first female prime minister, Ms Gillard has presided over a lift in the polls for the Labour government. It has since been rumoured that Ms Gillard may consider calling an election within the next two months to capitalise on her early popularity.

Hurricane Alex is the first of the Atlantic season. It has strengthened to a category 1 hurricane and is expected to make landfall near the Texas-Mexico border late on Wednesday. Tens of thousands of barrels of oil have leaked every day since the Deepwater Horizon rig sank in April.

A containment cap placed over the leaking pipe is collecting up to 25,000 barrels a day and sending it to two surface ships. And a relief well being drilled to staunch the flow is on target to be finished by early August, a senior BP executive has said. Before it became a hurricane, ripple effects from what was Tropical Storm Alex created six-foot (1.8m) waves, according to the National Weather Service in New Orleans.

Skimming ships returned to shore in Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida and Alabama, as gusts and high waves made the procedure unsafe. Officials were also forced to move barges that had been preventing oil from reaching sensitive wetlands. The hurricane comes as US Vice-President Joe Biden is visiting Gulf coast officials and residents. Forecasters say Alex will bring six to 12 inches (15-30cm) of rain to northeastern Mexico and southern Texas.

The US state department has announced it has accepted additional offers of assistance from 12 countries and international organisations to help clean up and contain the spill.

More than 51 per cent of Germans want to axe the euro after widespread fury that Germany's taxpayers have been forced to come to the rescue of Greece and other high spending southern European countries. Only three in 10 people in Europe's largest economy now support the single currency, a flagship of EU integration and Germany's European policy.

The Ipsos opinion poll found that disenchantment was highest, 56 per cent, among Germans over 50, those old enough to remember repeated promises that Germany would never have to bail-out other countries as the price of the euro. Previous EU polls published before the Greek debt crisis showed two thirds of Germans in favour of the euro, with only 29 per cent against.

"At last the German people are waking up to the fact that they have been deceived on a massive scale by their own politicians and by the EU," said Lord Pearson, the leader of Ukip. "The speed of the change of opinion is remarkable but will be devastating to the political elite, both in Berlin and in Brussels."

Papandreou, whose union-backed Pasok party prevailed in elections last October, has reduced wages for state workers, trimmed some retirement benefits, and raised sales, fuel and alcohol taxes. The 58-year-old argues the measures, to tame a budget deficit of 13.6 percent of economic output, are needed to prevent the country from defaulting on its debts.

Greek pensioners on average live on 96 percent of the salary they had when they worked, more than twice the proportion of earnings as Germans, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Paris-based group called the system a "fiscal time bomb."

Companies are prevented from dismissing any more than 2 percent of their workforce in any given month, just as the Greek economy is mired in its first recession since 1993. "It's the usual routine," said Elina Zaroulia, 25, who does fashion public relations for Hugo Boss in Athens and didn't join strikers today. "Protesters, banners, slogans, but if you work in the private sector you go to work, it's the way it is and definitely now that it is a time of crisis."

The order that caused the slump, 8,820 shares of Citigroup that crossed for $3.3174 at 1:03:51 p..in New York, was cancelled, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The stock changed hands for $3.80 when trading resumed, compared with yesterday's close of $4, as US stocks posted the biggest losses in three weeks.

Regulators are seeking to prevent declines in one or more securities from causing volatility to snowball, prompting a cascade of losses across markets. During the May 6 rout that erased $862 billion in value from US equities in less than 20 minutes, ETFs and companies such as Accenture Plc fell as much as 99 percent. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission said the plunge may have been fueled by curbs that applied on some venues and not others.

"It's great that the circuit breaker picked it up and stopped everything, but how is an order that size allowed to print so far below where it's trading?" said Alec Levine, an options strategist at Wallachbeth Capital LLC in New York. "If you did that for every stock you could effectively shut down the stock market."