A giant new clock being built in the Islamic holy city of Mecca hopes to usurp the role of Greenwich Observatory, and aims to have the world's 1.5 billion Muslims setting their watches by its time. The four-faced clock, which bears a striking resemblance to Big Ben's tower, will top a massive skyscraper that when completed will stand at almost 2,000 feet, making it one of the world's tallest buildings.

Only one of the clock's four faces has so far been completed and is covered with 98 million pieces of glass mosaics. Each face will be inscribed with 'God is greatest' in Arabic and fitted with thousands of coloured lights, making it visible from more than 16 miles.

It will run on Arabia Standard Time, which is three hours ahead of GMT, and will begin testing tomorrow.

'Putting Mecca time in the face of Greenwich Mean Time, this is the goal,' said Mohammed Al-Arkubi, the manager of one of the hotels in the complex. At a conference in Doha in 2008, Muslim clerics and scholars presented 'scientific' arguments that Mecca time is the true global meridian. They said that Mecca is the centre of the world and that the Greenwich standard was imposed by the West.

Greenwich was chosen as the starting point for the measurement of time at the International Meridian Conference in 1884 and has retained its crown largely unchallenged during the ensuing 125 years.

"The pace of economic recovery is likely to be more modest in the near term than had been anticipated," the Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement in Washington. "To help support the economic recovery in a context of price stability, the Committee will keep constant the Federal Reserve's holdings of securities at their current level." The Fed retained a commitment to keep its benchmark interest rate close to zero for an "extended period."

With growth weakening in the second quarter and company job gains in July falling short of estimates, today's step signals that risks of a downturn have increased enough for the Fed to delay its exit from unprecedented stimulus. Chairman Ben S Bernanke told Congress last month that the Fed was "prepared to take further policy actions as needed."

The Fed said it will "continue to roll over the Federal Reserve's holdings of Treasury securities as they mature." The reinvestment policy applies to agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities held by the central bank.

Although there have only been about 50 cases identified in the UK so far, scientists fear it will go global. Tight surveillance and new drugs are needed says Lancet Infectious Diseases. NDM-1 can exist inside different bacteria, like E-coli, and it makes them resistant to one of the most powerful groups of antibiotics - carbapenems. These are generally reserved for use in emergencies and to combat hard-to-treat infections caused by other multi-resistant bacteria.

And experts fear NDM-1 could now jump to other strains of bacteria that are already resistant to many other antibiotics. Ultimately, this could produce dangerous infections that would spread rapidly from person to person and be almost impossible to treat. At least one of the NDM-1 infections the researchers analysed was resistant to all known antibiotics.

Similar infections have been seen in the US, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands and international researchers say that NDM-1 could become a major global health problem. Infections have already been passed from patient to patient in UK hospitals.

I was living in China when the one-child policy began in 1980, and saw firsthand how it drove couples desperate for a son to eliminate unwanted daughters. In the early days this was often done by drowning, although it was also common to simply abandon baby girls in some out-of-the-way place to die of exposure. In more recent years, increased prosperity and new medical technologies have enabled couples to act on their longstanding preference for male children during pregnancy by undergoing prenatal sex determination and sex-selective abortion.

The result of this continued carnage of girl children is that China now has one of the highest sex ratios at birth ever recorded. Instead of 106 boys for every 100 girls - the usual ratio of boys to girls - China reports a ratio of 117 boys for every 100 girls. The ratios in some provinces are even more skewed, with 130 boys reported for every 100 girls. The shortage of girls and young women is obvious to anyone who visits China, as I have recently. In some high school classrooms, boys often outnumber girls two to one. The oldest cohort of only children are now in their twenties, and they are predominantly male. Demographers predict that there will be 30 million more Chinese men than women of marriageable age by 2020.

Chinese triads, which already dominate the drug trade in Southeast Asia, are spreading their influence in places far from China, such as Vancouver and Toronto, which have large Chinese minorities. The new Chinese Diaspora is also creating new communities of recent emigrants around China's periphery, whose loyalties still reside with the mother country, and whose presence may create a pretext for intervention.

Sociologists have long speculated that societies with large surplus populations of men have a tendency towards violence. China's one-child policy has led to a war on women. But it may ultimately lead to a war by men.

In a worst case scenario, large chunks could reach the heavily trafficked waters where another Greenland iceberg sank the Titanic in 1912.

It's been a summer of near biblical climatic havoc across the planet, with wildfires, heat and smog in Russia and killer floods in Asia. But the moment the Petermann glacier cracked last week - creating the biggest Arctic ice island in half a century - may symbolize a warming world like no other.

"It's so big that you can't prevent it from drifting. You can't stop it," said Jon-Ove Methlie Hagen, a glaciologist at the University of Oslo. Few images can capture the world's climate fears like a 100-square-miles (260 square kilometers) chunk of ice breaking off Greenland's vast ice sheet, a reservoir of freshwater that if it collapsed would raise global sea levels by a devastating 20 feet (6 meters).

While Greenland's glaciers break off thousands of icebergs into Arctic waters every year, scientists say this ice island is the biggest in the northern hemisphere since 1962. It contains enough freshwater to keep the Hudson River flowing for more than two years, said Andreas Muenchow of the University of Delaware. The drifting ice sheet is likely to remain at the heart of the global warming discussion during its journey.

At the same time, they have cut back dramatically on lending, reducing the amount of new credit to small businesses by 43 per cent. The double-whammy is driving thousands of companies to the brink of collapse with dire consequences for the wider economy. Small and medium firms employ 13 million staff - 57 per cent of the private sector workforce.

The loan rip-off has allowed the major high street banks, who were saved by the taxpayer, to declare profits of more than 15 billion pounds for the first six months of the year. It has brought predictions that bank bonuses will soar by 25 per cent this year to top 10 billion pounds. Details buried in the Bank of England Trends in Lending report reveals how the finance giants have been lining their pockets.

Two years ago, when the Bank base rate was 3 per cent, banks were charging small firms an average of around 5.7 per cent on variable rate loans. Since then base rate has come down by 2.5 percentage points to an historic low of just 0.5 per cent. However, the average bank loan rate has fallen by just 1.5 points to an average of 4.2 per cent.

David Cameron yesterday underlined his determination to force the banks to end the lending drought. Speaking at a public meeting in Manchester, the Prime Minister said ministers were examining a scheme that could see the banks forced to hit lending targets. An alternative plan is for the state to underwrite some loans. He said: 'The banks should be lending. We put all this money into them to stop them falling over, they should now be lending to business.'

China - At least 702 people die in northwestern Gansu province at the weekend when a torrent of mud and rocks engulfs the town of Zhouqu, with more than 1,000 missing. Year of heavy flooding has already killed nearly 1,500.

Pakistan - UN announced on Monday that the Pakistan flooding was the greatest humanitarian crisis in recent history, with more people affected than the South-East Asian tsunami and the recent earthquakes in Kashmir and Haiti combined. More than 1,600 killed, while almost 14 million have suffered losses requiring long or short-term help.

Central Europe - At least 11 killed and hundreds of homes damaged this week. Flooding in May and June caused hundreds of millions worth damage, killing 18 in Poland, others died in Czech Republic, while thousands were forced to flee homes in Slovakia and Hungary.

Kashmir - Hundreds of people still missing in Indian Himalayas after flash floods hit the remote region of Ladakh, killing at least 177.

Russia - Summer heatwave estimated to have cost almost 5,000 lives. Vladimir Putin ordered a halt to all exports of wheat and other grains due to the "abnormally high temperatures" and most of harvest being wiped out by fires. Heatwave could wipe up to $14 billion off economic growth according to economists.

Australia - Coldest June in nearly 30 years in Sydney with temperatures dropping to 39F (4C).

But you don't have to get into all the technicalities to understand the bigger picture. Basically, derivatives are financial instruments whose value depends upon or is derived from the price of something else. A derivative has no underlying value of its own. It is essentially a side bet. Originally, derivatives were mostly used to hedge risk and to offset the possibility of taking losses. But today it has gone way, way beyond that.

Today the world financial system has become a gigantic casino where insanely large bets are made on anything and everything that you can possibly imagine. The derivatives market is almost entirely unregulated and in recent years it has ballooned to such enormous proportions that it is almost hard to believe. Today, the worldwide derivatives market is approximately 20 times the size of the entire global economy.

Because derivatives are so unregulated, nobody knows for certain exactly what the total value of all the derivatives worldwide is, but low estimates put it around 600 trillion dollars and high estimates put it at around 1.5 quadrillion dollars. So what is going to happen when this insanely large derivatives bubble pops? Well, the truth is that the danger that we face from derivatives is so great that Warren Buffet has called them "financial weapons of mass destruction".

One day some event will happen which will cause a sudden shift in world financial markets and trillions of dollars of losses in derivatives will create a tsunami that will bring the entire house of cards down. All of the money in the world will not be enough to bail out the financial system when that day arrives.

Feedback from the likes of Oregon University's Mark Thoma and UC San Diego's James Hamilton suggests the US is at some kind of tipping point with a good number expecting it to fall rather than maintain balance:

68 percent said that conditions are mixed, and the rest split three to one toward weakness rather than growth. For an economy in which growth is the norm, 47 percent of respondents think that the US economy is worse than official statistics indicate, and only 5 percent believe it is better.

It is also worth noting, however, that only a minority, albeit a large one - 35 percent - thought the US had a more than 60 percent chance of entering a double-dip recession.

Full report: - http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/econ_blogger_outlook_q3_2010.pdf

The announcement appears to be a show of bravado after the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said last week that the US military has a contingency plan to attack Iran, although he thinks a military strike is probably a bad idea. The US and some of its allies accuse Iran of using its civilian nuclear program as a cover to build nuclear weapons. Iran has denied the charges, saying its nuclear program is geared merely toward generating electricity, not bombs.

The deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guard, General Hossein Kan'ani Moghadam, said graves for any attacking US troops have been dug in Iran's southwestern Khuzestan province, where Iran buried Iraqi soldiers killed during the ruinous 1980-88 war between the Islamic republic and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime.

"The mass graves that used to be for burying Saddam's soldiers have now been prepared again for US soldiers, and this is the reason for digging this big number of graves," Moghadam said, according to the semiofficial Fars news agency.

After almost two weeks of fires that have claimed over 50 lives and even part destroyed a military storage site, the authorities said they were making progress in fighting fires that still covered 174,035 hectares of land. "A positive dynamic in liquidating the wildfires continues to be observed," said the head of the emergencies ministry's crisis unit, Vladimir Stepanov.

"The numbers (of emergency workers) have been increased in those regions where there is a difficult situation with the fires," he added. The emergencies ministry said that over the last 24 hours, 247 new fires had appeared, more than the 239 that were extinguished, and 557 fires were still raging across the affected region.

Meanwhile, officials said fires close to the town of Snezhinsk in the Urals and home to one of Russia's top nuclear research centres had been localised. The acrid smog from wildfires 100 kilometres (60 miles) out in the countryside that descended over Moscow lightened Tuesday morning but forecasters warned it could return and the air quality was still dangerously poor.

Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

And a nation that once prized education - that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children - is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.

We're told that we have no choice, that basic government functions - essential services that have been provided for generations - are no longer affordable. And it's true that state and local governments, hit hard by the recession, are cash-strapped. But they wouldn't be quite as cash-strapped if their politicians were willing to consider at least some tax increases. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.

"It will be unconstitutional and contrary to natural law or, if you like, the will of God. It is similar to what India faced with imposition of the salt tax during British rule, only S510 extends control over all food in the US, violating the fundamental human right to food." says Dr Shiv Chopra, Canada Health whistleblower.

Monsanto says it has no interest in the bill and would not benefit from it, but Monsanto's Michael Taylor who gave us rBGH and unregulated genetically modified (GM) organisms, appears to have designed it and is waiting as an appointed Food Czar to the FDA (a position unapproved by Congress) to administer the agency it would create without judicial review if it passes.

S510 would give Monsanto unlimited power over all US seed, food supplements, food AND FARMING.

Dr Cynthia Sagers, an ecologist with the University of Arkansas, presented her findings to the 9th Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America on Friday. Sagers said her findings showed there is a lack of "proper monitoring" and control of GM plants in the United States, reported Nature.

Sagers said, "The extent of the escape is unprecedented." NPR reported that all the varieties of GM canola that Sagers and her team found growing wild in Dakota were all modified to be resistant to Monsanto's herbicide Roundup, but at least two different GM varieties bred together to produce a third variety of GM with a new trait, prompting Sagers to say. "What we've demonstrated in this study is a large-scale escape of a genetically modified crop in the United States."

As a consequence, rivers, lakes, lagoons and fisheries are brimming with decomposing fish and other creatures. Nothing like this has ever been seen in this magnitude in Bolivia. Inhabitants of riverside communities report the smell is nauseating and can be detected as far as a kilometer away from river banks.

River communities, whose livelihoods depend on fishing, fear they'll run out of food and will have nothing to sell. Authorities are concerned there will be a shortage of fish in markets and are more concerned by possible threats to public health, especially in communities that also use river water for bathing and drinking, but also fear contaminated or decaying fish may end up in market stalls.

They've begun a campaign to ensure market vendors and the public know how to tell the difference between fresh and unhealthy fish. In university fish ponds and commercial fisheries the losses are also catastrophic.