The new site will be found at BBC.com. Currently that address has redirected to the bbc.co.uk site which, like the vast majority of BBC's operations, is funded by a license fee paid by every British household. The BBC receives a guaranteed 3.6 billion pounds ($5.4 billon) each year from the license fee.

While BBC's TV, radio and web operations in the UK do not feature any advertising, the bbc.co.uk global website features ads when viewed by users in the US. Miranda Cresswell, senior vice president of BBC.com, said in a statement: "You're going to see more analysis, more insight and more perspective that connects the dots on events and issues that affect us all in the US."

Such an approach will undoubtedly see the BBC compete more directly with US newspapers and broadcasters for local and regional stories. Until now, most of BBC's US coverage has focused on major national stories, usually with an international impact. This also means that the BBC's US site will be competing for advertising dollars with the web operations of commercial newspapers and broadcasters who do not have any other source of revenue.

In the UK, it has come under fierce attack from broadcaster BSkyB and other commercial rivals experiencing a severe advertising slump. James Murdoch, seen as heir to his father Rupert Murdoch's News Corp's media empire, has described the broadcaster's scale and ambitions as "chilling". The amount of free content the BBC already makes available online has discouraged many UK newspapers from attempting to charge readers for content on the web.

Goldman has also consented to an agreement that when it puts together new mortgage securities, it'll run any prospectuses or term sheets by its legal or compliance departments. As if it wasn't doing that already. And there's lots more like that: people on the mortgage desk have to attend training seminars on disclosure! Goldman "shall provide for appropriate record keeping"! And so on and so forth.

Meanwhile, the closest thing to an admission of wrongdoing coming from Goldman is this: It was a mistake for the Goldman marketing materials to state that the reference portfolio was "selected by" ACA Management LLC without disclosing the role of Paulson & Co Inc in the portfolio selection process and that Paulson's economic interests were adverse to CDO investors. Goldman regrets that the marketing materials did not contain that disclosure.

This doesn't even rise to the level of an apology: it's just a "regret". Meanwhile, Goldman will be more than happy to wire $150 million to IKB and $100 million to RBS, as detailed in the proposed judgment. Technically the judgment is contingent on being approved by the New York judge, but that's just a formality. As a way of getting out from under this suit, it would be cheap at twice the price.

The UK's Royal Bank of Scotland, which is now 84% owned by the UK taxpayer and lost about $840 million in investments, will receive $100 million compensation. German bank IKB Deutsche Industriebank will receive $150 million, with the remaining $300 million going to the US Treasury. Terms of the settlement are subject to approval by a federal judge.

The SEC said Goldman had acknowledged that marketing material contained "incomplete information". In a statement, Goldman did not admit legal wrongdoing but said the move was "the right outcome for our firm, our shareholders and our clients". Despite the record fine, Goldman shares rose by 4.5%, reflecting the fact that many analysts felt the firm had got off lightly.

"They pay $550 million and they get an $800 million pop in their stock price... they got off easy," said Kevin Caron at Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Goldman made a profit of $3.5 billion in the first three months of this year.

BP executive Kent Wells said the oil had been stopped at 1425 local time (1925 GMT) and he was "excited" by the progress. "It is very good to see no oil go into the Gulf of Mexico," said Mr Wells. BP shares rose in New York trading on Thursday after the flow was stopped, having already performed well over the day. But BP is stressing that even if no oil escapes for 48 hours, that will not mean the flow of oil and gas has been stopped permanently.

BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles emphasised that there was no reason for "celebration" yet, particularly for those in areas already damaged by oil. "The job is not finished," he said. The pressure testing is necessary to check the strength of the well. If the pressure within the cap on top is low, that could indicate oil is leaking out further down the well.

If the pressure remains high, BP and the government will have to decide whether to try to keep the well shut or to leave it open and pipe oil to four vessels on the surface. The US government's incident commander, Admiral Thad Allen, said even if it was successful, the well would be reopened and oil capture by ships on the surface would restart while a seismic test was done.

The Vatican issued the guidelines in response to the clerical sexual abuse scandal. It is the first major Vatican document since the clerical abuse scandal erupted earlier this year. The Vatican in 2007 issued a decree saying the attempted ordination of women would result in automatic excommunication for the woman and the priest who tries to ordain her.

That is repeated in the new document, adding that the priest can also be punished by being defrocked. Today Vatican sex crimes prosecutor Monsignor Charles Scicluna defended the inclusion of both sex abuse and ordination of women in the same document. He said it was a way of codifying two of the most serious canonical crimes against sacraments and morals that the congregation deals with.

'They are grave, but on different levels,' he said, and noted that the document also lists crimes against the sacraments including desecrating the Eucharist, violating the seal of the confessional and - for the first time - APOSTASY, HERESY AND SCHISM.'

The senators said that the American public deserved to know whether "justice and punishment for terrorism took a back seat to back-room deals for an oil contract". The demand is the latest blow for BP which is already being vilified in America in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

It is understood that the firm has minutes of two telephone conversations between Sir Mark Allen, a former senior MI6 official who is now an adviser to BP, and Jack Straw, the former Justice Secretary. There is also a private letter between the pair. Within months of these communications, the Government agreed to a prisoner transfer agreement with Libya which paved the way for Abdel Basset al-Megrahi to be sent back to Tripoli.

BP has since won valuable oil contracts in Libya and is poised to begin deepwater drilling in the country next month. It is estimated the deal could be worth $20 billion.

The "pledge of allegiance" to a Jewish Temple Mount and a united Jerusalem was part of the monthly "March around Old City Temple Gates," a colorful event featuring the recital of Psalms at various closed gates around the Temple Mount. The monthly march usually attracts 2,000-3,000 people, but organizers successfully brought out thousands more Monday night as Jews around the world marked the beginning of the Hebrew month of Av.

The Ninth of Av is marked every year as the day when foreign invaders destroyed the First and Second Holy Temples. The marches feature music and dancing and are peaceful, but police have barred several of the monthly prayer rallies during the past year because of fears of Arab violence.

National Union Knesset Member Uri Ariel told the crowd that deterioration in security and the increasing discrimination against Jews in Jerusalem prompted the unusually large turnout. In his speech he described the "surrender of Jerusalem to Arabs," the worsening security in several Jewish neighborhoods, disturbances by anarchists and the discrimination by police who severely restrict the ability of Jews to ascend the Temple Mount.

(The fast of Tisha b'Av falls on the Hebrew calendar date of 9 Av - 20th July 2010.)

They follow similar tactics in villages across southern Lebanon, essentially using the residents as human shields, in gross violation of UN Resolution 1701. Al-Khiam was used as a rocket launching site during the Second Lebanon war.

During the Second Lebanon war, Hezbollah stored their weapons in open areas for the most part, which enabled the IDF to locate and destroy their stores. In the four years since then, Hezbollah has pursued a tactic of moving their weapons into civilian villages, essentially institutionalizing the tactic of using human shields on a large scale.

In an incident on 12 October 2009, there was an explosion at a Hezbollah weapons storehouse in the village of Tayr Filsay. Aerial footage, taken shortly after the explosion, shows Hezbollah operatives closing down the area around the warehouse, driving in two trucks and removing weaponry from the site. They then took the weapons to a known weapons storage facility in the center of the village of Dir a-Nahar about four kilometers away. Only after Hezbollah removed the weaponry did they allow UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army to enter the site of the explosion.

Pawning gold with the BIS, usually rare, is occurring at a record rate in 2010. The central banks plan to buy the gold back later in swap agreements, but if they don't, the BIS would need to sell the gold, which could then flood the market. This flies in the face of conventional market wisdom that the gold rush has been a "flight to safety" by governments: their central bankers considered gold more trustworthy than holding foreign currencies.

Yet, we have central banks offloading their gold, right in the middle of a sovereign debt crisis, to pay their governments' bills or prop up their commercial banks. Is gold losing its charm given the dire necessity of possessing hard cash to pay for emergencies? If central banks are trading their gold in, it might be bad news for the price of gold, but looking deeper, it may be even worse news for the world banking system.

For one, it means that central banks are actually having trouble paying their governments' bills and are finding it difficult to raise sovereign debt by issuing IOU paper. For another, gold is well-known as a fallback in times of extreme crisis - and if central banks are selling gold, could they be leaving themselves and their national banking system wide open to an even more severe liquidity crisis?

Key Question - If some central banks are trading their gold for cash, what are those central bankers thinking? What do they know, that we don't know yet?

During my time on the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, which makes quarterly economic prognoses, Governor Mervyn King controlled the hiring and firing of the forecast team, who did his bidding. They had to produce a result that was consistent with King's views, or else they would be history. A patchwork of arbitrary fixes and prejudices frequently drive forecasts, which for the uninitiated are hard to see.

King always emphasized the importance of top-down judgments, which means you can just make stuff up as you go along. Worryingly, this was often only loosely based on the workings of the real world. Such glorified guesswork operated reasonably well during the boom years, but failed miserably when the recession hit. To put it bluntly, it isn't that hard to manipulate a forecast. I have seen it done.

David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, is professor of economics at Dartmouth College and the University of Stirling.

The President of the European Commission told The Times that the new era at the White House was in danger of becoming a "missed opportunity" for Europe. Jose Manuel Barroso said that the EU-US relationship was not living up to its potential.

The criticism follows a series of fundamental disagreements on how to deal with the economic crisis, climate change and trade reform. The feelings of a deepening rift are mutual. Senior US figures said last night that Mr Obama could never live up to Europe's sky-high expectations.

The view from Washington is that communication with Europe on a range of crucial issues is difficult because the EU still lacks "a clear foreign policy apparatus."

The proposed law does not name BP, but would apply to any company that has experienced 10 or more deaths in the last seven years. The April explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers.

According to the draft legislation, the deaths must have taken place at drilling, production facilities, or refineries, and must have broken US health and environment laws. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is still being investigated. BP has already accepted its guilt in a separate accident in Texas in 2005 that killed 15 people. The proposal would need to be passed by both houses of Congress before it can be signed into law.

Built deep inside a mountain, the vault is designed to protect the world's main food plants from future disasters. Since opening in 2008, it has stored seeds from more than half a million of the planet's crops. The group delivering the seeds was led by Benjamin Cardin, Democrat Senator for Maryland, who said that all parts of the world were interdependent when it came to crop diversity. "As we manage the impact of climate change around the world, the seed vault in Svalbard will be the safety deposit box that ensures that we can keep that food supply intact," he said.

The seeds from the chilli plants, along with other samples such as soy, melon and sorghum, were provided by the US Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Plant Germplasm, based in Colorado. "[We] have a strong commitment to sharing our crop diversity to ensure that Svalbard is well positioned to protect the world's genetic diversity," explained Edward Knipling, administrator for the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS). The seeds are preserved at a temperature of -18C (-0.4F) in two secure store rooms located 130m (426ft) inside a mountain.

The vault has been designed to store duplicates of seeds from collections from all around the world. If the nation's seeds are lost as a result of a natural disaster, such as widespread flooding, the seed collections could be re-established using the specimens stored in the Arctic. The 5 million pounds ($7 million) facility took 12 months to build and opened in February 2008.

Svalbard is an archipelago in the Arctic, constituting the northernmost part of Norway. Located north of mainland Europe, it is about midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole.

The government had earlier delayed the whole procedure amid fears that a failure could make the situation worse. But after experts reviewed BP's plans, officials approved the operation. "There is a tremendous sense of urgency," said Admiral Thad Allen, the US incident commander. But he warned that nobody wanted to make "an irreversible mistake". BP hopes the series of valves will be capable of holding back all of the oil from the well.

Once the leak in the choke valve has been fixed, experts will begin to test the integrity of the new capping device by monitoring seismic, acoustic and temperature changes in the well and the surrounding area. The purpose of testing is to check whether oil will leak out of other areas if valves on the blow-out preventer and new cap are closed.

Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal's life. Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg. Professor John Brookfield, a specialist in evolutionary genetics at the University of Nottingham, told the UK Press Association the pecking order was clear. The living organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the chicken it would develop into, he said. "Therefore, the first living thing which we could say unequivocally was a member of the species would be this first egg," he added. "So, I would conclude THAT THE EGG CAME FIRST."

The same conclusion was reached by his fellow "eggsperts" Professor David Papineau, of King's College London, and poultry farmer Charles Bourns. Mr Papineau, an expert in the philosophy of science, agreed that the first chicken came from an egg and that proves there were chicken eggs before chickens. He told PA people were mistaken if they argued that the mutant egg belonged to the "non-chicken" bird parents.

The debate, which may come as a relief to those with argumentative relatives, WAS ORGANIZED BY DISNEY TO PROMOTE THE RELEASE OF THE FILM "CHICKEN LITTLE" ON DVD.

Meanwhile, A team from University of Sheffield and University of Warwick has found that a protein called ovocleidin (OC-17) is crucial in the formation of eggshells.

It is produced in the pregnant hen's ovaries so the correct reply to the egg riddle must be that the chicken came first, the scientists say. The team used a hi-tech computer, called HECToR, to look at the molecular structure of a shell. They discovered that OC-17 acts as a catalyst, kick-starting the conversion of calcium carbonate in the chicken's body into calcite crystals. It is these that make up the hard shell that houses the yolk and its protective fluids while the chick develops. Lead scientist Dr Colin Freeman of Sheffield University said: "It had long been suspected that the egg came first but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact THE CHICKEN CAME FIRST. However, the research does not come up with how the protein-producing chicken existed in the first place, the 'Daily Express' reported.