"Today, the phase for installing 6,000 new centrifuges at the facility in Natanz has started," the state broadcasting website quoted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying at the atomic plant. His announcement came as Iran marked its "national day of nuclear technology" on the second anniversary of its first production of uranium sufficiently enriched to make atomic fuel. Iran has already installed around 3,000 P1 centrifuges at an underground enrichment facility at Natanz, in central Iran, according to the latest report by the UN nuclear watchdog, and tripling this number would mark a major expansion of its nuclear capacities.

The West fears Iran could use enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon, and Tehran's refusal to suspend the process has been punished with three sets of UN Security Council sanctions and US pressure on its banking system.

The United States has never ruled out military action to bring Tehran to heel, and Iran's arch enemy Israel has expressed alarm about the nuclear drive, especially after Ahmadinejad predicted the Jewish state is doomed to disappear. Underlining the tensions, Israel's National Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer warned on Monday that Israel would respond to any Iranian attack by destroying the "Iranian nation."

The truth is far less romantic: The water is coming from a cracked 70-year-old tunnel hundreds of feet below ground, scientists say. The tunnel is leaking up to 36 million gallons a day as it carries drinking water from a reservoir to the big city. It is a powerful warning sign of a larger problem around the country: The infrastructure that delivers water to the nation's cities is badly aging and in need of repairs.

The Environmental Protection Agency says utilities will need to invest more than $277 billion over the next two decades on repairs and improvements to drinking water systems. Water industry engineers put the figure drastically higher, at about $480 billion. Water utilities, largely managed by city governments, have never faced improvements of this magnitude before. And customers will have to bear the majority of the cost through rate increases, according to the American Water Works Association, an industry group.

Engineers say this is a crucial era for the nation's water systems, especially in older cities like New York, where some pipes and tunnels were built in the 1800s and are now nearing the end of their life expectancies.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said in an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press that Benedict will deliver a message of "trust and hope." The pope turns 81 during the trip. Bertone says Benedict is fit but could not meet all the invitations from U.S. cities and had to limit himself to Washington and New York.

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden recently accused the pope of helping in a "new Crusade," but Bertone says the Vatican has faith in American security services to keep the pope safe. The cardinal is the Vatican secretary of state.

The Fed auction marked the ninth in a series that began in December that so far have pumped $310 billion in short-term loans into the nation's banking system. Meanwhile, the 185-nation IMF delivered its most detailed review yet of the global credit crisis that hit last August. It said Tuesday that governments must be prepared to do more to support the global financial system if conditions worsen.

"Markets remain under considerable strain" from a variety of forces such as weakened balance sheets from increased bad loans, the IMF said in a report prepared for meetings this week in Washington of the IMF and its sister lending institution, the World Bank. The global credit crisis is expected to be a top agenda item at those discussions. The IMF report urged policymakers in the United States and other nations to consider what else needs to be done.

"The critical challenge now facing policymakers is to take immediate steps to mitigate the risks of an even more wrenching adjustment, including by preparing contingency and other remediation plans, while also addressing the seeds of the present turmoil," the IMF said.

Rice, the staple food for half the world, gained 2.4 percent to $21.50 per 100 pounds in Chicago, double the price a year ago. Philippine President Gloria Arroyo announced two rice tenders today and pledged to crack down on hoarding. Anyone found guilty of "stealing rice from the people" will be jailed, she said.

"We're in for a tough time," Roland Jansen, chief executive officer of Pfaffikon, Switzerland-based Mother Earth Investments AG, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television from Zurich today. Unless prices decline "you will have huge problems of daily nutrition for half the planet." Mother Earth holds about 4 percent of its $100 million funds in the grain.

China, Egypt, Vietnam and India, accounting for more than a third of global rice exports, curbed sales this year to protect domestic stockpiles. The World Bank in Washington says 33 nations from Mexico to Yemen may face "social unrest" after food and energy costs increased for six consecutive years.

The Philippines, which imports about 15 percent of its rice, is tightening controls over domestic sales and buying more overseas. The government's rice tenders are in April and May.

New York's main oil contract, light sweet crude for delivery in May, touched 109.64 dollars per barrel early Tuesday. The contract later stood at 108.65 dollars, down 43 cents from the close on Monday. New York crude had forged a historic peak of 111.80 dollars on March 17 owing to a weak dollar, tightening global supplies and choppy world financial markets.

London's Brent North Sea crude for May dropped 48 cents to 106.66 dollars after earlier touching 107.78 dollars. That was close to a record high 108.02 reached in March. Oil prices were "still supported by renewed supply concerns after a fire at a Finnish refinery last Friday," said Sucden analyst Andrey Kryuchenkov on Tuesday. Prices surged higher after the fire at a 200,000 barrels-per-day refinery in Porvoo, Finland, he added.

Over the weekend, the OPEC secretary general, Abdullah al-Badri, rejected calls for an increase in the cartel's crude output, saying non-fundamental factors were to blame for current high prices. "At the moment there is enough oil in the market and no need to change OPEC's output," he said in Tehran late Saturday. The OPEC cartel defiantly maintained its output at 29.67 million barrels per day at its last meeting in March.

The head of London's 2012 Games described as "horrible" the burly henchmen who barged their way through the capital, shoving the public and even police out of the way. His trenchant remarks followed those of former Blue Peter presenter and torchbearer Konnie Huq, who revealed the Chinese minders barked orders at her and pushed her arm up to hold the flame higher. Sunday's scenes, which were repeated in France yesterday, brought accusations that Britain had imported Chinese police state tactics to control the supposedly showcase relay.

Referring to the Chinese security guards, who were in France yesterday with the torch on the next leg of its world tour, he said: "One thing in Paris is to get rid of those guys. They tried to push me out of the way three times. They are horrible. They did not speak English. They were thugs." Wearing blue tracksuits, the 14 minders surrounded the symbolic flame, pushing anyone who tried to get near, as it was relayed 31 miles across London.

Miss Huq, one of 80 torchbearers said: "The men in blue perplexed everyone. Nobody seemed to know who they were officially or what their title was. They were very robotic, very full on, and I noticed them having skirmishes with our own police and the Olympic authorities before our leg of the relay, which was confusing. They were barking orders at me, like 'Run! Stop!' and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, who are these people?' They kept pushing my hand up higher when I was holding the torch, so they were... interesting." Miss Huq was nearly knocked to the ground by a protester as thousands of campaigners disrupted the procession to demonstrate against China's human rights abuses and brutality in Tibet.

Some residents in Oakland, which is located south of Apopka, are outraged over the proposed limit on water and said the rapid growth in the area must stop until there is no longer a shortage. "I don't understand why they are allowing them to still build if the water supply is not there," Oakland resident "Susan" said. "And, why should we be cut?"

Mayor Rich Crotty said that if the county does not have a 40 percent reduction in water use, the aquifer will not have enough water to sustain the county. Similar to surrounding cities, water bills in Oakland order "no watering on any day between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. or face a $500 fine."

Local 6 reported that an average resident can use up to 90 gallons of water before leaving the house for the day. "If the growth stops today and we don't build another house, you're still going to have a water problem," Commissioner Willie Welch said. "People are going to have to learn to save (water)."

William Gray, the well-known Colorado State University hurricane forecaster, routinely uses the annual National Hurricane Conference as a platform to bash global warming. In a statement to Florida Today, Gray argued that the scientific consensus on global warming is bogus - and "a mild form of McCarthyism has developed toward those scientists who do not agree" that mankind is in danger.

"We are also brainwashing our children on the warming topic," Gray wrote. Some scientists believe global warming will actually decrease - not increase - the number of hurricanes that form over the Atlantic Ocean each year.

Knutson and Chris Landsea, science and operations officer with the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said historic observation data and computer models debunk doomsday scenarios that foresee armadas of deadly hurricanes, slamming into the Southeast. "Any hurricane trend we're seeing due to global warming really has very limited impact, very tiny changes," Landsea said.

The world will experience global cooling this year, according a leading climate scientist. The prediction - which follows a bitterly cold winter in China and the Arctic - is prompting some sceptics to question the theory of climate change.

However, the World Meteorological Organisation insists that this year's cooling has nothing to do with global climate change. In fact, this year's temperatures could still be way above the average - and it is possible that 2008 will exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming induced by greenhouse gases.

The Met Office predicts that 2008 will be around 0.4C warmer than the average for 1961-1990. It said temperatures are influenced by a range of variables - including changes in the sun's output, pollution and weather cycles such as La Nina. But most scientists argue that the long-term temperature rises since 1880 can only be explained by carbon dioxide from human activity.

New crime statistics released by the South African Police Service (SAPS) make grim reading: 19,202 murders; 52, 617 rapes; 12,761 home invasions; 13,599 carjackings; 92,021 aggravated robberies - and all of that just in the past year. And writers trying to make sense of that violent social landscape are turning increasingly to the crime genre. During the apartheid years, most would have found it unconscionable to write from a pro-police point of view, but the demise of apartheid has changed the equation. One of the new crime authors, Andrew Brown, whose Coldsleep Lullabye won the 2006 Sunday Times Literary Award for Fiction, was repeatedly arrested during the 1980s as a militant anti-apartheid activist. Twenty years on, he is a police reserve officer.

"Crime has become de-politicized," says Kunzmann, because unlike in the apartheid era where the law served the ends of racial domination, there is now a social consensus over what constitutes a crime. "Police officers [today] are officers of a law we all recognize."

Other crime writers concur: "It's now OK to write crime novels featuring the very cops who before had been seen as the soldiers of an invading army," says Mike Nicol, co-author with Joanne Hichens of Out to Score. "Crime writing is first and foremost about the two great human issues: mortality and morality. If you write about those two subjects you get to the heart and soul of a country, and so local crime writing is trying to make sense of this particularly vicious period of our history."

The rain clouds that had threatened all week were nowhere to be seen, and the Black Sea, usually choppy at this time of year was preternaturally still, providing the perfect backdrop for the two leaders to be photographed walking off into the sunset.

The chemistry between Bush and Putin was warm and sentimental - clearly, the continuing coolness in the relationship between Washington and Moscow is nothing personal. "I want to repeat and confirm that working with the U.S. President has always been pleasant and interesting for me," said Putin, praising his American counterpart's integrity and reliability. For his part, Bush did not spare words to heap up praise on the man whose soul he claimed to have glimpsed back in 2001, when they first met in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana, and decided he could trust.

And what of politics? Consumed with his global war on terrorism, Bush has tended to look the other way as Putin has curtailed whatever feeble political freedoms Russia enjoyed eight years ago. President Bush only laughed when an American correspondent asked who would now represent Russia at international forums and Putin answered that it would be his successor, Dmitri Medvedev, who once he becomes President, will, "under the Russian Constitution define foreign policies." Bush may have had reason to laugh: he knows as well as anyone who will hold the hand of the new Russian President once Medvedev is inaugurated next month.

The jury, which had spent almost six months listening to more than 250 witnesses from around the world, reached their decision on Monday after deliberating for four days in a case that had sparked worldwide media interest. A decade after the death of the world's most photographed woman at 36, Britain's former police chief John Stevens said he hoped this would bring closure to the tragedy and lay to rest conspiracy theories swirling around the case.

On the evening they died, Diana and Dodi fled from the back entrance of the Ritz Hotel in Paris in a futile effort to avoid swarms of paparazzi photographers. They pursued the couple on high-powered motorbikes into the Alma tunnel and took pictures of the dying princess in the wrecked Mercedes after it smashed into pillar 13. Dodi's father, luxury store owner Mohamed al-Fayed, had accused Queen Elizabeth's husband Prince Philip, Diana's former father-in-law, of ordering British security services to kill her and stop her marrying a Muslim and having his baby.

It was delayed for 10 years because Britain had to wait for the French legal process and then the British police investigation to run their course before it could begin. Both police inquiries concluded the crash was a tragic accident caused by Paul being drunk and driving too fast.

The news came after Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who launched a crackdown on Sadr's Mehdi Army late last month, ordered the cleric to disband his militia or face exclusion from the Iraqi political process. Black-masked Mehdi Army fighters have been principal actors in Iraq's five-year-old war and the main foes of U.S. and Iraqi forces in widespread battles over recent weeks.

Senior Sadr aide Hassan Zargani said Sadr would seek rulings from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most senior Shi'ite cleric, and senior Shi'ite clergy based in Iran, on whether to dissolve the Mehdi Army, and would obey their orders. "If they order the Mehdi Army to disband, Moqtada al-Sadr and the Sadr movement will obey the orders of the religious leaders," Zargani told Reuters from neighboring Iran, where U.S. officials say Sadr has spent most of the past year.

However, Sadr's spokesman in the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf, Salah al-Ubaidi, said the idea of disbanding the militia was not new and there was no plan to seek a ruling from top clerics. "Sadr is willing to dissolve the Mehdi Army if the higher religious authorities order him to do so. (But) this is an old idea and didn't come in response to Maliki's orders," he said.

Criminals are also targeting social networking sites, according to a web security firm report into online crime. Symantec says EU identities sell for more than American ones because they can be used across the EU.
Investigators say criminals are turning from online banking to social networks because their users are less careful.

According Symantec's latest twice-yearly Internet Security Threat Report, UK bank account details were the most advertised items on black-market forums used to trade stolen information. The most frequently targeted accounts belonged to high-value businesses, as the details could be sold for more than those of accounts with lower balances belonging to consumers.

Symantec also saw bulk-buying of personal details which had been packaged up in bargain bundles. In the final half of 2007, the security firm saw 50 credit card numbers for sale at £20 (£0.40 each), and 500 credit card numbers for £100 (£0.20 each). After credit cards, full identities were the third most common item advertised for sale - making up 9% of all advertised goods, an increase from 6% in the first half of 2007.