Nuclear subs collide in Atlantic

A Royal Navy nuclear submarine was involved in a collision with a French nuclear sub in the middle of the Atlantic, the MoD has confirmed.

HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant were badly damaged in the crash in heavy seas earlier this month.

First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Jonathon Band said the submarines came into contact at low speed and no injuries were reported.

Both the UK and France insisted nuclear security had not been compromised.

Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou has met China's senior envoy to the island in the highest level contact since 1949.

The meeting was brought forward five hours to avoid continuing protests by Taiwanese pro-independence groups.

Mr Ma defended his agreements with Beijing, saying they did not damage Taiwan's sovereignty.

The Chinese envoy, Chen Yunlin, has signed economic agreements with Taiwan but has also been trapped in a hotel by Taiwan pro-independence protesters.

Mr Chen's meeting with Mr Ma at a government guest house lasted just five minutes and involved the exchange of gifts - a vase from Mr Ma and a large scroll painting of a horse from Mr Chen.

Increased rainfall, or something linked to it, may be connected to the development of autism, scientists say.

The theory is based on child health and weather records from three US states, but has been greeted cautiously by a UK research charity.

The US study found autism rates were higher among children whose states experienced higher rainfall in their first three years.

The work appears in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

The rising rate of autism - up, by some measures, from one in 2,500 to one in 150 - has been attributed mainly to improvements in the way doctors are able to recognise the disorder.

The thickness of Arctic sea ice "plummeted" last winter, thinning by as much as 49 centimetres (1.6ft) in some regions, satellite data has revealed.

A study by UK researchers showed that the ice thickness had been fairly constant for the previous five winters.

The team from University College London added that the results provided the first definitive proof that the overall volume of Arctic ice was decreasing.

The findings have been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"The ice thickness was fairly constant for the five winters before this, but it plummeted in the winter after the 2007 minimum," lead author Katharine Giles told BBC News.

One of Europe's flagship space projects looks as though it is going to proceed with the UK continuing to be a bit-part player, scientists and engineers fear.

The Kopernikus programme is dedicated to acquiring and collating satellite data on the health of the planet.

Although Britain says it recognises the project's high value, especially for monitoring the climate, it has so far declined to take a lead in the venture.

Industry and academia have called for a swift change in government policy.

Failure to adopt a more positive approach before a critical meeting of Europe's space ministers next month will put expertise and jobs in the UK at risk, they warn.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has warned of "dramatic consequences" if Washington and Baghdad do not agree a security deal on US forces in Iraq.

He said if there were no Status of Forces Agreement the US would have to "basically stop doing anything".

Iraq's cabinet is demanding changes to a draft deal already agreed with Washington that would allow US forces to stay in Iraq until 2011.

Mr Gates said the US had "great reluctance" to renegotiate.

"I don't think you slam the door shut, but I would say it's pretty far closed," he said.

"If the US economy catches a cold, Mexico catches pneumonia," the saying goes. Money sent from the US by Mexican workers there rank as the country's second largest source of foreign income. But that money has dropped 12%, the Central Bank says, due to a recession in the US construction industry, a heavy user of Mexican labour. Tighter border controls and a US crackdown on illegal immigration have also played a role.

Despite these concerns, Mexico's President Felipe Calderon is confident that the country will not suffer the ramifications of the credit crunch, and has proposed to spend US$4.4 billion next year (£2.5bn; 3.3bn euros) on infrastructure projects.

The labour secretary for the Mexico City government, Benito Miron Lince, has announced plans to support some 30,000 workers who are expected to return to the Mexican capital because of the slowdown in the US. Officials have stated that the current unemployment insurance program, unveiled last autumn, will be broadened. According to Mr Miron Lince, demand for unemployment benefits has rapidly increased during the last few months.

With the wave of migrants heading back, it is becoming increasingly evident that re-adjusting to a country that was once their home is not that simple.

After spending most of their lives in the US, Mexican families barely recognise relatives or their towns. Children in particular are often mocked and discriminated against by their teachers and fellow students when they pronounce their names in an American accent. Many are returning to the same grinding poverty that originally drove them out.

Controlling the level of a fatty acid in the brain could help treat Alzheimer's disease, an American study has suggested.

Tests on mice showed that reducing excess levels of the acid lessened animals' memory problems and behavioural changes.

Writing in Nature Neuroscience, the team said fatty acid levels could be controlled through diet or drugs.

A UK Alzheimer's expert called the work "robust and exciting".

There are currently 700,000 people living with dementia in the UK, but that number is forecast to double within a generation.

US defence chief Robert Gates is seeking support from politicians on a draft deal to extend the US mandate in Iraq, which expires later this year.

Details have not been released, but officials say it would see US troops withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Mr Gates is said to be briefing key members of Congress on the deal, although their approval is not needed.

But the draft does need approval on the Iraqi side, which correspondents say could prove difficult.

The current UN mandate for US-led coalition forces in Iraq expires on 31 December. About 144,000 of the 152,000 foreign troops deployed there are US military personnel.

European shares have opened sharply lower following dramatic falls in Asia that saw Tokyo's Nikkei index fall 11%.

Global falls have largely wiped out the gains earlier in the week, as fears of recession cancelled out any optimism from the banking rescue package.

London's FTSE 100 opened 5% lower while the Cac 40 in Paris was down 6%.

On Wednesday, New York's Dow Jones index saw its worst one-day percentage fall on Wednesday since October 1987, closing almost 8% down

Shares in Hong Kong shed 7.6%. Australian, South Korea and Indian indexes all fell by at least 4%.

The comforting words of Indian politicians and financial officials - offering reassurance about the stability of the country's economy - are now ringing a little hollow.

The truth of the matter is India has been affected by the liquidity crunch - though arguably not as badly as other parts of the world have been.

The downturn in the West now appears to have reached India's shores. The Indian stock market is the most obvious and evident victim of the global credit crunch - having lost over half of its value since the crisis began - billions of dollars of foreign funds were pulled out of Indian shares, as foreign fund managers scrambled to get their books in order.

Concerns are growing here about a global recession and what that might mean for the 300 million strong Indian middle classes.

Many Indian professionals have put their savings into the stock market and into mutual funds over the last few years, tempted by the spectacular returns they saw.

This must be the week for the BBC to paint its logo on very large objects and send them off on ambitious journeys. You've already heard from Jeremy Hillman about 'The BBC Box,' a shipping container that will be used as a very creative way of illustrating global commerce over the next twelve months. The box was loaded onto a container ship in Southampton on Monday. It has now left the port of Greenock near Glasgow and is heading for China with Scotch whisky as its first payload.

The 'BBC Elections Bus' has also been sent on a 38 day journey across America, beginning in Los Angeles and ending in New York's Times Square. The bus is a project spearheaded by the BBC World Service, and includes journalists from every corner of the organisation: radio, language service, TV, and online.

I'm personally most looking forward to following what happens on the bus on the BBC News website. Two online journalists will be full-time bus riders; Jon Kelly will be blogging continuously throughout the journey, while Jennifer Copestake, a member of my World News America team, will be keeping a video diary of the trip.

What's the point of the BBC Bus? It is NOT to follow the presidential candidates or chronicle the 'who's up, who's down" horserace aspects of the contest for the White House. It IS to find out what's on the minds of Americans in all parts of this huge country during a historic election season; to see what issues matter most to citizens of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico...to gauge the real impact of the economic slump and housing crisis on families in Oxford, Mississippi...to find out how people in the 'oil patch' of Texas are coping with - or profiting from - higher oil prices.

 On the anniversary of the September 11th attacks, The World Tonight, had a special edition from Pakistan. Owen Bennett Jones presented the programme from Islamabad while Lyce Doucet reported from Afghanistan.

Seven years on from the attacks in New York and Washington, the key stronghold of groups linked to the Taleban and al-Qaeda is now the wild and remote mountain region straddling the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Many call this the new frontline in the battle between western forces, their Afghan and Pakistani allies, and armed Islamic militants.

But there is another way of looking at this region - it is the heartland of the Pashtuns - the tribal people who make up a large element of the population of both Afghanistan and Pakistan, but are resistant to the central authority of both states. The majority of the Taleban are Pashtuns and they have allied themselves to al-Qaeda.

In Afghanistan, American and Nato forces - with Afghan government troops - are involved in an increasingly fierce battle with the Taleban, while in Pakistan 120,000 Pakistani troops are engaged in large scale operations against Taleban fighters and their al-Qaeda allies.

These are the questions we hoped to address in the programme and ones we put to Afghan president Hamid Karzai and Pakistani Foreign Minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi as well as the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband.

The US presidential rivals have begun campaigning in earnest, as a new opinion poll put Republican John McCain ahead of Democrat Barack Obama.

Fresh from being nominated at their party conventions, the two men are now gearing up for the 4 November poll.

A USA Today-Gallup poll put Mr McCain ahead for the first time in months.

 US presidential rivals Barack Obama and John McCain have begun the final phase of their campaigns following their anointment by the party conventions.
Mr Obama, the Democratic candidate, seized on high unemployment figures to tell a rally that Republicans must be driven from the White House.

Republican John McCain promised to work to fix the economy.

Both candidates are focusing on key battleground states ahead of the presidential election in November.

Since my last blog, I've been busy putting together a highly skilled multiplatform team in place with a diverse range of skills for the new look Panorama website, from news and feature writing, editing and shooting video, encoding content for the web, to research and film archive.

The site hasn't re-launched yet, but we're already trying different things on the current website and on You Tube where Panorama's Primark: On The Rack special had a strong presence. This week's programme How The Economy Got Personal used information from an online "Feeling the Pinch" questionnaire which was suggested by Sandy Smith who edits Panorama. We promoted it on different platforms; our website, via the Panorama email newsletter and other parts of BBC News online, local radio and Jeremy Vine's show on Radio 2. More than 8,000 of you thought it was a good idea. A big thank you to all of you who took part.

The full results of the questionnaire are up on the website. Although it's not scientific as the figures were taken from a self-selecting sample rather than an official poll which has a representative sample, it did provide us with an interesting snapshot of what 8,770 people in the UK are concerned about.

So, in that sense it was invaluable to get such a big response to a story that has been dominating the headlines all year. That's why we're keeping the questionnaire online for a bit longer so if you haven't had a chance to to fill it in, you can.

And judging by the emails we've already received it's a story that will continue to develop as people struggle to cope with increasing fuel, energy and food bills as well as a fragile property market. We're always interested in how the big stories are affecting you, so if you've got a story you think we should investigate or know about please email panorama@bbc.co.uk.

Hurricane Gustav, raging ashore on the Gulf Coast, has cast a thousand-mile shadow all the way to St Paul, Minnesota, where the Republican convention opens/opened in curtailed and subdued session. Organisers are anxious not to be seen having a party while fellow Americans are losing their homes in a deluge. Convention proceedings are being kept to a constitutional minimum until the full extent of Gustav's wrath is known.

The US news networks, which provided round-the-clock coverage of last week's Democratic Party events, have a headache. To ensure a measure of balance they want to give similar prominence to the Republican event, but key correspondents and senior anchors have been redeployed south. Vast swathes of air time are going to catalogue Gustav's progress in minute, and sometimes morbid, detail, squeezing the time available for the events in St Paul. Politicians vie with meteorologists for the best slots.