The U.S. recovery appears to be faltering after a slowdown in consumer spending dampened growth and fueled fears of a double dip recession.

President Barack Obama's hopes of a strong showing in November's congressional elections took a blow as official figures revealed that the U.S. economy grew at an annualized rate of 2.4% in the second quarter compared with 3.7% in the first three months of the year.

Slower growth across the U.S., where almost one in 10 are out of work, was expected by economists. But many expressed surprise at the extent of the slowdown and the continued anxiety among consumers. While business investment grew strongly, consumers sat on their hands. Spending on services was especially weak with figures showing a meager 0.8% annual rise.

Christina Romer, chair of the White House council of economic advisers, said the growth had averaged more than 3% in the first half of the year, but expressed concern at a slowing trend.

"This solid rate of growth indicates that the process of steady recovery from the recession continues. Nevertheless, faster growth is needed to bring about substantial reductions in unemployment. Much work clearly remains to be done before the economy is fully recovered," she said.

Nowhere in Russia is the situation so explosive as in the autonomous republic of Dagestan. An ongoing Islamist insurgency has plunged the corruption-plagued region into near civil war. Some high-ranking Russian officials believe it will take years to defeat the extremists, if it can be done at all.

An old man is trudging home through the narrow, dusty streets of Gubden, carrying a last memento of his murdered son in the pocket of his trousers. The photo of his eldest son, which the man has stored on his mobile phone, shows a gaping hole next to his left eye. "They killed him when he could no longer defend himself," says the man, whose name is Magomedshapi Vagabov.

Vagabov takes off his grey, sheep's wool cap. His house lies in the shadow of a mosque that towers like a fortress over Gubden, a village in the mountains of Dagestan, a Russian republic in the Caucasus region. Representatives of the central government in Moscow rarely come to Gubden without the protection of armored vehicles and helicopters. It's not Russian criminal law but Sharia law that applies in this village of 4,000 inhabitants, many of whom sympathize with the Islamist insurgents who have spent more than a decade trying to establish a theocracy that would extend from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea.

Close to 9 million people live in the autonomous republics of Russia's northern Caucasus. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, each of these republics, particularly Chechnya, has been plagued by terrorism and war. But nowhere is the situation today as explosive as it is in Dagestan. This desperately poor strip of land on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, which is smaller than the U.S. state of West Virginia, is home to several dozen ethnic groups that are bitterly at odds over government posts and grazing land, while an Islamist insurgency wages a war against Moscow and Dagestan's Russian-controlled government.

After the WikiLeaks publication of classified military documents, the pressure on Western countries to withdraw from Afghanistan has become even greater. But unrealistic transition deadlines have damaging repercussions, argues Andrew Small of the German Marshall Fund.

"We have moved from a narrative, which lasted for years, that everything was fine when it wasn't, to a narrative that everything is going wrong when it isn't."

This lament from a former Western official, who, like others quoted in this piece, did not speak for attribution, summed up the frustrations of many in Kabul about the growing disconnect between the political timetables inside and outside the country. The concern is not only that the various transition deadlines are unrealistic, but that their very existence is creating counterproductive pressures that will make them even harder to achieve.

After last weekend's WikiLeaks publication of more than 90,000 classified military documents that paint a bleak picture of the war at the grassroots level, it has become even more difficult to argue that there is indeed any good news coming out of Afghanistan. But the one thing about last week's Kabul Conference on which everyone agrees is that the event happening at all was a tremendous success.

The largest gathering of foreign leaders to be held in Afghanistan in 30 years passed off without any serious security incidents. Forty foreign ministers flew in to sign off on plans that will channel at least 50 percent of development aid through the government's core budget and transfer security responsibility to Afghan National Security Forces by the end of 2014. For Karzai, this constituted the most visible show of international endorsement since last year's controversial presidential elections. One senior Western diplomat - a noted critic of the president - described him as more confident, more engaged, and more willing to take on responsibilities he had previously evaded.

New figures Thursday from Realty-Trac showed that foreclosure activity declined over the first six months of the year in nine of the 10 large metropolitan areas with the highest foreclosure rates.

However, most of the 206 metropolitan areas with 200,000-plus residents didn't fare as well. In fact, three out of four posted year-to-year increases in their foreclosure rates. Seventeen of the 20 hardest-hit areas were in Florida and California.

In the first half of 2010, more than 1.6 million U.S. properties were hit with foreclosure filings, which include bank repossessions, default notices and auction sale notices. That's up 8 percent from the first six months of 2009 and puts the U.S. on pace to top 3 million filings this year. That includes more than a million bank repossessions, and while sub-prime borrowers and bad loans led the surge in foreclosures in 2008 and 2009, this year's wave comes from homeowners who've lost their jobs.

The numbers reflect the widespread and continued fragility of local housing markets amid what's largely a jobless recovery. They also raise questions about the effectiveness of programs designed to fight foreclosures, such as the Obama administration's Home Affordable Modification Program.

As Germany's wild boar population has skyrocketed in recent years, so too has the number of animals contaminated by radioactivity left over from the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. Government payments compensating hunters for lost income due to radioactive boar have quadrupled since 2007.

It's no secret that Germany has a wild boar problem. Stories of marauding pigs hit the headlines with startling regularity: Ten days ago, a wild boar attacked a wheelchair-bound man in a park in Berlin; in early July, a pack of almost two dozen of the animals repeatedly marched into the eastern German town of Eisenach, frightening residents and keeping police busy; and on Friday morning, a German highway was closed for hours after 10 wild boar broke through a fence and waltzed onto the road.

Even worse, though, almost a quarter century after the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in Ukraine, a good chunk of Germany's wild boar population remains slightly radioactive - and the phenomenon has been costing the German government an increasing amount of money in recent years.

According to the Environment Ministry in Berlin, almost €425,000 ($555,000) was paid out to hunters in 2009 in compensation for wild boar meat that was too contaminated by radiation to be sold for consumption. That total is more than four times higher than compensation payments made in 2007.

The House ethics committee has a range of punishments it can administer or recommend to the full House. A reprimand is simply a vote by the House to express displeasure with a member's conduct, and would follow a finding of guilt in a trial.

Rep. Gene Green, D-Texas, said the two Democrats and two Republicans on the panel that investigated Rangel for two years were not unanimous in bringing all 13 charges against him, and "the recommendation we had was a reprimand." Green is one of the Democrats on the panel.

A separate ethics panel on Thursday set the stage for a trial of Rangel this fall. A trial would mean any decision on penalties would be months away, if Rangel's guilt is proved.

A reprimand is less serious than a censure, which requires not only a vote but forces a member to appear at the front of the chamber while the speaker or another designated member reads the censure resolution.

The eight ethics committee members who will conduct the trial held its organizational meeting Thursday. The message going forward, from the top Republican on the panel, was: Let the trial begin.

It is the starting point for our oceans' food chain. But stocks of phytoplankton have decreased by 40 percent since 1950, potentially as a result of global warming. It is an astonishing collapse, say researchers, and may have dramatic consequences for both the oceans and for humans.

The forms that marine flora and fauna come in are varied and spectacular. From bizarre deep sea creatures to elegant predators and giant marine mammals, the diversity in our planet's oceans is astounding.

But it is the microscopic organisms like diatoms, green algae, dinoflagellates and cayanobacteria that make it all possible. Phytoplankton is the first link in the oceanic food chain. It is eaten by zooplankton which is in turn eaten by other animals, which are then consumed by yet further sea creatures. Sometimes that chain can be quite short - the only thing that separates whales from phytoplankton in the food chain, for example, are the krill that come in between.

But it appears that humans may be in the process of destroying this fundamental link in the oceanic food chain. Temperatures on the surface of our oceans are rising because of climate change, resulting in a reduction of the stock of phytoplankton. Just how severe that reduction is, however, has long been a mystery.

Now, a frightening new study reveals the shocking degree of the die-off. Since 1899, the average global mass of phytoplankton has shrunk by 1 percent each year, an international research team reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature. Since 1950, phytoplankton has declined globally by about 40 percent.

With the financial crisis fading into the past, speculation on agricultural commodities markets has returned in force. Food prices are climbing once again as hedge funds rediscover the immense profits that can be made - led by a British chocolate baron.

Even by the standards of London's exclusive Mayfair neighborhood, businessman Anthony Ward leads a luxurious lifestyle. He and his family live in a 500-square-meter (5,380-square-foot) townhouse with five bedrooms, each with its own bath. There are separate quarters for the staff. When Ward opens a bottle of wine on his veranda in the evening, it's likely that it comes from his own vineyard at the foot of Paardeberg Mountain near Cape Town.

Ward's fabulous wealth comes as a result of his involvement in the cocoa business. The 50-year-old Briton with the nickname "Choc Finger" heads Armajaro, a commodities business and hedge fund he co-founded in 1998. In recent weeks, the hedge fund has caused a furor in the commodities markets. Traders report that Ward has purchased a vast number of futures contracts for the delivery of 241,000 tons of cocoa worth $1 billion (€770 million).

The cocoa represents about 7 percent of annual world production, enough to supply Germany with chocolate for an entire year. It was also enough to substantially drive up prices on the cocoa market. Last week, the price of cocoa climbed to a 33-year high.

What is so unusual about the British investor's coup is that he did not resell the contracts on the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE) before they expired, but instead took delivery of the beans. As a result, Armajaro now controls almost all the cocoa beans currently stored in registered warehouses in Europe, from Liverpool to Rotterdam to Hamburg.

British Prime Minister David Cameron has caused a furor in Pakistan by claiming it supports terrorists. Islamabad vehemently rejects the charge and accuses the West of blindly believing the WikiLeaks war logs.

British Prime Minister David Cameron has not been afraid to say what he thinks during a string of recent foreign trips, including calling Gaza a "prison camp" during a visit to Turkey. Now, his latest bit of plain speaking has sparked something of a diplomatic spat with Pakistan.

He offended Islamabad with comments made on Wednesday in, of all places, Pakistan's archenemy India. Speaking to an audience in the city of Bangalore, Cameron said: "We cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country is … able, in any way, to promote the export of terror whether to India, whether to Afghanistan or to anywhere else in the world."

Cameron later told the BBC that he had chosen his words carefully. "It is unacceptable for anything to happen within Pakistan that is supporting terrorism elsewhere," he said, adding: "It is well-documented that that has been the case in the past, and we have to make sure that the Pakistan authorities are not looking two ways. They must only look one way, and that is to a democratic and stable Pakistan."

His words have not gone down well in Pakistan, a country that is officially Britain's ally in the war on terror. Cameron was speaking just days after the publication of leaked U.S. military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan on the Internet platform WikiLeaks and in three media outlets, including Spiegel. According to the so-called war logs, the U.S. suspects that Pakistan is providing terrorists with a haven and that the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI is training insurgents and supplying them with weapons. According to one memo, the ISI was even involved in a  plot to assassinate the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. 

Gov. Jan Brewer called U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton's Wednesday's decision halting the law "a bump in the road," and her spokesman said they'd appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco later Thursday.

Outside the state Capitol, hundreds of protesters began marching at dawn, gathering in front of the federal courthouse where Bolton issued her ruling on Wednesday. They marched on to the office of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has made a crackdown on illegal immigration one of his signature issues.

At least eight protesters approached a police line and allowed themselves to be arrested. A group of about two dozen protesters then sat down in the middle of the street or refused to leave, and police arrested them as well.

Earlier, three people were detained at the courthouse after apparently entering a closed-off area. Former state Sen. Alfredo Gutierrez, who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2002, was among them.

For years, the government has denied that depleted uranium (D.U.), a radioactive toxic waste left over from nuclear fission and added to munitions used in the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars, poisoned Iraqi civilians and veterans.

But a little-known 1993 Defense Department document written by then-Brigadier Gen. Eric Shinseki, now the secretary for the Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.), shows that the Pentagon was concerned about D.U.  contamination and the agency had ordered medical testing on all personnel that were exposed to the toxic substance.

Shinseki's memo, under the subject line, "Review of Draft to Congress - Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium in the U.S. Army - Action Memorandum," makes some small revisions to the details of these three orders from the DoD:

1. Provide adequate training for personnel who may come in contact with D.U. contaminated equipment.

2. Complete medical testing of all personnel exposed to D.U. in the Persian Gulf War.

3. Develop a plan for D.U. contaminated equipment recovery during future operations.

The V.A., however, never conducted the medical tests, which may have deprived hundreds of thousands of veterans from receiving medical care to treat cancer and other diseases that result from exposure to D.U.

A U.S. federal judge Wednesday blocked the most controversial measures in an Arizona immigration law, placing an injunction on new police powers only hours before they were to come into effect at midnight.

The ruling delighted the law's opponents, which require Arizona police to demand immigration documents from anyone they have stopped. In practice, say opponents, the new law would target Hispanics and subject them to racial profiling, as well as conflicting with existing federal law and wasting police time.

While the statute remains on Arizona's books, and will take effect at midnight tonight, the ruling by U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton means the most controversial provisions are suspended for the time being. That could mean appeals by both supporters and opponents going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, according to legal experts.

In her 36-page ruling, Judge Bolton wrote: "There is a substantial likelihood that officers will wrongfully arrest legal resident aliens under the new [law]. By enforcing this statute, Arizona would impose a 'distinct, unusual and extraordinary' burden on legal resident aliens that only the federal government has the authority to impose."

The U.S. Justice Department, civil rights groups and local police had all asked the court for an injunction to stop the law - SB 1070 - from going into effect. The injunction will be appealed by the state, which passed the law back in April.

All signs suggest that the planet is still hurtling headlong toward climatic disaster. The U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has issued its "State of the Climate Report" covering January-May. The first five months of this year were the warmest since records began in 1880. May was the warmest month ever. Intense heat waves are currently hitting many parts of the world, yet still we fail to act.

There are several reasons for this, and we should understand them in order to break today's deadlock. First, the economic challenge of controlling human-induced climate change is truly complex. Anthropogenic climate change is caused by two principal sources of emissions of mainly carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide: fossil-fuel use for energy and agriculture (including deforestation to create new farmland and pastureland).

Changing the world's energy and agricultural systems is no small matter. It is not enough to just wave our hands and declare that climate change is an emergency. We need a practical strategy for overhauling two economic sectors that stand at the center of the global economy and involve the entire world's population.

The second major challenge in addressing climate change is the complexity of the science itself. Today's understanding of earth's climate and the human-induced component of climate change is the result of extremely difficult scientific work involving many thousands of scientists in all parts of the world. This scientific understanding is incomplete, and there remain significant uncertainties about the precise magnitudes, timing, and dangers of climate change.

The general public naturally has a hard time grappling with this complexity and uncertainty, especially since the changes in climate are occurring over a timetable of decades and centuries, rather than months and years. Moreover, year-to-year and even decade-to-decade natural variations in climate are intermixed with human-induced climate change, making it even more difficult to target damaging behavior.

The publication of the Afghanistan war logs by WikiLeaks has sparked a new debate about Germany's involvement in the conflict. The Social Democrats are threatening to withhold support for an extension of the German mission's mandate if the government does not provide answers about alleged wrongdoings revealed in the secret reports.

Speaking to German news magazine SPIEGEL about the publication of the Afghanistan war logs, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the material "will change the opinion of people in positions of political and diplomatic influence." In Germany, at least, his prediction appears to be coming true.

Rolf Mutzenich, the foreign policy spokesman for the parliamentary group of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), told the Wednesday edition of the Berliner Zeitung newspaper that the SPD would make their support for the extension of the Bundeswehr's mandate, which comes up for renewal in March 2011, dependent on how the government explains the details revealed by the war logs.

The SPD would "confront" the government with the new information, which has been obtained from over 90,000 documents uncovered by the whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks, and "question them intensively" about it, said Mutzenich . The details about the security situation in Kunduz, where German forces are stationed, and the activities of the U.S. Special Forces unit Task Force 373 make the government's recent statements about the conflict "look dubious," he said. Mutzenich called on the German government to check with its allies whether "all the U.S. Army's activities are covered by the ISAF mandate from the point of view of international law," referring to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.

Although Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government has enough votes in parliament to pass an extension of the mandate without SPD support, Merkel has in the past tried to win opposition votes to show that the mission is based on a broad social consensus.

Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, appears frequently in the war logs obtained by WikiLeaks. They suggest that even as Pakistan served as an ally to the United States, it was still secretly helping the Taliban in its insurgency in Afghanistan. The documents also suggest a major role is played by former ISI chief Hamid Gul.

Editor's note: The following article is an excerpt from this week's SPIEGEL cover story. The facts in the story come from a database of almost 92,000 American military reports on the state of the war in Afghanistan that were obtained by the WikiLeaks website. Britain's Guardian newspaper, the New York Times and SPIEGEL have all vetted the material and reported on the contents in articles that have been researched independently of each other. All three media sources have concluded that the documents are authentic and provide an unvarnished image of the war in Afghanstan - from the perspective of the soldiers on the ground.

Afghanistan's neighbor, Pakistan, has been in a tight spot since the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington. Officially, the country is part of the worldwide anti-terrorism coalition forged by former United States President George W. Bush. Unofficially, however, the Pakistani security forces are the patrons of the Taliban forces that gave refuge to Osama bin Laden and his terrorists. It is clear that the Taliban would not exist without help from abroad. The Pakistani intelligence service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), helped build up and install the Taliban after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and the country descended into a fratricidal war among the victorious mujahedeen, creating the threat of a power vacuum.

Despite all assurances by Pakistani politicians that these old connections were severed long ago, the country still pursues an ambiguous policy, in which Pakistan is both an ally of the United States and a helper of its enemies.

Now there is new evidence to support this. The war logs make it clear that the Pakistani intelligence service is still presumably the Taliban's most important supporter outside Afghanistan. The fact is that the war against the Afghan security forces, the Americans and their allies within the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is still being conducted from Pakistani soil, with the country serving as a safe haven for all hostile forces.

It also serves as a staging ground from which they can deploy. The Taliban's new recruits, including feared foreign fighters, are streaming across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The three main enemies of the Western coalition forces, the Taliban under Mullah Omar, the fighters led by former mujahedeen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the militias of the Haqqani clan of warlords all have important quarters and operations centers in Pakistan.

Osama bin Laden, the original justification for this war, is also believed to have found safe haven in Pakistan, where he is still involved in the day-to-day operations of jihad against the infidels. On one occasion, according to the documents, bin Laden planned to attack his enemies with a poison called, in his honor, "Osama Kapa," and on another he reportedly gave the gift of a wife to a particularly zealous Taliban fighter who had designed effective remotely triggered explosive booby traps.

The oil industry has been responsible for thousands of fires, explosions, and leaks over the last decade, killing dozens of people and destroying wildlife and the environment across America, according to a report published Thursday. 

None of the individual incidents catalogued by the National Wildlife Federation comes close in scale to BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental disaster in America's history. But the thousands of lesser offshore spills, pipeline leaks, refinery fires and other accidents demolish the industry argument that BP's ruptured well was a one-off, and that the oil and gas business has grown safer, the report's authors said.

"These disasters make it clear that the BP disaster isn't a rare accident," said Tim Warman, who directs the global warming program for NWF, which calls itself the country's largest conservation organization. "These are daily occurrences. These are daily incidents of not paying attention."

In a further grim reminder, the American Midwest was in the throes of its own environmental disaster Thursday, with a ruptured pipeline gushing gallons of oil into Michigan's Kalamazoo River.

The Afghan capital is on high alert after rioting sparked by the death of four civilians when a U.S.  embassy vehicle crashed into their car. There are fears of a repeat of the city-wide riots that struck Kabul in 2006.

Police fired shots into the air in a bid to disperse an angry mob that torched two embassy vehicles and threw stones at police and NATO soldiers who rushed to the scene near the center of Kabul's diplomatic quarter.

Sayed Abdul Ghafar Sayedzada, the head of Kabul's crime investigation department, said six Afghan civilians were involved in the accident and four died. The U.S. embassy said the vehicle had been carrying four U.S. contractors who "co-operated immediately with local Afghan security forces after the incident".

"Our sympathies go out to the families of those Afghans injured or killed in this tragic accident," said the embassy statement.

A western official said two embassy vehicles went to the scene to rescue the contractors but after one of the rescue cars got stuck on a central embankment everyone was forced to get into a single car.

The death toll in three days of flooding in Pakistan reached at least 430 Friday, rescue and government officials said, as rains bloated rivers, submerged villages, and triggered landslides.

The rising toll from the monsoon rains underscore the poor infrastructure in Pakistan, where under-equipped rescue workers were struggling to reach people stranded in remote villages. The weather forecast was mixed, with some areas expected to see reduced rainfall and others likely to see an intensification.

Pakistani TV showed images of people clinging to fences and other stationary items as water at times gushed over their heads.

The northwest appeared to be the hardest hit, and Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the information minister for the province, said it was the worst flooding in the region since 1929. The highway connecting Peshawar to the federal capital, Islamabad, was shut down after the water washed away bridges and other links.

At least 291 people died in various parts of that province over the last three days, said Mujahid Khan of the Edhi Foundation, a privately run rescue service that operates morgues and ambulances across the South Asian country.

In Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, at least 22 people were confirmed dead last night, the area's prime minister, Sardar Attique Khan, told reporters.

Britain's former deputy prime minister, Lord Prescott, has described how he had doubted intelligence reports about Iraq before the invasion but dismissed what he called "fashionable" criticism of Tony Blair for taking the country to war.

Offering fresh insights into the run-up to the invasion, he told the Chilcot inquiry: "When I kept reading them [intelligence reports], I kept saying to myself, 'Is this intelligence?' It was not very substantiated but clearly was robust."

Joint Intelligence Committee assessments contained conclusions "based too much on too little evidence, that was my impression at the time," he said. There was "a bit of tittle tatttle there, and a bit of judgment here".

Prescott said he felt "nervous" about the notorious claim in the government's September 2002 dossier that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. He said he adopted a skeptical approach but was not in a position to say to intelligence chiefs: "You are wrong."

He had asked Robin Cook, former foreign secretary then leader of the House of Commons, not to resign but said: "In the end of the day he was right." He admitted that Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, warned after the invasion in 2003 of the increased danger of a terrorist attack, but suggested she was simply trying to obtain additional funding for MI5.

Saddam Hussein drained the unique wetlands of southern Iraq as a punishment to the region's Marsh Arabs who had backed an uprising. Two decades later, one courageous U.S. Iraqi is leading efforts to restore the marshes. Not even exploding bombs can deter him from his dream.

Azzam Alwash is an anomaly in Iraq, a country devastated by war and terrorism. As he punts through the war zone in a wooden boat, his biggest concerns are a missing otter, poisoned water and endangered birds. Who thinks about the environment in southern Iraq, and who is willing to risk his life to save a marsh?

"Isn't this wonderful?" Alwash asks as his boat, accompanied by armed guards, glides through a channel lined with reeds. Flocks of birds fly through a reddish evening sky above the marshland, where the air temperature has dropped to 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) - cool by local standards. Basra, a city devastated by war, is only 60 kilometers (37 miles) away, and yet it might as well be on another planet.

Water buffalo snort as they swim past the boat. Alwash, a broad-shouldered man with bushy gray hair and a moustache, is beaming as he sits upright on the rowing bench. "Just look at this," he says. "There was a desert here just a few months ago."

In one case, CEO Ray McDaniel sold 100,000 shares of Moody's stock on the same day that the Securities and Exchange Commission notified Moody's that it was under investigation. The notice followed months of federal inquiries into Moody's business practices.

Moody's said that McDaniel's sales are within the scope of an SEC rule that's designed to protect executives from accusations of insider trading.

The rule permits executives to sell stock in their own firms under special 10b5-1 plans that trigger prearranged sales automatically, such as in set time intervals throughout the year, or when the stock hits a specified price.

However, experts question McDaniel's sales because he had key information about the company's finances that ordinary investors didn't have, because his stock sales' timing is curious, and because Moody's won't disclose when he set the terms of his plan's prearranged stock sales, or whether he changed those terms.

As the Gulf of Mexico oil spill hit the 100-day mark Wednesday, here are 10 big developments likely to influence future decisions on offshore exploration:

It doesn't all float: The massive slick has largely vanished - partly consumed by microbes and worked on by wind, waves and sun - but perhaps tens of millions of gallons may still be under water.

The discovery of vast deep sea plumes - thought to be the result of chemical dispersant reducing the gushing flow into tiny suspended droplets - has destroyed conventional wisdom about what happens when oil and seawater mix. Particularly when you add an unprecedented volume of chemical dispersants.

BP initially dismissed they were there.

Now, the plumes - likened to underwater clouds of mist - rank among the biggest cleanup concerns. Federal and academic researchers can't say for sure yet how big they are, what is likely to happen to them over time or whether the concentrations, which fade from strong around the well to barely detectable 40 miles away, are toxic to marine life.

In a SPIEGEL interview, genetic scientist Craig Venter discusses the 10 years he spent sequencing the human genome, why we have learned so little from it a decade on and the potential for mass production of artificial life forms that could be used to produce fuels and other resources.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Venter, when the elite among gene researchers undertook the decoding of the human genome, you were their greatest enemy. They called you "Frankenstein," "blood sucker," "Darth Venter" and even "asshole." Why do you attract so much hostility?

Venter: Well, nobody likes to be beaten - by superior intelligence, planning and technology. That gets people upset.

SPIEGEL: Every area of science is competitive. But it doesn't lead to that kind of hostility in all areas.

Venter: The human genome project was completely different, it was supposed to be the biggest thing in the history of biological sciences. Billions in government funding for a single project - we had never seen anything like that before in biology. And then a single person comes along and beats scientists who have been working on it for years. It is no wonder they didn't like that.

SPIEGEL: Wasn't it more the case that your opponents were afraid that you, as a profit-oriented entrepreneur, would make the human genome your own private property?

Venter: That is totally absurd; and you know it. Initially, Francis Collins and the other people on the Human Genome Project claimed that my methods would never work. When they started to realize that they were wrong, they began personal attacks against me and made up these things about the ownership of the genome. It was all absurd.

SPIEGEL: So it was all just propaganda?

Venter: At the end of the day, it is an argument over nothing. But this battle between common good and commerce -- that is the kind of story that sells newspapers.

SPIEGEL: Was the importance of gene patents, which fueled the dispute, exaggerated?

President Barack Obama already has taken the first steps by tucking new language into the Iran sanctions bill signed in early July. His aides are now compiling the "munitions list," which regulates the sale of military items.

The administration's stated reason for the changes is to simplify the sale of weapons to U.S. allies, but potential spin-offs include generating business for the U.S. defense industry, creating jobs and contributing to Obama's drive to double U.S. exports by 2015.

Critics say the reforms are being rushed and warn that the expedited procedures could allow weapons technology to fall into the wrong hands.

India, which currently is seeking 126 fighter-jets worth over $10 billion, 10 large transport aircraft worth $6 billion, and other multi-billion dollar defense sales, could be among the possible beneficiaries. Allies seeking advanced U.S. weaponry and equipment, who now often buy elsewhere due to the cumbersome U.S. approval process, would draw immediate benefit from the reforms, said U.S. officials.

An 88-year-old retired civil servant has been charged with participating in the murder of 430,000 Jews in a Nazi death camp. The former guard came under the radar of the prosecutors during their investigation into John Demjanjuk.

Many had predicted that the Demjanjuk trial, currently underway in Munich, would be the last big Nazi war crimes trial in Germany. But public prosecutors have now indicted another elderly man on charges relating to the Holocaust.

Samuel K. has been charged with participating in the murder of 434,000 Jews at the Belzec camp in occupied Poland. He is also charged with shooting dead 10 Jewish prisoners, according to the testimony of another former guard who has since died.

K., an 88-year-old retired civil servant who lives near the western German city of Bonn, was informed last week of his indictment, Christoph Goeke, of the Dortmund prosecutor's office, told the Associated Press.

K., who was a guard at the Belzec death camp from January 1942 to July 1943, had previously been questioned several times, in 1969, 1975 and 1980, by German investigators but had not become the focus of interest himself until his name was mentioned during the investigation into John Demjanjuk.

China may have no intentions of using its growing military might, but that is of little comfort for Western countries. From the World Trade Organization to the United Nations, Beijing is happy to use its soft power to get what it wants - and it is wrong-footing the West at every turn.

Former Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen once told me, half with amusement and half with resignation, that military people around the world are all more or less the same. "They can only be happy when they have the most up-to-date toys," he said.

If this is true, Beijing's generals must be very happy at the moment. China has increased its military budget by 7.5 percent in 2010, making funds available for new fighter jets and more cruise missiles. Beijing's military buildup is a source of concern for Western experts, even though the U.S.'s military budget is about eight times larger. Some feel that China poses a threat to East Asia, while others are even convinced that Beijing is preparing to conquer the world militarily.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Unlike, say, the United States, the People's Republic has not attacked any other country in more than three decades, not since it launched an offensive against Vietnam in 1979. And even though Beijing's leaders periodically rattle their sabers against Taiwan, which they refer to as a "renegade province," they have no intention of entering into any armed conflicts.

Unlike many in the West, they have long since recognized that bombs are little more than deterrents these days. In today's asymmetric conflicts, it is difficult to hold on to territory captured in bloody battles. War is an instrument of the past, and Mao's argument that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" no longer holds true today.

Phytoplankton might be too small to see with the naked eye, but they are the foundations of the ocean food chain, ultimately capturing the energy that sustains the seas' great beasts such as whales.

A new study though has raised the alarm about fundamental changes to life underwater. It warns that populations of these microscopic organisms have plummeted in the last century, and the rate of loss has increased in recent years.

The reduction - averaging about 1% per year - is related to increasing sea surface temperatures, says the paper, to be published Thursday in the journal Nature.

The decline of these tiny plankton will have impacted nearly all sea creatures and will also have affected fish stocks.

Record high water levels are putting the capacity of China's massive Three Gorges dam to the test after heavy rains across the country, compounding flooding problems that have left more than 1,200 people dead or missing.

The dam's water flow reached 56,000 cubic meters per second (1.96 million cubic feet), the biggest peak flow this year, with the water height reaching 158 meters (518 feet), the official Xinhua news agency reported. This is about 10% less than the dam's maximum capacity.

Chinese officials for years have boasted the dam could withstand floods so severe they come only once every 10,000 years. The dam is the world's largest hydroelectric project.

Floods this year have killed at least 823 people, with 437 missing, and have caused damage worth tens of billions of dollars, according to the state flood control agency. More heavy rains are expected for the southeast, southwest and northeast parts of the country.

Thousands of workers sandbagged riverbanks and checked reservoirs in Wuhan city in central Hubei province in preparation for potential floods expected to flow from the swollen Yangtze and Han rivers, an official with the Yangtze water resources commission said. "Right now the Han river in Hubei province is on the verge of breaching warning levels," said the official, who gave his name as Zhang.

It is difficult for politicians to admit they were wrong. But when it comes to Afghanistan, the  consequences of not doing so could be high. It is time for the West to cut its losses and withdraw.

The most difficult thing to do in politics is to change course - admitting that everything that was right yesterday is wrong today. It is a particularly challenging maneuver when the decision is between war and peace.

Winston Churchill, stubborn as he was, never could admit that he had made a mistake in 1915 when, as first lord of the Admiralty, his strategic error helped lead to the bitter defeat of the Entente troops at the hands of the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli. Similarly, it took 30 years for former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to acknowledge that the Vietnam War had been a mistake.

The German government, NATO and the West shouldn't wait that long. Together they should realize - and admit -  that the war in Afghanistan is not going to end in success. We have failed. The war has been lost. The country that we leave behind will not be pacified. It is possible that we could have been successful had we understood earlier how the country works. But now, we are no longer a part of the solution - increasingly, we have become part of the problem. It is best just to leave now, before additional blood is spilled. The secret war logs given by WikiLeaks to SPIEGELconfirm as much.

Led by the U.S., NATO and other Western allies have been trying to pacify Afghanistan for almost 10 years - with little success. War aims have changed frequently. None of them, however, has been achieved. The intervals  between the large-scale Afghanistan conferences, from Berlin to Paris, London to Kabul, have become ever shorter, but the list of problems has only grown. The country remains a potential breeding ground for terrorism as it was prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S. And little that the West has imported to Afghanistan since then has put down such deep roots that it would survive a pullout for long. Girls' schools, wells and newly paved roads are pleasant side effects of the NATO mission in Afghanistan. As a justification, however, they are not enough.

In the strongest British criticism of Pakistan so far, the prime minister warned Islamabad it could no longer "look both ways" by tolerating terrorism while demanding respect as a democracy.

In an angry response, Pakistan's high commissioner to Britain accused Cameron of damaging the prospects for regional peace, and criticized him for believing allegations in the WikiLeaks documents published in the Guardian  earlier this week.

The leaked documents claim that the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence agency, is still encouraging the Taliban.

Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan's high commissioner, writes on the Guardian Comment is fee site: "One would have wished that the prime minister would have considered Pakistan's enormous role in the war on terror and the sacrifices it has rendered since 9/11.

"There seems to be more reliance on information based on intelligence leaks which lack credibility of proof. A bilateral visit aimed at earning business could have been done without damaging the prospects of regional peace."