UN troops failed 242 women and children who suffered a mass rape attack in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a top UN peacekeeping official has said.

Congo hosts the largest and most costly UN peacekeeping mission in the world, but the mass rape attacks happened just 30km from a UN base some time between July 30 and August 3 in the North Kivu region.

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BP says no single factor caused the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst ecological catastrophe in recent US history.

Instead, "a sequence of failures involving a number of different parties" led to the explosion which killed 11 people and caused the leak.

The company said it had accepted all the recommendations in the report, and would implement them worldwide.

An estimated 4.9m barrels of oil leaked into the Gulf after the blast.

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In July, a 30-inch oil pipeline burst in Battle Creek, Mich., near a tributary of the Kalamazoo River. The cracked pipe leaked an estimated million gallons of oil into the water, and at the time, Enbridge Energy, the Canadian company that owns the pipe, promised a complete cleanup and rigorous review of its practices. "This is our responsibility," said Patrick Daniel, Enbridge's chief executive officer. "This is our mess. We're going to clean it up."

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PARIS - French strikers disrupted trains and planes, hospitals and mail delivery Tuesday amid massive street protests over plans to raise the retirement age. Across the English Channel, London subway workers unhappy with staff cuts walked off the job.

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BUDAPEST - The European Union will prolong the global downturn if policymakers in the bloc's big economies insist on austerity measures to cut budget deficits, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said on Tuesday.

Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, said austerity as a policy to end the global crisis was a 'disaster', adding that Europe was heading towards more economic difficulties if politicians meant what they say when they promised to cut back spending rather than just trying to calm down markets.

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BAGHDAD — Two American soldiers were killed on Tuesday when an Iraqi army comrade opened fire after an argument over a sports match, the first US deaths since Washington declared an end to combat operations here.

The shooting, which also left nine American soldiers wounded, happened at the Iraq's Al-Saadiq Air Base near the city of Tuz Khurmatu in Salaheddin province while a US army company was visiting local security forces.

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As President Barack Obama formally declared an end to combat operations in Iraq this week, the anti-war movement that helped sweep him into office - and that worked for seven years to bring U.S. troops home - finds itself struggling for survival.

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It boasted that it would introduce a new dining movement to Germany, called for diners to donate body parts to be incorporated into the dishes, and even advertised for a surgeon to perform the amputations.

But Flime, the Berlin restaurant which was nicknamed the "Cannibal Cafe" and was due to open in Berlin today has - perhaps not surprisingly - been exposed as a fake.

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It is a tragedy, a horror, a crime against humanity. The details of the murders - of the women beheaded, burned to death, stoned to death, stabbed, electrocuted, strangled and buried alive for the "honor" of their families - are as barbaric as they are shameful. Many women's groups in the Middle East and South-west Asia suspect the victims are at least four times the United Nations' latest world figure of around 5,000 deaths a year.

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PARIS  - The United Nations declared 2010 the Year of Biodiversity. But 17 years after the Convention on Biological Diversity was adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the issue of biopiracy is still pitching North against South.

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STOCKHOLM  - A major week-long international water conference opened in the Swedish capital Monday with an ominous warning: time is running out faster than fresh water.

If the "massive and complex challenges" facing one of the world's most finite natural resources are not resolved soon, the future looks grimly devastating: scarcities, pollution, droughts, floods, desertification and diseases.

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High tide, and the remains of a late summer storm, and it is hard to tell on this strip of land between the Mississippi and the marsh where land ends and water begins. It was here - in the most southerly reaches of Louisiana on terrain that is slowly sliding into the sea - that oil from BP's Macondo well first started coming ashore, about a week after the 20 April explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. Eleven men were killed when the drilling platform blew up.

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WASHINGTON — US President Barack Obama unveiled plans Monday to spend at least 50 billion dollars to expand and renew US roads, railways and airports, in a fresh bid to fire up sluggish economic growth.

President Obama will speak in Milwaukee this Labor Day, his second Wisconsin appearance in as many months.

The president's attentiveness to the state is notable, if perhaps somewhat less than altruistic.

This is, after all, an election year. And Wisconsin is the swingingest of swing states — a state where a governorship that has been in Democratic hands could be lost, and where a Senate seat and at least one U.S. House seat are vulnerable.

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Unions have intensified political fundraising and spending for the upcoming midterm elections, which union leaders and political analysts alike describe as the most important campaigns for the labor movement in decades.

The result this Labor Day is that unions are forging closer alliances with each other as they strategize about how to spend money, deploy staff and determine which races to target.

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WASHINGTON — Twenty years after northern spotted owls were protected under the Endangered Species Act, their numbers continue to decline, and scientists aren't certain whether the birds will survive even though logging was banned on much of the old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest where they live in order to save them.

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It has been a summer of record temperatures — Japan had its hottest summer on record, as did South Florida and New York. Meanwhile, Pakistan and Niger are flooded and the eastern US is mopping up after hurricane Earl. None of these individual events can definitively be attributed to global warming.

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Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.

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Two Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air raids in the Gaza Strip, medics and security sources say. Another person has been critically injured.

The Israeli army launched three raids in the south of Gaza on Saturday after Palestinian fighters fired a rocket over the border.

The flare-up of violence on the Israel-Gaza border came just two days after the relaunch of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in the US.

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The UN has called an urgent meeting on rising global food prices in an attempt to head off a repeat of the 2008 crisis that sparked riots around the world.

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DUBLIN - Violent skirmishes broke out between protesters and police at the first public signing for Tony Blair's memoirs, with shoes and eggs hurled at the former prime minister.

Three men were arrested after they broke through a security barrier at around 10.45am today outside Eason's bookshop on O'Connell Street in Dublin, Ireland.

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The new confrontation emerged yesterday as BP announced that total costs arising from the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on 20 April, in which 11 workers died in one the worst environmental disasters in US history, rose by a further $2bn last month to around $8bn.

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The Great Jobs Depression continues to worsen.

The Labor Department reports this morning that companies created ony 67,000 new jobs in August. That's down from the 107,000 they created in July. And because the government laid off temporary Census workers, the economy as a whole lost 54,000 jobs.

To put this into perspective, we need 125,000 net new jobs a month just to keep up with the growth of the population and the potential workforce.

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WASHINGTON - A surprisingly small number of scientists have studied the impacts of the oil spill resulting from the 1979 blowout at the Ixtoc I oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Wes Tunnell, who first studied the spill's effects in July and August of 1980 and has returned many times since, is one of the few exceptions.

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As the online world continues to expand, Oxford University's Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield has warned excessive screen culture may be changing the way our brains are wired.

The effect of screen culture on the brain is not dissimilar to symptoms associated with attention deficit disorder, such as a shorter attention span and decline in empathy.

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Enbridge Inc. will be investing $185 million to expand its Athabasca oilsands pipeline in time to accommodate new volumes from Cenovus Energy's Christina Lake project, the pipeline giant said.

The announcement Thursday was the second in less than a week about projects in the northeast corner of Alberta.

The newest expansion will boost capacity of the Athabasca pipeline to 430,000 barrels per day when it comes online by the fall of 2013, Enbridge said.

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An explosion Thursday on a Gulf of Mexico oil platform thrust the politics of offshore drilling back in the spotlight, as critics immediately seized on the accident to highlight what they called the industry's inherent dangers.

The explosion and fire happened Thursday morning at a production platform at Vermilion Block 380, about 100 miles off the Louisiana coast, according to its owner, Houston-based Mariner Energy, Inc.

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VIENNA - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog has invited Israel to consider joining a global anti-nuclear arms pact and to place all its atomic facilities under his agency's inspections, an IAEA report said on Friday.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report said Director General Yukiya Amano met with Israeli leaders during a visit to Israel last month to discuss an Arab-led push for the Jewish state to accede to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

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The organizer of the Rally for Jobs events, The American Petroleum Institute (API), with help from other industry groups including the Independent Petroleum Association of America, the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association and the International Association of Drilling Contractors.

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