It is the first time the flow has stopped since an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig on 20 April.

The well has been sealed with a cap as part of a test of its integrity that could last up to 48 hours.

BP executive Kent Wells said the oil was stopped at 1425 local time (1925 GMT) and he was “excited” by the progress.

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.

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.

The US government’s incident commander, Adm 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.

“We can go back then and put the system under pressure again. Once we are convinced we can certainly consider shutting in the well that is always possible and we would certainly look to do that.”

But he emphasised that the option of shutting in the well – closing all the valves and stopping the flow – was a “side benefit” of the new capping stack.

The priority had always been to increase the amount of oil being captured and piped to the surface, he said.

Whatever happens will be a temporary solution, ahead of a relief well being used to permanently killing the original well with mud and cement.

Work on both of the relief wells is currently suspended because of the integrity test. One of the relief wells is within four or five feet horizontally and 100ft vertically of intersecting.

The pressure test was twice delayed before starting on Thursday, once while additional checks were put in place to allay fears it could make the leak worse, and on Wednesday by a leaking piece of equipment.

Meanwhile, BP continues to face political pressure in the US.

A Congressional committee has agreed measures that would ban the firm from new offshore drilling for seven years.

And in a separate move, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said she will look into a request by four senators to investigate allegations that BP lobbied for the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi while attempting to finalise an oil deal with Libya.

The 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 killed 270 people – most of them were American.

Megrahi, who has terminal prostate cancer, was freed by Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill on compassionate grounds in August 2009 after serving eight years.

In a statement on Thursday, BP admitted it had expressed concern to the UK government about the slow progress of a prisoner transfer agreement between the two countries.

But the firm said it had taken no part in discussions on the decision to free Megrahi.

And the UK ambassador to Washington, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, said: “Claims in the press that Megrahi was released because of an oil deal involving BP, and that the medical evidence used by the Scottish Executive supporting his release was paid for by the Libyan government, are not true.”

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The first blast occurred at 9:20 p.m. in front of the city’s Grand Mosque, and the second explosion followed within minutes, IRNA said.

The news agency reported that at least 20 people were killed and 100 were injured. Iran’s state-run Arabic channel, Al-Alam, reported that at least 30 were killed and more than 50 injured.

“It is not yet possible to announce the exact number of those killed and injured in the incident,” a police official said, according to IRNA. Zahedan is the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province, which borders Pakistan.

Iranian Deputy Interior Minister Ali Abdollahi labeled the incident a terrorist act, the semi-official Fars news agency said.

“Terrorist operations in Zahedan have left several dead and injured,” Abdollahi said, according to Fars.

“More information will be given when our investigations are completed,” he told Fars.

An official in Zahedan told IRNA that “the two explosions were the result of suicide bombings. First, someone in a woman’s clothing tried to enter the Jam-e Mosque in Zahedan but was prevented from entering.”

It was not immediately known whether that person was a man or a woman, the official said.

Three or four people died in the first explosion, and while people were trying to help those victims, the second suicide bomber detonated his explosives, the official told IRNA.”

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The vaccine would fight off all strains of influenza – from the routine winter flu that brings misery to tens of thousands of people each year, to virulent new strains of deadly bird flu.

Two injections could give up to a decade of protection unlike the current vaccine which has to be given every autumn to catch the latest strains.

Although the jab is at an early stage of development, scientists have tested it successfully on monkeys. Safety trials have already begun and its effectiveness could be tested in patients as early as 2013.

The creation of a universal flu jab is a holy grail for doctors.

In a typical year, winter flu kills around 2,000 people in England and Wales – mostly the elderly or sick. But in 2008-09 it killed around 10,000 people while in 1999-2000 it claimed more than 20,000 lives.

The virus is constantly mutating so that different strains predominate from year to year.

Researchers across the world are already working on universal flu jabs, some of which have begun clinical trials.

The latest breakthrough comes from scientists US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland who have developed a unique two-step approach to immunisation.

Working with mice, ferrets and monkeys, the team first primed the immune system with DNA taken from a flu virus.

Injections of flu DNA provokes a much stronger response from the immune system than a conventional vaccine made from a whole virus.

They then gave the animals a ‘booster’ consisting of a regular seasonal flu vaccine.

The combination was effective against flu viruses of different sub-types and from different years, the researchers reported in the journal Science.

Although the DNA part of the vaccine came from a 1999 virus, the antibodies – cells that seek out and neutralise viruses – produced in response to the jab were effective against other strains.

Mice and ferrets produced antibodies that were effective against strains of flu that circulated in 1934, 2006 and 2007.

The vaccine was also effective against a range of type A flu viruses – the type that causes most outbreaks. These included highly virulent H5N1 ‘bird flu’.

In other experiments, the scientists measured how well the new vaccine protected mice and ferrets against deadly levels of flu virus.

Three weeks after receiving the boost, 20 mice were exposed to high levels of 1934 flu virus and 80 per cent survived. When mice were given either of two elements of the vaccine alone, they died.

Similar results were seen in ferrets, which are good predictors of flu vaccine effectiveness in humans.

Study leader Dr Gary Nabel, said: ‘We are excited by these results. The prime-boost approach opens a new door to vaccinations for influenza that would be similar to vaccination against such diseases as hepatitis, where we vaccinate early in life and then boost immunity through occasional, additional inoculations in adulthood.

‘We may be able to begin efficacy trials of a broadly protective flu vaccine in three to five years.’

Antibodies usually target a protein on the surface of the flu virus that is shaped like a lollipop-shaped flu virus.

The head of the protein, called haemagglutinin (HA), mutates easily – allowing the virus to go undetected when a new strain emerges.

But the new vaccine generates antibodies that target the ‘stick’ of the HA lollipop, which varies little from strain to strain.

Antibodies that recognise the virus stem should be able to neutralise multiple strains, scientists believe.

Prof John Oxford, Britain’s leading flu expert, said the vaccine had huge potential – but cautioned it was still at the early stage.

‘It’s a very opportune moment for something like this,’ he said today. ‘We are not yet out of the swine flu business, while there are concerns that the H5N1 bird flu could mutate into a form that spreads among people.’

Currently it takes manufacturers months to create enough jabs in the event of a new strain of flu emerging. People getting a jab have to be vaccinated the following year.

He added: ‘Making a universal flu vaccine would be expensive, but it would allow stockpiles to be built up ahead of a pandemic. At the moment it takes a long time to develop and manufacture enough vaccine if a new strain appears.

‘But there’s a big jump from animals to humans and not every vaccine that works in an animal works for people.’”

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“Russian companies are prepared to deliver oil products to Iran. The possibility of delivering oil products to Iran exists, if there is a commercial interest,” said Russian Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko.

Russia already expressed its dissatisfaction with sanction measures, agreed last month by the U.S. and the EU, to punish Iran for its defiance in the nuclear standoff with Western countries.

These go beyond the new U.N. sanctions, agreed by Russia and other world powers, which mainly target military-related industries.

“Sanctions cannot hinder us,” Shmatko said after a meeting in Moscow with Iranian Petroleum Minister Massoud Mir Kazemi, quoted by Russian news agencies.

Iran, which holds around 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves, is the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter and the second-largest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, after Saudi Arabia.

However, a lack of refining capacity and inefficiency problems means Iran needs to import vast volumes of gasoline from a variety of sources in order to satisfy domestic demand.”

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Daniel Houghton, 25, was caught by MI5, its internal security counterpart, in a ”sting” operation in a central London hotel as he tried to leave with £900,000 ($1.5 million) cash in a suitcase.

Undercover officers set him up after a tip-off from the Dutch intelligence agency, which he had offered British secrets.

Houghton, a computer programmer, had been helping to develop a cutting-edge technique for intercepting emails, sources said.

In order to drive up the price of the material, he also stole staff lists and home and mobile telephone numbers of intelligence officers.

The information, which Houghton smuggled out of MI6′s headquarters in Vauxhall Cross, was labelled ”top secret” and ”secret”. If leaked, it would have had a ”severe impact on operational capabilities and particularly the ability to collect intelligence”, a security source said.

MI6 has IT security measures in place that are supposed to stop computer users copying files. It also conducts bag searches and vets recruits.

At the Old Bailey on Wednesday Houghton pleaded guilty to two charges under the Official Secrets Act concerning the unlawful disclosure of material relating to security or intelligence. He was told he faces an ”inevitable” custodial sentence.

Piers Arnold, prosecuting, said Houghton claimed he was ”directed by voices” to try to sell the secrets. The judge adjourned the case for further psychiatric reports.

MI6 was unaware of what Houghton was doing until he contacted the Dutch intelligence service last August.

Houghton, who has dual British and Dutch nationality, worked for MI6 between September 2007 and May last year, after leaving university, where he studied interactive computer systems.

In the hands of another intelligence agency, a staff list of the members of MI5 and MI6 would have been vital material for entrapment operations and the interception techniques British security and intelligence services have developed is valuable information.

Houghton’s lawyer, Michael O’Kane, said the thought of some foreign spy agencies gaining the information ”would send a shiver down the spine of everyone in this courtroom. The Dutch do not fall into that category.”

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Obama will attend a groundbreaking ceremony for a plant that will manufacture advanced batteries for Chevrolet and Ford electric cars. The Compact Power plant in Holland, Mich., is the ninth factory to begin construction following the $2.4 billion investment in advanced batteries and electric vehicles Obama announced last August.

An Energy Department report to be released Thursday says the investments will increase U.S. production of advanced batteries from 2 percent to 40 percent of the world’s supply by 2015, creating thousands of jobs along the way.

“We’re going to build these products in America,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Wednesday. “We’re going to employ Americans. I think that’s a strong economic record.”

But recent polls suggest the public’s confidence in the president’s record on the economy is slipping. A Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted this month found that just 43 percent of Americans approved of Obama’s handling of the economy, down from 50 percent last month.

With unemployment expected to hover near 10 percent through November’s midterm elections, White House officials know they will have a tough sell with voters as they argue that the economy would be even worse had it not been for Obama’s $862 billion stimulus program.

Investing in electric vehicles has been a central tenet of Obama’s message on the economy and clean energy. He’s pledged to put 1 million plug-in hybrid electric vehicles on U.S. roads by 2015. The administration has said the $2.4 billion investment could spur the production of 50,000 batteries a year for plug-in hybrids by 2011 and 500,000 batteries a year for the advanced vehicles by late 2014.

Most of the batteries are now manufactured in Asia, and auto suppliers and manufacturers have sought ways to expand the battery industry in the United States.

Michigan is the largest recipient of the electric battery grants and is expected to receive more than $1 billion. About $150 million of that is going to the Compact Power plant. Administration officials say the construction project will create about 300 jobs, with an additional 300 workers hired once the factory is operational.

With Michigan facing 13.7 percent unemployment, the state’s governor says those jobs are welcome news.

“It’s clearly going to have an impact if we have a whole new sector added to our economy,” Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm said. “It’s not the only answer, but it certainly is a significant one.”

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Archaeologists said the 32ft-long vessel was probably used along with other debris to fill in land to extend New York City into the Hudson River.

Those who examined the find described it as ‘significant’.

An anchor weighing seven stone was also discovered at the site, although investigators said it was unclear whether it belonged to the newly-unearthed ship.

Archaeologists Molly McDonald and A. Michael Pappalardo examined the ship when it was found by staff about 30ft below street level in a planned underground vehicle security centre.

Ms McDonald said: ‘We noticed curved timbers that a backhoe [mechanical digger] brought up.

‘We quickly found the rib of a vessel and continued to clear it away and expose the hull over the last two days.’

The two archaeologists work for AKRF, a firm hired to document artefacts discovered at the site.

They called Tuesday’s find significant but said more study was needed to determine the age of the ship.

‘We’re going to send timber samples to a laboratory to do dendochronology that will help us to get a sense of when the boat was constructed,’ said McDonald.

A boat specialist was due at the site today to further investigate the find which is turning into a race against time after the delicate wood was exposed to air.

‘I kept thinking of how closely it came to being destroyed,’ Mr Pappalardo said.

The discovery of the ship was made on land which was not disturbed by construction of the original World Trade Centre towers in the 1960s.

The 2001 terrorist attacks destroyed the iconic Twin Towers, prompting a competition to design their replacement.

Work on One World Trade Centre, a single skyscraper originally named Freedom Tower, started in 2006.

The 1,776ft building is expected to be completed and open by 2013.”

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A new study on the spread of emotions through social networks shows that these feelings circulate in patterns analogous to what’s seen from epidemiological models of disease.

Earlier studies raised the possibility, but had not mapped social networks against actual disease models.

“This is the first time this contagion has been measured in the way we think about traditional infectious disease,” said biophysicist Alison Hill of Harvard University.

Data in the research, in the July 7 Proceedings of the Royal Society, comes from the Framingham Heart Study, a one-of-a-kind project which since 1948 has regularly collected social and medical information from thousands of people in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Earlier analyses found that a variety of habits and feelings, including obesity, loneliness, smoking and happiness appear to be contagious.

In the current study, Hill’s team compared patterns of relationships and emotions measured in the study to those generated by a model designed to track SARS, foot-and-mouth disease and other traditional contagions. They discounted spontaneous or immediately shared emotion — friends or relatives undergoing a common experience — and focused on emotional changes that followed changes in others.

In the spread of happiness, the researchers found clusters of “infected” and “uninfected” people, a pattern considered a “hallmark of the infectious process,” said Hill. “For happiness, clustering is what you expect from contagion rates. Whereas for sadness, the clusters were much larger than we’d expect. Something else is going on.”

Happiness proved less social than sadness. Each happy friend increased an individual’s chances of personal happiness by 11 percent, while just one sad friend was needed to double an individual’s chance of becoming unhappy.

Patterns fit disease models in another way. “The more friends with flu that you have, the more likely you are to get it. But once you have the flu, how long it takes you to get better doesn’t depend on your contacts. The same thing is true of happiness and sadness,” said David Rand, an evolutionary dynamics researcher at Harvard. “It fits with the infectious disease framework.”

The findings still aren’t conclusive proof of contagion, but they provide parameters of transmission rates and network dynamics that will guide predictions tested against future Framingham results, said Hill and Rand. And whereas the Framingham study wasn’t originally designed with emotional information in mind, future studies tailored to test network contagion should provide more sophisticated information.

Both Hill and Rand warned that the findings illustrate broad, possible dynamics, and are not intended to guide personal decisions, such as withdrawing from friends who are having a hard time.

“The better solution is to make your sad friends happy,” said Rand.”

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An Israeli attack on Iran would fail to stop Tehran’s alleged nuclear weapons program and would lead to a “long war” that would be marked by economic instability and mass civilian casualties, says a study from British think tank.

In a report (PDF) released Wednesday, the Oxford Research Group stated that, while the likelihood of a US attack on Iran’s nuclear program has been lessened by the Obama administration’s policies, advances in Israeli military technology have increased the potential for an Israeli attack.

The study, entitled “Military Action Against Iran: Impact and Effects,” also argues that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would galvanize the Iranian public behind the leadership of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and give the regime in Tehran more support and rationale for developing nuclear capabilities.

“An Iranian administration under attack would experience considerable national unity and would work rapidly to redevelop its weapons programs, withdrawing from the NPT and prioritizing nuclear weapons,” the report states.

As a result of that, the study concluded, Israel would be forced into repeatedly attacking Iranian facilities, “resulting in prolonged conflict — the start of a long war with potential regional and global consequences.”

Furthermore, the report — written by Paul Rogers, a professor of peace studies at Bradford University — suggested that any Israeli strike on Iran would cause a large number of civilian casualties because the Israeli strike would likely not be limited to the nuclear facilities themselves.

Israel “would hit factories and research centers, and even university laboratories, in order to do as much damage as possible to the Iranian expertise that underpins the program,” Rogers said in a press release. Any Israeli military attempt to neutralize Iran’s nuclear facilities “would probably include attempts to kill those technocrats who manage Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.”

“There would be many civilian casualties, both directly among people working on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, but also their families as their living quarters were hit, and secretaries, cleaners, laborers and other staff in factories, research stations and university departments,” Rogers said.

The ORG argues in its report that Iran would have many options in retaliating for an attack on its nuclear facilities. Chief among them would be Iran’s ability to block the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow body of water separating the Indian Ocean from the Persian Gulf, through which oil tankers from the Middle East have to travel. If Iran were to block the Strait, oil prices would jump dramatically throughout the world.

Iran could also launch “paramilitary and/or missile attacks” on Western oil processing facilities in the Middle East, and could begin supporting groups fighting the US presence in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq.

Earlier this month, President Barack Obama signed into law another round of US sanctions against Iran, following on the heels of a fourth round of sanctions placed on the country by the UN.

Whether or not Iran is planning to build nuclear weapons has been an issue of controversy for years. While Iran says its nuclear program is purely for peaceful purposes, Israeli lawmakers have described it as an “existential threat” to the small Jewish state.

The ORG report says that Iran is “slowly developing the technologies and personnel to enable it to handle a range of nuclear-related systems.” If the country were to decide to use those capabilities to make weapons, it would take three to seven years for it to produce six usable weapons.

“There is no firm evidence that such a decision has been taken, but the nature of recent construction projects, especially those underground, suggests that the leadership at least wants the option of a capability, even if it is held in reserve rather than implemented,” the report states.

The Oxford Research Group describes itself as “an independent non-governmental organisation and registered charity, which works together with others to promote a more sustainable approach to security for the UK and the world.” It is not affiliated with Oxford University.”

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Research into so-called ‘extinction events’ for our planet over the past 500 million years – twice as long as any previous studies – has proved that they crop up with metronomic regularity.

Scientists from the University of Kansas and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC are 99 per cent confident that there are extinctions every 27 million years.

In the 1980s scientists believed that Earth’s regular extinctions could be the result of a distant dark twin of the Sun, called Nemesis.

The theory was that Nemesis crashed through the Oort cloud every 27 million years and sent a shower of comets in our direction.

The Oort cloud is a vast belt of dust and ice that is believed to lie around one light year from the Sun and is the origin of many of the comets that pass through our solar system.

But now scientists claim that the regularity of the mass extinctions actually disproves the Nemesis theory because its orbit would have changed over time as it interacted with other stars.

‘Fossil data, which motivated the idea of Nemesis, now militate against it,’ say the researchers.’

The last extinction event, 11 million years ago, saw 10 per cent of the Earth’s inhabitants wiped out.

This means there is around 16million years until the next event takes place, although the graph shows that it occasionally the event takes place up to 10 million years early.

Asteroids crashing into the Earth are commonly believed to be one of the main reasons behind mass extinctions like that suffered by the dinosaurs – the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction.

The extinction wiped out more than half of all species on the planet clearing the way for mammals to become the dominant species on Earth.

The extinction was caused by a massive asteroid slamming into Earth at Chicxulub in Mexico.

The asteroid, which was around 15 kilometres wide, is believed to have hit Earth with a force one billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.”

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