"We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war," Mr Kouchner said in an interview on French TV and radio.

An increasing number of young people in America - and adults around the world - don't believe in God. Greg Epstein, who advises fellow atheists and agnostics at Harvard University, wants to create a kind of church for those who reject religion. But he's encountering resistance from some of the very people he wants to unite.

When tourists ask for the bathroom in the Minneapolis airport lately, it’s usually not because they have to go.

It’s because they want to see the stall made famous by U.S. Sen. Larry Craig’s arrest in a sex sting.

“It’s become a tourist attraction,” said Karen Evans, information specialist at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. “People are taking pictures.”

First of all, don't try to tell the New Atheists (insert obligatory detestation of the term here) what the New Atheists believe unless you've actually got some understanding of what the New Atheists believe. This is a mistake I'm seeing repeatedly now.

The New Atheist Camp (for lack of a better term) asserts that science and atheism are one. Religion and science are not internally consistent. Any attempt to recognize religion within a scientific framework is appeasement of superstition and is by extension damaging to the scientific enterprise. We might as well publish statements we know to be lies in scientific journals.

No. Once again, science is a method. It's a general set of procedures that rest on skepticism, induction, empiricism, and naturalism. Atheism is a conclusion. We look at the universe using the tools of science, and it does not fit any description of the universe derived from religious perspectives: we therefore reject religious dogma. We also see that the nature of the universe does not reflect any of the orthodox conceptions of what a god-ruled universe would look like. We arrive at the conclusion that there is no god.

Israel’s cost to the Arabs, by Ghada KarmiAfter nearly 60 years, Israel is still not at peace with most of its neighbours. The Saudi peace plan, first proposed in 2002, is the latest in a series of Arab overtures aiming to end this situation. It offers Israel full normalisation of relations in return for withdrawal from the territories it conquered in 1967, and a negotiated agreement on the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Israel ignored the plan in 2002, but this year the Arabs have re-presented it more forcefully. In July two Arab League envoys visited Jerusalem to press the Arab case, and plans led by the United States are afoot for an Arab-Israeli peace conference in September. Though Israel may still not respond, this is a giant step for the Arabs, reversing decades of hostility.

The 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight -- if ever so slightly. Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies.

I'm a little surprised, Hillary hasn't sold out yet. Certainly Kucinich has the best plan followed by Edwards, Clinton, and Obamma in that order.

Broadly speaking, the Clinton plan is as ambitious as any plan touted by a major presidential candidate right now. Indeed, the basic structure of the plan--starting with a requirement that all Americans buy health insurance--is strikingly similar to the structure first proposed by former Senator John Edwards, which has rightly won him considerable praise.