Fans, friends and family joined together for an emotional farewell to Michael Jackson at a memorial in Los Angeles.
Mariah Carey and Stevie Wonder were among the stars to perform. There was also an emotional tribute from Jackson's daughter, Paris.
A mechanical lion has been brought back to life nearly five centuries after it was first conceived by Leonardo da Vinci.
Emma Jane Kirby has been to the artist's former home in Amboise, France to find out how the lion was reconstructed.
Forest rangers in India have used a crane to help rescue an elephant after it fell into a ditch near a tea estate in Jalpaiguri district, West Bengal.
Game wardens managed to haul the distressed animal out of the ditch before it walked away without injury.
A wildlife safari in Oregon, USA, has come up with an unusual way to raise money in the tough economic climate.
For $20, visitors can have their car washed by the zoo's elephants, who scrub with sponges and rinse with their trunks.
Wildlife Safari Executive Director, Dan Van Slyke, and Elephant Supervisor, Carol Matthews, claim that the elephants don't mind the work, and that the fundraiser has been a hit.
University teams battled it out to become underwater robot champions at an event this week.
It was held at Europe's largest freshwater tank in Gosport, Hampshire - a facility normally used by the Ministry of Defence for ship and submarine trials.
University teams battled it out to become underwater robot champions at an event this week.
It was held at Europe's largest freshwater tank in Gosport, Hampshire - a facility normally used by the Ministry of Defence for ship and submarine trials.
A mechanical lion has been brought back to life nearly five centuries after it was first conceived by Leonardo da Vinci.
Emma Jane Kirby has been to the artist's former home in Amboise, France to find out how the lion was reconstructed.
Millions of Michael Jackson fans will be desperate to watch their idol’s funeral and memorial service that is being held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Tuesday 7th July and thousands have already received the tickets via the lottery system as mentioned in an earlier post.
But for those fans who didn’t register for the draw, or just can’t be there or the nearby Nokia Center, there are other means of watching the service. According to examiner.com, the King of Pop’s funeral and memorial will be aired on television and some websites are offering live feeds.
But many fans have been warned that there could be major problems with Internet congestion as millions of fans worldwide attempt to watch the service. There is a chance also that there could be bogus sites, so fans are being warned beforehand to search for genuine sites.
HERE is some live streaming site
others links
others links
Footage of Michael Jackson in rehearsal for the This Is It tour has been released by the concert promoters AEG Live.
The star looks energetic and in good health, and seems to be enjoying the run-through of hit They Don't Really Care About Us.
Madonna kicked off her revamped Sticky And Sweet tour at London's O2 Arena with a tribute to Michael Jackson.
Jackson, who died last week, was due to perform a series of 50 farewell concerts at the venue.
 The accident happened in the Magic Kingdom of the theme park |
A monorail crash at the Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, has killed an employee of the theme park, officials say.
The accident happened at 0200 local time (0600 GMT) on Sunday, when two monorails reportedly collided in the Magic Kingdom section of the park.
No visitors were seriously injured, local fire department officials told WESH television station.
The monorail service was shut down after the accident.
Mike Griffin, a senior official at Walt Disney World, expressed condolences to the family of the killed employee, the Associated Press reports.
The victim's name was not immediately known.
The hot dog competition is an Independence Day tradition
The world record for competitive hot dog eating has been broken in the US.
Joey "Jaws" Chestnut ate 68 hot dogs in 10 minutes at the annual 4 July contest at Coney Island in New York, shattering his old record of 66.
His main rival, Japan's six-time winner Takeru "Tsunami" Kobayashi, ate 64 and a half. It is thought the two men ate around 19,000 calories between them.
The first such hot dog eating contest was held in 1916, when the winner put away only 13 franks.
The two men have gone gut-to-gut for almost a decade at the annual competition, which has become an Independence Day tradition in the US.
This year's contest was broadcast live on sports channel ESPN, and featured much of the fanfare usually reserved for professional sporting events.
Mr Chestnut, who won his third straight title in a row, takes home $20,000 (£12,250) in prize money and the coveted Mustard Belt.
The 25-year-old Californian is a man of diverse taste, the BBC's Jon Donnison reports from Washington.
His other world records include eating 5kg of macaroni and cheese in seven minutes; and 188 jalapeno peppers in 10 minutes.
Watch a clip of Blur playing Girls & Boys in Hyde Park
Britpop stars Blur have revealed that Hyde Park was the inspiration for their signature song Parklife, during their first reunion gig in the 350-acre park.
"I had the idea for this song in this park," frontman Damon Albarn told fans.
"I used to live near Kensington Church Street, and I used to watch pigeons and people and all that stuff."
The reunited band played a two-hour set, opening with their debut single, She's So High. Phil Daniels joined them on stage to recreate his Parklife role.
Fans were treated to 25 songs, in a show that was almost a track-by-track recreation of their headlining slot at Glastonbury last weekend.
Highlights included This Is A Low, Girls and Boys, Song 2 and End Of A Century.
The only addition to the Glastonbury setlist was 1997 fan favourite Death Of A Party, which came during a six-song encore.
 The band scored 12 top 10 hits between 1991 and 2003 |
Before the final number of the night, sci-fi ballad The Universal, Albarn expressed doubts about Friday night's follow-up gig.
"I honestly don't know how we're going to repeat this tomorrow, thank you for coming," he said.
The four-piece announced in December that they would reform, five years after guitarist Graham Coxon departed during recording sessions for the Think Tank album.
Frontman Albarn, who has spent the intervening years working on projects such as hip-hop collective Gorillaz, fairytale opera Monkey and supergroup The Good, The Bad and The Queen, clearly enjoyed being back with his childhood friends.
He took to the stage grinning from ear to ear, and spent the rest of the evening jogging, po-going and spinning around the stage - only stopping at one point to tie his shoelaces.
"We feel really privileged to be able to do nothing for years, then come back to this," he told the crowd, visibly moved.
"It's incredible, really incredible."
Residents of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand have been flocking to the city's zoo for their first sight of a 6-week old panda cub.
It is the first time a panda has been bred in captivity in Thailand.
Over half a million Thais entered a competition to name the new arrival.
Hundreds of screaming fans gathered at a central London department store to see David Beckham unveil his new range of designer underwear.
Beckham signed autographs for fans at Selfridges during the launch.
The former Spice Girl and wife of fellow Armani underwear model, David Beckham, has posed for photographers in front of a 20-foot banner showcasing the new underwear range.
She talked about living in America and modelling in her underwear.
It is 10 years since David and Victoria Beckham got hitched in a fairytale wedding in Ireland.
Over the last decade, "Posh and Becks" have rarely been out of the media spotlight.
Now ugly dogs, giant shoes, a BBC newsreader trying to be Andy Murray and some amazing toilets.
It's this week's weird and wonderful video stories in Newsbeat's Odd Box with Dominic Byrne.
 Eve Online is about the struggle between giant corporations |
Space trading game Eve Online has suffered a virtual version of the credit crunch.
One of the game's biggest financial institutions lost a significant chunk of its deposits as a huge theft started a run on the bank.
One of the bank's controllers stole about 200bn kredits and swapped them for real world cash of £3,115.
As news of the theft spread, many of the bank's customers rushed to remove their virtual cash.
Space scandal
The theft from EBank took place in early June but only now have details emerged about the amount of money stolen and why it was taken.
The theft was carried out by EBank's chief executive, a player known as Ricdic, now known to be a 27-year-old Australian who works in the technology industry. His full identity has not been revealed save that his first name is Richard.
The stolen kredits amounted to 8% of the 2.6tn that Ebank had in its virtual vaults.
"Basically this character was one of the people who had been running EBank for a while. He took a bunch of (virtual) money out of the bank, and traded it away for real money," Ned Coker, of Icelandic company CCP which runs Eve, told the Reuters news agency.
Eve Online has about 300,000 players all of whom inhabit the same online universe. The game revolves around trade, mining asteroids and the efforts of different player-controlled corporations to take control of swathes of virtual space.
It has now emerged that Ricdic used the cash to put down a deposit on a house and to pay medical bills.
"I'm not proud of it at all, that's why I didn't brag about it," Ricdic told Reuters. "But you know, if I had to do it again, I probably would've chosen the same path based on the same situation."
Ricdic has now been thrown out of the game as trading in-game cash for real money is against Eve Online's terms and conditions.
The rules governing play within Eve would not have sanctioned Ricdic if he had simply stolen the cash and used it in the game, nor if he had bought kredits with real dollars.
The scandal is not the first to play out in Eve Online. In early 2009 one of the game's biggest corporations, called Band of Brothers, was brought down by industrial espionage.
| By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News |
Honeybees mount a very effective mobbing defence
Honeybee hordes use two weapons - heat and carbon dioxide - to kill their natural enemies, giant hornets.
Japanese honeybees form "bee balls" - mobbing and smothering the predators.
This has previously been referred to as "heat-balling", but a study has now shown that carbon dioxide also plays a role in its lethal effectiveness.
In the journal Naturwissenschaften, the scientists describe how hornets are killed within 10 minutes when they are trapped inside a ball of bees.
Japanese giant hornets, which can be up to 5cm long, are voracious predators that can devastate bees' nests and consume their larvae.
But, if the bees spot their attacker in time, they mount a powerful defence in the form of a bee ball. This study found that the heat inside the bee ball alone was not enough to reliably kill the hornets.
 Giant hornets were taped to temperature and gas probes |
"They can survive for 10 minutes at a temperature up to 47C, and the temperature inside the bee balls does not rise higher than 46C," said Fumio Sakamoto, a researcher from Kyoto Gakuen University in Japan, and one of the authors of the study.
His team recreated experimental bee balls and took direct measurements from inside them.
They anaesthetised giant hornets and fixed them to the tip either of a thermometer probe, or the inlet of a gas detector.
Once the hornets recovered from their anaesthesia, the probes were touched to the bees' nest.
"The bee ball formed (around the hornet) immediately," said Dr Sakamoto.
After 10 minutes the bees were packed solidly enough around the probe to be removed from the nest in a distinct ball.
As the temperature inside the ball increased to more than 45C, the carbon dioxide level also rose sharply.
In a parallel experiment, the scientists found that in an atmosphere relatively high in carbon dioxide, the temperature at which hornets could survive for 10 minutes was lowered.
"So we concluded that carbon dioxide produced inside the bee ball by the honeybees is a major factor, together with temperature, involved in the bees' defence."
 The bee ball formed as a bump on the bottom of the nest |
Dr Sakamoto is not sure, at this point, whether the bees were effectively "gassing" the hornets, or simply depriving them of oxygen.
"Either way, the carbon dioxide increase and/or the oxygen decrease lowered the temperature that was lethal to the hornets, " he told BBC News.
"We are going to do the additional experiments about this point using mixed air of various oxygen and carbon dioxide (concentrations)."
The mob of bees also appeared to operate in "two phases".
"The hornet may be killed during the first 0-5 minute period, in which the highest level of heat production and carbon dioxide emissions take place," said Dr Sakamoto.
This might suggest that the bees are aware of what physiological state the hornet is in.
Dr Sakamoto said: "The latter 5-10 min period may be free running to ensure their victim's death."
Dinosaur discovery "a major breakthrough"
Australian palaeontologists say they have discovered three new dinosaur species after examining fossils dug up in Queensland.
Writing in the journal PLoS One, they describe one of the creatures as a fearsome predator with three large slashing claws on each hand.
The other two were herbivores: one a tall giraffe-like creature, the other of stocky build like a hippopotamus.
The fossils date back nearly 100 million years.
They were found in rocks known as the Winton Formation.
The dinosaurs have been named after characters in Australia's famous song Waltzing Matilda.
The carnivore, which has the scientific classification Australovenator wintonensis, has therefore been dubbed "Banjo" after Banjo Patterson, who composed the song in Winton in 1885.
Queensland Museum palaeontologist Scott Hucknell said the creature would have been a terrifying prospect.
"The cheetah of his time, Banjo was light and agile. He could run down most prey with ease over open ground," he told reporters.
 | FROM BBC WORLD SERVICE  More from BBC World Service |
The two plant-eating, four-legged sauropod species are new types of titanosaurs - the largest animals ever to walk the Earth.
"Clancy" (scientific name: Witonotitan wattsi) was a tall slender animal, while Matilda (Diamantinasaurus matildae) was more stocky and hippo-like.
Banjo and Matilda - possibly predator and his prey - were found buried together in a 98-million-year-old billabong, or stagnant pond.
The findings have been published in the public access journal Public Library of Science One (PLoS One), and were announced by Queensland Premier Anna Bligh at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History in Winton.
She said the discoveries were a major breakthrough in the scientific understanding of prehistoric life in Australia.
Museum Victoria palaeontologist John Long described the fossils as "amazing".
The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper quoted him as saying that the creatures put Australia back on the international map of big dinosaur discoveries for the first time since 1981, when the unearthing of Muttaburrasaurus, a large four-legged herbivore that could rear up on two legs, was announced.
The new species will be part of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History under construction in Winton. It should be completed in 2015.
| By Dan Whitworth Newsbeat technology reporter |
 Facebook is the most popular social networking site in the world |
The social networking site Facebook has come under fire for planned changes to its privacy settings.
It wants to "simplify" the process so users only have to set them once, instead of for each individual feature.
Facebook says the change will help people share more information with one another.
However, critics argue the new set up could lead to members being persuaded to share too many personal details - their date of birth for example.
Tom Royal is from Computeractive magazine.
He said: "I'm a little bit worried about the settings recommended by Facebook because as far as I can see it's actually sharing quite a lot of information with quite a few people.
"That's not something we'd advise people to do. We'd very much recommend people choose the 'limited' option instead.
'One size fits all'
"For example, just your date of birth can be a security question for lots of internet applications."
Facebook argues a 'one size fits all' approach will make things more straightforward for users.
"The effect of more and more settings has made controlling privacy on Facebook too complicated," according to the site's chief privacy officer Chris Kelly.
It's also phasing out regional networks like London and Manchester because Kelly says "they don't adequately reflect a world where people choose the audience they want to share with".
The number of people using Facebook has risen above the 20 million mark this year in the UK.
It is the most popular social networking site in the world, with 200 million members globally.
WHO calls for vigilance over swine flu
The UN's top health official has opened a forum in Mexico on combating swine flu by saying that the spread of the virus worldwide is now unstoppable.
World Health Organization head Margaret Chan added that the holding of the meeting in Cancun showed confidence in Mexico, which has been hard hit.
The WHO says most H1N1 cases are mild, with many people recovering unaided.
As the summit opened, the UK alone was projecting more than 100,000 new cases of H1N1 a day by the end of the summer.
As the peak of the flu season approaches in South America, some areas have declared a public health emergency.
El Salvador reported its first death from swine flu, a day after Paraguay reported its first fatality.
'Mild symptoms'
"As we see today, with well over 100 countries reporting cases, once a fully fit pandemic virus emerges, its further international spread is unstoppable," Dr Chan said in her opening remarks.
 A hospital in Athens, Greece, has been quarantined for swine flu |
She stressed that the overwhelming majority of patients experienced mild symptoms and made a full recovery within a week, often in the absence of any form of medical treatment.
The exceptions, she said, were pregnant women and people with underlying health problems, who were at higher risk from complications from the virus and should be monitored if they fell ill.
"For a pandemic of moderate severity, this is one of our greatest challenges: helping people to understand when they do not need to worry, and when they do need to seek urgent care," Dr Chan said.
Turning to the summit venue, the WHO chief added: "Mexico is a safe, as well as a beautiful and warmly gracious, place to visit."
Leaders and experts from 50 countries are in Cancun for the two-day meeting to discuss strategies for combating the virus.
It has been more than two months since the initial alert over swine flu.
Since then, the H1N1 virus has entered more than 100 countries, infected more than 70,000 people and killed more than 300 worldwide.
Authorities across South America are becoming increasingly concerned as the peak flu season approaches, the BBC's Andy Gallacher reports from Cancun.
Schools across Argentina have sent students home and pregnant women have been told they can take two weeks off work to avoid contracting the virus.
It is hoped the Cancun meeting will address many of the issues that might help slow the spread of swine flu but, our correspondent adds, many people are concerned that an effective vaccine has still not been developed.
| By Jonathan Fildes Science and technology reporter, |
Over time Professor Roy's son learns how to say the word 'ball' (footage: MIT Media Lab)
"Can you think of a more complicated question to ask?" says Deb Roy, as he explains the genesis of his work.
In 2005, the artificial intelligence researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab set out to understand how children learn to talk.
"We wanted to understand how minds work and how they develop and how the interplay of innate and environmental influence makes us who we are and how we learn to communicate."
It was a big task and after years of research, scientists around the world had only begun to scratch the surface of it.
But now, Professor Roy is beginning to get some answers, thanks to an unconventional approach, an accommodating family and a house wired with technology.
And the research may even have kick-backs for everything from robotics to video analysis.
Snap shots
The question of how infants learn to speak is hotly debated. At its simplest level the argument comes down to "nature versus nurture".
On one side, scientists argue that children have an innate hard-wired ability to learn language, while on the other side, researchers argue that language is learned through interactions with the people and environment around them.
|   The first task we set for ourselves was to transcribe everything my son heard or said from nine to 24 months  Deb Roy |
Between the two extremes is a spectrum of opinion.
Professor Roy wandered into this debate as someone originally more interested in robots than children.
"I was initially inspired by how children learn language as a new way of building machines," he says.
But looking through the raft of prior research on the effect of environment on language, he noticed a common problem; previous studies only offered snapshots of a child's development.
"Every parent knows that a child can change a lot in a week or a month," he told BBC News.
"If you're interested in the process of development then it is important to have a continuous view."
It is a problem recognised by other linguists as well.
"Current samples that the field works with - typically an hour of recorded speech a week - are one to two orders of magnitude too small for our scientific purposes," Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard University told BBC News.
So, Professor Roy, who by then had a child on the way, set about solving the conundrum. His solution: wire up his house with 11 cameras, 14 microphones and terabytes of storage and record every waking moment of his soon-to-arrive son.
It was christened the Human Speechome project and immediately drew comparisons with its genetic counterpart.
"Just as the Human Genome Project illuminates the innate genetic code that shapes us, the Speechome Project is an important first step toward creating a map of how the environment shapes human development and learning," said Frank Moss, the director of MIT's Media Lab at the time.
Professor Pinker, who is also an adviser to the project, said: "In developmental psychology there has long been a trade-off between gathering lots of data from a small number of children, or a small amount of data from a much larger number of children.
"Roy is simply pushing this trade-off to an extreme - a truly massive amount of data from a single child."
Now, a quarter of million hours of recordings later, Professor Roy is beginning to tease apart the masses of data and look for answers.
Deep dive
To extract meaningful patterns from the 200GB (gigabytes) of data that flowed daily onto the racks of hard drives in the basement, the team created a series of software tools.
The first, ominously called Total Recall, allows a researcher to quickly scan through any part of the data. All 25 recordings from the microphones and cameras are shown as separate channels.
| HUMAN SPEECHOME PROJECT 11x 1 megapixel fisheye lens cameras. Swithced on by motion sensors. 14x omnidirectional microphones recording CD quality sound 1000m (3000ft) wires connect recorders to servers in basement Record from 8am -10pm every day for 3 years PDAs in each room can be used to control recording 'Oops' button wipes last few minutes of recording |
Sound is represented as a spectrograph, while the video is processed to show only movement, creating a ribbon of colour, which looks like the flow of traffic at night and represents the accumulated motions of life in the Roy household.
While useful for getting a sense of when and where action may have taken place, the team needed another set of tools to delve deeper into the data.
"The first task we set for ourselves was to transcribe everything my son heard or said from nine to 24 months," he says.
He estimates that there is somewhere between 10 to 12 million words of speech to transcribe.
"For anyone that has transcribed speech, they will know that is a laborious and slow process," he says, with a degree of understatement.
Initially his team tried to use off-the-shelf speech recognition software, but soon realised that they were not up to the job of extracting words from often-noisy environments.
"We realised that the state of the art is not even close to good enough," he told the BBC.
Automatic systems could have error rates of up to 90%, he said.
At the other extreme, Professor Roy also experimented with human transcribers, but that also came with its own problems.
"It would take an average of 10 hours to find and transcribe one hour of speech," he told the BBC.
| HUMAN SPEECHOME IN NUMBERS 90,000 hours of video recorded 140,000 hours of audio recordings Approx 200GB of data collected every day 150 TB of raw data collected over course of project 70% of infants waking hours captured 10 to 12m words spoken 4m words so far transcribed Speechome project launched |
When you are trying to analyse 16 months of video from 14 microphones, those kinds of ratios don't seem attractive.
Instead, the researchers created a piece of software called Blitzscribe, which finds speech in the recordings and breaks it down into easily transcribed sound bites.
"We have automated components assisting human annotators," he said.
The net result is that we have reduced 10 hours down to two hours."
The analysis also takes into account how a word was said - called prosody - and who said it.
To date, the team have already transcribed more than four million words.
"It's already the most complete transcript of everyday life at home than any recording ever made."
A similar human-computer system, called TrackMarks, has also been developed to analyse the video and gives information such as where people are in relation to one another and the orientation of their heads.
Software visualises how care givers interact with the child over time
Although the data sets are still incomplete, Professor Roy says they are already beginning to see interesting results.
For example, his team has been able to begin to tease apart a process he calls "word births", the time when a baby first begins to use a word.
By analysing the length, and hence complexity, of sentences spoken by caregivers to his son, he believes that he has shown that adults subconsciously simplify sentences until the child understands the word.
Once it has been understood, the adults then build up the complexity of the sentences containing the word.
"We essentially meet him at this point of the birth of the word and gently pull him into language," he says.
 The Speechome Recorder can be fitted in any home |
Professor Roy stresses it is an initial result and has not been validated by the scientific community. However, he says, it shows the kind of questions that can be answered with the data and tools he now has.
But winning over the rest of the scientific community might be his most difficult job.
It remains to be seen whether other scientists will accept his conclusions as they are based on the analysis of just one child and, as Professor Roy admits, are unlikely to be reproduced because of time and cost.
In part to address this criticism, he has developed a stand-alone device - called the Speechome recorder - that can be easily put into homes with out 1000m (3000ft) of wiring in the walls and converting the basement into a data centre.
The devices look like floor lamps and contain an overhead microphone and camera, with another lens at eye level for children.
The base of the device holds a touch-screen display and enough storage to hold several months of recordings.
Their first deployment will be in six pilot studies of children with autism where they will be used to monitor and quantify the children's response to treatment.
"I'm really excited - this is the future of the project," says Professor Roy.
Robot reflex
But he also has his eye on other possible spin-offs.
For example the video-analysis algorithms designed for the project could be used in automated systems to monitor CCTV cameras and extract information about particular events.
He is also working with architects to visualise how people move around an environment and how changes to building design affect that.
The results are being fed into creating a semi-automated architectural design system.
"This could be really interesting if you're designing a retail space or if you are an architect and have a design and want to know whether it will work or how to change it."
However, Professor Roy has never forgotten his roots in robotics and still hopes to bring the project full-circle.
"What if we can build a machine that can step into the shoes of a child and learn in human-like ways," he asks.
"Imagine transferring that into a video game character or into a domestic robot that can now learn to communicate and interact in social ways.
"I see a lot of pathways back."
 North Korea is thought to have thousands of missiles |
North Korea has tested four short-range missiles, South Korean media say, amid speculation it may be planning to launch another long-range missile.
The North test-fired other missiles earlier this week and has incurred fresh UN sanctions since holding a second underground nuclear test in May.
Two of the latest missiles were fired into the Sea of Japan, South Korea's defence ministry said.
They are believed to have been Scuds with a range of 500km (312 miles).
South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said the first two missiles had been fired between 0800 (2300 GMT) and 0830.
| Today's launches, which came on the eve of the US Independence Day, are believed to be aimed at political purposes Unnamed South Korean official |
The third missile was fired at around 1045, South Korean news agency Yonhap said, and a fourth test was reported a few hours later.
"Our military is fully ready to counter any North Korean threats and provocations based on strong South Korea-US combined defence posture," the JCS said in a statement.
A South Korean defence official said Saturday's tests were of greater concern than Thursday's, as the missiles had longer ranges.
"Thursday's missile tests were apparently made as part of a military drill but today's launches, which came on the eve of the US Independence Day, are believed to be aimed at political purposes," the official told Yonhap.
Nuclear warhead fears
The BBC's John Sudworth in Seoul says the launches are seen there as part of North Korean efforts to ratchet up the tension.
 |
Japanese and South Korean media have reported that North Korea may be preparing to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Pyongyang is banned from testing ballistic missiles under UN resolutions but launched a long-range rocket in April, which many governments saw as a thinly disguised test of Taepodong-2 missile technology.
There are fears that North Korea is trying to produce nuclear warheads small enough to put on missiles.
After six-nation talks aimed at curbing North Korea's nuclear ambitions broke down earlier this year, Pyongyang said it would "weaponise" its plutonium stocks and start enriching uranium for a light-water nuclear reactor.
On 12 June the UN Security Council approved a resolution allowing inspection of air, sea and land shipments in and out of North Korea suspected of carrying banned arms and weapons-related material.
The North has said it will treat any interception of its ships as a declaration of war.
Sarah Palin: "I'm doing what is best for Alaska"
Former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has announced she will resign as governor of Alaska on 26 July and not run for re-election.
Mrs Palin's term of office was due to end in 2010.
Some have speculated that Mrs Palin, who is popular with the Republican Party base, might be preparing to make a bid for the White House in 2012.
But a report on NBC news suggested that Mrs Palin intends to get "out of politics for good".
Her resignation means Alaska's Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell will take over as state governor.
'New direction'
Polls indicated Mrs Palin was very popular in Alaska during the first few years of her governorship, and although her approval ratings have dipped somewhat since her vice-presidential run, she still enjoys widespread popularity in her home state.
Mrs Palin announced her decision in a statement from her home town of Wasilla, Alaska.
"I'm taking my fight for what's right in a new direction," she said, as her family looked on.
Mrs Palin did not reveal what she intended to do after leaving office, and did not give an explicit reason for her decision not to run for re-election.
But in a written statement, she made it clear that once she had decided not to run again, she did not want to hang on in office until her term expired.
"Once I decided not to run for re-election, I also felt that to embrace the conventional Lame Duck status in this particular climate would just be another dose of politics as usual, something I campaigned against and will always oppose," she said.
The BBC's Kevin Connolly in Washington says Mrs Palin's revelation came out of the blue, as most Americans were turning to the celebration of Independence Day on 4 July.
She offered no single clear reason for stepping down, our correspondent adds, but the strongest clue was her depiction of what it had been like to be the subject of sustained attack by liberals since she appeared on the national stage.
If she does decide to run for future office, Palin will now face the challenge of explaining to voters why she should be president of the United States despite serving less than three of the four years of her elected term as Alaska's governor, and spending months of her second year as governor campaigning for the vice presidency. 
Time magazine's Michael Scherer weighs up Mrs Palin's future prospects.
Listening to her, it seems like this is a combination of stepping back and moving forward. Stepping back, because it's way too overwhelming to be Sarah Palin, political phenom, Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, and Sarah Palin, wife and mother. I don't know that anyone can fulfil all those roles well, simultaneously. And we're unrealistic, I think, when we assume people can or should. Kathryn Jean Lopez, writing at the National Review's Corner blog, thinks Americans should give Mrs Palin a break.
I think the simple truth is that, as even Alaskan Republicans told us last September, she was far from able to be governor of Alaska, let alone vice-president of the United States. Once the klieglights hit, it was only a matter of time before she imploded or exploded or some gruesome combination of the two. Andrew Sullivan, never one of the Alaska governor's biggest fans, has been predicting this for a while.
If Palin wants to run in 2012, why not do exactly what she announced today? It's an enormous gamble - but it could be a shrewd one. After all, she's freeing herself from the duties of the governorship. Now she can do her book, give speeches, travel the country and the world, campaign for others, meet people, get more educated on the issues - and without being criticized for neglecting her duties in Alaska. The Weekly Standard's William Kristol, one of the first prominent Republicans to highlight Mrs Palin, thinks her resignation could be part of a long-term plan.
Not finishing her first term will provide a major, major, major obstacle to any presidential bid. I thought a 2012 campaign would be a mistake; from today's comments, it's not clear whether Palin is still interested in that option. 
