Most analysts have forecast that the disaster could cost BP around $20bn as a worst-case scenario, though Credit Suisse has suggested as much as $37bn. It is understood that a group of senior congressmen from Mr Obama's Democratic Party are pushing the President to sue for up to $100bn. These would include punitive, as well as physical damages, effectively representing a punishment to the company and a broader industry deterrent to breaching safety regulations – even though it is not yet clear that BP failed to meet its responsibilities.

"The president of the federation of medical specialists, Dr. Gaetan Barrette, said doctors already see some form of euthanasia in the course of their work. "Eighty one per cent of doctors do see the practice of euthanasia given the circumstances in their practice," Barrette said. "They hear their patients, they see their patients, asking for it."

Barrette says the debate over euthanasia is similar to the one 20 years surrounding legal access to abortion. A recent Angus Reid poll found that 77 per cent of Quebecers support the move to legalize euthanasia.

The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany's University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet's stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.

Imagine selling a piece of real estate, then collecting a fee every time the property changes hands; long after you owned it. Freehold Licensing, a Texas-based intellectual property licensing group whose Florida office is in Fort Lauderdale, wants owners of any kind of real estate to be able to do just that. Freehold contends transfer-fee convents aren't new, only the version it's seeking to patent." The company calls the fee a "unique business method," a form of intellectual property it says can be patented, thus giving it and its licensees exclusive use of the system. Freehold licenses its covenant, which has a patent pending, to a seller for a $249 fee.