London, Aug 5 : British consumers are the grumpiest in the Western world, according to BNP Paribas economists.

Reviewing barometers of consumer confidence in Europe and the United States, they concluded that: "If there was a competition for the country with the most pessimistic consumers, the UK would be the winner".

The Independent quotes the GFK/NOP poll of consumer confidence, published recently, as saying that British households were more miserable about their fortunes than at any time since the survey began in 1974.

The housing crash of the early 1990s, two miners'' strikes, various energy crises, the three-day week, 9/11, 7/7, and the threat of nuclear annihilation during the cold war all failed to shred our optimism as comprehensively as the credit crunch.

London, Aug. 5 : The British defence forces were prevented from participating in a battle for the Iraqi city of Basra thanks to a secret deal between their government and the notorious al-Mahdi militia.

The Times quotes American and Iraqi officers who took part in the assault as saying that 4000 British troops – including elements of the SAS and an entire mechanised brigade – watched from the sidelines for six days because of an “accommodation” with the Iranian-backed group.

US Marines and soldiers had to be rushed in to fill the void, fighting bitter street battles and facing mortar fire, rockets and roadside bombs with their Iraqi counterparts, they added.

London, August 5 : Scientists have discovered the hottest water on Earth, which is deep down at the very bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

According to a report in New Scientist, the water sits atop what could be a huge bubble of magma, at over 3 kilometers beneath the surface.

Found by geochemist Andrea Koschinsky from Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, the fluid is in a “supercritical” state that has never before been seen in nature, spewing out of two black smokers called “Two Boats” and “Sisters Peak”.

Koschinsky said that it is somewhere between a gas and a liquid.

London, Aug.

London, August 5 : University of Cincinnati researchers have devised a new way to improve the efficiency of traditional LCD panels by preventing a huge part of the light generated in the display from getting wasted.

Jason Heikenfeld, a university expert, says that his team’s approach uses ultraviolet light and liquid lenses.

He has revealed that the display is made from pixels of red, blue and green phosphorescent materials that emit photons when zapped with ultraviolet light.

This is channelled onto the pixels by tiny "waveguides", he adds.

London, Aug 5 : Think twice before you accept a dinner invitation from a loving Italian couple when holidaying in Italy, for along with dinner you might be served an offer to swap your partners.

From what is being reported by La Stampa newspaper in Italy, a quarter of all Italian couples regularly take part in wife swapping.

According to their article titled, "The Lunch Time Swingers", almost 500,000 Italian couples are officially swapping partners at private sex clubs, and thousands more doing it in a more ad-hoc fashion in car parks, specially designated beaches or even cemeteries.