Much of this recent spike in bee mortality is attributed to Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious condition where all the worker bees in a colony simply fly off as a group and never make it back to the hive. Scientists have been studying this odd phenomenon for years and they still aren’t sure why it is happening.

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Hamburg's state data protection agency said Monday that Google admitted collecting data including emails, passwords, photos and chat protocols from 2008-2010 as it prepared to launch its Street View service. Google says it never intended to store personal data and the agency says it has been deleted.

Agency head Johannes Caspar says "company internal control mechanisms failed seriously" at Google but the maximum fine possible was 150,000 euros which was "unlikely...to have a deterring effect." Google earned $3.3 billion in the first quarter.

Caspar urged dramatic increases to possible maximum fines under future European regulations.

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Now there's hope of new riches beneath the area's sandy heathland.

The Campine is one of dozens of regions across Europe believed to be sitting on significant reserves of shale gas — the underground fuel that has revolutionized energy supply in the United States over the past decade.

"The potential in Europe could be huge," says Professor Richard Davies, a specialist at Britain's Durham University and advisor to the industry. "We've got all the right sort of rocks."

Shale gas now accounts for more than 20 percent of US natural gas production, up from barely 1 percent in 2000. By the 2030s, it's share is expected to be over 50 percent.

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Investigators are now focusing on the trip that Tsarnaev made to Russia in January 2012 that has raised many questions. His father said his son stayed with him in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, where the family lived briefly before moving to the U.S. a decade ago. The father had only recently returned.

"He was here, with me in Makhachkala," Anzor Tsarnaev told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "He slept until 3 p.m., and you know, I would ask him: 'Have you come here to sleep?' He used to go visiting, here and there. He would go to eat somewhere. Then he would come back and go to bed."

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — both ethnic Chechens — are accused of setting off the two bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15 that killed three people and wounded more than 180 others. Three days later, Tamerlan died in a shootout with police, while his brother was later captured alive but wounded.

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First, you’ve got the Reinhart/Rogoff (R&R) dustup which is generating lots of ink in the AMs papers—more on that in a moment.  Second, indicators once again show that the ongoing expansion in American economy continues to underperform, with weak readings on jobs, retail sales, and inflation.

The connective tissue here is contractionary fiscal policy.  And while no one or two individuals gets the blame for that, R&R’s work, with its arbitrary threshold (remember, they’re the ones purveying the debt/GDP-above-90%-slows-growth thesis), non-contextualized broad averages across countries, and data errors, is a  good example of how economists have misled the debate.

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The 220-pound (100-kilogram) bomb was found Tuesday evening at a building site near the station, which stands in a relatively sparsely populated area near what used to be the border between West and East Berlin.

Experts decided to defuse the Soviet bomb on the spot, a former freight depot. They evacuated people from a few dozen nearby buildings and diverted trains heading north toward Hamburg. Most trains, however, were able to continue running undisrupted.

As a precaution, authorities also decided briefly to stop planes landing at the city's Tegel airport, a few miles away, while the bomb was defused — an operation that took half an hour. It wasn't immediately clear how many flights were delayed.

Some 150 people who lived nearby waited at a nearby school while the bomb was defused, police spokesman Jens Berger said.

Allied airplanes dropped huge quantities of ordnance on Germany during World War II in an effort to cripple the Nazi war machine.

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Official figures Tuesday showed that unemployment across the 17 European Union countries that use the euro has struck 12 percent for the first time since the currency was launched in 1999.

Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, said the rate in February was unchanged at the record high after January's figure was revised up to 12 percent from 11.9 percent.

Spain and Greece have mass unemployment and many other countries are seeing their numbers swell to uncomfortably high levels as governments across the region enact tough austerity measures to get a handle on their debts.

The eurozone, which is made up of a little more than 330 million people, is one of the world's major economic pillars and the turmoil surrounding it has been one of the main reasons why the global recovery has been muted.

A total of 19.07 million people were officially out of work in the eurozone in February, nearly two million more than the same month the year before. For the 27-country European Union, of which the eurozone is a large part, the unemployment rate was 10.9 percent.

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The regulators announced plans to take legal action Tuesday. But the threat of fines will mean little to the Internet giant. As the Guardian noted, two threatened sets of fines (one up to $500,000, one up to $300,000) amount to the money generated by Google in sales every 10 minutes. Via the Guardian:

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Credit or debit card payments abroad will be capped at 5,000 euros a day, while no checks will be cashed, although they can be deposited in bank accounts, the agency said Wednesday.

Meanwhile, armed police officers guarded several trucks carrying containers arriving at the country's Central Bank in Nicosia. A helicopter hovered overhead.

Banks have been shut across the country since March 16 to prevent a run on deposits while politicians worked out a new plan to secure an international

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The south pole vortex is being closely monitored by European scientists who wrote about their findings in a recent issue of Nature Geoscience.

The European Space Agency has been tracking the Europe-sized storm for six years using the Venus Express satellite.

The satellite arrived at the burning planet in 2006.

Scientists believe the storm is constantly evolving.

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"The system's profile as an offshore financial center is unlikely to survive this crisis," Moody's senior credit officer Sarah Carlson said. "The potentially irreparable damage to the country's current drivers of economic growth leaves its ability to sustain its current debt highly in doubt."

The crisis had negative implications for the credit ratings of the region's countries. Moody's Investors' Service says Cyprus will still be at risk of default for a "prolonged period" and possibly a euro zone exit. "Even if negotiations are successful and Cyprus remains within the euro area," the service said in a Monday statement, "policy makers' recent decisions raise the risk of deposit outflows, capital flight, increased bank and sovereign-funding costs and broader financial market dislocation."

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The list has been compiled by the editors of The I Files, a one-stop online news source. We scour YouTube and other sources for the best documentaries and investigative videos. We’d also like to hear from you. Let us know about any reports or video footage that you think we should add to our list.

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“Iraq’s Secret War Files,” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

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The government is urging parliament to approve a deal that would avert a bankruptcy that would almost certainly prompt Cyprus's exit from the euro zone.

"The next few hours will determine the future of the country," government spokesman Christos Stylianides said before the parliamentary debate. "We must all assume our share of the responsibility."

The ECB is pushing Cyprus to reach a deal quickly or risk Cypriot banks losing their financing. Without the government's approval for new measures, the country would lose the $13 billion bailout it previously requested and would risk a disorderly default.

Several hundred protesters gathered outside the Parliament building on Friday morning, angrily demanding compensation for their losses at banks.

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The problems we face if we don’t have healthy populations of pollinators, particularly honeybees, extend beyond almonds. Three fourths of the top crops grown in the world require animals – mostly insects – for pollination. Odds are that most of your favorite fruits, nuts and melons are pollinated by honeybees.

Across the pond, the European Union has made major strides in shedding light on the role of certain pesticides in honeybee deaths. In fact, the European Commission has proposed a two-year ban on these pesticides. Meanwhile, at home, beekeepers remain frustrated that the U.S. government is not as forward-thinking. And, for another year, the saga of bee deaths continues.

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“Overall,” the scholars wrote, “the Scandinavians emerged as the best informed, averaging 62–67 percent correct responses, the British were relatively close behind with 59 percent, and the Americans lagging in the rear with 40 percent.” We didn't fare much better when it came to domestic stories.

Widespread ignorance of objective reality poses a genuine threat to democracy. The people of the United States have ignorance in abundance.

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Animal rights groups have lauded the move and Tonio Borg, the E.U.'s top official on health and consumer issues, said "This is a great opportunity for Europe to set an example of responsible innovation in cosmetics without any compromise on consumer safety."

Neither the U.S. nor Asian markets have similar bans in place and, as the New York Times noted, "the global divergence in safety rules could also mean that companies sell the same product globally, but market one version for countries like China backed up by safety evidence from animal tests, and another version for Europe backed up by evidence from alternative tests."

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After mounting political pressure, the Philharmonic commissioned a group of independent historians to examine the orchestra's archives between years 1938-1945. The report reveals that in 1938, 13 musicians were dismissed for either being Jewish or married to Jews, and that by 1942, 60 out of 123 musicians identified with the Nazi party, reflecting a higher percentage of Nazi sympathizers within the organization than among the Austrian population.

The report also explains that the orchestra became an instrument of propaganda for the Nazi party, including its famous New Year's Day concert. The anti-Jewish sentiment continued after the war as well; only 10 Nazi sympathizers were forced to leave the orchestra after the war ended.

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International researchers analyzed the country's rates of sickness and death from 1990 to 2010 in comparison to those of 15 other Western European countries in addition to Australia, Canada and the U.S. Experts described the U.K. results as "startling" and said Britain was failing to address underlying health risks in its population, including rising rates of high blood pressure, obesity and drug and alcohol abuse.

"It's incredibly surprising," said Dr. Christopher Murray, who studies health metrics at the University of Washington in Seattle and is the lead author of the latest report.

"We all think of the U.K. as having a great health system and as one of the most sophisticated medical research communities in the world," he wrote in an email. "Nobody would have really expected that the U.K. would be toward the bottom."

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