Paul the psychic octopus may not have
predicted a medal and a soccer jersey in his future, but he now owns
both.

The global phenomenon picked Spain to beat the Netherlands
in the World Cup finals earlier this month.

Nearly two weeks
later, a Spanish delegation from the town of Carballino brought a gift
basket Thursday for the cephalopod in his hometown of Oberhausen,
Germany.

The gifts included a bronze statue that is the symbol of
the town of Carballino, which makes Paul an official ”best friend of
the town.”

The delegation — which included Carballino’s mayor
Carlos Alberto Montes Marques and various businessmen — also gave the
tentacled one an official Spanish soccer jersey.

Businessman
Manuel Pazo was part of the delegation. Pazo has in the past expressed
his intent to buy Paul as the town’s mascot.

Carballino residents
will celebrate Paul again on August 8th in the 43rd “festival of the
octopus.”

Paul not only predicted Spain’s win over the
Netherlands in the final, but also the team’s semifinal success against
Germany.

Before that, he correctly predicted all five of
Germany’s earlier results, and picked Germany to beat Uruguay in the
third-place playoff, ending the tournament with a remarkable
eight-for-eight record.

For each prediction, two mussel-filled
acrylic boxes labeled with a team’s flag were lowered into Paul’s tank.
Whichever box he chose conveyed the winning team.

Sea Life staff,
where Paul lives, have announced he is retiring from the predictions
game, but previously said they were considering offers from around the
globe.

Spain has expressed an interest in Paul,
and a Russian bookmaking company has offered to pay 100,000 euros
(about $129,800) for the octopus.

Using high-tech robotic cameras, a team of scientists is getting a rare first glimpse of marine life in the North Atlantic that could shed light on the ocean’s ecosystem and climate to as far back as 1,000 years.

Images of tulip-shaped sponges, brightly colored corals, delicate pink stars and feathery organisms were among the breathtaking marine life beamed up by a submersible robot that scoured the ocean bed at a depth of some 9,800 feet [3,000 meters] off the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland.

The team, from three Canadian universities and the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, is in the midst of a 20-day expedition to study 11 areas under the protection of the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization.

Exploring these areas is important because they contain the “trees of the ocean,” said Ellen Kenchington, research scientist with the Fisheries Department of Canada. She is among the lead scientists in the expedition.

“It’s been really spectacular,” she told CNN affiliate CTV from her office at the institute as pictures from the robot streamed on her computer. “It’s really changing our perception of the diversity that’s out there. … We’re seeing new species in deeper waters.”

Kenchington told the Montreal Gazette that scientists potentially can look at the coral’s chemical composition and determine the temperature of the water and other data from 1,000 years ago.

“That’s how we are able to say if there is warming or a change in climate direction,” she said. “In order to understand the present, we need to put it into context.”

Corals have been a highly successful life form for 250 million years. They are tiny animals and polyps that exist as genetically identical individuals and can eat, defend themselves and kill plankton for food. In the process they also secrete calcium carbonate, which becomes the basis for an external skeleton on which they sit.

These calcified deposits can grow to enormous sizes over a long period of time and form coral reefs. The reefs are among the world’s most productive ecosystems and can harbor more than 4,000 species of fish and many other marine life forms.

Some estimates have suggested 20 percent of the world’s coral reefs are already dead and an additional 24 percent are gravely threatened.

In the week they have left in the expedition, Kenchington and her team hope to collect samples and video from the depths of the ocean to gain a new understanding of these corals as well as other marine life.

The underwater robot, operated by crew aboard the Canadian Coast Guard ship Hudson, is enabling the crew to go about 500 meters deeper than they have before.

Kenchington told CTV the research will also help them evaluate areas that are still too deep for current fishing technologies but could be accessible in years to come.

“This will enable us to give advice in the future about what types of organisms are in these areas before they’re fished,” she said.

BEIJING – Flooding this year has killed 701 people, left 347 missing and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage, the worst toll across the board that China has seen in a decade, a senior Chinese official said Wednesday.

Three-quarters of China’s provinces have been hit by flooding and 25 rivers have seen record-high water levels, Liu Ning, general secretary of the government’s flood prevention agency, told a news conference.

Aside from the 701 dead and 347 missing, 645,000 houses were toppled and overall damage totaled 142.2 billion yuan. All the figures, Liu said, were the highest China had seen since 2000.

With the flood season far from over, this year is shaping up to be one of the most devastating since 1998, which was the worst in 50 years.

Flooding, particularly along the Yangtze River Basin, has overwhelmed reservoirs, swamped towns and cities, and broken off hillsides causing landslides that have smothered communities.

Soldiers used bulldozers to plow through debris Tuesday in search of survivors from separate landslides in Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces, while workers in other parts of the country scrambled to drain overflowing reservoirs and pile up sandbags to prevent further flooding, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Three people were killed late Sunday night by landslides in Lingao county in Shaanxi province that also left 17 missing, Xinhua reported. In all, flooding and landslides from rain-soaked hillsides in Shaanxi have killed 37 and left another 97 missing.

In nearby Sichuan province, rescuers searched for 13 missing people after a landslide hit Xujiaping Village on Tuesday morning, burying homes and blocking roads, Xinhua reported.

Xinhua and state broadcaster China Central Television reported the Three Gorges Dam was dealing with its highest water levels ever when a flood crest passed the dam Tuesday morning.

The government cited flood control along the Yangtze as one of the main reasons for the $23 billion dam project that forced the relocation of 1.4 million people.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – A drug gang that carried out the first successful car bombing against Mexican security forces likely used an industrial explosive that organized crime gangs in the past have stolen from private companies, a U.S. official said Monday.

The assailants apparently used Tovex, a water gel explosive commonly used as a replacement for dynamite in mining and other industrial activities, said the U.S. official, who is familiar with the investigation but spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the Mexican-led investigation.

The U.S. official had no other details on how the bomb was constructed, and Mexican officials declined to comment.

The car bomb killed three people — including a federal police officer — Thursday in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, and introduced a new threat in Mexico’s drug war. Mexican authorities say the assailants lured police and paramedics to the scene through an elaborate ruse seemingly taken out of an Al-Qaida playbook.

A street gang tied to the Juarez cartel dressed a bound, wounded man in a police uniform, then called in a false report of an officer shot at an intersection. They waited until the authorities were in place to detonate the bomb.

U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the car bomb “may represent a different tactic.”

“Unfortunately, these drug cartels, they have an enormous amount of resources at their disposal. They can buy any kind of capability they want. But we are determined, working with Mexico, to do everything in our power to reduce this violence that affects not only the Mexican people, but our own,” Crowley told a news conference Monday.

A graffiti message scrawled on a wall Monday threatened more attacks in the city across the border from El Paso, Texas. The message directed its threat at the FBI and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, demanding an investigation of Mexican law enforcement officials who “support the Sinaloa cartel.”

The Sinaloa cartel — one of the world’s most powerful drug-trafficking organizations — has been battling the Juarez cartel for control of Ciudad Juarez in a 2-year-old war that has converted the city into one of the world’s deadliest.

Messages that presumed drug-gang members have scrawled on walls and banners and attached to the bodies of their victims frequently accuse Mexican federal forces of protecting the Sinaloa cartel, a charge President Felipe Calderon’s administration vehemently denies.

Monday’s graffiti message said there would be another car bomb unless “corrupt federal” officials are arrested within 15 days. There was no way to verify the authenticity of the message.

The FBI and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives are aiding the Mexicans in the car bomb investigation, officials from those agencies have said.

“This is a whole new level” of aggression from drug gangs, said Tony Payan, a political analyst and expert in Mexico’s effort to combat drug cartels. “When you compare it to terrorism as it is traditionally understood, there are some similarities. The modus operandi was definitely of a terrorist attack. It was designed to instill fear in the police and the general population.”

Payan added that the Mexican government was too quick to dismiss the possibility that the motive behind the attack was political.

“When you state purposefully that your goal is to intimidate the police and scare the population it means that you intend to drive an even wider wedge between the government and the government’s popular support for the war on drugs,” he said.

The day after the bombing, Mexican Attorney General Arturo Chavez insisted there was no evidence of “narcoterrorism” in Mexico or any ideological motive behind the attack. On Monday, officials from his office said they could provide no new information on the ongoing investigation.

Brig. Gen. Eduardo Zarate, the commander of the regional military zone, has said as much as 22 pounds (10 kilograms) of explosives might have been used in the car bomb attack. He said last week that batteries and a mobile phone found at the scene suggested it was remotely detonated.

Mexico’s powerful drug cartels have long been experimenting with explosives. In the northern state of Durango in 2009, more than a dozen masked gunmen stole 900 cartridges of Tovex water gel explosives from a warehouse run by the U.S.-based Austin Powder Company. Mexican authorities recovered the stolen material, but the theft underscored how easy it can be to get explosive material in the country, where armed men also have attacked transport vehicles carrying such substances.

The ATF has helped investigate several events involving improvised explosive devices around Mexico, including a roadside bomb in March at a gas station in the northern state of Nuevo Leon. That bomb, which didn’t injure anyone, consisted of two large cylinders filled with nails and possibly black powder, another substance that is readily available on the black market.

Mexico’s drug violence has killed nearly 25,000 people since December 2006, when Calderon deployed thousands of troops and federal police to fight the cartels in their strongholds.

The government announced Monday it would send more federal troops to the northern state of Coahuila following the massacre of 17 people at a private party there. Gunmen stormed the party in the city of Torreon on Sunday and opened fire without saying a word.

Investigators had no suspects or information on a possible motive but Coahuila is among several northern Mexican states that have seen a spike in drug-related violence as the Gulf cartel and its former enforcers, the Zetas, fight for control of drug-trafficking routes.

The Coahuila state Attorney General’s Office said in a statement early Monday that the death toll rose to 18 overnight after one of the wounded died. Later Monday, state Prosecutor Jesus Torres Charles said that person was still in intensive care.

There were 12 male and six female victims; among them were four teenagers, the youngest a 17-year-old boy. At least 17 were wounded.

The attack was ghastly, but no longer unprecedented in a region that is slammed day after day by gruesome slayings that authorities attribute to an increasingly brutal battle between drug gangs feuding over territory.

— Twin suicide bombings killed 48 people on Sunday, including dozens from a government-backed, anti-al-Qaida militia lining up to collect their paychecks near a military base southwest of Baghdad, Iraqi officials said.

The bombings were the deadliest in a series of attacks across Iraq Sunday that were aimed at the Sons of Iraq, Sunni groups also known as Awakening Councils that work with government forces to fight al-Qaida in Iraq.

The attacks highlighted the stiff challenges the country faces as the U.S. scales back its forces in Iraq, leaving their Iraqi counterparts in charge of security.

The first attack Sunday morning — the worst against Iraq’s security forces in months — killed at least 45 people and wounded more than 40. It occurred at a checkpoint near a military base where the Awakening Council members had lined up to collect their paychecks in the mostly Sunni district of Radwaniya southwest of Baghdad.

“There were more than 150 people sitting on the ground when the explosion took place. I ran, thinking that I was a dead man,” said Uday Khamis, 24, who was sitting outside the Mahmoudiyah hospital where many of the wounded were taken. His left hand was bandaged and his clothes were stained with blood.

“There were more dead than wounded,” he added.

At least a dozen men, dressed in military-style uniforms were seen laying in pools of blood in front of a blast wall in footage taken by the Associated Press Television shortly after the blast.

ISLAMABAD – Pakistan and Afghanistan sealed a landmark trade deal Sunday as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pushed the two neighbors to step up civilian cooperation and work together against al-Qaida and the Taliban.

Shortly after kicking off a South Asia trip aimed at refining the goals of the increasingly unpopular war in Afghanistan, Clinton looked on as the Afghan and Pakistani commerce ministers signed the trade agreement. It was reached only after years of negotiation with recent and very active U.S. encouragement.

The pact, which eases restrictions on cross-border transportation, must be ratified by the Afghan parliament and Pakistani Cabinet. U.S. officials said they believe it will significantly enhance ties between the two countries, boost development and incomes on both sides of the border and contribute to the fight against extremists.

“Bringing Islamabad and Kabul together has been a goal of this administration from the beginning,” said Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. “This is a vivid demonstration of the two countries coming closer together.”

Despite the agreement, Clinton faces challenges in appealing for greater cooperation between the neighboring nations on the nearly 9-year-old war, pressing Pakistan for more help in taking on militants accused of plotting attacks on the U.S., including the failed Times Square bombing, and stepping up action against extremists along the Afghan border.

Although Pakistan has relented on issuing long-delayed visas for some 450 U.S. officials and Clinton is bringing new U.S. development aid for Pakistan, anti-American sentiment remains high.

In addition, U.S. officials have also expressed concerns about Pakistan’s plans for a deal with China that would give energy-starved Pakistan two new nuclear power plants. Critics said transferring the reactors would violate international nonproliferation agreements.

In talks with President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, ahead of Monday meetings with military and civilian officials, Clinton was conveying the message that the U.S. is committed to the country’s long-term development needs, not just short-term security gains.

Clinton is offering a package of about $500 million in development programs, funded by legislation approved by Congress to triple nonmilitary aid to $1.5 billion a year over five years. The aid will focus on water, energy, agriculture and health. The initiatives mark the second phase of projects begun under a new and enhanced strategic partnership.

Holbrooke noted that when Clinton visited Pakistan last October she had “waded into continually hostile and skeptical crowds.” But he maintained that the new U.S. focus is “producing a change in Pakistani attitudes, first within the government and gradually, more slowly, within the public.”

Still, he and other officials acknowledge, mistrust of America runs deep in Pakistan, particularly over unmanned drone strikes. They’re aimed at militants but often kill or injury civilians; to many Pakistanis, they represent an unacceptable violation of sovereignty.

Vali Nasr, a Holbrooke deputy, said overcoming the suspicion remains a work in progress.

“We’re not going to be able to get them aligned over a one-year time period on every single issue and change 30 years of foreign policy of Pakistan on a dime,” he said.

Underscoring Pakistan’s fragility, only hours after Clinton’s arrival a suicide bomber ran past guards at a minority Shiite mosque in eastern Pakistan then blew himself up, wounding several worshippers. The attack, hundreds of miles away from Islamabad, appeared to be the latest in a string by Sunni extremists against other Muslims they consider infidels.

After her stop in Pakistan, Clinton is set to attend an international conference on Afghanistan on Tuesday in Kabul, where Afghan officials will present details on their plans to reintegrate militants into society and outline how they intend to implement reform and anti-corruption pledges made earlier this year.

Security was tightened in the Afghan capital ahead the conference which will assemble diplomats from 60 nations as well as the heads of NATO and the United Nations. Nonetheless, a suicide bomber killed three civilians near a busy market.

American lawmakers and voters are increasingly questioning the course of the drawn-out war with rising death tolls among U.S. and international troops and growing questions about corruption. Last month was the deadliest of the war for international forces: 103 coalition troops were killed, despite the addition of tens of thousands more U.S. troops.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – The first successful car bombing by a drug cartel brings a new dimension of terror to a Mexican border region already shocked by random street battles, bodies dangling from bridges and highway checkpoints mounted by heavily armed criminals.

The attack, seemingly lifted from an al-Qaida playbook, demonstrated once again that the cartels are a step ahead of both an already guarded public and federal police, who have recently taken over command from the military of the battle against traffickers in Ciudad Juarez, a city across the border from El Paso, Texas.

“It’s a lot like Iraq,” said Claudio Arjon, who owns a restaurant near the scene of the attack and was surveying the damage from behind police lines Saturday morning. “Now, things are very different. It’s very different. It’s very ugly.”

People in Ciudad Juarez already live under siege. Like many restaurant owners, Arjon closes his business long before dark every day to avoid criminal gangs that threaten him and his clientele. Parents take separate cars to the same place so one can warn the other of dangers up ahead. Ambulance drivers and emergency room doctors come under fire from gang members trying to finish off wounded rivals.

The car bomb, which killed at least three people Thursday, was the one thing nobody was expecting. It was a carefully planned attack designed to catch the extremely wary population and security forces off guard.

A street gang tied to the Juarez cartel lured federal officers and paramedics to the site of the bomb by dressing a bound, wounded man in a police uniform and calling in a false report of an officer shot, said Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes.

Among those killed was a private doctor who rushed to the scene to help treat the wounded man. Among the injured was a local TV cameraman who had been filming the paramedics treating the man. Even in a country where beheadings and drive-by shootings are routine, they could not imagine the cartels would choose that vulnerable moment to strike.

“In all my time working, nothing like this had ever happened to me,” Channel 5 cameraman Luis Hernandez said in an interview with Milenio television.

The Red Cross in Ciudad Juarez already instructs their personnel to wait until police cordon off the scene of an attack before treating the wounded — but that wasn’t enough Thursday when the attackers clearly waited until everyone was in place before striking.

Now, Red Cross officials said they were instructing their rescuers to look out for anything unusual — a parked car or an abandoned bag — that could be a bomb.

“They have to think with their heads and not their hearts,” said Gilberto Contreras, the president of the Red Cross in the city.

Federal police said the bombing attack was in retaliation for the arrest earlier in the day of a top leader of the La Linea gang, which works for the Juarez drug cartel. Investigators were still trying to determine what type of explosives the attackers used.

Brig. Gen. Eduardo Zarate, the commander of the regional military zone, said as much as 22 pounds (10 kilograms) of explosives might have been used. He said it might have been detonated remotely, adding that burned batteries connecting to a mobile phone were found at the scene.

A senior U.S. law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the Mexican investigation is ongoing, said it is possible Mexican drug cartels were receiving bomb training from foreign groups — but it is just as likely they are learning on their own. “They could be looking at the Internet, and there are publications out there,” he said.

There have long been indications that the drug gangs were experimenting with explosives — and steadily improving their know-how. Gunmen have stolen explosive substances from transport vehicles and private companies. In a February 2009 raid on a U.S. firm in the northern state of Durango, masked gunmen stole 900 cartridges of Tovex water gel explosives.

In March, an improvised explosive device went off without injuring anyone at a gas station in Cadereyta, a town in the northern state of Nuevo Leon.

That bomb consisted of two large cylinders filled with nails and possibly black powder — a substance easily available on the black market — according to a U.S. Bomb Data Center report. A cell phone hard-wired to a cattle prod was found at the scene.

The report said the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was helping investigate that blast and several other situations around Mexico possibly involving remotely controlled IEDs.

While Mexican federal police have training in post-blast investigations, no security force in the country has experience with patrolling cities that could be mined with car bombs or roadside explosives.

“There’s no way the Mexicans are prepared for it,” said Eric Olson, a senior associate at the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute. “I hate to say it but the cartels seem to have no limits to the violence and terrible things they are willing to do.”

Olson said the best way for federal police to confront this new threat would be to improve their intelligence capabilities — an area he called a serious weakness.

“It requires operational intelligence. It requires ‘We know this is going to happen or likely is going to happen in this neighborhood,’” he said. “That kind of refined intelligence is extremely difficult anywhere. But it doesn’t seem to be available in a place like Ciudad Juarez.”

The cartels, on the other hand, “have an amazing intelligence capability,” he said. “They are far ahead of law enforcement. All that keeps law enforcement from getting ahead of the curve.”

Mexican cartels — armed with billions of dollars and networks of informers among corrupt police forces — have long demonstrated their ability to target the highest-ranking security officials and government officials.

Last month, cartel gunmen killed 12 federal police in the western state of Michoacan. A jailed suspect later described the carefully planned ambush to police, making it clear the gang knew exactly where the police patrol was going to be and when.

And in another first, suspected cartel gunmen assassinated two candidates during campaigning last month for local and state elections, including the leading contender for governor of the northern border state of Tamaulipas. Never before had drug gangs killed such a high-ranking electoral candidate.

Reyes, the Ciudad Juarez mayor, told The Associated Press that city authorities have “started changing all our protocols, to include bomb situations,” he said.

But there was little information from the federal government on what its next steps would be.

Attorney General Arturo Chavez told a news conference Friday that the nature of the explosives used in the attack was still under investigation, and that there was “no evidence anywhere in the country of narco-terrorism.”

It didn’t seem that way to many frightened Mexicans — or police.

“It’s terrorism,” a federal police officer muttered at the bombing scene Saturday.

Yuriria Sierra, a columnist for Excelsior Newspaper, questioned the attorney general’s remarks: “With a population terrified to go out because they don’t know if they will come home, we still can’t talk about ‘narco-terrorism?’”

“We don’t need Al-Qaida to live in fear,” she wrote.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has a history of heart problems, including five heart attacks.

During the operation last week at the Inova Fairfax Heart and Vascular Institute, doctors implanted a small pump that “improves heart function and will enable me to resume an active life,” Cheney’s statement said.

“The operation went very well and I am now recuperating,” the statement said.

Dr. Tim Gardner, former president of the American Heart Association, told CNN that such implants indicate severe heart failure.

“These devices are put in patients whose heart failure is so bad that they need a mechanical pump to keep their circulation going,” said Gardner, who is the medical director of the Center for Heart and Vascular Health at Christiana Care in Wilmington, Delaware.

Gardner was not involved in Cheney’s treatment.

Cheney has a history of heart problems, including five heart attacks dating back to the first one he suffered in 1978 at age 37.

“A few weeks ago, it became clear that I was entering a new phase of the disease when I began to experience increasing congestive heart failure,” Cheney’s statement said. “After a series of recent tests and discussions with my doctors, I decided to take advantage of one of the new technologies available and have a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) implanted.”

Cheney also suffered heart attacks in 1984 and 1988, and underwent a quadruple bypass surgery to unblock his arteries. Shortly after Cheney was elected vice president in November 2000, he had a fourth heart attack and received a stent to open an artery.

In February, Cheney suffered his fifth heart attack.

He was released from a Washington, D.C., hospital on June 28 after suffering from “progressive retention of fluid related to his coronary artery disease,” his office said at the time.