Europe

So far on her trip to Europe, Michelle Obama has hugged the queen of England, double cheek-kissed the glamorous first lady of France and electrified the celebrity-obsessed tabloids. When she talked to students at a school for underprivileged girls in London, though, her message was about her working-class childhood and her success gained through strong values and hard work in school.

Easing the U.S. push for a European missile defense system, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told NATO allies Thursday that the Obama administration was reviewing plans for the controversial program and hoped to reopen talks with Moscow, which is bitterly opposed to the project. Gates, echoing views of other top administration officials, said the U.S. would consider whether the system was affordable and technologically feasible as plans move forward.

When President Bush visited London in 2003, protests were so furious and safeguards so tight that he was kept deep inside his security bubble, far from the madding crowd. By contrast, an admired President Obama touched down Tuesday and paid a placid visit to U.S. Embassy staffers at a school in the heart of residential London before this week's economic summit.

Like many spy tales in fiction and reality, "Background to Danger" begins in a train station. A down-and-out freelance journalist awaits a night train alone on a platform in Nuremberg, Germany, hands in overcoat pockets, shoulders hunched against a November wind. Soon a frightened Russian offers him cash to smuggle documents across the Austrian border, and the plot steams into a labyrinth of treachery.

Stocks fell in Europe and Asia on Friday, extending the MSCI World Index's longest weekly losing streak since March, as reports on retail sales and the service industry added to concern that the first global recession since World War II will persist. U.S. markets were closed for the Fourth of July holiday. Metro AG, Germany's biggest retailer, slipped 2.5% as European retail sales dropped more than economists estimated. Seven & I Holdings Co.

Iran's response Thursday to a proposed deal to transform its controversial nuclear material into fuel for a medical reactor is "inadequate," a senior Western diplomat said, adding that the reply failed to address key U.S. and European concerns about Tehran's nuclear intentions. Iran appeared to seek modifications to the proposal to temporarily move most of its enriched uranium to Russia and France to be further refined and shaped for use in a medical reactor after a delay of nearly a week and a flurry of contradictory signals.

Former enemies and allies somberly marked the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II on Tuesday, underlining the need to remember the bloodiest conflict of the 20th century so as not to repeat it. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whose country sided with Nazi Germany during the initial invasion of Poland in 1939 before later opposing Germany, said the war and its causes needed to be studied from all perspectives. "We should examine everything which ended up bringing about the tragedy of Sept.

The good folk of Broughton don't take kindly to being photographed without permission. Just ask Google. When the search-engine giant sent one of its specially equipped cars to take pictures of the village for its Street View feature, residents swung into action. They stopped the car in its tracks, called the police and quizzed the bewildered driver for nearly two hours before letting him go. "I don't think this guy anticipated how angry people would get," said Edward Butler-Ellis, 28. "We didn't stand there with pitchforks or anything and block the road with bales of hay, but obviously people were agitated.

It is a worrisome first: an American accused of going to Europe to plot a terrorist attack there. Recent arrests in Chicago underscore a growing concern among Western officials about the threat posed by U.S. militants who take advantage of their passports to travel easily around the world on violent missions. "We never thought it could be persons from the U.S. coming here to commit attacks," said Hans Jorgen Bonnichsen, a former chief of Denmark's police security intelligence service.

Which of his films does Roman Polanski's life resemble most: "Rosemary's Baby," his horror classic about a devil whose libido is hideously visited upon an innocent girl, or "The Pianist," his Oscar-winning tale of an artist who survives relentless state persecution? Here in Europe, where the celebrated director finds himself looking at the world from behind bars instead of through a movie camera, it all depends on whom you ask. To those in the arts community, especially in France where Polanski lives, he has been cast as a hounded hero whose arrest in Switzerland on Saturday smacks of something "frightening" about America.