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Need to know: Iran on Sunday began large-scale air defense war games aimed at protecting the country's nuclear facilities against any possible attack, state television reported. It said the five-day drill will cover an area a third of the size of Iran and spread across the central, western and southern parts of the country. The flexing of military might comes at a time when tensions are rising between Iran and six world powers over the prospect of Tehran developing nuclear weapons.

Want to know: How does the U.A.E. respond to news that it possesses the biggest carbon footprint, per-capita, of any country in the world? By throwing money at the problem, of course. Abu Dhabi has put up $15 billion in seed money to develop the world's first carbon neutral, zero-waste city. GlobalPost's Tom Hundley gets into it.

Dull but important: Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Sunday that there was no substitute to the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. "My own feeling is that we have not entered an era of irreversible shift in economic strength of the United States," Singh said during an interview with CNN.

Just because: It's not fast food, mind you, but it is la restauration rapide, France's own take on the proverbial Big Mac. France's master chefs interpret fast food with American-style lunches of salads and sandwiches, often priced as meal deals and packaged to be eaten on the run. Read more in the Wall Street Journal.

Wacky: Peruvian police made the claims late last week that a criminal organization had been murdering people and selling their human fat for thousands of dollars to people who made cosmetics out of it. But medical experts say it doesn't quite add up. "It doesn't make sense that the [body] fat would be sold at prices of US$15,000 dollars a liter," said Julio Castro, dean of Peru's Medical College in the capital Lima. "Hundreds of liters of human fat are obtained every day at cosmetic clinics, and disposed of."

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