(Reuters) - London's Olympic Games is not threatened by a major security contractor's failure to find enough staff, ministers and the head of the city's organising committee said on Sunday, seeking to quell a political storm ahead of athletes' arrival.

Three days ago, the government announced it would draft in 3,500 extra troops as cover after contractor G4S admitted it was unlikely to train the guards it had promised under its 284 billion pound contract in time.

The news, two weeks before the start of the Games on July 27, prompted concerns over the safety of athletes and spectators, and raised fears that those trying to get into venues would face long queues to get through security.

"(Security) has not been compromised," Sebastian Coe, chairman of the London Olympic organising committee (LOCOG), told BBC radio.

(Reuters) - The chief executive of Airbus (EAD.PA) said U.S. rival Boeing has slashed the prices of Boeing 737 Max aircraft in a bid to grab market share from Airbus A320neo, a German newspaper reported on Sunday.

"Boeing is desperately trying now to boost the market share of B737 Max. They are very aggressive when it comes to pricing," Fabrice Bregier said in an interview with Welt am Sonntag.

For the full year, Boeing will likely announce a higher level of new orders for the whole group than Airbus, he added.

Asked how EADS would protect itself in case of a euro zone break up, he said: "Our parent EADS is examining right now whether we should set up our own bank. With its 10 billion euros (7.85 billion pounds), EADS has a strong cash position and is doing everything in order to preserve this cash."

(Reuters) - Romania's suspended President Traian Basescu said on Sunday the ruling party's drive to force him from office was an attempt to protect some of its lawmakers from corruption investigations.

European Union leaders have criticised leftist Prime Minister Victor Ponta for his campaign to oust Basescu, his long-time political rival. They accused him of failing to protect the rule of law and democratic institutions.

Ponta and his Social Liberal Union (USL), backed by a vote in parliament, earlier this month suspended Basescu for 30 days. A national referendum due on July 29 will decide whether the president will be impeached.

"My suspension was a long-planned move ... and was done to protect would-be convicts in Romanian politics," Basescu told private television station Realitatea TV in an interview.

On a recent BBC Newsnight debate, Jeremy Paxman drew applause by popping up on a screen a photo of Herman Van Rompuy, the rather nondescript Belgian president of the European Council, and asking the audience whether they had voted for him and even knew who he was. Argument over: of course we'd rather not be bossed about by unelected officials whom we can't even name.

Except for this. It was tosh. Why didn't he also put up photos of the Secretary General of Nato, or the head of the World Trade Organisation, or the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the International Maritime Organisation, or even the head of Fifa? We didn't vote for any of those either; they come from funny foreign countries and we don't even know their names - except perhaps the President of Fifa.

Read Adam Smith, Eurosceptics

Yet all of them hold pieces of our sovereignty in their sweaty, unelected palms. Our elected representatives chose to hand over that power without even thinking about referendums. Membership of Nato obliges us to go to war if another country were to attack, say, Turkey. No ifs and buts: unless we are prepared to renege upon the founding treaty of Nato, we would then be at war, whether we like it or not. Makes the sacrifices that go with EU membership seem trivial.

German weapons manufacturers should have an easier time selling their products as the government intends to relax export regulations, Der Spiegel magazine reported on Sunday. The Economy Ministry denied the report.

Two draft papers drawn up in the Economy Ministry would affect the biggest sectors of the German arms export industry, the magazine said.

The aim would be to "purge foreign trade law" and to "lift special German rules which disadvantage German exporters in comparison to their European competitors," the papers said.

But a spokeswoman for the ministry said the report was wrong. She said the export of weapons would not be affected by the draft amendments to the export trade rules. Current rules affecting arms would remain in place, she said.

But Der Spiegel said the drafts would mean that exports between European Union states were considered transfers rather than exports, enabling the licensing process to be simplified.

JERUSALEM -- The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre confirmed Sunday that Laszlo Csatary, accused of complicity in the killings of 15,700 Jews, had been tracked down to the Hungarian capital.

"I confirm that Laszlo Csatary has been identified and found in Budapest," the centre's director Efraim Zuroff told AFP.

Ten months ago an informer had provided information that allowed them to locate Csatary, 97, in Budapest, Zuroff told AFP by phone. They had paid the informer the $25,000 promised for such information, he added.

In September last year, they had passed on their information to the prosecutor's office in Budapest.

A statement released Sunday by the centre said Zuroff had "last week submitted new evidence to the prosecutor in Budapest regarding crimes committed during World War II by its No 1 Most Wanted suspect Laszlo Csatary."

The Wall Street Journal reports that Mario Draghi proposed a bail-in of senior Spanish bondholders at the recent eurogroup meeting; ministers rejected the advice, fearing that the Irish programme would have to be unravelled, and because they feared a negative market reaction; Draghi proposed to restrict bondholder bail-ins only to cases where a bank is closed down, but not sized down; Italy plans to sell €120bn in assets by 2017 and hopes to cut debt by 20%; Paolo Guerrieri says Italy may be facing a Greek scenario; The cumulative total of austerity plans is €330bn according to Il Sole 24 Ore; the head of the CSU says he will only support that Spanish rescues if it is clear that the Spanish state remains liable for any loans to Spanish banks even after the ESM lends directly to banks; Angela Merkel said the liability had not yet been worked out; Klaus Regling says the whole point of a direct lending is to remove the liability of the state; Jens Weidmann says Spain's MoU does not go far enough; Bundestag is certain to approve the Spanish package, but Merkel may not have her own coalition majority; Andrea Enria wants to make permanent the 9% capital requirement for European banks; he said banks should conserve capital, and not reduce capital, especially in view of the phase-in for Basle III; Spain's austerity law says the unemployed will lose their entitlement if they travel abroad even for a single day (and even if they go for a job interview); Portugal's bonus payment might also be challenged for this year; Ed Hugh says Portugal's original deficit target will not be met even with the cut in Christmas bonuses; 7 out of 10 Greeks want their government to insist on renegotiation; Jens Weidman says Italy cannot join the ESM just to reduce finance costs as the ESM can only be used in an acute emergency; he also said that he opposed the recent cut in interest rates; Merkel says she will run in 2013, and promises to turn the elections into a campaign on the future of Europe; Wolfgang Munchau, meanwhile, argues that the eurosceptics are winning the debate in Germany because the pro-Europeans are spineless.

Spiggle Englisch

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

The centralist right-wing government of Spain is copying the form and substance of EU policy.

Although the word "bailout" did not figure in the 14-page document, the rescued has nonetheless become the rescuer. Much as the EU sent financial envoys to Madrid to pore over the state of the nation's bank balance sheets, Finance Minister Cristóbal Montoro can dispatch teams of what he once termed as "men in black" to probe regional accounts before awarding rescue funds, which will be paid in installments with harsh budgetary and fiscal conditions attached.

In the name of serving the greater good of the EU, Brussels claims it is forced to strong-arm its members. Examples from Romania, Hungary and Italy, however, reveal something quite different: civil society and local cultures are sometimes being sacrificed.
Thomas Schmid

Going into debt today means a poorer tomorrow. That's why austerity is the alpha and omega of a policy that is meant to ensure the continued survival of that half-freewheeling, half-iron-clad grouping of states that we have somewhat hastily called the European Union. This priority is perceived in some states of the EU as a diktat from Germany. That's not fair.

And yet, if we're to tell the whole truth, we have to admit that the new European austerity policy is also doing some damage. As nice as the talk about federal Europe (including its supposedly subnational structure) sounds, the reality is that it's not just the financial crisis but the overall interests of the Union that can have a serious impact on sovereignty.

(Die Welt is an awful newspaper in general, which is why we have not included it in our press review, but it is now qualifying to make it into our rogue's gallery, along with Bild.)

(Reuters) - For nearly three years, as Kyle Lagow struggled to find work and his finances crumbled, he kept a secret from nearly everyone he knew, including his wife: He was a whistleblower.

Lagow had filed a suit against his former employer, subprime mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, alleging appraisal fraud. He couldn't discuss the case, filed under seal, until this year when he was awarded $14.5 million for his role in sparking a $1 billion settlement with Countrywide's current parent, Bank of America Corp.

"You have to sit there in silence, and you just get up every day and beat your head against the wall," Lagow, 50, said in a recent interview.

The settlement has brought Lagow financial security and a measure of redemption. But it was a long, hard path. And even after his travails, he fears little has changed in the mortgage industry.

As regulators ramp up their global investigation into the manipulation of interest rates, the Justice Department has identified potential criminal wrongdoing by big banks and individuals at the center of the scandal.

The department's criminal division is building cases against several financial institutions and their employees, including traders at Barclays, the British bank, according to government officials close to the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing. The authorities expect to file charges against at least one bank later this year, one of the officials said.

The prospect of criminal cases is expected to rattle the banking world and provide a new impetus for financial institutions to settle with the authorities. The Justice Department investigation comes on top of private investor lawsuits and a sweeping regulatory inquiry led by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Collectively, the civil and criminal actions could cost the banking industry tens of billions of dollars.

BRUSSELS - In the dark days of the financial crisis, as credit markets froze around the world amidst uncertainty and confusion, one thing at least was clear. The global financial sector had become interconnected as never before.

In the 19th century, it was said that: "When France sneezes, the rest of Europe catches a cold." In the early 21st century, when Citibank, Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase, cough and splutter, the whole world reaches for the aspirin bottle.

The impact of the failure of these firms beyond their home jurisdictions is apparent for anyone to see.

When it comes to assessing the positive contributions of these global giants to the welfare of citizens around the world, the answer is altogether less clear.

Four years after the Lehman crisis, economic activity and employment in the OECD has not yet returned to its pre-crisis level. Unemployment is at postwar highs in every major European country apart from Germany and, while the U.S. jobless rate is now a little below its postwar record, it has been stuck above 8 percent for longer than at any time since the Great Depression. And in Britain, the long-term loss of output assumed by the government's latest budget forecasts implies, according to Goldman Sachs calculations, that the six months of the post-Lehman crisis did greater permanent damage to the country's productive capacity than the Great Depression or World War Two.

Now consider the response. In the U.S., the four years since Lehman have been dominated by economic debates among politicians, media commentators and business leaders on issues that are almost totally irrelevant to unemployment and the pace of economic recovery: how to reduce long-term budget deficits and whether to tweak the top rate of income tax from 36 percent to 39.6 percent. In Britain, the biggest economic controversy this year has been the extension of value added tax to hot pies. Europe's response to the deepest economic depression in living memory - and an even more alarming xenophobic nationalism that threatens the literal disintegration of the euro and the European Union - has been to debate the bureaucratic "modalities" of bank regulations, fiscal treaties and pension reforms in the next decade.

How to explain this insouciance in the face of the gravest threat to the Western world since the height of the Cold War?

Concerns are growing about the reliability of oil prices, after a report for the G20 found the market is wide open to "manipulation or distortion".

Traders from banks, oil companies or hedge funds have an "incentive" to distort the market and are likely to try to report false prices, it said.

Politicians and fuel campaigners last night urged the Government to expand its inquiry into the Libor scandal to see whether oil prices have also been falsely pushed up.

They warned any efforts to rig the oil price would affect how much drivers pay at the pump, which soared to a record high of 137p per litre of unleaded earlier this year.

More than four years after the financial crisis began, the world's major advanced economies remain deeply depressed, in a scene all too reminiscent of the 1930s. And the reason is simple: we are relying on the same ideas that governed policy in the 1930s. These ideas, long since disproved, involve profound errors both about the causes of the crisis, its nature, and the appropriate response.

These errors have taken deep root in public consciousness and provide the public support for the excessive austerity of current fiscal policies in many countries. So the time is ripe for a Manifesto in which mainstream economists offer the public a more evidence-based analysis of our problems.

...

In the face of a less severe shock, monetary policy could take up the slack. But with interest rates close to zero, monetary policy - while it should do all it can - cannot do the whole job. There must of course be a medium-term plan for reducing the government deficit. But if this is too front-loaded it can easily be self-defeating by aborting the recovery. A key priority now is to reduce unemployment, before it becomes endemic, making recovery and future deficit reduction even more difficult.

517,031 have signed. Help us get to 1,000,000
Posted: 10 July 2012
Big banks have been caught in a massive scam to rig global interest rates, ripping off millions of people on their mortgages, student loans and more! We'd go to jail for this, but Barclays bank has only been fined, and just a fraction of their profits! Outrage is mounting -- this is our chance to finally turn the tide of the banks' reign over our democracies.

The EU finance regulator, Michel Barnier is standing up to the powerful bank lobby and championing reform that would put bankers behind bars for fraud like this. If the EU goes first, accountability could quickly spread across the globe. But the banks are lobbying hard against it, and we need a massive surge of people power to drive these reforms through.

If we can get 1 million people to stand with Barnier in the next 3 days, it will give him momentum to face down the banking lobby and push governments to bring reform. Sign the petition, and our growing numbers will be represented by adding mock bankers to a jail right in front of the EU Parliament.

I have absolutely no idea what Ben Bernanke thinks he is doing...

Syria has denied accusations by special envoy Kofi Annan that state forces used heavy weapons or helicopters in clashes in the village of Tremseh last week, where activists said there was a massacre of over 100 people.

Jihad Makdissi, spokesman for Syria's Foreign Ministry, told reporters on Sunday that security forces killed 37 fighters and two civilians in a campaign against the village, from which the government said rebels were launching attacks on other areas.

"Government forces did not use planes, or helicopters, or tanks or artillery. The heaviest weapon used was an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade]," Makdissi told the reporters in Damascus.

The African Union is ready to send troops to the restive eastern Democratic Republic of Congo as part of a
peacekeeping force, AU Commission Chairman Jean Ping has said.

"The AU is prepared to contribute to the establishment of a regional force to put an end to the activities of armed groups," Ping told African leaders at the opening of the pan-African bloc's summit meeting in Ethiopia on Sunday.

DR Congo President Joseph Kabila was at the meeting as well as Paul Kagame of Rwanda, currently at odds over Kinshasa's allegations Kigali is supporting a rebellion known as M23, in the mineral-rich eastern Kivu region.

Kabila's government has accused high-ranking Rwandan officers of supporting a rebellion by soldiers who mutinied from DR Congo's regular army.

The allegations echo the findings of a UN panel of experts who last month said Rwanda was supplying arms and fighters to the rebels.

Rwanda has denied involvement and in turn accuses Kinshasa of renewing co-operation with Rwandan Hutu rebels, who have been based in eastern DR Congo since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and South Sudanese President Salva Kiir embraced each other as leaders filed into the summit room, following their first face-to-face talks late Saturday since border clashes in April and March.

CAIRO, Jul 15 2012 (IPS) - The first major confrontation between Egypt's new Islamist president and its quasi-ruling military council - fought over the issue of legislative authority - appears to have been won by the latter.

"The Muslim Brotherhood and its allies may have swept last year's parliamentary polls, but lawmaking power remains in the hands of the military," Magdi Sherif, political analyst and head of the Guardians of the Revolution Party established in the wake of last year's Tahrir Square uprising, told IPS. "And recent developments have drawn Egypt's judiciary into the conflict."

On Jul. 8, Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first freely-elected president and long-time Muslim Brotherhood figure, issued an executive decree calling on members of the People's Assembly, the lower house of Egypt's parliament, to convene. The decree further called for fresh parliamentary polls to be held 60 days after approval of a new constitution via popular referendum.

On Jul. 10, however, Egypt's High Constitutional Court (HCC) `suspended' implementation of Morsi's decree based on an earlier HCC ruling calling for the dissolution of parliament's lower house. The constitutional court went on to stress that its decisions were "final" and "irreversible."

The following day, Morsi backed down. Vowing to abide by the court ruling, he stressed the presidency's "respect for the HCC, its judges and all rulings emanating from Egypt's judiciary."

TEL AVIV, Jul 15 2012 (IPS) - During a march Saturday marking one year since social protests engulfed Israel, a man silently set himself on fire, leaving behind him a painful "I accuse!" letter that exposes widespread disillusionment in the face of the immense expectation for change, and the abyss between the people and the State.

Mobile phones captured the horror - a student haranguing the crowd about the deficiency of the public transportation system, suddenly interrupted by a clamour and a blaze.

An eyewitness said "someone read out a letter; then doused himself in gasoline." Panicked demonstrators poured water on the man.

Suffering from second- and third-degree burns over 94 percent of his body, he's been hospitalised at the Sheba Medical Centre's intensive care unit, fighting for his life.

"I can't afford medication or rent. I paid millions in taxes; I served in the army, in the reserve. The state robbed me, left me with nothing; I can't even live month to month. I won't be homeless," he wrote in the letter whose copies were found on the ground by fellow demonstrators.

North Korean military chief Ri Yong-ho has been removed from all official posts, according to state media.

As well as being head of the army, he was vice-chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission and held top posts in the ruling Workers' Party.

In a short statement, the party said Mr Ri had been removed from his posts "because of illness".

The BBC's Seoul correspondent Lucy Williamson says there is widespread scepticism about that explanation.

(Reuters) - The U.S. Navy angered Republicans by spending $26 a gallon for biofuels for this week's Great Green Fleet demonstration, but the Air Force received little attention when it paid twice as much per gallon to test synthetic jet fuel last month.

The Air Force bought 11,000 gallons of alcohol-to-jet fuel from Gevo Inc, a Colorado biofuels company, at $59 a gallon in a program aimed at proving that new alternative fuels can be used reliably in military aircraft - once, that is, their pricing is competitive with petroleum, which now costs $3.60 a gallon.

The cost of the Air Force demonstration - $639,000 - was far less eye-catching than the $12 million the Navy spent for biofuels to power a carrier strike group on alternative energy for a day.

But it was part of the same Pentagon push, which has escalated under the administration of President Barack Obama, to adopt green solutions to rising fuel costs.

More than 5,000 people are cut off by landslides as more heavy rain and floods are forecast in southwestern Japan, where the death toll from torrential downpours has risen to 24.

Landslides and fallen trees have cut roads and water supplies in the region since late Saturday, where unprecedented rainfall has fallen since Wednesday.

Television footage showed troops loading relief material such as food, water and medical supplies into military helicopters to send them to mountainous areas in Yame, Fukuoka prefecture in northern Kyushu island, on Sunday.

Local authorities were separately dispatching rescue helicopters to take patients and elderly villagers to hospital from the isolated area, where at least one person was killed, officials said.

"We will continue sending emergency ration to people there as it is still unknown when we can secure access to the area," said Kayo Shinohara, a spokeswoman for Yame City government.

WASHINGTON, Jul 12 2012 (EurasiaNet) - When it comes to the brewing arms race in the Caspian Sea region, no one can accuse Turkmen leader Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov of navel-gazing. Ashgabat is now able to back its claims to some energy-rich patches of the sea with considerable firepower.

Abundant energy resources under and around the sea have pushed all five littoral states - Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan - to bolster their naval capabilities. Analysts agree that Russia has the most powerful flotilla on the Caspian. But who is Number Two is a matter of debate.

Iran traditionally has played second fiddle to Russia on the Caspian. Currently, Tehran's claim to a 20-percent share of the sea is generally considered the biggest obstacle standing in the way of a regional treaty that would facilitate large-scale energy extraction. Russia and other former Soviet states contend that Iran should receive only a 13-percent Caspian share.

According to a late June report distributed by the semi-official Fars news agency, Tehran now plans to deploy an undisclosed number of "light submarines" in the Caspian. The Fars report did not specify how many subs would be deployed, what kind of armaments they would carry or when they would enter service.

According to a major Russian defence magazine, Turkmenistan is challenging Iran as the second leading naval power on the sea.

Researchers have discovered yet another way to harvest small amounts of electricity from motion in the world around us - this time by capturing the electrical charge produced when two different kinds of plastic materials rub against one another. Based on flexible polymer materials, this "triboelectric" generator could provide alternating current (AC) from activities such as walking.

The triboelectric generator could supplement power produced by nanogenerators that use the piezoelectric effect to create current from the flexing of zinc oxide nanowires. And because these triboelectric generators can be made nearly transparent, they could offer a new way to produce active sensors that might replace technology now used for touch-sensitive device displays.

What do beer, dogs and cats, and corn all have in common? All of them are the end products of the process of domestication. Almost everybody knows that a number of different animals and plants have been bred for qualities that benefit humans. But few people realize that a number of microbes have undergone a similar transformation.

Take brewer's yeast, for example. It is the quintessential ingredient in beer making: genetically altered to convert the sugars in malted barley into alcohol and to produce metabolic byproducts that give beer its unique taste. In fact, dozens of specialized strains of yeast produce the wide variety of beers, lagers and ales that brewers have developed.

"Although people don't often think about it, we haven't only domesticated animals and plants, but we have also domesticated dozens of different microbes," said Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Antonis Rokas, adding that it's hard to imagine what life would be like without beer, wine, leavened bread, cheese, yoghurt, soy sauce, sauerkraut and a number of other mainstays of the human diet that are produced by domesticated microbes.

"The genetic basis for the domestication of many different plants and animals has been extensively studied, but, remarkably, very little is known about how domestication has shaped the genetic makeup of microbes," he said.

Apparently it wasn't quite enough for the House Agriculture Committee to pass a version of the farm bill that made over $16 billion in cuts to food stamps and allowed for an open-ended expansion of crop insurance for Big Ag.

No, the members of the committee also felt the need to sneak something in to help out those poor struggling biotechnology behemoths in their attempts to win approval for new genetically engineered seed. Since we all know genetically modified seeds never win approval. I'm sorry. Did I say never? I meant always.

But apparently an unending winning streak isn't enough for the biotech industry. It wants to make sure that the U.S. Department of Agriculture approves its new seeds with minimal study, and loses the ability to withdraw them from the market should they prove harmful. To top it off, biotech companies want to ensure that anyone harmed by these seeds will have no recourse for damages.*

Germany's environment minister raised eyebrows on Sunday by conceding that some of the targets that are part of the government's policy of phasing out the use of nuclear energy, while at the same time cutting emissions of greenhouse gases, may not be achievable.

"It has to be questioned whether we'll really succeed in reducing electricity use by 10 per cent by 2020," Peter Altmaier said in an interview with the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

[...]

Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right coalition had previously said that it was on track to put a million electric cars on the road by 2020. Official figures put that number at just over 4,500 at the start of 2012.

(Reuters) - Tablets with paper-thin screens that can be folded and tucked into your back pocket, artificial intelligence and augmented reality -- the stuff of science fiction may be coming to a store near you.

It's been two years since Apple Inc launched the iPad and spawned rival tablets from the likes of Samsung Electronics Co, Amazon.com Inc, Sony Corp, and now Google Inc and Microsoft Corp.

Much of the competition so far has centered on making smartphone and tablets lighter, slimmer, faster and longer-running than their predecessors, and the trend shows no signs of slowing. The increasingly crowded marketplace is also galvanizing hardware designers and software engineers to explore new technologies that may revolutionize the look and feel of mobile devices in coming years.

"We should think beyond just the touch-screen device," said Lin Zhong, a professor at Rice University who does research on mobile systems. "Why do we have to hold tablets, carry many displays? We should think about wearable computers."

Alexander the Great is portrayed as a legendary conqueror and military leader in Greek-influenced Western history books but his legacy looks very different from a Persian perspective.

Any visitor of the spectacular ruins of Persepolis - the site of the ceremonial capital of the ancient Persian Achaemenid empire, will be told three facts: it was built by Darius the Great, embellished by his son Xerxes, and destroyed by that man, Alexander.

That man Alexander, would be the Alexander the Great, feted in Western culture as the conqueror of the Persian Empire and one of the great military geniuses of history.

Indeed, reading some Western history books one might be forgiven for thinking that the Persians existed to be conquered by Alexander.

Most people buy cornstarch to make custard or gravy, but Scott Waitukaitis and Heinrich Jaeger have used it to solve a longstanding physics problem with a substance known to generations of Dr. Seuss readers as "Oobleck," and to scientists as a non-Newtonian liquid.

This substance, a liquid that can instantaneously turn into a solid under the force of a sudden impact, behaves in surprising ways. It consists of a simple mixture of cornstarch and water, and adults can actually run across a vat of this liquid, as has been done many times on television game shows and programs such as MythBusters.

The University of Chicago's Waitukaitis and Jaeger suspect that many similarly constituted suspensions - liquids laden with micron-sized particles - will behave exactly the same way. Scientists and engineers have attempted to explain the underlying physics of this phenomenon since the 1930s, but with incomplete success.

In a characteristic passage Professor Edgeworth has applied these theories to the frequency of dactyls in successive extracts from the Aeneid. The mean for the line is 1:6, exclusive of the fifth foot, thus sharply distinguishing the Virgilian line from the Ovidian, for which the corresponding figure is 2:2. But there is also a marked stability. "That the Mean of any five lines should differ from the general Mean by a whole dactyl is proved to be an exceptional phenomenon, about as rare as an Englishman measuring 5 feet, or 6 feet 3 inches. An excess of two dactyls in the Mean of five lines would be as exceptional as an Englishman measuring 6 feet 10 inches." But not only so--the stability is excessive, and the fluctuation is less "than that which is obtained upon the hypothesis of pure sortition. If we could imagine dactyls and spondees to be mixed up in the poet's brain in the proportion of 16 to 24 and shaken out at random, the modulus in the number of dactyls would be 1:38, whereas we have constantly obtained a smaller number, on an average (the square root of the average fluctuation) 1:2." On Lexian principles these statistical results would support the hypothesis that the series under investigation is `organic' and not subject to Bernoullian conditions, an hypothesis in accordance with our ideas of poetry. That Edgeworth should have put forward this example in criticism of Lexis's conclusions, and that Lexis should have retorted that the explanation was to be found in Edgeworth's series' not consisting of an adequate number of separate observations, indicates, if I do not misapprehend them, that these authorities are at fault in the principles, if not of Probability, of Poetry.

The Tour de France came within a whisker of being plunged into chaos yesterday after tacks strewn at the summit of the descent of a major Pyrenean climb caused dozens of riders to puncture tyres and at least one to crash.

Bradley Wiggins was forced to change bikes after a mechanical incident but otherwise came through unscathed, but others, around 30 of the 162 taking part, were far less lucky and punctured. Croatian Robert Kiserlovski was the most unfortunate - he skidded off the road and broke his collarbone, while 2011 Tour de France winner Cadel Evans punctured three times in less than a kilometre.

"We think the tacks were thrown on the last part of the climb and on the first part of the descent," said the Tour's technical director, Jean François Pescheux, who showed one of the offending tacks to reporters afterwards.

I wish to make it clear that, though this happened at a spot I know well, not far from where and I live,

1. I was not there
   
2. I do not possess tacks of the kind incriminated
   
3. I was not there
   
4. Why would I have made Evans puncture three times anyway?