France's ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy has supplied judges probing illegal campaign financing claims with his 2007 diary to prove he did not receive funds, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Magistrates are investigating claims that staff for Liliane Bettencourt, heiress to the L'Oreal cosmetics empire and France's richest woman, handed over envelopes stuffed with cash to Sarkozy aides to finance his 2007 campaign.

Sarkozy, who has denied any wrongdoing and whose presidential immunity from prosecution expired on Friday, supplied the diary to judges in Bordeaux to disprove claims from witnesses that he attended meetings in the Bettencourt household, newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche reported.

Tanks are designed to do many things: to shoot, to run unstoppably over fields, to intimidate the enemy; in Russia, they are also designed to dance.

Russia marshalled five of them last week to perform in a "tank ballet", humbly entitled Invincible and Legendaryand choreographed by Andrei Melanin of the Bolshoi Theatre. As one of the main attractions at a new annual arms fare designed to boost Russia's standing in the global arms trade, they swayed and waved their gun turrets like limbs to the thumping beat of a Carmen aria souped up on techno .

President Vladimir Putin said on Monday Russian arms export deliveries for the first six months of 2012 had reached over $6.5bn (£4.1bn), a 14% increase on the same period last year. That figure put Russia on track to beat last year's record-breaking total sales of $13.2bn, analysts said.

BRUSSELS - Just days after being hailed as solved, the EU decades-long quest for a single patent hit an unexpected snag on Monday evening when MEPs postponed a vote on the draft patent claiming member states had "emasculated" the proposal.

Eurodeputies are up in arms about a late-minute deal - struck at last week's EU summit - with France, Germany and the UK on where to house the patent court.

In a typical compromise - after all sides refused to back down - each country received a slice of the host duties. But it was the concession to British leader David Cameron, reducing the competence of the European Court of Justice in patent litigation matters, that has caused the outrage.

"If Council is working to delete articles 6-8, it would emasculate the proposal," said German centre-right deputy Klaus-Heiner Lehne, head of the legal affairs committee.

"We want clear confirmation that these three key articles are to be deleted. If so, this will go straight to the European Court of Justice as a 'crash test' case."

European Commissioner Michel Barnier proposed today (3 July) new rules to dismantle shoddy practices amongst investment and insurance brokers in the financial sector, another building block in the EU's implementation of the global financial regulatory reform agreed by the G20.

The package of measures is designed to tackle low consumer confidence in financial products resulting from lack of transparency and conflicts of interest amongst salesmen, who sometimes sell inappropriate products to clients.

The new regulation would demand finance retailers to publish key information documents (KIDs) when selling complex packaged retail investment products (PRIPS) directly to the public.

New changes to the Insurance Mediation Directive will require insurance sellers to provide clearer information about the products they sell and be up front about any third party payments they receive - which can reveal conflicts of interest. That is supposed to protect consumers from fraud, no matter who sells them the products.

Consumer protection in the investment funds market will also be protected by tightening of the Undertakings for Collective Investments in Transferable Securities (UCITS) Directive.

Spain needs a bailout of its banking sector and it needs it to be done well. What happened three weeks ago was such a disaster that it made things worse. The agreement coming out of the recent summit looks more like a proper rescue for banks facing problems: risks are shared and not just assumed by the Spanish government alone. But that doesn't solve the problem. I also don't think that a sovereign bailout is the answer -- you just have to look at what is happening in Greece and Ireland, where there is not even the hint of a recovery. I don't even think there is enough money for a Greek-style rescue for Spain. What Spain needs is a change in European macro-economic policy, and for the ECB to purchase bonds to reduce its yields. Spain is not "come and rescue us" but rather it needs a change in monetary policy.

IMF chief says rate cuts help some but not other, while asset purchases would have overall more effect; eurozone producer prices drop 0.5% in May, bringing the annual rate to 2.3%; data are seen as supporting an ECB rate cut tomorrow; the ECB has capped use of government guaranteed bonds as collateral; Mario Monti seeks to impose more austerity in Italy through a comprehensive spending review; in an attempt to make up, Monti says he totally agrees with Angela Merkel on virtually everything; the CSU threatens Merkel that it may not support her latest euro concessions, and threatened to leave the coalition; the Dutch say ESM equity injections into banks may require treaty change; after the June 17 elections, deposits have returned to Greek banks; Ireland to test capital markets with €500m short term bills; Portugal plans to sell €3.75bn in longish bills in third quarter; Finland to push for collaterals against bank loans; French PM Jean-Marc Ayrault revises French growth further down; El Pais says French and Italian banks may also need large capital injections if the eurozone crisis were to deteriorate further; S&P says summit deal may have been a breakthrough, but implementation risks are significant; Paolo Manasse says price-fixing deals must have unlimited resources to work; FT Alphaville says bond purchases will never even get off the ground; Amartya Sen, meanwhile, criticises the intellectual confusion between austerity and reform in the eurozone.

Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond has resigned a week after the bank was fined a record amount for trying to manipulate inter-bank lending rates.

BBC business editor Robert Peston said he was encouraged to go by the heads of the Bank of England and the FSA.

Mr Diamond said he was stepping down because the external pressure on the bank risked "damaging the franchise".

Chief operating officer Jerry del Missier has also resigned, the third top executive in two days to do so.

A Chinese court on Monday said Apple Inc. has settled a lingering dispute with a local technology company concerning the use of the iPad trademark for the California-based tech giant's popular tablet computers in the Chinese mainland.

This development in the two-year legal tussle is seen by some market analysts as Apple's stepping stone for bringing its New iPad to eager Chinese consumers. The product is in the process of getting final approval from authorities, people familiar with the matter said.

Apple has paid 60 million U.S. dollars to Proview Technology (Shenzhen)for the trademark, the Higher People's Court of Guangdong Province said in a statement issued Monday. The State Administration for Industry and Commerce was asked to assist the transfer of the iPad trademark to Apple, the court said.

It's not all been positive, by any means. Growing social inequality and the City's failure to serve the domestic economy as extravagantly as it has its own interests have given rise to the gravest possible concerns. But when Lord Myners says that the financial crisis has cost the economy such a colossal chunk of its GDP, he should reflect on the fact that there can be no bust without a boom, and that if Britain had never enjoyed the growth that international finance provided - or indeed the ingenuity of people like Mr Diamond - its economy would today be in an even darker place. Would London soon be showcasing itself to the world as host to the 2012 Olympics without the renewed sense of prosperity, swagger and self-confidence that finance helped deliver? It seems unlikely.

It has become fashionable to think of the City as far too big and powerful for the economy's own good. But in fact, periods of relative British prosperity have always gone hand in hand with a key position in international finance. At the height of Victorian empire, the City was even more powerful and influential than it is now. It's only in the past 30 years that Britain has been able to begin to reverse the catastrophic period of decline that followed the loss of Empire.

...

The City, I fear, is already damned to one of its multi-decade periods of decline - with all that means for our tax revenues, public services and living standards.

Pakistan is to reopen crucial supply routes to Nato-led forces in Afghanistan after Washington apologised for killing 24 of its soldiers in November, the US has announced.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said: "We are sorry for the losses suffered by the Pakistani military."

Pakistan has not yet commented on the US statement.

The routes are increasingly important as Nato prepares to withdraw all combat troops from Afghanistan in 2014.

The row over the supply lines has been hugely damaging to relations between Pakistan and the US.

Mali's embattled interim government has ramped up diplomatic efforts to save the north from rebel fighters who have destroyed World Heritage shrines in Timbuktu and have reportedly rigged another city with mines.

The interim government in the capital Bamako, set up after the March 22 coup which led to a takeover in the north as armed groups exploited the resulting chaos, has been scrambling for assistance to regain its territory.

A new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the Syrian intelligence agencies are running torture centres across the country where detainees are beaten with batons and cables, burned with acid, sexually assaulted, and their fingernails torn out.

The report released on Tuesday by the New York-based group identified 27 detention centres that it says intelligence agencies have been using since President Bashar al-Assad's government began a crackdown on an uprising that began in March 2011. 

HRW conducted more than 200 interviews with people who said they were tortured, including a 31-year-old man who was detained in the Idlib area in June and made to undress.

A car bomb in a busy market in the southern Iraqi city of Diwaniya killed at least 40 people and wounded 75 others, a provincial council official said.

A hospital source in the city, 160 kilometres south of Baghdad, confirmed receiving 25 bodies.

Earlier on Tuesday, two roadside bombs targeting Shia pilgrims killed four people and wounded 21 near Kerbala, a city in central Iraq, hospital and police sources said.

The attack, 80km south-west of Baghdad, is the latest in a series of bombings in Iraq aimed at Shia worshippers. Shia pilgrims in Kerbala will be celebrating the birthday of an important imam in the coming days.

Following a lengthy and heated debate, committee 15 of the 220th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States voted in favor of a motion calling for divestment from three companies that do business with Israel.

Whether or not the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel is gaining traction is one of the hottest questions being asked among the most politically active members of the Jewish community - as many people take the issue to heart.

Israel supporters claim that the numbers of participants in the annual "Israel apartheid" week have not grown significantly, and that the American Methodist and Presbyterian Churches, despite regularly raising the topic of divesting from companies that "profit from Israeli occupation," generally end up voting against it.  The discourse is shifting - and not in Israel's favor.

Eight years after the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Al-Jazeera network published on Tuesday findings of an investigation which attempts to shed light on the circumstances of his death. According to the report, Swiss experts found high levels of polonium, a highly radioactive element, in his personal belongings.

Arafat's death on November 11, 2004 had generated no small number of conspiracy theories, including poisoning by Israel and even HIV.

Iran and six world powers started here on Tuesday a new round of nuclear talks at the level of technical experts, trying to explore common ground for full- fledged talks after previous meetings failed to produce any breakthrough.

Since the negotiations on Tehran's nuclear program remained deadlocked in the latest meeting held in Moscow on June 19, the P5+ 1 -- Britain, China, France, Russia, United States plus Germany -- are attempting to take the process further with small steps, said a senior Turkish diplomat.

The two sides agreed in Moscow on an early follow-up technical- level meeting in Istanbul to provide a further clarification about the proposals of the world powers, increase the P5+1's understanding of the Iranian response, and study the issues raised by Tehran during the sessions.

A Kenyan court on Tuesday fined two smugglers 375,000 U.S. dollars who are involved in the smuggling of 600-kg ivory bound for Nigeria at Kenya's main airport in Nairobi in June.

The two, John Mesilya Mule Mweu and Ngusu David James alias King David alias Bouncer, were arraigned before a Magistrate court in Nairobi and denied the charges.

However, they are remanded in police after they failed to raise the bond. They are expected to appear in the same court on Wednesday for a mention of their case. The magistrate set Sept. 17 as the date of the hearing.

Some 1.4m storm-struck households in the eastern US are without electricity for a fourth day amid sweltering temperatures.

Three people have already died from heat-related deaths in Maryland, as crews from as far as Quebec and Oklahoma battle to restore power.

Utilities are warning that a number of places could still be without electricity by Friday.

Some Independence Day celebrations have been cancelled near Washington DC.

Traffic lights remain out in many areas of Maryland and Virginia, creating commuting headaches.

"Metabolism of plants provides humans with fiber, fuel, food and therapeutics," said Robert Last, an MSU professor of biochemistry and molecular biology.

"As the human population grows and nonrenewable energy sources diminish, we need to rely increasingly on plants and to increase the sustainability of agriculture."

However, Last and co-author Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science point out that despite decades of plant genetic engineering, there are relatively few types of commercial products originating from this body of work.

"This is in part because we do not understand enough about the vastly complex set of metabolic reactions that plants employ," Last said. "It's like designing and building a bridge armed only with satellite images of existing bridges."

Japan and its allies shot down a Latin American-led proposal Monday to create a sanctuary for whales in the southern Atlantic Ocean, reigniting international tensions over Tokyo's whaling.

The International Whaling Commission, which has long been torn by disputes, fell into familiar divisions just hours after officials opened the main session of their week-long annual meeting in Panama City.

Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and Uruguay put forward a proposal to declare the southern Atlantic a no-kill zone for whales, a largely symbolic measure as whaling ended there long ago.

Thirty-eight countries voted in favor of the measure and 21 voted against, with two abstentions. Under commission rules, proposals need to enjoy a "consensus" of 75 percent support for approval.

Using a method of measuring CO2 exchange that involves placing sensors high above the ground to record tiny changes in CO2, temperature, water vapor and wind, McFadden and Peters set out to monitor the suburbs just outside of St. Paul, Minn., a place with distinct seasonal changes and enough rainfall for plants to grow without irrigation.

"The question was: Can we see what the green space is doing against the backdrop of human activities?" said McFadden.

The researchers found that typical suburban greenery, such as trees and lawns, played significant roles with respect to CO2 uptake. For nine months out of the year, the suburban landscape was a source of CO2 to the atmosphere; but during the summer, the carbon uptake by vegetation was large enough to balance out fossil fuel emissions of carbon within the neighborhood. Compared to the natural landscape outside the city, the peak daily uptake of CO2 in the suburbs would have been at the low end uptake for a hardwood forest in the region.

According to this 2010 analysis from Food & Water Watch, the ag-biotech industry spent $547.5 million between 1999 and 2009. It employed more than 100 lobbying firms in 2010 alone, FWW reports, in addition to their own in-house lobbying teams.

The gusher continues. The most famous ag-biotech firm of all, Monsanto, spent $1.4 million on lobbying in the first three months of 2012, after shelling out $6.3 million total last year, "more than any other agribusiness firm except the tobacco company Altria," reports the money-in-politics tracker OpenSecrets.org. Industry trade groups like the Biotechnology Industry Organization and Croplife America have weighed in with $1.8 million and $524,000, respectively.

What fruits have been borne by such generous fertilizing of the legislative terrain? It's impossible to tie the fate of any bit of legislation directly to an industry's lobbying power, but here are two unambiguous legislative victories won on the Hill this month by Monsanto and its peers.

I'd like to introduce you to Sepp Holzer  , a man who not only produces food in a very unlikely location, at a high and frigid altitude in Austria, but is also growing very unlikely crops there as well -- and all without the use of chemicals, and with minimal input of human labour.

I guess you could call him a European counterpart of people like Bill Mollison   and Masanobu Fukuoka   -- as all three independently discovered ways of working with nature that save money and labour and that don't degrade the environment, but actually improve it. In Holzer's case, he was effectively running a permaculture farm for more than two decades before he even realised his unconventional approach could be termed 'permaculture'.

In the coldest part of Austria, a farmer is turning conventional wisdom on its head by growing a veritable Garden of Eden full of tropical plants in the open on his steep Alpine pastures.

Amid average annual temperatures of a mere 4.2 degrees Celsius (39.5 Fahrenheit), Sepp Holzer grows everything from apricots to eucalyptus, figs to kiwi fruit, peaches to wheat at an altitude of between 1,000 and 1,500 metres (3,300 and 4,900 feet).

... "Once planted, I do absolutely nothing," Holzer told Reuters. "It really is just nature working for itself - no weeding, no pruning, no watering, no fertiliser, no pesticides." -- permaculture.org.uk  

What's more, the land he cultivates so successfully today had notoriously poor soil when he originally inherited it. Not anymore. Where people were before calling him mad, now farmers are arriving on his doorstep to learn how he does it, and others are flocking to buy his superior produce. His methods are currently being implemented in dozens of countries.

euro treasure...

The power of knowledge is in mortal combat with the knowledge of power. It really is that simple... That's the Edenic apple we are all munching on.

Toby Young, writing in The Spectator, thinks disabled children should be excluded from schools.

No - I'm not exaggerating - he really does say that wheelchair ramps in schools are an example of `ghastly, politically correct' inclusiveness.

Sun columnist Toby presumably reckons that educating children who can't walk would mean more `dumbing down' of the level of education in our schools, so much better to exclude them then.

US-based physicists reported finding strong hints of the Higgs boson, the elusive "God particle" believed to give objects mass, but said European data is needed to confirm any potential discovery.

If physicists can confirm the existence of the Higgs boson, the last missing piece in the standard model of physics, the announcement would rank among the most important scientific breakthroughs of the last century.

University of Alberta researchers have uncovered physical proof that animals existed 585 million years ago, 30 million years earlier than all previous established records show.

The discovery was made U of A geologists Ernesto Pecoits and Natalie Aubet in Uruguay. They found fossilized tracks of a centimetre long, slug-like animal left behind 585 million years ago in a silty sediment.

Along with other U of A researchers, the team determined that the tracks were made by a primitive animal called a bilaterian, which is distinguished from other non-animal, simple life forms by its symmetry-its topside is distinguishable from its bottom side-and a unique set of 'footprints'.

The researchers say the fossilized tracks indicate the soft-bodied animal's musculature enabled it to move through the sediment on the shallow ocean floor. The pattern of movement indicates an evolutionary adaptation to search for food, which would have been organic material in the sediment.

Local reports suggest the French authorities are investigating the software giant over claims that it has committed fraud, by secretly routing money through offshore companies to avoid corporate tax -- a move which could violate the country's laws.

French magazine Le Canard Enchaîné made the claims after Microsoft's French headquarters were subjected to a tax raid last week.

The magazine claims that the authorities are examining whether for the past four years Microsoft has operated "a business aimed at French customers, for the French market, using the human and material resources of Microsoft France and located in France... without paying corresponding taxes."

The man, facing eviction for not paying his rent, had barricaded himself in his flat with the hostages.

...

As well as the gunman, a bailiff and a locksmith died, along with the flat-owner and a prospective tenant.

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"I am deeply shocked by the deaths of five people, including a bailiff working as a justice official for Karlsruhe district court," Baden-Wuerttemberg's Justice Minister Rainer Stickelberger said, according to Bild website. It was an "incomprehensible act," he added.

To the relief of anyone who knows just how windy Bexhill can get, there will be at least eight tons of steel girders helping to hold in place the teetering coach hanging off one of the most striking buildings on the south coast. "It is designed for the worst case scenario," promised the artist, Richard Wilson.

The installation is a recreation of the final scene in the film The Italian Job. In one of the more outlandish contributions to the hundreds of arts events marking the Olympics, the vehicle will hover on the side of the modernist De La Warr Pavilion until October.

Named after Michael Caine's last line in the 1969 film, "Hang on a minute lads, I've got a great idea ...", the work is part of the London 2012 Festival within the Cultural Olympiad.

John Constable's The Lock has become one of the most expensive British paintings ever sold, fetching £22.4m at auction at Christie's in London.

The full price of £22,441,250 for the 1824 masterpiece depicting Suffolk rural life places it joint fourth on the list of most-expensive Old Masters.

George Stubbs's Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, a Stable-Lad, and a Jockey, fetched the same in 2011.

The Lock had been housed in Madrid's Bornemisza Museum.